Mentshes/4

Andrew, on the left, with Benny

Share the Wealth with Andrew Wimmer:
Julian Assange in Conversation with John Pilger

“You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can’t lead to a good conclusion.”
–Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks

 

In the last several years, my friend Andrew Wimmer has paid close attention to the work of Wikileaks and the subsequent arrest of Bradley Manning as well as the threats against Julian Assange.

We invite you to join us this Sunday 13 January to view a recent interview with Julian Assange by veteran journalist John Pilger at Andrew’s home (4542 Gibson Avenue, 63110). Potluck dinner begins at 6:00 p.m., and the interview begins at 6.40, with discussion to follow.

Please bring a friend!

Mark

Some background:

The Reading Life/2

Emily, Lindsey, Katie

By the Blue Light of a Cell Phone
by Katie Consamus

Dr Chmiel,

I just flipped on CNN after getting home from rehearsal and immediately thought of our encounter on New Year’s Eve as I watched a saddening report on Gaza.

My immediate reaction was desolation and helplessness– so often my response these days as I watch the news.  But then I became happier when I remembered I had good news to share with you that I neglected to mention the other day. My apologies for my forgetfulness– my mind was already on the show I was rushing off to perform in.

But anyway. This holiday, while riding around in the tour van between shows, I was able to start and complete The Book of Mev I was so engrossed that I finished the last 100 pages of the book by the feeble blue light of my open cell phone late at night on the road. (It couldn’t wait until I got home, evidently, although I paid for it the next day with an eye strain headache. Haha.)

Social Justice as a course truly changed my entire perspective on life, and The Book of Mev only solidified my new perspectives into the deepest corners of my heart.

I am extremely grateful to you.

I have not yet processed my thoughts well enough to articulate an intelligible response to your book, but it is coming, and when I have come up with them, I will be sure to share them with you.

Thank you for sharing your words and your heart with your students and your readers.

Katie

An Alphabetical List

The following is an alphabetical list of topics and/or possible chapter titles for a book I was working on in 2011. At this stage, it was autobiographical. It eventually morphed and became the novel, Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine. Some of what’s below found a home there…

A Little Taste/ [Detention]
A Little Taste
Accompaniment/1
Accompaniment/2
Accompaniment/3
Activist
Administrative Detention
Ahlan wa-sahlan
Aide-Memoire
Aide-Memoire
Al-Hamdulilah
Al-Quds
Al-Quds
Allah
American Activists
Analogies/1
Analogies/2
Analogies/3
Anger/1
Anger/2
Anger (or, Fury)
Anti-Semitism/1
Anti-Semitism/2: Review of Finkelstein
Apartheid
Apartheid
Apathy
Arabic [see Lexicon]
Arabic lessons
Arabic expression for Profession of Faith, What Israel wants, there is no God but Israel
Aspiration/1
Aspiration/2
Asymmetry

Gleanings and Connections

Anne Waldman and Laura Wright, editors,  Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics—An Anthology

Dear Layla: “modernist textual montage/collage of a wide-ranging array mixing the personal and the historical”

Dear Layla: “Ezra Pound’s Cantos gave me a way to collage many texts and voices into poems, using material from a range of historical records.”

Dear Layla: “Reznikoff, like many poets, often focuses on the micro to make real the macro.”

Dear Layla: a multitude of voices within the narrative

Cross Worlds: “speaking on what happens both between and across spaces, locations, languages, genres and media.”

Cid Corman: “the main thing is to stay open to others, to listen, that’s the secret, and to look around you.”

“Rap is a black person’s CNN, according to Chuck D.”

Putting Marginalia to Use

for Danielle Mackey

Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces
31 Saturday October 2009

I reread this book for one reason:  To see if it could help me generate some ideas as to form and content for my third book, which still will deal with Palestine.

So, all I scribble below is from marginalia—ideas, chapter or unit titles, possibilities—I  have made as I read these short, lyrical, lightly dense meditations that still make me think: Ah, this is my form, too!

Today as I finished the book in Borders waiting for Sharifa and Dania, it occurred to me: 10 themes each with 10 chapters, fractured and sequenced, with the ten chapters on Hedy being the “spine” of the work: a link between Shoah and Nakba. This is reflected below in the end of these notes.

It really will be a meditation on history.

Lexicon entries
The Occupation
What Prison can do to a Man [Hitler story]

Ghadeer, 400 words [tell me your story]
Different fonts of Arabic words…. Calligraphy
Reading Chomsky/1/2

Take a quotation and revise it to tell my story
Transformations/1 [Halper]

People I Know: The Actor
People I Know: The Survivor
People I Know: The Professor

Two Ways of Looking at a Plague…

Ernesto Cardenal, Zero Hour And Other Documentary Poems
New Directions, 1980

Dear Chase & Liz,

The Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal died on March 1. I’m going back over his works this spring under quarantine. I first read Zero Hour in 2008, and it was a godsend, a goad, a glory. A little more than 100 pages, Cardenal’s exteriorismo invites you into a world of injustice, resistance, and revolution, the last of which the U.S. government was determined to kill off, and did by the late 1980s. Translator Robert Print-Mill has this to say: “Cardenal’s recording of the present or the past is aimed at helping to shape the future—involving the reader in the poetic process in order to provoke him into full political commitment, thus fostering the translation of the poet’s more prophetic visions into sociopolitical fact.” Without Cardenal, without this book, I could not have written Dear Layla [see therein, Reading/5 (Subversive/3)]. The following are some passages from several poems that caught my attention…

The Brazilian miracle
Of a Hilton Hotel surrounded by hovels.
The price of things goes up
And the price of people comes down.

