Despair is a Luxury... (Rebecca Solnit)

In the construction of our forthcoming anthology of peace poems, I've been invited into thinking the beyond of resistance...

Despair is a luxury. If I despair I can drive a Yukon and watch bad television. Despair makes no demand upon us; hope demands everything. For people around the world, in places like Burma and Chiapas, giving up means accepting hideous conditions of life, or death. Despair is cheap for us, expensive for them. What does it mean to be radical, to tell radical stories in our time, to win the battle of the story? The North American tradition seems to focus its activity on the exposé, the telling of the grim underside of what we know: the food is poison, the system is corrupt, the leaders are lying, the war is failing. There is a place for this, but you cannot base a revolution on the bad things the status quo forgot to mention. You need to tell the stories they are not telling, to learn to see where they are blind, to look at how the great changes of the world come from the shadows and the margins, not center stage, to see where we’re winning and that we can win something that matters, if not everything all the time.

from "Our Storied Future" by Rebecca Solnit, Orion Magazine. January/February 2008.

Are You A Hopehead?

Gone Swimming

Aleatory Geometries: A Review of E.J. McAdams' 4 X 4

E.J. McAdams' new chapbook, 4 X 4, published this year by Twin Cities-based unarmed journal (publisher Michael Mann), is a delight, drawing upon the visual and concrete poetic trajectories represented by such figures as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Aram Saroyan and Robert Grenier. Each poem, such as the one shown above, follows a rigid structure of four words composed of four letters, thus creating a kind of hallucinatory effect of language squared off, words framed. In "SAME/SAME/SAME/SAME," for example, the spaces between the letters reasserts the alienating materiality of letters themselves. I kept wanting to read "SAME" as anything but "SAME"--"say me," for example.

"SAME" also happened to be the cover for my particular version of 4 X 4--but not for anybody else, apparently. 4 X 4 is also a remarkable study in aleatory publication; each published version of the chap is unique insofar as it has randomized the page orders. In this way, it hearkens back to foundational aleatory material texts such as Robert Grenier's Sentences, a box of 500 note card sized poems, with no particular order. (Bill Howe's recent talk at Orono about Sentences is suggestive of how aleatory orderings offer a geometrically explosive number of possible iterations, such that reading the text in each of its possible ways would be impossible for a single reader.)

McAdams' poems sometimes approach public signage--if public signage were to ask for the impossible:

In an age of the Security State, such a command does not feel entirely out of place. Yet to "hand over your hell"--in addition to its alliterative beauty--is just the sort of beautiful sign (both funny and ominous) that I'd be pleased to read just about anywhere, not just above a confessional. Such a text also invites a vertical reading--I keep wanting to say "A(B)OVE" is part of the poem somehow.

In his sameness of form, McAdams' 4 X 4 presses against the purported transparency of language, re-pressurizes words, threatens explosion, as in:

"BOOM/BOOM/BOOM/BOOM" could be a sign of the ongoing wars (and their endless detonations), but it also could be read as a lyric from the great John Lee Hooker. (This particular poem also had life as a broadside card published by Ugly Duckling Presse).

Given its aleatory publication, chance also leads to some brilliant juxtapositions:

The plaintive eros of the left panel, laid against the graphic language of sex and defecation, invites us to see these as a couple split in bed, as opposites in sudden attraction/repulsion. It also invites reading horizontally across the split, as in "ARMS SHIT / LEGS FUCK / SOFT COCK / EYES CUNT." If there ever were a solidified non-aleatory version of this text, this happy chance meeting must not be parted.

McAdams, a longtime urban ecologist who played a key role in the preservation of the hawk Pale Male's nesting site on a city building in New York, might be playing with the urban grid in his formal structures, and how it both becomes a place of habitation and absence, as all cities simultaneously control and exist in spite of nature:


This collection is an auspicious debut, and I look forward to seeing what comes next from McAdams.

Sleater-Kinney's Dialectical "Jumpers" and "Modern Girl"/An Elegy to the L.P.

I miss the LP.

No, I'm not one of those audiophiles hoarding records and hi-fi stereos because "the music sounds warmer" on LP's. Actually, I never owned many records (having been born too late or grew up too poor), but even in my cassettes and CD's, I could still feel the structural footprint of the LP.

Those old enough to remember the "LP" will recall how a certain formal structure solidified, somewhere in the late 1960s or 1970s. If at first albums were built upon a couple hits at the front and filler for the rest, at some point the album became a form in itself, in which each song fulfilled some part of an overall concept.

