Hard Ground by Michael O'Brien and Tom Waits

Here is the blurb from the University of Texas Press about this book:
Michael O'Brien got out of his car one day in 1975 and sought the acquaintance of a man named John Madden who lived under an overpass. Their initial contact grew into a friendship that O'Brien chronicled for the Miami News, where he began his career as a staff photographer. O'Brien's photo essays conveyed empathy for the homeless and the disenfranchised and won two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. In 2006, O'Brien reconnected with the issue of homelessness and learned the problem has grown exponentially since the 1970s, with as many as 3.5 million adults and children in America experiencing homelessness at some point in any given year.

In Hard Ground, O'Brien joins with renowned singer-songwriter Tom Waits, described by the New York Times as "the poet of outcasts," to create a portrait of homelessness that impels us to look into the eyes of people who live "on the hard ground" and recognize our common humanity. For Waits, who has spent decades writing about outsiders, this subject is familiar territory. Combining their formidable talents in photography and poetry, O'Brien and Waits have crafted a work in the spirit of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which James Agee's text and Walker Evans's photographs were "coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative" elements. Letting words and images communicate on their own terms, rather than merely illustrate each other, Hard Ground transcends documentary and presents independent, yet powerfully complementary views of the trials of homelessness and the resilience of people who survive on the streets


And it's totally accurate- when you read the gritty poetry of Waits, in juxtaposition to the faces and the stories of the increasingly large number of homeless people in America,many of whom thrown out of homes by disastrous health situations,it almost makes a sham out of speeches like the one delivered in Tucson by our great orator President, for this is a country that,notwithstanding its tremendous wealth, and even with the decline from unitary superpower, still has the capacity to offer basic social protection to those less fortunate than others, but turns its back on them and on their dreams,while granting virtually every last wish of those of mega-Mammon status.

News fromLibya- Hard Ground with poems by Tom Waits

(Photo of Benghazi residents learning to use anti-aircraft weapons)


Wouldn't it be a lot of fun
to use an anti-aircraft gun
to stop the propaganda and the bleating

wouldn't it be just so much fun
to use the anti-aircraft gun
to stop corrupt Congresses from meeting

wouldn't it be a lot of fun
to bring financiers in the sun
with subpoenas for an in court meeting?

wouldn't it be a barrel of fun
to stop the sale of the automatic gun
at least while our hearts are swiftly beating?..


Stay tuned for the review of Hard Ground, a collection of photos and short life profiles of the new homeless accompanied by poems from Tom Waits- to be posted tomorrow

Valentine to a Celestial Body

Maybe
C by Ed Kabak

Maybe the wind is schizophrenic
The sky is depressed when it’s blue
Maybe the clouds are catatonic
When the eye of a storm passes through

Maybe the stars have paranoia
Celestically prancing apace
And maybe the moon is often bi-polar
Those times it averts its whole face

Maybe the trees and mountains and valleys
Are demented by flowers and rain
Maybe the oceans rivers and gorges
Disordered are flowing insane

Maybe the earth is confused and deluded
Confined by its gravity too
For even the sun was manic depressive
Until it fell crazy for you

AWP Conference;Bridge St Books; Multiple recommendations;

I was fortunate to have attended the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference and Bookfair last week in Washington,D.C..This event, which features hundreds of seminars and readings,and 600 exhibitors,honors among other things the nation's poets and poetry programs, as well as MFA and seminar programs.It is the one place to see Susan Howe,Rae Armantrout(Pulitzer Prize winner),as well as a host of other poets from Rita Dove to Yusuf Kumunyakaa, Carolyn Forche,et al.Writers including Jhumpa Lahiri,Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Gaitskill and Junot Diaz were in attendance, but it is the plethora of literary magazines, small presses and the like that stamp the uniqueness of the event- New Directions was one of the largest exhibitors- Really refreshing-
I attended a couple of readings one night at Bridge St Books, 2804 Pennsylvania Ave, just over the M st bridge.Bridge St is a lovely two-storey building owned by Philip Levy, who grew up in the area, and managed by poet extraordinaire Rod Smith, who also teaches at the Iowa school.The first floor of Bridge St Books contains some good fiction and nonfiction new titles, art, film and theatre, but it is the second floor with its fabulously chosen fiction, philosophy, and especially poetry and poetry criticism that gives support to the claim by many aficionados that this is the best small to medium independent bookstore on a book for book basis.And the discerning book buyer here will find over and over again titles seen nowhere else, even in NY or San Francisco.
One great new title is Against Expression, an anthology of conceptual writing edited by Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin(published by Northwestern U.Press), which covers a wide swath of writing from Duchamp to Beckett to William Burroughs to numerous poets, Oulipian writers(Georges Perec) and a host of others whose found, appropriated, and material written under mathematical or other constraints can change one's views forever about the poetry of unoriginal genius, as Stamford Professor Emerita Marjorie Perloff would have it.

