I've been proofing

my novel, Love Like Hate, which is about Vietnam--it's due out in July, at the latest--then I wrote a New York Times op-ed about the Fall of Saigon, then I posted two poems by B.D. Trail, also about Vietnam. In short, Vietnam's on my mind. I'm starting to think I must get back there in the next few years. It's been too long. The last time I was in Vietnam was 2001.

There is a problem, however, as I explained in a recent email to Kent Johnson:

The Vietnamese government hates my guts. I can't publish a single poem there. Those fuckers used to send me viruses. Let's say you have a yahoo account as Kent.Johnson@yahoo.com. They would send me an email as _Kent.Johnson@yahoo.com. See the difference? Just one little dash before Kent. Anyway, they would send me a fake email pretending to be you. It would ape your language, say, "Hey Linh, check out my new poem poking fun at the avant imposters," etc, but in the attachment would be a virus.

My one collection in Vietnamese was published underground, in 2007 or so.

I also wrote to my friend, Dan Duffy, who managed to get a Vietnamese visa recently after several years of trying:

Congrats on your visa, by the way. You should be very leery of going, however, as they turned away Nguyen Hung Quoc twice (!!!) at the airport after giving him a visa. They can also give you major shit once you get there. When I was in Saigon, friends told me that if they hate you badly enough, they might just kick you off your motorbike.

When poet Mong Lan was in Saigon three years ago, the government warned her not to discuss me during her talk to university students. "They didn't single out anyone else," Lan said. "Just you!"

In short, I'm fucked.

To slake my Vietnam hunger, I watched a scene from Tran Anh Hung's amazing portrait of Saigon, "Cyclo." Five stars, highly recommended. In this, a man sings a lullaby to his soon-to-be victim. He prefaces it by showing his scars from the war, saying, "Do you know which is bigger, the entry or exit wound?" Then, "I understand you. I love you." This man's accent is pure Mekong Delta. If you click on the second video, you can hear Phuong Thanh, who possesses the most soulful voice in contemporary Vietnamese pop music. Her accent is, by contrast, pure Thanh Hoá, about two hours from Hanoi.

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Novelties of Horror

My 83rd post at the Harriet Blog:



Today is either Liberation Day or Day of Deep Resentment, depending on your point of view. On April 30th, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. I had escaped on the evening of April 27th, just hours before the bombs fell on Tan Son Nhat Airport, rendering it inoperable. On the cover of Frank Stanford's the battlefield where the moon says I love you, there's a photo of children who died on the 28th at Tan Son Nhat. Thousands of poems have been written in English about the Vietnam War. I want to share two by B.D. Trail, a poet not widely known. When he died on New Year's Day of 1992, a suicide at 51-years-old, Trail had published just one chapbook, Flesh Wounds (Richford, VT: Samisdat 1989).

The Grenading

dedicated to Captain Nguyen Van Te, 2nd ARVN Infantry Division; and to Dock Burke, "life-time friend"

The ARVN Major beat the boy
with the captured rifle sling
glancing proudly at us,
his American advisors.

An uninteresting event to everyone
except the boy who silently cringed
and shook from blow to blow.

In the madness of the war
today was near-to-normal.
There had been the usual dance to snipers,
the suck-up in the chest,
the dash across manioc fields,
the crack and whip of bullets
in time with running feet.

Looking at the photos now,
the sand is light like snow.
But then, the sand was griddle-hot
and hard to run across.

And there had been the usual harassment
of the villagers,
the pig killings and gold tooth grinnings
of the chicken thieves,
the stolen rice boiling in black cauldrons.

In our little corner of the war
the major beat the boy,
we Americans smoked cigarettes,
the Vietnamese village women cooked rice
for ARVNs down on the ground
spread out in casual circles.

The stick grenade was lobbed out of a bunker
with all the surety and disguised slowness
of a softball. And it seemed to move towards
a cookfire with measured, casual directness.

A village woman heavy in her pregnancy
caught the rolling blast of the grenade.
The fragments plunged into the soldiers.
For her the blast was a sonic scalpel
slicing, filleting, cutting
deep, deep into her belly.

Something clicks in time of crisis,
a switch to surreal slow motion.
We Americans froze in place
while the Vietnamese,
as if coming up for air,
floundered and fumbled.

Still half-frame, the image slowed
to show her baby,
her corded baby,
ease ooze
from her fish-gutted belly
and fall into the fire.

The madness was not just the fetus in the fire.
No, that was just a novelty-of-horrors.
to men who had seen minings and other mutilations.

The madness was the mother was still alive.
Split from throat to crotch,
the mother was alive and
screaming screaming screaming

I didn't shoot her and I don't know why.
No one shot her. And she kept on
screaming screaming screaming.

Dragged over the white-hot sand
on a red-wet poncho,
she screamed for two hours on the landing zone.

She died before a helicopter came.

I died back at the fire.

Our Lady of the Flies

Our infantry satchel-charged a bunker
And killed a VC nurse.
With hooks, they snaked her out.

Then one pimple-faced killer sliced out
That which is between the legs
of all women, dead or alive.

Impaled upon a bamboo stick
It glistened in the sun.

Our Lady of the Flies,
Forgive them not.

They knew what they were doing.
WITH MY SHIELD OR ON IT

When the Danang chopper plucked me out of Tam Ky,
Everything rolled by like a grim silent movie:

The whirring blades--a noisy khaki camera
The little people--extras for a biblical spectacle
The pock-faced land--Hollywood badlands

And it was right that I should see this final film clip,
For I had paid. Not in money,
But I had paid.

No one laughed or even talked much on the plane.
The Stewardesses seemed disappointed in us.
But, I heard one man say,
'At least nothing will ever be as bad as what
We've been through,'
He was wrong, of course.
Home was still ahead.

Fat women in slacks. San Francisco whores and hippies.
The forgotten nausea caused by neon. Slept-in khakis.
Patriotic old men and wonder-struck girls.
Kids saying, 'Did you ever shoot anybody in the face?'

When I flew out of the Inferno
I did not suspect I was entering into another one.

After awhile,
I missed the honest horror of Viet Nam.

Yes, there are some false moves here, and the poems' rhythm sometimes sputters, but there's no denying their tremendous power, especially in the first, which Trail considered his best. Trail has earned the right to subject us to these horrible and enlightening tableaux, not only because he was a witness--he served two tours in Vietnam--but because he has struggled mightily to sort out his and our complicities. There is no act that does not implicate the species as a whole.




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Saigon’s Fall, 35 Years Later

New York Times, 4/30/10, by this blogger:



DEPENDING on which side you were on, Saigon either fell on April 30, 1975, or it was liberated. Inside Vietnam, the day is marked as Liberation Day — but outside, among the Vietnamese refugees, it is called Deep Resentment Day. (The resentment is not just over losing a war, but also a country.)

On April 21, 1975, I was 11 and living in Saigon. I turned on the television and saw our president, Nguyen Van Thieu. He had a high forehead, a sign of intelligence, and long ears, indicating longevity. He had a round face with a well-defined jaw — the face of a leader — unlike his main rival, Nguyen Cao Ky, who resembled a cricket with a mustache. Thieu said, “At the time of the peace agreement the United States agreed to replace equipment on a one-by-one basis, but the United States did not keep its word. Is an American’s word reliable these days?”

Growing up in Saigon, I did not witness the war, only its apparatus: tanks, jeeps, jets. I often heard the rhythmic, out-of-breath phuoc phuoc phuoc of chopper blades rotating overhead. As it did for many Americans, the war came to me mainly through the news media. Open a newspaper and you would see Vietcong corpses lying in disarray. Turn on the radio and you could hear how our side was winning. Saigon theaters even showed American movies of World War II. Saigonese could sit in air-conditioning and watch expensively staged war scenes.

We considered the VC little more than a nightmare, a rumor, a bogeyman for scaring children. Once, in Saigon’s Phu Lam neighborhood, I saw four blindfolded men standing on a military truck, but there was no way to tell if they were really VC. If someone took a bad photo, you said, “You look just like a VC!” Only after April 30, 1975, did Saigonese realize there were plenty of VC among them.

Before the government fell, my father arranged for me and my brother to flee the country with a Chinese family. He sent his secretary along to take care of us. This secretary was 22, Chinese, with a very short temper, her face round and puffy. Sister Ha, as I called her, would later become my stepmother.

