One takes pictures

and often forgets about them, but going through my files today, I was glad to see these images again:




Dien Bien Phu, 1995.





Hanoi, 1995.





Dekalb, Illinois, 2007.





Reykjavík, 2007.





Paris, 2008.





London, 2008.



[I thought it might me fun to write a 1,000-word essay to accompany each of these photos, as in a picture is worth a thousand words. I'm too busy right now, but who knows, I might just do that.]

Bill Knott:

*
When poets start to break under the torrent of hatred society pours upon them; when they begin to internalize that hatred and to self-generate it in the neurotic hope of propitiating its cruelties, when they snatch the whip from Master and lash themselves;

when they understand how loathed and despised poetry is by all the powers of this world; when they realize how loathed and despised they are by all the authorities of this world; and when, under the endless onslaught of contempt and scorn and persecution which they as poets are condemned to suffer, at last they too loathe and despise themselves,

that is the point they turn on each other and kill each other.

*
All societies exist for one purpose: to murder poets.

Everything in the world exists in order to end up on the point of a knife entering the poet's throat.

**




[context]

Static and Hiss

Honestly, buddy, I'm too educated,
Handsome, suave, cultured, straight
Talking, yeah right, funny, intelligent,
Charity-minded, well-traveled, green,
Humble, well-endowed, hard working,
American, fresh off the boat immigrant,
Descendant, goddamn it, from the Mayflower,

To be shafted, fucked twice, madoffed,
Upside down mortgaged, underemployed,
Just handed my two-weeks, without a
Safety net beneath my fat ass, drugged
By 24/7 cheeky bullshit, rah, rah, rah,
Time for another SuperBowl commercial,
While I invest my last dime on a machine
That will lick my wife 280 times a minute,
Because the Cyalis just might finish me off,
What with the high blood pressure, and no

Health insurance.





.

Protests, strikes

and rioting in Paris over collapsing economy, corruption and bailouts for banksters:










...........................................................
Economic woes at heart of French strike

BBC, 29 January 2009--Last summer, President Nicolas Sarkozy boasted that these days when there is a strike in France, nobody notices.

But this time, with three-quarters of French people and all the main unions backing the walk-out, the strike will hit hard.

In Paris, train and underground services are disrupted and up to a third of Air France short-haul flights will be cancelled. Many schools and post offices are shut, with courts, hospitals and power companies also affected.

[...]


.

Two videos by Chris Barrett,

whom I met at my reading in Camden last night:


HAMLET ON THE STREET - Monologue by Craig Bazan in Camden NJ


Barack Obama: Too Much Pie For One Guy

Millions of Chinese set to lose jobs as New Year celebrations end

The Telegraph, 27 Jan 2009:


As many as 40 million Chinese who moved from the country to the city to find work are expected to lose their jobs this week as the New Year celebrations come to a close.

Instead of returning to work after the public holiday, many will remain in their remote rural homes, having been told not to come back.

Others will make the long journey to China's economic heartlands only to find their source of income has evaporated.

The gloomy prediction came from an official at the Central Communist Party School, who estimated that between 20 and 30 per cent of the 130 million provincial Chinese who moved to the city for employment would find themselves obsolete.

To make matters worse, they will find no guarantee of work at home as sophisticated farming methods reduce the need for labourers and agricultural hands.

In Shanghai, the New Year was ushered in with an unparalleled pyrotechnic display as the population let off steam.

Firework sales rose by a third from last year, and it took more than 30,000 street sweepers to clear the 1,200 tonnes of debris from the streets.

[...]



.

[ NSFW ]

.

[For The Lower Half]

Writing Spaces

Over at Harriet, Jason Guriel has a post about writers' desks. Below are some of my writing spaces over the years:


1994, Philadelphia, when I still considered myself primarily an artist, hence a simple typewriter in my painting studio. This image, from the catalog of a Rosenbach Museum exhibit, Manuscripts of the 1992-93 Pew Fellowships in the Arts, shows manuscripts and drawings arranged on a photograph.



2003, when I'd write lying on my belly. Image taken in Certaldo, Italy, and printed in American Poetry Review. In 2006, while living in Norwich, England, I was lying on my belly on a low fishing pier, reading, when a hissing swan suddenly emerged from the reeds, trailing a wife and two nearly mature offspring. He was as startled by me as I was by him. Swans can be fierce. I was lucky he didn't strike. Speaking of swans, did you know that the male also sits on the eggs? My wife and I saw one do it. How lovely. How come no one ever speaks of eating a swan? Does it stink? A beautiful animal, Sir, until you try to chew on one. I've had sparrow, pigeon and ostrich, but never swan meat. One of these days, I'll just pin one to the grass and, without lifting my head, slobber it whole.



2008, while I was teaching in Missoula, MT. This image is of my kitchen table, where I sometimes wrote, although the round table was pretty annoying for that purpose.



2009. My working space at home in Philadelphia. Notice the plastic bling in the corner. The pillow is for kneeling, my most comfortable writing posture. That fine table was given to me by my friend, Lloyd Luntz, who died of cancer two years ago. In 1998, Lloyd went with me to Vietnam. At 6-9, he was quite a sight, especially in the remote parts of the Mekong Delta, where some people had never seen a white man close up.



.

For The Lower Half:

.

Tahseen al Khateeb:

Do you know that the codename of the latest Israeli massacre in Gaza [Operation Cast Lead (Hebrew: מבצע עופרת יצוקה‎), was adapted from a Hanukkah poem by Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the national poet of Israel!

Is it the poetics of war?!

Hallelujah!


For Hanukkah
Hayyim Nahman Bialik
(1873-1934)

Father lighted candles for me;
Like a torch the Shamash shone.
In whose honor, for whose glory?
For Hanukkah alone.

Teacher bought a big top for me,
Solid (cast) lead, the finest known.
In whose honor, for whose glory?
For Hanukkah alone.

Mother made a pancake for me,
Hot and sweet and sugar-strewn.
In whose honor, for whose glory?
For Hanukkah alone.

Uncle had a present for me,
An old penny for my own.
In whose honor, for whose glory?
For Hanukkah alone.



..........................
[See also]

State of Cringe

James Howard Kunstler's latest, 1/26/09:


Just as Mr. Obama has danced into the oval office, we've arrived at a moment when a lot of people have a hard time imagining the future. This includes especially the mainstream media, which has reached a state of zombification parallel to that of the banks. But even in the mighty blogosphere, with its thousands of voices unconstrained by craven advertisers or pandering managing editors, the view forward dims as a dark and ominous fog rolls over the landscape of possibilities.

For at least a year several story-lines have been slugging it out inconclusively for supremacy of the Web-waves. The main event has been the Deflationists versus the Inflationists. The first group basically says that so much "money" is being welshed out of existence that it dwarfs the new "money" being shoveled into existence in the form of bail-outs, tarps, and office re-decoration stipends. The Deflationists see the tattered remnants of the consumer credit economy auguring ever deeper into a hole until it is buried so far down that all the back-hoes ever sold will not be able to dig it out. The competing Inflationists say that the massive truckloads of shoveled-in "money" will soon overtake vanishing "wealth" and, in the process, make the US dollar worthless.

Some of us see both outcomes in sequence: the deflationary "work out" of bad debt currently underway -- of loans that will will never be paid back, of acronymic paper securities revealed as frauds, of "non-performing" contracts entering the swamps of foreclosure, of banks pretending to still exist, of hallucinated "wealth" rushing into the cosmic worm-hole of oblivion -- can only go for so long before everyone who can go broke will go broke. Then, just as we find ourselves a nation of empty pockets, the tsunami of shoveled-in "money" designed to "reboot the consumer" (created not from productive activity but just printed recklessly), will start churning through the "economy," chasing products and commodities that became scarce during the deflationary phase -- and the result is hyper-inflation, the eraser of debt, destroyer of fortunes, and suicide pill of feckless governments.

[...]

75% Of Latest Bank Of America Bailout Used To Pay Merrill Lynch Bonuses (BAC)

Clusterstock, Jan 22, 09--Remember the latest Bank of America (BAC) bailout, the one we were all so steamed about last week? (The $20 billion of cash and $100+ billion of trash-asset guarantees that absolutely had to be given or else Bank of America shareholders might have lost everything?)

