Eclectic Refrigerator: Jazz, Poetry, Politics, & Anything Else That Will Fit in 25 cu. ft.

2006-07-12T21:05:00.000-07:00

Physical Acts: Thornton Dial and Reclamation

2005-12-10T21:39:00.000-08:00

Growing up in rural Missouri, I wasn’t exposed to much art. So when, at 19, I visited Monet’s Water Lily Gallery in Paris’s Musée de l'Orangerie, I was literally moved to tears by the sheer beauty of Monet’s paintings as they curved around the gallery he had specially designed. From that moment on, I realized art – visual, literary, or musical – is physical. Before the intellect kicks in and starts theorizing, historicizing, and contextualizing, the body reacts. To paraphrase the oft-used Emily Dickinson quote, one feels as if your head has been taken off – leaving only the body to appreciate the work. .

For me, it is often this initial reaction that forms my strongest and most lasting impression of a work of art. And since, my first such experience was with Monet’s Water Lilies it has become, for better or worse and even though they are no longer my favorite works of art, the benchmark by which I judge my reaction to other visual art. Few works have reached that level, but the work of self-taught African-American artist Thornton Dial has.

That long preamble was basically to say Dial’s current show at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston blew me away.

Using a vast array of found objects, from carpet scraps to two-litter soda bottles, from cattle bones to car parts, Dial creates large-scale two- and three-dimensional works that transform the debris of history into explorations of post-9/11 America, race, nature, and life. But what struck me first was the physicality of the work. In The Beginning of Life in the Yellow Jungle transcends the quieter color-fields of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, by arranging plastic soda bottles, dolls, pieces of clothing, wire, found metal, gloves, and plastic flowers on a large canvas and then painting everything yellow, invoking a three-dimensional color field alive with a sense of movement and chaos.

While In The Beginning... celebrates birth, Dial’s Lost Farm (Billy Goat Hill) emanates a sense of death and loss by assembling a gray field of desiccated animal carcasses, old shoes, tire scraps, and pieces of farm tools.

Though Dial’s visionary (in the sense of Blake) approach to color and objects transfigures the various components into a new whole, Dial constantly reminds the viewer of the objects origins as the scraps, the detritus, of society, generating a tension between an almost spiritual beauty and its mundane, ugly origins.

Thinking of Dial’s work I can’t help but think of Google-sculpted poetry such as flarf. While Dial searches fields and farms for cast-off junk, the poet clicks around the internet gathering cast-off phrases to reassemble into a new construct. Though Dial draws more from the industrial age and the poets more from the information age, there are similar impulses at work: attempts to reclaim, to reshape, to reconstruct society’s debris. Found objects/found phrases “pouring through the vernacular” (Drew Gardner, Petroleum Hat).

But Dial’s work unlike poetry has space and literal physicality. His work’s physical presence draws the viewer corporally into Dial’s vision(s). You become one of the found objects reclaimed from society’s trash heap. Dial transmutes objects and viewer creating a moment, a space, that might also transform, even if just briefly, society.

Domestic Projects: A Random Thought on Gertrude Stein and Lorrie Moore

2005-12-03T15:53:00.000-08:00

What do Lorrie Moore and Gertrude Stein have in common, other than I’m reading both of them right now? They write in different genres (does Stein actually write in a known “genre”?). They are separated by three or four generations. Even after nearly a century Stein’s brilliance is still somewhat obscured, while Moore, though hardly a bestseller, is widely praised.

And maybe the fact that I’m reading them at the same time, and that they both write in English, is all they have in common. Maybe I’m just seeking connections between unconnectable “things.” But I do see a connection. Domesticity. Or more the perversion of domesticity. Or maybe the problem of the perversion of domesticity. They both explore the tension between an idealized view of domesticity and a perceived reality, and the tension between domesticity and the exotic, the undomestic.

Their strategies are very different, which is reflected in their choice of genres. In Tender Buttons, Stein takes the actual language of domesticity (Objects, Food, Rooms), and, as if the nouns and verbs were physical objects, turns it on its heads, scrambles it and reassembles it into some adult version of Green Eggs and Ham. She throws an entire house through a cracked looking glass and forces the reader to climb in after it, forcing us to rethink our relationship to both language and the items she “describes.” (I’m using describes very loosely.)

Moore also employs a cracked looking glass, but instead of throwing things throw it she forces her characters in front of it. She approaches domesticity not through it’s framework or it’s language, but through its population. Moore’s characters seem to inhabit the domestic space’s Stein has de/relanguaged. Stein’s spaces seem devoid of inhabitants. Her response to the void of the domestic is too tear it down and rebuild it. Moore’s response is less radical, or at least more subtle, she forces you to live there.

The obvious problem is I’m comparing jackhammers to faulty plumbing and shredded blue jeans, experimental poetry to well-crafted short stories, anti-narrative to narrative. In this case, both are highly valuable as art, and together highlight the limits of each approach. Stein’s writing seems supra-human, but also devoid of characters, even “humanity” at times. Language seems to replace everything, and it doing so throws, necessarily, into question our very relationship to language, and our relationship to the “reality” it purports to describe. Moore deals less with the questions of language, and more with character’s relationship to “reality” as the character perceives it.

Is a melding of Stein and Moore possible? Not a compromise between the two, but something that radically reharmonizes the two into something new. (Maybe it has already occurred and I’m not aware of it, maybe Fanny Howe’s fractured and fragile domestic scenes). Because it seems the more I read Stein, who I tried to read at 19, during my Beat-phase and couldn’t wrap my head around (not that I have wrapped my head around her now), the more I think that much of contemporary “post-avant” poetry is trying to recreate, rewrite Stein. She often seems more influential than Pound or Eliot or Williams, and more modern than all three, and a better “contemporary” poet that many contemporary poets. However, Moore writes, stylistically at least, as if Stein never did, yet Moore inhabits similar spaces. It seems that instead of just rewiring Stein, an interesting project would be forcing Moore’s characters to not just live in Stein’s de/reconstructed spaces, but also in her de/reconstructed language.

Lisa Jarnot's BLACK DOG SONGS

2005-11-24T07:43:00.000-08:00

I am a little behind on my reading. My theory about poetry books is to buy the ones that look interesting the moment I see them, regardless of what I have unread at home, since with limited print runs and the shortage of good poetry sections, I may never see the book again. And my job, unfortunately limits my reading time – I have to read for work, which is both a pleasure and a curse. So I have stacks of books that I haven’t read yet.

I bought Lisa Jarnot’s Black Dog Songs at Gotham Book Mart. I can’t remember if it was when I was still living in New York or on a visit after I moved. But I do remember being initially attracted to the book as an object – the smaller trim size, the striking cover image, the nice brown endpapers, the picture of a dock jutting into a frozen pond where the author photo should be, the clean, crisp font and typesetting. Then I read two or three of the poems and thought they seemed very interesting. I bought it and added it to my to-be-read pile.

Unfortunately, it’s taken me two years to actually read it – my loss, since Jarnot, who I hadn’t read before, is one of the most original poets of my generation. Reading this collection of hard, crystalline poems is like watching DNA split and recombine, like entering a strange world of fractured fairy tales and children’s rhymes.

Her poetry, like few others, really returns us to the oral/aural nature of poetry. It revels in the joys of sound. It demands to be read aloud, and doubles, no triples in power, yes this poetry has power, raw power, when read aload:

Tatters of love and lack of love they loved the love forgotten in the springtime in the street they loved the garbage and the peanuts and the smoke, of that they love the him they loved they loved him in the fountains and the park, they loved the tatters of the park

- from Tatters of Love, p. 29

Using repeating sounds she lifts “love,” arguably the most overused word in poetry, from it’s triteness, dusts it off, and restores it. Poem after poem is like this, words becoming sounds, sounds becoming song. Yet the words meanings, their cultural baggage, still haunt the reader creating a tension that adds a strange drama to these poems. I’m not sure how she does it.

But reading these poems I can’t help but think of traditional forms like villanelles, sestinas, and nursery rhymes – the repeating sounds and rhymes building layer upon layer, resonating, echoing. Jarnot is an avant-formalist reinventing rhyme, restoring the lyrical, creating fractured and necessary songs.

Yoko Otomo's SMALL POEMS

2005-11-21T22:54:00.000-08:00

Yuko Otomo’s Small Poems is appropriately bound like a reporter’s notebook. As you read, you sense the immediacy of the language as if you had become some poet/reporter/repo[et]rter wandering an urban, almost post-apocalyptic, landscape jotting down fractured Zen-like observations:

a house cat is watching
spring snow
through a glass window

on the wall
a headless man is running
thinking, carrying his far-sighted forest
brain

at my feet
an ancient grain is swimming
in a pool of melancholy

and

there is not so much day time left

-Spring Snow (Ce-Pha-Lo-Phore)

…tossing off Creeley/Ikkyu-like witticisms:

in summer
we love wind

in winter
we hate it

wind never changes

-Attitude of Mind

…and

all you need is
air
water & (slight)
light

night
&
day

all
around

love? Well—

-General Botany

Alas, Ugly Duckling Presse is sold out, making this chapbook as ephemeral as the precise and beautiful language it attempts to keep within its covers. I found my copy a few weeks ago at Gotham Book Mart. It’s well worth the effort to see if they have another.

Google + Poetry = Googletry (Part 2)

2005-11-19T23:18:00.000-08:00

A couple of other poets and myself have played around with the raw googled language from the previous post and whittled it down to a poem.

Here is Thomas Basbøll’s contribution to the experiment:

Welcome to the Death Clock: a friendly, second by second reminder to work out the percentage of memories that are designed, manufactured and tested to specifications.

Here are the updated graphs for October. As you can see, the fish leapt from the water. This framework only provides guidelines: a limited amount of content. There will be "more deep cuts".

Here is Brian Campbell’s work in progress, in which he strayed a bit from the original idea and included a couple additional lines including some Spam:

GOOGLE SONNET 1: RAW GENERAL SEARCH

Welcome to the Death Clock, the Internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away... second by second.
Would you like to increase your brain power today?
Have some Hallmark ornaments you just don't want anymore?
What is the impact of recent hurricanes on U.S. Oil Markets?
Stanford University scientists have discovered a potential new weapon in the battle of the bulge: a hormone that reduces the urge to eat.
At least 500,000 earthquake survivors in Pakistan still have no shelter.
The dust-up in the Dungeon video arcade began when a group of Jordanian teenagers cursed aloud about the television reports.
Love is when you look into someone's eyes, and suddenly you go all the way inside their soul and you both know it.
The first space mission in a decade to Earth's closest neighbour, Venus, has blasted off.
Sensational revolution in medicine! Enlarge your penis up to 10 cm or 4 inches!
"We rented an apartment," she said, adding that her husband taught her how to use her explosives belt.
We drowsed for a while in the gentle purling murmur of the river, until Demi spoke again.
Why are you jerking off to this ten-second video clip?
Welcome to the Death Clock, the Internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away... second by second.

And here is my attempt:

GOOGLED TRIPLE SONNET #1: COOKED

Memory
that is
designed,
manu-
fact-
ured and
updated graphs
explain
how
to
make
the opening
sonnet
a limited
amount
of content
available in
English please
visit
for more
Blue Steel
the areas of
pre-engineered
buildings and
a New York college
trapped
in
an existential
nightmare victims
of a cruel
and enduring myth Love is when you look
into someone's
eyes
information
does
not want
to be free
it wants
to be brief economics
bath water
deer

The interesting thing about this process was that after a point it was like I was editing/whittling down my own language. After the initial cut, it was as if I had appropriate that language as my own, reclaimed it from a vast internet wasteland, language reclamation. Robert Archambeau asks:

Lately, I suppose, everything feels like a headline, and every headline feels like a lie. How to talk back? More headlines?

Is this reparsing of language a way of talking back? This seems to be partly the idea of flarf as expressed Gary Sullivan and Stan Apps. Though flarf seems to be more a challenge to poet (flarfer), reader, and society alike:

Flarf was never meant to put anyone at ease. It is not about writing "bad" poetry; it was never about that. "Bad" and "good" are irrelevant terms to flarf. It was about putting oneself into uncomfortable positions vis-à-vis the work. Literally, making manifest discomfort. In oneself, and--presumably--in one's readers.

I don’t think what I was doing here is flarf as defined by Sullivan and others. I found the process as I approached it interesting more for the randomness of the language, the raw material that was generated, and as an “act” of reclaiming and reprocessing “nonpoetic” language. Maybe this is as Sullivan quipped about Tony Tost’s “I Am Not A Pilot”, “What new wave was to punk.” But is there really a problem with being Elvis Costello? (Udate: According to Tony he was pre-flarf, thus pub rock, The Motors maybe.)

I think the process has many implications about how lanaguge works and the role of the poet/sculptur/shaper that I want to think through. One of the most interesting is that, as Thomas puts it, it deprives "the poet of some habitual vanities" and demystifies "linguistic inspiration." Poetry generated from the outside, from beyond the limited conception of “the self” or “the inspired poet.”

Google + Poetry = Googletry (Part 1)

2005-11-12T22:52:00.000-08:00

Thomas Basbøll has decided to take the idea (if it can be called that) of Flarf one step further:

This brings me to my point, which is about Flarf as procedurally defined. The use of Google shows how the poem might be understood as "criticism in a new composition" of existing usage.One can imagine a poetry (and this prose is trying to be a contribution to its poetics) that works in two windows: one is used to run Google searches, the other is a simple text editor (NotePad, for example). Text is cut out from the one and placed in the other and is then "workshopped" until perfect…

After all, consider the following line of thinking. Suppose there is no longer any need for "original compositions". Suppose that we can be sure that all the writing we will ever need is already getting done, more or less automatically. Suppose only the weeder is now needed.

An interesting idea, so for fun I thought I would try an experiment and Google some raw material. Using the rhyming words from Shakespeare first sonnet, I did three different Google searches: a general search, a news search, and a blog search. Then, I chose the first item from Google’s resutls, and then selected the first complete sentence from the source site. (Note for the news and blog results I included a link to the source site. I didn’t think of this while doing the general seacrh).

Here are the results:

GOOGLE SONNET 1: RAW GENERAL SEARCH

[Increase] Would you like to increase your brain power today?

[Die] Welcome to the Death Clock(TM), the Internet's friendly reminder that life is slipping away... second by second.

[Decrease] How to work out percentage increase and decrease.

[Memory] Memory that is designed, manufactured and tested to the specifications of brand name computer systems.

[Eyes] Hi - and welcome to Eyes on Design!

[Fuel] What is the impact of recent hurricanes on U.S. Oil Markets?

[Lies] Here are the updated graphs of US war deaths in Iraq for October.

[Cruel] The candiru fish shown in these gruesome photos leapt from the water and attacked the penis of a urinating Brazilian.

[Ornament] Have some Hallmark ornaments you just don't want anymore?

[Spring] Welcome to the home of the Spring Framework.

[Content] These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with disabilities.

[Niggarding] As the opening sonnet of the sequence, this one obviously has especial importance.

[Be] For the moment only a limited amount of content is available in English.

[Thee] "More Deep Cuts" is out now in the US. please visit Turn Records for more info.

GOOGLE SONNET 1: RAW NEWS SEARCH

[Increase] A significant rate increase given by federal regulators to Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Co. to decommission its plant at Haddam Neck is drawing fire from state officials and is under review by a judge.

[Die] At least 500,000 earthquake survivors in Pakistan still have no shelter with the fierce Himalayan winter just days away, international relief agencies have warned.

[Decrease] Stanford University scientists have discovered a potential new weapon in the battle of the bulge: a hormone that reduces the urge to eat.

[Memory] The iPod nano is already behind the cutting edge — and that’s good news.

[Eyes] The recent joint venture between Tata Steel and Blue Scope Steel of Australia will focus on the areas of pre-engineered buildings and steel-intensive buildings.

[Fuel] The dust-up in the Dungeon video arcade began when a group of Jordanian teenagers cursed aloud about television reports that at least one of the suicide bombings that shook this city Wednesday was carried out by an Iraqi.

[Lies] With his 2002 novel The Horned Man, James Lasdun delivered a taut tale about a New York college professor trapped in an existential nightmare.

[Cruel] ONE of the UK's leading authorities on the First World War has launched an outspoken defence of the British generals involved in the conflict, insisting they are the victims of a cruel and enduring myth.

[Ornament] This family of five is struggling financially, but active in school and church.

[Spring] Spring of 2004 may be just a distant memory, but it figures prominently in the outlook for Tuesday's opening day of firearms deer season.

[Content] The first space mission in a decade to Earth's closest neighbour, Venus, has blasted off.

[Niggarding] Your search - Niggarding - did not match any documents.

[Be] Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz today proposed that the SAARC Summit and other meetings be streamlined to make them business like.

[Thee] California emigres should have to pass a brief economics test before being welcomed as Nevada voters.

GOOGLE SONNET 1: RAW BLOG SEARCH

[Increase] The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms.

[Die] Well today went far better than I thought it would.

[Decrease] Olivier Blanchard's latest on European unemployment:

[Memory] Hey guys!

[Eyes] Love is when you look into someone's eyes, and suddenly you go all the way inside their soul and you both know it.

[Fuel] The Union of Concerned Scientists has a new Flash animation parodying the Bush administration's flawed proposal to revamp fuel economy standards in the US.

[Lies] Having a high focus on career indicates that you are extremely focused on furthering you career right now.

[Cruel] Amazing. Waterboarding (pictured above) is merely a "psychological technique," not rising to the level of torture.

[Ornament] I hope you all had a good weekend!

[Spring] Ha! I finally created my perfect spring semester schedule.

[Content] Information does not want to be free, it wants to be seen!

[Niggarding] From fairest creatures we desire [sic] increase,

[Be] But hey ho... I'm waiting for the bath water to heat up instead :).

[Thee] It's good to see pieces like this one from the Washington Post.

**

Are these poems yet? A collection of found objects? Readymades? Or raw material in need of “weeding” and “workshopping” (or "worshipping", according to spell check)? Most art that uses found objects, like Cornell’s boxes, relies on the artist to “edit” and juxtapose according to his or her “vision.” But is randomness, or at least structured randomness in this case, also art?

At the very least, this is a collection of raw material to be manipulated/transformed/workshopped edited into something else. I might try that in a following post, and the material is open for anyone else’s use. It would be interesting to see what becomes of this language in the hands of various writers.

Sound Design

2005-11-12T12:35:00.000-08:00

Proof (or at least a reminder) that poetry is also an oral/aural art, read aloud:

occurs a curve of
sound or sign

occurs a curve
of sound design waiting

awaiting occurs
a curve of sound design

This is the first section of Lisa Jarnot’s “Triptych” (from Black Dog Songs. On the page it appears slight. Read aloud you become a mellifluous cacophony.

A Little Mercy Now

2005-11-12T11:22:00.000-08:00

Ambviablog reminds us, even if most of the press has moved on, that over 80,000 people died in the recent earthquake in Pakistan, over 3 million are still homeless, and thousands upon thousands are without even temporary shelter, blankets, sufficient food, or medical supplies. She suggests giving to Mercy Corps.

Stuffed Armadillos?

2005-11-12T10:14:00.000-08:00

By the time an aesthetic movement is named, its players grouped into a school, does it no longer exist? Has it become an object in a museum, a stuffed armadillo, manipulated to suggest movement, but lifeless?

By trying to name the movement does the namer, like Adam, try to take control of the named, or try to create a community, a safe place for the schooled? Are both possibilities a danger to art?

By naming it is it now historical? Has it become something outside the named, something to be claimed by anyone?

Heralding Tyner

2005-11-10T20:27:00.000-08:00

Glasgow’s The Herald ran a nice appreciation of pianist McCoy Tyner, sadly the last surviving member of John Coltrane’s classic quartet:

Fifty years ago, as a 17-year-old pianist starting out in Philadelphia, McCoy Tyner was introduced to a friend of a friend who sat in with their band on tenor saxophone. Tyner and the newcomer hit it off straight away and would go round to this new acquaintance's mother's house to talk about music.

John Coltrane, for it was he, was back home on a sabbatical from Miles Davis's band at the time and would shortly rejoin Davis. But he left Philadelphia with the promise that, when he formed his own band, he'd have Tyner on piano.

Of course, in 1960 Tyner did join ‘Trane’s band and went on to provide blistering vamps, rhythmic harmonics, and sheer beauty on some of the best jazz recordings every cut. He also had a stellar solo career, most notably on the seminal The Real McCoy. And now Blue Note has re-released another classic, Time for Tyner, on their Rudy Van Gelder Editions, which has become the Rosetta Stone of post-bop jazz – though jazz is a language that is ultimately untranslatable into any written word.

On May 17th, 1968, barely a month after Martin Luther King, JR. was assassinated, Tyner, the extraordinary vibist Bobby Hutcherson, bassist Herbie Lewis, and drummer Freddie Waits (father of one of today’s best drummers, Nasheet Waits) headed over to Englewood Cliffs, NJ to record at Van Gelder Studios (in seems Van Gelder was present at the recording of almost every major jazz album of the past half century).

The opening track, “African Village,” a Tyner original, opens with Lewis’s melodic bass line that quickly draws an African-themed percussive response from Waits. Waits and Lewis trade licks in an amazing bass-drum duet, before Hutch enters on vibes. Soon Tyner and Hutch are creating rich harmonic layers, and this continues for 12 enlightened minutes punctuated by driving solos. This is clearly a tight band; all four players are sympathetic to each others musical ticks. I’m getting that tingling feeling listening as I type – but then Tyner and Hutch are two of my all time favorite musicians and hearing the two of them together is like watching Bogie and Bacall – they are perfectly matched.

The opening cut alone is worth the 12 bucks, but the rest of the album doesn’t disappoint, including a trio rendition of “The Surrey With The Fringe on Top,” and a solo version of “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face.” Why this album has been unavailable for so long is a mystery, but now that it’s back, enjoy.

Tati, In Case We Die Rehearsing My Choir, I'm [a] Burning Star

2005-11-09T20:00:00.000-08:00

ENRICO RAVA Tati

Italian trumpeter, Enrico Rava, who cut his teeth with free/avant jazz artist like Don Cherry, Steve Lacey, and Cecil Taylor, joins Italian pianist Stefano Bollani, and drummer Paul Motian to create some beautiful post-Miles minimalist jazz. Check out his haunting version of the standard “The Man I Love” and the swinging, yet abstract “Mirrors” and “Jessica Too.”

WILLIAM PARKER QUARTET Sound Unity

Bassists William Parker’s newest album opens with bright Monk-like abstractions, shifts into Coleman-like avant tones, then buzzes through Ayers-like free jazz. And that’s just the first cut. Recorded live at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival and Montreal’s Souni Per Il Popolo, Parker, and his talented band mates, Hamid Drake (d), Rob Brown (as), and Lewis Barnes (t), integrate [reharmonize] 60 years of improvisation and innovation into a breezy structured free jazz – yea, I know it’s a contradiction, but that means you have to get the CD and find out how they pull it off…and how good they are.

ARCHITECTURE IN HELSINKI In Case We Die

I discovered, or should I stay stumbled upon, Australia’s Architecture in Helsinki when they where doing an in-store at Austin’s great indie record store (yes, you can still call them a “record” store) Waterloo Records. I was impressed enough to catch their show at Emo’s, on Austin’s infamous 6th street (which, since my distant college days, has lost some of its indie funk). The 8 musicians crammed on to Emo’s outdoor stage and weaved catchy and quirky melodies with rich aural layers that includes everything from trumpets and trombones to various organs & synths to bird chirps to even power saws (I think). Their most recent album captures the energy of their shifting multi-instrumental performances; plus, they have the best band name.

