I just emailed this

to a poet friend:



My mind's not really on poetry, but here are a couple of quick thoughs on your chapbook: The playfulness is fine, but at some points, the reader needs to be convinced that you are deadly serious, and I don't think this came through in the chap. If you look at [name deleted]. His verbal pyrotechnics is very, very impressive, but after a while, one feels that he's not trying to get at anything, that he's not working through his own pains, or anyone else's pains, for that matter, to write those lines. You, too, need to get to a more psychically dangerous, alarming place to write more resonant poetry. If you look at my Cheese Orgy, I'm not just goofing around. I clown, but I'm deadly serious. I'm so serious that I turn off a bunch of people, I'm sure, but that's where a, ahem, serious writer needs to be, I insist. Also, I think you need to mix your language better. Use the whole spectrum. Go from really bad to really good English. Strut from the street right into the lecture hall, into the bedroom, etc.






....................................
Speaking of poems, here are four from yours truly at the Poetry Foundation.



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For some Chinese college students, sex is a business opportunity

Megan K. Stack in Los Angeles Time, 10/20/10:



In a country fast-changing economically and culturally, some middle-class women become mistresses to live a better life. A university pimp explains how it works.

Reporting from Beijing — The girls from the drama academy cost the most. Actresses are pretty, after all, and pretty is the point. Steady access to their sexual favors could cost a man more than $25,000 a year, not to mention the perks and gifts they would expect.

The gentleman on a budget had better browse through students at the tourism institute, or perhaps the business school. Women there can be had for as low as $5,000 a year.

Those are the prices advertised by the young man who calls himself "Student Ding," a senior at Shanghai University who, in the grand tradition of Chinese entrepreneurship, is earning his money by working as a pimp.

Ding calls himself "an agent, a fixer," but his job is all pimp. He started out small: fliers passed on the street to the chauffeurs of expensive cars. He has found his niche arranging long-term, cash-for-sex arrangements between wealthy men and aspirational students, taking a 10% commission off the top.

He is nonchalant about the work, even vaguely proud. He insists that he is doing a service to the men who don't want to hire streetwalkers, and to his middle-class, ambitious and frostily pragmatic college friends.

"Most of the girls are financially comfortable, but they see their classmates carrying Louis Vuitton or Gucci bags, and they're jealous," he said on the phone from Shanghai. "These girls want to have better lives.

[...]




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Opera Company of Philadelphia "Flash Brindisi"

at Reading Terminal Market, April 24, 2010:

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Prone Pioneers

As published on OpEd News, Dissident Voice, Common Dreams, Online Journal and Counterpunch, 10/30/10:





Don’t sit. Don’t lie. I mean, lie all you want to, especially if you’re sitting in office, but don’t sit or lie on a San Francisco sidewalk between 7AM and 11PM, should Proposition L pass this week. Repeated offenders could be fined up to $500 or jailed for 30 days.

Across the land, new laws are being introduced to criminalize our most vulnerable and destitute. In Santa Cruz, one can now be arrested for sleeping outdoors, including “in, on or under any parked vehicle,” between 11PM and 8:30AM. Venice Beach is also banning sleeping in parked vehicles.

Punishing our most desperate for being desperate is not only cruel, it’s also a self defeating proposition. The homeless can’t pay their fines, and if you jail them, it’s only a waste of tax money. Take Boulder, which has a law prohibiting camping outside overnight. Like all of our other municipalities, Boulder doesn’t have nearly enough beds in its shelters. In the last four years, Boulder has handed out over 1,600 tickets to its homeless. Hundreds have been arrested when they can’t pay up. After a night or two in jail, they end up on the streets again. The idea, I think, is to chase these people from Boulder altogether. They can become someone else’s problem.

As this depression becomes more undeniable, as more homes are foreclosed, more jobs evaporate, more businesses shut down, as our homeless population explodes, you can count on seeing more laws passed against helpless people sitting, camping or maybe just coughing on the sidewalk. Each city and town will try to dump its economic casualties onto the next. The homeless of Manhattan can trek over to Newark. Those in Newark can shuffle to Manhattan… While we’re at it, we should pass laws against curling up in a dumpster or being frozen to death outside.

We already lead the world in incarceration rate. More than one percent of American adults are jailed. With many more to be locked up, expect more prisons to be privatized. Lowest bidders will get the contracts. Privately run means more efficiency, means trimming costs. Just pack them in and, instead of sloppy joe, just feed them soy burgers or whatever. There’s a growth industry for all you investors out there.