Yes, well, you probably thought that that cash would be used to bolster the bank's capital or something. (We know you weren't dumb enough to think it might have been used to make loans).

Alas, it wasn't used for that. It was used to pay Merrill Lynch executives the huge bonuses they deserved for unloading their balance sheet on for-some-reason-not-yet-fired Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis.*

Has change really come to America? We'll believe it when we see it.



.

Hinchable

For The Lower Half:








.

Wildlife in the crosshairs as poaching ramps up

San Jose Mercury News, 01/15/2009:

FRESNO, Calif.—The country's financial tumult is exacting a toll on wildlife in California and Florida, where game wardens are seeing a surge in poaching for money as the economy declines.

In California, where officials are calling 2008 "The Year of the Extreme Poacher," state records show that arrests for the illegal killing of game birds, deer, bear, fish and abalone, which fetch $100 a pound, have risen dramatically since 2005.

One man was arrested four times for poaching lobsters in a La Jolla marine conservation area. A Gilroy man was caught with 335 waterfowl in his freezers, including protected species. And two people were arrested in Sacramento for allegedly poaching and selling deer to a meat market for $150 each.

With the struggling economy, some people are desperate enough to seek profits by poaching species that can be sold on the black market to consumers, retailers and restaurants. And officials say increased poaching here and in Florida may be a harbinger for the rest of the country.

[...]


.

Protests across Europe over Collapsing Economy

Der Spiegel:



Spain


Greece


Lithuania


Iceland


.

Perestroika 2.0 Beta

Dmitri Orlov, 1/22/09:


Congratulations, everyone, we have a new president: a fresh new face, a capable, optimistic, inspiring figure, ushering in a new era of responsibility, ready to confront the many serious challenges that face the nation; in short, we have us a Gorbachev. I don't know about you, but I find the parallel rather obvious.

Obama wishes to save the economy, and to inspire us with words such as "We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories." [Inauguration speech] At the same time, he cautions us that "We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense" -- an echo of Dick Cheney's "The American way of life is non-negotiable." And so we descend from the nonexistent but wonderfully evocative "clean coal" to the more pedestrian "Put a little dirt in your gas tank!"

But these are all euphemisms: the reality is that it is either fossil fuels, which are running out while simultaneously destabilizing the planet's climate and poisoning the biosphere, or the end of industrial civilization, or (most likely) both, happening in that order. According to the latest International Energy Agency projections, the half-life of industrial civilization can be capped at about 17 years: it's all downhill from here. All industrial countries will be forced to rapidly deindustrialize on this time scale, but the one that has spent the last century building an infrastructure that has no future -- based on little houses interconnected by cars, with all of its associated moribund, unmaintainable systems -- is virtually guaranteed to fall the hardest. An American's two greatest enemies are his house and his car. But try telling that to most Americans, and you will get ridicule, consternation, and disbelief. Thus, the problem has no political solution. Tragically, Obama happens to be a politician.

[...]

Indians flee Dubai as dreams crash

Daiji World, 1/14/09--It's the great escape by Indians who've hit the dead-end in Dubai.

Local police have found at least 3,000 automobiles--sedans, SUVs, regulars--abandoned outside Dubai International Airport in the last four months. Police say most of the vehicles had keys in the ignition, a clear sign they were left behind by owners in a hurry to take flight.

The global economic crisis has brought Dubai's economic progress, mirrored by its soaring towers and luxurious resorts, to a stuttering halt. Several people have been laid off in the past months after the realty boom started unraveling.

On the night of December 31, 2008 alone more than 80 vehicles were found at the airport. "Sixty cars were seized on the first day of this year," director general of Airport Security, Mohammed Bin Thani, told DNA over the phone. On the same day, deputy director of traffic, colonel Saif Mohair Al Mazroui, said they seized 22 cars abandoned at a prohibited area in the airport.

Faced with a cash crunch and a bleak future ahead, there were no goodbyes for the migrants--overwhelmingly South Asians, mostly Indians--just a quiet abandoning of the family car at the airport and other places [...]


..................................................
And this morning, I got an email from poet Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, speaking about Iceland:


Hey Linh.

Shit hit the fan tonight. Demonstrators, who'd been on for almost 36 hours last night - with a short break for sleep - started throwing rocks at the police last night, after the police stepped up their cudgeling. Other demonstrators made a human shield for the police, for awhile at least - two police officers were sent to the hospital, said to be seriously injured. At 00.30 hours they teargassed Austurvöllur (the square in front of the parliament, where most of the protesting has been taking place).

And here I sit in Helsinki trembling. The violence of demonstrators seems to have a great demoralizing effect - a lot more so than the violence of the police, which is to be expected. Most people feel they're fighting for justice, and breaking people's skulls (even if they are police officers) doesn't fit into that category.





.

Martin Kippenberger

.





Untitled, 1988. oil on canvas. 94 1/2 x 78 3/3 inches.




.

Craig Santos Perez writes:

--by October 31, 2009, Linh Dinh will publish his 300th post at the Harriet blog. On November 1, 2009, the Harriet blog will be renamed the "Linharriet" blog. sadly, Linh will not receive a dime for his harrowing efforts. [...]


.............................................................................
Speaking of making nothing, check out David Hammons' 1983 conceptual, performance piece, Bliz-aard Ball Sale:






.

Individual Kitsch vs. Mass Produced Schlock

From the BBC, 1/22/09:

[...] Street painters are part of the romantic lure of Montmartre. This was the home of artists like Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso.

Today, some 300 officially licensed artists work here. Almost all of their customers are tourists.

They may not produce great art but they are skilled painters.

And now they say their livelihoods are at risk because many of the souvenir shops in the area are selling cheap, mass-produced paintings from China and Eastern Europe.

"These imports have no soul, but they cost a fraction of the prices we charge," says local artist Pavlos Fassolis, a Greek who has worked here for decades.

"That's because they're produced on assembly lines, with one person painting a tree and the next one the sky," he adds.

"Another thing they do is make a print and then apply some paint by hand afterwards to make it look more real. This is very bad for the future of all the artists of Montmartre."

[...]



.

Don’t Read, This Poem is a Scam!!!

When someone says flower, you picture a rose.
You’ll die on September 29th of this year.
Just by reading that, you’ll certainly die.
Don’t thank or curse me, it wasn’t much
Of a prediction, but words are indeed deeds.
I find you very nice, sexy and intelligent…
Why not get even for once? Dominate
The English language today! It’s too late,
You’ll die even if you hide inside a bomb
Proof bunker, for all of September 29th,
Even if you burn this non-poem, destroy
Your just bought computer, or disappear.





.

A reading at Rutgers-Camden

January 28, 7 PM
at the Stedman Gallery, Fine Arts Building,
followed by Q&A sessions and receptions with the authors.
Free and open to the public.


Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House and Blood and Soap and four books of poems: All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts, Borderless Bodies and Jam Alerts. His novel, Love Like Hate, is scheduled to be released in 2009. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004, Best American Poetry 2007 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places.

Dave King's debut novel, The Ha-Ha, was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Christian Science Monitor and The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and was among eighteen books inluded on The Washington Post list of the season's best novels. The Ha-Ha was a finalist for Book-of-the-Month Club's "Best Literary Fiction" award and the Quills Foundation "Best Debut Author" award and won King a 2006-07 Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. King's poetry has been published in The Paris Review, among other venues, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.




[I've spent more than 20 years in Philly, but I've only been to Camden twice, one for a reading by a poet whose name I can no longer remember, and once for an outdoor Wynton Marsalis concert. I had seen him before, around 1981, at a much better show at DC Space, a Washington pub. Branford looked so young then, I thought he was a local high school kid, replacement musician. Speaking of D.C., that's also where I saw Bennie Goodman, and Art Pepper at his last concert, 15 days before he died. Looking like Gertrude Stein, the man played beautifully.]



.

Regarding money and power in poetry,

consider this 2006 essay by Steve Evans:


Free (Market) Verse

Ten years ago, when the New York Times Magazine set out to caricature the leading tendencies in the poetry world, it used the occasion of James Merrill’s death to file an obituary for the “poetry establishment” as a whole. Without that elegant poet’s inherited millions (his father was the Merrill in Merrill Lynch), which had trickled down to fellow poets via the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the clubby uptown world of old-style patronage—donor readings at J.P. Morgan’s former home, easy access to the pages of The New Yorker, cushy tenured chairs, guaranteed publication by FSG and Knopf, and a monopoly on prestige- and cash-conferring prizes—was fast unraveling. Barbarians of various descriptions—Language Poets, Hip Hop Poets, Neo-Formalists, Surrealists, and Nuyorican slam poets—were assembling at the gate. And it wasn’t another exquisitely crafted, emotionally muted, slyly allusive poem—such as Merrill had made his reputation on—that they were clamoring for.

