We've moved!

If you've stumbled onto this site looking for new stuff, I direct you to our new address and new weblog name. Reflections & Inquiries. "Literature & Society" is now an archive of posts prior to June, 2015. For newer posts, please visit us at the new blog site, Reflections & Inquiries.

See you there!

Also, check out the many other things (fiction and nonfiction including work-in-progress, plus reviews) on our newly redesigned website, GeoffreyFox.com.

A comrade and his legacy

[Note: This will be the first entry on my new blog, "Reflections & Inquiries," in my newly-designed website, to be launched in the next few days. "Literature & Society" will remain as an archive of entries from 2002-2015.]

July 18, 2015 

Perry Winston, 1945-2015

We were sadly surprised a few days ago to learn that a dear friend and comrade, the architect Perry Winston, has left us. It will be hard to carry on without his contributions, his teaching of students in various continents to be better and more socially responsible architects and, especially, his work with communities to build  better environments, beginning where I had begun, in Venezuela and continuing to East New York and many other places. For a good example of the kind of work he was dedicated to, and to get a sense of the man himself, check out the very good video on Urban Agriculture: East New York.

We had known Perry and his wife, the prolific architectural historian Zeynep Çelik, for years, and had dinner with them in their apartment in New York just a few months ago. He appeared to us to be recovering from his very serious bout with cancer, and despite chemotherapy and other debilitating treatment, had continued working. As usual, he was full of sharp political commentary, on national, international and especially New York city events. We didn’t always agree, but we shared some very deep values as well as many life experiences (Venezuela, Harvard, New York). He was one of those rare activists who actually make things happen, not just sharpening skills and perceptions of his friends and students, but also structural, spatial and architectural changes that have improved people’s daily lives — as you can see in the “Urban Agriculture” project. Adiós, Perry.

Narrative thought

In his column today, David Brooks offers a thought-provoking (he's good at that) contrast of off-line as compared to on-line learning. Here's a key passage:

When people in this slower world [off-line] gather to try to understand connections and context, they gravitate toward a different set of questions. These questions are less about sensation than about meaning. They argue about how events unfold and how context influences behavior. They are more likely to make moral evaluations. They want to know where it is all headed and what are the ultimate ends.

We short-story and novel writers — well, most of us, anyway — live and work mostly in this slower world. Video game-writers, on-line interactive plotters offering multiple pathways, and E. L. James are challenging the model, obviously, creating experiences rather than narrative. Which is fine, I suppose, and inevitable, but has its cost if it occupies all our attention. Brooks goes on,

The online world is brand new, but it feels more fun, effortless and natural than the offline world of reading and discussion. It nurtures agility, but there is clear evidence by now that it encourages a fast mental rhythm that undermines the ability to explore narrative, and place people, ideas and events in wider contexts.

I'm still an old-fashioned, Second Millennium guy, wedded to narrative. Not just in my fiction, but in my thinking and writing about social, political and (occasionally) scientific matters. And so is David Brooks. I think the world will always need such thinking for us to have some idea of where we're headed and how we got here, instead of just jumping to each new experience that seems exciting. It's a minority view, but you on-liners are going to need us when your games crash.

New pub on Poland

We've been traveling — Milan, Venice, Turin — so I'll have much to share with you when my new, redesigned website is up. For now I just want to let you know of my article 

End of a Saga: Andrzej Wajda’s Wałęsa: Man of Hope

just published in Film International. About a great director and a powerful history.

Reflections and inquiries

This may be my last post in Literature & Society. My newly designed website, with the same URL as before (geoffreyfox.com) but much better organized, will incorporate a new blog, Reflections & Inquiries. Literature & Society will remain as an archive.

"Reflections" will try to make sense of things read or experienced, as in my previous blogs. (Before Literature & Society, 2002-2015, I had a blog-like section of my website that I called "Unsolicited comments," 1993-2002. That archive will also be available from my newly designed geoffreyfox.com website.)

By "Inquiries," I mean more serious attempts to grapple with difficult questions, questions to which I don't have satisfying answers. Some that I have in mind include:
,

• the many diverse forms of violence we label as "terrorism," how they come about and how they may evolve — often (generally?) into very stable political systems. Might this happen with the so-called Islamic State?
• Transformation and continuity in socialist Cuba
• The path and likely future of "Bolivarianism" in Latin America

For recent examples of my reflections and hypothesis-testing inquiries, I invite you to look at my article on Spain's insurgent political formation "Podemos" in CounterPunch, or my article on the evolution of the Polish labor movement and Andrzej Wajda's films, about to appear in Film International.

What I can formulate are testable hypotheses, and examine them, trying to get closer to an explanation that will help us understand and respond to these phenomena.

1,001 stories of displacement

Gate Of The Sun by Elias Khoury
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Umm Hassan is dead."
These are Dr. Khaleel Ayyoub's first words to his only patient, the legendary hero of a dozen failed wars for Palestinian liberation, in Galilee Hospital in Shatila. But this isn't a real hospital (scarcely any supplies or professional staff), Khaleel is not a real doctor (though he had some rudimentary medical training in China), and Yunis, or Abu Salim, is not a real hero (though famous as a "lone wolf" fighter who rose in the ranks of Fatah) — and is now probably brain dead. But Umm Hassan, "Mother of Hassan", the licensed midwife who "knew everything," had told Khaleel he had to talk to the unconscious hero to keep his spirit alive. So Khaleel — 40-ish, with no family and only tumultuous memories of his own — talks to his patient for seven months, inventing Yunis's responses and spinning a thousand and one stories of Yunis' and Palestine's history, from the 1936 Arab revolt on to nearly today. The real beginning was the 1948 war when villagers saw their villages erased and were thrown together as refugees and at least partly, tentatively, re-imagined themselves as "Palestinians," a new-found, widely embracing identity for people who didn't know one another nor even speak the same dialects. Everything since then has been confusion, shifting alliances, dreaming and longing for a past that cannot be recovered and probably never really existed as they remember it. And innumerable wars, against the Israelis, against other Arabs, and even (or especially) against other Palestinians. And alliances, often surprising — with Jews, on some occasions, with Christians sometimes, and foreigners.

These tales — reworked as fiction by Khoury from his own experiences and his hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of interviews as a journalist in Lebanon —are sometimes stunningly sad, even when funny, as the characters contradict one another or even themselves in their uncertain memories, vain boasts and magical thinking. One especially memorable tale recalled by Khaleel is Umm Hassan's very daring return, across Israeli shoot-to-kill defense lines, to what had been her village of El Kweikat, now mostly razed to create a modern Israeli settlement of brick houses. Her old house is one of the few remaining from the old days, and after long hesitation, she tentatively knocks on the door. The woman who opens is about Umm Hassan's age. She surprises Umm Hassan by answering her Hebrew greeting in Arabic with a Syrian accent. Ella Dweik, the current inhabitant, has guessed that this "is" (not "was") Umm Hassan's house, and tells her she had been expecting her, and invites her to sit and have some coffee. She is another victim of uprooting, a Lebanese Jewess who, when she learns that Umm Hassan has come from Beirut, almost screams with envy — she wants nothing more than to return to that city and abandon this desolate patch her husband (an Iraqi Jew) has brought her to in Israel, while Umm Hassan doesn't even know the Beirut that Ella longs for (because poverty and hostility have kept her in Shatila) and could hardly adjust to such a hectic, urban environment, but yearns for her beloved El Kweikat.

And many, many other stories, of women who have lost their children, young men who try to adapt as Arabs in Israel, betrayals and ingratitudes, and sometimes just the surprising courage of those who insist on living and protecting what they can of their families. In the end, after 7 months of Khaleel's one-side conversations with the inert hero, he slips out of the "hospital" to fetch photographs from Yunis's apartment, thinking they may help restore him to consciousness — photos of Yunis's long-suffering wife Naheeleh, of his children and many grandchildren, half a dozen of them also named Yunis. He is stopped on a deserted street of Shatila by a woman in black with a black scarf, like the spirit woman who had so frightened Yunis on one of his earlier adventures; she asks him for the house of Elias El Roumi — but Khaleel tells her there is no Elias (a Christian name) in all of Muslim Shatila; she asks for a hotel to spend the night, but there is no hotel in Shatila, either, but she accepts his offer to spend the night in Khaleel's house — a magical encounter where he is fed and touched by the womanhood he has been longing for, but when he awakens in the morning, there is no trace of her. This is the last of the many tales, the character's visit by the unseen Elias El Roumi, Elias Khoury, the author who has from the beginning been hovering around these stories and is occasionally glimpsed, once as the old man El Khouri of the House of Ice, and in other guises. A delightful, marvelous, terribly sad invitation to reflect on and review this whole terrible saga of two peoples, Jews and Palestinians, each unwilling or unable to hear the other's story.

View all my reviews
 
For a much more comprehensive review of this book and of its context in the life and work of Elias Khoury, see this excellent report by Jeremy Harding:

Jeremy Harding goes to Beirut to meet the novelist Elias Khoury: ‘Before everything else, a writer of stories’ � LRB 16 November 2006

Pudimos: The Little Party That Could

Yesterday's voting across Spain signaled a major triumph for the Little Party That Could  — Podemos (We Can) can now proclaim Pudimos (We Could).

Manuela Carmena, mayor of Madrid?

Could what? Well, not seize the Moncloa (Spain's nearest equivalent to the Winter Palace) in a neo-Bolshevik-Bolivarian revolution, as some hysterical right-wing politicians claimed to fear. Nor even to out-poll the two biggest and most established parties.

But Podemos was either the instigator or a major contributor in the electoral coalitions that will be decisive in forming governments of towns and cities across the country. Most stunningly, especially to the stunned Partido Popular, that party's the two most strongholds, Madrid and Barcelona. In Madrid, the highly respected judge Manuela Carmena, backed by an ad-hoc coalition of progressive groups initiated by Podemos, won enough seats to seize the mayoralty from the PP — assuming, as we expect, that the third-place Socialist Party gives her its support.

Ada Colau, in her anti-eviction T-shirt

And in Barcelona, Ada Colau, leader of the movement against evictions of suddenly impoverished families, running with the backing of another ad-hoc coalition, also with Podemos as a major actor, won more seats than any other party and should therefore become the mayor — though, because the voting in Barcelona was so fragmented, she will have to rely on the support of many smaller groups in order to govern. (Sort of like Netanyahu's fragile government.)

So, se pudo. Now let's see where we go from here.

Staying awake in the city that never sleeps

From Jacob Lawrence's migration series, 1941

We used to say that New York was the city that never sleeps. More than that, it is a city that wants to keep you alert. However, the flashing signage, noise and bustling-hustling crowds in Times Square, the agitated foot and skateboard and motor traffic, the rattling subway and the hurried pace and startling changes may produce the opposite effect, stupefying you with conflicting demands on your attention and shutting down most of your brain, leaving the remaining working part so focused on whatever you're trying to do that you mindlessly become another vector in the general agitation, avoiding obstacles but otherwise oblivious to other people and your surroundings.

All that is true, but New York also offers sites and events that invite quiet reflection, that permit you to integrate some of all those stimuli into a coherent narrative. The New York Public Library, with all its branches, has always bee such a site, and I hope it will remain so — though we heard disturbing news of plans to sell off the branches (more valuable as real estate) and ship the books out to an out-of-city warehouse. Good people are fighting to save the libraries, and good people in New York have been able to accomplish many things, so maybe it'll all be all right.

Other great sites for reflection on where we are and what it all means include the great museums, the galleries and the theaters. We returned to Madrid yesterday after another week in New York, a city we know well — we lived there for over 30 years — and still recognize, though it is ever changing. And we took the opportunity to take in some shows at a couple of museums, several galleries and a theater: the Music Box, for the revival of Wendy Wasserstein's 1989 hit, "The Heidi Chronicles". Great production, terrific actors, in a very dated story that reminded us how far we have not yet come in women's struggle for recognition and equal opportunity.

