This woman was wailing like a baby and it worked. In less than half an hour, she made about five bucks, way more than most panhandlers and nearly as much as what my wife earns in a hour selling purses, watches and changing watch batteries at a shopping mall. As our economic crisis deepens and begging becomes more competitive, you'll see more creative signs, more acting and, mark my words, even children enlisted. In 2000, I wrote an article about begging in Saigon:

Give Me Money

You would think that begging is a freelance profession. Just walk up to someone and say, “Give me money!” But it’s not quite that simple. All the lucrative spots for begging in Saigon are controlled by cowboys (hoodlums). You must be authorized to beg on Nguyen Tri Phuong, for example, a street known for its seafood restaurants attracting deep-pocketed diners. At the end of the day, you pay the cowboys a commission. Those who trespass are asking for a puffy face and a black eye.

Another off-limits area for unauthorized beggars is Pham Ngu Lao Street. This is where the foreign backpackers in Saigon congregate. Here the beggars will ignore the local Vietnamese and make a beeline for the foreigners. English is a prerequisite: “Giver me one doughlar!”

And then we have the art of begging. How can you compete with the others if you are young, have two arms, two legs, and appear healthy in every way?

To gain an edge on the competition, you can rub fish slime on your skin to attract flies; wrap a pig blood-saturated bandage on an imaginary wound; keep salt under your tongue to make your mouth foam and dribble; swallow half a tube of toothpaste to induce a fever.

There is also the trick of eating half a fried millipede to give yourself a rash all over. (The other half will get rid of the rash.)

If you are an amputee of a certain age, you can always pose as a vet. If not, you can hide one arm, wrapped tight against your body, inside your shirt.

On Nguyen Van Cu Street there is a beggar who crawls around with a lime in his mouth and a lumpy bundle of cloth strapped to his back inside his shirt. The uninformed will think that this guy is a hunchback with a weird cyst on his face.

Near Thai Binh Market there is a “vet” who will point his leg stump at your face as you’re trying to eat.

Near Phu Lam Market there is a guy who will curse in the most colorful language to embarrass your mother, wife or girlfriend. Most people are more than happy to part with a thousand dong [7 cents] to get rid of him.

Once, as I was trying to eat a bowl of beef soup, an obviously drunk beggar threatened to slam a Coca Cola bottle against... his own face, unless I gave him twenty thousand dong. The restaurant owner, an old man, had to grab him by the collar to throw him back out onto the street.

The most insidious trick among beggars is that of renting a baby. How can you not give money to a mother carrying a filthy, naked infant?

Nguyen Thi Am, who used to sell sticky rice on Cam Chi Street in Hanoi, wrote about this practice in her haunting story, “Sleeping on Earth” (see Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam—Seven Stories Press 1996).

The going rate for renting a baby is a buck fifty a day. The infant will stay quiet if you pop a pill or two of Seduxel into his mouth. The child should look as wretched as possible. There have been cases of kidnapped babies deliberately injured to gain extra sympathy from passersby.


[as published in The Literary Review]

..................................
Also, from Armando R. Favazza's Bodies Under Siege: Self-mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry]

In 1882, Dr. R. A. Jamieson, of Shanghai, presented a pair of feet to the British Royal College of Surgeons. The feet belonged to a Chinese beggar who extracted much pity and made a profitable business in Shanghai's foreign settlement by displaying the mutilated stumps of his legs while carrying his feet on a string around his neck. After being run over by a carriage, he was carried to a hospital where he admitted that he removed the feet himself. In order to make himself as attractive as possible to the charitably disposed, he had fastened cords around his ankles, tightening them every two days. After two weeks he felt no pain; after six weeks he was able to remove the feet by partly cutting and partly snapping the bones. The stumps healed, and the feet became black and mummified. When the police threatened to confiscate his feet, he sold them to a hospital attendant. Jamieson noted that such instances of self-mutilation were frequent in China and added that "they throw a light on that singular mixture of courage, deceit, and sacrifice of almost anything to advance low enterprise, which characterizes the low orders in that country" (Jamieson 1882, p. 398).

.

Tyrone showing me

all that he owns, which include four empty beer bottles, one broken, to use as a weapon, perhaps, three plastic forks, a packet of Ramen Pride, a book someone gave him, Una Vida con Proposito, which he hasn't read, a blanket which used to smell of perfume, maybe myrtle or lavender, he explains, but now stinks of urine, a bank statement with proofs that someone has stolen his identity, his social security card, an empty jar, a notebook with two pages of writing, and a scar on his leg.

.