If there was no trace in the magazine’s cartoon gallery of a cohort of midwestern white guys with business backgrounds aspiring to write instantly “accessible” poems about authentic American life for the amusement and improvement of semi-literate “regular” folks, that’s because it would take a presidency as benighted and hokey as that of George W. Bush to bring such a group to prominence. Through men like Dana Gioia, John Barr, and Ted Kooser, Karl Rove’s battle-tested blend of unapologetic economic elitism and reactionary cultural populism is now being marketed in the far-off reaches of the poetry world. A curiously timed gift from a pharmaceutical heir who, before slipping into four decades of crippling depression, had submitted a pseudonymous item or two to Chicago’s Poetry magazine, which politely rejected them, has bankrolled the unlikely effort.

What interested most people about Ruth Lilly’s hundred-million-dollar gift to Poetry, publicly announced in the late fall of 2002, was the sheer size of the sum. Though she bestowed even more money on an organization called Americans for the Arts, the idea that a quaintly penurious outfit like Poetry should come into such unexpected riches appealed to the journalistic imagination. The charming, Dickensian narrative involved shabby, sunless quarters in a library basement inhabited by a chain-smoking, lunch-skipping editor who had for two decades heroically sacrificed all to the culling—from ninety thousand submissions a year—of the few poems good enough to earn their two dollars a line and be brought before the eyes of the magazine’s subscribers. Now, through her mysterious beneficence, Lilly had lifted Poetry from this place of squalor and cultural obsolescence: from a grandparent warehoused in a seedy retirement home, it had been transformed into the newest and richest kid on the block, its financial capital now far exceeding the dwindling symbolic capital it had been husbanding since the days of first-wave modernism.

[...]



.

Victorious, but vilified: Israel has 'destroyed its image and its soul'

The Independent's Kim Sengupta in Jerusalem and Donald Macintyre on the Gaza-Egypt border, Sunday, 18 January 2009:


After three weeks of carnage in Gaza, there were tentative signs of a ceasefire last night. But the bitter legacy of the past 22 days for Israel is that, while it declares victory on the battlefield, the country's reputation has rarely sunk so low.

Yesterday the United Nations called for a war crimes investigation after two children, aged five and seven, were killed when, it claimed, an Israeli tank shell hit a school sheltering some of the more than 40,000 internally displaced refugees.

"These two little boys are as innocent, indisputably, as they are dead," said John Ging, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza. In Jerusalem, Chris Gunness, the organisation's spokesman, added: "There has to be an investigation to determine whether a war crime has been committed."

Mr Gunness used unusually strong language. But the call came at the culmination not only of a rising civilian death toll but also a series of attacks on UN installations and, in some cases, the people who were under the UN's care at the time. The most lethal of these was an earlier shelling in which 43 internally displaced Gazans, sheltering in the Fakhura UNRWA school in Jabalya, were killed on 6 January.

[...]


.

Juarez vigilante group claims it will kill one criminal every 24 hours

El Paso Times, 1/15/09--A group calling itself the Comando Ciudadano por Juárez, or the Juárez Citizens Command, is claiming it will kill a criminal every 24 hours to bring order to the violent crime-plagued city.

The announcement of the supposed group was the first known case of possible organized vigilantism in Juárez as police and the military have been apparently unable to stop a plague of killings and other crimes.

"Better the death of a bad person than that they continue to contaminating our region," the news release stated in Spanish [...]



.

A Collapse Update

from Mike Ruppert, 1/18/09:


Perhaps we should be holding our breaths for something else; something that is breaking out all over the world. Civil unrest now moves from a back to a front burner as a landmark on our map and a pressing issue for our discussion.

On January 16th and 17th I saw (either) cowardice or duplicity on the part of mainstream media. Chesley Sullenberger is a great pilot. Coming from an Air Force/aviation family I would be honored to shake his hand. The U.S. Air miracle on the Hudson was indeed that. But for almost 36 hours I watched in rage as the mainstream media, especially CNN, played the same four of five clips endlessly, over and over, rehashing the rehash – hour after hour. The anchors and their producers were either taking a break or regrouping. Several looked very bored. Not since 9-11 have I seen American media shut down news coverage of other important events to such a degree. But the US Air crash landing wasn't a 9-11 was it?

On January 16th the United States shed another 21,000 jobs… in one day. Globally, the economic collapse is hitting other industrialized countries much harder than here. Around the world "emerging" bourses are imploding at a faster rate than ours. Perhaps we should rename them as "disappearing markets" now. The disappearing act has hit turbo charge in Europe as a result of a now three-week old lack of Russian natural gas. Triggered by the economic collapse and compounded by human suffering in unheated, near-zero weather, riots – big ones – have erupted from Latvia in the North, to Sofia in the South. There is serious street fighting. Around the world, from China, to India, to Europe, industrialized nations are "frantically" preparing for civil unrest (China at a very rapid pace). Of course our map says that the US, the UK, Russia and a few others have been preparing for this for years.

Arab nations have lost $2.5 trillion (40% of their investments) thus far in the collapse and have postponed or cancelled 60% of their new development projects… You know? Those hotels where you can snow ski inside when it's 112 outside? That kind of a shutdown will cause the Arab oil-producing nations to explode in civil unrest as aggravated poverty, starvation and disease hit home in short order. Collapsed oil prices have exposed the lack of economic stamina in the region. (You thought Americans were foolish spenders.) The luxuries of the princes will now stand starkly contrasted against the barren desert of their subjects' lives. Thus, geography is giving us our first major political tectonic fault line. From the Baltic south, through Greece, into Turkey, then fanning out across the Middle East is a new frontier of soon-to-be flaming unrest

Unrest will happen here and it will happen in an earthshaking fashion within the next year. Could the evidence supporting this conclusion have been missed as we watched footage on the Hudson for the thirty-second time in 36 hours? Couldn't they have squeezed any of this other news in… somewhere?

[...]

Going down with Dale and Anne

At the end of 2007, Dale Smith made some grim predictions for 2008 which I thought were pretty right on, if perhaps premature? Today, they are certainly more pertinent. For a new set of speculations on our near future, check out this piece by Anne Boyer:


a small essay on the anxious swarm

We can go the streets, at least, to attempt to resist the State, but how exactly does one resist The Economy? Already, in the face of the meltdown, much of the ordinary business of poetry seems a heightened ridiculousness, and I think some things are going to happen to this, the anxious swarm. Poetry always goes on, business or no, but how we reproduce, distribute, and read it is a different matter.

The way it looks now, grant funding for non-profit presses will dry up; university presses will get slashed. Contest fees will go up at first, but it is difficult to imagine the contest system, after a few years of this, continuing on, when the decision is to pay to have one’s poetry read or to pay for food, healthcare, or fuel. Micro-presses funded by individual incomes will for the most part probably cease, as the propertied class can no longer rely on income from investment, and working people will have less work, less pay, less credit, and less inclination to spend their money freely on publishing works of poetry. A number of micro-press books were funded by individual credit in the first place, as was the circuit of poetry travel for readings, conferences, festivals, etc. funded individually by credit, and overall by an endowment system that relied on now defunct investments. Even those poets funded up by their universities for travel, mailing, copies, etc., who are now and will be later in the best positions to be comfortable for awhile, will probably find their access to these privileges stripped as budgets tighten.

As far as the official academic-industry, there will likely be very few tenure track hires for “creative writing,” so few people will be able to join the ranks of the protected. There will likely be very few “creative writing majors.” There will likely be, even, a scarcity of contingent teaching positions for the hoardes of people trained to write and read poetry, and those contingent teachers who do, somehow, make the cut, often spousal hires, will live with even lower pay and even more abusive working conditions. Those brilliant friends now in graduate school will probably not have much to do in a few years. Those brilliant friends now on tenure tracks will be expected to behave as shaking cowards and stooges until they get secured into the system. There could be an onslaught, at first, of people in MFA programs, though I think these ranks would be comprised, generally, of those who are deluded into thinking we are in a “downturn,” not a total economic re-organization. After a few years, this will drop off.