Before I left, my father gave me $2,000, saying, “Two thousand bucks should last you a year.” American bills, I noticed, were less colorful than Vietnamese ones, though longer and crisper. After sewing the money into the hem of my blue shorts, made of rayon and extremely hot, my grandmother advised, “Whatever you do, don’t take these shorts off.”

Before boarding the plane, I stayed at an American compound for four days. On the evening of April 27, I got on a C-130 to fly to Guam. Sitting next to Sister Ha, I watched a kid eat raw instant noodles. When the plane landed, it was pitch dark. No one knew a thing about Guam; we knew only that we had left Vietnam behind.


Linh Dinh is the author of the forthcoming novel “Love Like Hate.”




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Concertgoers show the Reich stuff, are beaten by crowd

Philadelphia Daily News, 4/27/10--How did they Nazi this coming?

Three men who showed up in full Nazi regalia to a hardcore punk show at an Old City bar Friday night were attacked by as many as 50 people on the streets after leaving the venue, according to witnesses and club management.

The headlining band at the Khyber that night was Murphy's Law, led by front man Jimmy G, who formerly went by the moniker Jimmy Gestapo.

In an e-mail to the Daily News, Jimmy G confirmed that some guys had showed up to the concert in "full Nazi field dress."

"And they did get their asses kicked," he wrote. "Again."

Khyber owner Stephen Simons, who was not at the show, said he had been told that the crowd inside "largely ignored and mocked" the three men.

But after they exited the club, on 2nd Street near Chestnut, they were attacked by a group of up to 50 people, he said.

"I guess being on 2nd Street in SS uniforms on a Friday night is a way to incite a semi-riot," Simons said.

[...]



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A Still Moment

James Howard Kunstler, 4/25/10:


George W. Bush was onto something in the fall of 2008 when he remarked apropos of the Lehman collapse: "...this sucker could go down."

It's my serene conviction, by the way, that this sucker actually is going down, right now, even as I clatter away at the keys -- perhaps in slow motion, so that not many other bystanders have noticed yet, and the few who have noticed are mostly too crosseyed with nausea to speak.

It's perhaps useful to define even what we mean when we say "this sucker." Everybody knows what a sucker is, of course -- say, a Midwestern public employees' union pension fund snookered into buying a fat slice of equity tranche in a Goldman Sachs-engineered CDO. But "this sucker" is something else: a rather large cargo of commercial relations, entailed obligations, hopes, expectations, habits of daily life -- indeed millions of whole lives -- loaded onto the rather creaky vessel we call modern civilization. "This sucker" was such an apt term coming from someone whose understanding of civilization was like unto that of a boy who found a PlayStation under the Christmas tree.

It's also perhaps useful to define what we mean by "going down." To my mind it means an awful lot of money disappears and nobody can pay for anything and an awful of things that have kept going on promises to pay and to get paid will stop keeping going. I don't think that the idea of money disappears -- that is, paper certificates representing claims on future work -- but there will be a lot less of it to go around. Eventually the idea of money could go, too, at least in its current form as Federal Reserve notes. But mostly for some years it will just be a lot of people, companies, and governments who are broke.

"Going down" will mean a society with no money and an infrastructure for daily life that requires gobs of money to run, and a populace too dazed, confused, and inflamed to do anything useful in the way of organizing new infrastructures for daily life for their new circumstances. In retrospect, the Great Depression of the 1930s will look like "The Philadelphia Story" compared to what we wake up to ten years from now.

[...]




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Pain for Asian youth didn't end with school assault

Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/26/10--On March 16, ninth grader Lindi Liu was exiting a bathroom stall at South Philadelphia High when another boy kicked the door inward, bashing him in the head.

As Liu picked himself up off the floor, he could hear the boy laughing.

The incident lasted only seconds, but for Liu, a 16-year-old immigrant from China, the consequences have been profound.

His vision frequently turns blurry, to where he can't count fingers held in front of his face. He forgets conversations that occurred moments earlier, and sometimes struggles to identify everyday objects, like the chicken on his dinner plate. He gets sudden nose bleeds.

District spokesman Fernando Gallard said the school inquiry showed Liu was injured carelessly but unintentionally. The boy was kicking the doors of the stalls in turn, and did not realize Liu was there, he said.

"It seems it was not intended as an assault or intended to injure anyone," he said.

However, a student who was in the bathroom at the time contradicted that.

Dong Chen, 19, said the assailant kicked only one of five doors, the one with a broken lock, behind which stood Liu. Chen said when the door hit Liu's head, "we could hear it, it was so loud. Pow!"

[...]



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The problem at South Philadelphia High is between black and East Asian students. Like Eric Holder said, Americans are cowards because they avoid candid talk about race. Here's a straight fact: seven out of ten black children are now born out of wedlock. Seven out of ten! Whatever the causes, that's a recipe for disaster. Even before it got this horrific, Thomas Sowell wrote in 1981:

Along with general progress, blacks have experienced retrogression in particular areas. The proportion of one-parent, female-headed black families increased from 18 percent in 1950 to 33 percent in 1973—from double the white percentage in 1950 to more than triple the white percentage in 1973. Despite attempts to depict this as a "legacy of slavery," one-parent, female-headed black families were a rare phenomenon in earlier times, even under slavery. The proportion of blacks on welfare also rose during the 1960s and 1970s, as the proportion in poverty declined. The proportion of the black population that is working has been declining both absolutely and relative to whites. Unemployment among blacks has risen, also absolutely and relative to whites. Black teenage unemployment in 1978 was more than five times what it had been thirty years earlier. Among the factors responsible, a number of government programs—notably the minimum wage laws—have made it more difficult for blacks to find jobs, and other government programs— notably welfare—have made it less necessary.

A number of governmental efforts have been made to advance-blacks, but these efforts are difficult to disentangle from the effects of growing black education, skill, geographic redistribution, and changing racial attitudes by whites that made the civil rights laws and other government activities possible. The most controversial of the government programs has been "affirmative action," or racial quota hiring, established as "goals and timetables" in 1971. Economists have found these quota systems to have had little or no effect beyond what had already been achieved under "equal opportunity" policies in the 1960s. The public perception of "affirmative action" has, however, engendered strong resentment among whites in general—resentment exploited by growing racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis, often in parts of the country where such organizations never flourished before. The historic alliance between Negro and Jewish organizations likewise broke up over the issue of quotas.

--Ethnic America (New York: Basic Books)

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50/50

My 82nd post at the Harriet Blog:



Linh Dinh: Assembly line line breaks, Kent, and the decline of the comma, one of the greatest of inventions. Worse than reality TV, confessional poetry that doesn’t fess up. On the other leg, paratatic glossolalia, and in the middle, a shriveled hybrid. A feeble bunt. Why not speak the unspeakable, for once?

Kent Johnson: The AWP was, like, unspeakably fun. Oops, a burnt carcass is what M. Ansari resembled, after he was set ablaze, with family, by phosphorous bomb, in poppy fields outside Herat. And still he breathes… Perhaps he will yet go to America one day, to study Conceptual Poetry, as he dreams.

LD: Reagan, “Life ain’t fair.” It’s cool to witness, especially on a flat screen. Most are merely teased. Century ago, you would be dead already from a misplaced period, before you could test your malnourished dip stick. Morose man during happy hours, “Study hard, I counseled my dick. Become a jester.”

KJ: Close your eyes and think of England, Mlle Khalil, you Champion of the Poetry Fair of your Gaza school, a fortnight back, evaporated, with classmate, 'neath the blossoming bower. We wish we could've warned you: Don't hide under sentimental flowers, dear... Adieu. Our panel, “Innovative Poetry in the Academy," is packed.

LD: I too speak English, Kent, though from my restless void, downtrodden with scrapple, bow, bower and bowel all sound the same. Blame the Pentagon. Thanks to globalism, we don’t manufacture yet export words and pixels. Each burp of ours well packaged, to be parsed by natives. I read Snodgrass today.

KJ: Mr. Ahmad, picking up his own arm, sees the torso of his son, Rashad, silly clear across the square. Go, Mr. Ahmad, Go! Through uncreativity, unoriginality, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification we will rip Poetry's heart apart, and rain down on you blue mud tiles of radical avant-garde art.

