Waiting for Galeano

Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan master writer, has a new book '"Mirrors" coming out soon from Nation Books. As soon as we locate a galley we will review. We have read Galeano for many years, including his Memory of Fire Trilogy,wherein he in capsule size segments gives the reader dose after dose of exquisitely written pieces on colonial oppression and resistance throughout Latin America from antiquity to now. The Book of Embraces, a series of short lyrical pieces with imaginative graphics by Galeano is an equally inventive set on art, poliitcs, and psyche, and a critique of modern capitalism. Days and Nights of Love and War is a terrific memoir and the earliest English-language (in translation) version of his anecdotal style. And of course it was his early "Open Veins of Latin America",a more traditional written history of colonial exploitation that was a gift from Hugo Chavez to Pres. Obama at the recent Trinidad Summit- and the book rocketed from somewhere in the 50000's on Amazon to No 2 as a result.Galeano is one of the most profound voices we have and we look forward with great excitement to his new work.

Robert Gardner

Gardner is one of the great independent cinematographers of our time with an empahsis on anthropolgical films and aesthetics. A review of his work, including his eloquent film diaries captured in Impulse to Preserve, is forthcoming here soon.

J G Ballard passed away last week. His incredible oeuvre of semi-dystopian science fiction/parables will stand with the works of both science fiction and surrealist writers for ages.More on his world soon.


The New York Times reports that the Taliban are moving closer to Islamabad and one sign of the crisis is that Richard Holbrooke is now writing several memos a day to Hillary Clinton ...Hmmmmmm....



C

We Need Snipers

We Need Snipers
C 2009 all rights reserved

We need snipers
We need snipers
to get rid of all the vermin and the vipers
Clear the windows of the world’s dirt with those wipers
Protect our democracy—

We need snipers
we’re still in diapers
shooting killing using suicide bombs
our best snipers take out pied pipers
and restore to us a deadly numbing calm

when you’re taken on a subway
or held hostage on a bus
we’ve an army now of snipers
who can make this scum eat dust

We need snipers
Our side swipers
To defend against the pirates of the sea
Long-Range shooters-roto-rooters
Who’ll extirpate filth from our society

Just remember
By November
Lips may threaten
If they speak too free

And with scopes that work at night
Even miles away they’ll bite
As they turn their sights on you and me

OULIPO adventures in New York

Various outposts of French culture are hosting a series of workshops with members of the O.U.L.I.P.O. in New York this week. The OULIPO is an acronym for Ouvroir(Workplace) of Potential Literature, Its members include the deceased Raymond Queneau, and George Perec, the multitalented essayist, anagrammist, novelist (Life- A User's Manual, and A Void, a lipogrammatic novel written entirely without the letter e, the novelist/poet essayist Harry Mathews , Marcel Benabou, Jacques Roubaud, Ian Monk, and others, all of whom write under the constraint of one or another rule or yardstick, often mathematical. It's a heady mind exercise and for those who enjoy right-brain thinking and word play, one of the great pleasures in life.

In tribute to OULIPO, here is a short exercise I penned this am--(more to report later this week)--

An Interlude with Professor Spooner(ism)(i.e. a transposition of sounds of two or more words-let me sew you to your sheet-let me show you to your seat)
C 2009

When I met her on the commuter train in Greenwich she spoke of her great love for literature, and her incandescent beauty and seductive intellectual openness immediately sent fires through my cortical cells.As she recounted stories of her athletic prowess, and skiing skills, I dreamed that I counded my wock into her het pole as she lead her shell-spraped wegs just perfectly in the exercise. ”Would you like to be apping my whiped striss” she purred –although at the moment I would have preferred to have roseed the rimmering puckbud .And as for clicking that lorged engit, that went without saying, at least heuristically.
But just when I was sure she had genished her flapowering overtalia, the illusions disappeared and I awoke as if from an opium daze-
I felt somehow cheated , defrauded and I called upon Inspector Onamandias Ozynism, the leading ontological detective to put her to the test. ‘Madam”, he abruptly addressed her”, I am afraid that your disappy is pussearing faster than my 401k account” ‘In fact, your punt is nothing but a Schonzi ceme through and through”.
“I ‘m afraid I have a warrant to protest your arruberance,”, he continued ,’unless you can put up a collin as merkateral.”
‘Wait’ she replied- hold off on that warrant and I might just bruck your fexed oversains out right now.”

