The Politics of Hope (After the War): Selected and New Poems by Dubravka Djurić

 

My review of The Politics of Hope (After the War): Selected and New Poems, by Dubravka Djurić, edited and translated with an interview by Biljana D. Obradović, and a foreword by Charles Bernstein, Roof Books, 2023, can be found on Jacket 2:

The Politics of Hope

A Plaque for My Father from Students at the Virginia Theological Seminary, 1981

 

Lutheran theological seminary humor from 1981, on a plaque for my father that I never saw before or heard him talk about. I discovered it in storage with some of his belongings only recently, after his death more than three years ago now.

Below is the text.

__

This is to certify that

The Rev. Dewey Diaz Wallace

Presbyterian Divine and Church Historian Extra-Ordinaire

Has Been Designated

An Honorary, Middle-of-the-Road Anglican

By the Church History 3 Class

Virginia Theological Seminary

Spring Semester, 1981

In Recognition Of

His abilities as an erudite, entertaining lecturer with an amazing grasp of the first, middle, and last names of all sorts of churchly notables, both historical and hysterical.

An uncanny ability to mention a certain seminary in Princeton, New Jersey, in every lecture, at least once.

And

His recall of, and willingness to share, as writer’s cramp sets in at noon on Fridays, his fund of stories regarding most unforgettable evangelicals and long-dead theologians.

Engaging in “The Jerks” and various other holy awakenings.

____

I discarded the plaque with its humor that is not even remotely like my father’s humor. The description in it though certainly does sound quite a bit like my father, which is why I have posted a photo of it here, and the complete text, for the sake of any relevant posterity.

Someone Is Awake All Night by Beth Joselow

 

I really enjoyed the poems by Beth Joselow’s always surprising and inventive new book, Someone Is Awake All Night. Each poem is its own room. The mood is a fascinating combination of frightened and calm, overwhelmed and steadfast. The subject matter changes and slides within the poems and between poems in a way that’s sometimes oblique yet also feels grounded in good sense. The poems can be dark or funny or both. They don’t avoid human pain while also refusing to make pain the point.

The book shows the importance of contemplation as a useful response to distress, how aging can’t be avoided but doesn’t have to define everything about experience. The poems feel oddly comforting even when they don’t really offer comfort, if we can imagine that comfort can come from being alive to the awareness of what we sometimes cannot do. There are no platitudes in Someone Is Awake All Night. There’s just the reality of waking again and looking at oneself and others and figuring out how to stay present in the world in whatever time we have left.

Why a King is Anti-American But Socialism Isn’t, or, The Internet is Filled with Misinformation (American Government History 1)

 

Although George Washington discussed with some men the possibility of his becoming King, the idea was rejected, and the U.S. was founded as an anti-monarchical country. To be in favor of a King is to be against the founding values of the United States. The United States government has always been based on the idea that no leader should be above the law.

The United States was not however founded as an anti-socialist or anti-communist state, since the rise of ideas associated with socialism and communism did not happen until the 19th century.

In fact there were a number of 19th century American groups, most often Christian groups, who practiced socialist ideas. So being an American or a Christian does not mean that one has to be against socialism or communism.

In the 1920s and 30s, during the early development of the Soviet Union, many Americans became anti-communist or anti-socialist, but many Americans were also pro-communist or pro-socialist. In fact a significant rise in socialist ideas in the United States comes in the Progressive Era of U.S. history (roughly 1896-1917). And Franklin Roosevelt,  the U.S. President who led the country through the depression and World War II, instituted many socialist ideas into the practice of the U.S. government and helped the country get past the depression.

Roosevelt’s U.S. government made some reprehensible decisions, of course, the internment of Japanese Americans most especially. Being a socialist doesn’t mean making no mistakes.

The rise of anti-communism in the United States begins in earnest with the U.S. government of the 1950s, while the 1960s and 70s saw a resurgence of socialist and communist ideas among the people of the country.

