Silliman's Blog: 1/4/09

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Mike Amado

1975 – 2009

Friday, January 09, 2009

We have been without power for 24 hours at this point – I was fortunate to get yesterday’s post done before the branch hit the line. Right now I’m operating on battery power here and piggybacking on a neighbor’s wireless connection. And wearing more layers than usual, even for winter.

Labels: Personal

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Thursday, January 08, 2009

More books into Braille!

Poetry & capitalism

Jack Spicer’s “Golem”

Spicer celebration at SF Main Library
Saturday, Jan. 10

Richard Seaver has passed away

So has Carol Adair, Kay Ryan’s partner

American Hybrid

“Some Hybrid”

Partial MLA offsite reading
(85MB, Gordon thru Rothenberg,
available only to Saturday)

Jessa Crispin talking with Clayton Eshleman

Why teach literature?

A profile of the most popular
poetry contest in the world

Anti-war poetry then & now

Among Gaza’s atrocities

Doug Messerli
on
Emma Bee Bernstein

Editing friends

Francisco Goldman on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

Natasha Wimmer on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

Listening to Goldman & Wimmer
on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

Nazim Hikmet gets his citizenship back
(too bad he’s been dead for 45 years)

When Langpo & flarf are not enough

Is “embarrassment” more important than
”offensiveness” to flarf?

(Re)emerging poets

Talking with Arielle Greenberg

Bashō finds an abandoned infant
& leaves it to die

Response to the video

Bashō: The Complete Haiku

Always on: libraries in a world
of permanent connectivity

Where Barack buys books

Where Tom Hanks gets his

A coup at Borders

Remembering Glenn Goldman

How to kill a bookstore:
raise the rent to $1 million

After 85 years,
Stacey’s to close in SF

The indie bookstores of
Montpelier, Vermont

Making used books pay

A renaissance for used books?

2008: the poetry year in review

Roberta Beary: one-minute poetry reading

Still answering H.L. Hix’ “20 Questions”

Pervasive communication environments

Every book ever published
will end up online

Is captcha poetry hipper than flarf?

Remembering Dave Church

Mark Doty, making it real

Remembering Jason Shinder

Linh Dinh’s Seven Contemporary Italian Poets:
Marco Giovenale
Gherardo Bortolotti

Looking for a laureate

Cuba opens Hemingway e-archives

Shakespeare’s church is becoming unsafe

Writing & fame –
the case of Mishima

Frank Wilson’s likes & dislikes for 2008

Asher Ghaffar & Sue Sinclair

rob mclennan on Asher Ghaffar

Why spell-check sucks

Publishing: the new austerity

The “G” in FSG

Magazine ads are drying up

Readings at rush hour
at the train station!

Talking with Mark Irwin

Work needed for Poet’s Pause

The oldsters turn out for
Poems for the Millennium, vol. 3

Donald Westlake has died

Terry Gross talks to Westlake

Remembering Westlake

Celebrating W.D. Snodgrass

Talking with Mark Gwynne Jones

A poem-a-day for a decade

Talking with Peter Bennet

David Lunde’s Breaking the Willow

The origin of originality

Worst poetry book covers, 2008

Stanley Fish goes to the movies
(he gets Vertigo right)

Quietists who correspond

The fiction lineup for ought nine

Cell-phone novels

Hating all the new Canadian anthologies

The state of the humanities

Humanities Indicators Prototype (HIP)

In this recession, who will support the arts

What happens to the arts
when critics disappear

The Art Instinct

David Denby gets all snarky

Philosophy at (in) the movies

Making MOCA work

Foulds wins a Costa

Matisse’s model speaks

An artsy homeless shelter

The opposite of blockbuster

The man who invented ballet

Terry Teachout’s top 25
classical recordings of all time

Music theory now

The pitch-time continuum

Grateful Dead analysis:
the relationship between
concert & listening behavior

Betty Freeman & the music she commissioned

Ive’s ears

What we can learn from Guitar Hero

Magic may be over for
the Magic Theater

Another at risk
in Beverly, Mass

What will change
E V E R Y T H I N G ?