In MoMA, we spent a lot of time at the exhibit Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980 — mainly because we've been working on a book that includes that period. Not, in our view, a totally successful presentation of such a complicated history — as Ronald Reagan famously noted, there are a lot of different countries "down there", and unless you already knew a lot about what you were looking at, you might not be sure whether a particular project or building was in São Paulo or Mexico, or 1952 or 1972, and some enormously important events (e.g., the coups in Chile and Argentina) were scarcely mentioned. But, if you did have some idea what you were looking at, you could find many fascinating, more obscure works that you hadn't seen before. Susana will be writing a more detailed review, so I'll leave my comments at that.

A totally successful exhibit (in my view) was the marvelous One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North. Seeing the entire series of Lawrence's 60 paintings, re-united for the first time in many years and set out on the four walls of a large gallery in the order he intended, was marvelous in many ways. First, the beauty of the pieces, in Lawrence's dramatic, flattened images in just four colors, emphasizing the stark reality of the great black migration from the southern to northern states of the U.S. in the years just before Lawrence was born (in 1917). And then, of course, that dramatic story, which the young Lawrence (he was only 23 when he painted the series) had thorough documented, by his readings in the  collection on black history amassed by Puerto Rican-born scholar and bibliophile, Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, (now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the wonderful resources of the New York Public Library,) and from his many conversations with his parents and other older neighbors in Harlem. The exhibit is further enriched by works by other artists, including the poet Langston Hughes (a friend of Lawrence, who illustrated Hughes's collection of poems with the same title as his series picture series, "One-Way Ticket"), a video of Marian Anderson singing at the Lincoln Memorial, another of Betty Holiday performing "Strange Fruit," and many other black musicians and graphic artists.

This I saw as a hopeful, optimistic picture of triumph, of people who and maintained and efended their dignity against the tremendous odds of color discrimination. 

But then, for a much more pessimistic view of ethnic relations in the U.S., the sad show at the Metropolitan Museum, The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky. The peoples of the American plains seized on new materials (glass, metals), images (clothing styles and others), and the great possibilities offered by the horse — all these imported by Europeans, with extensive contact beginning around 1700 — to create beautiful new forms and to increase their hunting and manufacturing prowess. Their ancestors had already been producing many beautiful objects before the European contact, but with more limited materials; the new things and ideas inspired a great growth and exploration of new styles and images. That demonstrates once again how creative people can be when given the chance. But this flourishing culture was brief, and its end disastrous: more and more Europeans came, killed off the buffalo that the plains people had come to rely on, massacred enormous numbers of "Indians" and then herded the survivors into camps and prisons and reservations, prohibiting their languages and many of their customs.

Some of their descendants have not given up or given in, and it's good to know that there are still rebels among them, defending their dignity and expressing themselves in new ways. But overall, the story told by the Met's exhibit is very sad one.

The Nationalist Solution - NYTimes.com

In considering how to confront religious extremism and the terror it manifests, David Brooks has posed the problem intelligently in his column in today's NYT, The Nationalist Solution - NYTimes.com:

Extremism is a spiritual phenomenon, a desire for loftiness of spirit gone perverse. You can’t counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision. There will always be alienated young men fueled by spiritual ardor. Terrorism will be defeated only when they find a different fulfillment, even more bold and self-transcending.

I think this is true and important. However Brooks' proposed solution for some of those alienated young men is unconvincing: "a revived Egyptian nationalism, Lebanese nationalism, Syrian nationalism, some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime."

Yes indeed, revived nationalism may fulfill their need for a bold and self-transcending heroic vision. Revived nationalism is what is fueling the reciprocal slaughter in eastern Ukraine, and fueled the 1990s wars in the Balkans. And rather than an antidote to religious extremism, it may be a facilitator. In the chaotic violence in Libya, Syria and other places, nationalist and religious fanaticism tend to be mutually reinforcing. The decapitators of ISIS are fanatics of that new self-proclaimed "state", whether or not they have any clear notion of Islam.