Likely this means no more gluts of overprinted books of poetry and no more b.s. anthologies. Much of that side noise that had to do with c.v. fluffing will go dead. Those who are not totally, pathologically committed to poetry will probably stop writing, and writing about, poetry. I imagine in the urban literary centers, literary activity will fare a little better (for no other reason than poetry is good, free diversion); but those disconnected from the centers of power will be exactly that – disconnected – as travel becomes increasingly impossible.

The extant differences in power and money in the poetry world will become all that more apparent. There will be a certain kind of centralization. Note already The Poetry Foundation, and the way even many of American poetry’s outspoken leftists and/or “outsiders” write for their corporate blog or magazine, and also how the same will freely provide content for it in the comment boxes. Those who are in the safest positions economically will be the target of increasing resentment by those who were too late, really, to catch that train, and I expect there will be an increase in angry accusations that most of these little emperors wear exactly no clothes [...]




.................

Ann Lauterbach on Wealth, Fame and Power:

Art is not entertainment, and it is not decor. It is one of the rude fallacies of our time to want to reduce all art forms, and in particular literary arts, to their most facile and elemental role, and so deny their potential to awaken, provoke and elicit our glee at being agents in the construction of meaning. As Martha Nussbaum points out, "We are accustomed by now to think of literature as optional: as great, valuable, entertaining, excellent, but something that exists off to one side of political and economic and legal thought, in another university department, ancillary rather than competitive." We have, she adds, "narrowly hedonistic theories of literary value." Our world---late twentieth century America --- is relentless in its desire to dictate to us what we desire; it wants to assign and to determine how we construct and construe meaning in our lives, it wants to tell us from where our pleasures come. It wants us to believe that only Wealth, Fame and Power (WFP), in some combination or another, are worthwhile goals, because only WFP can confer ---what?--- celebrity.

Celebrity: the modern, secular form of martyrdom, where individuals are cast into the riotous blast of an eviscerating, obliterating light. How many personal disasters of every conceivable kind --- suicide, homicide, divorce, addiction --- before it is understood that celebrities are victims? "Their divorce was more predictable than their marriage."

6. Penance

With the insistent picturing and telling of Celebrity, it is of course not uninteresting to be a poet. John Ashbery once remarked, "To be famous, and to be a famous poet are not the same thing," by which he simply wanted to point out that the world of poetry is not included in celebrity picturing and storytelling. Why is this? Because the economy of being a poet subverts the received relationship between ambition, money, and success. Poets must acknowledge this fact a priori, at the outset; must, in a sense, agree to it. Many persons in many fields have an increasingly hard time making a living, and endemic poverty caused by social oppression is not something to be lightly set aside. To be poor in this culture carries all kinds of stigmas, and invites all kinds of rhetorical evocations of the American Dream, which holds that the pursuit of happiness is necessarily tied to the capacity to earn a living. (What constitutes a "living wage" in a culture driven by WFP is worth a pause, as we witness the slow but certain shrinkage of the middle class and the institutions of social transformation --- schools, libraries, museums, newspapers, research universities, concert halls, and so forth --- in which it has traditionally invested.)

A living wage: that which allows a person sufficient freedom to feel she/he has some control over her/his destiny; an alignment of capacity to activity which leads to a sense of sufficiency.

Nonetheless, persons who wish to become poets in this culture must make a kind of promise or vow, like St. Francis, in which they agree to a kind of economic obscurity, at least in relation to the writing of poems. The history of the embedded relation between poverty and poetry is not just a romance but is linked to the history of spiritual resistance, a resistance which characterized the initial founding of America, sometimes with dire consequences, and which finds its greatest secular expression in Emerson's Self-Reliance. People are disturbed when poets make a decent living as professors; they think it is a sort of bad joke (but of course newsworthy) when Allen Ginsberg sells his archive to a major university for big bucks, as if some breach of decorum had been committed. They are not equally bemused when movie stars, baseball players or television news commentators get millions upon millions for acting a part, playing ball, or reading aloud the news in front of a camera.

When poets make Money something is askew. As if, for every celebrity---say Michael Jackson or Madonna or --- exploding in the firmament like giant stars, there needs to be a shadow figure, an obscure Other toiling away in the dimmest corner, lost in the dark matter of the universe, never to be found by the searching lenses of far-reaching cameras. Poets must hold down this invisible portion of the universe, the part that we never see but guess at, lest the whole thing fly apart in a final radiance of destruction, on the incendiary flames of outrageous (mis)fortune.

Off-camera and out of earshot, watching the night snow fall, noticing that snow contains myriad nows.

There must be some remnant habit of willed obscurity, of volunteer poverty for an acceptance of an inequity, a gap, between work and recompense, in which some vague need is met, a sort of spiritual critique, an antithetical motion, however far-off, however imperceptible, of the equation of happiness with the capacity to buy things, many things, more things than one could ever possibly need. As if, on the Day of Judgment, poets will step forward out of the crevices --- the tiny rooms, the smoky bars --- by the hundreds and thousands wearing dark glasses, like a great witnessing Chorus, to proclaim the faith of little children, the hope of the excluded, and the charity of the hard moments.

(She catches sight of herself in the mirror. Go in fear of hyperbole.)




From The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Viking, 2005)
..................................................
[My 72nd post at the Harriet Blog]

Power, Money and Fame

My 71st post at the Harriet Blog:

Linh: Everyone wants power. And money. And fame. Get over it.--Kenneth Goldsmith

I don't seem to want power or money or fame. I only seem to want food and shelter, (library) books and good friends.--Unreliable Narrator

He said, she said, but I say that if power, money and fame are your primary objectives in life, then poetry is a dismal career choice. Imagine hearing your teenaged offspring confiding at the dinner table, his or her mouth stuffed with Chef Boy R Dee, "Mom, dad, since I won't rest until I’ve achieved lots of power, money and fame, I've decided to study noncreative writing with Kenneth Goldsmith at the University of Pennsylvania." With tuition for 2008-2009 at $37,526 and rising fast, $51,300 if you count cost of living, I’d advise against such a bold choice, unless you’re really dedicated to non-creativity, then go for broke, literally, and don’t look back!

Sure, it’s nice to always have enough change to eat, at least, and be sheltered, but money and power—I’ll leave out fame, for now--are rarely the rewards for those who won’t quit emjambing, starting from early youth, even as rejection slips flutter around their ankles, so what they’re chasing must be more pathetic and sublime than anything that would interest, say, Hank Paulson, Bernard Madoff or George W. Bush?

Let’s check in on Erasmus, speaking as the voice of Folly: “Poets aren't so much in my debt, though they're admittedly members of my party, as they're a free race, as the saying goes, whose sole interest lies in delighting the ears of the foolish with pure nonsense and silly tales. Yet strange to say, they rely on these for the immortality and god-like life they assure themselves, and they make similar promises to others. 'Self-love and flattery' are their special friends, and no other race of men worships me with such wholehearted devotion [...] Of the same kidney are those who court immortal fame by writing books. They all owe a great deal to me, especially any who blot their pages with unadulterated rubbish. But people who use their erudition to write for a learned minority and are anxious to have either Persius or Laelius pass judgment don't seem to me favored by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous self-torture. They add, change, remove, lay aside, take up, rephrase, show to their friends, keep for nine years and are never satisfied. And their futile reward, a word of praise from a handful of people, they win at such a cost – so many late nights, such loss of sleep, sweetest of all things, and so much sweat and anguish. Then their health deteriorates, their looks are destroyed, they suffer partial or total blindness, poverty, ill-will, denial of pleasure, premature old age and early death, and whatever remaining disasters there may be. Yet the wise man believes he is compensated for everything if he wins the approval of one or another purblind scholar.”

To conflate poetry with power, money and fame, one should go back to imperial China, with its mandarinate exams. Starting in the 7th century, it sought to supplant the leverage of the regional, hereditary aristocracy with a national test rewarding those who could master the Four Books and Five Classics of the Confucian canon, including the Book of Songs, an anthology of 305 poems, mostly folk lyrics, supposedly collected by Confucius himself. (Nonsense.) Emanating from the center of empire, this selection process was a power play to encourage and enforce cultural unity and an ideology of obedience, primarily to the state. By requiring knowledge of the Book of Songs, however, it also created generations of bureaucrats who had studied at least 305 poems, and could effortlessly crank out a few themselves. In the 20th century, Westerners have often marveled that the East Asian Communist dictators, Mao, Ho and Kim Jong Il, could write poetry, but this felicity was merely an echo from the mandarinate exams of the imperial era.

