Commerce: Brzezinski wrote, “the most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.” (The Grand Chessboard)
The Soviet Union collapse in 1991 created several new nations around the Caspian Sea. Major US oil companies, including Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Unocal, BP, Amoco, Shell and Enron, invested billions in these Central Asian nations, bribing heads of state to secure equity rights in the huge oil reserves. US companies owned approximately 75% of the rights. However, Russia owned the pipelines and could control the quantity and price of transporting the oil. (New Yorker 7/9/01, Asia Times 1/26/02)
The natural route for pipelines would be...
In an effort to increase their cultural visibility in the States, The French have been sponsoring for a number of years various translation prizes, and helped the winning translators find publishers.This year the reception celebrating the finalists and the winners was on Tuesday, May 24th, and since I was in the City for the BEA, I was more than happy to honor the invitation I’d received.David Bellos—celebrated translator of Ismail Kadare and Georges Pérec—was Master of...
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...
Yale University’s Sterling Professor of Humanities, author of many books of literary criticism and cultural analysis, Harold Bloom, was introduced and questioned by Paul Holdengraber to stimulate a conversation about Mr. Bloom's opinions and career. Holdengraber is curator of “LIVE from the NYPL, a Cognitive Theatre with a mission to provoke, engage, instigate, and agitate the mind.” The acoustics in the auditorium were poor, causing an echo-like reverberation that made it difficult to understand what the men were saying. Holdengraber's German accent and Harold Bloom's age and difficult speech, and habit of mumbling behind the hand supporting his chin, made it hard to understand their conversation. Most audience members, except for those in the very front rows near the stage, had difficulty getting all the...
She appeared at three events. Wearing a brightly colored dress and beautiful silver hair, she would raise her hand. Each time she would ask a difficult, penetrating question in a spritely, musical voice that challenged an author on a PEN World Voices Panel. This time about the role of government, that time about writing and dreams. She always carried herself with dignity and smiled warmly at her neighbors. I kept wondering to myself, who is this woman?
I soon found out at the Freedom to Write Lecture at NYU's Cooper Union. For she was stepping onto the stage with the Ghanaian Kwame Anthony Appiah, President of PEN America and professor at Princeton. The woman was Nawal El Saadawi.
60 million people can’t be nerds. If they are, they’ve probably come to terms with it.
The Japanese story form manga uses extended plotlines and a distinct pictorial style. It falls somewhere in between a graphic novel and a comic book. Widely read in Japan, where it is a $4 billion industry, Manga attracts a slightly more esoteric crowd in the U.S. Here such readers may be considered nerds. There, they are cool. But increased domestic sales suggest that manga may no longer be the stuff stashed in freshman lockers.
Manga depicts stories of everything from shogunate sword fights to the lives of ordinary salarymen. A typical issue may contain several shorter storylines and be between 200-400 pages in length. Most of...
Fifteen years after the death of author Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Niger Delta region of Nigeria remains embroiled in conflict. Kidnappings and murders are on the rise, and America is more dependent on Nigerian oil than ever. If there is hope, it may be found in Saro-Wiwa's legacy of non-violent activism. But the window of opportunity may soon be closing.
A Little Background: Why we care about Saro-Wiwa
A little background is in order. Ken Saro-Wiwa largely became known to people outside Nigeria for his activism against the degradation of his homeland in the Southern part of the country. Oil companies, particularly Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum, had destroyed this once fertile wetlands through a combination of mismanagement, gas flaring, and regular oil...
BREAKING NEWS: The Statue of Liberty has swine flu. Evacuate New York. Punish the Mexicans. And let's all OVERREACT ... please!
Yes, here we go again. Fear is back. It never becomes unfashionable, does it? Fear sells newspapers, and now we're all supposed to stop traveling. Europeans should stay in Europe, Americans should stay in America, and nobody should travel to Mexico because swine flu is going to do us in!
I doubt it but maybe it will. Perhaps swine flu is going to b blamed for every death in the US the next twelve months. It might surpass our fear of terrorist attacks and erectile dysfunction. All You Need Is Fear - isn't that what John Lennon sang...
