Silliman's Blog: 1/4/09

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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Monday, January 05, 2009

Robert Grenier on Carol Watts

The program for Emma Bee Bernstein’s funeral

Charles Bernstein’s
”Eulogy for Emma”

A note from Felix Bernstein

From the Angels of Light to New Narrative

A terrific anthology of New York City poetry:
The Portable Boog Reader 3
(PDF)

Last year’s equally stunning collection (PDF)

The poetry of C.D. Wright

How to write language poetry

Poetry & relevance
(a good collection of all the links)

Framing Gabe Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook

Cities vie over celebrating Poe

Mark Scroggins on John Taggart

Bruce Sterling:
State of the World, 2009

Talking with Dan Chiasson
about editing
poetry for the Paris Review

26 instant reviews

Jack Kerouac’s
”Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”

Sex at the MLA

Nobel secretary
who told the truth
steps down

Taxonomies

Beloafism

Eileen Tabios’ Reproductions of the Empty Flagpole

Teaching & satisfaction

Some work by Crystal Curry
with a comments stream
that has broken out into warfare

Writers who practice medicine

Joshua Clover on Michèle Bernstein

W.S. Merwin on PBS Newshour

Hemingway as a poet

In the basement of the ivory tower

200 applications for every job

With whom is Stanley Fish speaking with?

“Reading Frank O’Hara on the Blue Line
and a Few Words About Disappointment”

Poesy for the kids

Adam Kirsch on a new translation of
Kafka’s Amerika

& on Burton Raffael’s new translation of
The Canterbury Tales

Prison poetry in India

Man Booker prize funds
were invested with
Bernie Madoff

What is “non-commercial”?

How far should
© exemptions extend?

Hitler’s Private Library

“The Man Who Burned Books”

A more intimate memoir from
Azar Nafisi

A profile of Jay Ruzesky

Paperback Dreams

Charity bookshops

Glenn Goldman has died

New York’s French bookshop
bids adieu

The MLA & the Middle East

Susan Sontag’s early diaries

Denis O’Leary on poetry
& other stuff

Poetry as “divine therapy”

Mary Karr on Tryfon Tolides

The poet of money who saw it coming

Best translations of 2008

Recalling the first inaugural poet

National Reading 2666 Month

Poets of New York’s suburbs

Buffalo’s experimental past

Todd Boss’ Yellowrocket

Saving (maybe) the foreign language major

Anne Carson
reading with sculpture & dancers

Andrew Motion on a bio of
Robert Burns

Burns as an analgesic

& as a democrat

“Little machines made out of words”

The impact of trees on poetry

Sylvia Townsend Warner & Valentine Ackland

Paul Guest’s
My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge

Richard Tillinghast finds Ireland

Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman

Tale of Genji at 1,000

Edward FitzGerald’s “unfaithful translation”

Mainstream media is dead (sorta)

Portraits of America poets

Painting books

Oranges & Sardines at the Hammer

Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes

Jackson Pollock crosses the street

S. Clay Wilson today

The day the music died

Thelonius Monk’s advice to Steve Lacy

Putting Charles Olson (literally)
to music (10MB MP3)

Labels: links

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Sunday, January 04, 2009

As Captain Harold Dobey in Starsky & Hutch in the 1970s, Bernie Hamilton was one of the very first African-American authority figures on American television. He passed away last week at the age of 80. I got to know Hamilton a little back then while he was dating one of my roommates in a large collective household on California Street in San Francisco. Hamilton was smart, kind, funny, generous, spontaneous – “Hey, Lizzie, let’s go to Egypt for the weekend!” – a little sensitive that his brother, jazzman Chico Hamilton, was more famous & successful than he was, and totally frustrated at whites who didn’t think African-Americans could excel at whatever they set their sights on. He’d been a volunteer driver for Paul Robeson during the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign & revered Robeson. As the son of a cop, I remember being surprised at how progressive Hamilton was.

Once Hamilton decided to take our whole household out for a Sunday brunch at some swank place just off Union Square. With a 40-something black man leading a gaggle of seven hippies, we must have looked like the Symbionese Liberation Army as we walked into the place. In any event, the maitre d’ didn’t recognize Hamilton & officiously told us that this was a very expensive place, with a prix fixe of $24 a person. Without blinking, Hamilton reached into his billfold, pulled off a hundred dollar bill & gave it to the man, growling “Give us the best table.” Which he did.

I still have one minor vice I can directly blame on Hamilton. He swore that everybody he knew in “the business” was hot for this new show that was going to appear on NBC and that it would be the hippest thing in the history of television. That show was, and is, Saturday Night Live.

Labels: passing

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Friday, January 02, 2009

Charles Olson today

Charles Olson,
who would have been 99 on Dec. 27,
reading ”The Librarian”
(YouTube)

Billy Little died of cancer this morning

Jack Spicer & the law

rob mclennan’s review

Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This to Me

Investigating Ed Sanders

Joe Safdie and Rae Armantrout
at Beyond Baroque

Post-avant is here to stay!

George Packer of The New Yorker
gets some mail
about his reservations about
Elizabeth Alexander
as the inaugural poet

Why do pols gravitate
to crappy poetry?

The books & poetry of
John Martone

2 new sets of DVDs of readings
in France
(includes Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein,
Rosmarie Waldrop, Jacques Roubaud, Keith Waldrop,
Norma Cole, Bill Berkson, Emanuel Hocquard,
Robert Grenier, Kristin Prevallet,
Jerry Rothenberg, Tom Raworth
& many more)