Encyclopedia Out + Jean Wyllys, Brazilian Congressman + Revolt Hits Egypt

A while back I mentioned that the journal Encyclopedia's second volume, F-K, would soon be out, and it is now on bookstands and available for order ($25).  I've flipped through a copy of this newest volume and am delighted to say that like the first one, it is a beautifully designed and produced journal, but it's also an inventive, intellectually provocative anthology and a substantial (and hefty, in terms of size and weight) book.

I'm also very pleased that my translations of two of Brazilian writer Jean Wyllys's microstories from his collection Aflitos (Fundação Casa Jorge Amado; Editora Globo, 2001), which won his native Bahia's Prêmio Copene de Cultura e Arte in 2001, appear in this volume. I began translating them in the middle of last decade, and about a year and a half ago completed a translation of the entire volume. I haven't yet found a publisher, but the experience of translating his very condensed, lyrical prose pieces, some of them closer to poetry than fiction, others nearer to horror in the brutal realities they depict, and all of which offer a fresh perspective on Brazilian and Bahian life, was instructive and creatively energizing.

I'm also glad to have undertaken this project translating Jean's work. As I've noted before, he was the first person to come out as gay on a Brazilian reality TV show--Big Brother 5, which he won in 2005--and after moving to Rio de Janeiro and returning to his roots as a journalist and professor for a few years, he recently ran on the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) ticket, representing a district in Rio, was elected in October and is now the first openly gay federal deputy (equivalent to a US Representative) to be seated in Brazil's lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies.

I imagine he'll be a bit too busy to write more fiction anytime soon, but I hope he continues to do so, and I also hope his legislative and proposed political goals and career succeed, for him, his constituents and the Brazilian people.

---

Not long ago I blogged about the revolt in Tunisia, which continues as I type this entry, and it was clear to me that if it could even partially succeed--and it has--its spirit would spread throughout other parts of the Middle East. And it has. The largest popular revolution appears to be unfolding in Egypt, where protesters comprising a sizable cross-section of that country's urban populace have staged sustained public protests against the unresponsive, dictatorial government of nonagenarian president-for-life Hosni Mubarak.  Economic stagnation, an authoritarian political systm and violent repression of dissidents have long created a volatile situation that has finally exploded, sparked in part by Tunisia's example, and it's unclear that Mubarak and the security forces will be able to turn back the clock.

In response to the revolt Egypt's government last night shut down Internet, wireless cellular phone, SMS/texting, and satellite phone services, and its secret police and over the last few days its security forces have fired live and non-live ammunition on protesters, killing and badly wounding numerous people in Cairo, Suez, and other cities. The government's communications blackout continued today, in order to shut down Friday afternoon post-prayer demonstrations, though several news reports I've read say that protesters nevertheless gathered at 6 different sites around Cairo, and began marching on government buildings. Anti-nuclear weapon activist and Nobel Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, an acknowledged leader of the opposition, returned to Egypt yesterday to rally the opposition and today the security forces purportedly turned water cannons on him and numerous supporters, besieging them in a Cairo mosque.  The New York Times is now reporting that Mubarak has now called the military to quell protests that the police forces cannot and has declared a curfew, but demonstrators remain on the streets, a ruling party building is in flames, and Al Jazeera has footage of a torched police car being pushed off a bridge. One thing that remains unclear to me is how widespread the uprisings are. I have heard about demonstrations and attacks on protesters in Suez, but what about other sizable Egyptian cities like Alexandria, Giza and Port Said? What about in the mid-sized cities and in rural areas? What about in southern Egypt? Also, if the protests do succeed in toppling Mubarak, as happened in Tunisia with Ben Ali, who are the likely leading candidates to replace him, and what sort of democratic, republican government might emerge?

Symbolic and public protests have also begun in Algeria, Yemen and Syria, which also suspended its Internet service. In the current New York Review of Books in an article entitled "Uprisings: From Cairo to Tunis," William Pfaff discusses the ferment bubbling across the Arab world, and notes how many of the strongmen under threat have been close allies, sometimes protegés and agents, of US power. This was the case with Tunisia's Ben Ali, who even studied in the US; Mubarak has for years collected billions of dollars annually to prop up his regime. Across the region, US-allied leaders have been stalwarts in the nebulous "War on Terror" at the same time as they have grown increasingly ineffectual in addressing the social, political and economic problems in their own countries. Among the many fine points Pfaff makes, one is key: reform in and of itself hasn't always worked out either. Ben Ali's educational and social reforms in part enabled his downfall, by helping to create a more educated population, a working and middle class with a mind of its own unwilling to continue to take the degraded and diminishing opportunities his regime offered. Enlightenment in this case unleashed forces to ensure its fuller realization. Egypt is several orders larger than Tunisia, with an enraged and engaged young populace, politicized secular and religious opposition parties, and perhaps a majority with no desire to go backwards. As I noted with Tunisia, it's unclear what the final outcome of this current Egyptian revolt will be, but what is likely is that whatever results, Mubarak's hold on power will be fatally damaged, even if he manages to retain it.