LD: Don’t point your severance at me, dude. I marched, held up a signifier. Is it my fault I was born with an original recipe carcass inside my chops? We gave them free jazz, didn’t we? Who said you have to be napalmed, queer and of la raza to be anthologized?

KJ: Said Amin, 24, a poet, had his legs severed by Humvee gunner M. Allen, 24, a poet, too. “Look at my feet there on the road!” cried M. Amin. Then he died. The Pulitzer is ours, the NBCC, NYTBR, NBA, the Academy. In transport, our eyes go white: We're "avant."

LD: Thanks to Amin, Allen is a thundering witness on tour and hanging with Forche, though his balls are AWOL. Goddamn Amin’s posse. Breaking pita, they’re all best friends now. “It’s not fair, Said. With a name like that, you were destined to be a poet, a has been poet.”

KJ: Oblivious to our station, sometimes we poets blabber just to show
We are brighter than other people. When we do, we can’t really know
What we are saying, and everyone is very glad when we stop.
Think: Do the birds sing to show they are brighter? No, they do not.






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Video by Matthew Zacharias:

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For over an hour, 25 New Yorkers

walked past dying man on sidewalk. New York Post, 4/24/10:


[...]

One indifferent stroller snapped a photo of the victim on his cellphone. Another even lifted an unresponsive Tale-Yax, saw a pool of blood below his body and then walked off. Firefighters didn’t receive a 911 call until 7:23 a.m.

"The news was very painful for all of us," Tacam said. "We never would have expected he would die this way. He was a person who always stepped up to help others."

A Guatemalan immigrant, Tale-Yax eked out a living working odd jobs, but he was recently out of work and lost his home in Queens. [...]





[Around 1991, I saw a car run over a homeless man's legs as he slept on the sidewalk. I went into a nearby apartment building and asked the desk lady to call 911, then I continued to work. Getting there 20 minutes later, I called 911 myself and was told that, no, no one had called.]



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Switch, Leap

My 81st post at the Harriet Blog:



Dumb foreigner, always confusing hungry with angry. “Are you hungry at me? Who you hungry at?” “I’m so angry, I could eat a gold man sachs.”

Reversing Christ, Vallejo turns bread to stone. In “The Hungry Man’s Wheel,” he riffs, zigzags and amplifies:

From between my own teeth I come out smoking,
shouting, pushing,
pulling down my pants ...
My stomach empties, my jejunum empties,
misery pulls me out between my own teeth,
caught in my shirt cuff by a little stick.

A stone to sit down on
will now be denied to me?
Not even that stone on which the woman trips who has given birth,
the mother of the lamb, the cause, the root,
that one will now be denied to me?
At least that other one,
that crouching has passed through my soul!
At least
the calcarid or the evil one (humble ocean)
or the one no longer even worth throwing at man,
that one give it to me now!

At least the one they could have found lying across and alone in an insult,
that one give it to me now!
At least the twisted and crowned, on which echoes
only once the walk of moral rectitude,
or, at least, that other one, that flung in dignified curve,
will drop by itself,
acting as a true core,
that one give it to me now!

A piece of bread, that too denied to me?
Now I am resigned to be what I always have to be,
but give me
a stone to sit down on,
but give me,
please, a piece of bread to sit down on,
but give me
in Spanish
something, in short, to drink, to eat, to live by, to rest on,
and then I will go away ...
I find a strange form, my shirt very torn
and filthy
and now I have nothing, this is hideous.

--translated by Clayton Eshleman

Having introduced a stone that “crouching has passed through my soul”—amazing in itself, and reminiscent of Da Vinci’s “at death, a man will pass through his own bowels”—Vallejo echoes it with “please, a piece of bread to sit down on.”

The poet’s logic, or rather, poetry’s syllogism, must always outstrip the reader’s, leaves him staggering. Another astounding example, and this, my favorite passage in all of literature:

Should I have realized all your memories,--should I be the one who can bind you hand and foot,--I shall strangle you.

--from Arthur Rimbaud’s “Phrases,” as translated by Louise Varèse

[Que j’aie réalisé tous vos souvenirs,--que je sois celle qui sait vous garrotter,--je vous étoufferai.]




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Relevant

to my recent posts about Polish poetry and television syntax, this Kent Johnson's observation from 2003:



[...] at the heart of this growing discussion is the notion, clearly conveyed in recent statements by proponents of the "deconstructive" approach (most prominently Silliman, Bernstein, & Watten), that a certain "advanced" poetic practice--one which self-consciously takes the ideological status of language as thematic sine qua non-- is of greater social, historical, and political value than the more formally conventional kinds of responses that have flourished in the U.S. poetry world (notably via PAW) in response to the imperialist war.

The statements, in fact (see Bernstein's "Enough" and entries at Silliman's Blog on the "poetry of quietude"), have been stunningly haughty, quite open in suggesting that anti-war poets who write in "mainstream" modes--who use, in Bernstein's disdainful terms, "righteous monologue" and "digestible messages"--inevitably play into the hands of those forces that would "discipline and contain dissent."

This elitist posture, as I pointed out in earlier response, is frankly embarrassing. Moreover, and more consequentially, it stimulates sectarian division just when the building of dialogic strategies and ethics in the cultural community is an urgent matter; it projects the "superior" nature of one relatively small poetic formation, ignoring, against all evidence, that the forms of poetic resistance that most writers and readers make use of in times of political exigency are ordered from the forms of everyday language--forms which naturally tend to be pointed outward in addresses of partisan reference, and not inward in deconstructive analyses of cultural ideologemes. Given this fact, some fairly obvious questions could be posed to Watten, et. al. : Whose poetry was, or is, more "politically" relevant: Stein's or Neruda's? Zukofsky's or Hikmet's? Mallarme's or Brecht's? Was Vallejo wrong to abandon the hermetic poetry
of _Trilce_ when he wrote the great popular poetry collected in _Espana, aparta de mi este caliz_? Does, say, Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" have the effect of disciplining dissent because it is written in a prosody and syntax similar to that used by Kipling or other pro-imperial poets?

That's not to suggest that the poetry of a Stein or Zukofsky is without political value, nor, much less, that the kinds of writing practices advocated by the first-generation Language poets are irrelevant. To the contrary--their poetry and criticism has much to contribute. But culture (it's a somewhat obvious proposition) is informed by a diversity of reading formations, and these negotiate and manipulate their semiotic environments in complex and mutually impacting ways. An effective poetics of resistance will be likewise diverse, and informed (at least provisionally) by attitudes of mutual tolerance and respect. Call it a Total Syntax of Poetic Resistance--one that recognizes axiological values as fluid, contingent, and not necessarily counterposed in their utilities, and which refuses, consequently, to grant privilege to any particular mode of compositional attention.

But in that regard, the so-called avant-garde in American poetry is far away, right now, from leading the way.



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Speaking of Kent Johnson, check out this recent interview on the U.K. based Argotist.

Goldman Sachs Eats Its Young

A must read by Keith Johnson at Revolt of the Plebs, 4/20/10:


[...]

Fabrice Tourre, 31, is the classic patsy and the kind of villain the American people love to hate. He’s foreign (French), flamboyant, young, rich and shrewd. He was only 22 and fresh out of college when he started working for Goldman Sachs in 2001. Just five years into his employment, he found himself at the center of a scheme devised by one of the world’s richest billionaires, hedge fund manager John Paulson.

Paulson had presented a roster of sub-prime mortgage deals that he was betting would fail in the housing market. He paid Goldman Sachs $15 million to find clients that would bet the other way. The scheme was packaged into what has come to be known as an ‘Abacus Deal’.

Tourre is alledged to have taken this portfolio to potential investors and sell them as favorable risks while hiding the fact that he was working with Paulson, who was betting against them.

To help with pitching these toxic investments, they employed the services of ACA Capital Holdings, Inc. and convinced them that Paulson was actually investing in these mortgages. Tourre and Paulson then used ACA’s endorsement of the mortgages as a credible and sound investment. Everything went as planned and Paulson cashed in on a cool $1 billion while the Goldman Sachs investors took it in the shorts.

[...]








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Do check out

Ian Keenan's amazing essay on Ron Silliman, No Content Left: Silliman’s Transit.