Labels: links, Passings

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Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Inger Christensen

1935 – 2009

In 1981, Christensen
used the Fibonacci series
to compose a book
entitled Alphabet

Labels: passing

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Tuesday, January 06, 2009

I have been asked more than once if I would comment on the situation in Gaza, tho I’ve never proposed myself as an expert on the Middle East. Philip Metres, in Monday’s comments stream, is very sweet when he writes

You're a voice that matters, that people listen to, and I personally want to know what you think about it.

Personally, I would want somebody with a lot more background on this topic myself.

Having said that, however, I do have both thoughts & feelings on the current situation. More than anything, I am reminded of a conversation I had with Sigmund Laufer the one time I got to spend an afternoon with him maybe 20 years ago. Perhaps it’s that I was just at the funeral for his granddaughter, Emma Bee Bernstein, last week, tho she was buried alongside her other grandfather in Valhalla, New York, not with Sigmund in New Jersey. Sigmund & Miriam Laufer, Susan Bee’s parents, left Palestine in 1947 & settled in New York City just a few blocks from where Susan lives today. They did so at a time when the creation of Israel was clearly about to happen. I asked Sigmund why, with the foundation of a new nation in the offing, they chose to leave. He said that it was self-evident that any Jewish state had to be a theocracy – otherwise the resident Palestinians would have been an overwhelming electoral majority – and that the creation of a state based on religion was only an investment in what he termed a “generation of tsouris.” Would that it had been only a generation.

In reality, the creation of Israel in the 1940s ensured what I believe will be multiple millennia of murder & counter-murder that will make the 700-year-old conflict in Kosovo between Christians & Muslims feel like small potatoes. The creation of Israel could have been accomplished only through genocidal action – the displacement of an entire nation already in place long before Zionism got going in the 1890s. It is a sad comment on the crudeness of colonialism – on a par with many of the arbitrary “national” boundaries that stretch across Africa & well into Southern Asia, completely ignorant of tribal communities that may cross over them – that anyone thought it was in their power or right to just give a state to any group of people.

Now, however, it is there and it is not going away. Israel’s government is dysfunctional and willing to do anything – no limits – to protect itself. That it projects itself externally as a bully, or uses the methodology of apartheid internally, should surprise no one. That it howls when this is pointed out – thank you, Jimmy Carter – is no different than the U.S. pretending it did not commit genocide in its sweeping aside of native nations in the 18^th & 19^th centuries.

I have sometimes wondered what America might be like today if the Roosevelt & Truman administrations had not been so overtly anti-Semitic and had instead opened our doors to every displaced Jew after the Second World War. The entrepreneurial capabilities and deep commitment to learning of that community would have flourished in the United States, the civil rights movement would have had a much easier time of it and George Bush never would have carried Florida. Instead we have had 60 years of fighting & cease-fires. Some day someone will be able to simply add another zero to that number. And then another.

Hamas is the perfectly logical response to this situation. The local version of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas is at best a group of thugs and even more committed to theocracy than is Israel. They are not all that much different, nor any better, than the Taliban in Afghanistan. By shooting rockets into Israel, Hamas invited the current Israeli response and did so because it forces the population there to rally around what has been an obviously failing regime. The cynicism of its strategy – which turns Gaza’s own civilian dead into an investment in Hamas’ political fortunes – is beyond appalling.

That Israel would be suckered into this response and would do so during the last three weeks of the Bush administration speaks volumes for its role as an American client-state – our primary military surrogate in the region – as well as for the ineptness of Team Bush. The cynicism of Israel’s strategy is beyond appalling.

There are no “good guys” in this conflict. The citizens of both sides are the victims of history as well as of their immediate hoodlum politicians. If the Zionist movement could invent the state of Israel in the middle of the 20^th century, you can be certain that the descendants of the Palestinians will still be able to imagine a “right of return” in the 40^th century. There is simply no solution. Period.

What there are, however, are measures that can minimize the bloodshed on all sides. A cease-fire, a two-state balancing act, serious economic investment in Palestine – the presence of a real middle class there would be a substantial brake on the impulse to violence – would all have an impact. I don’t think this is all so mysterious, but I don’t think it’s a long-term resolution either.

In the meantime, I bleed for the victims of all sides.

Labels: Politics

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