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On David Kato

David Kato (Photo: Frontline, CAHR)

Gukira has one of the best (as always), most thoughtful and considerate memorial posts I've read on David Kato (Kisule), the Ugandan teacher and LGBT rights activist, who had served as advocacy officer for Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG).

Kato was brutally beaten to death in his home on Wednesday, January 26, 2011. As the New York Times reports, Kato was one of a number of people Rolling Stone, a notorious Ugandan newspaper, identified as "homosexual" and targeted under the banner "Hang Them." He had been repeatedly threatened and attacked over the years, and had just won a legal decision against Rolling Stone. Uganda’s High Court ordered the magazine financially compensate those it had attacked and to stop publishing the names of people it claimed were gay.

His murder also occurred within the context of Uganda's parliamentary debates about making homosexuality a capital crime, a move directly fostered by US evangelicals, as the Times reported early in January of this year.  In fact it was shortly after a 2009 visit by US evangelicals that Uganda's Parliament began pushing a law to capitalize being gay, though pressure from the US led Ugandan president Yoweri Musaveni to disavow the law. It nevertheless could still be enacted. (Here's the Times's presentation of the views of four Ugandans, including a transman, on the issue.)

I won't even try to reprise Gukira's post, but I'll just quote a small section:

A quick look at his Facebook page tells one story. Early this morning, messages from January 3 and 4 congratulated David on the win against the Ugandan Rolling Stone. Just above them, expressions of loss and solidarity, of love and courage, of mourning. This juxtaposition enacts a certain kind of work to which I hope to return in this edit.

From what I know, which is to say, from the available evidence, it is not clear that a direct line can be traced from David’s activism to his murder. I write this not to be contrary, but because I think it’s important to be judicious, to be contextual. Simultaneously, and just as importantly, there is no evidence that his murder was not a result of his activism. For now, his death remains something that can be used in any number of ways.

Please do read the rest.

RIP, David Kato (1964-2011)

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Nabokov's Butterfly Hypothesis + Poem: Nabokov

In the introduction to his brilliant study of MFA programs and their effects on American literature, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard, 2010), UCLA professor Mark McGurl relates the anecdote of how, when Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was proposed as a potential professor in Harvard's English department, the eminent scholar and linguist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) responded negatively, stating, "I do respect very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of Zoology?" I mention this not to launch into a discussion of the conflicts that have existed between creative writers and scholars, but rather to note how wrong Jakobson, in making his categorical statement, not only dismissed an entire group of people, but Nabokov in particular. Jakobson wasn't the only person to underestimate Nabokov's genius.

In the field of entomology, it turns out that Nabokov's theoretical insights were far reaching and predictive, far beyond, it's clear, the experimental capacity of his time.  A self-taught expert on butterflies who worked as the curator of lepidoptera at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, in 1945 he proposed a theory to explain the evolution of the butterflies he was studying, the Polyommatus blues (at left, photo Vlad Dinca, New York Times) suggesting that they reached the New World via Asia, in successive waves, over thousands of years. Trained entomologists of his era did not take this theory seriously, nor did several subsequent generations of professional scientists.  Over the last decade, however, a scientific team, using gene-sequencing, did decide to take his theories seriously, and it turns out, as was published last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, that Nabokov was correct.


According to Carl Zimmer's article in yesterday's The New York Times

Only in the 1990s did a team of scientists systematically review his work and recognize the strength of his classifications. Dr. [Naomi] Pierce, who became a Harvard biology professor and curator of lepidoptera in 1990, began looking closely at Nabokov’s work while preparing an exhibit to celebrate his 100th birthday in 1999. She was captivated by his idea of butterflies coming from Asia. “It was an amazing, bold hypothesis,” she said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, we could test this.’ ”

***

Working with American and European lepidopterists, Dr. Pierce organized four separate expeditions into the Andes in search of blues. Back at her lab at Harvard, she and her colleagues sequenced the genes of the butterflies and used a computer to calculate the most likely relationships between them. They also compared the number of mutations each species had acquired to determine how long ago they had diverged from one another.

As Professor Pierce came to realize, "By God, he got every one right....I couldn’t get over it--I was blown away." His hypothesis about the butterflies crossing the Bering Strait also turned out to be correct too. It's not hard, knowing even a little about Nabokov's ego, to imagine that he would have been very pleased to have been proved right. The Times quotes only the first stanza of his poem on lepidoptery, so I'll quote the entire poem here. The man was, to put it simply, a marvel.

On Discovering a Butterfly 

by Vladimir Nabokov

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer -- and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

(From so full of noise and riot)

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Sabin Howard's Pop-Up Gallery

Wandering around Chelsea a few weekends back when I was home for an event, I passed by one of the empty storefronts (300 W. 22nd Street) I often passed during the summer and early fall, and noticed that a new pop-up exhibit had been installed, a series of bronzes and plaster sculptures by artist Sabin Howard. The show was entitled "Apollo."

