New Year's Resolution 2004: more focus

Resolved: To keep this blog on topic, i.e., "literature & politics." By "politics" I mean the power dynamics in a society, whether the actors are classes, races, genders or clans, even when these forces don't consciously organize themselves as parties. Mainly what interests me is the politics assumed by or implied by poetry and fiction, and the poets and narrators who most interest me are those who are aware of those implications.

So I'm going to try to refrain from sounding off about politics without literature, or literature without mentioning its politics. And that's why for now I'm replacing my old slogan (which was an inversion of a passage from Marx) with these famous verses, from William Carlos Williams:

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

For a longer excerpt from the poem, see Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

P.S.: For those of you who read Spanish, acabo de reorganizar la Pequeña Biblioteca Comentada, y de agregarle otra narrativa de Mario Vargas Llosa.

The year that was: a blog-by-blog review

Getting this weblog up was one of my New Year's resolutions for 2003.

Venezuela

One of my first blogs, on January 2 was about the turmoil in Venezuela. I still think I was right then, about the general lines of the conflict. One of my resolutions for 2004 is to analyze that situation in greater depth. (You can view the original if you click on "Archive" on the left and go to 2003/01/02. See also Hugo Chávez' triple struggle).

World literature

Another of my 2004 resolutions is to learn more poetry "by heart" (which is much better than learning it "by head") -- if not a poem a day, as close as I can manage. It's a wonderful exercise -- even if I later forget a line or a stanza, the process of repeating it and listening to the poem's music and its several meanings helps me understand it, and in the longer run may build my confidence to commit poetry myself. I started a couple of weeks ago with Robert Frost's "Birches" -- a joyous poem about, I think, mortality and bouncing back. Then I picked up a book I had looked into many times but never before tried to read with care, seeking something that sang to me so that I would want to learn it: Pablo Neruda's Canto general (1949), which is a whole history of Latin America in verse. Then T. S. Eliot (so far, about half of "The Lovesong of J. Allen Prufrock," which is delicious), William Carlos Williams, "The Poor" -- not my favorite of his, but I had only a scanty selection available in an anthology on my shelves. Next I turned to one of the most famous voices of the late 19th century, Nicaragua's (and the world's) Rubén Darío. I'm sure every second adult and school child in Nicaragua has learned by heart much more of Darío than I aspire to, but when next I'm there I'll be able to join in on the choruses of "Juventud, divino tesoro,/ ¡Ya te vas para no volver!/Cuando quiero llorar no lloro,/ y a veces lloro sin querer." (Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva assumed everybody would get the reference when he titled a novel Cuando quiero llorar no lloro -- I didn't get it in 1987, when I read the novel.)

For 2004, I resolve to include more fiction and poetry in Spanish in my reading. In 2003, I commented on Gabriel García Márquez' memoir, Vivir para contarla (in "Archive," 2003/01/04). In English, you can find my blogs on Richard Powers, Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance (01/13); Stephen Crane, Red Badge of Courage (01/20), and several others -- but just go to my Fiction Readings page for a compendium.

Movies

During the year, I made brief comments on several movies. You can find them all gathered at Film & Theater Notes.

Ecological disaster

Horrible oil spill in Galicia noted 01/07; we were in Spain (though on the opposite coast) when it happened.

Wars on terror (or to promote it?

I first "blogged" against the then-pending war on Iraq on 01/12. I'm still agin it.

Ground Zero, memorial, reconstruction

See Susana Torre's entry in the memorial contest, and my blog of 2003/12/10.

My fiction

I started the year with great expectations for publishing my novel, A Gift for the Sultan; for a description and how I came to write about Constantinople in 1402, check out blog for 01/08. I did give a reading from it in Brooklyn, and published two chapters as stories in Copperfield Review. Several agents asked to see sections, and one requested and eagerly read the whole thing -- but she was disappointed by the ending. I now think she was right, and I'm planning to add a 4th section before sending it out again. (That's another of my 2004 resolutions.) Meanwhile, besides the two publications in Copperfield, I have unrelated stories in Small Spiral Notebook and forthcoming in InkPot, and a couple of others submitted and pending response at other journals. An addendum to my novel-finishing resolution, I also want to revise or write and send out more stories to more journals in 2004.