THE FIERY FURNCANCES Rehearsing My Choir

Zapped by the zombie
zapped zapped by the zombie
Zapped by the zombie in the two door dodge;
twiced baked brioche and danish pastry pocket
sand lock’s it’s two door dodge.

So begins the middle of “Candymaker’s Knife In My Handbag” the third song on The Fiery Furnances wacky and wonderful concept album about their Grandmother’s life in Chicago. Fractured narrative bouncing through funky fractured melodies laced with honky-tonk piano, avant art songs, neo-cabaret, and all manner of idiosyncrasies.

COHEEH AND CAMBRIA Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV.Vol 1

Another concept album, actually part of a series of concept albums. Ambitious, but I don’t get it musically. It strikes me as a cross between rehashed Rush and rejects from the Rent soundtrack. I didn’t like prog rock the first time (OK, I admit I owned Moving Pictures on cassette and can sing along to “Tom Sawyer”) so I don’t think this prog rock revival is for me.

"Maintream" Poetry?

2005-10-31T10:48:00.000-08:00

On Friday, I sent Josh Corey the following email in response to his post on new books by Brandon Downing and Dan Chiasson. He has now posted a lengthy and interesting response to my email.

Josh,

I enjoy reading your blog (the obligatory complement as introduction) but I always laugh when you use the term "mainstream" in regards to poetry. I noticed you often place it in quotes, which suggests to me there is a touch of irony when you use it, since poetry, even ole Billy Collins, is no where near the real mainstream of American culture. Poetry in this culture is more a rivulet in a dessert. But I think I understand your use of "mainstream" in the context poetry's micro-environment.

But as someone who works for a mainstream publisher, I was even more amused when you called Chiasson's new poetry book a "mainstream 'event' book". As you probably realized, as evidenced by the quotation marks around event, Chiasson's 2000-5000 copy print run and $10 marketing budget, which was probably used up by photocopying fact sheets and author questionnaires, hardly qualifies as event publishing – a new John Grisham or Dan Brown it ain't. And those publishing events pale in comparison to the movies. Sadly, when you look at the sales of even major bestselling authors, they are not even reaching 1% of the U.S. population, and for more literary writers the numbers are even more depressing.

So as someone who loves poetry but is on the "outside" of the micro-environment, I’m not really troubled by “mainstream” poetry or really concerned with the whole post avant/quietude dichotomy, though I find the aesthetic theories that provide the back story interesting. As a reader, I’m not looking for poetry that belongs to a particular school or that is “marketed,” but poetry I like. I admit that is very vague and more appropriate for a high school year book. But I like James Wright and Charles Wright (well Country Music-era Wright, his later “notebook” style while interesting at first has become rather boring) and also really like Fanny Howe and Rae Armantrout. I find Pinksy boring (I actually prefer his mentor Yvor Winters). I haven’t bought a copy of Poetry in years, regularly read Fence, Verse, and Canary, but like Wilbur. One could say I have eclectic taste (and to some extent I think we have entered an era of eclectic aesthetics) but what interest me more is why I like these particular poets and not others. What is the common thread, if any, that runs through Ikkyu, Tu Fu, Sydney, Dickinson, Hopkins, Pound, Elliot, Stevens, Williams, Mandelstam, Trakl, Neruda, Paz, Celan, James Wright, Creeley, Oppen, Fanny Howe, Jean Valentine, Inger Christensen right up to such poets as Foust, Ales Debeljak, and Cole Swensen?

If I had time for more theoretical reading, which unfortunately I don’t, I might be able to better express the similarities I find in these poets. But I have a vague sense that it relates to a lyrical impulse and a sparse, intense use of language that revels in the language as language but also has a deep connection to the “human.” To use the distinctions David Lehman’s uses in the introduction to The Last Avant-Garde poems that are both “linguistic engines” and “repositories of felt experience” – automatons with flesh – now there’s an idea, android poetics. Not exactly what I was going for, but interesting.

The best example of what I’m driving at may not come from poetry but jazz. I think Coltrane may be the best embodiment of the aesthetic I envision – an intense experimentation with technique that is not driven by a nihilistic desire to destroy but a humanistic desire to find a truer means of expression. For the last couple of years of his life, Coltrane had been exploring every aspect of free jazz producing muscular pan-rhythmic 25-minute performances crammed with squeaks, squawks, and new ideas every second. However, toward the end of his life, when he was dying of cancer, Coltrane made a few final recordings (released posthumously as Stellar Regions) that where much tighter and re-harmonized the free jazz cacophony with melody to produce intensely beautiful music. I think that’s what the best poetry today is doing, reharmonizing the last 100 years of experimentation. Maybe that is what post avant is all about or maybe it could be called post quietude. Or why bother to label it all? As Camus wrote,

“But just as there is no nihilism that does not end by supposing a value, and no materialism that, being self-conceived, does not end by contradicting itself, so formal art and realist art are absurd concepts. No art can completely reject reality. The Gorgon is doubtless, a purely imaginary creature; its face and the serpents that crown it are part of nature. Formalism can succeed in purging itself more and more of real content, but there is always a limit. Even pure geometry, where abstract painting sometimes ends, still derives its color and its conformity to perspective from the exterior world. The only real formalism is silence. Moreover, realism cannot dispense with a minimum of interpretation and arbitrariness. Even the very best photographs do not represent reality; they result from an act of selection and impose a limit on something that has none. The realist artist and the formal artist try to find unity where it doesn’t exist, in reality in its crudest state, or in imaginative creation which wants to abolish reality. On the contrary, unity in art appears at the limit of the transformation that the artist imposes on reality.”

Maybe, in a very general sense, what these poets shares is a desire for finding that limit and then understanding it in order to re-harmonize it with (or rediscover even) human “dignity” (to borrow from Camus again). I’m nor sure that is quite it and that sounds too grandiose and vague. Maybe I just like their compact use of language. Some where in there there might be a semblance of an answer, but I don’t see labels doing much to help me find it.

Well, this was just going to be a short comment on the use of the word “mainstream” and I didn’t mean for it to become a rambling discourse, but I’ve been thinking a lot about these ideas and have had trouble assembling them into a generic blog post. It’s interesting how writing in the context of an email/letter to a specific audience/person seems to have helped.

Best,

David Leftwich

Cifford Brown (b. Oct. 30, 1930)

2005-10-30T19:25:00.000-08:00

In celebration. Clifford Brown (b. Oct. 30, 1930, d. June 26th, 1956) was one of the great jazz trumpeters. His life was tragically cut short at 25 in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I think the final paragraph from a 1956 Downbeat tribute sums it up:

Clifford, at 25, was at the beginning of showing capabilities parallel only to those of Charlie Parker. There was nothing he would stop at to make each performance sound as if it were his last. But there will never be an ending performance for him, because his constant desire was to make every musical moment one of sincere warmth and beauty; this lives on forever. This would be a better world today if we had more people who believed in what Clifford Brown stood for as a man and a musician. Jazz will always be grateful for his few precious moments; I know I will.

I’m also reminded of the closing lines of Rueben Jackson’s tribute to Monk:

he tilled song
like it was earth

and he
a gardener
hell bent
on raising

any beauty
waiting
on the other
side.

Doing It Hope's Way

2005-10-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

On the cover of Blue Note’s reissue of bebop pianist Elmo Hope’s Trio and Quintet, Hope appears child-like. His suit hangs loosely from his frame, his hat seems too big, his feet are off the ground giving the illusion he is too small for the chair, and his smooth face is innocent and angelic. Yet, he towers over a dog with a bear-like head, a giant among predators. He is staring intently at several sheets of music.

The picture seems sadly apt. A brilliant jazz pianist, Hope, like the great Herbie Nichols, has been overshadowed by his peers Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. A childhood friend of Bud Powell – they listened to Bach together while growing up in New York City – Hope shares some of Powell’s rhythmic attack, but explores more complex melodies. But these promising explorations were hindered and cut short by self-doubt and heroine leaving us with only a few glimpses of the genius that could have been.

One of the best examples of Hope’s talent are the trio recordings on Trio and Quintet. On June 18, 1953 (the day Egypt was declared a Republic), Hope along with Percy Heath (bass) and Philly Joe Jones (drums) entered the famous Van Gelder Studios in Hackensack, NJ. Hope nudged a stool toward the piano, adjusted a few rumpled sheets of music, and at Van Gelder’s signal began to play.

On the first track Hope delivers a joyful, almost bouncy, rendition of Berlin’s “It’s A Lovely Day,” that is reminiscent of Powell’s linear, muscular rhythms – hard spiders marching ahead.

The second cut, “Mo Is On”, a Hope original, opens with dark, chunky chords, quickly switches to fast paced train-like rhythms, then opens up to lighter tones played in the higher registers with out losing any rhythmic intensity.

On the third song, Hope slows it down with a quiet rendering of the standard “Sweet and Lovely.”

The fourth track “Happy Hour”, another Hope original, opens with a few Monk-like phrases and then eases into a straight ahead piece, like drinking smooth scotch in a smoky bar, Philly Joe keeping time.

Cut five, the Hope original “Hot Sauce”, which really highlights his talents, opens with driving minor chords. Then using some quick trills segues into furious, piston-driving action fueled by Heath and Jones, who delivers a rapid fire solo. Genius unbound.

For the next track, Hope offers the exotic original “Stars Over Marrakech.” A dark, rhythm-rich journey.

On “Freffie”, another original, Hope returns to the joyful bounce of the first track – solid bebop action.

Co-written with Sonny Rollins, and recorded by Clifford Brown, “Cravin’ the Rock,” Riker’s Island, would presage Hope’s ongoing drug problems and prison time. Jones opens with dark, stomps on the bass pedal, then beats a military-like rhythm on the snares, before Hope enters with a driving circular minor-keyed melody, which opens to brighter tones, before returning to the dark. Hope continues to shift between light and dark tones creating a tension that is never completely resolved.

Finally, Hope launches in into a swinging, yet relaxed take of Mercer’s “I Remember You.”

These trio recordings reveal Hope at the height of his heroine-plagued career. Combining a high-energy melodic line with tight, hard-driving rhythms, that are tinged with darker more mercurial moods, Hope created a style that is less straight ahead than Powell’s, less angular and abstract than Monk’s, that is influenced by both, yet it in no way derivative. Hope’s way was his own.

Kinetics: Merce and Mobiles

2005-10-21T23:36:00.000-07:00

An aesthetic of movement has entered the glass towers and staid suburban landscapes of Houston, works by Alexander Calder and Merce Cunningham. Last night the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performed Ground Level Overlay and Split Sides,* a dance piece accompanied by the music of Radiohead and Sigur Ros, in which the order of the choreography, music, back drops, costumes, and lighting are chosen by the roll of a dice – each element of the performance independent, juxtaposed randomly, unsynchronized, dancers moving to ideas not music:

“Mary, pass the potatoes” becomes
division of subject and object. – Robert Creeley

Reminding me of contemporaries/movement: Pollack:

Movement/automatons:

Movement/Calder – "I paint with shapes."

Metallic shapes organic like Moore but in action – shadows floating on walls… “Shadow is the absence of light and only rises from the opposition of dense bodies (da Vinci)” – bodies in motion – “Motion is created by the disruption of balance (da Vinci)” – kinetic energy: Kinetic energy is energy of motion. The kinetic energy of an object [body] is the energy it possesses because of its motion. …'[T]he continued keeping of the elasticity of the muscles, the continued control of the mind over the body’s actions, the constant hoped-for flow of the spirit into physical movement, both new and renewed, is not a natural way. It is unnatural in its demands on all the sources of energy. But the final synthesis can be a natural one, natural in the sense that the mind, body and spirit function as one.” - Merce Cunningham

Why is poetry so still?

The poem is the record of a movement from perception to vision… – Jerome Rothenberg

I’m on a train, watching landscape streaming by, thinking
of the single equation that lets time turn physical,
equivocal, almost equable on a train

where the window is speed, vertile, vertige. It will be

one of those beautiful equations, almost visible, almost green. – Cole Swensen

Bodies in motion, mobiles, abstracted motion, convergence of three dimensions: objects/bodies, energy, and light: “the evolutions of celestial bodies, the trembling of leaves on their branches, the memory of caresses (Andre Breton on Calder)…”

In blue light cast from the stage, she turns to him and says, “Art is found in the differences.”

___________________________________________________

* Side Note: This New Yorker critic seems particularly clueless, especially about Radiohead and Sigur Ros. She seems to think that the ambient music they recorded for Cunnigham’s choreography is out of character for these “rock bands,” obviously she had never heard them before. The music is very much an extension of what both groups have been exploring over the last few year.

Jack Nicholson and Post/aesthetic Poe(tics)

2005-10-21T14:13:00.000-07:00

Forget the post-avant and quietude thing, poets, well male poets, really want to be Jack Nicholson…

Current poet laureate, Ted “I wanted to be James Wright” Kooser, sensing the decline in poetry’s popularity has decided the solution is to channel Nicholson’s voice at readings (scroll down to the various audio links).

Poet/blogger Jim Behrle not wanting to be out done by quietude has once again pimped Kooser by living the rest of his life as Jack Torrance (but with less hair).

Nicholson, acknowledging his influence on the literary arts, has released an inspiring new film.

“the books within the eardrum”

2005-10-15T21:17:00.000-07:00

Brian Campbell has been translating Nicaraguan poet Francisco Santos for several years and now has a book of translations coming out from a Costa Rican press. For those of you not heading to your local Costa Rican bookstore this week, Brian has posted some translations and the introduction at Undressing the Night. Here is a sample:

FIESTA

The glass beyond the fiesta
the books within the eardrum
the quotidian in the blood --
and the madman with his dirty fist
comes out of the mineshaft
waving a flower

-Fransciso Santos, trans. Brian Campbell

The line "books within the eardrum” really resonates – it seems to condence into one line the whole aural appeal of poetry, the sounds that unlock like skeleton keys the doors to deep memory. If Santos can do this in one short poem, I can’t wait to read more.

DANCING IN ODESSA, by Ilya Kaminksy

2005-10-12T23:13:00.000-07:00

In the opening poem (be sure to check out this link—it’s a wonderful montage of web technology, music, image and poetry) of his amazing first book, Dancing in Odessa, Ilya Kaminsky, writes:

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,
For an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

From that page on Kaminsky never surrenders and speaks not just for the dead but the living.

It’s hard to imagine that someone who was born in 1977, someone who can revel in imaginative joy and write:

in a city that belongs to no nation
but all the nations of wind,

she spoke the speech of poplar trees—
her ears trembling as she spoke, my Aunt Rose
composed odes to barbershops, drug stores.

Can then delve deep into human darkness and breath wisely:

…my grandfather composed lectures on the supply

and demand of clouds in our country:
the State declared him an enemy of the people.
He ran after a train with tomatoes in his coat

and danced naked on the table in front of our house—
he was shot, and my grandmother raped
by the public prosecutor, who stuck his pen in her vagina,

the pen which signed people off for twenty years.
But in the secret history of anger—one man’s silence
lives in the bodies of the others—as we dance to keep from falling,

between the doctor and the prosecutor:
my family, the people of Odessa,
women with huge breasts, old men naïve and childlike,

all our words, heaps of burning feathers
that rise and rise with each retelling.

All of this by the third poem.

Kaminsky is a poet who tries to draw all of humanity into his poems, who, to paraphrase Auden, doesn’t confuse authenticity with originality, yet in doing so creates something original and authentic, something “clothed in the heart” (Wittgenstein), something that combines fragments of memory, loss, pain, joy, even the erotic to create something beautiful, “a realm that is uncanny yet turned toward what’s human” (Celan). If it were music, it would be Lamentate by Arvo Part – “a voice smelling of oranges” (Kaminsky):

A voice, I say, like Icarus,
whispering to himself as he falls.

Yes, my life as a broken branch in the wind
hits Northern ground.
I am writing now a history of snow,
the lamplight bathing the ships
that sail across the page.
– Musica Humana, Ilya Kaminsky

Get a hold of these pages, breath in their light, and relearn what has already been given.

Interlinked Group Navel Gazing: Or Why I’m Tired of Political Blogging

2005-10-12T10:29:00.000-07:00

This post on whether or not Laura Bush called critics of Miers sexist to me exemplifies the state of much of today’s political discourse: intelligent citizens passionately engaged in politics and ideas (a good thing) while at the same time being myopic and self indulgent in scope (a bad thing, yet something most of us, including myself, are sometimes guilty of).

There seems to be a paranoid group mentality in Big Lizards post, characterized by such statements as:

“We know the MSM lie and distort, particularly when transcribing oral statements that have a chance of fanning the flames.”

This could have been written by a leftie or a rightie (both think the MSM is biased against them), but in this case a rightie wrote it. I find it odd that a group who prides itself on fighting the “victim mentality” so often whines that it is a victim of the media (which for the most part is owned by fellow Republicans). Are individual members of the press liberal and biased? Of course. My wife is a lawyer who does work for “evil” corporations, and it is interesting to see how biased toward planitffs news reports on major ligation can be, but some of that is also driven by poor reporting and a misunderstanding of the legal issues. Of course, lenghty detailed balanced reports on tort ligation would probably bore most readers (or so the CFO and market researchers would probably say) and lead to declining readership/viewership, which in turn leads to less advertising dollars, which leads to less profits for stockholders…well you get the idea…the media is in it for the money and sensationalist stories are what corporate execs (read editors) think drive profits. (Though this is preferable to the state running the media – you can’t have freedom of the press unless the press is free to market.)

The point wasn’t to give my opinion on the media, but to suggest that this myopic viewpoint slices away the complexities to create a neat little “Us vs. Them” package. We end up clinging to white washed bones instead of examining fleshed out reality. Or staring at our compatriots navels hoping they look just like ours.

People should be passionately enaged in ideas and their pratical application (in the end, for government it is results that matter, or at least should – something ideologues often lose sight of). The challenge is knowing when you have subsituted ideaology* for ideas, when politics has become more about the points than the polis.

I think what people need to do is look up from their navels, take a deep breath, take in the expansive blue sky, and then ask their neighbor, “What’s your vision of an ideal society?” We are doing things ass backwards. Instead trying to hogtie each other over the color of your state, we should be looking for common goals and working toward them. I’m friends with both conservatives and liberals and when push comes to shove they often want similar things – less poverty, good schools, protection of freedoms, etc. The real questions, and these I grant you are hard questions with no easy answers, are how to achieve those goals. But if you keep the goals at the forefront instead of tucked in a back pocket as an afterthought you are more likely to reach a civil compromise, and leave the party with your throat in tack. At least that’s what I’ve found.

I know this may sound a little too naïve, a little too starry eyed and romanatic (just what you’d expect form someone writing about poetry, right?), but I realize that us humans have been at this for awhile and the results have often been pretty messy and bloody. Many of the current political battles aren’t that differenet than they were a 100 year ago, or 2000 years ago for that matter, but it’s a sweeping view of history that also shows that there has been some progress, and how useless and silly plucking navel hair is when compared to looking your neighbor in the eye and saying, “I agree with you on that, disaggree with you there, maybe we can do this instead.”

-------------------------------------------------------

Side Note:

* When did ideology take on such negative connotations? As defined by Merriam-Webster:

1 : visionary theorizing
2 a : a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture b : a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture c : the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program

That sounds pretty damn good to me.

In Memory of Monk

2005-10-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

Thelonious Sphere Monk (Born Oct. 10, 1917)

Thelonious: sonorous, melodic, familiar, yet slightly askew – a clock that never hangs straight, one bell chiming on key.

Sphere: Celestial, out of center, eccentric: a mechanical device consisting of a disk through which a shaft is keyed and a circular strap which works freely round the rim for communicating its motion to one end of a rod whose other end is constrained to move in a straight line so as to produce reciprocating motion – hands communicating motion, rhythm—stopped time recorded

Monk: solitary, spiritual, a clockwork prayer

“Monk delights the brain, but…also animates the heart.” – Gary Giddins

Trinkle Tinkle, Well, You Needn’t, 'Round Midnight, Ruby My Dear…

Out in the Open

3

Sun burning. The plane comes in low
throwing a shadow shaped like a giant cross that rushes over the ground.
A man is sitting in the field poking at something.
The shadow arrives.
For a fraction of a second he is right in the center of the cross.

I have seen the cross hanging in the cool church vaults.
At times it resembles a split-second snapshot of something
moving at tremendous speed.

– Thomas Transtromer, trans. Robert Bly

Criss-Cross – dancing the fingers into the night, we will know no better than angled abstractions of the heart, harmony off kilter bringing a strange light…

Listening with Sonny: Freedom/Chaos/Unity and Art (not Pepper)

2005-09-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

A lucky New York Times reporter spent an afternoon listening to some choice tracks selected by the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins: Fats Waller, I’m Going To Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter; Lester Young: Afternoon Of A Basie-ite; Charlie Parker: Another Hairdo; Coleman Hawkins: The Man I Love.

While sampling Charlie Parker, Rollins rifts on his jazz aesthetic:

"People playing jazz have to try to understand where he [Charlie Parker] was coming from, what that was, and emulate it and absorb it. This is what jazz is: jazz is freedom. I don't think you always have to play in time. But there's two different ways of playing. There's a way of playing where you can play with no time. Or, you can have a fixed time and play against it. That's what I feel is heaven - being able to be that free, spiritual, musical. I would say that's an ideal which is underappreciated."

Here he seemed to sense that he was getting into rough waters. "I mean playing free without any kind of time strictures - there's nothing wrong with that either. I'm not saying that's inferior. But I guess I'm getting older now, so I'm getting to be a person that's steeping myself in the tradition of Fats Waller and all of these people we're listening to today, who are playing time music. I'm probably going to be dissing myself to the new guys coming up somewhere, but a lot of our audiences still relate to time. I'm still in the era of time being an important component of jazz. I'm still there, O.K.? So kill me."

Rollins, like so many artists (hell like anyone interested in life), is navigating the narrow, yet deep, rift between anarchy an order, freedom and unity, structure and chaos – like Coltrane recording quiet ballads after the experimental explorations of Live at The Village Vanguard, momentarily turning from the abyss.

Total freedom, freedom with no rules and no structure (chaos) drifts into nihilism and limits expression, simply put, you end up asking, “Now what?” The discipline of some rules (structure) can lead to (truer) freedom and beauty, like a Buddhist monk spending years meditating; or imagine the opposite, poetry as just a random utterance of vowel sounds, maybe of interest for a minute or two, but then you move on to washing dishes. Art is the tension between chaos and order, Robert Johnson’s crossroads—that is the force, the passion, that drives creation. As Camus writes,

This passion which lifts the mind above the commonplaces of a dispersed world, from which it nevertheless cannot free itself, is the passion of unity. It does not result in mediocre efforts to escape, however, but in the most obstinate demands. Religion or crime, every human endeavor in fact, finally obeys this unreasonable desire and claims to give life a form it does not have. The same impulse, which can lead to the adoration of the heavens or the destruction of man, also leads to creative literature, which derives its serious content from this source.

The source. Cracked dishes and blemished silverware. Birds in rough weather. Decent into language and the rhythm of time…

"And The City Now Has Gone"

2005-09-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

The town of Holly Beach, LA destroyed by Hurricane Rita.

AND THE CITY NOW HAS GONE

How the clock moves on, relentlessly,
with such assurance that it eats the years.
The days are small and transitory grapes,
the months grow faded, taken out of time.