I wasn't too fond of the work, which I found well-crafted but not especially original, but the atmosophere of this temporary gallery, which I'd photographed several times in its differing guises at the end of last year, did interest me, as did the crowd, which comprised friends of the artist, locals and tourists wandering in off the street to look at the pieces, and the curious who just wanted to see what was going. I took a number of photos, which give a sense of the show, and to fix for posterity (at least as long as this blog exists) the ephemerality that such a show embodies. I'm always surprised when more empty storefronts don't pursue this option, but then having spoken to some longtime shop proprietors, I know that rents in Manhattan (and parts of Chicago) are still too high, that some landlords would rather warehouse the empty spaces in the hopes of a massive payday than seek temporary rents, and that the ongoing credit crunch and economic crisis make renting prohibitive if you don't have the money to put down.

A temporary gallery in my neighborhood in Chicago didn't last the summer; it was bidding to be a lively neighborhood art venue before I left for the summer, and when I returned, the space was dark and cleared of even the slightest artistic touch. Perhaps someone could make a conceptual project of empty storefronts--that would be the concept, the evacuated, abandoned, foreclosed, humanless retail space. One could even call it "money," for the emptiness wouldn't mean an empty signifier, but rather the root cause of the void was the very thing that was lacking to fill it, or keeping it from being filled.  But back to Sabin Howard's show: I didn't stay to catch him unveiling one of the pieces, though I did capture its draped form in at least a few of my shots.

 
Outside the exhibit
 
Two plaster busts
 
A trio of bronzes

 
Profiles
 
The coatroom/staging area
 
The unveiled statue
 
Casts
 
The gallery's temporary patrons

The same store as a pop-up discount jeweler, in December 2010

The same gallery back in November 2010

The same gallery

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Adam Pendleton's Band @ the Kitchen

Over the winter break I dropped by The Kitchen to check out artist Adam Pendleton's solo exhibit BAND.  I've followed Pendleton's work for awhile, and have regretted having missed several earlier shows of his in Chicago, all word art pieces at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery--2007's "Rendered in Black and Rendered," 2005's "Gorilla, My Love," and 2004's "It's about memory"--so I beat a path to Chelsea to catch this one before it closed on December 23, 2010.

Curated by Rashida Bumbray, the Kitchen exhibition marked the US premiere of Pendleton's large-scale video installation and the final stage of a more extensive multi-platform exhibition, which debuted on September 17, 2009 at the Toronto International Film Festival and featured a rehearsal and live public concert by indie-postpunk band Deerhoof.  A December 2009-January 2010 performance and reading in Amsterdam, featuring the first edit of Toronto event footage along with work-in-progress sequences based on texts directly drawn from Jean-Luc Godard's famous 1968 quasi-documentary, Sympathy for the Devil, such as ones by Eldridge Cleaver, along with more associatively linked works, by writers like Gertrude Stein, was programmed by and held at the Kunstverein/de Appel Arts Center.

Band reimagines film, replacing the Rolling Stones prepping and then playing their eponymous song with Deerhoof practicing and then performing the haunting "I Did Crimes for You" (from their new album Deerhoof vs. Evil, Polyvinyl, 2011) in refracted, multiscreen, asynchronous form. Pendleton's film also retains more than just the spirit of Godard's overtly radical, overtly politicized aesthetics in Sympathy, which juxtaposes imagined scenes of Black radicalism, informed by the work of Cleaver, Amiri Baraka and others with a performance by Godard's then-wife Anne Wiazemsky, as "Eve Democracy," an icon of Euro-American leftist politics and poetics. Band does also carry forward in formal and content terms this aspect of Godard's film. In post-production, Pendleton and editor Deco Dawson interlaced the Deerhoof footage with audio from a short documentary film entitled Teddy, created, to quote The Kitchen's press release, "as part of the Social Seminar, a multi-media training series developed by the National Institute of Mental Health with the U.S. Office of Education." Teddy, directed by Richard Wells and edited by Andrew Stein, portrayed a day in the life of a politically active 17-year-old black man; in Band Pendleton paired the audio track with clips from a late 1960s LA Police Department raid on a Black Panther office.


It's been a while since I've seen Godard's film, but Pendleton distills its essence here; both works link the rehearsal sessions of a band with arguably progressive politics, sympathies, and aesthetics, then and now, with revolutionary imagery, as a means of reflection on the political valences of popular music, and institutionally validated cultural production and performance themselves. Yet the differences in social, political, economic, and cultural contexts between the two films create very different responses for the viewer.  While Godard's film, for all its faults feels like a revolutionary by a self-consciously white artist striving to imagine a new way of engaging the political through art, Pendleton's admittedly visually striking film comes off as one component of a well-made, formally innovative institutional product by an aesthetically revolutionary un-self-consciously black artist, and, I'm almost loath to say this because I am a huge admirer of Pendleton's, it almost approximates a skillfully effective commercial.

Perhaps that's unavoidable in this era when art and capital have almost completely made their peace; artists of all ages shuttle through schools, programs and residencies created by the very institutions and sponsored by the very industries that they once critiqued and challenged; and few bands possess the combination of popularity and street cred that a group like the Rolling Stones did in their heyday. Moreover, Pendleton's goal obviously isn't Godard's. Whereas Godard was trying both to ideologically and aesthetically remake and undermine cinema as it had developed up till his time, Pendleton's work has struck me as increasingly virtuoso contributions to various strands of artmaking that have become mainstream since Sympathy for the Devil. I don't criticize this, because it's worthy of praise.

I nevertheless hope that Pendleton will employ his multiple gifts down the road in the service of something radical and revolutionary. Though it was not his goal  I wondered what might a creative reading of Godard's film look like that paired a politically radical musicians like Michael Franti or a group like Dead Prez, say, with footage from the anti-war protests of 2002 and 2003, or from the Iraq War or Abu Ghraib, or from Guantánamo, open wounds that continue to fester? Or, perhaps even more directly related to the politics and themes articulated by the Black Panthers, old and new, who directly challenged state power, and racism and white supremacy, what about scenes from any of the maximum security prisons around the country, especially those engaging in what amounts to torture of black and brown peoples via prolonged isolation and depravation, among the many other tragedies occurring with their heavily guarded walls?

The exhibit also included featured new works from Pendleton’s ongoing System of Display (2008-) series, which, like the film, demonstrated considerable plastic facility.  These wall-mounted assemblages sample a range of references, such as from the scholar Aby Warburg’s archive of late 19th Century American West photographs, which Pendleton juxtaposes with word fragments drawn from an associative list. Formally, the assemblages consist of silkscreens of the images and letters onto mirrors and clear glass, placing them within boxes, allowing Pendleton to create a fresh mode of display and presentation that delinks the visual imagery from their prior historical and material contexts and the words form their usual semantic and signifying relations.  Individually and together they merit repeated viewing, so I hope to see some more of them soon at another Pendleton exhibit.

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Kanye West's Art Film

It's his video for "Runaway," but actually contains a condensed medley of many of his songs on his recent album, My Dark Twisted Fantasy, and I think it's one of the best music videos I've seen in decades; so good, in fact, that it approaches the status of art. If you aren't among the 8 million or so people who've seen it yet imagine a cross between Liquid Sky and The Man Who Fell To Earth but with a female phoenix, ballerinas, and an African last supper. Stretching for over half an hour. It really does work, believe me....

A still from the video for "Runaway"

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Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Last week Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson claimed that were the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (at left, Riverfront Times) still alive, Rev. Dr. King would have supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Without hesitation a wide array of people across the internet decried this evidently nonsensical assertion, and cited many examples, from throughout his life and career, of his anti-war and anti-violence stances.

But why not go directly to Rev. Dr. King's words themselves? Here is one of his most important speeches, delivered on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, a year before his assassination, on the Vietnam War.  Rev. Dr. King had spoken many times at Riverside, often memorably, but this speech was a landmark for many reasons.  I sincerely hope the President and others who honor Rev. Dr. King's memory take note of this profound speech, among the bravest and most important he ever delivered.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Speech at Riverside Church (with audio)

A snippet from the speech's end:

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when "justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

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Google's Poetry Translation Software

The more my workload increases, the more I find myself dreaming of books, writing, reading, blogging, immersing myself in works of imaginative writing. But there simply is not enough time. Such is the irony of my life these days, but one result is the scarcity of posts here. I don't want to quit blogging, but sometimes I fear it's too difficult to keep it up. Ah well--it's a new year, so I'll keep trying.

***

Desparapluies, one of my brilliant former undergraduate students, works at Google (I think she's still there!), and I was thinking of her and her honors project, and of the countless works of undergraduate and graduate works I've read, as well as of the vast body of literature out there, including my own modest contributions, that would pose challenges to Google's new Poetry Translation software. Poetry, even the seemingly simplest of it, gives many readers a mental workout, so you need not extrapolate too wildly to consider how difficult it remains for artificial intelligence.

But why? Poetic language in almost every language has traditionally involved prosody, figuration, rhetorical devices, rhyme and other sonic devices, allusions and symbolic registers rooted in the language and culture in which it was produced, and the overall and often intricate interplay between all of these elements, in part because it arose out of orality, for which all of these aspects of poetry are required, and while computers have been increasingly able to perform extraordinary complex intellectual tasks, including readable, often idiomatic translation of prose, poetry and poetic language entails many more potentially insurmountable hurdles.  Even the idea of paraphrasing poetry, whether in translation or not, can present difficulties; what, for example, is the paraphrase--or, to put it another way, a précis or simple meaning rendered in prose--of Stéphane Mallarmé's famous poem, "Ses purs ongles très haut....," a sonnet most likely remembered for its dazzling use of the teleuton "-yx"?

Google software engineer Dmitriy Genzel and his team presented a paper at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference at MIT this past October, in which they focused on the "purely technical challenges around generating translations with fixed rhyme and meter schemes."  Part of the team's debate has centered on the importance of preserving form and meter in translating poetry, and in his blog post Genzel cites Vladimir Nabokov arguments about the impossibility of maintaining such features, while approvingly noting computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter's arguments on behalf of trying to do so.  As anyone who has read my many poetry translations on here or elsewhere knows, I agree wholeheartedly with Hofstadter.

Genzel continues in his Google post:

A Statistical Machine Translation system, like Google Translate, typically performs translations by searching through a multitude of possible translations, guided by a statistical model of accuracy. However, to translate poetry, we not only considered translation accuracy, but meter and rhyming schemes as well. In our paper we describe in more detail how we altered our translation model, but in general we chose to sacrifice a little of the translation’s accuracy to get the poetic form right.