We cut through the canyon of windows [in Manhattan] and trillions of dollars

Who is that other monster rising up in the night?
The Chase Manhattan Bank screwing half of humanity.

THE EARTH BELONGS TO EVERYBODY, NOT THE RICH

Think Small

Today my friend Lucy, an ICU nurse in Idaho, sent me a text expressing her gratitude for the solace she received from a very short chapter in my book, Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine.

 

Internationalista (Daydream/2)

It’s Nablus spring 1989
The intifada is in full bloom
And there’s always something happening in and with and from the resistance
International delegations come and go
10,000 photos are taken of David
(A Palestinian teen-ager with stones)
Squaring off against Goliath
(An Israeli tank)
The leaflets and communiqués everywhere
The women come into public space and assert their voices
And the mighty State of Israel has a major PR problem
Unnoticed is the older man with wavy grey hair
Like so many non-Palestinians, he, too, adopts the kaffiyeh
He studied some Arabic in Beirut and Sāo Paolo
He’d always been thinking of how to make “it” happen
To birth the revolution
Here, there, and everywhere
He wasn’t as talkative as he was in his thirties
He listened far more intently
Suffering can do that to a person
He’d seen so much misery
No, he wasn’t religious at all, but he found himself saying “crucifixion”
A fate he had several times narrowly escaped himself
He arrived with a Brazilian passport: “Joāo Azevedo”
He came on fire for the people living under a dehumanizing system
He came, thinking, once again: If I’m going to go out
(translated: to die)
Better to die in the struggle
Than being interviewed for the 200th time by a cynical, smug journalist whose specialty is retro features
Better to be with the rock throwers than those who blithely and brainlessly pay their taxes to support the occupiers
Better to go and blend in and enjoy every bite of falafel and hummus and
Say “gracias, uh, shukran”
To every Palestinian grandmother, wife, or teenager who offers sustenance
Better to connect the blood red dots once again
From the Guatemalan Highlands to Ramallah
From Santiago to Gaza City
From San Salvador to al-Quds
Better to recognize the Palestinians as sisters and brothers
Compañeros and compañeras
And offer them one’s silence
One’s experience
One’s impatience
One’s indignation
One’s stories from crisscrossing a planet crucified by capitalism
Better to join the demonstration
Tear gas won’t faze him
Beatings—even at his age (61)—don’t evoke fear
In the afternoon near the sooq
He meets a new resister
(They are everywhere)
The older man extends his hand to the youth,
Smiles and says,
“Ismii Che…”

OK, Henry
I’ve got some down time over here
I wrote this for your pleasure

Hasta la Intifada Siempre

Perry

–from Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine

Where the Tortured and the Torturer Shook Hands

How many of our most famous novelists, for instance, have bothered to take the two-and-a-half hour flight from Miami and see for themselves what’s going on here?
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti

 

I first read Seven Days in Nicaragua Libre in the mid-eighties; Ferlinghetti and I had both visited Nicaragua in 1984 (I on a Kentucky Witness for Peace delegation). I looked at the book again ten years ago, when Becca Gorley and I were reading from the City Lights Pocket Poets series. At that time, I was, still, trying to write something about our times in the West Bank and Gaza, and Ferlinghetti’s account was one of several books I read for provocation and inspiration. Many things, you can’t force; Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine was self-published in summer 2015.

A man of the Left, Ferlinghetti saw Nicaraguan history this way: “What has happened here, rather, is the overthrow of a tyrant (Somoza) supported by the U.S., and the attempt to overthrow the economic tyrant of colonialism in which Latin America has been for centuries the cheap labor market for North American and multinational business.” Many U.S. citizens may suffer amnesia about this appalling history but Latin Americans have a long memory.

The Pithy, the Necessary, the Clear, and the Plain

Charles Reznikoff: Man and Poet, edited by Milton Hindus
National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, 1984

Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling.

— A.C. Graham quoting a Chinese poet from long ago

 

This thick volume is a collection of reminisces, literary analyses, and appreciations of Charles Reznikoff: Objectivist, American-Jew between two worlds, New Yorker, walker, miniaturist, transformer of documentary mass of data into free verse art, survivor of mean anti-Semitism growing up, self-published devotee to his own writing, lawyer who never practiced, maker of a preferential option (in writing, anyway) for the humblest, and chronicler of the Jewish history.

I first learned of Reznikoff from writings by Eliot Weinberger and Allen Ginsberg. In the summer of 2010 I plunged into his works and Hindus’s volume during the generation of what became Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine.