It’s touching how diligently pundits and politicians of the non-fact-based reality persuasion try to rewrite the record of George W. Bush. For example: Tea Party Nation head Judson Phillips “said that the death of Osama bin Laden happened in spite of President Obama.” (Right Wing Watch 5/2/11) “Bush’s persistence was palpable and set the tone for the intelligence community tasked with bringing bin Laden to justice. (Dan Balz, Washington Post 5/2/11)
To make such statements one must ignore the opportunity before 9/11. “The Bush administration now had in its hands what one participant called ‘the holy grail’ of a three-year quest by the U.S. government – a tool that could kill bin Laden within minutes of finding him. The CIA planned and practiced the operation. But...
When I was a school child we pledged allegiance to one nation, indivisible, but studied the “War Between the States.” Other children pledged allegiance but studied “The War of Northern Aggression.” Still others studied “The War of Southern Rebellion.” Some, particularly Jehovah’s Witness, were harassed and persecuted because they would not take an oath that violated their religious beliefs.
The pledge I recited wasn’t the original pledge written by Frances Bellamy, a Baptist minister and a Socialist, who believed America could have an economy with political, social and economic liberty for all. As chair of the state committee in the National Education Association he included the raising of the flag and the pledge in a Columbus Day celebration. “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the...
PEN World Voices is one of my favorite weeks in the literary year. I'm making a list of events I want to cover, and also preparing to talk about Sherman Alexie at the National Book Critics Circle panel on Friday April 30 at 1 pm at the Austrian Cultural Center. (I'm moderating a conversation about writers at this year's festival, with Rigoberto Gonzalez, who will talk about Mexican novelist Martin Solares; Eric Banks, who will discuss German-language writers, and Mary Ann Newman, who will discuss Catalan author Quim Monzo.)
Monday night's launch at WNYC, with Claire Messud moderating a panel including Lorraine Adams, Andrea Levy, and Norman Rush, bouncing off her Guernica guest edited edition on women, sex and fiction, and looks like a...
When Ronald Reagan died, his complicit enablers in the media lauded him for his myth-making “city on a hill,” ignoring the condemnation of the International Court of Justice that America had hidden its light under a bushel of terrorism. David Podvin commented, “On air and in print, the truth about the fortieth president was distorted beyond recognition by commentators determined to transform a bad leader (and even worse human being) into a hallowed icon.”
Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker wrote that Reagan “undermined environmental, civil-rights, and labor protections, neglected the AIDS epidemic, and packed the courts with reactionary mediocrities. He made callousness respectable.” Others pointed out that wealth was concentrated in the richest few, Reagan gave amnesty to almost 3 million illegal immigrants to...
By Saturday night, the week-long PEN World Voices Festival feels like a village where 160 writers from 41 countries, speaking 18 languages, have brought New York’s cultural vortex close to a boil.
Time for a World Voices variety show, the PEN Cabaret. Savvy Walter Mosley reads a brief chapter. Northern Irish poet Nick Laird reads a few poems (with self deprecating humor thrown in). He introduces his poem “To the Wife” as “a sonnet in a sentence, not a boast.” (In his case, the wife is Zadie Smith.)
Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya’s reads (in Spanish, with simultaneous English by actor David Conrad, and a drum backup) from Senselessness, his eighth novel. The haunting and repeated opening line, “I am...
It's icily cold in Instito Cervantes on 49th Street. Maybe the Spanish institute wants us to forget it's a beautiful night outside. But we can live with this onslaught of air condition since we're going to watch a lot of short films.
And what a feast it is. For two hours we "visit" India, Chile, Israel, and Chicago. We travel through landscapes that touch us to films that are downright pretentious. However, all of them are poetry in motion, so to speak - they explore the relationship between words and image. So we laugh, we smile, we are enlightened and irritated - what more can you ask for, while you freeze to death in beautiful surroundings?
September 20, 2001 George W. Bush said “From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” (White House, 9/20/01)
Perhaps we should start at home. In 1871 Congress passed the Anti-KKK Act of 1871 allowing authorities to declare martial law where the KKK was strongest. The civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 drove “home-grown terror” underground but it has not gone away. Christian extremist/white supremacist groups commit little noticed “hate crimes” against African-Americans, Jews, gays and lesbians, and Muslims. “The Justice Department says hate crimes are increasing and are a major category of their criminal prosecutions.” Since the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Christian extremist Timothy McVeigh the radical...
Jacques Derrida. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet and translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. xiii + 176 pp. Notes. $20.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8232-2791-4.
Reviewed for H-NILAS by Boria Sax, Liberal Studies, University of Illinois at Springfield
Do you Believe in the Animal?
Theorists constantly remind us that words like "nature," "God," "civilization," or "consciousness," except in the most restrictive contexts, have nothing close to the sort of precision that we usually expect from academic work, and it is very easy to dismiss them as incoherent or even meaningless. But, to the immense frustration of many positivists, analytic philosophers, and...
"The drive to dominance... is a product of human frailty. If we ever fully overcome our feelings of helplessness and terror in confrontation with the natural world, will we cease to be human?"
For the entire audio-visual presentation, please go to:
Resonances: Contemporary Writers on the Great Works
Thursday May 1
Gabriel Garcia Marquez never forgot the day he won permission to write. It happened long before he knew he was a writer, and it happened instantly, as soon as he finished Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
...Probably Kafka’s The Metamorphosis” was a revelation . . . It was in 1947 . . . I was nineteen . . . I was doing my first year of law school . . . I remember the opening sentences, it reads exactly thus: “As Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” . . . Holy shit! When I read that I said to myself, “This isn’t right!...
April is the pucker factor for Vietnam Veterans. Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army on April 30. Every anniversary Vietnam vets are told again that their service, suffering and sacrifice was for nothing, that their comrades died in vain.
In 1989, the War Atrocity Museum in the city still called Saigon displayed the photograph of the arch war criminal, Dwight Eisenhower. The Vietnamese consider him the primary villain because he did not sign the Peace Accord between France and Vietnam but signed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) agreement committing the US to defend South Vietnam. More foreign troops, other than US, fought in Vietnam under the SEATO Treaty than fought in Korea under the UN flag or in the Coalition...
Francisco Goldman, the Guatemalan born author who moderated Friday's "Gritty Realism" panel, proved an expert guide through the shift from magical realism to "gritty realism" in the work of a new generation of Latin American writers.
The four authors, whose work is set in the sometimes violent, sometimes fragile metropolitan landscapes of Lima (Daniel Alarcon), Medellin (Jorge Franco), Mexico City (Guillermo Arriaga), Rio and Sao Paulo (Patricia Melo), provide a twenty-first century alternative to the great Latin American trio of Borges, Garcia Marquez and Vargas-Llosa. Their work reflects the migrations from the countryside to cities, from the interior to the coast, from the south to the north, with accompaniments of violence, dislocation, and cultural chaos. Fertile ground for fiction writers.
Alarcon, who is an associate editor for the Lima monthly Etiqueta...