It fades, it falls away, the moment, fired
by that implacable artillery-
and suddenly, only a year is left to us,
a month, a day, and death turns up in the diary.

No one could ever stop the water's flowing;
nor thought nor love has ever held it back.
It has run on through suns and other beings,
its passing rhythm signifying our death.

Until, in the end, we fall in time, exhausted,
and it takes us, and that's it. Then we are dead,
dragged off with no being left, no life, no darkness,

no dust, no words. That is what it comes to;
and in the city where we'll live no more,
all is left empty, our clothing and our pride.

-Pablo Neruda, trans. Alastair Reid

Cameron, LA -- damage from Hurricane Rita.

What a difference a week makes – last week at this time worry and stocking up on water, and now the heat has finally broken; the sky is blue with a few high clouds reminding me of gentle waves – a beautiful day. But for thousands of displaced people in East Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi their lives are still uprooted. The humbling thought is next time it could be me, or any of us – the clock relentlessly moves on for all of us. The least we can do is stop and help someone along the way….

Habitat for Humanity

Hildegard von Bingen

2005-09-29T20:38:00.000-07:00

Listening to The Origin of Fire...

echoes in a cathedral of skeletons

________

from your heart's haven

you poured a more human space into this shadowy world.

-Rilke

"six poems equal the dirt in the road"

2005-09-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

Not long after my post below on “Crisis Aesthetics” I happened upon an essay by Raymond Carver where he loosely describes his “minimalist” approached to writing.

But extremely clever chichi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement.

Is contemporary poetry missing this sense of wonder? Or at least a sense of amazement at something other than its own language?

Compare:

My only recourse lay in a sort of divination,
lying down conjuring the Fred and Ginger building

so to pollenate my categories like catbirds and cowbirds.
“Missing footage suggests she lost an arm.”

Subtitles appear as grass under our feet
Though we would like to read what they say of us

(with the fungible singers of the fainter ochers
droning through the ivy netting on rash brick)

–Ange Mlinko, “The Treasury of Plain Sense,” from STARRED WIRE, recently selected to be part of the National Poetry Series

with:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distance of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

–James Wright, “Lying in A Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota”, ABOVE THE RIVER

I like Mlinko’s poem, especially the line, “Subtitles appear as grass under our feet.” And I like some of the other poems in her new book. But they ultimately seem to be just about the language, the unique image or sound, and not much else. While Wright seems to be using the language not only to create something beautiful out of language but to also touch and explore something more essential. One could argue that Wright’s poetry is also only about the language, that it’s only reference point is the poem itself. But then you would have to argue that all language refers only to itself. I know there are complex theories of language and I have tried to wade through some of them, but in the end when you tell a child, “Go to your room!”, the child knows what that group of sounds means, what parts or the real world they refer to.

This is not to say I’m opposed to experimentation in poetry and art – far from it. I think experimentation is an essential part of art. The Wright poem at the time it was written was a break from tradition, it was an experiment. I can’t imagine jazz without the experiments of Coltrane, Coleman, Davis, or Monk; the visual arts without Picasso, Rothko, Agnes Martin, and countless other artists. What would poetry be without Stevens, Elliot, Pound, O’Hara, Berrigan, Howe, and many other poets? It would be repetitive and boring. Experiment for experimentation's sake might be necessary at times to advance the art, to breakup a log-jammed imagination, but experimentation alone can also harm the art. As Carver goes on to say

Too often "experimentation" is a license to be careless, silly or imitative in the writing. Even worse, a license to try to brutalize or alienate the reader. Too often such writing gives us no news of the world, or else describes a desert landscape and that's all—a few dunes and lizards here and there, but no people; a place uninhabited by anything recognizably human, a place of interest only to a few scientific specialists…But if writers haven't taken leave of their senses, they also want to stay in touch with us, they want to carry news from their world to ours.

Deserts can be beautiful and moving and simple “news” boring. But I think what Carver is saying is that a poem or story must still be in touch with everything that makes us human, not just language, which is an essential part of humanity. I think William Carlos Williams was saying something similar when he wrote,

It is difficult /to get the news from poems /yet men die miserably every day /for lack /of what is found there.

I think experimentation is always needed in order to say things new, but experimentation that loses sight of the soul, of the human, of reality will ultimately fail and fall flat. Somehow Coltrane, even at is most experimental, was always grounded in the human spirit.

Wittgenstein wrote,

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

What contemporary poetry may need is a little less “thought” and a little more “reality” – poets who can harmonize the last 50 years of experimentation with thousands of years of human experience.

Where wrought iron spears
punctuate the common and rain
turns to snow a minute
I learned six poems
equal the dirt in the road
twenty more make a cobweb
thirty five muddy bodies equal a wall
one and a half jobs don’t make a living
great novels are stainglass
their pain is their color

—Fanny Howe, “Goodbye, Post Office Square,” SELECTED POEMS

Live from Houston: Saturday Afternoon

2005-09-24T16:01:00.000-07:00

SUNSHINE, WIND, AND NEIGHBORS

The sun is actually shinning and the streets are dry. There has been some blustery wind all day and you hear an occasional chain saw as someone cuts up a downed branch. Luckily, there is only one medium-sized branch down on our block, and lots of scattered leaves. We lost electricity from about 4:30am to 8:30am. But thankfully we are OK, as are all our neighbors. Late this morning I walked the dog and checked on the elderly woman who lives at the end of the block. She has lived there for 50 years and survived several hurricanes. She was tired but fine, and brought out her 1 month-old Quaker parrot. I had no idea she raised birds. She has two pairs, plus babies. I’ve learned a lot about my neighbors over the last couple of days – a great bunch and they definitely made riding out Hurricane Rita much better.

Luckily for us, riding out Rita turned out to be little more than a roller coaster ride, though a roller coaster ride with a big build up. There were 30-40 mph sustained winds all night long with occasional 50+ mph gusts – it was like a very long severe thunderstorm with no thunder or lightening. We didn’t get much sleep and we are tired, but considering that a couple of days ago they were predicting that one of the most powerful hurricanes on record would hit Houston head on, a sleepless night and an afternoon of tape removal and leaf raking is close to nirvana—just some karmic yoga.

The power and unpredictability of nature is awesome especially when compared to fragile human lives and our ongoing, but semi-futile*, attempts to understand and control nature and our fate. I’m reminded of Camus’ definition of absurdist reasoning:

“The acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe.”

* I don’t say futile, because we have made technological progress – as one meteorologist said just 10 years ago once a hurricane entered the Gulf of Mexico everyone on the Gulf Shore had to be ready because they didn’t know if it would hit Mexico or Alabama, now they can do a pretty good job of predicting were it will hit within 300-500 miles 5 days out, giving people time to prepare.

“EVENTS”

When did everything become an “event”? I’ve heard several emergency management and weather officials say things like “flooding event,” “heavy-rain event”, “hurricane event?” As one of my neighbors quipped, “An event is catered.” Is this a byproduct of our entertainment-oriented society and/or bureaucratic-speak? Plus, it’s redundant – just say “flood” or “hurricane”, I know what you mean.

CRISES AESTHETICS

Poet/Blogger Brian Cambell commented:

I love your poetry quotes. Shows the usefulness of poetry in moments of crisis, and bolsters my faith in the in the relevance of this art we all love.

Which got me thinking about the nature of poetry—it is interesting that during recent crises—9/11, the tsunami, Katrina, and now Rita—I didn’t reach for John Ashberry, Wallace Stevens (who I love), Ron Silliman, or a first book from an Iowa MFA grad, but Donne, Auden, Eliot, Celan, Neruda, James Wright or the Chinese masters like Tu Fu or Li Po. What does that say about poetry?

I enjoy the aesthetic games and beauty of post-modern poetry – on a leisurely day Michael Palmer is lyrically wonderful and Ted Berrigan is disjunctively beautiful. But when I’m trying to make some sense of human experience, of human tragedy, trying to find, dare I say in this postmodern era, human truths, I find myself turning to poets who were also concerned with exploring these ideas in poetic language. Not that these other poets aren’t concerned with humanity, but I wonder has poetry become too caught up in the language game and become too removed from something more essentially human?

The wind runs free across our plains,
The live sea beats forever at our beaches.
Man makes earth fertile, earth gives him flowers and fruits.
He lives in toil and joy; he hopes, fears, and begets sweet offspring.

– Primo Levi

Live From Houston: Early Saturday Morning

2005-09-24T02:16:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Rita officially made landfall at 2:38 am near Sabine Pass, TX about 100 miles east of Houston (one should say the eye of Hurricane Rita, because people have been feeling the effects for hours). So we have officially been spared the brunt of this storm.

We have had fairly heavy winds all night long but not a lot of rain, and we, obviously, still have electricity. Not all Houstonians are so lucky. It’s being reported that about 450,000 homes in the Houston-area are without power, and that areas closer to the coast have experienced heavier winds, rain, and more damage. Thankfully, for now, we only have hundreds of green leaves scattered across our deck.

WATCHING THE DISTANCES

I watch the limitless distance of autumn,
the far-off dark rising up in layers

where icy waters merge with the frozen sky
and the city is blurred with mist.

Last leaves are torn into flight by winds,
and sunless, distant peaks fade fast.

A lone crane flops home at dusk.
The trees are full of crows.

– Tu Fu

Live from Houston: Late Friday Night

2005-09-23T21:53:00.000-07:00

The winds have picked – maybe 20-30mph sustained winds, which is not bad, considering. But there was just a big gust that blew over something like a potted plant because we were just surprised by a big crash. We are trying to sleep downstairs – though we missed the brunt of the storm I still feel safer staying downstairs. I’ve left a couple of lights on and the TV news is still going but the volume is down. My wife is on the couch, and I was, until that last gust, curled in on over-sized stuffed chair with an ottoman. I’m going back to try and get a little sleep.

The old joints of the house
cracked in the gale but the house
held around the bass chimney.

– Alan Dugan, Winter Gale

Live From Houston: Friday Night

2005-09-23T20:28:00.000-07:00

Just had a big gust of wind, but otherwise the wind is not much stronger than late this afternoon – the wind you’d expect as a summer thunderstorm approached. There’s been just enough rain to wet the streets. And I expect there will be more rain and wind, but it looks like, if you dare say it, that we lucked out—this time. I don’t think I’m even going to fill the bathtub.

But I’m already thinking about how to be better prepared for next time. I’ve got plenty of food, water, and other emergency supplies stocked up, but I think I will get more batteries, more duct tape, maybe a hand-crank radio, and have pre-cut and labeled plywood stored in the garage, since I wasn’t able to get any plywood for this storm.

Any suggestions for getting tape off windows? (I hope I’m not being premature.)

The sad, strange thing is our “dodged bullet” is someone else’s “killer storm.” Port Arthur, Beaumont, Cameron, Lake Charles and other communities along the Texas-Louisiana are in for a very nasty night. Human lives will be affected so we are all, in some way, affected.

Once dry, these wildflowers bend and, there
where the wind is sweeping, fall.

– Tu Fu

Live from Houston: Friday Evening

2005-09-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

I just returned from my evening dog outing—several of us in the neighborhood get together everyday after work and let our dogs run around and play. All of us stayed, so our dogs were able to get some exercise before being cooped up for a day or so.

We were all a little more optimistic about the situation, since the storm keeps tracking to the northeast and away from Houston. Everyone is still preparing for a long night, but maybe feeling a little relieved. However, I know things could still change.

The wind just picked up and a little rain is falling. But the cloud cover to the west has thinned and there is a pale yellow, blue-gray sunset.

I yearn to travel…

And all during this blustery evening,
from mountain after mountain, yellow leaves are blown.

– Wang Po

Live from Houston: The Butterfly Effect

2005-09-23T14:16:00.000-07:00

The wind has increased and the sky in now gray. I walked outside and was greeted by a butterfly hovering at my door.

Live from Houston: Friday Afternoon

2005-09-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

The wind is starting to pick up, and heavier clouds are starting to roll in from the north – though the sun is still visible. The streets are quiet. I’m no longer hearing the sounds of band saws, hammers and electric screwdrivers. I think people have made most of their preparations. I added some more tape to windows and secured the inside shutters in the front of the house, which made it very dark there. I’ll do the back shutters tonight. But for now it’s nice to have some natural light. If we lose power, we’ll be in the dark for awhile.

A couple of hours ago we walked the dog around the neighbor. Besides all the people staying on our block, it seems like quite a few people didn’t leave. There were kids playing on a local playground. A couple of guys were playing tennis. A woman was tying down her driftwood sculpture. A couple of people were still putting up plywood. Other people were also out walking their dogs. For now, life goes on.

It is interesting being in the middle of a “news event.” You realize that news reports are only a one-dimensional sketch—just a collection of a few facts, quotes, nouns and verbs that provides a rough outline of the story.

You also realize how myopic politics (politics in the narrow sense) is sometimes. I’ve read a few political blogs (admittedly not in depth at the moment) and you already get the feeling they are circling the post-Rita analysis like vultures (I know a cliché but apt). The pundits, wonks, ideologues, and politicos probably can’t wait, if they are, to “analyze” and spin the performance of Bush, FEMA, Gov. Perry, Mayor White, and the dog catcher. Critiquing performance is important, if the goal is to improve ongoing and future performance. But too much of it is about scoring political points, and has little to do with the human lives involved. That’s my political rant for now. The storm is approaching, and maybe approaching faster than originally predicted.

If the wind doesn’t pick up much in the next couple of hours and the rain hasn’t started, we’ll probably walk the dog one more time and check in with the neighbors. Then fill the bathtub with water, secure the back shutters, settled in with a good book, and wait.

The curtains belly in the waking room.
Sails are round with holding, horned at top,
and net a blue bull in the wind: the day.
They drag the blunt hulls of my heels awake
and outrigged by myself through morning seas.
If I do land, let breakfast harbor me.

–Alan Dugan, Landfall

Live from Houston: Friday Morning

2005-09-23T06:29:00.000-07:00

It’s Friday morning. The sky is blue with some high wispy clouds, and there is a slight breeze ruffling the leaves. It’s hard to imagine that a hurricane is approaching.

But it is. And it is still tracking to the east. However, a couple of models show it tracking back west or even making landfall to the east and looping back toward Houston. Despite all our science and technology nature is still uncertainty.

And so is life. And life can be sad and tragic. The news is reporting a truly tragic story. A bus carrying elderly evacuees from Houston caught fire on I-45 just south of Dallas, and they think about 20 people died. How horrible – and how horrible for those people hunkered down at home or stuck on the freeway wondering if it was their loved one on the bus.

The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
– T.S. Elliot, Preludes

Live From Houston: Pre-Hurricane Party

2005-09-22T23:13:00.000-07:00

I’m back from our Pre-Hurricane Party. Our neighbor’s sister is on vacation in England, so she went over and cleaned out her sister’s freezer, since she feared everything would go bad. Her husband grilled up some chicken and sausage. We brought over some tuna steak and a bottle of red wine. Other neighbors brought beer.

We were a diverse group. A Republican sculptor (if you believe the Bush/Cheney 04 bumper sticker on the back of his pick up truck) and his wife—they own several cats and currently have 2 stray dogs. A contractor originally form Easton, PA, wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and his wife – by the way they own a dog named Shelia. A sales manager from an international shipping company, who is pet-less and new to the block. And our hosts, a graphic designer and her musician husband who have 4 dogs and several cats. And my wife and myself—we have a dog and a cat.

We ate good and drank some – a nice break from 24-hour hurricane news and prep. Our host has a very nice music room lined with guitars, records, and CDs. We listened to some Wilco, Radiohead, Peter Gabriel, and the Police. And for those brief moments of melodic intensity it felt pretty good to be alive. Maybe being reminded of the fragileness of life makes life more real, more worth living.

The threats are real, but there is only so much you can do. And sitting around worrying doesn’t seem to help much. You have to live life, and isn’t this what community is for—safety in numbers, mutual help, shared experiences and friendship? Plus, I think, and I may regret this in 24-hours, it is better than this…

I would hate to be caught on the highway by the Hurricane. And this is still going on tonight even with the contra flow traffic patterns. The news is still showing, at 1:00 AM on Friday, bumper to bumper traffic – a stream of red tail lights going no where…

Every street-lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

--T.S. Elliot, Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Live from Houston: Riding The Storm Out

2005-09-22T16:52:00.000-07:00

Well. I’m still here in Houston. I’m about 60 miles inland on high ground in the Heights, one of the highest points in Houston, and we are well stocked with food and water, and other emergency supplies. I’ve spent the day moving those supplies to a downstairs shower stall that is tiled on three sides and under the stairway, so they should be fairly safe. We’ve move all our plants, outdoor furniture, and the porch swing into the garage so they don’t become flying projectiles.

I’ve taped the windows, which considering the force of hurricane winds seems futile, but it makes us little humans feel like we are doing something to protect ourselves. And it does cut down on the windows shattering, but they’ll still break.

I have to say that Katrina was a wake up call and, thankfully, because of that hurricane I had already stocked up on food and water and had gotten other emergency supplies. I suggest everyone, no matter where you are, do the same – you just never know.

The evacuation has been messy, and I feel for those thousands stuck on the highway in 100 degree heat – yes, it’s that hot here. And there is no gas anywhere. I have a full tank if we decide to bug out, and you never know now that they have put the contra flow plans in place on I-45 North and I-10 South – traffic may clear up, but you’d have to go a long way to find a place stay. Hotels all over Texas are booked. And two families in our neighbor tried to leave. One family never made it out of Houston, and another headed out to Austin via some back roads, but then got stuck in traffic and didn’t move for 2 hours. Both families came back and are staying.

As of now, it looks like the storm has weakened since yesterday – I was a little panicked then. Plus it seems to be tracking to the east of Houston, which is good news for us. But we are still in the “cone of possibility,” so we still have be prepared.

We have several neighbors staying and we are checking in on each other and helping each other – there is real sense of neighbor cohesion, which gives you, maybe falsely, a little extra sense of security. You know you are not in this alone.

And I have to give praise to the local news stations here – usually they are, well, pretty lame. But this is thier moment. They have been broadcasting 24-hours a day since yesterday. They have there flaws, but they are providing good information and the weather people have been very good and surprisingly calm.

The local officials, especially Mayor White and County Judge Robert Eckels, have been very good and are giving regular news conferences. The contra flow traffic plan was not part of the original evacuation plan (maybe it should have been and I’m sure it will be in the future), but they it put together with TXDOT officials on the fly. They have been evacuating the elderly and sick for several days using buses and planes. I think people learned something from Katrina.

And I think the local politicians are really trying to cover all the bases, and I hate to be cynical there is probably a little CYA as well – but if it benefits the people, more power to them. Also, there have been some mixed signals from the pols. I think the plan was to get all of the people in the costal/storm surge areas out first – thus the mandatory evacs today, yesterday and Tuesday. And this has happened – I think people have been scared by Katrina and are heeding the warnings. Unfortunately, you can’t stop people from Houston also leaving and that has caused some of the traffic jams and some tension between officials from costal counties and Houston and Harris County. And some pols, like Governor Perry and a local councilmen were basically indicating to people if you can get out then get out regardless of where you are. While other officials were saying you should “run from the water and hide from the wind,” suggesting if you are not in a flood zone or live in a trailer home or other weak structure, it may be safer to stay put. But who can blame people for leaving, especially yesterday when a huge Cat 5 was heading right for Houston – I know I was really worried.

I’ll keep you posted as long as I can. I figure we will lose power. For now, we are trying to keep a sense of normalcy. I just got back from walking my dog. (The streets are eerily quiet expect for the occasionally sound of a band saw ripping plywood). My wife baked scones – we are trying to use food that will spoil in the fridge but keep once cooked, so we have also hard boiled eggs and grilled some chicken that should be good for a day or so. One of our neighbors is grilling up some chicken and sausage, and several of us are getting together for a pre-hurricane dinner. We are hunkering down and hoping for the best.

Should we "modify existing jurisdictional authority to give the Pentagon functional first-responder status?"

2005-09-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

Daniel Henniger at the WSJ also wonders if the military should become the first responders or “movers” in a disaster like Katrina:

The question raised by the Katrina fiasco--and by the Pentagon's new Homeland Defense Strategy to protect against WMD attack--is whether the threat from madmen and nature is now sufficiently huge in its potential horror and unacceptable loss that we should modify existing jurisdictional authority to give the Pentagon functional first-responder status. Should we repeal or modify the Posse Comitatus Act so homicidal thugs have more to fear than the Keystone Kops? Should a governor be able to phone the Defense Secretary direct, creating a kind of "yellow-light authority" and cutting out the Homeland Security or FEMA middleman? Should presidential initiative extend beyond the Insurrection Act?

Instinct says the answer is forever no. Survival suggests we had better talk about it.

Read the whole piece, apparently the military was preparing a week before the storm:

According to accounts provided by several sources involved with preparations for Katrina, the Pentagon began tracking the storm when it was still just a number in the ocean on Aug. 23, some five days before landfall in Buras, La. As the storm approached, senior Pentagon officials told staff to conduct an inventory of resources available should it grow into a severe hurricane. Their template for these plans was the assistance DoD provided Florida last year for its four hurricanes.

And a week earlier than this, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued an executive order delegating hurricane decision authority to the head of the Northern Command, Adm. Timothy J. Keating. Four days later, as the tropical storm soon to be named Katrina gathered force, Adm. Keating acted on that order.

Before the hurricane arrived in New Orleans, Adm. Keating approved the use of the bases in Meridien, Miss., and Barksdale, La., to position emergency meals and some medical equipment; eventually the number of emergency-use bases grew to six. And before landfall, Adm. Keating sent military officers to Mississippi and Louisiana to set up traditional coordination with their counterparts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As well, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ordered the movement of ships into the Gulf.

By the Pentagon's account, it carried out these preparations without any formal Katrina-related request from FEMA or other authorities. The personnel behind the massive military effort now on display in Louisiana--airlift evacuation, medical, supply, and the National Guard--was on alert a week before the hurricane.

Another sign that people are thinking the military may be best suited for dealing with a disaster of this magnitude is that embattled FEMA head, Michael Brown has been replaced as the head of the Feds onsite relief efforts by Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad. W. Allen.

However, Henniger does bring up the important issue of our long held federalist traditions. States do have a role here and can serve as a balance against the feds exercising too much power. And we should be careful about rushing judgments and solutions, because that is what created the Department of Homeland Security, which may turnout to be too unwieldy to respond to the threats it was created to handle. Though it seems a more streamlined response with a clear chain of command would save more lives.

However, FEMA seems to have done an acceptable job dealing with smaller disasters in the past, so what are the chances of another disaster of this scale occurring? There are several other cities potentially at risk from major disasters, manmade and/or natural. And I've never been comfortable with the "hundred-year-storm (or flooding)" or "once-in-a-life-time" mentality, since neither nature nor our enemies seem to work on that schedule. I've already been in New York on 9/11, witnessed Katrina and been at ground zero for many of her evacuees, and seen two major Mississippi River floods (1973 and 1993) in my home state of Missouri, and don’t forget the tsunami, and many other disasters that I haven' been directly involved in—that already seems like enough for one lifetime, but I doubt it will be. So I think it would be wise to err on the side of preparedness (individuals should also do their own preparing). However, there are limited recourses and many demands on those resources. So we have to make choices and find a reasonable way to balance the risks with the costs.

I hope we can get past the partisan bickering long enough to ask the tough questions and develop real solutions. In the meantime, I’m going to restock my own disaster preparedness kit.

