January 2011 Archives

The cache, dubbed william s. burroughs word horde 2.0, is priced at $260,000. Apparently some institution, or somebody with that kinda bus fare, already has dibs on it. The dealer -- Ken Lopez Bookseller -- has it listed with a "hold." Here's what he has to say about the collection:

A substantial archive of manuscript material, correspondence, and books and printed matter, mostly signed. [See the inventory.] The manuscript material comprises some hundreds of pages, mostly from the 1950s to the 1980s, much of it unpublished, including:

→ 90 pages on the Carsons family: Audrey Carsons appears in The Wild Boys, Exterminator!, Port of Saints and the Red Night trilogy; in Cities of the Red Night he is the first person to be exposed to the B-23 virus that is a central element of the novel. Most of this material never appeared in print, or appeared in markedly different form;

→ a large cache of manuscript material identified as being from 1960-64 and including much material from the Nova trilogy intermingled with unpublished material from the same "Word Horde";

→ manuscript and typescripts from the 1950s, including material that went into Naked Lunch and other material left out of that book; material similar to the Yage Letters -- epistolary fiction and 'routines' written to Allen Ginsberg in the early 1950s;

→ a "Scribbling Diary" (Dream Diary) from 1968, with multicolored entries on his dreams for many of the days of the year;

→ the manuscript and publishing archive for Doctor Benway, a section from Naked Lunch, expanded, and later published as a limited edition; and much more.

Oh, gee. Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, is terribly upset. In his view, Julian Assange is the very scruffy model of a modern major-general. File his complaint under Gilbert and Sullivan; see The Pirates of Penzance. Keller is a mirthless feller.

I am the very model of a modern Major-General,
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;
I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical,
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news,
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.

Now that Hollywood's hype is fully upon us -- I'm talking about the Oscar nominations -- it's worth recalling what William Wyler, far and away the most Oscar-nominated director, once said:

Sitting here in this room, I can see a beautiful bridge -- the George Washington Bridge -- spanning the Hudson River. It is a great, majestic piece of work. But who was its builder? What's the fellow's name? I'll bet one person out of ten thousand couldn't tell me. Yet who in Hollywood has ever done anything to match it?

Just so we all know: Othmar Hermann Ammann designed the George Washington Bridge and was the chief engineer during its construction. Ammann also did New York's Triborough, Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck, and Verrazano-Narrows bridges, and was a consulting engineer on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Lizzy Ratner said she was in "triage mode" finishing up an article, and could she answer my question in "two or three days?" The question was, what prompted her to co-edit THE GOLDSTONE REPORT: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict? It was just published by Nation Books.

She hasn't got back to me yet. But she doesn't have to. She already answered the question in her article, "Two Years After Gaza." It's a stunner:

In January 2009, during a lull in the bombing of Israel's "Cast Lead" operation against Gaza, I spoke by telephone with an old family friend, Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, from his home on Gaza's Salah al-Din Street. In a voice etched with panic, he told me about his family's dwindling water supply, his children's terror, his dream of escaping. He asked if I could help find a way for him and his family to leave the Gaza Strip. I made some genuine efforts to solicit help from friends with more connections than I, people who might actually be able to do something, but it pains me to this day that I did not do more. The next time we spoke, it was about the death of his three daughters.

The article continues:

On January 16, 2009, three of Dr. Abuelaish's eight children--Bessan, 21, Mayar, 15, and Aya, 14--were killed when Israeli soldiers trained the nozzle of their tank on the Abuelaish house and fired. Twice. The blasts killed all three girls immediately, as well as their cousin Noor, and it wounded their sister, Shatha, another cousin and an uncle. Dr. Abuelaish himself was unharmed, but in a harrowing turn of events that is now well and painfully known, he phoned Israeli newscaster Shlomi Eldar and, in a frantic tangle of Hebrew and Arabic, begged for help on Israel's nightly news. "Oh God, oh my God, my daughters have been killed. They've killed my children," he cried. "Could somebody please come to us?" The phone call, which was broadcast live throughout Israel, sounds like a shriek out of hell. It is almost impossible to listen to.

In the wake of this tragedy, Dr. Abuelaish, a well-known peace activist, remained resolutely, even stubbornly, committed to reconciliation and understanding. He did not want revenge. He just wanted accountability. "They were my beloved girls, very beautiful, very kind. Why were they killed?" he asked in a phone conversation shortly after his daughters' deaths. "I don't ask for anything, just [for the Israeli military] to admit and say sorry."

"Take responsibility," he begged.

One of the beautiful things about Lizzy Ratner, apart from her terrific writing and reporting, is her own sense of responsibility. Despite what Alan Dershowitz claims, she and her co-editors -- Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz -- have made a huge effort to contextualize the Goldstone Report in their edited version as, in the publisher's words, "a corrective to the relentless attacks" on the original.