Sign displayed by some bongo banging guy in Boulder: “Sleep is an Involuntary Action. Which is NOT ILLEGAL.” Yet sleeping on the sidewalk, even when you have nowhere else to sleep, is already illegal in many American places. During too late late capitalism, just about any street activity is illicit or a nuisance. Don’t beg. Don’t peddle. Don’t busk. Don’t even loiter. Just walk straight in to that big box store, why don’t you, and be a good American.

Emerging from a Bart station in San Francisco, I saw two men tap dancing quite magnificently to a rapt crowd of tourists. Dollar bills filled their donation bag. Everyone was having a good time until an unsmiling, shades-wearing cop appeared. Show’s over. Edward Jackson, one of the dancers, knew his nemesis, “Why do you always do this to me, Bob?” Hearing no answer, Ed continued, “Don’t you have anything better to do than stopping a black man from making an honest living?” Still no answer. “Why don’t you go down to the Tenderloin and arrest all those crack smoking junkies?! How am I going to pay my rent if you don’t let me make an honest living? What do you want me to do, go mug somebody?!”

A transplant from Detroit, Ed later told me that he had been dancing in downtown San Francisco for more than a decade, and that he made several more times than his wife, with her straight job in a retail store. Unlike most of us, Ed can’t be fired, but he can certainly be thwarted by a policeman.

If we can’t make a dime on the street, will Big Brother leave us alone if we just putz putz around in our own backyard? Not so fast. In Michigan, House Bill 6458, introduced by two Democrats, Gabe Leland and Mike Huckleberry, will prohibit farming in any city with a population of 900,000 or more. Why didn’t they name Detroit outright, since it’s the only one that qualifies? And what’s going on here, exactly?

Urban farming is about the only positive development in Detroit right now. If more Americans planted their own vegetables and raised their own chickens, ducks and rabbits, etc, even in the cities, they wouldn’t have to rely on the toxic factory farms. Detroit is also the only American city without a supermarket chain, so access to food, even crappy stuff, is already limited. With factories gone, jobs gone, can’t a person plant an odd cabbage without being branded a criminal?!

There seems to be a pattern here. In Chicago, school cafeterias are banned from using vegetables grown on school ground, by the children themselves. Big Brother is even messing with the Amish. Dan Allgyer, of Kinzers, PA, has been harassed by our Food and Drug Administration for supposedly selling unpasteurized milk, a charge he denies. Even if he was, I’d rather drink milk from any Amish farm than the diseased product on supermarket shelves.

As all of our interlocking systems unravel in the years ahead, each of us will have to become more self-sufficient and resourceful. Each community, each neighborhood, will finally be introduced to itself. For better or worse, you will be welcomed home. You will be home, at last. As we stagger forward, don’t scorn the ones who are scraping by on the fringe, the day-laborers, odd job men, buskers, scroungers, the peddlers pushing carts, even the homeless, for they are the point men, the pioneers of our time.






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["Collapsing America"]



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'US troops beheaded Iraqi detainee'

Iran's Press TV, 10/25/10:


American forces decapitated an Iraqi last year on the order of their higher-up, show recently-exposed US military documents.

The troops operated under the command of an unnamed US major, who had been involved in the rape of an Iraqi female, showed one such document posted on the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

The incident took place after the victim, the brother of the raped female, reportedly killed a military official in reprisal for the indecent assault.

[...]




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Stephen Sohn reviews Love Like Hate

diaCRITICS, October 25, 2010:




Linh Dinh’s long awaited first novel is perfectly titled. Love like Hate refers, on the one hand, to the name of a band that a character in the novel idolizes due to her involvement with the lead singer. On the other, “love like hate,” also invokes the many paradoxes that the narrative engages. For instance, Dinh is clearly interested in problematizing the supposed communist status of Vietnam, showing how the country has been infiltrated by global capitalism. Kim Lan, one of the main characters, is sure that the key to changing her life is making sure her daughter, Hoa, marries a Viet Kieu, otherwise known as ethnic Vietnamese whose primary residence is outside of Vietnam. Kim Lan makes sure that Hoa wears the most fashionable and westernized clothing, only eats at the most westernized restaurants, all in the hope of marrying her off to a Viet Kieu. Kim Lan’s tactic is obviously much too simplistic and she fails to understand how tragically limited her vision might be in circumscribing her daughter within an economically-motivated paradigm. Her single-minded focus in getting Hoa to marry a Viet Kieu is just a figurative rendering of Dinh’s major critique of contemporary Vietnamese society. But, Kim Lan is only one of many flawed and dynamic characters that Dinh chooses to create. Others include: Hoang Long, Kim Lan’s first husband, a career military man, who later languishes in a re-education camp following the fall of Saigon; Sen, an ethnic Chinese living in Vietnam and ostensibly Kim Lan’s second husband that she takes up with only after she believes Hoang Long is either killed in action while serving in the military or has fled Vietnam; Cun, Kim Lan’s son from her marriage with Hoang Long.