Declaring an Emergency: Supplementing the Assistance or Coordinating the Administration of Releif?

2005-09-07T21:11:00.000-07:00

I’m no expert in the arcane realm of administrative law that runs federal agencies, but I’ve been trying to make sense of exactly what in means to have a state of emergency declared and what it means for federal authority over state and local officials.

Based on this timeline (though from a lefty site it seems, based on the supporting documentation/links, pretty accurate in regards to timing of certain key events before Katrina):

1) On Friday, August 26th Governor Blanco declares a State of Emergency in Louisiana

2) On Saturday, August 27th, 5 AM, Hurricane Katrina is upgraded to a Category 3

3) On Saturday, August 27th, Governor Blanco asks President Bush to declare a State of Emergency

4)On Saturday, August 27th, President Bush declares a State of Emergency for Louisiana – 2 days before the storm hits

At this point, what if anything changed in regards to federal authority? First, lets look at Blanco’s request:

“I have determined that this incident is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and affected local governments, and that supplementary Federal assistance is necessary to save lives, protect property, public health, and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a disaster. I am specifically requesting emergency protective measures, direct Federal Assistance, Individual and Household Program (IHP) assistance, Special Needs Program assistance, and debris removal.”

She is admitting that responding to the coming hurricane will be beyond the ability of state and local government, but only wants supplemental help. Does this mean she would still control the state’s response? She goes on to say:

“I request Direct Federal assistance for work and services to save lives and protect property…In accordance with 44 CFR § 206.208, the State of Louisiana agrees that it will, with respect to Direct Federal assistance:

1. Provide without cost to the United States all lands, easement, and rights-of-ways necessary to accomplish the approved work.
2. Hold and save the United States free from damages due to the requested work, and shall indemnify the Federal Government against any claims arising from such work;
3. Provide reimbursement to FEMA for the non-Federal share of the cost of such work in accordance with the provisions of the FEMA-State Agreement; and
4. Assist the performing Federal agency in all support and local jurisdictional matters.In addition, I anticipate the need for debris removal, which poses an immediate threat to lives, public health, and safety.”

Still this does not make it clear who will be in charge?

Now let’s look at Bush’s declaration:

“The President today declared an emergency exists in the State of Louisiana and ordered Federal aid to supplement state and local response efforts in the parishes located in the path of Hurricane Katrina beginning on August 26, 2005, and continuing.
The President's action authorizes the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to coordinate all disaster relief efforts which have the purpose of alleviating the hardship and suffering caused by the emergency on the local population, and to provide appropriate assistance for required emergency measures, authorized under Title V of the Stafford Act, to save lives, protect property and public health and safety, or to lessen or avert the threat of a catastrophe.”

This says the feds are to supplement state and local efforts, yet it also authorizes Department of Homeland Security and FEMA to coordinate all relief efforts caused by the storm. Does this mean that Feds authority starts the minute the storm hits? Does this mean they should be assisting with and/or coordinating with first responders as well as all following efforts? Does it mean that once the storm hits they have authority over state and local agencies? Does it make sense that to accomplish this legal obligation, if that is what it is, planning prior to the event is required by the Feds? (I’m thinking specifically of short term planning in the 2 days prior to the storm, and I’m not saying it didn’t happen.)

Both the governor’s statement and Bush’s statements provide no clear indication of who is in charge, are very formal and governed by the Stafford Act, which I’ve just read.

Here are a few of the more relevant sections (all emphasis added):

5143. COORDINATING OFFICERS {Sec. 302}

a. Appointment of Federal coordinating officerImmediately upon his declaration of a major disaster or emergency, the President shall appoint a Federal coordinating officer to operate in the affected area.
b. Functions of Federal coordinating officer In order to effectuate the purposes of this Act, the Federal coordinating officer, within the affected area, shall--
1. make an initial appraisal of the types of relief most urgently needed;
2. establish such field offices as he deems necessary and as are authorized by the President;
3. coordinate the administration of relief, including activities of the State and local
governments, the American National Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Mennonite Disaster Service, and other relief or disaster assistance organizations, which agree to operate under his advice or direction, except that nothing contained in this Act shall limit or in any way affect the responsibilities of the American National Red Cross under the Act of January 5, 1905, as amended (33 Stat. 599) [36 U.S.C. §§ 1 et seq.]; and;
4. take such other action, consistent with authority delegated to him by the President, and consistent with the provisions of this Act, as he may deem necessary to assist local citizens and public officials in promptly obtaining assistance to which they are entitled.;
5. State coordinating officer When the President determines assistance under this Act is necessary, he shall request that the Governor of the affected State designate a State coordinating officer for the purpose of coordinating State and local disaster assistance efforts with those of the Federal Government.

Here it seems that the individual appointed to run the federal efforts during a disaster is charged with “coordinating” relief efforts but “assisting” in obtaining post-disaster assistance. What isn’t clear to me is what the difference is? If I’m reading this correctly, this official is to organize federal, state, local, and volunteer agencies during the immediate relief efforts. Then help citizens and local officials apply for monetary and material aid for recovery. But this is not clear, and assisting and coordinating can be very different things.

§ 5170. PROCEDURE FOR DECLARATION {Sec. 401}

All requests for a declaration by the President that a major disaster exists shall be made by the Governor of the affected State. Such a request shall be based on a finding that the disaster is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capabilities of the State and the affected local governments and that Federal assistance is necessary. As part of such request, and as a prerequisite to major disaster assistance under this Act, the Governor shall take appropriate response action under State law and direct execution of the State's emergency plan. The Governor shall furnish information on the nature and amount of State and local resources which have been or will be committed to alleviating the results of the disaster, and shall certify that, for the current disaster, State and local government obligations and expenditures (of which State commitments must be a significant proportion) will comply with all applicable cost-sharing requirements of this Act. Based on the request of a Governor under this section, the President may declare under this Act that a major disaster or emergency exists.
(Pub. L. 93-288, title IV, § 401, as added Pub. L. 100-707, title I, § 106(a)(3), Nov. 23, 1988, 102 Stat. 4696.)

In conjunction with the request to declare an emergency, it seems clear, at least in this section, that the Governor still has a responsibility to execute state emergency plans

§ 5170a. GENERAL FEDERAL ASSISTANCE {Sec. 402}

In any major disaster, the President may--
1. direct any Federal agency, with or without reimbursement, to utilize its authorities and the resources granted to it under Federal law (including personnel, equipment, supplies, facilities, and managerial, technical, and advisory services) in support of State and local assistance efforts;
2. coordinate all disaster relief assistance (including voluntary assistance) provided by Federal agencies, private organizations, and State and local governments;
3. provide technical and advisory assistance to affected State and local governments for--
A. the performance of essential community services;
B. issuance of warnings of risks and hazards;
C. public health and safety information, including dissemination of such information;
D. provision of health and safety measures; and
E. management, control, and reduction of immediate threats to public health and safety; and
4. assist State and local governments in the distribution of medicine, food, and other consumable supplies, and emergency assistance.
(Pub. L. 93-288, title IV, § 402, as added Pub. L. 100-707, title I, § 106(a)(3), Nov. 23, 1988, 102 Stat. 4696.)

Here it seems after the emergency declaration the president can choose whether the federal role will be in support, to coordinate, or assist.

§ 5170b. ESSENTIAL ASSISTANCE {Sec. 403}

a. In generalFederal agencies may on the direction of the President, provide assistance essential to meeting immediate threats to life and property resulting from a major disaster, as follows:
1. Federal resources, generallyUtilizing, lending, or donating to State and local governments Federal equipment, supplies, facilities, personnel, and other resources, other than the extension of credit, for use or distribution by such governments in accordance with the purposes of this Act.
2. Medicine, food, and other consumablesDistributing or rendering through State and local governments, the American National Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Mennonite Disaster Service, and other relief and disaster assistance organizations medicine, food, and other consumable supplies, and other services and assistance to disaster victims.
3. Work and services to save lives and protect propertyPerforming on public or private lands or waters any work or services essential to saving lives and protecting and preserving property or public health and safety, including--
A. debris removal;
B. search and rescue, emergency medical care, emergency mass care, emergency shelter, and provision of food, water, medicine, and other essential needs, including movement of supplies or persons;
C. clearance of roads and construction of temporary bridges necessary to the performance of emergency tasks and essential community services;
D. provision of temporary facilities for schools and other essential community services;
E. demolition of unsafe structures which endanger the public;
F. warning of further risks and hazards;
G. dissemination of public information and assistance regarding health and safety measures;
H. provision of technical advice to State and local governments on disaster management and control; and
I. reduction of immediate threats to life, property, and public health and safety.
4. Contributions Making contributions to State or local governments or owners or operators of private nonprofit facilities for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of this subsection.
b. Federal share The Federal share of assistance under this section shall be not less than 75 percent of the eligible cost of such assistance.

c. Utilization of DOD resources

1. General rule During the immediate aftermath of an incident which may ultimately qualify for assistance under this title or title V of this Act [42 U.S.C. §§ 5170 et seq. or 5191 et seq.], the Governor of the State in which such incident occurred may request the President to direct the Secretary of Defense to utilize the resources of the Department of Defense for the purpose of performing on public and private lands any emergency work which is made necessary by such incident and which is essential for the preservation of life and property. If the President determines that such work is essential for the preservation of life and property, the President shall grant such request to the extent the President determines practicable. Such emergency work may only be carried out for a period not to exceed 10 days.

Here it seems that the president is given fairly broad powers to provide assistance in an emergency. Yet, as a general rule, military assistance should be requested by the governor.

What is missing from this very brief analysis is the accepted, or precedent, for the way these laws are general interpreted. If there is an expert in this area, please comment.

Despite my lack of expertise, it seems to me that the Stafford Act does not make it clear who is in charge after the president declares a state of emergency. It does seem the federal government can assume a fairly strong leadership role to direct and coordinate efforts in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, once a state of emergency has been declared. However, it’s not clear that it is required by law, even if it is expected by citizens, or that state and local officials surrender their control.

Once the finger pointing stops (if it does and yes, I’m guilty of it) and people look to improve our response to the next disaster (if that is possible in light of mother nature’s power) I would encourage lawmakers to not only re-examine who responds, but also the laws for declaring states of emergencies and establishing chains of command in a major disaster—because ponderous bureaucratic rules seem to lead to ponderous bureaucratic responses.

"A large military, combined-services unit, trained and equipped specifically for large cataclysmic events"

2005-09-07T09:26:00.000-07:00

Email of the Day…from a conservative historian friend of mine, who I have been discussing this with…

First, every citizen should take responsibility for evacuating and/or preparing for disaster instead of waiting for someone in authority to make their decisions for them. Secondly, an emergency deployment division could work very well if the commander has broad authority to act without fear of reprimand, dismissal, criminal prosecution, or litigation (all within reason, whatever that is.) A competent general, properly equipped and prepared, would have put his assets in the area by the next morning, suppressed the looters, rescued victims, and dropped in limited food, water, and medical supplies.

A large military, combined-services unit, trained and equipped specifically for large cataclysmic events (heck, St. Helens near Seattle should be added to the list) could accomplish things that would boggle the mind.

I think this pretty much sums up what needs to be done post-Katrina. As shown by the quick and efficient response of the Coast Guard, Emergency Management and Response should be turned over to the military and taken out of the hands of ineffective bureaucrats in Washington.

"The memo politely ended, 'Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities.'"

2005-09-06T21:39:00.000-07:00

I’ve been trying to hold back, but the more I read about the failures of Michael Brown and FEMA the angrier I get, especially after reading this about a Michael Brown memo documenting FEMA’s slow response:

“The government’s disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security employees to the region — and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents.”

Why the hell, with a Category 5 Hurricane about to slam into New Orleans, where these people not dispatched BEFORE the hurricane hit. These people should have been in Houston, Memphis, Oxford, MS, Baton Rouge – any number of cities out of the direct path of Katrina but within striking distance so they could be on the scene as soon as possible. Instead, they weren’t deployed until several hours AFTER a PREDICTED category 5 hurricane, and then given two days to get there. This was set up to fail before it got started.

“Brown said that among duties of these employees was to ‘convey a positive image’ about the government’s response for victims.”

Where they just supposed to be PR flacks or where they suppose to manage recovery and rescue efforts?

“Before then, FEMA had positioned smaller rescue and communications teams across the Gulf Coast. "

Where were they positioned? Was anyone positioned in New Orleans’ designated emergency shelters? Where they communicating information to FEMA? Because FEMA chief Michael Brown didn’t seem to know what was going on.

“He [Brown] proposed sending 1,000 Homeland Security Department employees within 48 hours and 2,000 within seven days.

Knocke [Homeland Security spokesman] said the 48-hour period suggested for the Homeland employees was to ensure they had adequate training. 'They were training to help the life-savers,' Knocke said.

Employees required a supervisor’s approval and at least 24 hours of disaster training in Maryland, Florida or Georgia. 'You must be physically able to work in a disaster area without refrigeration for medications and have the ability to work in the outdoors all day,' Brown wrote.

What the f*%K? These people weren’t trained yet? In post 9/11 America, Homeland Security employees assigned to respond quickly to either a terrorist attack or a natural disaster are trained and cleared for medical conditions AFTER the emergency occurs. Shouldn’t this have been done as a normal course of business, and then shouldn’t people be assigned to their duties instead of asking for a supervisor’s approval? Who runs an organization like this?

This is not a partisan issue. This is an issue of competence vs. incompetence, an issue of being prepared for a major emergency, man-made or natural, vs. being unprepared, an issue of national security. And the cabinet-level agency charged with domestic national security, the Department of Homeland Security, has failed.

One federal agency deserves praise for their fast, brave, can-do response the United States Coast Guard. Let’s put the Coast Guard in charge of FEMA – maybe something would get done right (at least they have training).

OK enough with the finger pointing, which accomplishes little at this point, but when I see what happened I just get angry.

"...along with state and federal partners, and voluntary agencies.”

2005-09-06T16:20:00.000-07:00

It looks like FEMA might finally be getting it together, but now that Rove has taken over Federal Emergency Image Management Agency, please don’t accept everything FEMA says it’s doing at face value, and be leery of statements like, “FEMA, along with state and federal partners, and voluntary agencies.” I’m not a conspiracy theorist, just a healthy skeptic of political spin.

For example, this from a FEMA Press Release on 9/4:

"Even as progress is being made, we know that victims are still out there and we are working tirelessly to bring them the help they need," said Brown. "FEMA and the entire federal government, is deploying every resource available to treat wounds, aid the suffering and protect and preserve lives. We will not rest until every need is met.

Brown, along with state and federal partners, and voluntary agencies, is holding press briefings twice a day to provide updates on response efforts. To date:...

As of yesterday, 308 shelters in nine states had a total population of 94,000.”

If other areas receiving evacuees are anything like Houston, most of this is being done by the Red Cross, local officials, churches, and faith-based charities, not FEMA…though FEMA works with the Red Cross, and might have some coordinating function, but many of the smaller shelters seemed to have been set up spontaneously by local groups. To be fair, several other items listed on this press release seem like operations that would have more FEMA involvement. However, I also saw Chertoff stating the 300-shelters claim in an interview.

As a side note, also, from this press release:

“Affected individuals in declared counties can register online for disaster assistance at www.fema.gov or call FEMA's toll-free registration line 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) - TTY 800-462-7585, hours. Victims are encouraged to register on-line due to the possibility of high call volume.”

Does FEMA realize many victims have no electricity, let alone a computer, or internet access, but they are encouraged to apply for FEMA aid via computer? Thank goodness folks are donating laptops for use at the Astrodome.

Also on the FEMA website there is a FEMA Slideshow. It shows two photos from Houston, one inside the Astrodome and one of the stockpile of donated clothing, both with the credit “FEMA Photo.” I’m no expert on how FEMA operates, and I’m sure they have some bureaucratic oversight role in what is going on in Houston. But from my two days volunteering at Reliant City and from local news reports it seems that the huge evacuee centers set up in Houston were due to the quick response of Mayor White, the Red Cross, Houston and Harris County officials, Harris County Citizen Corps (an offshoot of Freedom Corp, which might prove to be one of Bush’s best post 9/11 ideas--the Harris County chapter at least responded faster and more efficiently than FEMA), average Houston citizens, the Salvation Army, Star of Hope shelter, local businesses and churches, etc. I have yet to see or hear from one FEMA official here in Houston.

Not that FEMA isn’t finally doing something, but with the Bush Administration’s apparent strategy of shifting all the blame to local officials (not that they don’t deserve it as well) and away from their own poor response, watch out for them also trying to take credit for all the amazing responses of state and local governments around the country, and more importantly of volunteer organizations and private citizens.

Delta Blues

2005-09-06T13:02:00.000-07:00

An oddly poignant political cartoon.

Re: Out of a Clear Blue Sky

2005-09-03T23:30:00.000-07:00

The AmbviaBlog has a couple of great posts.

After reading all the annoying blah, blah, on various political blogs right and left about who to blame for the aftermath of Katrina, both sides lining up lock step, the lefties bashing Bush, the righties bashing the lefties for bashing Bush and posting ponderous defenses of his inaction (yes I have my opinions and frustration but they don’t seem very necessary now and are probably pretty raw and ill informed), I read this little gem.

And then there is this amazing post on still being haunted by 9/11 (go read the whole thing first), which inspired a lengthy response that I decided to post here as well:

Amba,

I understand completely, though I don’t think I ever totally “moved on.” I still get very emotional when I see images from that day. (I like that you put that phrase in quotes; it is in so many ways an inane phrase).

I was working in New York then, and that day I was, as I had been for several weeks, pretty emotionally raw because my wife had nearly bled to death after a bungled operation at Lenox Hill Hospital. So those two events and the strong emotions involved will always be linked.

I still remember the bus ride into New York the morning of 9/11. There was a low fog in the fields along Route 29 as it rose out of the Delaware River Valley and away from Lambertville, NJ. I still remember what I wrote in my journal early that day:

His voice was low fog in a field
Half water, half air suspended

By the time the bus was in sight of the Towers the sun was up and the sky clear. The Towers rising over the New Jersey skyline were always the first sign we were close to the City. Then two days later as I went into work, really to just be in New York to show sympathy and support, the first thing I saw as we approached the city was the smoke towering over the skyline.

And now this, just 300 miles away…where I have several booksellers friends I work with (so far I’ve heard from 2 and about a 3rd and they are fine, but there are still a few folks I haven’t heard from yet) in a city I’ve grown to love after visiting it regularly for business, a city that though very different from New York in ways reminds me of New York – New Orleans even has it’s own Brooklyn-like accent, the “yat” accent, when you hear it, you would swear the person was from Brooklyn or North Jersey.

Now with the destruction along the Gulf coast, all the emotions I had after 9/11 have come back full force.

When I volunteered yesterday at Reliant Arena helping evacuees as they came off the buses, the glazed look in their eyes, their slumped shoulders and slow walk reminded me of New Yorkers in the days after 9/11 when the sadness in the air was literally tangible. Yet this is worse…think of 9/11 New York times 10. The scale of the human toll is unimaginable. Thousands of people were arriving with only the clothes on their back, and maybe a few personal items shoved into a trash bag or a single suit case.

I watched one woman pull out a handful of Polaroids and snapshots from a bag. She wasn’t looking at them so much as feeling them to make sure they—some of her last possessions in this world—were really there. Writing about it now, I’m reminded of the way people clung to the photos of loved ones missing after 9/11, posting them desperately around the city.

And yet even with the massiveness of this tragedy and 9/11, one thinks of even worse tragedies—the Holocaust, last year’s tsunami with an estimated 23,000 dead, surviving the sieges of Stalingrad and Leningrad, Rwanda, the massacre of the Armenians, Rwanda, Darfur, the Rape of Nanking—not to diminish the tragedies of Katrina or 9/11 but to realize how vulnerable we all are, even we who live in the United States, who live in such safety and who, like me, often think we wont suffer such things—but we do, and maybe we are, somehow, more human for it.

All the best,

David

WWL-TV New Orleans

2005-09-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

Once again, I want to praise WWL for their on-going, nonstop coverage of the situation in New Orleans. They have moved to Baton Rogue, borrowed studios from various other stations including Louisana Public TV, and provided what I think is the best coverage of the situation. Both their live feed and their blog are provided information and coverage not found anywhere else. These folks should get a special Emmy award.

With everything going on it seems odd to focus in on a news organization, but it's important to get good information and these folks are providing it, even though there own lives and homes have been disrupted.

Once again, be sure to give to the Red Cross or the relief charity of your choice.

Volunteering at Reliant Arena

2005-09-02T21:29:00.000-07:00

Spent the day down at Reliant Arena, which is in Reliant Park where the Astrodome is located. They have set up a temporary shelter there now that the Astrodome is full. I started out working in the temporary staging area where they were putting people as they got off the buses. We directed them to seats, got them food and water, handed out blankets, collected trash, whatever was needed. Then they got registered and waited for clothes, showers, and then to be moved on to a place with cots. I also sorted clothes for awhile. The response from Houstonians has been heart warming. The efforts seem to be totally run and staffed by volunteers, even the doctors and nurses. The only paid staff was probably the police and firemen.

The people are coming basically with the clothes on their back and the few items they can shove in a garbage bag. They are tired and weary, but are also calm and patience, (and probably just stunned and wiped out), no one was causing trouble, and they were very appreciative of the help. People had lots of questions -- one the big ones "When can I take a shower?,” which was coming.

I'll probably go back over the weekend...they are going to need volunteers 24/7 for days if not weeks. I'm not sure if there is a stage 2 plan in place to help people long term (but if FEMA is involved, based on their current performance, I doubt it ). It's going to be probably months before they can go back to New Orleans, if they do. I have a feeling many will stay in Texas. In and around Houston alone they estimate there are 100,000 evacuees, from those just arriving to those who left before the storm hit. They plan on opening Reliant Center as a third large shelter and then the George R. Brown Convention Center.

One of the saddest things was the lost children area where the they have volunteers playing with kids who can't find there parents.

The whole thing is both heart breaking, yet the way people can pull together in a crisis is heartwarming -- rather cliché but apt (and I'm too tired for details).

Also, I have to give kudos to local Houston officials and Mayor White for really stepping up to the plate and providing some semblance of leadership in this crisis, unlike the President who, in my opinion, is failing on that front. And thanks to all the citizens of the Houston-area who have opened their city to those in need, opened their hearts and wallets, and given their time.

Please donate what you can to the relief charity of your choice. Here is a link to the Houston Red Cross.

I leave you with this…

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. --John Donne

Astrodome Update

2005-09-02T04:54:00.000-07:00

For the safety reasons the Astrodome was closed to new refugees. Around 12,000 are now there. Officials did open up near-by Reliant Center, a large space in the Reliant Arena/Astrodome campus used for shows and conventions. Refugees are temporarily being housed there until they can be taken to other large shelters now being set up in Dallas and San Antonio.

They are currently accepting donations and volunteers. I plan on going down there today.

Asking The Right Questions

2005-09-01T22:30:00.000-07:00

Via Ambivablog:

A black conservative blogger verbalizing what I've been wondering:

"If helicopters can fly in to send us back pictures of people huddled on highways and wading through water to get to higher ground why can't we fly helicopters in to drop those people food, water, and supplies until we can get them out? "

Astrodome Closed

2005-09-01T21:35:00.000-07:00

Breaking new from Houston...

Local news stations are reporting that the Houston Fire Marshal and the Red Cross have closed the Astrodome to new refugees, leaving busloads coming to Houston with no place to go.

