A New Poem By Gerald Nicosia: The Role of the Poet
Obama a disappointment
Money for wars but not
For the poor, the sick, the kids in school
And corporations calling
All the shots
What chance has the human
Heart got?
The wise man said
“Poetry gives us a place to stand”
But I’d say rather
Poetry keeps
Your heart beating
And blood flowing
And without it
God forbid
The whole place
Called existence
Goes
Black
Rather than
Sit there listening
For the click of
The switch
Better to
Just
Keep
Writing!
The Greatest Music In The World
Angel Stankhov, left, Lionel Rolfe, right
Theodosii Spassov, left, Mayya Isaeva, center, Lionel Rolfe, right
By LIONEL ROLFE
While I’m mostly inclined to listen to what is called “classical music,” upon occasion other musical genres have proven enticing and powerful. I grew up with classical music, but along the way a few musicians not necessarily in that category have impinged their way onto my consciousness. I will humbly offer up a few of their names to make my point that what makes music great is not necessarily its genre.
Foremost among them was Giora Feidman, the greatest of the Klezmer musicians. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0GXlIEIy60). The first time I heard him was in a small synagogue as the result of an invitation by an old friend Marshall Levy, an amateur clarinetist and magician who said I just had to hear Giora. Read more
Christopher Hitchens and the Two Lefts
By Leslie Evans
I cannot help but feel deeply the loss of Christopher Hitchens. I never met him. I read a number of his books, many of his articles in Vanity Fair and in the online Slate magazine, and saw a few of his speeches on video. Contrarian though he was, he had become for me, with a few other similar thinkers, a political anchor in a time when the world was sorting itself into new and unexpected categories and many old convictions had become sterile and untenable. Read more
Edendale, Chapter 14
The view from Barnsdale, 1906--Los Angeles Public Library
Over the Grapevine
By Phyl M. Noir
Hiro smelled water and pines. Small boats gathered next to houses on the edge of Clearlake. Beyond them was the expanse of the lake — larger in his imagination than it really was because of the fog. He parked across the street from a wood house set on posts in the water.
Cyd Bissell wore a turquoise dress. She came out of the house through a screen door, turned on the porch light, looked down the road for a moment and went back inside the house. She hadn’t looked across the street: the fog had softened the sound of his van’s engine when he arrived.
Hiro had a limp from the polio he had when he was four years old. It took him a few minutes to swing his legs out of the van and slide his feet to the pavement. He pulled the package from the seat next to him and tucked it under his arm. He walked down the wooden ramp, stood on the porch in front of the door and waited. Read more
Tengo Kawana and Aomame’s Adventures in the World with Two Moons
1Q84. By Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. Audible audiobook edition: 10-25-2011. Narrated by Allison Hiroto, Marc Vietor, and Mark Boyett. 46 hours and 50 minutes. Paper edition: 944 pages. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, October 25, 2011.
By Leslie Evans
I first encountered Haruki Murakami’s work only last year when I “read,” as an audiobook, as I do most fiction, his 1985 novel “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” Literature began as oral storytelling and in our technological age it is to an important degree returning to those roots. It is common in works of fantasy for the conventions of the fantastic world, once established, to be presented with a strict faux realism to promote the suspension of disbelief. Murakami employs realism generously, but to a different end, long sequences of mundane detail are embedded in a world rich in surreal elements, whose rules and reasons are often never explained. Read more
The Trotsky Project
By LIONEL ROLFE
Back when I was in high school 50 years ago, I was called a Stalinist by my Trotskyite friend, Les Evans. Les had been a Republican because that’s what his salesman father had been up until I talked Les into a more leftist position. Les’ father was the man Arthur Miller must have had in mind when he wrote “Death of a Salesman.” Anyway, Les made the transition to being an acolyte of Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s main accomplice during the Russian Revolution. Les then went on to become an officer in the Socialist Workers Party, an editor in the party’s publishing arm and the author of a scholarly book about China in the 1970s, among others. Read more
Photographer Susan McRae Finds An Interesting Comment On The Beach
FIRST, click on the photo to make the details clearer. Then contemplate who was this commentator--a homeless person living on the beach in Ventura with a lot of time to ponder, or just a wandering genius?