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Unbecoming Teachers

As their country and state go bankrupt, some New Jersey teachers react to a proposed payfreeze with profanities, fat jokes and comparisons of their governor to Pol Pot and the KKK. Wally Edge reports on PolitickerNJ.com:


Robert Reboli, a basic skills and remedial English teacher at Madison Avenue Elementary School in Irvington, has some advice for his fellow educators as they prepare to fight Gov. Christopher Christie’s proposed state budget: “Never trust a fat fuck.”

That’s what Reboli posted on a Facebook group called New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie’s Pay Freeze, which has more than 57,000 fans -- a powerful grass roots tool as the teachers union fights Christie’s proposed state budget.

But comments posted on the social networking site – most of them during school hours -- often get personal as they exercise their first amendment rights.

“How do you spell Asshole? C-H-R-I-S C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E,” wrote Peter Griffin, the supervisor of the music department at Hopewell Valley Regional High School. “To those of you who voted for this fat piece of shit, shame on you!”

Beth Berzanskis, who makes $83,000 a year as an elementary school librarian in East Brunswick, calls Christie's budget cuts "rediculous" (sic).

A Newark elementary school teacher wants her colleagues to encourage students to write protest letters to Christie. “My fourth graders will be writing,” said Andrea Hamilton.

Some educators try to be constructive. Jeffrey Lawson, a science teacher at Milltown High School, is proposing a 3% sales tax on clothing in order so that the state can afford to pay teachers. And some teachers, like Rockaway High School math teacher Toni Clark, try to explain what’s going on.

“Do not agree to pay a freeze,” Clark says. “It will in turn be a pay cut when you are giving (part) of your salary for health care."

But others are just mean.

“He is such a liar. Liar. Liar. Liar. And many of you bought his crap. Thanks to all who voted for him and his bullshit,” wrote Angelic Delcher, a middle school teacher in Egg Harbor Township.

Chris Larson, an art teacher at Hunterdon Central Regional High School, says of Christie: “this piece of crap should not be allowed by any type of school to set one foot on campus, college, high school or day care. He is raping the educational system. We just got our proposed budget and it doesn’t look good."

Camden County Vocational and Technical High School biology teacher Marlene Brubaker says that “KingKrisKristy is copying from another famous dictator: Pol Pot, who got rid of teachers and intellectuals and turned the population against them. NJ has its own Khmer Rouge, it’s your Legislature.”

“King Kris Krustie is quite the trickster. He has taken our the democratic process, and runs the state of NJ by executive proclamations. Your legislature is full of KKK's yes-men. They bow to his will. They all need to be kicked out of office. I always called NJ the 'Nazi state' I used to be joking,” Brubaker wrote. “Where did he graduate from, get them to revoke his degrees.”

Another Pol Polt reference posted by Brubaker: “He reigned in terror, his target was teachers and intellectuals. They were either killed or put into forced labor...King Kris Kristy is headed in this direction...this is hardly hyperbole .. He wants to roll back the clock to the days where teachers lived with a family in the community, where we had to be single! Where we were the smartest kid in the 8th grade. Remember when married women got fired when they showed their baby-bump? My mom lost her job, when I was 6 mo. in utero...welcome to the fiefdom of KingKrisKristy, where going back to the 'good ol days' is the law of the land."

“WTF? Seriously? This man makes me ill!” said Nicola Jefferey, who teaches second grade in Elizabeth.

Amelia Tartaglia Reganis, a pre-school teacher employed by the Pemberton Board of Education says that Christie’s mother “was supposedly a teacher, so I guess she put the hammer down on her darling son, Chris, when he was a kid. I think she must have hidden the Twinkies from him. So now Christie is on a witch hunt and against the teachers and eating tons of Twinkies!”

“In the NJ kingdom of King Kris Kristie, the King has proclaimed, abolish all STARS programs, therefore, all children shall be left behind, and increase the King's caloric intake for one govenor (sic) with a big behind!,” Reganis wrote in a subsequent post.

A school psychologist for the Kearny Board of Education, Nicole Marino, suggests that teachers might retaliate against students if they are unhappy with the governor. “Christie is going to take that away from all of us. Either support us or take your comments somewhere else. The last group of people you want educating your children is those that feel they are undercompensated and underappreciated and most of all discriminated against,” she wrote.






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Top Contributors to Barack Obama

Open Secret:


This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2008 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organization's PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Because of contribution limits, organizations that bundle together many individual contributions are often among the top donors to presidential candidates. These contributions can come from the organization's members or employees (and their families). The organization may support one candidate, or hedge its bets by supporting multiple candidates. Groups with national networks of donors - like EMILY's List and Club for Growth - make for particularly big bundlers.

University of California--$1,591,395
Goldman Sachs--$994,795
Harvard University--$854,747
Microsoft Corp--$833,617
Google Inc--$803,436
Citigroup Inc--$701,290

[...]




........................................
For comparison, these were the top contributors to John McCain:

Merrill Lynch--$373,595
Citigroup Inc--$322,051
Morgan Stanley--$273,452
Goldman Sachs--$230,095
JPMorgan Chase & Co--$228,107
US Government--$208,379

.

Where's Rico?

James Howard Kunstler, 4/19/10:


It's interesting and instructive to read The New York Times' lead story this morning, Top Goldman Leaders Said to Have Overseen Mortgage Unit. While it pretends to report all the particulars of the huge scandal growing out of Friday's SEC action against Goldman Sachs, the story really comes off as an attempt to create an alibi for the so-called "bank." It pretends that some kind of an intellectual struggle was going on among GS executives as to whether the housing market was doing just fine or poised to tank -- therefore muddling the company's intent in setting up investment deals based on sketchy mortgages designed to blow up so that a favored big customer, John Paulson, could collect on the deal insurance known as credit default swaps.

The truth is that anyone with half a brain could see the securitized mortgage fiasco coming from ten-thousand miles away. I said as much in Chapter Six ("Running on Fumes: the Hallucinated Economy") of my book The Long Emergency, which was published in 2005 but written well before that in 2002-4. And I had had no work experience whatsoever in banking generally or Wall Street investment banking in particular.

One week before the SEC action against GS, the Pro Publica website published a story about virtually the same kind of mischief being run out of the Chicago-based hedge fund Magnetar led by a clever young fellow named Alec Litowitz. Like Goldman Sachs, Magnetar deliberately constructed investments (bundles of bundled mortgage-backed securities called collateralized debt obligations) that were certain to fail so that Magnetar could collect on credit default swaps that amounted to a bet against products they themselves had participated in creating. There was no question that Litowitz and his employees did this absolutely on purpose. Nor is there any question that they aggressively sold positions in these CDOs to credulous investors like Thrivent Financial for Lutherans and others.

The question that now begs to be answered is: why is this activity not being investigated and prosecuted under the federal RICO statutes against racketeering? The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was designed to punish exactly this kind of behavior, whether the defendant's name ended in a vowel or not. How is it not a racket to deliberately and systematically construct investments designed to fail so you can collect what amounts to insurance against them -- and then to sell those financial instruments to customers without telling them that these investments were engineered to blow up? At the very least it amounts to a failure to disclose material information, which is the basis for distinguishing illegality. More to the point, it almost certainly amounts to prosecutable criminal fraud and insider trading.

[...]







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Present Past Tense

My 80th post at the Harriet Blog:




Interviewed by Kent Johnson in 2002, Eliot Weinberger said:

The Trade Center attack will not alter the autobiographical, anecdotal, therapeutic poems of the workshops; it will merely add another subject. But it will be interesting to see what happens, if anything, on the progressive front. Their poetry has been a kind of decadent modernism and their politics has tended toward an academic pseudo-Marxism that is completely oblivious to politics as the rest of the world knows it: the infliction and alleviation of suffering. Meaning is not a capitalist construct, as they claim, but meaninglessness is, and 9/11 was an explosion of meaning in the prevailing media-fantasy unreality of the nation.

Meaninglessness as a capitalist construct. The daily flood of trivia, applauded by such “radical” poets as Kenny G, has become a staple of our media, but it’s not just fluff that gets dished up daily, and here lies the real insidiousness. Presenting in a rapid, endless succession, scandal, fried chicken, bullshit, bombs, boobs, earthquake, four wheel drive, waterboarding, singing contest, actually a pretty good documentary on the Irish in 19th century America, awesome breakfast burrito deal and more scandal, the media flatten everything and nothing sticks.