There is no reasons currently being given, but there is speculation that someone died, that they have already run out of hot food (fruit is apparently still available), that they have simply run out of space, and that there are not enough volunteers to handle all the people (though lots of people have tried to volunteer).

Also, the original plan was to accept from 22,000 to 25,000 refugees but apparently only 10-11,000 are now there. But none of this is confirmed. But it seems certain that it is not nearly as many people as they had originally planned for.

Just more insult and injury for these people, and poor planning. People in Houston have been lining up outside the Astordome to donate food and time and have been turned away. I do think Red Cross officials had good intentions, but planning seems short sighted.

Also, I thought post 9/11 we had been planning for handling large scale disasters – it shouldn’t matter whether it is manmade or natural. Not very comforting. I know we can’t plan for everything, that nature has a way of throwing us curve balls, but still….

Update

At 12:26 AM, local Houston news is reporting that officials at the Astrodome are now at least letting in people from the buses currently on the grounds and outside the Astrodome (about 20-30 buses). No word on what will happen to refugees still coming from the Superdome. Information seems spotty.

Update 2

12:45 AM Over 100 buses waiting outside the Astrodome. Reports are that the Fire Marshal was overruled. Still no word on what they are doing about buses still coming from New Orleans.

City of Ruins

2005-09-01T20:56:00.000-07:00

I have to return to blogging after the tragedy of Katrina, mainly because I don’t know what else to do other than donate.

So please give, and then give again:

http://www.redcross.org/

For other charities see the list compiled at Instapundit.

Some of the best coverage of the situation in the New Orleans-area is local TV-station WWL, which has been airing non-stop coverage, and New Orleans Times-Picayune, which as been publishing on the web from Baton Rouge.

Here are a couple of great appreciations of New Orleans, from very diverse sources: the National Review and the New York Times.

I can’t even express my anger at the pathetic federal response, but just compare House Speaker Dennis Hastert comments with the chaotic scenes outside the New Orleans convention center.

I have tried to be reasonable and not jump on the bashing bandwagon, but the more I see and read I just don’t understand how after 4 days the richest country in the world can’t get food and water to these people, even with the thugs and idiots disrupting things there. This is only 300 miles from my home (I drive there regularly for business) not Somalia.

I’ll leave you with this (it’s only a short snippet and written about post-9/11 New York but Springsteen’s song is vary apt).

The Ephemeral Post: Posterity or Posthistory?

2005-02-26T17:23:00.000-08:00

What will historians, literary critics, sociologists, etc. interested in the early 21st century read 200 years from now? Will they be reading blogs? Will they be able to read blogs? Are blogs too ephemeral to provide a lasting cultural record?

I’m sure there are some obsessed bloggers printing out every post, and some more tech-savvy ones backing up their blogs on CD. But what are Blogspot, Typepad, or other blog hosting services doing with all of that data? Are they backing it up for posterity sake? Will some intrepid 23rd-century historian stumble upon a cache of old servers in a warehouse and discover a trove of writing not read since it briefly flashed on a few monitors at the dawn of a new century?

At least with books, newspapers, diaries and letters a few survive for years, sometimes centuries, despite the fragile nature of the medium. There is at least something physical to hand down from one generation to next or to be stored in an attic or on a library shelf until someone discovers it.

Hopefully an astute editor is planning on publishing The Best American Blog Posts 2006 (something in vein of The Best American Essays 2004, of course, the sex blogs have beat everyone to the punch; why is that when it comes to the net, sex always seems to be leading the way?) This way there will be printed backup for the electronic backup.

Of course the value of blogs really isn’t the future, but what they provide now—a forum for debate, for discussing ideas, expressing opinions, etc. Did Orwell write because he thought all of his essays would be collected in one massive volume? Did Jefferson and Adams correspond so we could read their letters today? Though I’m sure visions of literary immortality lurk in the recesses of every writers’ mind (they are an underlying theme of Shakespeare’s sonnets, “Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.”), blogs, like most writing, is about the present. Jefferson and Adams were exchanging personal information and hammering out political differences as they related to the young republic, not writing for historians. That’s what blogs are doing—though it will be shame if all of this writing is lost to the future.

Pepys Revenge: The Blog Strikes Back

2005-02-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

The discussion over at AmbivaBlog on the literary forebears of blogging, the Blogfathers, got me thinking that despite the apparent revolutionary nature of blogging, it is in many ways old fashioned, even reactionary. The medium may be new, but the means are not.

In this era of visual images, moving pictures, and declining readership, blogs are reviving the old traditions of the written word—traditions represented by letter writing, pamphlets, broadsides, diaries, and journals.

But blogging also taps into another old tradition: the tradition of the engaged reader; the reader, like Coleridge, jotting marginalia beside important passages or copying passages and commenting on them in a journal. Something I’ve been doing since college.

In a recent Slate article (hat tip: the always astute AmbivaBlog) Josh Levin lashes out at bloggers by comparing them to rappers (for a good laugh, read the whole piece). He says, “Essentially, blogging is sampling plus a new riff. Political bloggers take a story in the news, rip out a few chunks, and type out a few comments.” This is supposed to be derogatory, but I am thinking, great. This means people are engaged readers. Why as Pattercio (hat tip: Iconic Midwest) points out is the MSM so quick to bash the very people that are taking the time to read them and are engaged enough to comment. The MSM should be happy such folks exist. (Or do they prefer us just to be docile and hand over our hard-earned cash for their product?)

This leads to another old tradition. Blogging, and political blogging in particular, is also an extension of the letter-to-the-editor and the op-ed page. But now more voices can be heard and the writer has more opportunity/space to express his or her ideas and opinions.

None of this is meant to suggest that blogging is only a reaction to the MSM. The best blogs offer original and thoughtful commentary on a variety of subjects—commentary that is often much better than anything found in the MSM.

One thing that makes blogging different from all of these traditions are links. The fact that one blog leads to another and another then to an article and so on is great—creating a web of ideas, a collective consciousness that can be tapped into at a moments notice. Books and articles can provide this as well, but not with a simple click of the mouse.

From Orwell to Althouse, from Paine to Sullivan, from the Frankfurt School to Old Town Review Chronicles, from Coleridge to Josh Corey, from Burke to the Captain’s Quarters, blogs are reviving the old traditions of the written word, the engaged reader, and informed debate. Viva las blogs!

Update: For anyone interested, some hardy soul is publishing every daily entry from Pepys diary as a daily blog post.

Blog-o-matic Blogging

2005-02-23T21:14:00.000-08:00

As anyone who has stopped by in the last couple of months has noticed, I haven’t been blogging much. I have been traveling lots for work, which means when I am home I’m playing catch up – all of which limits my blogging time. Not to mention it was keeping me up late at night, not always the healthiest of options. Though I have always thought sleep was over rated and somewhat a waste of time. If the body and mind didn’t require it, I’m not sure I would sleep; though it is nice waking up refreshed, the cares of the previous day washed away.

Despite the lull in writing that old idea-machine the mind has still been active. I’ve tried to keep up with a few favorite blogs, read books and the news, and listen to jazz – all of which require comment, of course. However, all my commenting has been taking place in the shower or on long work-related drives through Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. So what I need is some sort of blog-o-matic device that publishes my thought-posts directly to my blog. Or at the very least a device that would covert speech to digital text…or I could just try podcasting. Now that’s a scary thought, podcasting from the shower. However, podcasting while driving around the south sounds intriguing. One problem, I don’t like the sound of my own voice. That why I love the written word.

Travel Notes: More on New York & New Orleans, plus Austin & Amarillo

2005-02-06T18:30:00.000-08:00

Traveling for work has once again kept me from doing much blogging. January is particularly busy for me, I have been on the road at least a part of every week since the beginning of the year, and have a two or three more weeks of heavy traveling ahead of me. I’m not complaining, I enjoy the traveling, except it keeps me away from my wife, dog, and two cats.

In a comment to my last Travel Notes post my fellow ex-Missourian over at Iconic Midwest responded to my comments on New York and New Orleans being the quintessential American cities:

This is both right and wrong. New York & New Orleans reach unique heights that makes them truly great world cities. But that is also their problem as well. They offer an experience you could only get in America, but not a uniquely American experience. For any foreign visitor who really wants to know something about America they are much better off getting to know places like Cleveland, St. Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, Austin, etc. It is in these places that you can see the diffusion of the great urban experiences of New York and New Orleans to urban America more generally speaking.

I would agree that a foreign traveller would get a more complete understanding of America by visiting cities like St. Louis, Ceveland or Memphis (I’ll come to Austin later.) But I think it is native-born Americans who can learn the most about America from New Orleans and New York. I don’t think it is an accident that such iconic American writers as Tennesse Williams, William Faulkner, or Walt Whitman all spent a portion of their formative years in New Orleans (and Whitman, of course, spent much time in New York), or that so many writers have spent time in NYC. This is not to say that these cities are better, and this has nothing to do with the overused red state/blue state dicotohmy. But it does mean that we can learn a lot about the US from these two cities. They represent some of the essences of America in their most concentrated form.

For me one of the main charateristics of America is its unique blend of cultures and religions. No other country has been influenced by and assimilated more cultures to create a unique cultural blend than America. Interestingly in today’s New York Times Book Review Noah Feldman comments in a review essay on recent books on Islam and Terrorism:

Our constitutional combination of freedom to practice one's religion, coupled with the strong separation of church and state, has worked far better in accommodating religious diversity than anything Europe has yet dreamed up.

This diversity of both religions and cultures is best displayed in New York. And this is as the Iconic Midwestern points out then diffused through out the rest of the country: St. Louis has its Italian neighborhood, the Hill; Houston, has Tex-Mex, a China Town that should really be a Little Hanoi, because of the large Vietnamese-American population, and the intersection of Harwin and Hillcroft, where a Columbian empanada place is neighbor to a Halal Chinese Restaurant, and a Pak-Indian grocery store. But in these cities and others it seems you have to try a little harder to uncover this uniqueness, in New York it is right there on almost every street, and in New Orleans you find highlighted the pre-Ellis Island, pre-20th century version of this in the French and African influences of that city. It is by visiting these cities that one can really experience this, especially if you, like me, grew up in a small, rural Midwestern town, which, by the way, only this year got a national fast-food chain, a Subway.

If foreign travelers wanted to experience the “American-ness,” for lack of a better term, of the US, they should visit Amarillo, TX. Anchoring the Texas panhandle and the High Plains that consist of North East New Mexico, the Okalahoma panhandle, South East Colorado, and much of Kansas, Amarillo is flat, cattle and farm country. Home of the National Quarter Horse Museum, the Big Texan Restaurant, one of those places that if you eat a 72 oz. steak in an hour you get it free, and not far from the beautiful Palo Duro Canyon State Park, this is real cowboy country. The Amarillo Airport has the only security check point I’ve been through that provides boot jacks for removing cowboy boots. Amarillo was also a stop on Route 66 and is home of that all-American art installation, Cadillac Ranch. Amarillo has the only cable I’ve seen (and mind you I haven’t seen them all) that has five Christian stations. I’ve even heard some of the alt-looking kids working at Starbucks talking about seeing a Christian rock group. Yes, I did say Starbucks. Amarillo has that, two in fact, plus many other chain restaurants and stores. With its mix of cowboys, Christianity, conservative politics, corporate retail outlets, car culture, and unique Texas independence (reflected in Cadillac Ranch and the fact that this area is home of the original Alt-Country group the Flatlanders, which launched the careers of Texas/Austin musicians Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, and Butch Hancock), Amarillo in many ways reflects what many foreigners might consider American.

Music is a nice segue to Austin, where I was last week, and which is a mix of Haight-Asbury hippiness, Nashville, Dallas and well, Amarillo. But it my opinion it is much better than all four—the best damn city in Texas. Home of the University of Texas and the Texas State capitol, it has had, for years, a vibrant music scene. Austin is the only city I know that has its won music video station, Austin Music Network, and its own national music show, Austin City Limits. It prides itself on maintaining unique and independent businesses and culture(s)—characterized by their Keep Austin Weird campaign and such great businesses as Book People, one of the premier independent booksellers in the US, and Waterloo Records, one of the premier independent music retailers. Austin is the home of its very own singular phenomenon, I’ll call it the red neck hippie—just think of Willie Nelson, but I think an even better example would be the men’s room in Austin’s Continental Club. The great honk-tonker Dale Watson, who turned down corporate Nashville to stick to his Hank Williams Sr./Merle Haggard roots, is on stage playing his boot-stompin’ trucker song, Truckstop in La Grange, when I notice scrawled in black above the urinal, “Who Would Jesus Torture.” The intrepid foreign traveler who plans on visiting Austin should pack their Doc Martins, Birkenstocks, and their cowboy boots.

This week I’m off to Blytheville, AR, Oxford, MS, and Jacksonville, MS. Three more towns that will probably prove, as do Austin, Amarillo, New Orleans, and New York, that despite justified fears of US homogenization, unique cultures still thrive and survive in the US of A.

Brave Iraqis & the Illiberal Left

2005-01-30T09:42:00.000-08:00

The Iraqi people were amazing today. The reaction of some on the illiberal left (which does not make up all the left) is appalling:

Compare this from Iraqi blogger The Mesopotamian:

I bow in respect and awe to the men and women of our people who, armed only with faith and hope are going to the polls under the very real threats of being blown to pieces. These are the real braves; not the miserable creatures of hate who are attacking one of the noblest things that has ever happened to us. Have you ever seen anything like this? Iraq will be O.K. with so many brave people, it will certainly O.K.; I can say no more just now; I am just filled with pride and moved beyond words. People are turning up not only under the present threat to polling stations but also under future threats to themselves and their families; yet they are coming, and keep coming. Behold the Iraqi people; now you know their true metal. We shall never forget the meanness of these bas…s. After this is over there will be no let up, they must be wiped out. It is our duty and the duty of every decent human to make sure this vermin is no more and that no more innocent decent people are victimized.

With this from lefty blogger Oliver Willis:

When our newfound champions of democracy^TM twist themselves into pretzel knots to explain the next homicidal despot they prop up (newsflash: we don't have a very good track record with this, as a nation, but especially on the right).

Or compare this from Democracy in Iraq:

What a day it has been. I am very tired, but I am at peace, something I havn't felt in this regard before. I am happy to report that I found very few people during my post-voting trip through Baghdad who had not voted. I even got a few to "convert" and go out and vote. When confronted with the fact that staying away from voting was futile, some who had opposed the election relented, and went and made their mark.

With this from popular lefty blogger Mathew Yglesias:

Looks reasonably successful so far, no mass casualties, turnout low only in a few trouble spots. It's time to prepare for three weeks of gloating from the hawks before they realize that nothing has really changed and they return to previous hawk practice of not mentioning Iraq. The interesting thing to watch, I think, will be whether or not Shiite political unity starts to break down now that the elections are behind us.

It is amazing that when the so-called “reality”-based community is confronted with the reality of millions of Iraqi people voting they simply declare nothing really happened. Or they try to twist the events to their version of reality. Like Juan Cole who claims, “This thing was more like a referendum than an election.” By the way Juan, a referendum is determined by popular vote, so either way an historic event for Iraq. So why try to diminish it?

The “reality”-based community misunderstood what the US electorate wanted and they have failed to understand what the Iraqis wanted. It seems they are so determined to get Bush that they are willing to sacrifice the good that can come from this election. Some on the illiberal left just can’t wait for things to fall apart and Iraq to erupt in a civil war, just so they can say to Bush, “We told you so.” If they were really champions of liberalism and democracy, they would be congratulating the brave Iraqis who voted, and then be willing to work with them, and yes, work with the Bushies, to make sure the self-determination that Iraqis displayed today becomes an everyday reality. But instead on this rather historic day the Democratic leadership is talking “exit strategies.”

It would be foolish to think the road ahead for Iraqis will be easy. There is still much to accomplish: counting and finalizing the vote, choosing a president and prime minister, writing a constitution, stopping the terrorists, continuing to rebuild. But this election is a major accomplishment for the Iraqis.

It empowers the Iraqis to move forward.
It sends a signal to the terrorists that the majority of Iraqis don’t agree with their anti-democracy violence and instead want democracy and freedom.
It is a stepping stone to establishing a democratic government in Iraq.

This is not a time to gloat, nor is it a time to whine. It is time to support the Iraqi people.

Travel Notes: New Orleans & I-10 between Houston and New Orleans

2005-01-22T23:23:00.000-08:00

I was traveling for work all last week and had no time for blogging. However, I did jot down a few impression using old fashion pen and paper.

New Orleans

Walking Bourbon Street at night, I think of Baudelaire. It must be the old world charm and the aura of fin-de- siècle (or should that be post-fin-de-siècle) decadence—the revelers draped in beads, the Girls-Gone-Wild wannabes, the leering middle-aged men, the strip clubs, the bars blaring 20-year old rock music. But this is American decadence – exuberant, loud, and vociferous, not a dark 19th-century European opium den.

This is the dark heart of America – the hucksters, the shysters, the con artist, the fools easily parted with their money, the openness and vice that comes with freedom. It’s all here along the sidewalks, under the iron-work balconies, in the smoky clubs and on the sleazy stages, in the stories that could be told by the bartenders, the cops, bouncers, stripers, musicians, and the middle-aged women (accountants, school teachers, housewives) dancing and drinking hurricanes.

This, like New York City, is the most American of cities. All of our contradictions are so obvious here, even celebrated: the exuberant, hyper-capitalist decadence, genteel southern hospitality, faith and religion (witness Mardi Gras); the mix of European and African culture: Creole, Cajun, Zydeco; poor and rich, black and white – all of these are on view in this crescent-shaped bowl that hovers just below sea level. It’s not Cleveland or St. Louis or L.A. that captures our cultural gumbo, our uniqueness, but New Orleans and New York – even the names mix the old world with the promise of the new.

These are not Baudelaire’s cities. They are Walt Whitman’s.

I-10 Between Houston and New Orleans

At first, boring. The ubiquitous Burger Kings, McDonalds& Subways. Then…

A flock of white egrets rise above the Sabine River.

Casinos and Cajun food at truck stops.

I-10 rising above the Atchafalaya Basin.

At night, heading east from the Texas/Louisiana border, I pass through the eerie greenish-orangish glow of the refineries and chemical plants--swirling steam lit by hundreds of lights—a man-made nebula swirling in the stars.

Philip Levine on NPR

2005-01-15T23:26:00.000-08:00

Stuck in Saturday traffic here in Houston, I caught a nice NPR profile of poet Philip Levine. Levine talks about breath, jazz, and elegy. Plus he reads with a beautiful Charlie Parker piece playing in the background. Give it a listen.

Iran's Greatest Hope: Women & Gen X?

2005-01-15T23:12:00.000-08:00

It may be women who save Iran. Noble Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi is standing up to the Mullahs (see post below), and now, according to the Financial Times, the popular Mehr-Banoo classical music group is made up of 6 women and 4 men:

But the presence of female performers, wearing yellow scarves and long black shirts and trousers, outnumbering the men in the band, poses a direct challenge to Iran's hardliners, who would like to see greater restrictions on women.

The FT adds:

Many young women ignore the loose dresses recommended by the religious establishment and instead wear tight trousers, covered with short overcoats or flimsy cotton shirts. Their headscarves slip backwards to reveal as much hair as possible, and they wear heavy make-up.

Last summer, a Tehran police chief announced during a crackdown on women for non-observance of hijab that the arrest of "100 street supermodels" would resolve the problem. But this proved not to be the case, as many women responded with defiance.

The FT finds challenges coming not just from women but from Iran’s youth as well:

But despite their growing political strength, the conservatives face a challenge in the social arena. Their main source of support comes from the traditional sections of Iranian society. But there is widespread dissatisfaction with the regime among Iranians under 35 years old, who make up about 70 per cent of the population of 70m.

Many are highly educated and with access to internet and satellite TV, making attempts at censorship futile.

"The mental gap between the rulers and young people is now between 100 and 150 years," said Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, a former vice-president who resigned in protest at parliament's conservative shift.

Maybe Iran’s MTV-generation will be able to really rock the vote. Is their anything we can do to help?

Shirin Ebadi, Torture, and Bad PR

2005-01-15T21:29:00.000-08:00

Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi last week became the attorney for “Ruzbeh Mir-Ebrahimi, the latest target of the Iranian government's high-profile prosecution of webloggers and journalists.” Now, the Revolutionary Court of Iran has summoned her to appear for questioning. But Shirin has challenged the legality of that court order. The State Department did take notice:

Louis Fintor, a State Department spokesman, said the department was monitoring the case, which appeared to be part of a broader campaign by Tehran.

"The continued harassment and arrest of proponents of moderation, pluralism, and political reform -- as evidenced not only by this incident, but also by the recent Iranian decision to close several reform newspapers -- are in violation of international standards of human rights," Fintor said.

Not suprisingly, Iranian President Khatami, siting Abu Ghraib, rejected the United State’s legitimacy in questioning Iranian human rights abuses:

"Now they must respond to the crimes committed in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and their relentless killing of people in all parts of the world in the name of freedom and democracy and the support they provide to the brutalities and atrocities committed against the Palestinian people," he said.

Abu Ghraid and Palestine are not excuses for ongoing abuses in Iran, but unfortunately they provide convenient rhetorical cover for the Mullahs and other like-minded regimes. Even if one could justify the use of torture, the negative PR impact of such practices should be enough to stop its use. The U.S. should, and usually does hold itself to a higher standard, and does have and up hold higher human rights standards than Iran. But Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and other recent cases of torture hurt those standards and the way the U.S. is perceived in the world. Granted, those who view us as “the Great Satan” don’t need much ammunition to begin with. But why give them, and others, more. You would think that the Bushies who effectively use the media here, could at the very least figure out that torture equals negative, and damning, press coverage that undermines everything we stand for and everything we are trying accomplish in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Iraq: Poor Planning, Elections, Hope, and Entering Phase V (Post-Election Iraq)

2005-01-15T11:01:00.000-08:00

Even Neo-Coninsh intellectual standard barrier, Policy Review, has published a damning piece, by Michael E. O’Hanlon, on the Bushies’ lack of a post-invasion plan:

The problem was simply this: The war plan was seriously flawed and incomplete. Invading another country with the intention of destroying its existing government yet without a serious strategy for providing security thereafter defies logic and falls short of proper professional military standards of competence. It was in fact unconscionable.

Lest there be any doubt about the absence of a plan, one need only consult the Third Infantry Division’s after-action report, which reads: “Higher headquarters did not provide the Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) with a plan for Phase iv. As a result, Third Infantry Division transitioned into Phase iv in the absence of guidance.”

This lack of planning has lead to possible civil war in Iraq, and as Thomas Friedman argues has left us with the “least bad option” – forging ahead with elections on Jan. 30th:

We are already in a civil war in Iraq. That civil war was started by the Sunni Baathists, and their Islamist fascist allies from around the region, the minute the U.S. toppled Saddam. And they started that war not because they felt the Iraqi elections were going to be rigged, but because they knew they weren't going to be rigged.

They started the war not to get their fair share of Iraqi power, but in hopes of retaining their unfair share. Under Saddam, Iraq's Sunni minority, with only 20 percent of the population, ruled everyone. These fascist insurgents have never given politics a chance to work in Iraq because they don't want it to work. That's why they have never issued a list of demands. They don't want people to see what they are really after, which is continued minority rule, Saddamism without Saddam. If that was my politics, I'd be wearing a ski mask over my head, too.

The notion that delaying the elections for a few months would somehow give time for the "Sunni moderates" to persuade the extremists to come around is dead wrong - literally. Any delay would simply embolden the guys with the guns to kill more Iraqi police officers and to intimidate more Sunnis. It could only convince them that with just a little more violence, they could scuttle the whole project of rebuilding Iraq.