If I were to generalize this form, it would go something like this: one might expect a rousing opener, something to mix it up for the second song, a real hit on the third, and then, toward the end of the record, something a bit softer, maybe acoustic, maybe drumless. The album's ebbs and flows, at times, would be made even more powerful by stark juxtapositions between songs in the middle.

Sleater-Kinney's The Woods (2005), fuzzed-out post-riot-grrrl punk rock with no pretensions to "rock opera" concept album status, nonetheless benefits from such dialectics. Notice, for example, how "Jumpers," a song from the point of view of a suicide from Golden Gate Bridge, is followed by the most blissful of S-K's songs (though not without its own self-war), "Modern Girl."

"Jumpers" by Sleater Kinney

I spend the afternoon in cars
I sit in traffic jams for hours
Don't push me
I am not ok

The sky is blue most every day
The lemons grow like tumors
They are tiny suns
Infused with sour

Lonely as a cloud
In the Golden State
"The coldest winter that I ever saw
Was the summer that I spent..."

The only substance is the fog
And it hides all that has gone wrong
Can't see a thing
Inside the maze

There is a bridge adored and famed
The Golden spine of engineering
Whose back is heavy
With my weight

Lonely as a cloud
In the Golden State
"The coldest winter that I ever saw
Was the summer that I spent..."

Be still this old heart
Be still this old skin
Drink you last drink
Sin your last sin
Sing your last song
About the beginning
Sing your song loud
So the people can hear
Let's Go

Be still this sad day
Be still this sad year
Hope your last hope
Fear your last fear
You're not the only one
You're not the only one
You're not the only one
You're not the only one
Let's Go

My falling shape will draw a line
Between the blue of sea and sky
I'm not a bird
I'm not a plane

I took a taxi to the Gate
I will not go to school again
Four seconds was
The longest wait

Four seconds was
the longest wait. [4x]

Today, I can "rip" and "burn" and "download," but I miss terribly that old consumer experience of opening up a new album (or CD), with cover art, and lyrics pages, of sitting in someone else's sound/mind for an hour--nothing but pure immersion, no persons from Porlock to interrupt the composition. Call me old-fashioned, but what's art when no one has the time to return to a thing, to live inside of it, to slough off something of the self into it?

"Strangers": A Short Film on the Racial Divide Between Arabs and Jews (and What Brings Them Together)

Mairead Byrne's "The Russian Week"

We've been on the road, and sorry sick of it, but finally back in our nest. We were like nesting dolls, matryoshki, little mothers, giving birth to diminished versions of ourselves, nested in ourselves, wooden, painted with expressions, unable to move but moved by whatever moved us. So here, upon return, I come across dear Mairead's poem, which I'd heard some time ago, and it's grown, it's given birth to something else. Everyone has had these weeks.

The latest from Ali Abunimah

The latest from Ali Abunimah...

What Obama missed in the Middle East

Barack Obama's visit to Israel and Palestine this week seemed
designed to appease pro-Israel groups in the US

By Ali Abunimah

guardian.co.uk
23 July 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/23/barackobama.israelandthepalestinians

When I and other Palestinian-Americans first knew Barack
Obama in Chicago in the 1990s, he grasped the oppression
faced by Palestinians under Israeli occupation. He
understood that an honest broker cannot simultaneously be
the main cheerleader, financier and arms supplier for one
side in a conflict. He often attended Palestinian-American
community events and heard about the Palestinian
experience from perspectives stifled in mainstream
discussion.

In recent months, Obama has sought to allay persistent
concerns from pro-Israel groups by recasting himself as a
stalwart backer of Israel and tacking ever closer to
positions espoused by the powerful, hard-line pro-Israel
lobby Aipac. He distanced himself from mainstream advisers
because pro-Israel groups objected to their calls for
even-handedness.

Like his Republican rival, senator John McCain, Obama gave
staunch backing to Israel's 2006 bombing of Lebanon, which
killed over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and the
blockade and bombardment of the Gaza Strip, calling them
"self defence".

Every aspect of Obama's visit to Palestine-Israel this
week has seemed designed to further appease pro-Israel
groups. Typically for an American aspirant to high office,
he visited the Israeli Holocaust memorial and the Western
Wall. He met the full spectrum of Israeli Jewish (though
not Israeli Arab) political leaders. He travelled to the
Israeli Jewish town of Sderot, which until last month's
ceasefire, frequently experienced rockets from the Gaza
Strip. At every step, Obama warmly professed his support
for Israel and condemned Palestinian violence.