What to make of a poetry that constantly pivots away from itself? That invites nonsense, and when meaning is created, refuses to let it linger? What of a poetry that does not allow significance its proper duration, that shuns context, in sum, a poetry that imitates television, especially cable TV with a remote control for accelerated derangement? Is this poetry radical, complicit or merely inevitable due to neurological damages inflicted by said appliance?

Living inside such media-induced miasma, poetry is no longer possible, really. Sure, a reading may attract 20 uncomfortable, shifting chairs, and a yawning commuter may glance at some cutesy haiku overhead, but the current mind is no longer capable of meditation or reflection, those slow and silent processes that allow a poem to truly matter. The average American watches four hours of television a day, listens to constant music, and there's also the internet with its Facebook, texting, twitter, email and excellent porn, etc, to distract him. Two or more of these activities are often indulged in simultaneously. In a third of American households, the television is never turned off. If a poem can squeeze in sideway in such climate, it will likely just flit by, to make room for yet another ephemera, and another, and another. Conversation itself has been degraded. There is hardly a place to talk, especially one without sonic distractions. In a culture hostile to thinking, speaking and hearing, the poem has no chance.

Imagine a public that could be inspired by a poem such as this:

The Answer

Debasement is the password of the base,
Nobility the epitaph of the noble.
See how the gilded sky is covered
With the drifting twisted shadows of the dead.

The Ice Age is over now,
Why is there ice everywhere?
The Cape of Good Hope has been discovered,
Why do a thousand sails contest the Dead Sea?

I came into this world
Bringing only paper, rope, a shadow,
To proclaim before the judgment
The voice that has been judged:

Let me tell you, world,
I—do—not—believe!
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,
Count me as number thousand and one.

I don't believe the sky is blue;
I don't believe in thunder's echoes;
I don't believe that dreams are false;
I don't believe that death has no revenge.

If the sea is destined to breach the dikes
Let all the brackish water pour into my heart;
If the land is destined to rise
Let humanity choose a peak for existence again.

A new conjunction and glimmering stars
Adorn the unobstructed sky now;
They are the pictographs from five thousand years.
They are the watchful eyes of future generations.


--Bei Dao, as translated by Bonnie S. McDougall

That audience is gone, I’m afraid. I don’t know China, but poet Zhang Er, co-editor of Another Kind of Nation: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Talisman 2007), told me that a Bei Dao is no longer possible in that country. The mass media have taken over. The only political voices with a public belong to a few journalists and rock stars.

Dissidence as entertainment. We’ve been there for a while, haven’t we? At the biggest corporate bash of the year, the Who earnestly belted out “We don't get fooled again,” yet no one guffawed and spat out nachos. At a White House soirée, grizzled peaceniks Joan Baez and Bob Dylan performed for our bankster-funded (and yet another) war president. Before strumming, Queen Jane even gazed at Obama and cooed, “Mr. President, you are much loved.”

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss is right. But, but, but, I can hear a chorus rising, this one is so much more articulate! A symbolic victory must count for something, no? He is black. Our usually lugubrious gated community was positively orgasmic with a kind of self-congratulation as the American version of Carlos Menem was elected. Where now, where now? Don’t stay tuned.

Images from my photo blog, State of the Union: Chicago; Philadelphia; Philadelphia; Los Angeles.



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[My 79th post at the Harriet Blog.]

THE GAME THAT GOES ON AND ON: A SWISS BANK, A PRESIDENT, AND THE PERMANENT GOVERNMENT

RUSS BAKER in WHOWWHATWHY, 4/14/10:


Last August, the presidential press corps followed Barack Obama and his family to Martha’s Vineyard for their brief vacation. The coverage focused on summery fare–a visit to an ice cream parlor, the books the president had brought along. Nearly everyone mentioned his few rounds of golf, including his swing, and the enthusiasm of onlookers. What caught my eye, though, was the makeup of his foursome. The president was joined by an old friend from Chicago; a young aide; and Robert Wolf, Chairman and CEO, UBS Group Americas. In a decidedly incurious piece, a New York Times reporter made light of Wolf’s presence:

“The president has told friends that to truly relax he prefers golfing with young aides…But he departed from that pattern Monday when he invited a top campaign contributor, Robert Wolf, president of UBS Investment Bank, to join him for 18 holes. Call it donor maintenance.”

Wolf, however, is hardly–as the Times suggested– just another donor. For one thing, he is a leading figure in an industry that almost brought down the entire financial system–and then was the recipient of astonishing government largesse. UBS, along with other banks, benefited directly from the backdoor bailout of the insurance giant AIG.

But UBS stands alone in one rather formidable respect–it was the defendant in the largest offshore tax evasion case in U.S. history, accused of helping wealthy Americans hide their income in secret offshore accounts. To settle a massive investigation, UBS forked over $780 million to the US treasury. This settlement came shortly before Wolf rounded out Obama’s golfing party. Given this rather problematical situation, why then would the President choose UBS’s Wolf of all people for this honor?

Wolf declined a request for an interview about his relationship with the President, so it was not possible to pose that question to him. This hardly matters, though, for the story goes far beyond Wolf and UBS. It involves Republicans as well as Democrats, the Bush Administration as well as Obama’s. More importantly, behind the trivialized golf outing on Martha’s Vineyard, lie the interests that increasingly set the course for every administration. And that now game the system so well that the rest of us—wherever we live in the world—are kept fighting for the scraps.

[...]



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Frontal

My 78th post at the Harriet Blog:



Last week, a plane carrying the Polish president, his wife and many of the country’s top military and political leaders crashed, killing all aboard. They were traveling to Russia to commemorate the Katyn massacre, in which 22,000 Poles were killed by the Soviets in April of 1940. Poland is pinched in between two major forces, Germanic and Russian. With no natural barriers as deterences, historical catastrophes have been routine. Poles understand only too well that geography is destiny, and that history is a mass murderer, ready to pounce. And yet, poetry. Wislawa Szymborska:

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,
of the mornings
that make waking up worthwhile.
The grass is green
on Maciejowice's fields,
and studded with dew,
as is usually the case with grass.

Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
all grounds are battlegrounds,
those we remember
and those that are forgotten:
the birch, cedar, and fir forests, the white snows,
the yellow sands, gray gravel, the iridescent swamps,
the canyons of black defeat,
where, in times of crisis,
you can cower under a bush.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.
Only the blood flows, drying quickly,
and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.

[from “Reality Demands,” translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh]

An awareness of historical terrors does not negate poetry but deepens it. Addressing this same tension, Zbigniew Herbert:

Five Men

1
They take them out in the morning to the stone courtyard
and put them against the wall

five men
two of them very young
the others middle-aged

nothing more
can be said about them

2
when the platoon
level their guns
everything suddenly appears
in the garish light
of obviousness

the yellow wall
the cold blue
the black wire on the wall
instead of a horizon

that is the moment
when the five senses rebel
they would gladly escape
like rats from a sinking ship

before the bullet reaches its destination
the eye will perceive the flight of the projectile
the ear record a steely rustle
the nostrils will be filled with biting smoke
a petal of blood will brush the palate
the touch will shrink and then slacken

now they lie on the ground
covered up to their eyes with shadow
the platoon walks away
their buttons straps
and steel helmets
are more alive
than those lying beside the wall

3
I did not learn this today
I knew it before yesterday

so why have I been writing
unimportant poems on flowers

what did the five talk of
the night before the execution

of prophetic dreams
of an escapade in a brothel
of automobile parts
of a sea voyage
of how when he had spades
he ought not to have opened
of how vodka is best
after wine you get a headache
of girls
of fruit
of life

thus one can use in poetry
names of Greek shepherds
one can attempt to catch the color of morning sky
write of love
and also
once again
in dead earnest
offer to the betrayed world
a rose

[translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott]

Seldomly do we see this kind of gravity in American poetry. Clear, direct and free of personal references, it's also aimed at the widest public, at the nation. Americans, those few tolerating poetry, tend to cringe at poets assuming such a grand posture. Our first, Walt Whitman, remains our best. Ginsberg was but a shadow, at times parody. Half prophet, half clown, he was in any case our last public bard.