There is only one thing that will enable the Sunni moderates in Iraq to win the debate, and that is when the fascist insurgents are forced to confront the fact that their tactics have not only failed to prevent the elections, but have also dug the Sunnis of Iraq into an even deeper hole.

I am not sure Iraq is in a full-scale civil war, yet. The majority of the violence is still confined to 4 out of 18 provinces, the Sunnis make up only 20% of the population, and they are not all part of the terrorist groups now promoting anti-election chaos in Iraq. It is also a good sign that there was not any major retaliation by the Shiites after the assassination of Sistani’s aide. Though continued sectarian violence is almost guaranteed, and is likely to become more Sunni vs. Shiite, and less "insurgents" vs. "occupying army" after the elections.

As for a possible Shia theocracy, Iraqi blogger Decmocracy in Iraq sees this as unlikely: (Also see his interesting post on foreign influences in Iraq, and he calls the Saudis the Beverly Hillbillies of the Arab world.) :

Still the possible election of a large-scale Shia coalition has some people outside of Iraq worried that we will slide towards a theocracy like Iran. I say that it isn't going to happen.

There are many reasons for this. The first being that Iraq is too diverse to be a singular religion theocracy. Since we have so many Shias and Sunnis, it would be impossible to have a theocracy without angering the other group. It would if anything lead to a civil war, but this is very unlikely. Both sides realize that our nation is one of diversity, there are after all smaller religious groups too such as the various Christian groups, where would they be left in a theocracy?

This diversity is also ingrained in Iraq. We have lived our whole lives with other types of people. Not to mention, most of us grew up in a secular system. Saddam was a worthless man, but the Baathists were secular, at least until the end when they began trying to manipulate religions for their own use. Regardless, not only my generation, but that of my parents have grown up in an environment of secularism. I have seen my mothers pictures of her college days and the women were dressed very liberally, this continued in Iraq until the terrorists began spreading like a plague and infesting fear in the people.

So then how can people who are used to secularism accept a theocracy, or even accept a theocracy that is limited ie: one that only appeals to one religious belief? Its very unlikely, I would say impossible.

And from the Washington Post comes another bit of anecdotal hopeful news:

"Without elections, there will be tyranny," said Kadhim Hassan, a 37-year-old writer.
---
"A country will not find progress without making sacrifices," Mohammed said.

He pointed to the Iran-Iraq war and the battle in 1988 to retake the Faw peninsula on the Persian Gulf. Thousands were lost, he said, "for Saddam's moment of madness. If we lose 100 or 200 people as martyrs in the election, the sacrifice is worth it."

"This is the tax that we have to pay," added Mohammed Thamer, a poet. "We have no other option, no other solution."

"The Americans will leave," Karim said. "They will leave like the other occupiers, whether it's a short period or long."
----
In the meantime, the three men said, they would remain hopeful.

"I'm optimistic 1,000 percent," Danif exclaimed.
Karim nodded. "I'm twice as optimistic," he said.

Yassin smiled. "I'm optimistic, but I know there will be obstacles and difficulties."
He nodded to the others and said: "It's just the beginning."

And this is key. This is the beginning of a much longer process for the Iraqi people, and one that if it is to be legitimate, must have more Iraqi involvement and much less U.S. involvement. How this is to be accomplished should be the central question of the next few months. A good place to start this discussion is an amazing post by Nadezhda over at the insightful blog Liberals Against Terrorism:

The challenges ahead for the US will be two-fold. To shift the "shot calling" to whatever government in Baghdad emerges after Jan 30. And to reduce the US presence in the cities as much as possible. That means leaving the Sunni triangle to the Sunnis -- other than to harrass their ability to organize the insurgency operations. And reducing the US physical presence in other urban areas as fast as possible.

Complete withdrawal is clearly neither possible nor likely to be demanded by the new government -- they will insist on a timetable for future withdrawal, but they're not suicidal. The US should publicly embrace the notion of a timetable for withdrawal agreed with the new government and engage in publicly visible negotiations over that timetable. BTW, good PR inside Iraq for the Iraqi politicians, good fig-leaf for eventual involvement of other countries who would not be forced to be part of the US-led "multinational coalition", and good for the US, because we could stop playing the denial games for domestic consumption.
----
Bush's "peace with honor" is that America didn't cut and run but that America is coming home as the job gets done and as the Iraqis want us to depart. As we depart, we will point to some portion of Iraqis being able to start building a future, to a portion of Iraq that is emerging as an independent society, to America's continued commitment, on the basis of mutual respect between two countries to provide financial and, if requested, military support. These are the objectives of Bush's "peace with honor" as it is taking shape. I can embrace those objectives.

So can I. We need to remain focused on what is best for the Iraqi people, because it is both the right thing to do, and, in the long run, will be best for the U.S. as well.

Modern Art Deep In The Heart of Texas: The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

2005-01-12T23:05:00.000-08:00

I’ve been traveling the last couple of days and have had little time to surf the blogosphere. However, I did have a couple of hours to visit The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Yes, such a thing does exist, and it is an outstanding museum.

The building itself, completed in 2002 and designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, is a breathtaking work of art—a masterful blend of light, space, glass, water, steel, and concrete. At night, it resembles Japanese paper lanterns reflected in a still pond.

This amazing building houses an impressive collection of over 2,400 works of postwar art. One of my favorites was German artist Anselm Kiefer's lead sculpture, Book with Wings. As a booklover, it is hard not to like an angelic-like book taking flight.

Another interesting piece was Dwelling by young Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa—a whimsical, surreal black-and-white DVD that features a fleet of toy die-cast airplanes flying around a small, sparse apartment.

In conjunction with the 2005 Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show, the museum has set up Red Grooms’, Ruckus Rodeo. Commissioned for a 1976 exhibition, Grooms attended every rodeo performance of the 1975 Fort Worth Livestock Show. After designing this room-size environmental sculpture in his New York studio, Grooms assembled the Ruckus Construction Company, a group of 15 painters, sculptures, carpenters, and engineers and returned to Ft. Worth to assemble the piece. It is a Texas-size, chaotic, colorful, clownish pop-art tribute to the cowboy and his rodeo. Proof that modern art is all-American and a live and well in the Lone Star State. Well worth a visit.

As a side note, at the museum bookstore I picked In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O’Hara and American Art. I am fascinated by the interplay between the New York School poets and the Abstract Expressionists, the rich dialogue between poetry and visual art, so this should be an interesting book.

Well, I have my beautiful de Kooning
to aspire to. I think it has an orange
bed in it, more than the ear can hold.

--Frank O’Hara, Radio

Liberal Decentralization or a Sensible Centrist Federalism?

2005-01-09T23:06:00.000-08:00

With the repubs now consolidating power (NCLB, Anti-Gay Marriage amendment, etc.) and feeding at the federal trough, is it time to rethink Federalism and states rights, once a dirty concept associated with segregationist and Jim Crow? Stanford law prof Richard Thompson Ford (I guess he doesn’t want to be confused with the novelist) thinks so:

A meaningful federalism could maintain fundamental rights and centralized control over activities whose effects cross state boundaries. But it would also let the red states experience more of the consequences of their political ideology and the blue states of theirs. I can't imagine a better way to advertise the virtues of progressive policy.

The whole article is worth reading, and if the Senate’s debates over the Anti-Gay Marriage debate (Hillary talking states rights) are any indication, Federalism may be the wave of the future. De Tocqueville would be proud.

He Pulled Up To The Hydrogen Pump….

2005-01-09T08:14:00.000-08:00

It looks like automakers are finally getting serious about hydrogen-fueled cars, and it about time. Hydrogen has the potential to cut pollution and green house gases, and reduce our dependence on oil. However, we are still many years from replacing petroleum-fueled autos, but this is promising:

After a century of dependence on oil-based fuel, the auto industry is finally giving consumers a serious look at a future with little or no gasoline power. The products showing up this week in Detroit have far more corporate support than recent electricity-powered vehicles, and are advanced beyond the demonstration vehicles shown by car companies over the last few years. The fleet of fuel-cell minivans that GM maintains in Washington, for example, has limited range and must be operated by company employees.

By contrast, Honda lets almost anyone drive its FCX. In a recent feature on the automotive research online site Edmunds.com, a reviewer described picking up the FCX from a valet-parking attendant.

Hydrogen is still years away from reducing the nation's dependence on foreign oil. No one has yet figured out how to generate large amounts of hydrogen without causing as much pollution as internal-combustion engines now create, or how to pay for a nationwide distribution network. And the vehicles are prohibitively expensive; if GM's Sequel were for sale, it would cost as much as a warehouse full of
Corvettes.

Still, auto industry executives say their business is on the verge of a fundamental change. "It's a frenzy" to get out front with new technology, said Mary Ann Wright, director of such efforts at Ford. "What you're seeing is a groundswell, not really of industry pushing as much as everybody demanding that we really get serious about these solutions. . . . The market's telling us something -- they're ready for this kind of stuff. The public is aware that we can't continue to consume oil like we do."

People have sent that message in the way car companies understand best: by buying products such as the Toyota Prius, the Honda Civic Hybrid and the Ford Escape Hybrid. Rising fuel prices, instability in the Middle East and concerns about global warming have helped sustain the hybrid phenomenon, and U.S. car buyers have even turned away from the biggest SUVs in favor of smaller models.

Iran Continues Crackdown on Blogs

2005-01-08T21:01:00.000-08:00

Hodder discusses the Iran’s must recent attempts to limit free speech by requiring ISP’s to filter out blogging services. More on this subject can be found at the excellent chez Nadezhda.

Idealism, Realism, & What Do We Do Now?

2005-01-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

Over at Chronicles Dr. Emile has posted a very intelligent response to my critique of his view as conservative. Here is a excerpt but the whole post is worth reading:

My defense of the left is that it is actually acting far more grown up about terrorism than the liberal hawks are. The liberal arguments in favor of the Iraq campaign put forward by Berman, Hitchens, and Beinart are not wrong-hearted, they're wrong-headed. It simply won't work. You don't democratize a region in this manner, overnight or otherwise. There is a realism and soberness at work on the left that is actually very healthy. Furthermore, one could argue that the left's skepticism about Iraq represents a refutation of its own past fellow travelling with Stalinism, Trotskiism, and other systems of thought, including neoconservativism, which advocate violent revolution and radical destabilizing change as the necessary means to a brighter future. Perhaps by living through the disastrous flirtation with revolutionarism, the left in America learned something that the right never did about the limits of violence as a pursuance of politics by other means. Perhaps this makes the left in America more patriotic than is realized.
In this case, it is the neocons who are now the true revolutionaries - sort of pseudo-Trotskiists who want it all NOW NOW NOW, and it is the left that has embraced skepticism and realism about the limits of the use of force.

I agree, as I argued earlier, with Dr. Emile that this is a long-term process and that to assume democratization would happen overnight is naïve. As Thomas Friedman argued, (maybe slightly naively but he has a point):

This is not to say that the "liberation" of Iraq's people is impossible. But unlike in Eastern Europe - where a democratic majority was already present and crying to get out, and all we needed to do was remove the wall - in Iraq we first need to create that democratic majority.
That is what these elections are about and why they are so crucial. We don't want the kind of civil war that we have in Iraq now. That is a war of Sunni and Islamist militants against the U.S. and its Iraqi allies, many of whom do not seem comfortable fighting with, and seemingly for, the U.S. America cannot win that war. That is a civil war in which the murderous insurgents appear to be on the side of ending the U.S. "occupation of Iraq" and the U.S. and its allies appear to be about sustaining that
occupation.
The civil war we want is a democratically elected Iraqi government against the Baathist and Islamist militants. It needs to be clear that these so-called insurgents are not fighting to liberate Iraq from America, but rather to reassert the tyranny of a Sunni-Baathist minority over the majority there. The insurgents are clearly desperate that they not be cast as fighting a democratically elected Iraqi government - which is why they are desperately trying to scuttle the elections. After all, if all they wanted was their fair share of the pie, and nothing more, they would be taking part in the elections.
We cannot liberate Iraq, and never could. Only Iraqis can liberate themselves, by first forging a social contract for sharing power and then having the will to go out and defend that compact against the minorities who will try to resist it. Elections are necessary for that process to unfold, but not sufficient. There has to be the will - Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds - to forge that equitable social contract and then fight for it.

The Bushies were probably blinded by their idealistic zeal and assumed (or at least presented to the public this view) that by simply removing Saddam democracy would take root. A fatal mistake. Unfortunately, we are stuck with it. And it is my view that at this point it matters less why we went into Iraq, but is Iraq salvageable? Because to fail would be much worse. And it is also my view that some on the Left care more about bringing down Bush than trying to doing something positive for Iraq (as characterized by much of the presidential campaigning).

I would also add that I am not sure many on the Left are really comfortable with this discovery of foreign policy realism. Just witness AK's recent post at Chronicles:

The Bushies PRIMARY means of fighting the "War on Terror" is through long-standing allegiances with tyrannies possessing police apparatuses capable of crushing Islamic insurgencies, notably: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan and Pakistan. The pivotal question Morgan and other Liberal Hawks avoid, while giving nothing but "low marks" to the Bushies, is how this hypocrisy affects America's alleged fostering of democracy in the Middle East.

It seems that a realistic go-slow approach would mean dealing with such regimes, which AK seems uncomfortable doing. I agree that these governments in the long-term need to change, but I am not sure Liberal Hawks or the Bushies thought this would all happen at once. Nobody argued that the day after Saddam fell then Saudi Arabia would also become more democratic. In the end our main goal probably is to protect ourselves and others from Islamic-fascism. A long-term approach would clearly involve encouraging reform in these countries (something that seems to be happening slowly) as well as using what resources we have in locating and destroying the terrorists and their cells. As Dr. Emile commented, this is a very complicated project, but what one we must be engaged in.

Finally, Dr Emile commented:

What I advocate is total war with those who attack America (bin Ladenists, jihad internationale, those planning attacks on civilian targets in Europe, etc., who are not the "core" of the Islamic world).

Dr. Emile, unlike some, takes the threat of terrorism seriously, but just as it is easy to say, “I am for democratization”, it is easy to say, “I am against terrorism.” The challenge is how you accomplish both.

There are no easy answers, but I think to accomplish this we need both idealism (a belief that a pluralistic, democratic society is a worthy goal) and a heavy dose of realism. However, I do think that the real threat of terrorism also requires an approach that encourages changes sooner that later. Did we after 9/11 and do we now have time to wait?

Unfortunately the Bush administration has failed on this front as well. While totally focusing on Iraq, I think they failed to mount an aggressive, yet nonviolent, diplomatic campaign to promote democracy elsewhere in the Muslim world. Instead of having the discussions we are having now about Iran, they should have been going on two years ago. Could we have been putting more pressure on the Saudis, Egypt, and Pakistan to reform? Could we have done more to promote, and learn from, such Muslim democracy as Malaysia?

But these questions are now irrelevant. The question is, what do we do now? How do we stabilize Iraq and help foster a democracy there? How do we encourage reform in Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, while at the same time protecting ourselves against current terrorist’s threats?

Tsunami and the Power of TV

2005-01-04T23:30:00.000-08:00

We don’t have cable or get good reception at home, so I don’t watch TV. However, I do watch it when I travel. I’m on the road this week (Amarillo, TX – the high plains) and I’m watching tsunami coverage. The images and interviews with survivors are moving and powerful. It is one thing to read them, but actually seeing their faces, the sadness in their eyes, really personalizes and intensifies the tragedy. It reminds me of the faces I met walking through New York City after 9/11, where sadness literally weighed down the air. Yet having experienced that I can’t imagine what these people must being going through. Words fail:

Don’t sign your name
between worlds,

surmount
the manifold of meanings

trust the tearstain,
learn to live.

--Paul Celan, Glottal Stop, trans. Nikolai Popov & Heather McHugh, p.108

(ps: I started with the idea of writing a snarky commentary on how bad CNN’s title for its tsunami coverage, Turning the Tide, is, but that quickly seemed pointless and inappropriate.)

Poetry Offers A Little Solace To Tsunami Victim

2005-01-04T07:32:00.000-08:00

[India News]: Port Blair, Jan 4 : When Sadhan Neogi feels too depressed about the killer tsunami smashing through his beloved Andaman and Nicobar islands, he turns to verse.

"I was on the beach/Dreaming of my castles/When the sands shifted/The waves rose/Hideous/Crashing on the vessels," Neogi read his Bengali poetry to IANS. "

It is only when I write that I can come to terms with what happened," said Neogi, who works as a part-time mechanic and handyman.

Three of Neogi's dearest friends were killed when tidal waves rose across the shores of the archipelago made up of 572 islands, islets and rocks. "They had gone boating," said Neogi, who speaks little and writes a lot these days. "They never returned." [More]

Hints of Reform in Egypt

2005-01-03T02:51:00.000-08:00

The BBC reports on the growing call for reform in Egypt:

A few weeks ago hundreds of activists staged an unprecedented protest in Cairo to declare their opposition to a new term for Mr Mubarak.

Many placed over their mouths stickers saying "Enough".

In October, 26 civil society groups launched a petition demanding constitutional reforms before the expiry of the president's mandate.

They continue to collect signatures, and say they will eventually present the document to parliament.

This challenge comes at a time when "reform" has become a catchword not only for the opposition, but also for the government.

With the United States launching repeated initiatives for reform in the Middle East, all governments in the region feel under pressure to declare a commitment to some kind of change. [Emphasis added.]

"The government can clamp down on us," said human rights activist Ahmed Seif al-Islam.

"But it would pay a heavily political price because it is trying to send a message to the West saying that is carrying out reforms."

Artie Shaw

2005-01-02T23:35:00.000-08:00

Last week, the great clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw passed away.

WAMU, one of DC's public radio stations, has a long-running old time/big band jazz program, Hot Jazz Saturday Night. The DJ is very knowlegable and has a huge record collection -- I learned a lot listening to his show. On New Year’s Day, he did a nice tribute to Artie Shaw. To listen, click here.

Healing Iraq Sums Up The Elections

2005-01-02T19:38:00.000-08:00

Here is an excellent summary of the Iraqi elections from Zeyad’s excellent blog Healing Iraq.

Changes to Sunni Voter Registration Rules

2005-01-02T19:03:00.000-08:00

The Times UK is reporting that the UN officials are relaxing the voter registration rules in Sunni-populated provinces in Iraq:

Carlos Valenzuela said that the population of Anbar province, the western desert region better known as the Sunni Triangle, would be allowed to register and vote on polling day, even though the rest of the country finished registering its voters weeks ago.

“They will be given the possibility of registering on the same day, which gives them the possibility of deciding where it is they will be voting,” said Señor Valenzuela. The same conditions will apply for Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, which has been racked by violence recently and where an additional 8,000 US troops have been deployed to secure the elections.

Democratization or what?

2005-01-02T18:36:00.000-08:00

It sounds like Dr. Emile over at Chronicles is advocating all out war with Islam (though I suspect he actually making a larger point, but still):

Let's stop pretending that prosecuting a war on terrorism is about doing anybody any favors and patting ourselves on the back about democratizing anything. These fantasies are abject, counterproductive, and dangerous. The policies this philosophy has spawned are not working in the favor of pluralists in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, etc. It costs nothing and means almost as much to say that "we should support pluralists in the Middle East."

This sounds suspiciously similar to some hardcore conservative hawks I know who basically believe the “moderate Muslim” is a myth and that we should admit that the “War on Terrorism” is to some extent a “War on Arab Muslims.” However, they still think that democratization is a worthy project. I think divorcing the fight against Terrorism/Islamic-Fascism from a larger goal of democratization leads us down a dangerous path. And I think this shows a failure of some (not all) on the Left to articulate a viable plan for the War on Terror or the War in Iraq.

Dr. Emile also states:

On a wider level, there is a direct and totally quicksanding contradiction at the heart of the democratizing strategy in the war on terrorism. Terrorism has little - not nothing, but little - to do with root causes and democracy, it has nothing to do with the "core of the Islamic world"

I would say this is highly debatable, and again sounds like some conservatives who also think that “terrorism” is not about root causes but about an evil ideology that needs to be wiped out. And there is some truth to this ideology theory. But Freedom House has noted:

Freedom House survey data also shed some light on the debate about the relationship between the lack of political rights and civil liberties and the growing threat of international terrorism. According to a Freedom House analysis of global terrorist attacks of a five year period from 1999-2003, 70 percent of all attributable deaths by terrorism were perpetrated by terrorists and terrorist movements originating in Not Free countries. By contrast, only 8 percent of global fatalities from terrorism were perpetrated by terrorists and groupings with origins in the free world. "This suggests that the expansion of democracy and freedom is an important component in the international effort to rid the world of the terrorist scourge," said Adrian Karatnycky, principal analyst of Freedom in the World.

Freedom is hard to quantify, but Freedom House’s index seems to be the only one out there and is a useful tool. They make it clear that even if the root cause of terrorism isn’t lack of democracy, democratic countries are much less likely to produce terrorists. I still contend that democratically elected governments are better for the world’s long term security than totalitarian or theocratic regimes, and are better for the citizens of those countries--that goes for our current “allies” Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The question is how to best achieve this. There are no easy answers. the approaches will vary with each country, nor will the U.S. be involved in every case. But democratization should be our long term goal.

I think the first question we must ask is what countries currently pose the biggest threats. For these countries, like Iran and North Korea, I think we need a more aggressive approach, that doesn’t necessary mean using the military; it could also mean employing an aggressive diplomatic approach or supporting democratizing elements within a country, as was recently done in Ukraine. For other countries, the approach might be more long term, like encouraging market reforms and actively engaging the country at the economic and diplomatic level like China or Saudi Arabia (though I don’t think we are putting enough pressure on the Saudis). As for Iraq, what choice do we have but to help rebuild the country, encourage democracy, and provide security? Would leaving now just ensure that Iraq would slip into chaos and/or become a pawn of Iran?

Shririn Ebadi Announces Candidacy For Iranian Presidency

2005-01-02T17:31:00.000-08:00

According IranMania Nobel Peace Prize Laureate has decided to run for president of Iran:

14 groups such as the Council in Defense of Prisoners' Rights along with independent human rights advocates are to form a coalition to back Ebadi's candidacy.

This is while according to Iran's Guardian Council, the controversial term ' Rejal' explicitly mentioned in Iran's constitution in defining the characteristics of the presidential hopefuls refers to the masculinity of the candidates. Thus it is still unknown what strategies Ebadi's supporters are to take to overcome this obstacle.

This could be an interesting development. However, will the Mullah’s really allow her to run? Is there anything the US, EU, or UN do to support her?

(Hat Tip to Judith Apter Klinghoffer)

Best of 2004

2004-12-31T20:22:00.000-08:00

OK, I almost wasn't going to do it, but what the heck--here is my 2004 round-up/best of post. (Note no list is in any particular order. I just like them.)

Best/Favorite Books of 2004

GOEST, by Cole Swensen. National Book Award finalist, this poetry collection is intense and beautiful. Explores the white spaces, the invisible, and the “living windows.” (For more, click here.)

DOOR IN THE MOUTAIN: NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS, 1965-2003, by Jean Valentine; National Book Award Winner. Not a totally fair choice, since I read many of these poems in previous years, but one of my favorite poets. And it is great to have them all in one place.

