April 2011 Archives

The poet Nanos Valaoritis and I were good friends many years ago, in San Francisco. Here's a poem of his, which I published in 1970, in a broadside edition of 500 or 1,000 copies -- I can't recall exactly. "Endless Crucifixion" is a collector's item now. Jed Birmingham, who writes the RealityStudio column the Bibliographic Bunker, managed to snag one for me from a rare books dealer out in California.

Re-reading the poem today, I like it as much as I did 41 years ago.

Nanos used to come by my flat at 29-b Guy Place several times a week on his way home to Oakland from San Francisco State University, where he was a professor of comparative literature and creative writing.

Andrei Codrescu used to show up, too, though less predictably. From the moment I introduced them, it was clear they would hit it off.

Here's Andrei's description of us, from his memoir An Involuntary Genius in America's Shoes: (And What Happened Afterwards):

Well, I was paranoid, probably from smoking so much dope. Andrei was beyond paranoid, probably from taking too much speed.

Postscript: Nanos will be 91 this summer. Have a look at this memoir of his, about his years in London in the 1940s. The stories he tells of his meetings with Stephen Spender, T.S. Eliot, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, Cyril Connolly, and many other writers of that period and later, are a pleasure to read ... and typical of Nanos's cosmopolitan brilliance.

Here's the headline: William S Burroughs on trial for corrupting Turkish morality. And here's the lede:

The Istanbul Prosecutor's Office has opened an investigation into a book written by internationally renowned author William S. Burroughs. It was translated and published by Sel Publishing House in January.

The court referred to a report written by the Prime Ministry's Council for Protecting Minors from Explicit Publications that accused the novel, "The Soft Machine," of "incompliance with moral norms" and "hurting people's moral feelings."

Believe it or not, this is not a deadpan news report in The Onion.

Norman Ogue Mustill in his desert lair. [Self-Portrait With Collage]

In 2007, at my request, he took a photo of himself with several of his collages from the mid-'60s. This is one of them. Blogs are personal (in case you hadn't noticed).

Why, in a 2,160-word article, Classified Files Offer New Insights Into Detainees, which dominates the front page of today's New York Times print edition, is the key source of the revelations buried so deep that the reader has to guess at it?

Wikileaks, without which there would be no story, is not acknowledged until the 10th paragraph -- 644 words in -- long after the jump to an inside page, and then only obliquely in reference to the Obama administration's objection to seeing the documents published. An even longer 2,360-word article, Judging Detainees' Risk, Often With Flawed Evidence, which also begins on the front page as a sidebar, does not cite Wikileaks until the 19th paragraph, 1,244 words in.

The Riss diner was on 8th Avenue between 22nd and 23rd Streets in Manhattan.
It's no longer there. In its place is a Murray's Bagels shop. Much less interesting.

Keith Seward, in a remarkable piece of detective work, susses out the mystery behind an enigmatic literary figure. I quote from his intro:

In the summer of 1959, with Olympia Press about to publish the first edition of Naked Lunch in Paris, William Burroughs was raving about the work of another writer. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso -- they all paled, Burroughs declared,in comparison with an unknown who was possibly "the greatest writer of our time." He was rich and eccentric, this newcomer. He was a cripple and a junky. He was capable of great generosity and abusive tantrums. He could be unnervingly eloquent and equally incomprehensible. Burroughs took to calling him "the mad baron."

Go read the piece to find out who he was and what became of him. And while you're there, check out an amazing archive of rare materials, including the text of the experimental novel that elicited such praise from Burroughs, along with previously unheard audio recordings, as well as a terrific excerpt from Stewart Meyer's unfinished novel Memory Chips, about his first meeting with the man in question.

Then have a look at Jed Birmingham's latest report, AbeBooks sucks, from the RS bibliographic bunker. It's about Amazon's invasion of the online market for rare books and why that's bad not just for collectors but for anybody who reads books.

Obama's speech, "laying out his plan to reduce the deficit," seemed to make a lot of liberals happy, or happier than they thought they'd be. Rachel Maddow, for example, praised the speech "for defining Democratic values, defending social programs, and confronting Republicans." The plan even had Paul Krugman in sort of a swoon:

Substance: Much better than many of us feared. ... It relies on letting the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire -- finally! -- plus unspecified reductions in tax expenditures. ... Overall, way better than the rumors and trial balloons. I can live with this.