One interesting thing to consider here is their belief in a baseline fidelity in terms of the "translation's accuracy"; one thing most translators of poetry in particular recognize, following in the wake of theorists like Walter Benjamin, is that the possiblity of perfect accuracy is an impossibility, that we can never completely capture all the nuances of the source language or recapture an Ursprache in which both languages would be equal. Something is always lost and something else is gained in the process of carrying something across. For poetic language, this raises a host of questions and issues which to which some eminent scholars and translators like Lawrence Venuti, for example, or my colleague Reg Gibbons, have devoted careers, but I will just say that in the case of some poems "translation accuracy," which is to say, semantic accuracy and fidelity, may in some cases be less important that other elements of the poem, such as rhythm, feeling, figuration, and so forth.

That said, I think this Google project is incredibly important, particularly because of its potential effect on translation software in general.  As I heard NPR Science Consultant Robert Krulwich noting today on All Things Considered, since so much online material is now no longer just in English, accurate translation software, especially of the kind that can minutely and subtly parse a range of languages, will open up even more material to readers all over the world, and that includes we (primary) Anglophones.  It will probably not eliminate the need for those devoted to the translation of literature, however; I can think of a host of works of literary fiction off the top of my head, not all of them formally experimental, that would give the best translation software out today a run for its money.  But in the future, who knows?

One last point about the Google poetry translator that will prove a useful tool, I imagine, for poets and others interested in digital and electronic poetries and natural language processing:

As a pleasant side-effect, the system is also able to translate anything into poetry, allowing us to specify the genre (say, limericks or haikus), or letting the system pick the one it thinks fits best.

This entire blog entry could thus become a poem, and in Urdu or Chinese, with the click of a few buttons. In a year or two, that is.

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(E-)Revolution in Tunisia

Holly Pickett/NY Times

So the Tunisian people have driven out their corrupt, authoritarian president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, in office since 1987. Mohamed Ghannouchi, the prime minister, has stepped into the breach on his ouster, to form a coalition government and work with the former Speaker of the Parliament, Fouad Mebazaa (below, at left), who has now temporarily assumed the presidency according to the Tunisian Constitution. Mebazaa has promised elections within 60 days, but it remains unclear what sort of government will be formed, and by whom, especially given how harshly Ben Ali and his allies, many of whom presumably are still in the country, had restricted the opposition parties, especially those on the left and of a religious cast. In fact, Al Nahda, the Islamist Party, had been completely outlawed. Ben Ali's Constitutional Democratic Rally Party (Rassemblement Constitutionnel Democratique) or RCD, so long in control and so dominant, is now, it appears, thoroughly discredited.

What provoked this "Jasmine" revolution, which is reverberating throughout the Middle East, has been the frustration, building over a series of years but erupting a month ago, of millions of people, especially the young, the middle and working-classes and the poor, who faced a lack of jobs, rising costs for staples, constant repression in a police state, and no representation in and by a government that was robbing the country blind. Ben Ali's stage-managed elections were a sign of the problems; his family's steady enrichment a symptom of all that had been going wrong in Tunisia.  The specific spark seems to have been the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, an unemployed university graduate, who made his mortal protest after police stopped him from earning a subsistence living selling fruits and vegetables, because he lacked a permit.  News of his death spread via Facebook, engendering protests by unemployed university graduates like Bouazizi, and then, according to The New York Times, by workers and young professionals, which the Ben Ali government met with brutal, repressive responses.

Thus far, gun battles between the military and militias loyal to Ben Ali are continuing in and around key sites in the capital, Tunis and its suburb, the historical city of Carthage, with the military apparently backing the nascent government. Though he also may have aided Ben Ali's flight from Tunisia, the country's military's chief, General Rachid Ammar, had earlier made the dramatic and crucial decision to cease firing live ammunition against the protesters (initially labeled by the Western media as "rioters" and "looters"--sound famliar), which enabled Ben Ali's overthrow.  Military authorities have arrested Ben Ali's former Security Chief, Ali Seriati, who is alleged to have been promoting chaos, "murder and pillage," along with other leading figures in Ben Ali's government, including the former Interior Minister, Rafik Belhaj Kacem. (Is he any relation to the French philosopher, critic and novelist Mehdi Belhaj Kacem? Do any J's Theater readers know?)

One point much discussed in recent days is the role that Twitter and Facebook may be playing in spreading news about and helping to organize the protests, and in serving as means of communication and information dissemination; according to several reports I've read, these platforms were integral to the sustained anti-government action that culminated in Ben Ali's ouster.  This counters some arguments out there that these platforms are basically impotent in this regard, and confirms, to some degree, predictions by figures like NYU's Clay Shirky. Also noteworthy is a US cable, released by WikiLeaks, detailing Ben Ali's corruption and the US's lack of confidence in his rule, leading some to call this a "WikiLeaks Revolution." To quote The Huffington Post:

Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks had discussed the high levels of nepotism and corruption displayed by [former Tunisian First Lady Leila] Trabelsi's clan. But U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley rejected any notion that WikiLeaks disclosures led to the revolution in Tunisia, saying Sunday that Tunisians were already well aware of the graft, nepotism and lavish lifestyles of the former president and his relatives.