UP TO SPEED, by Rae Armantrout, tight, concise, edgy, and wholly original. Armantrout is one of our best poets, and a new book from her is always reason to celebrate. Plus, who can resist a book that exposes the narcissistic pleasures of writing:

In order to write
you must fall in love

with your own thought
every time.

(Bloggers beware.)

GOLDBEATER’S SKIN, by G.C. Waldrep (really a 2003 book, but I read it this year, I really liked it, and I am making the rules.) Post-modern Amish poetry? Yes. Waldrep, who has a Ph.D. in American History, converted to the Amish faith and lived in an Amish community from 1990 to 1995. He began his writing career as a teenager, publishing two volumes on the cemeteries of Halifax County, MA. His poetry is rich, intelligent and full of verbal and imaginative acrobatics; Robert Penn Warren meets Wallace Stevens.

Winner of the Colorado Prize. For an interview, click here.

THE DEVIL’S HIGWAY, by Luis Alberto Urrea; Winner of the 2004 Lannan Foundation LiteraryAward for Nonfiction, a searing account of 26 Mexican immigrants who crossed the border into Arizona via a 110-degree desert, only 12 survived.

Best Manuscripts I Read in 2004 That Will be Published in 2005

THE HA-HA, by Dave King (Jan. 2005); A beautiful debut novel that explores the silent world of Howard Kapostash, a Vietnam vet who due to injuries received in the first few days in country cannot speak, read, or write. Howard has settled into a decent, routine life that is shattered when he must care for a young boy—an amazing story that explores the nature of relationships and language told with luminous clarity.

THE HISTORIAN, by Elizabeth Kostova (June 2005). Imagine Arturo Perez-Reverte and John LeCarre teaming up to write a book about Dracula alive and well in the 20th century. A great romp through history, dusty archives, Turkey, France, and 1950’s Eastern Europe.

DRAMA CITY, by George Pelecanos (March 2005). Pelecanos is our best writer of crime fiction, and one of our best writers in any genre. Pelecanos combines great stories, great characters, and great dialogue, with an intense examination of good and evil. Any book by him is worth reading.

(Disclosure: I work for the publisher of these books. That doesn’t mean they aren’t great books, just that when it comes to fiction I get to combine work with pleasure, but it also limits everything else I want to read.)

Books From 2004 That I Really Want To Read But Haven’t Got To Yet

SNOW, by Orhan Pamuk. A great writer – should definitely be a candidate for the Nobel.

THE SELF-DISMEMBERED MAN, by Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. By Donald Revell. The great surrealist, who died on Armistice Day, exposes the horror and contradictions of the birth of the Modern in this collection of his later poems.

Best Jazz CDs

STRANGE LIBERATIONS, Dave Douglas. Beautiful and witty. At times reminiscent of Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, yet original and innovative. (More here.)

SUSPENDED NIGHT, Tomasz Stanko Quartet. New Europe does jazz right. Polish trumpeter Stanko has produced a powerful, lyrically intense gem.

CHANGING PLACES, Tord Gustaven Trio. A 2003 release, but on Amazon it is currently the #2 CD in Chile, and I bought it this year, so I am counting it. Norwegian pianists Gustaven’s most recent release is beautiful and haunting. Bill Evans would approve.

CELESTIAL MECHANIX: BLUE SERIES MASTERMIX. DJ Spooky works his magic on tracks from Mathew Shipp’s innovative Blue Series. Postmodern jazz meets hip-hop electronica.
MYLAB, Mylab. Eclectic wonder. If you took jazz, funk, pop, electronica, samples, amazing musicians and threw them in an aural mixer, you would get Mylab – the future of jazz.

Best Discovery/DVD Release

FREEKS AND GEEKS (THE COMPLETE SERIES). Maybe the best TV series ever. Poignant and funny. Wonderful writing, amazing acting, convincing characters. A very sensitive and accurate portrait of high school in the 80’s. Only 18 episodes where aired on NBC in 1999, insuring this series status as a cult classic.

Tragedy and the Failure of Words

2004-12-28T14:39:00.000-08:00

After such terrible tragedies as the recent tsunamis, I find myself turning to literature by Holocaust survivors. The work by these writers, like few other bodies of work, explores the nature of the human spirit in the darkest of times. From those writers, I have learned that humanity can somehow survive almost anything. As a grad student at American University, I was always impressed that Czech writer, filmmaker and Holocaust survivor Arnost Lustig (click here for an interview) was often the most cheerful person in the literature department. Not all Holocaust victims maintained such an optimistic outlook, but in their writings I find a framework for dealing with and understanding the horrors that people suffer. Though my ability to make sense of the recent catastrophe is of little consequence, what people really need now is our help not words. But maybe this poem by Paul Celan will help someone:

THERE WAS EARTH INSIDE THEM, and they dug.

They dug and they dug, so their day
went by for them, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, knew all this.

They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
thought up for themselves no language.
They dug.

There came a stillness, and there came a storm,
and all the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and the worms dig too,
and that singing out there says: They dig.

O one, o none, o no one, o you:
Where did the way lead when it lead nowhere?
O you did and I did, and I dig towards you,
and on our finger the ring awakes.

--Paul Celan, tr. Michael Hamburger (Against Forgetting, ed. by Carolyn Forche, p. 382)

However, I doubt this will provide much solace for so many like this man:

"My son is crying for his mother," said Bejkhajorn Saithong, 39, searching for his wife at a wrecked hotel on the beach. Body parts jutted from the wreckage.

"I think this is her," he said. "I recognize her hand, but I'm not sure."

More Help for Tsunami Victims

2004-12-27T17:25:00.000-08:00

A group of bloggers has set up a blog with updates on relief efforts and options for donations.

Help Tsunami Victims

2004-12-27T07:34:00.000-08:00

Here are some links to relief efforts.

Helping Afghani Children Learn

2004-12-27T07:23:00.000-08:00

A former Peace Corp worker and Iranian hostage, is working, in conjunction with Teachers College of Columbia University, with Afghanis to create new text books for the education-starved children of Afghanistan:

"One of our tenets is social justice," added Margaret Jo Shepherd, professor emeritus at the college, also working in Kabul. "The aim of Teachers College is to help poor people and immigrants, and educating Afghans so they can make a difference."….Children have returned to school in huge numbers since the repressive Taliban government ended three years ago, highlighting gaping deficiencies in the educational system…..The contribution of Teachers College is a small but important part of a multimillion-dollar international drive to revive the education system in Afghanistan. Financed by the United Nations Children's Fund, the Teachers College group is rewriting the curriculum and all primary school textbooks, including language textbooks in four local languages, while introducing a style of teaching new to Afghan teachers and students that encourages student participation.

However, there is still a lot to be done:

But the team has been slowed by a lack of money. It currently relies on Unicef for a $1 million budget, a minute proportion of the $150 million being spent by the United States on education programs here in the past year. An additional $60 million is expected from other donors over several years.

Many children are behind in their schooling after years of war and Taliban repression, and 40 percent of children - 63 percent of all girls - still do not go to school. Even more debilitating for the system, 80 percent of the 105,000 registered teachers have no formal training. About 40,000 more teachers are needed.

Some children interviewed in villages said they spent only two hours a day in class, and teachers are so poorly paid that they are often absent, working at a second job, students and teachers say.

Morale among teachers is low, and is not helped by the fact that some have been teaching for their third year in tents or in the open.

Despite millions of dollars put into building schools over the last two years, the international effort has only touched on the damage done in 25 years of war. Eighty percent of the country's 7,000 schools were damaged or destroyed, and 3,400 schools are still waiting to be rebuilt, according to the Ministry of Education.

The country needs 8,000 more schools on top of that, Unicef's senior program coordinator in Afghanistan, Reza Hossaini, estimated.

This is one area where everyone should be able to find common ground. There may be larger geopolitical issues involved, but in this case what really matters are the children of Afghanistan. There must be thousands of projects like this in Afghanistan and Iraq that could be rallying points for folks on the left and right.

To help the children of Afghanistan, click here.

China, Sudan, & the Limits of the UN

2004-12-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I expressed skepticism about the UN’s ability to manage conflicts and international crises, and unfortunately the situation in Sudan highlights the problems. Today’s Washington Post features an article detailing China’s involvement in Sudan. China is a major investor in Sudan’s oil industry, and is the primary supplier of arms to Sudan. Here are some key points:

China's transformation from an insular, agrarian society into a key force in the global economy has spawned a voracious appetite for raw materials, sending its companies to distant points of the globe in pursuit -- sometimes to lands shunned by the rest of the world as rogue states. China's relationship with Sudan has become particularly deep, demonstrating that China's commercial relations are intensifying human rights concerns outside its borders while beginning to clash with U.S. policies and interests.

Sudan is China's largest overseas oil project. China is Sudan's largest supplier of arms, according to a former Sudan government minister. Chinese-made tanks, fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades have intensified Sudan's two-decade-old north-south civil war. A cease-fire is in effect and a peace agreement is expected to be signed by year-end. But the fighting in Sudan's Darfur region rages on, as government-backed Arab militias push African tribes off their land.

From its seat on the United Nations Security Council, China has been Sudan's chief diplomatic ally. In recent months, the council has neared votes on a series of resolutions aimed at pressuring Sudan's predominantly Arab government to protect the African tribes under attack in Darfur and stop support for militias by threatening to sanction its oil sales. China has threatened to veto such actions while watering down the threat of oil sanctions.

Ultimately, it may be peace that presents the Chinese firm with its greatest challenge. Under the terms of an agreement still being negotiated, oil contracts are supposed to remain secure. But three commanders of the southern Sudan rebel group said in an interviews that the SPLA will seek to punish China once the rebels gain a formal decision-making role in the government.

With China having veto power on the Security Council and strong ties to Khartoum, I seriously doubt the UN will be able to accomplish much in Sudan. Yesterday, Kofi Annan refused to visit Sudan, admitted that the UN’s approach had failed, and wanted to go back to the Security Council and reassess the situation. How many people have to die while the UN reassess what is clearly a major humanitarian crisis? In addition, what does Annan expect to accomplish when China, France, and Russia (also click here and here and here and here) have economic ties to the current Sudanese government. Theoretically, these countries, especially China, could use their ties to influence the government in Khartoum, but they could have done that already. And considering China’s record on human rights, I doubt this is a high priority in Beijing.

One of the many complaints leveled against the US is that it is pursuing its own interest, but so are all of the other countries on the UN Security Council, not to mention all 191 countries in the UN. At least the U.S. has a commitment to human rights and the rule of law within its own borders and often outside its borders—unlike, China or Russia.

With China and Russia having equal power to the democratically-elected governments on the Security Council and more power than the democratically-elected governments in the General Assembly, how effective can the UN be in managing conflicts or promoting democracy, peace, and human rights?

The UN was ineffective in Sudan and Iraq. It will probably be ineffective in Iran. China is becoming a major player in Iran and recently signed a $70 billion oil deal with Tehran (also click here and here). Russian has major economic ties with Iran. They want to build 7 nuclear power plants and they import 12 billion cubic meters of natural gas from. Plus, France has significant economic ties with Tehran. All three countries are on the Security Council, no wonder they are so reluctant to have the Iranian uranium crisis brought there.

In many cases, opening countries up to market forces promotes positive changes. However, that process is long term. In crisis situations like Sudan or Iran, time is of the essence, and with many members of the UN Security Council having strong ties to some of the worst of the worst I am very skeptical of the UN’s ability or willingness to do anything to stop the bloodshed in Sudan or nuclear proliferation in Iran, one of the world’s major supporters of terrorism.

"Voting is a right and that right is yours."

2004-12-23T08:18:00.000-08:00

From a poster outside a Palestinian polling place. In a run-up to the Jan. 9th presidential elections, approximately 150,000 Palestinians voted today in 26 municipal elections, the first in 30 years. A modest but positive step:

"Just the crush of people was totally unexpected," said Nasser Awanja, the election official in charge of the station. "Because it has been since 1976 since we have had elections they are really fired up," he said.

Iran Watch, Dec. 22

2004-12-21T23:39:00.000-08:00

Iran breaks spirit of its agreement with EU-3, and will continue to produce uranium-based materials until end of February.
If all of this is legit, an extremely bleak picture of Iran: children trafficked for sex and labor, homeless children in the streets, high drug use. UNICEF does back some of the claims in the article.
Worth repeating. Iran to execute two women on morality charges.
U.N. approves a US-backed resolution condemning Iran’s human rights violations. The kicker:

"The measure, which is not legally binding but reflects global opinion, was approved 71-54 with 55 abstentions."

So more than half the world’s countries either actively opposed the resolution (which will probably have the impact of throwing a spitball at a Mac truck), or didn’t care enough to vote.
Association of American Publishers promotes translation and publication of Iranian novels.
Iran cuts off natural gas to Turkey. Note Russia imports 12 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Iran.
Iranian officials fight over use of $8 billion in oil revenue surplus. With surpluses like this would sanctions work? Will it be used to influence elections in Iraq and support terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere?
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei accuses US and Israel of planning recent terrorist attacks Najaf and Karbala. A sign of hope – he’s cracking up?

No More Wimpy Multilateralism?

2004-12-21T20:25:00.000-08:00

In Foreign Policy Javier Solana makes a thoughtful plea for a muscular multilateralism:

The enduring lesson of the war in Iraq is the importance of linking force and legitimacy. Without the use of force, Saddam Hussein would still be in power in Iraq. No one in Europe wishes that. But force alone will not and cannot advance the cause of plural modernity. For that mission, legitimacy is required. And in the international sphere, legitimacy comes through multilateral action. The best way to advance the cause of political and economic freedom in the next century is multilateralism with muscle—rules with teeth.

Of course, the other nations involved have to a) have legitimate internal governments based on the rule of law and a respect for human rights b) be willing to actually use force c) have a self interest in resolving the dispute or be persuaded that pursuing a larger global strategy is in the long run in their self interest.

International agreements and international organizations are a good start. But it is no use agreeing to treaties only to ignore them. It is no use setting up international organizations only to prevent them from functioning. If we want the world to work, we need multilateralism. But if we want multilateralism to work, then the powerful need to put their power behind it. A complex world needs multilateral bodies—but it also needs leadership. In most cases, only the United States can provide the necessary leadership.

Very good points, but how do you convince the US that it should provide this leadership? How do you convince the rest of world that they should follow the US’s lead?

Some economists predict that in fewer than 40 years China will surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy and that, together, Brazil, Russia, India, and China will eclipse the economic might of the current Group of Seven industrialized nations.

Sobering prospects.

I would agree that multilateralism backed by sufficient force and with the power to enforce the rule of law could be a viable alternative in the future. But in the here and now I don’t see other major players (China and Russia, for example) willing to play along by these rules, especially with the US leading the charge. Nor do I see the US willing to reduce its role to make it more palatable for these countries. Nor do I see many of these countries seriously committing to the use of force to enforce such rules. There may be a multilateral approach that involves the democratic countries of the world, perhaps something along the lines of the prenatal UN Democracy Caucus. Giving current global realities, I am skeptical that a large-scale version of this approach will work anytime soon. It may be a worthy goal to work toward, but in the meantime, I think we will have to depend on a small-scale multilateralism that relies on regional alliances working with larger states, and that appeals to internationally accepted standards like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

CPD's Iran Proposal

2004-12-21T16:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to praktike over at Liberals Against Terrorism for posting a link to The Committee on Present Danger’s suggestions on creating a new approach on Iran that combines engagement and isolation.

The CPD clearly lays out the threat presented by Iran:

The centrality of the threat posed by Iran is clear. In addition to its peace-threatening nuclear program, Iran under Khamenei, continues to be the world’s foremost state supporter of terrorism, offering financial and logistical support to both Shi'a and Sunni terrorist organizations, including Hizballah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Elements of al-Qaida and Ansar al-Islam transit through Iran and find safe haven there. Through these groups Khamenei destabilizes the region, prevents the emergence of an independent and democratic Lebanon and tries to stymie any movement toward peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Khamenei supports Moqtada al-Sadr and others in Iraq who want it to become another theocratic dictatorship under Iranian tutelage. He is seeking regional hegemony, both ideologically and militarily. His growing oil wealth increases his capacity for wreaking havoc on his own people and the region.

Prakite summarizes the CPD proposals (but read the whole report):

Offer to reopen our embassy in Tehran
Step up cultural, academic and professional exchanges
Authorize American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to operate within Iran
Arrange for young Iranian activists to attend civic campaign seminars in the U.S. and elsewhere
Engage in interaction between such agencies as the CIA, FBI and the Drug Enforcement
Agency with Iranian counterparts on issues such as drugs and terrorism
Build a legal case against Khamenei and his associates for their financing of terrorists and human rights violations in order to build pressure for them to "return to the mosque" or face a possible international tribunal
Use "smart" sanctions to target assets of Khamenei and his associates
Provide up to $10 million a year to fund independent satellite television stations now broadcasting from the U.S. to Iran.

I think this is a step in the right direction and is a good starting point for developing a policy on Iran, which may become the dominant foreign policy issue of the next four years (unless Russia continues on its current backslide). I am skeptical that all of these proposals would work. Does Iran really want us to open an embassy Tehran? Would Iran allow students to attend to interact with activists from other countries? Would Iran really interact with the FBI, CIA, and DEA? And I think the threat of forces has to be sufficient and clearly defined. Nonetheless we need to develop, and develop fast, a policy that isolates the mullahs while supporting pro-democracy forces in Iran, and this a good place to start.

Straightaway Dangerous: Theolonius Monk’s CRISS-CROSS

2004-12-21T14:18:00.000-08:00

Thelonious Monk, Criss-Cross
(Monk, piano; Charlie Rouse, tenor saxophone; John Ore, bass; Frankie Dunlop, drums)

Originally released in 1963, Criss-Cross shows Monk at his playful and deconstructive best. Of particular note is Monk’s take on the standard Tea for Two. He breaks the melody down to its essence and rebuilds it with his own quirky harmonies—not Monk’s most radical performance, but it provides real insight into his style and, if you have never heard Monk, it is a great introduction to this innovative jazz master.

Oddly, Monk’s aesthetic approach often reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s. They were both playful and innovative, and they both remained attuned to traditional forms while making them radically unique:

Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –

--Emily Dickinson, 1890

Zakaria's Hope

2004-12-21T14:15:00.000-08:00

Fareed Zakaria has just published his yearly assessment of the state of reform in the Muslim world, and he finds a few hopeful signs that things are starting to improve:

There are glimmers of reform, even in the Arab world, the place that remains the locus of the problem. Governments are talking about changing their economic and even political systems. Some are doing more than talking. Jordan has begun serious economic reforms. Egypt, which remains the most tragic case of lost potential in the Arab world, could be rousing from its slumber. An energetic new prime minister has appointed a team with strong reformist credentials, including businessmen in the cabinet (a first in Egypt). The reforms they have proposed are bold and far-reaching. Markets are taking note: Egyptian stocks are up 100 percent this year.

Plus there has been a successful election in Afghanistan, and elections coming in Iraq and Palestine. Maybe, just maybe, all this talk of democracy and reform will amount to something. It’s too early to tell, but as Freedom House and Zakaria indicate there is reason for hope.

The Experimenter’s Tale

2004-12-21T09:51:00.000-08:00

Was Chaucer the father of the avant-garde? One professor thinks so:

“Chaucer has traditionally been seen as the single poet who determined that, for the next four centuries, we’d be counting syllables,” Quinn said. “My title suggests he broke the rules on purpose, and anticipated change.”

The State of Freedom 2004 (The Post)

2004-12-21T09:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Freedom House released its annual Freedom In The World report. Here is a round up of the world’s reactions.

Vladimir Putin was cited for maintaining Russia’s tradition of centralizing government control. Putin said, “I think my forebears would be proud that such an esteemed American institution has once again labeled the motherland as ‘not free.’” He said he will use Russia’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council and its position on the UN Commission on Human Rights to further his commitment to Russia’s foreign policy heritage. One of the first items on his agenda is to improve Russia’s relationship with other non-free countries like Iran. He said, “We really want those contracts to build nuclear reactors in Iran.” When asked about Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, Putin responded, “We have many Soviet-era warheads that are not currently in use, but they are not on the table, yet.”

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, while taking a break from signing the 1200 condolence letters he recently found in his inbox, has announced that he will be stepping down to run the Saudi prison system. Rumsfeld said we was appalled that the Saudi’s once again ranked among the worst of the worst when it comes to human rights and civil liberties. He said, “I think my commitment to effective prison management will be a major asset in the Saudis efforts to improve human rights.”

A UN spokesperson praised the Sudanese delegate to the UN Commission on Human Rights for the fine work he has done to help promote human rights in the world and in Sudan, which ranked among the worst of the worst.

After hearing that it was again ranked “not free”, China announced that until it improved its record on human rights and civil liberties it was giving up its seat on the UN Security Council as well as withdrawing from the Commission on Human Rights. Cuba said it would follow China’s lead and would also give up its seat on Human Rights Commission. In a joint statement with China and North Korea, Castro said that all three countries realize that to prove their commitment to the workers of the world they must first treat their own citizens better. He then announced that once they have accomplished this the three nations were eyeing a small uninhabited atoll in the Pacific as the site of the next People’s Revolution.

In all seriousness, Freedom House did show reason for some optimism:

The 2004 survey data reveal positive, albeit modest, trends in the Middle East and North Africa. While no countries in the region changed status, small gains were registered in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Qatar. Egypt's civil liberties score improved because of greater civic activism, particularly by women's advocacy groups. Jordan's civil liberties score improved due to improvements in women's rights and press freedom. Morocco's civil liberties score increased after the country passed one of the most liberal family codes in the Arab world. And Qatar's score improved as a result of gains in academic freedom. Notably, there were no gains in political rights registered in the Middle East and North Africa.

Among the study's other findings:

Of the world's 192 states, 119 are electoral democracies (89 Free and 30 Partly Free), an increase of 2 since 2003. While these states are not all rated Free, all provide considerable political space and media access for opposition movements and allow for elections that meet minimum international standards of ballot secrecy and vote tabulation.
Over the last 15 years, the number of electoral democracies has risen from 69 out of 167 (41 percent) to 119 out of 192 (62 percent). On average during that time frame, an additional 3 states have adopted minimal standards for free and fair elections each year.

Freedom further consolidated in Central Europe. Five of the new EU countries—the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia—achieved the highest possible survey rating: 1 for political rights and 1 for civil liberties.
Here’s to doing what we can to make next year’s report even better.

The Limits & Failures of International Governance

2004-12-19T23:54:00.000-08:00

Steve in a comment below said (be sure to see The Iconic Midwest’s insightful comment as well):

One of their [the US's] goals has been precisely to destroy the international system that governed the cold war (a system that we ourselves set up) and replace it with an ad hoc system of alliances. This, they thought, was more appropriate to a situation of American Hyper power. Even with all of its many and great deficiencies, I think that the previous system had potentialities for developing into a quasi-cosmopolitan order.

I am not sure if Steve is referring directly to the UN here or a larger system that includes the UN. But I am going to focus on the UN. First, the “system” that governed the Cold War was not the UN but primarily a system of nuclear-armed super powers pursuing their own interest while maintaining a tenuous balance based on avoiding mutual shared destruction--a system that also involved some permanent alliances like NATO and the Warsaw Pact, various regional alliances, and other shifting alliances that operated primarily outside UN authority. Thankfully, with the fall of the Soviet Union, this global framework has dissolved.