Anyone who has ever invited a friend to come to the U.S. has bumped into the ruthless bureaucracy of the immigration system. The process often works something like this:
Consular officer: I regret that your visa application was denied, Mr. Jonathan. Jonathan: Why? Consular officer: Because I think you plan to stay in the U.S. Jonathan But I have a wife and two kids here in Djibouti, and plenty of money. Consular officer: The decision has been made. Next in line, please. Jonathan: Can't I appeal? Consular officer: You can submit another visa application. Next, please....
I went early on election day to vote at the polling station in the church on the cobblestone street in my neighborhood. The lines snaked down the block as neighbors read their morning papers, chatted, visited each other with their dogs on leashes and waited to get inside. After I voted, I went to the airport, and before the polls closed, I flew out to Africa.
When I arrived in Amsterdam, the big television screen outside the airport announced that Albert Gore was the next President of the United States. I went to sleep for a few hours in an airport hotel before my connecting flight. When I awoke, the television announced George Bush was the next President of the United States. I boarded...
On June 4 China will face the 19th anniversary of the killing of citizens occupying Tiananmen Square. Nineteen years ago as president of PEN USA, I remember well sorting through dozens of unfamiliar Chinese names as we sought to untangle what writers had been arrested. Today there are at least 42 writers imprisoned in China.
I wake up 22 stories in the air. Most of Hong Kong is in the air with thousands of high rises shooting into the sky. I’m in a cubicle—two small beds pressed against each wall, a tiny shelf between, a TV mounted on the wall at the foot of one bed. At the head of...
One of the more creative and moving responses to the Olympics in China this year is a poem relay, initiated by writers and members of International PEN. The poem June, was written by Shi Tao, who is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for sending to pro democracy websites a government directive for Chinese media to downplay the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.
You may recall in 2004 Shi Tao was identified when Yahoo! turned over his email account to the authorities.Charged with “illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities,” Shi Tao now faces the next decade in prison. His poem June is his memorial of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
It's still too cold for me to wear one of my wife-of-a-chicken-farmer dresses. That is lost on you, no doubt, for what does the wife of a chicken farmer wear? Probably nothing at all like I imagine myself to be should I run away and start a chicken farm with the man that I love and yet I tell myself one day, one day, I will do this. We will simply take off and go to somewhere in Sicily and start a small no-kill chicken farm where the chickens can run around free-range and we will simply sell the eggs and live a poor but sated life. We will love. We will have time for our writing, our editing, our...
It's hard to capture the moment of any given moment in a single snapshot, and yet this shot, to me, captures everything about my most recent foray to NYC. It was subtle, full of life, soft, scented, productive, proud, energetic yet mild, and always but always with friends both old and new and discovering new things about myself and about them as well. One can hardly say that this was by any means a 'wasted' trip; besides which, no trip is wasted unless you make it so.
Life, like anything (and I realize this is trite) is what you make it. It's like that song by the group "Talk Talk" (remember them?) "Baby... life's what you make it..."...
As a sometime professor of book editing and writing a very fine graduate program in publishing, I should be so lucky, as I am, to have such thoughtful students who are interested in interning, actively seeking work, volunteering, etc. once the class is over and it is my promise to them, just as someone once gave me a leg up, to help them out as best I can through recommendations, by sending them to publishers and agents that I know well and that perhaps will take my recommendation about this or that student under advisement. This is the hope.
So far, I have become a mentor to two students - asked quite literally to "mentor" and I cannot begin to express what a...
It is a lonely feeling to lose anyone - lovers, friends, family and in any way, however you lose someone is a death. To lose a mentor tho, how does one begin to express what this feels like?
Were it not for Steven T. Florio I would not be in book publishing or publishing in any way. I always knew I would be a writer, but I never for a minute believed I could succeed as a publisher, as an editor, editorial director, acquisitions editor, etc - the myriad jobs I have held so far in my career - and I never thought that I would see to publish my work with some fair measure...
John Wayne Must Die
When I was young I saw a lot of John Wayne. I watched him kill a lot of people. All of them bad, most of them Indians. He was also pretty good at killing Japanese, but not so good at killing Germans. John Wayne didn’t die. Not in the movies.
When I was in Marine boot camp they showed us John Wayne movies. In Marine boot camp you couldn’t leave the base, you couldn’t go to the PX, you couldn’t buy soft drinks, ice cream or candy. You couldn’t have cigarettes, beer, or women. Instead we had John Wayne. Usually, he wore a Marine uniform and killed a lot of Japanese.
An eighteen-year-old...