If I read New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick's January 13 article correctly, the cables released by WikiLeaks may have played a role, however, in specific uprisings that occurred in the resort town of Hammamet, on the Mediterranean coast. Here, in the "St.-Tropez" of Tunisia, was where many members of Ben Ali's and Trabelsi's extended clans had built mansions and chosen to luxuriate, and here was where protesters had their say, in violent response, flooding the streets as they chanted and denounced the soon-to-depart president, and eventually ransacking, stripping and then burning the house of one of Ben Ali's relatives.

Holly Pickett for The New York Times
Looters took furniture from a home belonging to a relative of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Hammamet, Tunisia, on Thursday.

One final point is that neighboring authoritarian governments must be a bit nervous, Egypt especially, which is tighly ruled by its octogenarian president, Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia's revolution also presents challenges for the US, which has traditionally backed governments like Ben Ali's with money and political support, most recently as part of the "Global War on Terror," while unironically and simultaneously calling for increased democratization. So what is it going to be, and if it turns out that the Islamic Party is a big winner in Tunisia, what then for the US and its chess-playing in this country and across the region? Most importantly, though, what now for Tunisia and its people?

Scenes from the streets

Al Jazeera's report on the Tunisia protests, from last Friday

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RIP Ellen Stewart, Founder & Steward of LaMaMa

One of the truisms of this world is that someone somewhere is always leaving us. Years ago I realized that if I were to note the death of everyone I considered significant or admired, I could fill this blog up with nothing but such accounts--and I love reading obituaries, especially the fuller and more fulsome British versions--but that struck me as macabre and time-consuming, so, as regular J's Theater readers know, when I have time to blog I will post thoughtful but brief personal commemorations, and when time is as scarce as mountaintop air, I will simply post links and a short note.  I have little time today, so I'll be posting links to several obituaries of one of my personal hero(in)es, Ellen Stewart, the founder of La MaMa e.t.c., who died yesterday at age 91.

La MaMa e.t.c. (for Experimental Theater Club), which I am glad to be able to say I set foot in a few times, during the late 1990s (though I only smiled at Ms. Stewart, too afraid to utter a single world), is simply one of the most important theater and performance institutions in New York and the United States. Countless major actors, playwrights and performance artists got their start in its E. 9th St. basement and later first-floor spaces on E. 4th Street from 1962 onwards. Stewart, an African-American woman who had no theater experience when she started La MaMa and was working as a dress designer, directed and maintained this jewel with an almost unerring aesthetic compass and a determination that would make many a soldier jealous.  It has played an almost incalculable role in the development of Off and Off-Off Broadway theater, as well as in nurturing the possibilities of formal experimentation in a city and a larger culture that over the last 50 years has become increasingly hostile to anything non-commercial that isn't located within the walls of academe.

As I pointed out on a friend's Facebook link about Stewart's passing, one of the things that ought be noted is how crucial to the aesthetic, social and economic ecology of New York theater and performance, and national and global theater and performance this little downtown theater has been. Writers such as Adrienne Kennedy, Maria Irene Fornes, Sam Shepherd, Harvey Fierstein, Lanford Wilson, David and Amy Sedaris, and Tom Eyen, to name just a few, had some of their earliest productions in its theater, and, to quote the New York Times, acclaimed actors including "Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, F. Murray Abraham, Olympia Dukakis, Richard Dreyfuss, Bette Midler, Diane Lane and Nick Nolte" appeared in its productions during its early years.  The Times's Ben Brantley, in his appraisal of Stewart, notes how artists from around the world, sometimes significant figures from troubled regions, such as the Belarus Free Theatre and its current joint La MaMa-Under the Radar Festival production of Being Harold Pinter, circulated through Stewart's institution, making it a key node in an vital and thriving thick, material network of international artistic and intellectual exchange and relations.

The Public Theater has announced that it will dedicate the remainder of its 55th season to Ms. Stewart, and the Under the Radar Festival, which ends on January 16, has followed suit.

Ellen Stewart's Playbill obituary
Ellen Stewart's New York Times obituary
Ben Brantley's New York Times encomium to Ellen Stewart

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My "Subway Stores" in German Zine Show

Last year about this time, on a whim, I submitted a zine I'd offered for free on this blog (there was only one taker, eheu, who never sent me an address) to a zine exhibit open call at D21 Kunstraum in Leipzig, Germany.  The self-assembled, limited-edition zine, "Subway Stories," featured some of my iPhone drawings, with minimal text, though the images created something of an associative narrative.  I never heard anything back from the exhibit, "Thank You for Sharing," figured they were not interested and chalked it all up to experience. Last week, while cleaning up one of my email inboxes, I came across a mention of the show, and decided I would write the curator, Regine Ehleiter, just to find out if she had ever received my submission.  Things do sometimes get lost in the mail.