At no time in the history of the U.S. government has a desire for kings and monarchy been a significant part of the government, although the Confederacy did believe to a significant extent in the idea of a white aristocracy.

All of which is to say: if you are in favor of the U.S. President being like a King who is above the laws, your values are historically anti-U.S., anti-American.

If you believe in some degree of socialist or communist ideas, you are simply part of one ongoing tradition in U.S. life, one that has been sometimes loved or hated by different Americans.

The Supreme Court decision earlier this week to make “official” Presidential acts beyond the reach of the law can be said to be a fundamentally anti-U.S. attempt to give the President some powers like those of a King, while at the same time they granted themselves (the Supreme Court) some powers of an aristocracy, something that is also anti-U.S.

Support of the Supreme Court decision is to be against the founding principles of the United States. Donald Trump has come out in favor of that deeply anti-American decision.

Review of Hal Jaffe (RIP), Antif-Twitter: 150 50-word Stories

 

Although I don’t have details, I learned yesterday that fiction writer Harold (Hal) Jaffe has died. He lived in the San Diego area, where he taught at San Diego State University for many years. He was generous to me, inviting me to read at San Diego State University and publishing my work several times in Fiction International. He visited my campus twice to read, and brought with him all the flair, power, and danger for which his work was rightly loved by those who knew it. The students I met who worked with him were devoted to him. He acted from a set of beliefs that included the idea that the goal of politics should be art, not that the goal of art should be politics, and that crucial to the role of the artist should be not just to challenge everything, but to experience everything, to always put oneself at risk in one’s practice.

His writing was often astonishing: blunt, experimental, surprising, risky.

In memoriam, I’m posting here my review of his book Anti-Twitter, 150 50-Word Stories, that appeared in the Jan / Feb 2011 issue of American Book Review.

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Hal Jaffe, Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories

163 pp.

Raw Dog Screaming Press

978-1-933293-88-2

If it was inevitable that writers would take up the problems and possibilities of Twitter, it was also likely that Harold Jaffe would be one of the first to do so. Jaffe has long been interested in the relationship between mass media and literature, seeing the two not as separate, autonomous realms but as intertwined, subject to similar historical conditions and often enough having similar goals. One of his earlier and best books, False Positive, showed how media stories and literature are both constructions designed to inculcate, on a subliminal level, readers into various ideologies. In False Positive, it’s less through the message than through the details, nouns, verbs, and adjectives which readers unquestioningly accept as normal that both mass media and literature prop up dominant global ideologies.

In Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories, Jaffe is not interested in critiquing the shallow interactions that Twitter makes possible and that are easily mocked by the mass media that also loves them. Instead, Jaffe’s book suggests that Twitter isn’t so easily dismissed. Those who relegate Twitter to a sub-literary realm in which developing one’s thoughts seems outlawed overlook Twitter’s ability for social manipulation as well as the possibility of using it for socially conscious and self-aware literary creation. To critique shallowness for being shallow is shallow, Anti-Twitter suggests. Instead, Jaffe’s goal is to take shallowness, as well as systematic restrictions on what can be said, and do something insightful with them.

As he has done before in False Positive and elsewhere, Jaffe constructs his 50-word stories in Anti-Twitter by borrowing mass media language then twisting that language for new ends. Most of the stories are presented as brief snippets of news, which many originally were, although a few stories vary the approach. Some stories stay on one topic throughout their whole 50 words, while others offer tangents, counterpoints, or subplots, just in case anyone thinks that 50 is only enough words to tell one story. Even at their most ludicrous, contradictory, or appalling, it’s often impossible to know which words Jaffe found and which he changed. Which is part of Jaffe’s point, and not for the first time in his work: all writing is intervention into the world and never merely portrays it.