One writer included in the anthology is Vanessa Place. She is the publisher of LA based Les Figues Press, which publishes an avant-garde collection of surrealist and Ouliponian works.Place has herself written several books,including La Medusa, and other works including"Dies" a giant book consisting of one extended sentence . Place is also a criminal defense appellate lawyer specializing in sex abuse and violent predatory crimes. In Tragodia, Pt I Statement of Facts she has assembled a remarkable number of narratives fashioned from court testimony virtually verbatim that dwarfs any contemporary gothic. Marjorie Perloff, the author of the brilliant "Unoriginal Genius, Poetry by other Means in the New Century",(University of Chicago Press 2010), has called Vanessa Place's new work a superb piece of conceptual writing. It's the first of a three part series, with the second devoted to the procedure of the cases and the third volume to appeal and resolution. The publisher in this case is LA based Blanc Press. Buy it- your interest will not be Ms-Placed.

Karen Palmer's Spellbound: Inside West Africa's Witch Camps is a record of the Canadian journalist's time spent in the witch camps of rural Ghana, where hidden colonies of women exiled after the accusation of witchcraft proffered against them in a society caught between tradition and modernity eke out a bare existence.These women suffer a horrible plight from the use of witchcraft as a means of social control. The book is a complex and well researched piece of reporting and concerned journalism from a reporter who lived and worked in West Africa. Highly recommended. (The Free Press, 2010)

The Last Jew Of Treblinka, a memoir by Chil Rajchman, one of 60 survivors of the Nazi extermination camp,has finally been published in English for the first time in 2011 by Pegasus Books; it was first translated from Yiddish into French in 2009, (having been written in the1940's ).I read it all night and cried myself to sleep in the hotel room in DC. Treblinka was not a concentration camp cum extermination facilities like Auschwitz with its sister death camp Birkenau, but one of four camps the Nazis built in Eastern Poland solely for the purpose of extermination.Approximately 1 million people were killed in that mechanized slaughterhouse between 1942 and 1943 when it was closed down. Gitta Sereny has shown in her brilliant book Into That Darkness, (an account of Treblinka and her interviews with Franz Stangl, the commandant who was captured in South America and sent back to Germany for trial (he was convicted and committed suicide shortly after the interviews and after being handed dowm a life sentence.),that the Treblinka story is one of the most frightening tales of human evil , occurring in an advanced European culture in the middle of the 20th Century.

There were only several hundred Jews chosen upon arrival in the stinking trains at Treblinka to survive. Their job was to do the heavy work as the hundreds of thousands sent out of the trains immediately upon arrival were whipped in the "tube", a line between Nazi or Ukrainian thugs with whips, on to the gas chamber. Thousands were despatched this way each day.
The author served as a "barber",, having to cut the hair of all female lost souls for subsequent industrial use, then transporter of the bodies to the places they were burned and eventually the crematoriums, and later as a "dentist" where the task was to pull off the gold teeth of the fresh corpses and extract valuables hidden in body cavities as fast as possible.

The Jewish inmates of Treblinka staged a rebellion on August 2, 1943. 600 of them escaped, but many were found and killed by Germans, Ukrainians, or Polish villagers in the forest. There were only 60 or so survivors and only three or four of them attempted to capture and memorialize in writing what had transpired at this death camp.

The book is short, factual,and its power comes not from metaphor but from the salient facts of bearing witness against the slaughterhouse- of Treblinka and history. Much too important not to be read by every living soul with a conscience, and even more for those without one.

Dining out in Yemen- redux; John Ross Dies

The news of the revolt in Egypt and Yemen makes it timely to repost this piece on dangerous dining in Sana - the capital.