And, I am sadly informed, the temptation was too overwhelming for justice to carry the day

Short interlude on Express Kidnapping

A while ago the Mexican Cultural Institute sponsored a reception at Idlewild Books launching David Lida's new book-"First Stop in the New World, Mexico City, Capital of the 21st Century". David is a New Yorker living in Mexico who has written short stories as well as essays and travel literature. All downplayed the violence reflected in recent press reports ( and now NY Times articles as well as Hilary's great Mexican adventure). But David did concede the reality of the "Express Kidnapping- ie when you foolishly flag down a cab in the street (as opposed to arranging one in advance) and are held up for your ATM card, then usually unceremoniously dumped off- alive -in some suburb or out of the way place to make your way back to your hotel.Well it's better than being kidnapped and actually held for ransom , a fate of many of the full- time residents-
But so what, he says----let's face it, Mexico City still is one of the world's great cities, with the Greatest Anthropological Museum on the planet-oh that statue of Coatlicue can produce a lot more nightmares and excursions into the subconscious than all the vampire and werewolf films combined-

And it is such a world class food capital that even the Wall St Journal recognized it recently in a mouth -watering weekend piece, as well as the home of one of the planet's richest men-Carlos Slim ,who someday may own and control the New York Times..

No,you can't pretend to be a literate and imaginative involved citizen of the world and not visit Ciudad Mexico every few years to keep up with the culture

Express Kidnapper to Jack Benny:
"Your money or yourlife." Long pause and silence. Robber:"I said your money or YOUR LIFE." Benny; "I'm thinking, I'm THINKING."

Today's NYTimes story on The Supreme Court- in Support of Stripsearching the Following:

A Fox news bunny
Suzie Orman for your money
and shot glasses from those in a drunken stupor
Glue sniffers for epoxy
Rush Limbaugh for some oxy--
and jewels in the stool of commodities trading poopers

the 60 Minutes crew
including Leslie Stahl
are they carrying
their interviewees' fetish/devil dolls?

All hedge fund liars
to see if they're now wired
and FEMA employees who're checked for contraband
Southern Governors' rimulus
for some rejected stimulus
and fundamentalists' undies for literature they've banned

Those black robed judges
who guard the Constitution
for evidence they're lubricated for prostitution

Our world's slowed economy might move ahead and lurch
if only it's subjected to a little stripsearch

C2009- All rights reserved

Annals of Bookselling-The 100 Proof Seekers

No, they are not alcoholics,they are the proof seekers, an unlikely, if not somewhat unruly crowd which haunts and controls that area in the corner of the New York City bookstore basement that houses in several bookcases, the uncorrected advance review copies of books to be published.In their hangout, they control admission and departures so thoroughly that the section has been compared to the tribal areas of Waziristan where the Pakistan army dares not show its face.

And they are a motley group, from the 70ish short "retired investor" with wiry hair who is in the shop, I am told , every day, with his adoring wife,to the woman with the brown and white mutt often seen at the review desk downstairs picking up a bundle of 5 books, the guy with the oversized brown tortoise-shellglasses who looks like an aging hippie and who reads with his nose literally buried into the pages, and others of varying persuasions, at least some of whom are quite quite knowledgeable about books.

According to store legend, they have been known to push and shove overtly if not banish hostile proof seekers out of the aisle back onto the main section downstairs, preserving their proximity to the new proofs just dumped on the shelves.

For these are narrow aisles and there is no order ,alphabetically or otherwise to these filings- you just have to plunge in , look fast and grab. And they all cost a mere $1.49(up from 99c two years ago).Do some of them resell these treasures on e-Bay? Who knows- You can wait far and long before a proof even claims a $50 price- Like 2666 by Bolano.

So when I ventured into the basement one recent Friday evening and saw the knot of people hovering over and against the two shelves that had just received a deposit of new titles, I knew I had litle chance of moving them aside. I therefore engaged in a bit of pleasant banter, and with the delicacy necessary to thread between the tentacles of an octopus, reached between them and precisely and gently with two fingers picked out the autobiography of ex 1968 Columbia radical Mark Rudd and the terrific account by Michela Wrong-"It's Our Turn to Eat, The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower" .


At last the group fanned out over the basement, leading me to forget those critical passages in "Crowds and Power" by Nobel prize winning author Elias Canetti, about the organic quality and latent explosive powers possessed by a crowd.

I had my prizes, picked up a translation by Anne Carson ,of the three plays constituting the Oresteia, one each from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and headed for the exit ,happy to escape with a good stash and no fatal wounds.

Baseball and the Baptist/Spring Fever

(last performed in Istanbul to a religion class of visiting Americans from a midwest college)

C 2009-All rights reserved

Baseball is an ancient sport
though the history books don't say it
but long before the Doubledays
it was dangerous to play it
the Mayans gamed on ball courts
with the losers' lives held liable
the first World Serious event
is recorded in the Bible
Slugging John the Baptist led the league against the state
until the day fair Salome
faced him at home plate
Salome was appetizing
John was none the wiser
she wound up to pitch
and he wound up an appetizer
all eyes were on her serpent dance
she dropped all seven veils
John was so entranced
but never lived to tell the tale
She placed her fingers on his lips
kissed his shuttered eyes
dipped his head in dressing
and pronounced him as baptized

Against raw power of the state
this preacher's prowess stuck out
But after Herod's foul play
it was all too plain he'd struck out
when he slammed his bat
returning headless to the dugout
Blazing John the Baptist
had just one run in- with state
But when the preacher took strike three
his head stayed on the plate


They buried him to save some face
between the mound and second base.