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How to Have an Interesting Life

My 77th post at the Harriet Blog:

[a rhythmic response to Kwame Dawes' post]


Shun the smart crowds. Instead, mix
With the dumbest you could find.
They will teach you much, in fact,
Just about everything. They’ll show
You how inadequate you really are.

Sneer at beauty, especially all
Manifestations of glamor. Never
Forget that time brings each ugliness
And that we’re all hideous, at the core.
(Coeur.) If you see unblemished skin,

Peel it. To nourish your atrophied
Sense of empathy, practice mercy
Fucking at each opportunity, and try

To do it sober. Don’t, like every other,
Identify and align yourself with power.
Try to stop bobbing your head for once.
Instead, become a grudging or cheerful
Tool of the most impotent and inarticulate.

Short of suicide, always situate yourself
In the wrong place, at the worst time. Be
Vulnerable. If you are “at home,” you are

Not trying hard enough. Avoid amusement
Parks, especially MFA writing programs.

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Bloody Tulips!

Dmitry Orlov on Kyrgyzstan, 4/12/10:


Five years ago Kyrgyzstan (former Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic) went through a so-called "tulip revolution." Organized by George Soros and the usual suspects from the Orange Revolution Syndicate, they got rid of one unsavory dictator and installed another one – all in the name of democracy and freedom, of course. And now, just five years later, an uprising has taken place, the president and his entourage have fled, the government buildings have been looted, and the people are dividing up the land that they feel the rich elites have stolen from them.

This little country is important to the United States only because geography forces US and NATO to use it as a trans-shipment point for resupplying their endless war in Afghanistan. It is also used to channel out a lot of Afghanistan's heroin export. The proceeds from the heroin trade end up in Western banks, and that, in turn, keeps the war going.

[...]




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My photo blog,

State of the Union, is featured for the 4th time on the Brazilian webzine, Sibila.

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Fat Man Singing

My 76th post at the Harriet Blog:

I adored the blurb you gave me so much

I wrote you a thank you blurb, all in italics

now sitting cross-legged in the faculty parking lot

the sky the color of tenure

conifers and elk-upchuck envigorating the pine-scented conservatism

nothing ma! no, we’re not enriching uranium!

oh only in dreams do I get to relapse


--from Jim Behrle's "I Can No Longer Be Friends with Professors"

Ah, the reciprocal back scratching, house of mirrors, glass bubble existence of poebiz, all tucked nicely into the military-industrial complex! Well, thank you, Jim! Soon enough, though, it will be goodbye to all that.

Memo to Kenny: We will not become more machine-like in the future. Quite the reverse. Like it or not, we'll be yanked from our virtual, surrogate existence and plopped into the splendor and squalor of life in the flesh. Down with the tyranny of the eye! Make some room for the nose, will ya?

As for the 18th century, it will reappear momentarily, but don't count on wearing a wig, fanning yourself and lounging on some country estate. Pick up your hoe, born again peasant!, even if you have multiple degrees of higher learning, because we're chuting towards the mother of all depressions.

Like dog food, university writing programs will quickly be phased out of existence, to be replaced by workshops held at someone's home, a maestro who's likely just a village explainer, local yokel but with a gift for angular assonances and weird metaphors. Compensation will eventually be in barter, say, an old ring, rare can of tuna, lumps of coal or unadorned, funky human contact, after class.

With increasing destitution, certain themes will become more prevalent in literature: crime; class anger; racial or ethnic hatred; deceit and hunger. And prostitution, the literal kind, even performed by those who are now merely versed in its more abstract, allegorical offshoot. You will hear more about corruption. In the U.S., there is monstrous thievery at the top, but very little at the bottom. As we slide downward, you'll find much more petty graft like in the third world.

You will hear more voices talking, often over each other, and more yelling, because each home will have to accomodate more bodies, from returning adult children to close, then distant relatives, to boarders. More and more Americans will have to share their kitchen and bathrooms with strangers. Bedrooms will be partitioned. Familial conflicts will make a huge comeback.

Science fiction will become a genre about the past. Pondering those who needed machines to do just about everything, from brushing their teeth to writing, to self pleasure, future readers will be amused, disgusted and only seldomly envious. Imagine a world where music was a nuisance because it had become repetitive and could not be silenced! Imagine people who could barely walk, yet flew!

Like a fat man on his last leg, we are consuming our own stored, congested lard. Our autophagous, regurgitating proclivities are finding outlets in the oh, so au-courant group thinks of flarf and uncreativity. Don't generate, just recycle. (I love you, Kasey, but we don't need your clones!) Always, by the time you've heard of a movement, there's no more room for you. Are you comfortable? Well, do something about it!






Images are from my photo blog, State of the Union: Philadelphia; Los Angeles.



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Man charged with murdering girlfriend, dumping body

Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/9/10--A man has been charged with killing his live-in girlfriend, whose decomposing body was found Wednesday in an alley behind their North Philadelphia home.

Ronald Moon, 28, of the 100 block of West Diamond Street, apparently killed Danielle Winston on Dec. 26, but made no effort since then to move her body any further than the rear alley.

Moon had been charged in November with aggravated assault for allegedly choking Winston into unconsciousness, but he was released after posting $1,000 cash bail, court records show.

A preliminary hearing originally set for Feb. 19 was postponed until may because the complaining witness - Winston - was a "missing person," the records show.

On Wednesday, police answering a call to investigate an object found Winston's partially decomposed body covered by a sheet and trash bag in the rear alley behind 180 West Diamond Street.

An autopsy determined she had been stabbed multiple times, police said.

Police arrested Moon on Thursday and charged him with murder and related offenses.




................................................
Philadelphia is truly fucked. He choked her into unconsciousness, but was released after posting $1,000 bail. He went home and soon stabbed her to death, then dumped her body in a trash bag in an alley right behind the house where they lived. At the February trial for the choking incident, she, being dead, could not show up as witness but this raised no red flag. The hearing was simply postponed until May. Three months and a half after being dumped like garbage, her body was finally found.

.

.

All across U.S., in the crosshairs

Philadelphia Daily News, 4/8/10--CRIMES AGAINST pizza-delivery people aren't limited to Philadelphia. There have been dozens of robberies and aggravated assaults — and one killing — across the nation in recent weeks.

The slaying occurred in Lafayette, La., where a 50-year-old deliveryman was stabbed to death outside his car, which was parked in a customer's driveway.

The customer found the man's body, his wallet missing, when she looked outside after realizing her pizza was late.

ELSEWHERE:

In Tuesday's New York Post, the headline "Hey! You Want A Pizza Me?" sat atop a story that detailed how a deliveryman fought off two armed robbers and still managed to make his delivery — one pepperoni, one cheese — before going to the police station to file a report.

On April 2, two men attempted to carjack a pizza deliverywoman stopped at a light outside Allentown, Pa. The pair fled when they saw the car had a manual transmission.

In Charlotte, N.C., six pizza-delivery people were robbed in the 10-day stretch ending April 5. In the most recent incident, the delivery man was walking back to his car after a delivery when a robber put a gun to his head. No one has been seriously injured in the string of robberies, which police do not believe are related.

In South Carolina, a deliverywoman last Saturday was shot in the leg and bitten on the elbow as she fought off two men who stole $19 from her and tried to force her into the trunk of her car.

In Linden, N.J., a delivery man was punched in the face and head, then knocked to the ground by two men who robbed him of $40 on March 29 .

On March 27, a Pittsburgh deliveryman was beaten and his car was stolen while he was on the job.

In Anchorage, Alaska, on March 21, a hold-up turned into a SWAT situation when three youths who roughed up and robbed a deliveryman barricaded themselves — and their stolen booty — in a nearby apartment. The Anchorage Daily News quoted one police lieutenant as saying, "They communicated to the officers that they knew they were going to jail and they didn't want to come out because they wanted to eat the pizza."





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Destitute and desperate, Icelanders opt for exile

MOSFELLSBAER, Iceland (AFP), 4/7/10--Anna Margret Bjoernsdottir never thought she would be forced to leave her once wealthy homeland, but after 18 months of economic upheaval she has decided to join the biggest emigration wave from Iceland in more than a century.

"I just don't see any future here. There isn't going to be any future in this country for the next 20 years, everything is going backwards," lamented the 46-year-old single mother, who plans to move to Norway in June.