UN investigator accuses US of shameful neglect of homeless

Chris McGreal in Los Angeles, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 12 November 2009:


UN investigator accuses US of shameful neglect of homelessUN special rapporteur says wealthy US ignoring deepening homeless crisis while pumping billions into bank rescues


A United Nations special investigator who was blocked from visiting the US by the Bush administration has accused the American government of pouring billions of dollars into rescuing banks and big business while treating as "invisible" a deepening homeless crisis.

Raquel Rolnik, the UN special rapporteur for the right to adequate housing, who has just completed a seven-city tour of America, said it was shameful that a country as wealthy as the US was not spending more money on lifting its citizens out of homelessness and substandard, overcrowded housing.

[...]

<

.

Several people have asked

about buying a print from my State of the Union blog. Here's how to do it: email linhdinh99@yahoo.com to specify which photo you want--move your mouse over an image to get its title, then pay me through Paypal, or mail a check to 1124 E. Passyunk Ave. #4, Philadelphia, PA 19147, payable to LINH DINH, and I'll send it to you within a week or so. To avoid confusion, I will verify each order with a preview image via email.



$100 for a signed 8 x 12 inches, printed at a professional lab, at the best possible quality on archival paper. If you want more than one photo, each subsequent print is $80.




$140 for a signed 10 x 15 inches, printed at a professional lab, at the best possible quality on archival paper. If you want more than one photo, each subsequent print is $120.























.

On the Kenyon Review Blog, Jay Thompson

writes about my first poetry book:

Hung up on bad bodies and American trash, Linh Dinh’s poetry collection All Around What Empties Out has followed me around to work, to my room, to my lunch breaks, to my kitchen table [...] his poems in All Around (sporting names like “Whoaaaa!!,” “Freckles,” “A Childhood in Vermont,” and “I Refuse to Be Lambasted By Your Bloated I Ching”) are gleeful, lyrical or gross by turns [...]

.

Poet Régis Bonvicino

has picked a selection of photos from my blog, State of the Union, to feature in Sibila, the premier Brazilian literary webzine.

Régis asked for a statement, so I just emailed him this:

The main purpose of my photo blog, State of the Union, is to record a changing America as it enters "The Long Emergency," to borrow a phrase from James Howard Kunstler. With its industries mostly gone, unemployment constantly rising, millions of homes foreclosed and businesses shut down, it should become clear that the country is going through an economic convulsion that will forever change its character. What will emerge from this, I cannot conjecture, but I want to track it at street level, close to the ground, where the bodies are.

.

John Michael Greer

has a truly remarkable series of essays at his blog, The Archdruid Report. An excerpt from a recent piece:

As a society nears the geological limits to production, steadily growing fraction of its total supply of energy, resources, and labor have to be devoted to the task of bringing in the energy that keeps the entire economy moving. This percentage may be small at first, but it's effectively a tax in kind on every productive economic activity, and as it grows it makes productive economic activity less profitable. The process by which money produces more money consumes next to no energy, by contrast, and so financial investments don't lose ground due to rising energy costs.

This makes financial investments, on average, relatively more profitable than investing in the kinds of economic activity that use energy to produce nonfinancial goods and services. The higher the burden imposed by energy costs, the more sweeping the disparity becomes; the result, of course, is that individuals trying to maximize their own economic gains move their money out of investments in the productive economy of goods and services, and into the paper economy of finance.

Ironically, this happens just as a perpetually expanding money supply driven by mass borrowing at interest has become an anachronism unsuited to the new economic reality of energy contraction. It also guarantees that any attempt to limit the financial sphere of the economy will face mass opposition, not only from financiers, but from millions of ordinary citizens whose dream of a comfortable retirement depends on the hope that financial investments will outperform the faltering economy of goods and services. Meanwhile, just as the economy most needs massive reinvestment in productive capacity to retool itself for the very different world defined by contracting energy supplies, investment money seeking higher returns flees the productive economy for the realm of abstract paper wealth.

Nor will this effect be countered by a flood of investment money going into energy production and bringing the cost of energy back down. Producing energy takes energy, and thus is just as subject to rising energy costs as any other productive activity; even as the price of oil goes up, the costs of extracting it or making some substitute for it rise in tandem and make investments in oil production or replacement no more lucrative than any other part of the productive economy. Oil that has already been extracted from the ground may be a good investment, and financial paper speculating on the future price of oil will likely be an excellent one, but neither of these help increase the supply of oil, or any oil substitute, flowing into the economy.