Krugman did have a second thought: "I should probably say, I could live with this as an end result" -- an anxious reference, of course, to inevitable compromises and an implicit lament about Obama's notorious habit of ... let's see ... giving away the store, negotiating with himself, caving in.

But Glenn Greenwald is having none of it. He writes that he experiences "cognitive dissonance" whenever liberal pundits lament that "Obama isn't pursuing the right negotiating tactics, that he's not being as shrewd as he should be." On the contrary:

He's pursuing exactly the right negotiating tactics and is being extremely shrewd -- he just doesn't want the same results that these liberal pundits want and which they like to imagine the President wants, too. He's not trying to prevent budget cuts or entitlement reforms; he wants exactly those things because of how politically beneficial they are to him -- to say nothing of whether he agrees with them on the merits. [boldface added]

The Guardian reports that top U.S. legal scholars are outraged by Bradley Manning's treatment. They call it "torture" and, "in a stinging rebuke" to Barack Obama that is nothing if not personal, they question "whether his conduct as commander in chief meets fundamental standards of decency."

Glenn Greenwald's column today tipped me to the report. He writes:

Although, as Commander-in-Chief, Obama was technically responsible for Manning's treatment, there was no evidence that he even knew about it, let alone planned it. But since then, the Manning controversy exploded into national prominence and Obama has explicitly defended the treatment, leaving no doubt that it directly reflects on who he is as a leader and a person.

Couple that with Paul Krugman's column today -- about an entirely different subject (the budget) -- which calls Obama "this bland, timid guy who doesn't seem to stand for anything" and which declares in essence that he lacks moral backbone. Makes you wonder how the nation's great black hope can look himself in the mirror these days.

Lizzie Ratner, one of the editors of THE GOLDSTONE REPORT: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict, sends this response to the Goldstone bombshell, as I termed it:

I think your read is by and large right: The judge's retreat from the Goldstone Report's findings was far more modest than his critics' victory jig would suggest, and the key conclusions of the report still stand. As you point out, Goldstone backtracks on only one claim -- an incendiary one, to be sure -- but it is only one of several serious charges the Goldstone Report's authors level against Israel.

Ratner notes further that since "this line of thinking is now pretty much out there -- at least among the prog-o-sphere" -- it doesn't make much sense to re-hash it. "But," she adds, "I do have a statement that my co-editors and I just penned that we'd be thrilled if you'd post. It's our take on this particular Goldstone Moment, and a perversely optimistic take at that. If you like it, it's yours (note: it was originally posted on Mondoweiss.net, just a few minutes ago)."

I like. Here it is:

The Goldstone Report Now Belongs to the World

by Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner, and Philip Weiss

In the wake of Judge Richard Goldstone's op-ed in the Washington Post "reconsidering" one part of the United Nations report on the Gaza conflict that he co-authored, many have tried to write the obituary for the Goldstone Report. The truth is that the Report is more alive than ever. The ferocious debate ignited by Judge Goldstone's Op-Ed has demonstrated that the world refuses to forget those 22 days in the winter of 2008-2009, when Israel pummeled the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1300 people, including over 300 children. And it has shown that the 450 pages of the report have lost none of their power to shock and galvanize.

"The court of world opinion has accepted that the Report is credible and that the events it described occurred," Desmond Travers, a member of the Gaza fact-finding mission along with Goldstone, and a retired colonel in the Irish army, told us yesterday. "People saw on their TV screens that unacceptable levels of terror were brought down on a defenseless city. And then a report came out and confirmed that understanding."

As many others have pointed out, Goldstone's op-ed does not stand as a recantation of the Goldstone Report. Even if one accepts Judge Goldstone's claim that Israel did not intentionally target civilians during Operation Cast Lead - a position that the U.N. Committee of Experts, the official body charged with monitoring Israeli and Palestinian investigations into Cast Lead, does not support - the vast majority of the report stands as written. As Judge Goldstone has said himself in an interview with the Associated Press, "I have no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time."

This means that Judge Goldstone still believes that Israel and the Palestinian authorities committed war crimes during the conflict, that Israel intentionally targeted Gaza's civilian infrastructure and used "deliberately disproportionate force designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize the civilian population." These are the damning charges that remain unchallenged and that demand international action.

Here's the poster ...