My journalism and analysis

I don't believe there is any such thing as "nonfiction." All writing is fashioned deliberately by an artist or artisan of words (fiction derives from the past participle of Latin fingere, "to touch, form, mold").The difference is that when I present my work as journalism or analysis, I'm claiming that I didn't make the whole thing up (even though I did make up the form, the emphasis, the structure of the article). But to the matter: I began the year with an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, blog 01/24. Later in the year, I also landed a contract to write articles for Monster.com; the first one is due Jan. 7, 2004, so I'd better get busy. However by far the biggest "analysis" writing project that I have going is the book on Latin American architecture and urbanism, co-written with architect Susana Torre and to be published by W. W. Norton. It's a very challenging, wide-ranging book touching on many disciplines, many centuries (I start with the Olmecs of A. D. 500 and we go on to the present day and beyond), over an enormous territory with two dozen countries. I made less progress on it than I'd planned; my resolution for 2004 is to finish the drafts of my parts of the book and help Susana edit her parts (as she will help me).

2004

Check out "Archives" (link on the left) for 2003/01/01, to see what predictions I made last year. So far, #1, that Hugo Chávez would survive the employers' strike in Venezuela, has held up. #2, that Lula (Brazilian President Luiz Inacia da Silva) would advance economic democracy in his country, I think has also held up -- but (as we knew it would) it's proven to be a complicated task. These next ones have not yet come true, but I'm still hoping:

3) The Russians' stupid repression of Chechens, and the Chechens' reckless assaults on Russians, may so exhaust the patience of Russian citizens that they force Putin to change policy or get out.
4) Good people in Africa will keep trying (against terrible odds) to make democracy a habit -- Kenya may be the latest example.
5) The Israelis will run out of ways to punish Palestinians and out of patience with their own aggressive settlers, so more of them will demand that the government seek peace.
6) Palestinians are running out of families willing to sacrifice their children in suicidal attacks, so more of them will be willing to respond.
7) My latest novel, just completed, will become a best-seller and a movie, which will make me and my friends very happy.

Guns, germs & steel

I just finished reading Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Random House, 1997. Reprint, 1999 Norton paperback). I can see both why it is immensely popular on college campuses and why it is the exasperation of so many scholars -- mainly for the same two reasons.

If you haven't read it yet, here's the argument: The reasons why European whites acquired the "guns, germs and steel" with which they decimated and subdued all other peoples have nothing to do with their relative intelligence or other biological differences ("race") but entirely with accidental geographical advantages. The main ones were: a wide variety of minerals, including the rocks necessary for an efficient stone-age technology necessary as a first stage for using other minerals; the availability of easy-to domesticate, highly productive plants and animals enabling people in Mesopotamia to become farmers and produce enough of a surplus to build cities, long before anybody else; and the east-west orientation of the Eurasian continent, with a wide swath in the same latitude with a long growing season and plenty of rain, so that crops developed in Mesopotamia could also be grown as far as western India, all across northern Africa and across southern Europe to its western edge; the absence of major physical barriers also facilitated transfers of inventions (whether in agriculture or devices such as the wheel, practices such as weaving, etc.).

The book's great success ("over 1 million copies sold," the cover proclaims) is mainly because Diamond weaves a coherent story through a huge subject, all human history, that is a plausible alternative to the naïve race theories still current. The problem for many scholars is that the coherence seems too facile, neglecting the complexities of many developments over the millennia and (according to some of those scholars) getting many particulars wrong.

The other reason for both the books popularity and many scholars' impatience is that Diamond repeats his essential points over and over. This makes it hard to miss them, which must be convenient for the distracted undergraduate, but is wearisome for the attentive reader, especially one who is already familiar with many of the arguments. And if you've read Hans Zinsser's 1935 book Rats, Lice and History, or much of Max Weber, or any of the other many books on human development, much of this will be familiar. And such repetition wastes word-space, making the book longer than necessary for its argument.

Still, if I were teaching such a course, I would assign the book as a terrific discussion-starter, because it takes on so much. And I think the basic arguments are correct. That is, I think they are the most useful hypotheses at present for organizing our thinking about development and undevelopment.

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.