Anticapitalism, the Hyperstate, and the Current Crisis
By Leslie Evans
The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, Robert Conquest. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005, 256 pp.
“The Return of an Illusion,” John Gray. The New Republic, June 23, 2011.
The global economic crisis that began in 2008 has revived many salvationist dogmas that we should have thought were well past their shelf life. Most notably in the United States this has been Christian theocracy, but also, to some extent at least, the Marxist notion that the problems of inequality and declining living standards can best be solved by scrapping the whole existing system and abolishing private property tout court. Where the former has secured a commanding influence among Tea Party activists, the latter has been seeking, with a good deal less success, to persuade the Occupy movement campers. Read more
Edendale, Chapter 13
Malcolm Lowry, author of "Under The Volcano," was in Curaco about the time that Ronald and Marnix were there. Did the great author's close proximity to the young Ronald set him on his inevitable path under the volcano growing up in the Silverlake Hills?
THIRSTY PARADISE
By Phyl M. Noir
INT. COUNTRY HOUSE IN THE NETHERLANDS: DAY
A picture window in the living room reveals a descending garden, and the garden contains the bare branches of mature trees, bare rose bushes and perennial plants. There is snow on the ground. Only sky is seen above the trees. The sky is gray with clouds.
The interior’s design is Bauhaus but some of the furniture and the oil paintings were created in earlier centuries. There is a large painting in a carved gold frame of a blond woman wearing eighteenth century clothing, a large cupboard elaborately carved with vines, birds and mice, tables with feet shaped like lions’ claws, and a Balinese trunk made of dark wood. Read more
BEN & SARAH: A MURDER IN MISSISSIPPI
Writer Jeff Conine began researching and writing Ben & Sarah: A Murder in Mississippi after discovering that one of his students was the sister of once notorious murderer Ben Darras, who is doing life without parole at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, for his part in the sensational murderous rampage inspired by the movie “Natural Born Killers.” The case was famous in part because megawriter John Grisham was a friend of the first murder victim in the case who was shot and killed by Ben and his cohort Sarah. Grisham campaigned against Oliver Stone for making the movie that inspired Ben and Sarah to commit copycat murders. Eventually Stone and Time-Warner won the First Amendment case after it dragged on in the Louisana courts. Ben and Sarah’s story was the subject of a recent Discovery Channel investigation. But this is Conine’s story as his alter ego, Caine, journeys to the prison to interview Ben. In a parallel universe, he lives out his own descent into the heart of darkness, an adventure that takes him to The Blues Club Ground Zero that in reality is actor Morgan Freeman’s Club in Clarksdale, close to the prison. Boryanabooks is proud to present these excerpts from Conine’s story. Read more
Honey Speaks Her Piece on Mao & John Dewey
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
In, “Honey Begins Her Talk on John Dewey,” Boryanabooks, October 1, 2010, I began my essay on John Dewey’s influence in both American and Chinese utopian city design.
In “Honey Talks About Experiments in Urban Design at Llano del Rio,” Boryanabooks, November 1, 2010, I wrote about connections between Llano del Rio, the Jersey Homesteads created under the New Deal and the Maoist planning design of new towns that conserve energy. Urban Planning student Tammy Williams described the New Jersey utopia in “Honey Gives a Guest A Chance to Talk About a New Jersey Utopia,” Boryanabooks, December 30, 2010.)
A Conservative website lists Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) among the top ten most harmful books in the world – five points more harmful on their scale than Das Kapital. What’s the most odd thing about right-wing animosity towards John Dewey is that almost no one reads his books anymore. I was able to get Dewey material out of the CSUN library for two months without anyone asking me to return it. There was no long list of readers reserving those books.