However, without these competing forces there was not an overarching narrative to help manage post-Cold War conflict, essentially leaving the US, the remaining super power, and the UN to fill the gap. The US, prior to 9/11, did not pursue a robust policy of nation building or conflict resolution, but did not disengage from the world stage, for example the failed Oslo accords & Yugoslavia. During the Cold War, the UN had very limited success at preventing or managing conflict. Since the end of WWII there have been approximately 200 armed conflicts, only two approved by the UN Security Council. The post-Cold War UN has had a dismal record (Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sudan). It is operating under a moral cloud (the oil-for-food scandal, the conduct of Peace Keepers in Congo). And the very body that is charged with enforcing the best thing about the UN—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights--has included several countries with deplorable records on Human Rights (Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, China, Eritrea, Libya, Egypt).

In many respects, the failures of world bodies like the League of Nations and the UN are not surprising. As Steven, has pointed out the US pursues a foreign policy that combines a concern for democracy/liberty as well as securing its own interest. And this bears directly on the crux of geopolitical reality—the US, China, Russia, Indian, France, Saudi Arabia, Germany and all 191 members of the UN are pursuing their own interest, but not all of these countries are concerned about democracy, freedom or human rights within their own borders, let alone truly concerned about them outside their borders. All of these countries will agree to international governance when it serves their interest and ignore it when it doesn’t. Whether under the umbrella of an international organization or outside such a body, the work mostly gets done by shifting alliances of countries whose self-interests intersect and who have the will to act. Until most of the 191 states’ interests are more aligned and they are committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law both within their own borders and abroad, I am skeptical, because of historical precedent and the geopolitical reality of competing interests, that an international body like the UN can provide much more than a framework for forming “ad-hoc” alliances, often formed by those who share a regional interest and outside actors who have their own interests and/or a humanitarian concern in resolving the problem.

Iran Watch, Dec. 19

2004-12-18T23:45:00.000-08:00

Last week’s Economist (a little late on this one, but the info is still very relevant) has a good piece detailing the bleak situation in Iran: suppression of the reform movement, growing unemployment, rising inflation. However, there evaluation of options is pessimistic, and they basically argue for the status quo. I think that might be the worst option of all. A depressing fact for the Iranian people, yet possibly a hopeful sign:

Only half of Iranians bothered to vote in February's election; not much more than a quarter of those in Tehran, which embraces at least 8m people, turned out. Western diplomats reckon that barely 15% of Iranians still support the ruling order. The low turnout reflected not just apathy and fatalism, which are indeed strong. Many sour and embittered Iranians consciously decided not to go to the polls as a gesture of protest.

With apparently a large majority of Iranian unhappy with the current regime, maybe there is a chance change can be fostered from within.

Justice in Iran? Stoning or hanging for young woman forced into prostitution as child. Another woman to be buried up to chest and stoned to death.
Is Iran already breaking its agreement on uranium enrichment?
Russia ready to build seven nuclear reactors in Iran.
More on Iran's treatment of independent journalist.

"A Simple Little American"

2004-12-18T21:44:00.000-08:00

In response to my post on the Little American, Steven from Chronicles has written (full comment is here):

We [the U.S.] have a mélange of interests [in the Middle East], one of which is democracy promotion. This is elementary and not surprising. When this is admitted, however, the picture gets more complicated then you are David want to admit. Sometimes, for example David talks as if foreign policy were simply an exercise of charity.

Steven is correct to some extent regarding my recent posts on this subject. I am taking a rather simple and idealistic stand. That does not mean I think that the War on Islamic Fascism or attempts at democratization or reform in the Middle East will be simple. My point is too cut through what seems to have become nothing more than a cacophony of criticism for the sake of criticism (this is a general point and not directed at Steven), return to a core set of values, and develop a viable plan of action that retains those core values. Obviously, we agree, I think, that democracy and freedom are core values, we may share other core values as well. And we may or may not share the same ideas on how to achieve those values. But I am digressing.

One of my problems with the many discussions about Iraq, especially during the presidential campaigns, is they were primarily focused on re-debating whether we should have gone into Iraq or not, but not really discussing what to do on the ground right now, which to some extent is “an exercise in charity” -- meaning that we now need to be engaged in nation building, which includes everything from establishing security to building schools. All of the criticism, rehashing, and snipping are doing little to help the Iraqi people. Not that there isn’t plenty of discussion that is necessary.

But for now I think I will put my money where my fingers are and simply click over and donate some money to the Iraq Democracy Project and Library Books For Iraqi Children. And save the complexities for another day.

Let Freedom Ring...

2004-12-17T13:12:00.000-08:00

on your cell phone.

Today’s WSJ runs an inspiring op-ed about new communication technology and its role in the fight for freedom:

In 2004, in Ukraine's Independence Square, they had cell phones.

Using the phones' SMS messaging technology, demonstrators sent messages to meet to 10 or so friends, who'd each SMS the message to 10 more friends, and so on. It's called "smart-mobbing."

Anyone want to guess the third-most used language on the Web, behind English and Chinese? Farsi. Iran now has about 75,000 individual Web logs. That's because a young, Toronto-based Iranian journalist who publishes as Hoder created tools in Farsi to make it possible. Only 10% of the Iranian blogs could be called political; most discuss music, movies, poetry and Iranian or Western culture. "Iran's most interesting political conversations take place in taxis," said Hoder.

Throw out that mimeograph machine and hook up the satellite link.

Thanks to BuzzMachine.

The Passing of a Quiet Light

2004-12-17T11:51:00.000-08:00

Minimalist painter Agnes Martin has died. Her paintings were characterized by a Zen-like simplicity that transcended the stark, and sometimes cold, vision of some minimalist art. She will be missed. For a personal appreciation of her influence, read this post over at Althouse.

The Spinning Tower of Curitiba

2004-12-17T11:28:00.000-08:00

Revolving apartment building opens in Brazil:

"Lights, air conditioning and the revolving of the apartment can be turned on and off with a remote control or an oral command.

The owner may also change the direction and speed of the revolutions. At low speed, each floor takes an hour to revolve."

This could make cocktail parties very interesting. And don't invite Bill O'Rielly....

The Long Haul, Liberty, and Action

2004-12-17T02:00:00.000-08:00

The folks over at Chronicles have been having a lively discussion on the nature of the left and liberty as it relates to the War on Terror. In particular I want to address a post by Steven in which he quotes a long passage from Mickey Kaus.

Kaus remarks:

"a) "Islamist totalitarianism" isn't a state phenomenon the way Communist totalitarianism was (which Beinart acknowledges in passing);

b) Angry Islamists in 2004, unlike angry Communists in 1947, are increasingly empowered by ever-more-available technologies of mass destruction (something Beinart doesn't acknowledge)"

In an excellent follow up to The Fighting Faith that outlines the threats of Islamic Fascism Beinart addresses both concerns:

Is Al Qaeda likely to take power in all the places bin Laden desires? Of course not. But it could do far less and still send the United States into deep crisis. By many accounts, Al Qaeda has long enjoyed substantial support in the Pakistani security services. Were Islamist fanatics to assassinate Pervez Musharraf and ally themselves with the general who succeeded him--in an echo of the military-Islamist alliance that ruled Sudan from 1989 to 1999--Al Qaeda would be within striking distance of a nuclear bomb. Or take Saudi Arabia, where bin Laden is wildly popular. If bin Laden, or his local associates, took control of the Saudi oil supply, the U.S. economy would plunge into depression.

But, even if Al Qaeda never seizes a single government, it still poses a grave threat. By suggesting that Islamist totalitarianism is "thin beer" because, unlike Soviet totalitarianism, it doesn't control states, Drum ironically echoes the neocons, who are so mired in a cold war mindset that they can't grasp terrorism except as an extension of state power.

Drum suggests that Al Qaeda's "power to kill people isn't even remotely in the same league" as the ussr's. But, if you're talking about killing Americans--which Drum is--the fact that Al Qaeda controls no territory makes it more dangerous, as well as less. Yes, the ussr, with its massive nuclear arsenal, had the power to kill more Americans. But, as a government interested in self-preservation, it was also deterred by the threat of U.S. retaliation. And that threat made the ussr cautious about taking American lives.

As September 11 showed, Osama bin Laden is not cautious. The prospect of U.S. retaliation does not faze him--in fact, he welcomes it in the hope that it will spawn more Muslim anger and more recruits.

So, while bin Laden's capacity to kill Americans is clearly inferior to the ussr's, for Al Qaeda--unlike the Kremlin--capacity is the only limiting factor. And the spread of technical knowledge and materials makes the destructive capacity of a small terrorist band far greater than it was even a few years ago.

The fight for national security is the fight for liberal values, not merely in the Muslim world, where fanaticism has already blighted countless lives, but also at home, where threats to American safety almost inevitably spawn threats to American freedom. Totalitarian Islam has already damaged both, and unless defeated, the damage could be exponentially worse. What more do liberals need to know before they make this fight their own?

Kaus also claims:

d) We never did anything as aggressive, in the course of successfully containing communism, as what we've already done in the course of combating Islamic terror (i.e. invading Iraq).

This is historically incorrect. But first, the communist, even though they were extremely brutal to their own people, never did anything as aggressive toward us as the Islamic-fascists, who actually attacked the US, which changes the equation some.

In its fight against communism, the US mounted two large campaigns in Asia, Korea in 1950, and Vietnam in the 1960’s – 1970’s. Korea was loosely under UN authority, but was essentially a US war. And it was in response to North Korean aggression against a South Korea backed and armed by the US. That war resulted in 4,000,000 “military and civilian casualties including, 33,600 American, 16,000 UN allied, 415,000 South Korean, and 520,000 North Korean dead. There were also an estimated 900,000 Chinese casualties. Half of Korea's industry was destroyed and a third of all homes” (Total US dead was 53,000. There were 20,000 noncombat deaths, plus 157,000 wounded.) The result was at best a stalemate, leaving a divided Korea.

In Vietnam the US lost around 58,000 (47,000 in combat) and 307,000 wounded, the South Vietnamese lost 223,000 and suffered 1,169,000 wounded, the North Vietnamese and VC lost 1.1 million and 600,000 wounded, and this does not include civilian deaths, which have been estimated to be as high 4 million. And little or nothing was accomplished.

Clearly, in the fight against communism the US was extremely aggressive on two very bloody occasions, and much more so that in Iraq.

In Iraq, the US and UK have lost approximately 1500 with another 9500 wounded, and according to Iraq Body Count there are approximately 15,000 Iraqis dead. However, as AK has pointed out, this number is probably low. Lancet has estimated 100,000 Iraq dead, and some put the number closer to 300,000. However, compared to Korea and Vietnam at a similar stage, Iraq, despite major mistakes, has been somewhat successful: A brutal dictator has been removed from power, fighting is concentrated primarily in the Sunni Triangle, with much of the country now free of combat, and the first elections are being held soon.

Which brings me to the elections themselves, Dr. Emile at Chronicles has correctly pointed out elections are not equal to democracy. However, I view the elections as just one step in a longer process. And like Dr. Emile, I hope Bush doesn’t just declare victory on Jan. 30th, and walk away. That would be a major mistake.

I have always thought establishing democracy in Iraq would take a long time. Many supporters of the war, including some liberal hawks, were misguided in thinking this would be over quickly. This is partly Bush's fault; whether he truly believed this would be a short term venture or not, he sold it that way. Clearly a country that has never had true elections or a democracy, and that has been brutalized for some 20 years by Saddam’s reign would not be ready for democracy in a few months or even a couple of years. We occupied both Germany and Japan for several years after the WWII before we turned them over to self rule. I am not sure what troop levels will be after the elections. I suspect they will diminish some, but not disappear. And even after the initial elections it will take several years to to completely establish the intuitions and infrastructure of democracy.

Though I am passionate in me beliefs about democracy, freedom, and ending oppression where and when we can, and I not sure I am a believer in as Steven puts it “the radical transformative vision of millennial liberalism”, a process that he is very skeptical of. (I wonder if he is as skeptical of other radical transformative visions?) Primarily because I am not sure exactly what it is. My view was not that we would enter Iraq and democracy would suddenly spring up like some newly planted bluebonnets, but that with a brutal and oppressive dictator gone the Iraqi people themselves, with some assistance from the US and one would have hoped the UN and members of the EU (but they have put embarrassing the US ahead of helping the Iraqi people), would have an opportunity to eventually establish a freer society. The measure of success in Iraq should not be what it looks like on Feb. 1, 2005 but what it looks 5-10 years from now. That is one reasaon I am cautiously optimistic about Iraq. At this stage compared to similar conflicts, we have made a fair amount of progress.

My overall viewpoint is that Islamic-fascism is a real threat, a threat that espouses values antithetical to and seeks to destroy the pluralistic liberalism that we enjoy. Liberals need to embrace this struggle. Though this struggle will require some military action it will not always lead to military action, but unless liberals get on board and offer viable alternatives for countries like Iran, while at the same time doing what we can to help Iraq rebuild and to establish the necessary framework for democracy then failure and/or continued military action in the Middle East will become the norm. Liberals it is time to act, not only for the protection or our own ideas, but to act against totalitarianism and the oppression of other people. Dr. Emile, I know this may sound like the language of “mobilization,” but mobilization is exactly what is needed.

Iran Watch, Dec. 16

2004-12-15T21:21:00.000-08:00

Iranian reformer, Mohsen Kadivar, speaks out:
"Without respecting individuality and freedom of choice, human dignity cannot be respected."
Good news for dissident voices. Treasury eases ban on publications from Iran, Cuba, and Sudan.
Iraq defense minister accuses Iran of supporting terrorists.
TNR reports Neocons split on Iran—pessimism unbound.
Iran conducts war games. Scariest quote of the day:
"Simultaneously, some 25,000 volunteers have so far signed up at newly established draft centers for "suicide attacks" against any potential intruders in what is commonly termed 'asymmetrical warfare'".
Iran tries to play two of its biggest trade partners, Russia & the EU. Security council anyone?

Workin' It with Nat Adderley

2004-12-15T19:33:00.000-08:00

Nat Adderley couldn’t have picked a better name for his 1960 recording, Work Song. This disc is classic straight-ahead, hard-working jazz. Nat, Cannonball’s (of Kind of Blue fame) younger brother, tears it up on coronet. Joined by the incomparable Wes Montgomery on guitar, the work horse Bobby Timmons on piano, Percy Heath on bass, Louis Hayes on drums, and Sam Jones or Ketter Betts on cello or bass, this merry band of workaholics delivers concise linear attacks that remind you of blue neon, an upbeat waitress, scrambled eggs, and tapping work boots. Need a boast after a hard day? Then slide this disc in the player. You won’t regret it, or forget it.

Quote of The Day

2004-12-15T14:17:00.000-08:00

"Oh my god I cannot believe it. The book describe exactly what i experience here.Somewhere I read that George Orwell wrote this book against soviet. But I think all dictators read it before making their country." -- Iranian Blogger, Under Underground, discussing Orwell's novel, 1984.

Re: Little Americans

2004-12-15T00:48:00.000-08:00

Over at the Chronicles AK and Steven have written lengthy responses to my post on The Little American and a Liberating Vision. Also, see Morgans defense of the liberal hawk position. Here are my responses:

A Liberal Hawk Doesn’t Hide Behind the Bushes

AK is correct that there have been many mistakes made by the Bush administration in Iraq, one of the major ones being their total lack of planning or understanding in regards to “post-war” Iraq. I never bought the open-arms rhetoric of the neocons. I think he is also correct in asking tough questions about what Iraq will look like after elections, and expressing concerns over Iran's possible influence of elections. (Today's New York Time's has a detailed analysis of the Shiite power structure developing in Iraq, which concludes that division’s within the Iranian Shiites, both religious and secular, and the historical mistrust between Iraq and Iran make Hakim’s, whose brother was assassinated by Sadr, consolidation of power among the Shiites and Iran’s ability to influence Iraq far from certain.)

However, the Islamo-fascists pose a major threat not only to the US but to many parts of the world, and to confront that threat we need an aggressive approach that involves force, diplomacy, foreign aid, a serious commitment to a resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian crisis and supporting Moderate Muslims. I think the Bush administration has failed on the last four, and liberals, by not presenting a credible alternative to the Bush Doctrine, have failed step in and take up the slack.

Take Iran, prior to the Iraq invasion there was a growing reform movement and promising signs of liberalization. Here was an opportunity to support those movements, and possibly destabilize the conservative regime in Iran. The Bush administration failed to do this, allowing the Mullahs, while we were focused on Iraq, to quash the reform movements and consolidate power. Bush should have both invaded Iraq while applying nonmilitary pressure in Iran and other autocratic regimes in the Middle East. Since Bush failed to do this, the liberals should have seized the opportunity to force Bush’s hand on democratization in the Middle East. Instead, the liberals were unable to form a coherent unifying vision that embraced democratization while also addressing the real security threats of terrorism, thus conceding the battle to Bush and the neocons. Had the liberals not retreated into neoisolationist rhetoric they might have had some ability to influence Iraq policy and may have laid the groundwork for winning the 2004 elections.

My conception of hawkish liberalism does not mean one embraces the Bush doctrine nor believes that democracy in the Middle East will resemble Western democracy. However, it does understand that force, and the credible threat of force, will be necessary in defeating Islamic-fascism.

Universal Relativism???

“In the background of our discussions about Beinart’s piece is the philosophical question of relativism vs. universalism. Morgan, and David at Electric Refrigerator, take it that the belief in the universality of western values requires the active spreading of those values. Here is where it gets tricky however. For our liberal democratic civilization has other norms besides liberal ones, i.e., the republican belief in self-government and self-determination. The belief that every agent has a certain self-defined bundle of rights often come into conflict with the fact that other civilizations have different notions of the good and quite different self-understandings upon which they collectively determine their political lives. These self-understandings can be the result of a warped polity as in the case of Iraq, but they are also something quite real. Indeed, Wilsonianism was based upon respecting this latter norm much more then the norm of spreading liberal democracy by force....Now relativism is not defined as the believe that there are no valid norms, but pertains to those who are skeptical that the radical transformative vision of millenial liberalism is the enlightened way to go. To question this, is, as David at Electric Refrigerator put it, is to show skepticism towards ‘Freedom’. The logic here is impeccable, unfortunately it is also the same logic that Robespierre used during the terror.” -- Steve @ The Chronicles

To be honest I am not sure exactly what Steve is trying to say here. But if I understand him correctly freedom and self-determination might be valid norms, but not in all civilizations, and if it is a norm you don’t do much about it. This strikes me as being more dangerous than a “transformative vision”. Is the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights only valid for those people who live in countries whose leaders accept that those values are good? Oppression, torture, and government-sponsored murder, and invading other countries could be justified as part of a civilizations/states concept of the good, therefore should we simply allow them to go on? Under this concept is there any way, or any need, to establish international law or intervene in a humanitarian crisis? It is late and I might be totally mischaracterizing Steve, but oppression, murder, and torture are just that. I do not believe that freedom will lead to everyone being little Americans but I do believe that self determination for all people is a good thing, as Nelson Mandela, no little American, said during his trial in 1964:

“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Side Bar on Wilson

Wilson may have talked about his reluctance to use force but his actions proved otherwise. In 1914, to support of the constitutional forces trying to topple dictator Victoriano Huerta, Wilson sent the Navy to occupy the port city of Veracruz. In 1916, he authorized the use of force against Poncho Villa. He also sent troops to Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. Finally, after failing to get the warring parties in WWI to negotiate, he mobilized the US and sent troops to Europe, where approx. 126,000 Americans died and 234,000 were wounded. Wilson had one of the most aggressive foreign policies in US History. I’ll end with these two quotes from Wilson.

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

No man can sit down and withhold his hands from the warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.

Correction

2004-12-14T23:06:00.000-08:00

Finally, I’d politely question David’s post on the cost of democracy, Iraqi deaths since “liberation,” and the provided link to the alleged deaths of only 15,000 Iraqis
of which I’m a bit dubious. If you hit that link and click: “» Iraq casualties as of April 15, 2003,” you’ll note that, “Below is the latest information on the casualties of this war. Note, the casualty numbers are likely higher than those shown because only confirmed deaths are included.”

AK over at Chronicles has pointed out a mistake I made regarding a link in one of my previous post. I used this site because the figures quoted where similar to those from the often referenced Iraq Body Count, and I was trying to find a source that verified these numbers. I will note that the Iraq Body Count also refers only to civilian deaths. The number of dead Iraqi seems hard to determine, and probably does exceed the 14,000 to 16,000 reported by IBC.

Iran Watch, Dec. 14th

2004-12-13T23:07:00.000-08:00

Here is a round up of some less hawkish options for Iran. Albright and crew argue for allowing Iran to continue civilian nuclear activities. Until there is a different regime in Iran, I think this is a mistake. The current Iranian leadership has made it all too clear that is wants nuclear weapons and that it supports terrorism. I think any nuclear material in their hands would be dangerous. The second article provides excellent background information on the political forces at work in Iran and provides an interesting strategy for dividing theses forces--not sure their approach is enough. The third piece argues that opening Iran economically, similar to the approach in China, is the best way foster change in Iran. In many cases, I think this works, but will it work fast enough in this case?

Madeline Albright and seven other foreign ministers weigh in on Iran.
Two eminent scholars provide an excellent summary of the political forces at work in on Iran, and how to utilize them:

The situation calls for a more nuanced policy, one that will complement the fitful negotiations on nuclear policy led by our European allies. The objective should be first to slow down Revolutionary Guards' monopolization of power and, second, to strain their alliance with the religious leadership. A key will be gaining more international support for democracy in Iran, strengthening reformist forces and nongovernmental groups that continue to resist authoritarianism and can drive a wedge between the guards and the mullahs.

On the other hand, we must get the European countries with extensive commercial ties with Iran to use sticks as well as carrots. They must put pressure on the Revolutionary Guards' considerable business interests in a way that will enlarge fissures between the guards, the clerical elite and the various social groups that are tied to them through patronage.

Iran may be America's most intractable problem of the post-cold-war era. But in foreign policy it is always easier to deal with a divided opponent than a united one. America and the West must not only recognize the growing political divisions in Iran, but also exploit them.
The folks at the excellent blog Chez Nadezhda argue for active engagement with Iran, including free trade via the WTO:

Today was another missed opportunity: for the 20th year in a row, the U.S. rejected Iran's bid to enter the WTO. The irony, of course, is that the new ideas and rule sets (Westoxification!) that come with WTO accession are what Iran's corrupt, repressive ruling mullahs fear most. They won't be able to handle the rate of rapid social change that will come along.

The Great Blog Roll

2004-12-13T19:38:00.000-08:00

My fellow Midwestern compatriot over at The Iconic Midwest is doing his part to help promote emerging blogs with a political bent. If you are new (6 months or less) sign up for The Great Blog Roll. And while you are there be sure to check out his distinctive take on all things red, blue, and political.

Plight of Iranian Women & The Blog of the Day

2004-12-13T07:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan I discovered this fascinating blog by Judith Apter Klinghoffer, a senior research associate in the department of Political Science at Rutgers University, Camden First Kudos to Judith for hanging tough in Camden, NJ -- recently named the most danger city in the U.S., which is not surprising, I have been there a couple of times and I have never seen a city in such bad shape. Her blog offers and interesting discussion of the plight of women and children in Iraq and the nature of totalitarianism. She posted the following quote from an Iranian blogger Pouya:

Women are the silent victims of physical abuse which is being forced on them by the society, family and even themselves.

Anger against women in our society has become a behavior. And therefore men disregard calling this abusive behavior as an act of anger. On the other hand, women themselves have accepted this act as a norm also. That is why they repeatedly try to come up with acceptable reasons to justify this savage behavior.