The fact that mandarins could emote in rhymes made many East Asian poets fantasize that they, too, could become movers and shakers. “Shoot, I oughta be a mandarin.” Well aware of this lingering vanity, East Asian Communist states bait and reward obedient poets with officious titles and perks, including foreign travel for the most docile. In Vietnam, members of the government-sanctioned Writers’ Union are invited to pompous annual conferences, where they can applaud lecturing politicians, then hop on stage to declare their fealty. The most vital Vietnamese poetry, however, is not penned by these marionettes. Instead of gravitating towards power, money and fame, the best and most radical Vietnamese poets have risked prison and lifelong poverty to write what they had to, compelled by a suprarational and frankly heroic, if not suicidal, impulse. Consider Trần Dần: born in 1926, he joined, as a twenty-year-old, the Communist resistance against the French, but by 1953, had fallen out of favor with the Party for speaking his mind. In 1956, he was jailed by the Communists for three months in Hoả Lò [The Furnace], better known to Americans as Hanoi Hilton, where he tried to commit suicide. Released, he became a key figure of the dissident group, Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm, that was quickly suppressed, all of its members jailed and silenced, with Trần Dần forced to do hard labor for months at a time. For 29 years, 1959 until 1988, he was completely banned from publishing, although he continued to write novels and some the most radical and striking poetry in Vietnamese literature. Thanks to its intricate wordplay, it hasn’t been adequately translated into any foreign language. Had Trần Dần accommodated the power structure at any point, his life, not to mention those of his wife and children, would have been much easier, but he never did, and why not? Could it be because he was a true poet? Nah, what a silly idea!

It’s human nature to gravitate towards money, power and fame, and to admire, if not kiss ass, those who have them, and to shun, ridicule or despise those who don’t. Wealth exudes glamour, even beauty, as in “the beautiful people” to denote the “jet set.” If to be radical is to go against the grain, what can one make of a poet who aligns himself with all the prevailing ethos of his place and time, be it a craving for money, power, fame, narcissism, or the glorification of trivia, ephemera, shopping and the machine? Is it possible to be more orthodox?












.

Meanwhile,

at The Lower Half:



[South Africa]


[South Africa]


[Romania]

Thais 'leave boat people to die'

This story, about Bangladeshi and Burmese boat people in today's Thailand, reminds me of the Vietnamese boat people who were robbed, raped or killed by Thai pirates during the late 1970's and 80's, partly in retaliation against the Vietnamese Navy's practice of capturing Thai fishing boats for ransom, but mostly because there were simply so many Vietnamese trying to enter their country, all with gold or Dollars on their persons. As economies around the world collapse further, boat people will become even more common. When I lived in Italy during 2002-2004, you could hardly open a newspaper without running into yet another story of African and Middle Eastern boat people, some from Iraq, being washed up in Lampedusa, an Italian island just off the coast of Africa.




BBC, 1/15/09--Thai soldiers are detaining illegal migrants from Bangladesh and Burma and forcing them back out to sea in boats without engines, survivors say.

Survivors say their hands were tied and they were towed out to sea with little or no food or water.

About 500 migrants are now recovering from acute dehydration in India's Andaman islands and the Indonesian province of Aceh.

Thai officials were not immediately available for comment.

But sources in the police and army confirmed to the BBC's Jonathan Head in Bangkok that asylum seekers are being pushed out to sea. They did not provide further details about the practice.

[..]

.........................................
A BBC story about the Vietnamese boat people, 10/1/2008:

Vietnamese boat people

After three decades of separation the Vietnamese boat people tell their stories.

On 01 October 1978, a group of over 300 Vietnamese refugees were dramatically rescued from stormy seas by a British merchant ship, the Wellpark.

This group, who became known as the ‘Vietnamese Boat People’, fled Vietnam in the mid-1970s because they felt that life was going to be untenable under the new communist government there.

Many had used their entire life savings to secure a place on one of the boats headed for neighbouring countries.

Troubled voyage

The group had set sail under the cover of darkness and soon ran into trouble in rough waters.

Thee engines and pumps stopped working properly, and the makeshift vessels started sinking. Panic set in, and the Boat People became certain that they would drown.

Diep Quan recalls “I had heard that we were going to sink quite soon, and that we probably had a few hours.

"And I did not swim, didn’t know how to swim. I couldn’t imagine […] what it’s like if water goes over your head. I didn’t know what it’s like to go underwater."

Another refugee, Huy, recalls that, "It was very dangerous, because the waves were very big, and a few people fell into the sea, including my mum.

"She’s a non-swimmer, but luckily someone grabbed her and pulled her up."

Wellpark to the rescue

In desperation, they set off their last flare, which amazingly attracted the attention of the Wellpark.

The Boat People were hauled up onto the merchant vessel, some being lifted up in nets.

For two weeks, the refugees lived on the Wellpark while world governments decided their fate. It was then decided that they would be brought to England.

The survivors were flown there and temporarily housed at Kensington Army Barracks, before being offered council homes across the capital.

[...]


....................................................................
In the U.K. today, Vietnamese eateries aren't nearly as numerous or popular as Thai restaurants, but you can find them, mostly in London. One Vietnamese dish, Bún bò Huế, Hue style beef noodle soup, has even found its way onto the menu of the British chain, Wagamama. Although slightly modified, the fresh cilantro, onion, chili, lime and bean sprouts make this unmistakably Vietnamese:


[Photo taken at Heathrow in 2008]



.

Mexico Media on High Alert After Drug-Gang Attack on Televisa

Last year in Mexico, there were 5,300 deaths related to drug trafficking. That's more than the number of soldiers the U.S. have lost after nearly 6 years in Iraq:

Time, 1/15/09--Editors at Televisa, the world's most popular Spanish-language network, were having a lively news meeting in the northern Mexico city of Monterrey when they heard a series of pops followed by a thunderous explosion. Running outside, the editors realized the top breaking news item had come straight to them. The pops were bullets sprayed from Kalashnikov automatic rifles directly into the faÇade of their offices. The blast was from a fragmentation grenade. Next to the debris was a message scrawled on cardboard: "Stop just broadcasting us. Also broadcast the narco politicians," it said.

The Jan. 6 assault on Televisa's offices was the latest in a series of attacks on Mexico's media as the nation writhes in an orgy of drug-related bloodshed. Out of a record 5,300 deaths from beheadings, assassinations and massacres last year, eight of them were murdered Mexican journalists, making Mexico the most dangerous country for their trade in the hemisphere. Furthermore, many reporters in cities on the front lines of the drug war say they are systematically threatened, beaten and offered bribes because of their coverage of organized crime.

[...]


.

Here Comes Everybody

Two days ago, Ron Silliman discussed the art of the interview and Lance Phillips' series, Here Comes Everybody. Here's my segment, as published on December 14, 2004. The photo was taken in Saigon in 2000.

1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why?

I read many bad poems before I discovered “Phrases” by Rimbaud. I marvel at the state of mind that could produce such a miracle. Rimbaud and Vallejo are the most miraculous poets I’ve encountered.


2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them?

I’ve written elsewhere about my indulgence of trash, things like personal ads, missing person reports, teenage blogs and sport forums. When I lived in Italy, I read many tabloids. Reading Italian trash, I felt closer to Italians. Italian trash gave me direct access to the Italian mind, and provided a counterbalance to Boccaccio and Dante. I don’t know about Dante, but I’m sure Boccaccio must have read a lot of trash, judging from his work. Cervantes was said to read even a piece of paper skipping on the ground. I’ve also been “reading” boxscores of the Mariners for the last 20 years, in lieu of watching the games. I used to read Ring Magazine. His jab was more perceptive, etc. Joe Koizumi, Far East correspondent, would call a round a “stanza” or a “canto.”


3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why?

I’ve not read much philosophy. Two decades ago, I read Simone Weil intensely during a crisis period. I basically had a nervous breakdown. I read Weil and Emanuel Swedenborg and tried to join the CIA. They had a shrink interview me, gave me a drug test and, after 6 months, decided to hire me, but by then I was no longer crazy. Since that period, I’ve only read fiction, poetry and trash.