In his The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James gathered evidence from many cultures that a spiritual crisis in mid- to late-adolescence is almost universal, and can be resolved only by what he calls "conversion":  a turning away from the chaotic and contradictory messages that assail every young person to find some "process of unification of the self" which always brings "a characteristic sort of relief; and never such extreme relief as when it is cast into the religious mould. Happiness! happiness! religion is only one of the ways in which men gain that gift." (p. 163)

Note, "only one of the ways."  James continues: "The new birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by the irruption into the individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love, ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic demotion." (163-164)

The histories of Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran — and almost every other country — offer examples of other sorts of passions, other visions that united people in heroic struggles to construct something rather than destroy it. Mosadegh in Iran led one such movement. And in the Arab countries, Nasser in Egypt another, and the early Ba'ath in Syria, in those years when "Arab nationalism" aimed at modernization and national development, not religious intolerance. If that is the kind of "revived nationalism" Brooks was referring to, I'm afraid it's too late. Those movements were killed by pressure from more powerful nations in the 1950s (Britain principally, in the case of Iran, with more complicated frustrations in the other cases) which is one reason why they have not been repeated.

In any case, a new inspiring vision is not something outsiders can hope to inject. It can only emerge from within the alienated youth's own ideological and social environment, in the languages and symbols most familiar to them. The most we can do, and this is a lot, is rein in the racism and intolerance that beset those youth resident in Europe and widen opportunities — educational and occupational — for them to resolve their struggles of identity, so that fewer of them turn to destruction. And try not to frustrate so blatantly their new projects of construction, which will almost inevitably be opposed to vested economic interests. 

And don't miss this report by Mona el-Naggar, on how a young well-educated Egyptian from a supportive family became an ISIS terrorist — and his friends' thinking that the same could have happened to them. From a Private School in Cairo to ISIS Killing Fields in Syria (With Video) - NYTimes.com

Podemos: a different sort of party

My article on Podemos (CounterPunch, 13-15 February) has generated some thoughtful responses, including one from a French journalist friend who, remembering May 1968 in Paris, is worried that such "a social upheaval is not easily transformed into a viable political power."

As I told him, I think we may have some interesting disagreements — interesting because they provoke further thought. Some (at least ) of the campaign proposals for the European elections were quite unrealistic, but they served not only to get all those voters (1.25 million!) but to put the goals of a decent, more egalitarian distribution on the agenda for all the parties. And Iglesias and the others have taken the critiques into account, and refashioned the proposals to make them much more reasonable. The structure of Podemos makes it extremely flexible and open to pragmatic adjustments of this sort — not turnabouts decided by a leader (like Zapatero's disastrous reversal on the Socialist Party program in 2010), but responses to demands and critiques from the base.

Podemos has adopted the formal trappings of a political party (statutes, officers, etc.) because that's what the law requires for elections, but it is more of a social movement than an organized party. It's unlike any other party for the openness of debate, the fluidity of leadership and (unheard of in Spanish politics) the scant respect for hierarchy — Iglesias and his closest allies are generally respected, but not always heeded. In the primaries for municipal elections, Andalucía and Aragón already have chosen rival slates to Iglesias'. Susana (my accomplice) and I are involved in our Podemos circle here in Carboneras (a coastal village of 8,000 in Almería, Andalucía) for the same reason as most of the supporters across Spain, to shake up established, self-satisfied local structures that are doing too little for the community.

My correspondent suggests (if I've understood him rightly) that movements like Podemos "challenge  the two pillars of a decent European society : democracy and free market." First, I don't see how such an open, internally democratic movement as Podemos can be considered a challenge to democracy — but maybe there were such strains in the May 68 upheaval in Paris. And as for the "free market," I personally have been very impressed by the analysis of another Frenchman, Thomas Piketty. As Mohandas Gandhi said of European civilization, I think a free market would be a very good idea. But to try it will require some major reforms of the one we've got, so skewed to preserving the wealth of the wealthiest.