Lo and behold, not only had she received it, but the little zine was accepted and appeared in the May 2010 exhibit!  I never received an email or the acceptance letter, but these things happen. Ms. Ehleiter also told me that it was also listed in the printed documentation that the organizers finally finished last week (p. 37), and it will be mentioned in the publication at left, Thank You For Sharing, which will be released on Friday, January 21, 2011, at MZIN in Leipzig.  Ms. Ehleiter also kindly sent a link to pictures of the exhibition on Flickr, and to an article that appeared on their website, which listed my zine among the many others.  Although it appears that there won't be any more zine events at D21 Kunstraum, the zine collection, along with the display units developed by the four Leipzig designers, may travel to other sites in Germany and Europe. It would be great if they came to the US as well; perhaps a store/exhibition space like Printed Matter (a wonderful arts institution which I've never had even the slightest luck getting a response from) might be persuaded to partner with Ms. Ehleiter's organization. Perhaps someone (other than me!) could mention it to them.

Nevertheless, I was delighted by the news; I have never set foot in Germany, but I can now say that something I created has. Now, to "Subway Stories #2"....

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Snow (Again) + The Attempted Assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords

Snow, snow, everywhere snow. Or at least it feels like I'm trailing or it's trailing me here in Chicago. It wasn't snowing in Los Angeles, which I just returned from a few days ago, but it was chilly, though I can't complain because a little chill in the air is better than sliding across icy roadways as snow pour down from an infinite white sky. That was my experience this morning on the way to my first class. But I got there, and am now hoping that the snow here decides to trail off, soon.

***

I am not going to try to diagnose Jared Lee Loughner or offer some overarching rationale for why this past Saturday this 22-year-old evidently disturbed man attempted to assassinate US Representative (D-AZ) Gabrielle Giffords, who is now in critical care and still fighting for her life, though it increasingly appears as though she will make a strong recovery.  In his attempt to kill her he went on a rampage, murdering her aide, Gabe Zimmerman, 30; Federal judge John Roll, 63; Christina Taylor Green, a 9-year-old girl born on September 11, 200l, who was deeply interested in governmental affairs; Dorothy Murray, 76; Dorwin Stoddard, 76; and Phyllis Scheck, 79. He also wounded a number of other bystanders, making January 8th one of the most tragic days in 2011 America.

One thing that made this crime possible is the easily availability of semiautomatic weapons, such as the Glock that Loughner apparently was able to acquire without any problems.  Another, that many across the Net have pointed, is the extremist rhetoric that is now so common, though I would suggest that pointing to this backdrop does not mean that I am drawing a direct link and, as I've seen some do, I'd add that not forget such rhetoric isn't new in American history and that as recently as the 1990s not only was such rhetoric in wide circulation, but there was surge in private militias, attacks targeting racial, ethnic, sexual and religious minorities, and spectacularly horrific acts like the Oklahoma City Bombing, which killed over 100 people, occurred in 1995.

Let me make two micro points about rhetoric and discourse. First, rhetoric, one of the oldest aspects of verbal exchange (it precedes written language), is meant to have psychophysical effects. The way that one speaks can shape the way others act. This is why orators going back thousands of years were trained in the art of rhetoric. To speak of "rhetoric," even in its degraded contemporary form, then, is to speak of language with the potential make people think and act. We remember the best rhetoric: "Four score and seven years...," "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country," "I have a dream..." Second, anyone who has passed through or even near a lit crit class in the last 35 years has learned a little bit about "discourse," primarily via Foucault and his adepts. One lesson anyone who has paid attention learns (and I'm simplifying radically here) is that society, and people in society, change and are changed not simply by individual acts, history, material culture, etc., but also by the discourse that circulates--the language, the ideas, the memes, etc.--throughout an era in any given time. It shapes what people say, think, do, create, and so on. Foucault took the idea in very important and sometimes controversial directions, but it is now pretty much a given, at least in contemporary humanities scholarship, that discursive production, is something always to consider.

I thus do believe this extremist rhetoric and its discursive effects, aided and abetted by fanatics employing the media new and old, have increased, as has the failure of many in the corporate media, or in the upper reaches of the political left even to make any effort to counter it.  I also believe that the "eliminationist rhetoric" in particular, which New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote about on Monday, from politicians no less, is perhaps more prominent.  Yet let me make clear that I am not saying there is a direct causational link between the crazy ranting and the crazy acts. One of the tricks I've noticed online over the past few days is people on the right citing President Obama's "if they bring a knife, we bring a  gun" remark as a counterweight, missing the point that this is an old saw, composed of two metonyms and defensive in its meaning, as opposed to a direct offensive call for violence against opponents, or for revolutionary violence (Sharron Angle's "Second Amendment" solutions), etc.

Nevertheless, to show that the events of this past weekend were not in isolation, I want to post the following link from Dave Neiwert via Digby that details a series of similar events that have occurred since the last presidential election cycle got underway.