The former real estate agent who lost her job when Iceland's housing market disintegrated two years ago said she feared she could soon be forced out of her large house in Mosfellsbaer, some 15 kilometres (nine miles) from Reykjavik.

"I don't want to sell it," she said, vowing to "fight to keep" the comfortable wooden dwelling she, her daughter Olavia, their cat Isolde Tinna and their dog Candit the Bandit have called home since 2004.

Bjoernsdottir is not alone in planning to leave Iceland's economic mess behind and seek a new future abroad. Most people in Reykjavik have someone in their surroundings who has already packed their bags and left.

[...]






...............................................
With the peak oil and financial shenanigans-triggered economic collapse, far flung islands will become more isolated, again. In fact, each community will become more island like. When I was in Iceland in 2007, the place was super cosmopolitan, with sushi bars, hip coffee houses and even a Vietnamese restaurant in downtown Reykjavik, a city of just 120,000. The locals spoke perfect English, watched much American television, ate our junk food. Yoko Ono had just been there to inaugurate the Imagine Peace Tower. Bobby Fischer had been welcomed back and given immunity from George Bush's harassment. When Fischer butted heads with Spassky in 1972, Reykjavik was deemed just a slushy backwater. With my trip fresh in mind, I wrote on 10/18/07:

Island, insular, isolated, all derived from the Latin insula. Hawaiian-raised Zach Linmark told me that, as a teenager, he couldn't wait to get out of Oahu. And yet, after bouncing around the U.S. mainland, England, his native Philippines and even Japan, he's back on his lava spill for at least a portion of each year. Ólöf Arnalds, "Iceland's acid folk angel," and I've heard her sing, and she's very good, told me that many of her compatriots also want to get out. Of the younger generations, almost everyone has travelled overseas. Those who haven't are either very weird or very poor. Many Icelanders have settled abroad, but most would return home to live. It's very odd, she thought. Ólöf herself has spent a year in Berlin.

We were riding back to Reykjavik after the farewell dinner for the Nýhil's Poetry Festival. The organizers had hired a bus to take everyone to a fine lobster feast in the village of Stokkseyri. Our conversation turned to the hegemony of English. English syntax is creeping into Icelandic, Ólöf informed me, "Sometimes I hear things said in Icelandic that appear to have been constructed in English."

"That's incredible! You mean Icelanders are thinking in English while speaking Icelandic?"

"Yes, sometimes. Many Icelanders are so proud that we have come up with new words for "computer" and "software," for example, but they don't realize that English is creeping into our syntax. Icelandic grammar is very different from English. The language itself is very compact, whereas English is stretched out."

Suddenly we were engulfed by a funny, rotten egg smell, similar to the tap water funk back in my bathroom. "It's the sulfur in the hot springs," Ólöf laughed. It came from outside, in the darkened landscape. "I didn't want you to think it was me!"

Well, goodbye, globalism and its cultural offshoot, cosmopolitanism. Whether you like where you are, you will certainly know it much better in the years ahead.


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Tent City set to close, but questions remain

Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/7/10--The self-governing Camden homeless encampment known as Tent City, which draws daily donations and has attracted international attention, is being shut down next week.

But with its "mayor" threatening to stay, Camden County officials desperate for a solution, and advocates for the homeless divided, questions about the residents' eviction abound.

County authorities say Tent City, down the block from the downtown police headquarters, has become an unsanitary haven for drug users and criminals. Officials want to use federal stimulus funds to find apartments, drug rehabilitation services, and mental-health support for the residents.

Tent City, also called Transition Park or Transitional Park, is to close April 15. What that means, though, no one is quite sure.

Some of the 50 or so people who live there, in the woods inside an exit ramp of I-676, say the county is bluffing. Many say they doubt promised services are available. Others say that because of post-traumatic stress and other mental problems, they need to live outside.

"I don't do inside," said Lorenzo "Jamaica" Banks, Tent City's founder and widely acknowledged mayor. "I'm staying."

Banks, who is treated with reverence on the state-owned patch of mud and grass, walks with a limp after suffering frostbite on two toes during the grueling winter.

"Where are you going to put 60 people?" Banks asked. "The crime is going to shoot sky-high. What are these people going to do to survive?"

Residents say they have developed a community that is safer, for themselves and the city, than if they were forced to live in abandoned houses, on the street, or in shelters.

Though advocates for the homeless have attended monthly Camden Tent City Task Force meetings since the fall, some who work with the Tent City community question Camden County's approach.

"Where do they go? A storefront? An abandominium?" asked Hal Miller, homeless coordinator for Volunteers of America Delaware Valley. There are more than 1,000 abandominiums, slang for vacant houses, in Camden. A man died Tuesday morning in a fire in one such building.

Miller said several Tent City residents whom he visits regularly do not qualify for public housing because they have felony drug convictions. Others have previous evictions, bad credit, or intractable drug problems.

"You kick them out of homelessness to more homelessness," Miller said.

In a way, he said, Tent City is "a safe environment compared to where they would be living."

[...]





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Camden is a very menacing city, frankly, but I never feel safer there than when I'm in this tent city, which I've visited about ten times. Orderly and safe, it is truly a refuge. Jamaica (below) knows what he's doing. There are homeless people all over Camden. Instead of shutting down this self regulating community, Camden should try to help those sleeping on its sidewalks, doorways and bus station.

The relatively high number of women in this tent city is proof that it is safe. As for drugs, there are drugs all over Camden! Jamaica does not allow them, but of course he cannot keep watch on everyone at all time.

As the economy spirals downward, tent cities will become a fact of life all over the United States. Shutting them down will solve nothing if we cannot, or won't, help those evicted. For decades now, there have not been enough beds in shelters for our homeless, so as our municipalities go bankrupt, we should at least allow people to help themselves.

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You're All Good

My 75th post at the Harriet Blog:



A few years ago, I got a mass email from a poet acquaintance. Sent to a dozen of his peers, this poet offered to pay "the usual fee" to anyone who would review his new book. Needless to say, it should be positive. Not quite in the loop, I didn't know there was a usual fee, though I had already figured out that reriews of contemporary poetry weren't primarily about literary assessment, but schmoozing. Dishonesty isn't just rampant, it's more or less required. The reasons should be obvious. The poetry ghetto is tiny. Sooner or later, you will pretty much meet just about everybody. In Denver this week, you can probably do it in a night, if you know which after hour karaoke bar to pop in. (Do check your cane at the door, Rigoberto. I won't be inside, waiting to give you a hug in solidarity. Maybe some other time.) In such a cozy community, even a vaguely negative review can have nasty consequences. You have just made a lifelong enemy, someone who can deny you a grant, job or reading invitation down the line. With the pie so puny, you gotta lick each crumb before someone else does. Pen a puff piece, however, and you have just gained a new ally.

Responding to my gentle poke at the factory farm, MFA racket, poets have pointed out the benefits it brings them such as health insurance, a three-month vacation, even campus housing as "subsidized luxury." Hell, I'd love those perks too! Like Ange Mlinko, who wouldn't want a daily dip in the Mediterranean? But these are exactly the carrots dangling in front of the debt-addled students. To keep them (audaciously) hoping, dishonesty comes into play, again. Whatever the professor does, he must not frighten his charge into leaving the program. That would not be viewed kindly by the head cheerleader and used car salesman, uh, I mean, the department head. He should not warn them about their dismal prospects of making it, not just economically but as a writer. He must not let on, above all, that he himself may be irrelevant and unread, i.e., that he's already a failed poet. To keep them paying, the professor must reassure his young investors.

As with contemporary poetry criticism, flattery has become the dominant mode. It could only be called encouragement if so much money wasn't involved. As is, it really is a pyramid scheme. I'm not here to insult but to warn your precious students. As you count and justify your rewards, I'm pow wowing with them. If I had a class in front of me, I would point them to a passage such as this, from Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl:

It’s been a little over 10 years since I decided for sure, rock-solid, that I was going to be a writer no matter what. In that time I’ve mostly hustled – I’ve worked as a nightwatchman, I’ve worked as a reporter (and skipped having a social-life, mostly, working at night instead of watching TV or meeting people), I’ve signed up for school to be applicable for student loans (and then dropped-out, as I was home writing), I’ve collected unemploymant benefit, I’ve worked three jobs for several weeks to be able to relax and write for a couple of months – I’ve been really poor, collected gross debts. In the last three years I’ve twice gotten a smaller stipendium, and I’ve translated several crime-novels and the like, and thus manage an existence where I can “work from home” (or more accurately, from the library, as I have a six-month-old baby at home who makes it kinda hard to work there).