Other than a cursory 45-minute visit to occupied Ramallah
to meet with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud
Abbas, Palestinians got little. According to an Abbas
aide, Obama provided assurances that he would be "a
constructive partner in the peace process." Some observers
took comfort in his promise that he would get engaged
"starting from the minute I'm sworn into office". Obama
remained silent on the issue of Jerusalem, after boldly
promising the "undivided" city to Israel as its capital in
a speech to Aipac last month, and then appearing to
backtrack amid a wave of outrage across the Arab world.
But Obama missed the opportunity to visit Palestinian
refugee camps, schools and even shopping malls to witness
first-hand the devastation caused by the Israeli army and
settlers, or to see how Palestinians cope under what many
call "apartheid". This year alone, almost 500
Palestinians, including over 70 children, have been killed
by the Israeli army - exceeding the total for 2007 and
dwarfing the two-dozen Israelis killed in conflict-related
violence. Obama said nothing about Israel's relentless
expansion of colonies on occupied land. Nor did he follow
the courageous lead of former President Jimmy Carter and
meet with the democratically elected Hamas leaders, even
though Israel negotiated a ceasefire with them. That such
steps are inconceivable shows how off-balance is the US
debate on Palestine.

Many people I talk to are resigned to the conventional
wisdom that aspiring national politicians cannot afford to
be seen as sympathetic to the concerns of Palestinians,
Arabs or Muslims. They still hope that, if elected, Obama
would display an even-handedness absent in the campaign.

Without entirely foreclosing the possibility of change in
US policy, the reality is that the political pressures
evident in a campaign do not magically disappear once the
campaign is over. Nor is all change necessarily for the
better. One risk is that a President Obama or President
McCain would just bring back the Clinton-era approach
where the United States effectively acted as "Israel's
lawyer", as Aaron David Miller, a 25-year veteran of the
US state department's Middle East peace efforts, memorably
put it. This led to a doubling of Israeli settlements in
the West Bank, an upsurge in violence and the failed 2000
Camp David summit where Clinton tried to pressure Arafat
into accepting a bantustan. A depressing feature of
Obama's visit was the prominent advisory role for Dennis
Ross, the official in charge of the peace process under
Clinton, and the founder of an Aipac-sponsored pro-Israel
think-tank.

Whoever is elected will face a rapidly changing situation
in Palestine-Israel. A number of shifts are taking place
simultaneously. First, the consensus supporting the
two-state solution is disintegrating as Israeli colonies
have rendered it unachievable. Second, the traditional
Palestinian national leadership is being eclipsed by new
movements including Hamas. And, as western and Arab
governments become more craven in the face of Israeli
human rights violations, a Palestinian-led campaign
modelled on the anti-apartheid strategy of boycott,
divestment and sanctions is building global civil society
support. Finally, the demographic shift in
Palestine-Israel toward an absolute Palestinian majority
in all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip will be
complete in the next three to five years.

Making peace in this new reality will take leaders ready
to listen and talk to all sides in the conflict and to
consider alternatives to the moribund two-state solution,
such as power-sharing, confederation or a single
democratic state. It will require, above all, the courage,
imagination and political will to challenge the status quo
of Israeli domination and Palestinian dispossession that
has led to ever more violence with each passing year.


Ali Abunimah is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal
to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and a fellow with
the Palestine Centre in Washington, DC.

On the Beating of Mohammed Omer

I recently received this Action Alert from the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs regarding the recent assault of Mohammed Omer, a Gaza-based Palestinian journalist whose articles and witness have been courageous and humanizing portraits of life under military occupation. Please read on and consider signing the petition to ask Israel to protect all journalists and others traveling to the occupied territories.

Here is Pilger's account via Omer:

Last Thursday, on his return journey, he was met at the Allenby Bridge crossing (to Jordan) by a Dutch official, who waited outside the Israeli building, unaware Mohammed had been seized by Shin Bet, Israel's infamous security organisation. Mohammed was told to turn off his mobile and remove the battery. He asked if he could call his embassy escort and was told forcefully he could not. A man stood over his luggage, picking through his documents. "Where's the money?" he demanded. Mohammed produced some US dollars. "Where is the English pound you have?"

"I realised," said Mohammed, "he was after the award stipend for the Martha Gellhorn prize. I told him I didn't have it with me. 'You are lying', he said. I was now surrounded by eight Shin Bet officers, all armed. The man called Avi ordered me to take off my clothes. I had already been through an x-ray machine. I stripped down to my underwear and was told to take off everything. When I refused, Avi put his hand on his gun. I began to cry: 'Why are you treating me this way? I am a human being.' He said, 'This is nothing compared with what you will see now.' He took his gun out, pressing it to my head and with his full body weight pinning me on my side, he forcibly removed my underwear. He then made me do a concocted sort of dance. Another man, who was laughing, said, 'Why are you bringing perfumes?' I replied, 'They are gifts for the people I love'. He said, 'Oh, do you have love in your culture?'