-- July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how "liberals" are "destroying America," walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.
-- October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama.
-- December 2008: A pair of "Patriot" movement radicals -- the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted "to attack the political infrastructure" -- threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.
-- December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear "dirty bomb" in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb.
-- January 2009: A white supremacist named Keith Luke embarks on a killing rampage in Brockton, Mass., raping and wounding a black woman and killing her sister, then killing a homeless man before being captured by police as he is en route to a Jewish community center.
-- February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material.
-- April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself. Poplawski is currently awaiting trial.
-- April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama's purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police.
-- May 2009: A "sovereign citizen" named Scott Roeder walks into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and assassinates abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.
-- June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester named James Von Brunn opens fire at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard.
-- February 2010: An angry tax protester named Joseph Ray Stack flies an airplane into the building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas. (Media are reluctant to label this one "domestic terrorism" too.)
-- March 2010: Seven militiamen from the Hutaree Militia in Michigan and Ohio are arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate local police officers with the intent of sparking a new civil war.
-- March 2010: An anti-government extremist named John Patrick Bedell walks into the Pentagon and opens fire, wounding two officers before he is himself shot dead.
-- May 2010: A "sovereign citizen" from Georgia is arrested in Tennessee and charged with plotting the violent takeover of a local county courthouse.
-- May 2010: A still-unidentified white man walks into a Jacksonville, Fla., mosque and sets it afire, simultaneously setting off a pipe bomb.
-- May 2010: Two "sovereign citizens" named Jerry and Joe Kane gun down two police officers who pull them over for a traffic violation, and then wound two more officers in a shootout in which both of them are eventually killed.
-- July 2010: An agitated right-winger and convict named Byron Williams loads up on weapons and drives to the Bay Area intent on attacking the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, but is intercepted by state patrolmen and engages them in a shootout and armed standoff in which two officers and Williams are wounded.
-- September 2010: A Concord, N.C., man is arrested and charged with plotting to blow up a North Carolina abortion clinic. The man, 26-year--old Justin Carl Moose, referred to himself as the "Christian counterpart to (Osama) bin Laden” in a taped undercover meeting with a federal informant.

Whether this is a higher or lower number of such incidents, I cannot say. It is clear, however,  that a number of people have come unhinged, and in many of these cases, certain threads keep reappearing. I had pointed to some of them on this blog long before the November 2008 election, and their casual usage even by members of the press (the slurs against Obama's name, etc.), and we are seeing the results. Perhaps now the media will wake up and stop furthering this rhetoric and discourse, though as Foucault and others might say, it is already out there, and how it plays out, especially with the economy listing along, failed right-wing economic ideas still dominating policy discussions, and another major election just on the horizon, we'll have to see.

To give another perspective, from someone living in Tucson, here's acclaimed writer Larry McMurtry's reading of the situation there, "American Tragedy," from the New York Review of Books blog.

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New Year Links

I have been intending to blog more this year than I did last year, but the first week of the new year has coincided with the first week of classes (my first two, the introductory fiction writing course and the course on writing and publishing for senior writing majors, were on Tuesday), and now I am off to the Modern Language Association's annual convention in Los Angeles, so I haven't had any time to focus on any of the topics I've wanted to. Instead, here are a few links:


The new Congress opens, with GOP controlling the House and Democrats running the Senate

Mass die-offs of birds, crabs, fish across globe alarming scientists, observers

Whither progressivism in the United States from hereout?

After a lifetime of activism, Jean Quan takes office as Oakland's new mayor

Scholar bowdlerizes Huck Finn, changing n-word to slave

Michael Berubé on how conservatives have adopted postmodernism to ill ends

The very rich are very, very different from you and me (or maybe just me)

Republican Allen West joins Congressional Black Caucus, Tim Scott will not

Curtis Mayfield, blackness, autonomy, and resistance

Ivory Coast deadlocked, violence escalates, as Gbagbo refuses to concede

Is Sudan on the verge of a split into Muslim North, oil-rich Christian South?

And, as a bit of lagniappe, a rare random photo:

FRS workers' electric slide outside of the Apple Store, 14th St., NY

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Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!
Feliz año nuevo
Feliz Ano Novo
Bonne année
Buon Anno e tanti auguri
Kull 'aam wa-antum bikhayr
Aliheli'sdi Itse Udetiyvasadisv
Na MwakaMweru wi Gikeno
Feliĉan novan jaron
聖誕快樂 新年快樂 [圣诞快乐 新年快乐]
Bliain úr faoi shéan is faoi mise duit
Nava Varsh Ki Haardik Shubh Kaamnaayen
Ein gesundes neues Jahr
Mwaka Mwena
Pudhu Varusha Vaazhthukkal
Afe nhyia pa
Ufaaveri aa ahareh
Er sala we pîroz be
سال نو
С наступающим Новым Годом
šťastný nový rok
Manigong Bagong Taon sa inyong lahat
Feliç Any Nou
Yeni yılınızı kutlar, sağlık ve başarılar dileriz
نايا سال مبارک هو
Emnandi Nonyaka Omtsha Ozele Iintsikelelo
Subha Aluth Awrudhak Vewa
Chronia polla
Szczesliwego Nowego Roku
Kia pai te Tau Hou e heke mai nei
Shinnen omedeto goziamasu (クリスマスと新年おめでとうございます)
IHozhi Naghai
a manuia le Tausaga Fou
Paglaun Ukiutchiaq
Naya Saal Mubarak Ho

(International greetings courtesy of Omniglot and Jennifer's Polyglot Links; please note a few of the phrases may also contain Christmas greetings)

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