The book includes essays by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; human rights activist Raji Sourani; legal expert Jules Lobel; Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal; historians Rashid Khalidi and Jerome Slater; congressman Brian Baird; policy analyst Henry Siegman; authors Ali Abunimah, Naomi Klein, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin; and journalists Noam Sheizaf and Leila El-Haddad.

The original U.N. mission, headed by Richard Goldstone, caused enormous controversy -- and still does -- because it emphasized atrocities by the Israeli military in a bombing campaign, which had the stated aim of ending rocket attacks into Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian factions, but which was described in the report as a "deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population."

Although both sides -- the Palestinians, mainly Hamas fighters, and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) -- violated international humanitarian law, it was the Israelis who were culpable of massively greater crimes, according to the report. The IDF deliberately targeted unarmed civilians; purposely destroyed critical infrastructure in Gaza, razing large areas to the ground; and used weapons, such as incendiary white phosphorous in highly populated areas, that were beyond reprehensible.

Amnesty International issued its own detailed report in 2009 (available for free download as a pdf). Here, according to that report, is an example of what happened when "three white phosphorous artillery shells crashed through the roof of Sabah Abu Halima's home":

"Everything caught fire. My husband and four of my children burned alive in front of my eyes; my baby girl, Shahed, my only girl, melted in my arms. How can a mother have to see her children burn alive? I couldn't save them, I couldn't help them. I was on fire. Now I am still burning all over, I am in pain day and night; I am suffering terribly." [Italics in the original.]

Postscript: Just discovered this -- Lizzy Ratner talks about the book in a video interview. (The video report, which also includes an interview with Palestinian journalist and author Laila El-Haddad, begins at 10:38 on the track).

PPS: Jan. 26 -- In re the leaked documents of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, a new truth dawns on the Arab world.

On Martin Luther King Day, let's see ...

As Glenn Greenwald rightly explains in a devastating column on the "centrist" opposition to the rule of law by the Brookings Institution -- a Washington, D.C. think tank widely regarded as the best and most "independent," with a reputation for rising "above partisanship" -- the difference is more than a matter of words and tone, nice or otherwise. Way more. It's not a matter of good manners. It's a matter of ideas and actions.

I see there's a new one-man show on the boards, "Abbie," about Abbie Hoffman, starring a lookalike. According to the NYT review, it is "framed as a 1987 talk by Hoffman" covering his upbringing, influences, student activism, and Yippie days, as well as his underground life on the lam. He jumped bail after an arrest for selling cocaine, had plastic surgery to alter his appearance, and made an amazing comeback in plain sight as "Barry Freed," the alias he took in his battles for the environment in upstate New York and Pennsylvania.

It reminded me of a Los Angeles Times interview I did with him in May of 1988, less than a year before he died. His rap by telephone from Solebury, Pa., where he was living at the time, was the real one-man show. He sounded like an avid sports announcer whose enthusiasm for the game has curdled. Think Bill Murray satirizing Howard Cosell.

"Look!" Abbie chortled. He was watching the news on his television. "There's Lech Walesa! Wow! Union solidarity in Poland! Ha! Ha! No way does this TV ever relate to a rebel union leader over here the way it does to Lech! Big dissident! Is he getting his arms broken? His legs? My God! He's got 50 reporters around him! Wow! He's in terrible shape! He has a $2-million book contract! Try getting that as an American dissident!"

Abbie was just warming up. It could have been a rehearsal for one of the gleefully outrageous speech/lecture/stand-up routines that he'd been delivering on college campuses around the country.

Ol' amigo Mustill's collage, from 1979, says plenty about that.

Collage © 1979 by Norman O. Mustill.

driftglass: "... this problem didn't just precipitate out of the pellucid ether two years ago ..."

(Click for the latest Wikileaks news in real-time updates.)

In hyperventilating magazine style, Vanity Fair looks "behind the headlines" at the collaboration between "the Web's notorious information anarchist" and "some of the world's most respected news organizations." Sarah Ellison's less-than-friendly takeout, The Man Who Spilled the Secrets, focusses on his relations with the British newspaper The Guardian, describing the collaboration as "a clash of civilizations -- and ambitions..." in a struggle "to corral a whistle-blowing stampede amid growing distrust and anger."

Flickr / Nick Bygon

He tells Chris Hedges at truthdig: "The more outrageous the Republicans become, the weaker the left becomes. The more outrageous they become, the more the left has to accept the slightly less outrageous corporate Democrats. ... The left has nowhere to go. Obama knows it. The corporate Democrats know it."

She was that rare human being whose identity transcended all the categories that defined her -- poet, teacher, novelist, feminist, human-rights activist for prisoners and migrant farmworkers. Janine Pommy Vega died on Dec. 23. She was 68. Here's her obit in today's NYT. And here she is, reading "Habeus Corpus Blues," at a poetry festival in 2005.

The last time I saw her was on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, at a reading to celebrate a book of poems by migrant farmworkers, Estamos Aquí, which she had translated.