How much can one portray in 50-word stories, even when there are 150 of them? Jaffe’s answer is simple: pretty much the whole world. Not every aspect of it, obviously, but there’s no doubt that these stories are global in their reach. Although the primary focus falls on the U.S., other locations visited in these stories include Sweden, Great Britain, Germany, China, Thailand, Italy, Latvia, Denmark, Canada, Pakistan, Iraq, Israel, India, Chad, France, Kenya, Japan, Tanzania, Albania, Australia, Venezuela, Russia, Poland, Nigeria, Spain, Egypt, Nepal, Ghana, Switzerland, Austria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Brunei, Greece, Belgium, and Tibet. For each location visited by the media, something can be found and exploited as news. Something odd, at the least, and usually much more than odd. The stories are by turns hilarious, creepy, repellant, brutal, and unfathomable.

It’s safe to say that the stories in the book all tend towards the seamy and sensational. Both the mass media and Jaffe know that people often want to read about things that titillate them but at the same time can be denounced. Consider the story “Albino”:

Tanzania is urging the public to identify those guilty of murdering humans with albinism.

73 albinos have been slaughtered in the past year.

Albino body parts are sold to witchdoctors who compose potions designed to make people wealthy.

231 people have already been arrested.

No one has been convicted.

In “Albino,” readers are treated to a full dose of the exoticizing racism of the global media, which searches out and revels in the barbaric while at the same time congratulating itself on its own superiority. The fact that the story may contain some truth only makes the situation more disturbing.

Of course, as the story “An Austrian” shows, there is no shortage of horrifying otherness to be exploited among Europeans:

who sexually abused his daughter over 24 years, will plead guilty to all but one of the charges.

He admits to deprivation of liberty, rape, incest, coercion.

However he denies murdering one of the seven children he fathered with his daughter.

The trial is scheduled for March 29.

Readers can be assured that the United States doesn’t fare any better under this gaze, and often looks worse. Nor do the above examples exhaust the variety of subjects in these stories: global politics, the animal world and natural environment, and many related subjects prove just as useful for highlighting people’s desire to get a thrill out of the inexhaustible range of human depravity, foolishness, and self-regard.

Make no mistake: nobody comes out looking good in Anti-Twitter. There’s nothing that the media’s eye, not to mention Jaffe’s, won’t expose viciously. Of course the fact that Jaffe is just as responsible for the world on display here is crucial to the book’s point. According to Jaffe, authorship is not some privileged, authoritative removal from the morass of  the world. It is instead exactly that which gathers up and manipulates the morass for us, whether the author in question is a reporter for The National Enquirer or a winner of the Nobel Prize.

And yet, because of the flat and ironic style of the book, Anti-Twitter never lectures or moralizes. After all, Jaffe suggests, none of us are in a position to do that. Our desire to feel superior to others was crucial to what got us into this mess in the first place.

Fools Crow by James Welch

 

James Welch’s novel Fools Crow (first published 1986) is one of the great works of American fiction. It's certainly the best novel I’ve ever read about American Westward Expansion. Set in Montana Territory in 1869-70, it deals with the struggle of the Pikuni branch of the Blackfeet tribe against the complex divisions within the tribe as well as against the encroachment of white settlers and the U.S. Army.

The narrative collapses the conventional western distinction between realism and the magical, as well as balancing on the often terrifying line between hopelessness and hope. The subtlety and complexity of the characters brings to the forefront the dynamic between brutality and care for others that is one of the main tensions of the story. And the prose is remarkably and uniquely beautiful and unlike anything else I’ve come across in the English language.

Simone: A Novel, by Eduardo Lalo

 

Some worthwhile, relatively recent fiction (translation 2015) out of Puerto Rico. The narrator maybe talks a little too much early on, but once the character dynamics kick in, the narrative has some surprising turns in its development and some fascinating cultural dynamics built around the presence of the Chinese in Puerto Rico.

The second half of the book is riveting and intertwines literary politics, cultural politics, and globalist and economic politics into some wild and emotionally crushing moments. The book feels like it has echoes of Bolaňo and the cultural politics of many other Central and South American novels of earlier generations, but the social environment, and the dynamics of its younger age group characters, make it feel fresh. All of it, especially the literary politics, shows a very new Puerto Rico.