"As they ridiculed me, they took delight most in mocking letters I had received from readers in England. I had now been without food and water and the toilet for 12 hours, and having been made to stand, my legs buckled. I vomited and passed out. All I remember is one of them gouging, scraping and clawing with his nails at the tender flesh beneath my eyes. He scooped my head and dug his fingers in near the auditory nerves between my head and eardrum. The pain became sharper as he dug in two fingers at a time. Another man had his combat boot on my neck, pressing into the hard floor. I lay there for over an hour. The room became a menagerie of pain, sound and terror."

And here is the ACTION ALERT.

ACTION ALERT
July 7, 2008 Contact:
communications@wrmea.com


Washington Report Correspondent Mohammed Omer Released From Hospital Following Detention by Israeli Soldiers at Allenby Bridge Crossing

More than 2,300 people have signed a petition drafted by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs calling for the Israeli government to protect journalists and end its harassment of journalists, academics and other travelers to and from the occupied Palestinian territories.

We are requesting a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the U.S. State Department at which we plan to submit, along with our petition, Omer’s medical report detailing his injuries. We will call for an investigation of Omer’s treatment at the Allenby border crossing, as well as assurances from Israel that it will not target journalists, especially Omer, working in the occupied territories.

Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer, Gaza correspondent for the Washington Report, Inter Press Service News Agency contributor, and co-recipient of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, was hospitalized with cracked ribs and other injuries inflicted by Israeli soldiers June 26 at the Allenby Bridge crossing from Jordan into the occupied West Bank.

Omer was returning home to Gaza after a European speaking tour and the June 16 London ceremony at which he accepted the prestigious Gellhorn Prize.

Omer was detained, questioned by a Shin Bet agent, strip searched at gunpoint, assaulted and dragged by the heels to an ambulance after he began vomiting and going in and out of consciousness. When he finally came to, he was in a Palestinian hospital in Jericho, where he was treated and allowed to return home in the custody of the Dutch diplomats. See the following article by John Pilger in the July 2 Guardian:
Unable to eat and still in pain, Omer was taken by ambulance to a hospital in Gaza on June 28, re-examined, treated, and fed on an intravenous drip. He was released over the past weekend, but is far from recovered.

In his article in the August 2008 Washington Report, “A Voice for the Voiceless,” Omer defines his life’s mission as “to get the truth out,” and describes himself as “not pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli, but simply…an eyewitness on the ground, reporting what happens and why.” Palestinian journalists risk their lives on a daily basis to tell the world what is happening in their homeland.

Please visit the Washington Report website, www.wrmea.com, to sign the petition condemning Israel’s attacks on journalists, both Palestinian and international. We urge you to forward this petition to everyone you know. Add your voice to Mohammed Omer’s on behalf of voiceless Gazans and Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation—an occupation made possible by American tax dollars.

Visiting Walden/Thoreau's Legacies

My wife's sister lives just around the corner from a monument to the lost soldiers in King Philip's War, and down the road from Walden, which--even when we don't visit when we're here--brings me close to Thoreau.

I'll always be thankful to Professor Charles Reilly for his enthusiastic teaching of the 19th century; in some ways, I find myself more drawn to those writers than to the 20th century--I'm more fond of Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson and Thoreau, Melville and Douglass than Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, etc. There is a sense, at times, of pessimism and diminishment, of dread and specialization, in 20th century literature that sometimes leaves me cold. It is the age when literature became an institutionalized object of study, and poetry anxious about mass culture. Perhaps because I did my studies in the 20th century, when I teach the 19th century in my introductory survey class, "Major American Writers," I do so primarily as an enthusiast rather than a scholar.

It's difficult to imagine how such a minor literary figure as Thoreau would later become the touchstone to so many movements (both social and otherwise)--communitarians, Back to the Land-ers, ecologists, vegans, war resisters, birders, inveterate walkers. My admiration for Thoreau is partly in expressed in his own doggerel: "My life has been the poem I would have writ,/But I could not both live and utter it." There is something to be said for people whose lives are poetry, who don't need to be architects of another kind of language when they live that language.

On my drive to Orono early this year, I listened to a decaying audio version of Walden, and found the fragmentation--when only certain words or phrases would emerge from the tape's hiss--a Cagean tonic for Thoreau's occasionally didactic tone. (The drive poem, flecked with Thoreau, is forthcoming...)