4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

I also write poems in Vietnamese and am an active translator of Vietnamese poetry. Phan Nhien Hao and Nguyen Quoc Chanh are two Vietnamese poets I admire. You can download their poems for free here.

I’m also a big fan of the Vietnamese fiction writer, Nguyen Huy Thiep, whose work is available in English in the collection, Crossing the River. Most of my favorite writers are in fact non-American, and why not? English is only one of thousands of languages in the world. Here’s a short list of non-Anglo writers I admire: Borges, Rabelais, Celine, Dostoevski, Michel Houellebecq, Ingo Schulze in “33 Moments of Happiness” and Kawabata in “Palm of the Hand Stories.”


5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing?

I read my share but I’m a rather slow reader. Rarely do I read a book of poetry cover to cover. Glancing at a lot of poetry, I pause and study the poems that can teach me something.


6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you?

As an autodidact, there’s quite a bit that I’m supposed to have read that I haven’t read. I read what I need to feed my writing at the moment. I love Kafka and am influenced by him but I have not read his novels. Yet I reread his shorter pieces over and over.


7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old?

A poem is a compact sequence of unpredictable images. I remember reading about a B-baller called Half Man Half Amazing. That phrase alone is a poem.


8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?

Poets should consider how Whitman defined the character of an entire nation. He assumed the greatest role possible for a poet. The rest of us can participate in his project also. As American poets living through this period, I think each of us should feel personally challenged to help restore dignity and sanity to our national character.


9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest):

Lemon**Pie


Chiseled**Face


I**Ching


Of**Man


Form**Less



10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing?

I am hyper-conscious of every inch of my body and whatever it happens to be doing at the moment. The mind’s primary task is to contemplate the body. I am a poet of the body. Your body also.



.....................

Deir Yassin Remembered

Before 1948, the U.S. Department of Defense was the United States Department of War. Change one word and the country can never be the aggressor, but merely defending itself, always, as the victim. Commenting on Gaza, Joseph Hutchison wrote, "When Israel asserts its 'right to defend itself,' what it really means to assert is its right to define its crimes as not crimes," and like all states, Israel also defines its enemies as terrorists--an update on "rebels" and "guerrilas"--but before Israel was founded, there were Jewish paramilitary groups such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang that, well, terrorized, as on April 9, 1948, when they massacred more than 100 Arabs near Jerusalem:





.

Bolivia cuts Israel ties over Gaza

Al Jazeera, 1/14/09--Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, says he is breaking off ties with Israel in protest against its war in Gaza, which has left more than 1,000 Palestinians dead.

Morales said on Wednesday that he would seek to get top Israeli officials, including Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, charged with "genocide" in the International Criminal Court.

The Bolivian president also dismissed the United Nations and its "Insecurity Council" for its "lukewarm" response to the crisis and said the general assembly should hold an emergency session to condemn the invasion.

[...]


............

U.S. military report warns 'sudden collapse' of Mexico is possible

El Paso Times, 1/13/09--Mexico is one of two countries that "bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse," according to a report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command on worldwide security threats.

The command's "Joint Operating Environment (JOE 2008)" report, which contains projections of global threats and potential next wars, puts Pakistan on the same level as Mexico. "In terms of worse-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.

"The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone."

[...]

..................................
The same story, in Mexico City's El Universal:

EU: México es susceptible de “intervención”

Informe de las Fuerzas Armadas alerta que el narco debilita al país

México y Paquistán son dos naciones que el Departamento de Defensa de Estados Unidos considera como susceptibles de presentar conflictos súbitos que hagan necesaria la intervención de tropas estadounidenses.

[...]

..................................................
Meanwhile, in Juarez, across a thin river from El Paso:

2,000 fresh troops sent to Juárez as violence continues

El Paso Times, 1/13/09--The Mexican army has sent an estimated 2,000 troops to Juárez as part of a rotation even as the death toll surpassed 35 so far this year.

Two men were killed Tuesday evening, shot multiple times in separate attacks in which nearly 70 rounds were fired.

[...]



....................

Poets protest against the war in Gaza

"While Israeli planes and artillery continued to kill indiscriminately in Gaza, Israeli poets recited protest poetry while president Shimon Peres attended the dedication of Bialik (the national poet) House in Tel Aviv. The poets read Bialik's poem 'On The Slaughter,' and asked the attendees how they're able to sip champagne while hundreds are being murdered in Gaza."





On the Slaughter
Hayyim Nahman Bialik
(1873-1934)


Heaven, plead mercy on my behalf!
If there is a God in you, and a path in you to God –
yet I have not found it –
may you pray on my behalf!
As for me – my heart is dead, prayer no longer on my lips,
already strength is gone, and hope no more –
how long, until when, how long?

Hangman! Here is the neck – Up! Slaughter!
Behead me like a dog, yours is the arm and the axe,
and the whole earth, my scaffold –
and we – we are the few!
My blood is permitted – hack off the head,
and let the blood of murder stream out,
blood of suckling and greybeard upon your shirt,
and may it never, never be blotted out.

And if there is justice, let it shine forth now!
But if, after I am rubbed out from beneath the sky,
justice shines forth –
let its throne be cast down forever!
And let heaven rot in the evil of the ages;
and you go, arrogant, in this violence of yours,
and live by your blood, and be cleansed by it.

But cursed be the one who says; Avenge!
Revenge like this, revenge for the blood of a small child
Satan has not yet created –
and let the blood pierce the abyss!
Let the blood pierce through the deep-dark abysses,
and devour, in the darkness, and breach there
all the rotting foundations of the earth.



..............................

K. Silem Mohammad:

[...] the problem is not that (say) Poetry doesn't publish enough avant-garde poets. It's not even that it doesn't publish enough of them. It's that the avant-garde is not in complete control of the magazine--indeed, of the entire literary apparatus in the US. Not until we have humiliated and incapacitated the whole nest of genteel vermin who have polluted poetry in this country for the past few decades with their docile inanities can we relax our vigil. Indeed, not even then, for in order for vitally intense writing to continue to flourish, it must continually assert its superiority to the flabby complacencies of an aesthetic lumpenelite ... and to the enervated pretensions of those who would claim to be "supportive of our cause," but who in fact weaken that cause by their tolerance for the pablum that can only deteriorate whatever resolve and principles they may initially possess.



...........................

Pro-Israel Rally Attended by Big-Time NY Dems Descends into Calls for 'Wiping Out' Palestinians

Max Blumenthal in AlterNet, 1/13/09:


On January 11, an estimated 10,000 people rallied in front of the Israeli consulate in midtown New York in support of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip. The rally, which was organized by UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York in cooperation with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, featured speeches by New York’s most senior lawmakers. While the crowd was riled to righteous anger by speeches about Hamas evildoers, the event was a festive affair that began and ended with singing and joyous dancing.

[...]




...............

Israeli soldiers refusing to serve in Gaza

Tel Aviv, January 8th, 2009:




.................

Gaza 'genius' helps besieged city survive a year of Israel's blockade

A Guardian article about Gaza from June 13, 2008, by Donald Macintyre:


Fayez Annan turns the silver key to start the power, pushes the green button on the standard industrial jog-run-stop switch on the dashboard, and eases the white Peugeot 205 into the main east-west shopping street in Gaza City.

With traffic abnormally sparse, thanks to the acute fuel shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, he soon reaches the distinctly un-urban and pedestrian-scattering speed of 37 miles per hour (60kph).

But then Mr Annan is proudly trying to make a point that, while it might be electric, this Peugeot is no milkfloat. "It can do 100kph (62mph)," he says with a grin, as our knuckles whiten in the passenger seats. Whether or not Mr Annan's friend Hesham Abu Sido, an electrical consultant, is justified in describing the electric vehicle as a "genius idea" which is "the most fantastic thing that has happened in Gaza", it is certainly a case of turning adversity into opportunity.

It also proves that Gaza's famous entrepreneurial spirit has not yet been snuffed out by the draconian economic blockade imposed by Israel after the Palestinian militant group Hamas seized full control of the Strip by force a year ago tomorrow.