The other huge character in Dinh’s novel is clearly the third person narrator, who has an extremely caustic tone and is not afraid of off-color, politically “incorrect” humor. Take this excerpt for example, which comes up early on in the novel and is used to describe a minor Viet Kieu character not coincidentally named Jaded Nguyen: “Jaded was also Asian, which meant that he was smaller. If he were Yao Ming or Dat Nguyen, it wouldn’t have mattered, but he wasn’t even Ichiro size, more like Apolo Ohno, except not that good-looking, and he didn’t have Michael Chang’s born-again faith to rock himself to sleep at night. (If there was one guy who annoyed Jaded more than Michael Chang, it was Jackie Chan and his stunted sexuality. The guy clowned and kicked ass, but never got laid. About the only Asian guys to get laid in Western movies were the ones conjured up by the feverish mind of Marguerite Duras.)” (14). This passage is fairly representative of other such tracts in the novel, where the narrator often generates a perspective willing to plumb the depths of a character’s many intricacies and idiosyncrasies. As the passage later continues: “He also subscribed to nastycheerleaders.com, republicanbabeswithguns.com, sexykitchens.com, innermostdreams.com, and even youngpee.com. Upskirt, downskirt, dominatrix, hog-tied, slaves, elderly nuns in combat boos, elementary schoolteachers made to kneel naked then spanked, infants, corpses—he sampled them all with his eyes” (15). If we would want to characterize the narrator, it is to think of his as being perhaps a tad hyperbolic. But this passage also serves to demonstrate the limits of Kim Lan’s own fetishization of the Viet Kieu, who the narrator reveals to be, at least in this case, a kind of Vietnamese American loser, without many prospects.

The novel is particularly distinct in the growing body of Vietnamese American literature specifically for the narrator’s satirical wit and unflinching voice. It is a ferocious work, one that ultimately showcases the fallout generated by global capitalism.



Love Like Hate
By Linh Dinh
Seven Stories Press, 240 pp., $16.95

[Students in Karen Tei Yamashita's class. Karen's novel, I, Hotel, has just been nominated for a National Book Award, by the way. Whoaaa!]




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Upcoming Readings

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Philadelphia
Thursday, November 4--7:30PM
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work--Edwidge Danticat and Linh Dinh
Central Library
1901 Vine St



Philadelphia
Friday, November 19--7PM
With Ocean Vuong
Moonstone Arts Center
110a S. 13th Street



New York
Wednesday, December 8--8PM
The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church
131 E. 10th St.
212-674-0910 | info@poetryproject.org
Admission $8 / Students & Seniors $7




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A profile of Staughton Lynd

by Chris Hedges, 10/17/10:




[...]

“The hollowing out of the American economy, the absence of manufacturing jobs, is critical,” [Staughton Lynd] said. “It means that this is not an ordinary recession. We are not going to bounce back the way we did in past recessions. Alice and I have had some contact with a school in inner-city Youngstown where they send kids who are thrown out of public school to give them one last chance before they put them behind bars. We have a pretty intense feeling for what it is like to grow up as an African-American in a place like Youngstown. Even if you make it through high school, where do you find a job? I don’t mean to say the problem is wholly economic. There is often a lack of love in the home that these kids experience. But if there were decent jobs which a hard-working young person could go on to, we would have a different world. Instead, some of these kids volunteer for the military and take their hatred and trauma overseas.”

As the collapse has taken its toll on the residents in and around Youngstown, the Lynds have focused on the plight of inmates, especially those who were involved in a prison uprising in Lucasville, Ohio, in April 1993. Five of the leaders of the uprising were sentenced to death for their part. They remain on death row.

Three of the five are black and two are white. The two whites were members of the Aryan Brotherhood. The blacks are Muslims. The men have refused to testify against each other. The Lynds, when they read the testimony of Ohio Highway Patrol Sgt. Howard Hudson in the trial of one of the white inmates, George Skatzes, were inspired by the inmates’ ability to overcome racial and religious divisions.