Why hustle, many of you will ask, when you can have a tenured track position on some leafy campus? But you're already hustling! Speaking of which, Etheridge Knight is said to have sold a car, then driven off with it. To those suffering from the post MFA hangover, yet not as adept as Etheridge or Eiríkur at keeping one's head just above the waves, I offer these free signs. Just cut along the edges and, voila, you're ready to hit the street!:








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The happiest place in Camden

is not the aquarium, with its menage à trois of sardines, tunas and anchovies, not even Campbell Soup stadium, home of the Riversharks, though, it being winter, there are only steel dogs all over the infield and out to shoo away seagulls, no siree, the most ecstatic place in Camden, by far, is the McDonald’s at the corner of Haddon and Federal. First of, you’ll be inside and not lying on the sidewalk, and safe too, since the police station is right across the street. With trepidation and gratitude, I approach the counter and beg, in my manliest voice, “May I have the transfat special please?”

“What’s that?”

“With beef flavored tubers too.”

“You want me to call the manager?”

“I am your manager, baby. Can I have the Black Anguish Extravaganza.”

“You mean Black Angus?”

“Whatever. Just give me that! Give it to me. Give it! Now. Now!”

Floating on snowflakes, I glide into my private booth, cradling my bubbly, flirtatious sweetie, my cor(o)n(ary) syrup in its wax vessel. Like my Prez in his tank limousine, no bullet will penetrate my tatters, long as I stay in this fortress. I tilt my head just so, to see my father smiling down at me, for he, too, has lived in this city invincible, and has sat in this very booth in 1891, staring at his own tray of meaty complications.

Behind that locked door, my kin are fussing with a bit of acupuncture. Aiming for one last way home, they will spill some blood, but I will pretend to see nothing, after I knock, knock, knock, to finally let myself in.

All images are of Camden and from my photo blog, State of the Union. Top to bottom: Walt Whitman at McDonald’s; Outside Rite Aid at 2, South Broadway; Rex (76) and Tina (22), two residents of the tent city by I-676; James with his books, the biggest library at tent city; LETSFUCK; BREAK THIS BITCH.




[My 74th post at the Harriet Blog.]

I feel like Sissy Spacek in Carrie,

just before her pig blood shower. Seriously, though Amber Tamblyn's eyesight must not be perfect, I do appreciate her playful spirit. Poets should be playful and, yes, often inappropriate! From Harriet:

Completely inappropriate first post. I do not care.

I LOVE YOU LINH DINH. I just finished Exquisite Cheeses. I love your work. I love that book. I have a lot of love, in general, for you, surrounding you, feeling you up after math class in the janitor’s closet, or during math class, whichever you’d prefer. (I’m cool with under the bleachers, too.)

I’m super excited to read your posts here this month. And everyone else, of course. (Though I’ve already felt up Wanda Coleman and Jeffrey McDaniel, many many times.)

This concludes my stalkathon.

-Amber Tamblyn

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The Great College Hoax

After my previous post, I found this relevant article by Kathy Kristof in Forbes Magazine, 1/14/09:


As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses, the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.

Joel Kellum says he's living proof that the claim is a lie. A 40-year-old Los Angeles resident, Kellum did everything he was supposed to do to get ahead in life. He worked hard as a high schooler, got into the University of Virginia and graduated with a bachelor's degree in history.

Accepted into the California Western School of Law, a private San Diego institution, Kellum couldn't swing the $36,000 in annual tuition with financial aid and part-time work. So he did what friends and professors said was the smart move and took out $60,000 in student loans.

Kellum's law school sweetheart, Jennifer Coultas, did much the same. By the time they graduated in 1995, the couple was $194,000 in debt. They eventually married and each landed a six-figure job. Yet even with Kellum moonlighting, they had to scrounge to come up with $145,000 in loan payments. With interest accruing at up to 12% a year, that whittled away only $21,000 in principal. Their remaining bill: $173,000 and counting.

Kellum and Coultas divorced last year. Each cites their struggle with law school debt as a major source of stress on their marriage. "Two people with this much debt just shouldn't be together," Kellum says.

The two disillusioned attorneys were victims of an unfolding education hoax on the middle class that's just as insidious, and nearly as sweeping, as the housing debacle. The ingredients are strikingly similar, too: Misguided easy-money policies that are encouraging the masses to go into debt; a self-serving establishment trading in half-truths that exaggerate the value of its product; plus a Wall Street money machine dabbling in outright fraud as it foists unaffordable debt on the most vulnerable marks.

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New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has called private lending "the Wild West of the student loan industry." Some problems he notes smack of subprime mortgage lending: lax disclosure requirements, variable interest rates that compound and make paying off the principal a Sisyphean task, and kickback agreements by which lenders pay loan originators--in this case, colleges--a cut of their revenues.

State and federal authorities have taken action to curb the outright bribery. No less illustrious institutions of higher learning than Columbia University, New York University and the University of Pennsylvania paid $1 million-plus each to settle charges of wrongdoing in the student loan market.

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Invest Here, Sensitive Soul

My 73rd post at the Harriet Blog:




A while back, Joseph Hutchison posted this poem on his blog:

To Writing Programs: A Canticle

This way, that way, that way, this,

Here and there a fresh love is.

—Robert Herrick,

"To Bacchus, A Canticle"

for Seth Abramson

Realize the greatness
of your voice. Inspiration
comes in many forms.
Discover the writer's life
in New York City.
(You're not in Iowa
anymore.) Write
in Miami! Write
from the Heartland.
(We'll let our reputation
speak for us.) Write
from the heart
of writing. (The world's
focus is on our faculty.) My
words, my time, my MFA.
Otis emphasizes the writer's
ability to articulate
innovation. What makes
us different? Expect
more. Big thinking
for a big world.
Finally—an MFA
that trains you
for a career, not just
a genre. Study
your way. (Scribbling on
the ether.) Achievement!
Change the world
with words.

________________________

[1] The Voices Summer Writing Workshop

[2] NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies

[3] The New School

[4] Emerson College

[5] Florida Center for the Literary Arts at Miami Dade College

[6] Ashland University

[7] Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers

[8] Lesley University

[9] Drew—The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies

[10] University of Nebraska at Omaha

[11] Otis College of Art and Design

[12] Pine Manor College Low-Residency MFA

[13] Queens University of Charlotte

[14] Chatham University

[15] Western Connecticut State University

[16] Burlington College

[17] Prague Summer Program of Western Michigan University

[18] The Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University

[19] Antioch University Los Angeles

Pretty funny, I think, and thoroughly nauseating. Like everything else in America, poetry has become a racket. It promises you much more, deep meaning, fame and an oblique sex appeal, perhaps, than it can deliver. Get a loan--quick, before the bank shuts down altogether!--go into debt and in return you will be taken seriously by (mostly moonlighting) poets the rest of society doesn't give a caesura about--except during Poetry Month, of course. Just pay your tuition on time and at the end of the tunnel, you will have a comfortable, middle class career coated with a bit of bohemian juju, or so the student is led to believe. If everything goes well, you can encourage the next generation to stumble down this same path.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against young people wanting to learn about poetry or poetry writing. Those are beautiful yearnings, to be encouraged, but the system as it's set up demands a careerist mentality from both purveyors and suckers. Like every other ponzi scheme, it must entice its customers, the students, so that they don't shop at the next stall. This, it does mostly by flattery, since the poet's ego is always vulnerable and eager to vibrate. Poebiz must present its models, the professors, as somehow significant and relevant, though they may be nothing but careerist creeps. Oh shit, has the mike been on all this time?!

The mike is on?!

OK, all I mean to say is that the academy is fine and neccessary but it’s not good when nearly all of our poets are walled inside it. The academy is a utopia because that’s where our most untainted, optimistic and beautiful gather, and I’m only talking about the students, of course. Poets shouldn’t loiter in paradise. Paying through his nose, a young person drops into utopia, does a few hits of acid then leaves, but you can’t get rid of a tenured rhymeister with a crowbar, even if he hasn’t written anything in decades, if ever.






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