One intriguing detail of this scenario is that it has already affected the first major oil producer to reach peak oil--yes, that would be the United States. It's unlikely to be accidental that in the wake of its own 1972 production peak, the American economy has followed exactly this trajectory of massive disinvestment in the productive economy and massive expansion of the paper economy of finance. Plenty of other factors played a role in that process, no doubt, but I suspect that the unsteady but inexorable rise in energy costs over the last forty years or so may have had much more to do with the gutting of the American economy than most people suspect.

[...]

.

Dubai,

an oil-fueled mirage of endless skyscrapers, including the world's tallest, and absurd man-made islands, is going bankrupt. Like the rest of the world, it was defrauded by American banksters and, further, the high-rolling tourists aren't coming any more. In my Jam Alerts (2007), I wrote in "Recent Archeo News":

9 January 3006 – Miraculous city of Dubai
Discovered nearly intact in deserted desert.

And, in "Metropoles":

They built one-hundred-story towers,
Only to occupy the first three floors, the rest
Were haunted by their pissed-off ancestors.

.

Goldman Sachs and US demise

Hossein Askari and Noureddine Krichene in Asia Times, 11/24/09:

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.

Famous words, but uttered by whom and when? No, not some socialist or communist. It was none other than president Thomas Jefferson. The year was 1802. We forget these words at our own peril.

On November 17, the "leader of the pack", aka Goldman Sachs, apologized. Its chief honcho, Lloyd Blankfein said: "Certainly, our industry is responsible for things. We're a leader in our industry, and we participated in things that were clearly wrong and we have reasons to regret and apologize for."

To show remorse, Goldman Sachs will contribute US$100 million per year for five years to help small business. Wow! How generous! They only add insult to injury. After destroying millions of families, businesses and lives all over America and the world, they will contribute $100 million a year for five whole years. What are we supposed to say? Thank you?

Let's look at the record and suggest a more appropriate remedy. Goldman was as responsible as any financial institution in bringing down the entire US economy, even threatening its own existence. It needed a government bailout and guarantees to survive; a fact it now denies.

[...]









.

.

.

Courting Convulsion

James Howard Kunstler's latest, November 23, 2009:



How infantile is American society? Last night's CBS "Business Update" (in the midst of its "60 Minutes" program) featured three items: 1.) The New Moon teen vampire movie led the weekend box-office receipts; 2.) Cadbury shares hit an all-time high; 3.) Michael Jackson's rhinestone-studded white glove sold at auction for $350,000. Some in-house CBS-News producer is responsible for this fucking nonsense. How does he or she keep her job? Is there no adult supervision at the network?

Meanwhile, over at The New York Times this morning, Paul "Nobel Prize" Krugman writes:

"Most economists I talk to believe that the big risk to recovery comes from the inadequacy of government efforts; the stimulus was too small, and it will fade out next year, while high unemployment is undermining both consumer and business confidence."

Disclosure: I'm not one of the economists that Mr. Krugman talks to (nor am I an economist). But it's sure interesting to know that the ones palavering with Mr. Krugman imagine that that the US can possibly return to an economy based on the fraudulent securitization of reckless debt. Does Mr. Krugman think that the production housing industry can resume paving over the nether exurbs with half-million-dollar houses (to be bought with no money down loans by the sheet-rockers working inside them)? [...]








.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Poet friends

Photos from my recent trip:




It's been three weeks and I can't identify everybody, I'm sorry, but, from left to right, as taken at the Flat Iron in Chicago: Gabriel Gudding, ?, Kristin Dystra, Daniel Borzutzky, Larry Sawyer, ?, Brooks Johnson, Gene Tanta and ?.






Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith at home in Austin, TX.






Angela Genusa and I at the Newton Gang's Getaway Saloon, San Marcos, TX, as taken by Dale Smith.






Anne Boyer and I at the Red Balloon in Overland Park, KS, as taken by Cara Lefebvre.









Charles Alexander at home in Tucson, AZ, on Halloween night.







.

.

.

The Geopolitics behind the phoney US war in Afghanistan

F. William Engdahl, 21 October 2009:


One of the most remarkable aspects of the Obama Presidential agenda is how little anyone has questioned in the media or elsewhere why at all the United States Pentagon is committed to a military occupation of Afghanistan. There are two basic reasons, neither one of which can be admitted openly to the public at large.

Behind all the deceptive official debate over how many troops are needed to “win” the war in Afghanistan, whether another 30,000 is sufficient, or whether at least 200000 are needed, the real purpose of US military presence in that pivotal Central Asian country is obscured.

Even during the 2008 Presidential campaign candidate Obama argued that Afghanistan not Iraq was where the US must wage war. His reason? Because he claimed, that was where the Al Qaeda organization was holed up and that was the “real” threat to US national security. The reasons behind US involvement in Afghanistan is quite another one.