Since then, Gaza has seen continuing conflict, ever-deepening poverty, shortages, unemployment and despair. Against that background, the white Peugeot has become a symbol of Gaza's suppressed potential. "People who have seen it are even happier than we are," says Mr Annan. "They see it as something to be proud of in Gaza, which they haven't had in a long time."

[...]






..................

American Mandarins

Karen Kwiatkowski at LewRockwell, 1/12/09:


Robert Scheer asks an important question: "Why Do So Few Speak Up for Gaza?" His focus is the lack of Western public outrage against Israeli military actions against Gaza –outrage that should have been apparent in newspapers and television long before the most recent spasm of bloodshed and destruction. When the wrong party won democratic elections in Gaza, democracy supporters in Tel Aviv and Washington responded with an economic embargo, supported by the US-subsidized socialist-dictatorship of Egypt.

That particular act of war was extremely successful in starving and angering the already frustrated Palestinians who live in Gaza on $2 a day, with an unemployment rate of 70%. The lawless yet far less deadly Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli targets in December are claimed to have "started" the latest phase of the Israeli military and political campaign against Gaza. However, one needs only to look at the death toll (one-sided), the difference in military capacities between Israel and Gaza (shocking) and the kind of arsenals employed by both sides to determine what is happening. We’ve seen it on the elementary school playground, but this version is played out with incredible destructive force, no supervision, no brave friends, and no justice.

[...]



.........

Why Do So Few Speak Up for Gaza?

Robert Scheer in Truthdig, Jan 6, 2009:


Why are we so indifferent to the death and destruction in Gaza?

The major news outlets meekly accepted Israel’s banning of journalists from entering Gaza as an excuse for downplaying collateral civilian casualties, our president-elect, Barack Obama, has had little to say about an invasion that will much complicate his future Mideast peace efforts, and most commentators easily rationalize Israel’s many-more-eyes-for-an-eye killings.

Why is it that there is such widespread acceptance, beginning with the apologetic arguments of President Bush, that whatever Israel does is always justified as necessary to the survival of the Jewish state?

It is not.

While the Hamas rocket attacks are reprehensible, they are also an ineffectual challenge to Israel’s enormous security apparatus, and the severity of Israel’s response to them is counterproductive. Clearly, the very existence of Israel is not now, nor has it ever been, seriously challenged by anything the Palestinians did. Not back in 1948, when Israel was established as a state with insignificant Palestinian military resistance, nor at the time of the 1967 Six-Day War when Egypt, Syria and Jordan fought Israel.

The Palestinians were in no position to confront the Israeli army, because those whose lands were not already occupied by Israel were living under oppressive Egyptian control in Gaza and tough Jordanian rule in the West Bank. After the speedy Israeli victory, which demolished the myth of the new state’s vulnerability, the Palestinians became imprisoned as a people by Israel for crimes they had not committed.

Even if we accept the harshest portrayal of the tactics and motives of the Palestinian movements against Israel after the Six-Day War, at what point did that terrorism represent a serious challenge to the survival of the Jewish people or the state that claims to speak in their name? Yet that survival is invoked to justify the vastly excessive use of force by the Israeli war machine, with frequent allusions to the Holocaust previously visited upon the Jewish people, a holocaust that had nothing to do with Palestinians or Muslims, and everything to do with Central Europeans claiming to be Christians.

The high moral claim of the Israeli occupation rests not on the objective reality of a Palestinian threat to Israel’s survival, but rather on the non sequitur cry that “never again” should harm come to Jews as it did in Central Europe seven decades ago.

The basic argument is that Palestinian terrorists represented by Hamas are given to an irrational hatred of Jews so profound that it invalidates their movement, even when they win elections. That was not the view of the Israeli security service when it earlier supported Hamas as the alternative to the then dreaded PLO. Also, history is replete with examples of terrorists becoming statesmen, even within the early ranks of Jews fighting to establish the state of Israel.

[...]

..........................

What I Usually Tell My Students

For The Lower Half:


Rhymes are built into the language, any, really,
Even those without vowels. It takes no special
Effort or skill to sing song along as you versify.
That’s why you must be sly about rhyming. Don’t

Pummel readers with obvious end rhymes, OK? Pope
Benedict Now Bigger Dick to Gays. SEAN AVERY IS
NOW AN EVEN BIGGER DICK. Who’s got the bigger
Dick? Chris Brown or Neyo? My senator is a bigger
Dick than your senator. How can I get a bigger dick

(Naturally)? Men’s obsessions with penis size dates
Back to the start of time and no matter what god has
Given them, most men want a bigger dick. Watch the
How To Get A Bigger Dick Quick! Video. Daily Kos:
I'm so tired of "I've got a bigger dick" foreign policy.
How about it? Get A Bigger Dick Today. Let's Play

"Who's The Bigger Dick? Wow, Roger Clemens is a
Bigger dick than we imagined. Seth: How can I get
A bigger dick naturally without any pumps? WANT A
BIGGER DICK? MAXIMIZE YOUR MANHOOD. Ben Dover
Bigger Dick Kit. Ben Dover's Penis Pump Kit is from the
Porn star himself. Eight inch wonder includes a free cock
Ring, the chamber is made from a translucent plastic.

So, you see, it’s even OK to rhyme “Seth” with “get,”
“Cock” with “plastic,” and even “plastic” with “plastic.”



.........................

FULL OF KNIVES

by Zachary Schomburg, from The Man Suite (Boston: Black Ocean, 2007), and posted at GAMMM:



1) His back is full of knives. Notes are brittle around the blades.

2) He sleeps face down every night in a chalk outline of himself.

3) He has difficulties with metal detectors.

4) At birthday parties, someone might politely ask, May I borrow one of those knives to slice this chocolate cake?

5) He likes to stand with his back to walls. At restaurants, he likes the corner tables.

6) There is a detective that calls him to ask about the brittle notes. Also: a biographer, a woman who’d like to film a documentary, a curator of a museum, his mother. I can’t read them, he says. They’re on my back.

7) It would be a mistake for everyone to assume he wants the knives removed.

8) Most of the brittle notes are illegible. One of them, even, is written in French.

9) Every Halloween, he goes as a victim of a brutal stabbing. Once, he tried going as a whale,
but it was a hassle explaining away the knives.

10) He always wears the same bloody suit.

11) When he walks, he sounds like a tree still full of dead leaves holding on.

12) It is ok for children to count on his knives, but not to climb on them.

13) He saw his own shadow in the park. He moved his body to make the knives reach other people’s shadows. He did it all evening. In the shadows, his knives looked like soft outstretched arms.

14) His back is running out of space.

15) On a trip to Paris, he fell in love and ended up staying for a few years. He got a job performing on the street with the country’s best mimes.

16) The knives are what hold him together. It is the notes that are slowly killing him.

17) He is difficult to hold when he cries.

18) He will be very old when he dies and the Doctor will say, he was obviously stabbed, brutally and repeatedly. I’m sorry, the Doctor will say to a person in the room, but he’s not going to make it.



.......................

Glenn Greenwald

of Salon provides some perspective on what's happening in Gaza, 1/10/09:


According to the Report issued on Thursday (.pdf) by the U.N.'s Humanitarian affairs Office, more than 1/3 of overall Palestinian deaths are children (34% of the almost 800 total deaths), and a similar percentage of the more than 3,000 wounded are also children (34.8%).

To put that in perspective, note that the Russian invasion of Georgia -- which was vehemently and universally condemned in the U.S. as an excessive and brutal response to Georgia's assault on South Ossetia -- resulted, according to the Georgian government, in total deaths on the Georgia side of 405 (220 of whom were civilians) and total number of civilians wounded between 200-250 (see page 10 of this Amnesty International Report -- .pdf). The Russians agreed to a cease-fire accord after 5 days; the Israelis explicitly reject the U.N.'s call for a cease fire and continue to "escalate" after 14 full days (and counting) of full-scale air and land attacks on Gaza.

Of course, all of that pales in comparision to the duration, destruction and carnage created by the U.S. as a result of the Iraq War (the most unprovoked of all of these conflicts). To say that the U.S. applies a glaring double standard to wars fought by its allies and its "enemies" (to say nothing of itself) is to understate the case.