Once the prisoners surrendered and the Highway Patrol entered L block, which the prisoners had occupied, the officers found graffiti covering the walls. In the trial, Hudson, the state’s principal investigator, identified a photograph taken in the L block corridor.

Question: On the wall on the right there appears to be something written?

Answer: Says “Black and White Together.”

Q: Did you find that or similar slogans in many places in L block?

A: Yes, we did, throughout the corridor, in the L block.

The transcript goes on.

Q: [What is the photograph] 260?

A: 260, the words, “Convict Unity,” written on the walls of L corridor.

Q: Did you find the message of unity throughout L block?

A: Yes. …

Q: Next photo?

A: 261 is another photograph in L corridor that depicts the words, “Convict race.”

[...]



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Repulsive

"Young Classik":

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Massive stretches of weathered oil spotted in Gulf of Mexico

nola.com, October 23, 2010:



Just three days after the U.S. Coast Guard admiral in charge of the BP oil spill cleanup declared little recoverable surface oil remained in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana fishers Friday found miles-long strings of weathered oil floating toward fragile marshes on the Mississippi River delta.

The discovery, which comes as millions of birds begin moving toward the region in the fall migration, gave ammunition to groups that have insisted the government has overstated clean-up progress, and could force reclosure of key fishing areas only recently reopened.

[...]




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Upcoming readings

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University of California at Santa Cruz
Thursday, October 14--6PM
Humanities Lecture Hall
UCSC 1156 High St.
Santa Cruz, CA


San Francisco
Saturday, October 16--7PM
The Writer's Studio at California College of the Arts
195 De Haro Street




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Detroiters May Lose Right to Garden

Russ Harding | 9/28/2010:




House Bill 6458, introduced by Reps. Gabe Leland, D-Detroit, and Mike Huckleberry, D-Greenville, is the latest assault on private property rights to come out of Lansing. The bill exempts property owners in Michigan cities with a population of 900,000 or more (read: Detroit) from protection under Michigan's Right to Farm Act.

Michigan, once largely a rural state, became increasingly urbanized during the 20th century as suburbs spread to formerly rural lands. The growth of suburbs brought with it the inevitable conflict between farmers and new residents who did not appreciate the odors that often accompany farming. As a result of land use conflicts, the Right to Farm Act was enacted in 1981 in order to protect farmers from nuisance lawsuits if they followed Generally Accepted Agricultural and Management Practices that were developed by the Michigan Department of Agriculture.

Detroit has an official unemployment rate of 25.5 percent, but the actual number of unemployed Detroiters is higher, given the number of people out of work who have stopped looking for jobs and are not part of the official count. Residents of Detroit, regardless of their employment status, should be allowed to grow their own food and to sell or barter food they have grown that is excess to their needs. If HB 6458 becomes law, a basic right to use one's own land to grow food will become more difficult. With the pressing economic problems facing the state, it seems that lawmakers in Lansing would have more important things to do than regulate gardens.




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America's Third World Economy

Paul Craig Roberts in Counterpunch, 10/8/10:




[...]

The loss of middle class jobs and incomes was covered up for years by the expansion of consumer debt to substitute for the lack of income growth. Americans refinanced their homes and spent the equity, and they maxed out their credit cards.

Consumer debt expansion has run its course, and there is no possibility of continuing to drive the economy with additions to consumer debt.

Economists and policymakers continue to ignore the fact that all employment in tradable goods and services can be moved offshore (or filled by foreigners brought in on H-1b and L-1 visas). The only replacement jobs are in nontradable domestic services, that is, those jobs that require “hands-on” activity, such as ambulatory health services, barbers, cleaning services, waitresses and bartenders--jobs that describe the labor force of a third world country. Even many of these jobs are now filed with foreigners brought in on R-1 type visas from Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, Romania, and elsewhere.

The loss of American jobs and the compression of consumer income by low wages has removed consumer demand as the driving force of the economy. This is the reason expansionary monetary and fiscal policies are having no effect.

The latest jobs report issued today shows that America’s transformation into a third world economy continues. The economy lost 95,000 jobs in September, mainly due to cuts in local education and federal employment. Part of the loss of 159,000 government jobs was offset by 64,000 new private sector jobs.

Where are the new jobs? They are in nontradable lowly paid domestic services: 32,000 were in health care and social services, and 33,900 were in food services and drinking places.

There you have it. That is America’s “New Economy.”





