New story up

One of my Venezuelan stories, "Stairways," and many other good things to read (one really spooky story, another set in rural India, plus poetry and reviews) are now up at Small Spiral Notebook. I'm very pleased to be in such good company and in such a handsomely produced journal.

FTAA: A Communist plot

I already had plenty of reasons to oppose the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, but this is a new one on me:
The New American asks:

... Could the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, now galloping toward completion, actually spur the spread of Marxist revolution throughout Latin America? ...

Welcome Mat for Terrorists

Silly time

From a quiz, "What kind of postmodernist are you?" These were my results.
You are a Theory Slut. The true elite of the
postmodernists, you collect avant-garde
Indonesian hiphop compilations and eat journal
articles for breakfast. You positively live
for theory. It really doesn't matter what
kind, as long as the words are big and the
paragraph breaks few and far between.


What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla

Saddam and the G.O.P. (Greed, Oil & Privilege)

From another blog:

What happened Sunday was that the Republicans captured a former ally, with whom they had later fallen out.

For more, see historian Juan Cole's Informed Comment.

Memorials

Sara Fishko just sent me a note that her December 12 broadcast is now available for listening on the WNYC website. If you care about memory and memorials, or if you just enjoy intelligent reporting, you will want to listen. Here's the link again, to that and other radio essays she has produced.
The Fishko Files

Carlos Fuentes: 'Artemio Cruz'

I finally read Carlos Fuentes' famous analysis (1st published in 1962) of how injustice and corruption got institutionalized in Mexico after the revolution. If you read Spanish, and don't yet know this book, you may be interested in my commentary on La muerte de Artemio Cruz.

Constructing memorials

Here's the reference to the essay by Susana Torre that I mentioned the other day:

Susana Torre, "Constructing Memorials," in Enwezor, Okwui et al. eds. Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation, Documenta 11, Platform 2, Hatje Cantz 2002, pp. 343-360

The always intelligent Sara Fishko produced another of her serious, thought-provoking radio essays on this topic for the WNYC news program this morning. I couldn't find a link on the station's website -- perhaps it's too soon. You can find many other pieces by her, however, including one on memorials in music, focusing on mezzo-soprano Frederica Von Stade.

The Fishko Files

A 9-11 memorial proposal: Susana Torre

Susana Torre was one of the 5,000+ entrants in the open competition to design a memorial for the World Trade Center site. What distinguishes her proposal most from those of the eight finalists is its provision for memory's "reinscription," by dynamic events that continually renew memory and encourage us to rethink the meaning of what happened here. In part, this dynamic is in the recurrent, seasonal changes that the design celebrates and emphasizes. In part, it is in the provision of spaces for us and future generations to invent and act out our own rituals. Torre is the author of a major article on memorials, which she was completing just as the planes struck the World Trade Center towers -- whose burning and collapse she and I witnessed from our rooftop. In the essay, she compares memorials to the dead of World War I; victims of the European "Holocaust" in Poland, Austria and Germany; the murdered millions of Cambodia; the American dead in Vietnam; the "disappeared" during the military terror regimes of Chile, Uruguay, and her native Argentina -- and she added then a brief paragraph on what we had just witnessed. Everywhere, she finds, memory remains alive only when it is renewed, through reinscription by rituals that make the past speak to the ever-changing present.

9/11 MEMORIAL: LOSS, REMEMBRANCE, RENEWAL by Susana Torre

Cuban tragedy

À propos of recent reports and denials of a financial scandal in Cuba's Ministry of Tourism (one of the few places where anybody can get hold of large number of dollars there), a friend asked me a provocative question: what I thought of Cuba today. Here's the answer he provoked:
Briefly, what I think is that the tragedy of Cuba is that its people have not been permitted to assume [excuse me, I'm using this in the Spanish sense of asumir -- to "appropriate," or to "accept as theirs"] the enormous achievements of 1957 (beginning of the war) or 1959 (triumph of the revolution) to, say, 1970 (when the colossal failure of the "10-million ton sugar harvest" demonstrated the weakness of a command economy) and move on. Those achievements were, 1st, freeing the island from the heavy hand of US capital so that its people had some room to breathe and maneuver ("Cuba libre"); 2nd, hugely reducing disparities in wealth and life-chances (between black and white, rural and urban, rich and poor); 3rd, bringing the entire population to literacy and expanding educational opportunities to create a highly skilled, critically conscious population; 4th, infrastructural and industrial development projects that -- while mostly uncompleted and in some cases misdirected (importing a windowless Czech factory to make refrigerators, for example, or trying to convert the green zone around Havana into an immense coffee plantation) -- nevertheless pointed the way to greater economy autonomy and improved standards of living.

Having done these things, and having developed a literate population fully capable of rational debate, they should have been allowed to open political contests to groups outside the party, and let the enormous ingenuity of the people go into economic projects more constructive than building rafts to float to Miami, or "barbacoas" (improvised lofts) as a homemade solution to the housing crisis. Some very stubborn Cubans inside the party and a pack of crazed and persistent Cubans in Miami conspired (with lots of help from Washington) to keep tensions so high that party leaders are afraid to relax their grip or let Fidel retire.

'Every Child is Born a Poet' - Piri Thomas

People keep getting born, so there must be some who haven't heard yet of Piri Thomas. Most people find out about him when they're about 14. A sensitive teacher turns them on, or another kids says, "Hey! You godda read this book!"

The book, of course, is Down These Mean Streets, which Piri started to write as a teenager when he was in prison for a botched holdup. That was before he took his mother's nickname for him as his pen name (his prison record says "John Thomas"). The book was his way of transforming himself from a confused, violent, self-disgusted kid into the poet and performer he is today. Born to a Cuban-Puerto Rican couple in Harlem in 1928, saved from total self-destruction from drugs or violence by prison, he went back to Harlem and to other communities like that to awaken pride and a sense of possibility in other young men.

Now, one of the other kids touched by his story -- Jonathan Robinson, now grown up to be a filmmaker -- has finally finished his 10-year movie-making collaboration with Piri, to show his life, his performances of some of his poems and stories (including a hilarious presentation of "La Peseta," in which Piri takes all the parts -- Mama, Poppi, and naughty little Piri), and some of Piri's work with juvenile offenders in a California prison. I caught it, and had a chance to meet the jovial, life-affirming poet, at Anthology Film Archives the other night. "Every Child is Born a Poet" is supposed to be shown on public television in April, and should appear in other venues. Watch for it.

Piri Thomas' web site. If you click on "Reviews," you'll find a quote from my book Hispanic Nation.