The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.

[...]



.

My State of the Union blog,

launched in June, was meant primarily as a pictorial diary of our economic unraveling. It has nearly 800 images so far, with photos taken in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Maryland, Washington DC, Vermont, California, Kansas, Missouri and New Mexico. This week, I will add images from Arizona, Texas and Illinois. I've given slide talks about this project in San Marcos, Tucson and Los Angeles, and a photo was mentioned in the October issue of Harper's. In January, I'll travel to Buffalo, with many more trips to come via train, bus or plane.

.

Too Late Late Empire

[Written for this]




Talks of political and social responsibilities are moral in nature. Consider this stanza from Milosz:

What is poetry which does not save
Nations and people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.
That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,
That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,
In this and only this I find salvation.

Warning against collusion or smugness, these papal pronouncements have haunted and harassed me for more than two decades. One must be careful, however, to not become as dogmatic and prohibitive as a totalitarian who would slash a drunkard’s throat for singing.

Writers must be thinkers, yet many would argue that it’s enough to be sensitive (to oneself, above all, if not exclusively) and to emote poignantly, entertainingly and euphonically.

Unless it’s you who are stripped, smeared with shit, waterboarded or bombed, suffering can be an exhilarating and even instructive entertainment, yet we’re bored to death 24/7. We cannot switch the channels fast enough. Skimming bodies, we surf.

I prefer writers who strive to understand as much as possible, identify and grapple with the gravest injustices and contradictions, but one’s creative work doesn’t have to be “correct” to be relevant. Just think of all the legitimate writers who were Stalinists and Fascists. What saved them was a striving to account for the big picture, without which one cannot achieve any breadth or depth. I don’t stay up late at night to study the memoirs of naked mole rats and weevils.

When I lived in Vietnam from 1999 to 2001, I could clearly see that many writers had been conditioned to be frivolous or vague, since these attitudes allowed them a smidgen of creative freedom without getting them in trouble with the state. Sounds familiar? Surrealist tricks could be employed for an avant-garde veneer, as long as there were no social or political subtexts. Neutered and lobotomized, these pretenders considered themselves clever, but what a waste of time and talent? Living in a society of systemic abuses and mass misery, they conjured up barnyard ghosts and lamented about adolescent love even into old age. If a writer sees and understands less than the common man, if he refuses to acknowledge the prostitutes and child beggars obvious to even a just-landed tourist, then what insights does he really have, and why should anyone read him?

The powerful already have their paid defenders. Moreover, it is human nature to glamorize success and despise the defeated and ugly. That’s why a writer must speak out for the humiliated and tortured side of humanity. Otherwise, he’s just a whore who’s, at best, “an aristocrat of the servant class,” to quote Jasper Johns.

The greatest German artist between the two World Wars was undoubtedly Max Beckman, since his work captured the zeitgeist of his time. Today, we’re also living through major outrages and turmoil, but it’s hard to tell from the emphases and tenor of our cultural products, high and low. That’s why future generations will look back at us as unbelievably clueless, callous and complicit. We’re still calm, and life is normal. Relax.









[Do check out this Joseph Hutchison's post, which comments and elaborates on my statement.]

My fourth mention in the horoscope,

via Bob Brezsny:

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In the beginning of his career, poet Linh Dinh loved to stay up late and write. He was free to think thoughts that were harder to invoke during the bright hours. Dinh’s habits changed as he aged, though, in part because he got married and chose to keep more regular hours. But his early imprint has stayed alive inside him. “Now I can write at any time of the day,” he says, “because I always carry the night inside of me.” I’m making that your prescription for the coming week: Carry the night inside you during the day.

[Speaking of which, a prose poem, "13," from my book, Blood and Soap, was inspired by horoscopes.]

Un Poco de su Pais

.

.

Hai-Dang Phan on Cheese Orgy:

For months now I’ve been thinking of Linh Dinh the photographer and not the poet. That’s because he’s been busy issuing almost daily reports/updates on State of the Union, his photoblog devoted to documenting the lower half of our body politic. Mostly taken in and around Philadelphia, Linh’s documentary photos are dispatches from the frontiers of American decline. Seen at street level, shot on his nerve, & uploaded onto the computer screen, Linh’s photos capture: our contemporary hieroglyphs of graffiti, signs, billboards, and ads; our public spaces of sidewalks, alleyways, bus stops and subways, parks and tent parks; and most importantly, they capture the people who create and inhabit them, especially the dispossessed and transient, going about their daily life along the margins of Center City.