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Muhammad Cohen interviews Ma Jian

in Asia Times, 10/8/10:



UBUD, Bali - Beijing Coma author Ma Jian believed the crackdown on anti-government protesters in 1989 would kickstart the end of Communist Party rule in China. But things haven't turned out that way - yet.

"What astonished me after the Tiananmen massacre was to see one communist regime after another topple in Eastern Europe, while in China the communists not only retained, but strengthened, their control," Ma said. "The changes that I expected - a move to freedom, democracy and respect of human rights - are, I still believe, inevitable, but it appears they will take much longer than many had hoped."

Born in Qingdao in 1953, Ma first gained attention in China with the publication of Stick Out Your Tongue in 1987, a collection of stories set in Tibet which triggered protests by Tibetans for its explicit, unflattering portrayal of the region. The book was banned by the Beijing government. After moving to Hong Kong, he wrote satirically about capitalism in The Noodle Maker.

Ma's 2008 novel Beijing Coma has been praised widely for its depiction of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and the subsequent decade where economic development trumped politics. In the book the protagonist, injured in the crackdown, emerges from his coma remembering events of 1989 that the conscious people around him forget.

Asia Times Online spoke to Ma Jian ahead of the Citibank Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Ubud, Bali, running October 6-10.

Asia Times Online: Did you write Beijing Coma based on your personal experience or imagination?

Ma Jian: I took part in the 1989 democracy protests in Beijing, joining the marches, camping out in the square, so I had direct experience to draw on. I could remember the heat, the rainstorms, the smell of urine and rotten fruit peel in the square, the slogans blaring through the student megaphones, the feeling of being swept along and crushed by elated crowds, and behind all of this, the sense of impending doom. When it came to writing the book, I filled gaps in my knowledge through extensive research: I read memoirs, factual accounts, interviewed student leaders and intellectuals. But although based on personal experience and research, Beijing Coma is a novel. The main characters are imagined. Every element of the book serves primarily a literary purpose.

ATol: Beijing Coma also covers the decade after Tiananmen Square. What surprised you most about what happened in those years and thereafter? What changes did you expect after Tiananmen Square that haven't materialized yet?

Ma: What astonished me after the Tiananmen massacre was to see one communist regime after another topple in Eastern Europe, while in China the communists not only retained, but strengthened, their control. Like many others at the time, I presumed that the brutality of the massacre would destroy the regime's legitimacy, and that a new, democratic system would inevitably emerge. I hadn't expected that the Chinese people, numbed by the horror of the crackdown, would acquiesce so quickly and return to their previous state of subjection. The changes that I expected--a move to freedom, democracy and respect of human rights--are, I still believe, inevitable, but it appears they will take much longer than many had hoped.

ATol: Why does it matter if China's government acknowledges what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989?

Ma: It is crucial that China's government acknowledges what happened in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese psyche is crippled by historical taboos. There's 1989, but also the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Movement, and the Cultural Revolution. An estimated 70 million Chinese people have lost their lives due to communist rule, and until the government acknowledges the injustices they have committed and apologizes publicly, the nation will continue to live in an amoral, ahistorical limbo.

Today, parents are unable to look their children in the face and talk honestly about their pasts. There is a collective fear of truth, of personal memories. So it is important to address the past, not only to commemorate the dead, but to allow the living--the survivors--to regain their personal histories and their sense that each human life should be afforded dignity and respect.

[...]






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Jho in The City,

10/8/10:




Last night, CityBoy and I met up at the Center for Fiction in Mid-town Manhattan for “Matthew Sharpe & Linh Dinh: A Literary Friendship.” I’m so glad we did. Sharpe and Dinh are both great writers, with an amazing sense of wry humor and an obvious love for language and wordplay. But they’re also great friends and supporters of each other’s work.

[...]

Some things from their conversation that struck me:

- Sharpe on why he writes fiction: “I’m so consoled by novels.”

- And on his lusher, more Jamesian sentences: “I want to get as close to breaking the language…”

- And on why reading novels is hard work, harder than watching a movie: “It’s like going to hear the symphony and being handed a violin.”

I didn’t know anything about Linh Dinh before the reading and he mentioned that he’s a self-taught writer, that he actually trained in art, and he’s currently at work on a photo project that’s fulfilling his “desire to roam.” You can see his amazing stuff here. He mentioned that he’s been writing more political essays recently, and from these photographs, you can see why. Amazing, gritty, bleakly honest stuff about the hellish handbasket we’re now in.

[...]





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