Sometimes the greatest culinary surprises are buried deep in our literature. Thus, for example in the 1991 travel adventure Motoring with Mohammed by Eric Hansen, a fine essayist and writer of whimsical travel a la Eric Newby and Redmond O' Hanlon,we find the author shipwrecked off the coast of Yemen. Rescued by the Yemeni military on Groundhog Day 1978, he and his group of sailing compadres are brought to the capital, Sa'na,an ancient city with fine mud-brick tower houses that dot the skyline and convey along with the many delicate minarets the aura of Scheherezade. There in the country reputed to be once the home of the legendary Queen of Sheba, he stays with an American Peace Corps worker, who recommends to him at his specific request an authentic Yemeni restaurant not frequented by tourists.(How many times have we naively made the same request ?)
We next find him waiting in line to enter an underground eatery with no name displayed, being borne up by the surging crowd in the air and pressed down the "foot-worn" stone steps to enter an inferno of hot earthen ovens--There he is forced to climb over the tables one after another to reach an open chair and winds up being wedged between two quite heavily armed men.They proceed to instruct him in the fine art of attracting the waiter's attention by hitting him with moistened spitballs made from their napkins. (I would love to do this in French Laundry or Taillevent in Paris(and who could object, surely not the French poodles perched under the tables)-it alone would be worth the cost of the meal although in the Oyster Bar in New York it might take a very long toss, with the significant air resistance entering into the calculus )

He then strikes the waiter in the shoulders with some precisely thrown overheads, and orders Salah, a highly spiced potato, garlic, and mutton stew, covered in a frothy sauce called bulba made from whipped fenugreek paste and served in an earthenware pot so hot it leaves scar marks on the table.

And of course it is delicious.Eating with his fingers and energized by the chilis, the author pays the bill and leaves the restaurant in an opium-like daze.

Now that is the kind of dining experience even those of us who have taken far-flung journeys dream about!It's the perfect wave -that once in a lifetime experience of dangerous and delicious dining,from which, even within the constraints of that dreaded word "tourism" you emerge presumably alive with your adrenalin and gastric juices in free flow.
For me, this evoked memories of a trip 30 years ago to the famous Moti Mahal restaurant in Old Delhi, where you trace your steps down narrow alleyways to a step down raffish joint with what was considered by many India's best tandoor cooking. The butter chicken there still melts on my tongue, and it was predictable many years later when the chef was cajoled to go to London to open a well-financed "branch" in Covent Garden that the inevitable comparisons would be made-
I sampled the cuisine in this upscale dining establishment on a recent trip to London
It was quite tasty, subtle, well prepared but lacked the touch of brilliance of the original-
What is it about underground restaurants- are they close to the axis of the world- do they draw sustenance from the roots of the tree of life so that when they cook their pungent specialities one remembers them for a lifetime.


JOHN ROSS OBIT
John Ross, the radical poet and independent news writer, author and intimate of the Zapatistas, who wrote several early books on the movement, has died at 72 of liver cancer in mexico where he spent most of his time(other than his beloved Mission District in Sf), and where he wrote ElMonstruo- a kaleidoscopic history of Mexico City .(he moved there in the early 80's a day or so after the big earthquake) I met him twice, the first time on the occasion of his publishing that entertaining wild text"Murdered by Capitalism" blurbed by Thomas Pynchon, a great on the streets history of various left wing movements in the US. John was an inspiring, no nonsense ex "Red Diaper" baby from NY's Upper West Side, who has seen it all and who never pulled a punch.Ross brought together in his own lifetime the 30's radicals, SDS and the 60's rebellious as well the anti-globalist movement, in addition to his involvement with the Zapatistas.

On the barricades, a thorn in the side of authoritarians, he cut quite a figure with his bedraggled beard and much worn clothes- From the mission blog:

"In his later years, even as he struggled with cancer, Ross always woke at 7:30 a.m., according to his friends. He continued with a U.S. tour for his last book, El Monstruo. When here, he was known for walking around the Mission with his distinctive cane and black and white scarf, and going to Café La Boheme on 24th Street each morning for a double short latté, according to the café. “He was almost deaf in one ear, and had one eye gone,” said Bell. “He had an imitation eye that sometimes popped out.”

That eye was allegedly harmed in a fight with San Francisco police in 1967. The fight, Bay Guardian Executive Editor Tim Redmond said, broke out when Ross tried running for a spot on the Board of Supervisors. Afterward, he was removed from the ballot because of his felony conviction for resisting the draft. Later on, The Guardian, his employer, held a fundraiser and poetry reading at Café La Boheme to purchase the glass eye for Ross.

“He was one of the most amazing writers I ever worked with,” said Redmond. Ross walked into the Bay Guardian looking for a job in 1984 after “the campaign against marijuana planting raided his house [in Arcata] and destroyed all his stuff,” he said. All Ross had were his “clothes and a few bags of marijuana in his backpack.”

“Everyone knew he smoked marijuana morning, noon and night,” said Bell. “He totally disproved that pot ruins your memory, because he was razor sharp. He could tell you the middle name of a lawyer who worked on some random case in 1971,” she said."

Goodbye Dear John- voice of truth- always in the face of authority, the highest goal of journalism -R.I.P.

The Philosopher and the Wolf; Tom Hayden on The Long Sixties

To continue with the trip, we visited some knockout shops in London- especially recommended are John Sandoe, in Blacklands Terrace near Sloane Square, a quaint small two story shop where most of the staff are published writers- great literary magazines as well. Then there is the redoubtable London Review of Books Shop on 14 Bury Place, in the shadow of the British museum, and Housman's peace bookstore, near King's Cross, which is a terrific multidisciplinary progressive shop that has been publishing its own annual peace diary as well for more than 50 years now.

In Paris, in the wee hours of the morning at the venerable Deux Magots, for what has become the annual Limerick on the spot write-off.(with the spirit of bawdy Lord Douglas looking over our psyches)- On the subject of fetishes(not the only one that evening) here is one of my winning entries- and concededly mild as well--

In London, foot fetishist Hugh
contracted a hospital-borne flu
but I read in a letter
that he now feels much better
since they've reshaped his bed like a shoe


recommended- The Philosopher and The Wolf, (Pegasus Books), by Mark Rowlands, a marvellous example of how living with a wolf(whom the author would bring to the philosophy college courses he taught, where it sat inder the table and from time to time howled) is an experience utterly transformative . We hear that we are a simian species, engaged in dedeption or manipulation, whereas the wolf has a purer existence living for the moment and not always planning for pleasure in the future. A wonderful mind trip out of the species into greater comprehension of the role of non-human animals and our own strange place on earth.Truly transformative!

Tom Hayden, who wrote the Port Huron statement on participatory democracy in 1962,which laid out the basis for much of the social protest and change of the 60's,and was the President of SDS before it crashed in the 70's, and later state legislator and husband of Jane Fonda, has scribed a brilliant history of 50 years of activism, culminating in the beginning of 2009 with the first sign that the Obama years will be a complex period, and not a period of soaring straight line progressivism. A wonderful review of the last 50 years of activism, and of the continuing struggle against what Hayden calls the Machiavellians, those who use power and money to at the very least to reinforce and continue the status quo. Exceptional - it was published in 2009 by Paradigm Press and disappeared-will be in paperback in April 20111.

Book Magic In Europe;New Song-Just the Same

Coming back from two weeks in Europe,with particular pleasure in browsing the still vital bookshops and markets in Paris and London, we particularly recommend Village Voice Books on Rue Princesse in the 6th arrondisement for English language current and backlist, Galagnani's carriage trade Rue de Rivoli shop, that old reliable La Hune sandwiched between Cafe Aux Deux Magots and Cafe de Flore and most of all Jacques Noel's postage stamp sized brilliant graphics/art/ offbeat shop Un Regard Moderne, 9 Rue Git Le Coeur, in the heart of the Latin Quartier and opposite the Beat Hotel, since renamed, where Burroughs , Ginsberg, and friends hung out in the 50's and where Naked Lunch was pulled together.

To counter this spell of bourgeois activity,here is a piece we wrote ,inspired by thoughts of that great standard, "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds and updated.

Just the Same
C 2010 by E Kabak


Investment bankers, hedge traders.
stock brokers,bond salesmen
they're all on their iPads now
and they all act the same

there's a young one and an old one
and a moustached one and bald one
reading Financial Times and the Journal
and they all think just the same

and they live in McMansions
and gated communities
and they all trade with impunity
and they all do the same

selling mortgages, sliced and diced up
and derivatives unfathomable
making millions, if not billions
from playing the game

on their cell phones,making bad loans
and currency and credit swaps
leaving footprints like cow flops
which all look the same

using tax cuts and loopholes
you could drive a gold truck through
holding largesse, such extreme wealth
but never the blame

and they think in dry numbers
and faceless equations
which they hide by evasion
and secret code names

there's a thin one and a fat one
even scarified and tattooed one
and they all call it socialism
if it means a level game

and their credo- maxing out wealth
is best for society
leaving few crumbs on the table
they all now declaim

there's a rich one and a richer one
and the richest one,and a wannabe
and they live so compassionless
but they all die just the same-

and all of them golems
who turn to dust just the same