So when I drove down to Chicago the other week for Linh’s reading at Myopic Books I was happily reminded of Linh Dinh the poet. And what a poet he is. Author of Borderless Bodies (Factory School, 2006) and Jam Alerts (Chax, 2007), Linh writes something fierce, funky, and funny in his newest collection, the mysteriously titled and suspicious smelling, Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. Just out from Chax Press, this fifth book of poems by Linh is further evidence, if more is needed, that Linh is a poet to be reckoned with. His poetry, in its intensity of awareness, unsparing portrayal of modern life, and use of the grotesque image of the body to limn his most favored subjects–violence and the human psyche, social collapse and decline, language and translation, damaged lives and difficulty loves–is like no other in contemporary American verse. Always surprising, alarmed and disarming, Linh is a poetic outlaw making border raids on official verse culture, and Some Kind of Cheese Orgy is his latest incursion.

[...]





.

.

.

Disappearing Poem

I've heard this rumor, and, like
Anything said, it could be true,
If only in a bank shot with a
Trick mirror sort of way, but
I've been told there's a place
Named Asia, yeah, that's right,
Just around the next corner or
Inside your left ear maze, maybe,
Or purposely lost by your mom in
One of her countless drawers, but
Asia can't be all that, man, it can't
Be all that different than Burbank,
And I haven't been there either.
Bonus questions: Do you know
How to make fried rice? Do
You believe in reincarnation?





.

.

.

Fiction International

42, with a forum on The Artist in Wartime, to which I've contributed a piece.

From Larry Fondation's contribution:

[...] Upstanding citizens of the United States are not supposed to have a politics, an ideology.

It will take dynamite to blow up America's most pernicious myths.

American fiction writers fall easily into a similar trap: telling stories of the narrowest possible bandwidth, no broad canvas, no context, no politics. Bookstore shelves are stocked with primarily "parlor fiction," tales of private and personal drama. Most of this work--even the most critically acclaimed--is irrelevant and will not be read in 20, let alone, 100 years.

On the flip side, a contemporary Stephen Crane or John Dos Passos is hard to find. There is very little "public fiction" among today's well-known titles (though a great deal of truly agitational literature can be found in the small presses).

Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have done little to change that. "Inner emigration" is nearly always pandemic in America. Escapism is almost a national creed.

.

Timothy Poyser

.

.

From an email to Angela Genusa:

Yesterday, when I wrote about being crazy and sane, I didn't mean that you have to be both at every moment, of course, just that you need both qualities to be any kind of a writer. You have to be willing to stray in thoughts, sometimes even in actions, and I don't mean anything immoral, but your foundation or core must be sane, and I don't mean a generic or pedestrian but a radical, fierce and even ruthless, to yourself above all, sanity.


.

Anne Boyer on Cheese

Orgy:




"Seconds ago, I was among the chillin'."

Linh Dinh's new book, Some Kind of Cheese Orgy, is some kind of cheese orgy. That is, cheese is not just the fluid that comes from the tits of cows, sheep, and goats which is then recombined with substances from these animals intestines in order to coagulate, but it is also that stuff that comes from the crevices in our human flesh. Asses are widely known to smell cheesey, as are feet. Belly buttons can appear to create cheese. Fat people are cheesier than thin people. Poor people, with all their trucking in the baser sentiments and brutally obvious struggles, are cheesier than the rich. Cheesey is an aesthetic: smelling like ass, gooey or spongey, a signifier of profound effort, like when someone tells you to say "cheese" to simulate a smile (see Abu Ghraib). To be cheesey is to be artless and sentimental, a brute and ineffective emotional force. To have a cheese orgy -- that's all the smelly obscenity without any of the sexy.

Welcome to the U.S.A.

[...]







.

.

.

.

.

Did I die in Kansas?

.

[Thank you, Phyllis Moore!]



.

Muchos gracias

to Anne Boyer, for steering me to Kansas City, Kansas:

[My body was filthy, scabby practically, my clothes unwashed, my lenses and sensor mottled with stubborn, intractable dust, but my brain felt so well hosed.]

I just got back

from nearly three weeks on the road, passing through Chicago, Austin, Tucson, Los Angeles, Wichita and Kansas City. What warmth, generosity and candor I encountered. Thank you very much, Brooks Johnson, Hai-Dang Phan, Larry Sawyer, Gabe Gudding, Gene Tanta, Hoa Nguyen, Dale Smith, Angela Genusa, CJ Martin, Charles and Cynthia Alexander, Alex Garza, Frank Parker, Logan Esdale, Anna Leahy, Rei Magosaki, Jayson Chin, Robert J, Anne Boyer, Cara LeFebvre, Alex Savage and Phyllis Moore!!!