............................................................
Ditto, Bill Moyers:

"THIS DAY OF RECKONING"

Mike Ruppert on Jan 9, 2009:


It's not possible yet for any world leader to tell people that the collapse of industrialized civilization is coming but it appears as though the Obama administration is preparing to say it… at least from what we can see. (It's going to become obvious soon enough.) What is not known are what secret plans are being made and what contingencies are being prepared for. There are some clues.

As our first Chief Performance Officer, Nancy Killefer is extraordinarily qualified for the job of going through the federal budget line by line and seeing which programs work and which don't, determining which can be cut to save money. But I believe Barack Obama put her brief to her in a public-consumption version and also in a confidential one that was a bit more direct. It might have sounded something like this: "Nancy I want you to determine in what order we shut down the United States government. Tell us which switches to turn off, in what order, so that we don't shut the wrong things down too soon."

In Thursday's speech the President-elect, in my opinion, began weaning the American people, from their so-deeply ingrained sense of entitlement to wasteful excess. He called this the end of an era of "profound irresponsibility". He set the right tone initially about the gravity of the crisis but stopped short of Peak Oil and the fact that there can and will be no recovery. He chided us for living beyond our means and flatly said that there will be cutbacks in government services. He predicted double digit unemployment. (I see 20% or greater unemployment by January 2010.) He continues to talk about recovery but I'm sure he knows there won't be one. In fact he said that this could be a recovery that it might not be possible to recover from. We are being prepared.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a couple of days with 700+ point losses in the Dow over the next ten days to two weeks. The data is just horrendous and it is also becoming torrential around the globe as the Gaza crisis diverts attention.

So we're still waiting to see how the Obama Administration is going to conduct itself. I can pretty much bet that as many as 50-75 new Executive Orders will be announced within 72 hours of the inauguration. That's going to require some heavy reading on my part. The actions of the administration will tell us much more than the public statements and appointments which have given me grounds for optimism.

In the meantime WHILE EVERYONE WAS WATCHNG GAZA the stories of a global implosion are mounting. -- Europe's economy is contracting at a faster rate than in the 30s. In the meantime the Russian shut-off of European gas supplies is wreaking havoc, especially in the Balkans, the Czech Republic and elsewhere, causing factories to be shut because there isn't enough energy to run them and keep people from freezing. Corporate pension funds in the U.S. are facing serious shortfalls. Unemployment Claims have crashed three state web sites. Every major industrialized nation (including the U.S.) is preparing for civil unrest. And we haven't seen Q4 earnings reports yet.

China has just announced that it is holding onto its cash and not lending as much to the U.S. It has its own bailout package to fund. It needs that cash for its own bailout and thus can no longer lend anywhere near as much to the U.S. at a time when we are borrowing or printing money at rates about a hundred times higher than in World War II. Reports have suggested that China may dump half of its $1.4 trillion dollar holdings within the next two months. A global dollar dump will follow shortly thereafter bringing all those greenbacks back home. That could be the trigger for Weimar-style inflation.

[...]


.....................

Seven Contemporary Italian Poets (7/7)

Alessandro Broggi, translated by Linh Dinh:




Field of Action

Giulio proposes a toast. Everyone drinks. Berta laughs and receives a slap from Carlo, who reacts immediately. The woman who owns the café doesn’t react, Berta laughs and Carlo gives her a kiss. Bernarda plants herself before Carlo, raises her underskirt with one hand and extends an open hand to him. She sits down. The owner brings her a cold würstel and slams it on the table. Samantha skips over to Carlo. Carlo shoves one hand between her thighs and spits at Berta’s extended hand. Gustavo observes with boredom Samantha’s lower belly, then gives her a coin. Carlo stands up and grins fiercely. The owner goes towards Carlo and without saying a word gives him a slap. Berta laughs and receives a slap also. Carlo takes Berta by the hair and drags her to Gustavo, holding her face before Gustavo’s fly. Berta nods in agreement and Carlo lets go. Gustavo stands up, says nothing and bites violently a piece of bread. The owner heads towards Carlo. The handsome man, meanwhile, fixes his gaze on the beautiful woman, without looking he slips a hand into a pant pocket and without looking extends a large bill towards Samantha. Carlo wants to grab the money but the owner is quicker. Carlo sits down, panting. Berta wants to console him but he moves away. The owner heads towards the table of the beautiful couple with their hands by their sides. Gustavo eats with increasing voracity. The handsome man makes a gesture of refusal with his hand, without averting his gaze from the beautiful woman. The owner sits herself at Giulio’s and Bernarda’s table. Gustavo begins to move, kisses Giulio on the mouth, the owner on the forehead and Carlo on the mouth and on the forehead. Carlo disgusted wipes his lips to clean them. Gustavo walks towards the table of the beautiful couple and punches him awkwardly, hitting him on the shoulder. The handsome man makes a gesture of refusal with his hand, without averting his gaze from the beautiful woman. As the man gestures, Gustavo grabs his hand and places it between his legs. The handsome man observes coldly and without particular interest how Gustavo excites himself with his hand. Samantha covers her mouth with her hands and leaps up hysterically. Carlo moves closer and administers a slap to the beautiful woman. The owner yanks the handsome man’s hand from Gustavo and places it between her legs. Bernarda sneaks forward, gives the handsome man a slap in passing and places Carlo’s hand between her legs. Giulio reaches them and kneeling before the group in action begs them to stop. Berta on her feet watches the scene coldy, making an enormous bubble with the gum she’s chewing, which finally explodes on her face. The beautiful couple are dragged to the ground and brutally undressed. Carlo indicates he wants to rape the beautiful woman. Gustavo removes the handsome man’s pants while guffawing. The owner lifts her apron and sits on the handsome man’s face. Bernarda positions herself behind Giulio and waits for his erection so she could exploit it for herself. By now the beautiful couple are completely buried beneath the others’ bodies. Finally blood begins to splash. Berta is still standing at the same spot and continues to make bubbles with the gum she’s chewing. The beautiful couple are eaten. Gustavo gives Carlo a blow to the head with a piece of meat. The owner then hits him with a thighbone. Giulio remains seated, distracted, playing with the remains of the cadavers. The owner strikes Carlo with a rib. Carlo reacts immediately. Berta removes her shoes and socks and wedges a toe into Carlo’s mouth. Carlo sucks and cries. One after another follows his example, while Gustavo observes the scene with irritation. Bernarda gives Gustavo a slap, who then licks Berta’s foot while whining. Samantha kisses Berta’s ass. Berta gives one of the skeletons a kick, sits at the table where the beautiful couple were and drinks their spumante. Giulio goes to Berta and hides his face in her lap. She pours on his head a glass of spumante. He slips to the ground wearily and lies there for a moment. Samantha reaches him and gives his hand a kiss, as if in reverence. Bernarda takes off a shoe and a sock, goes towards Giuolo and gives him a kick in the ass. Seeing him offended, she wedges a foot in his mouth. Berta lifts a bone to hit Gustavo, then suddenly stops herself and slowly lowers her arm. She falls on Bernarda and shoves her head into one of the cadavers. Berta lets go of Bernarda and straightens her own hair. Bernarda hides beneath a table and nuzzles up to Samantha. Berta and Gustavo follow suit, murmurring.



...............................................................................................................
Alessandro Broggi was born in 1973 in Varese, and is the author of these poetry collections: Apprendistato (Eos Edizioni, 2000), Inezie (LietoColle, 2002; with a preface by Giampiero Neri, drawings by M. Morandini); lavori in prosa: Quaderni aperti (partially presented as an e-book for Biagio Cepollaro E-Dizioni, 2005); and total living (la camera verde, 2007). With C. Dentali, he edited l’Agenda Poetica di LietoColle (ed. 2003; with a note by M. Cucchi). He has also appeared in Verso i bit. Poesia e computer (2005) and Il presente della poesia italiana (2005). His poetry, prose, essays, interventions, as well as reviews of his works, have appeared in Almanacco del Ramo d’Oro, Bloc Notes, Hebenon, Il Segnale, La Clessidra, La Mosca di Milano, Nuova Antologia, Poesia, Sud, Testuale, among other places, and online at Poesia da fare, Dissidenze, Liberinversi, Microcritica, Nabanassar and Nazione indiana. Since 2004, he has been the editor of the poetry and cultural webzine L’Ulisse. He works as a writer and editor for Condé Nast Traveller, where he busies himself with the international art scene. Broggi also has an interest in contemporary music and sound art.


[My 70th post at the Harriet Blog]