William Monroe Trotter

In Boston's black community of Roxbury the name Trotter pops up now and again on schools and community centers. Who was Trotter? No one I asked seemed to know much about the person who bore the ubiquitous name. It may have been Muriel Snowden or her husband, Otto, directors of Freedom House, a Roxbury civic center, who told me. Muriel and Otto were faithful keepers of black community lore.

William Monroe Trotter was born in Ohio in 1872. He grew up in Boston, attended Harvard, and graduated magna cum laude in 1895, becoming in the process the first black student ever elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1901 he launched a Boston newspaper, the Guardian, whose motto was "For every right, with all they might." A relentless foe of the accommodationist Booker T. Washington, Trotter once spent a month in jail for disrupting a Booker T. speech. Trotter also got into a White House shouting match with President Woodrow Wilson, who had on one occasion described African-Americans as "sick of work, covetous of pleasure--a host of dusky children untimely put out of school." In 1915 the indefatigable Trotter was arrested, tried, and acquitted for leading a demonstration against the local screening of Birth of a Nation.

Until arriving in Boston, I'd never heard of William Monroe Trotter. Shouldn't I have? Shouldn't African-Americans generally have had a glimmer? I knew about Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, didn't I? Trotter might have fared better by history had the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa done a little soft-shoe with Shirley Temple.

Randall Robinson, Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America, pp.66-67

El Sombrerero

Sonó el teléfono, escuché la voz cascada: un error así, no puedo creer, óigame bien, yo no hablo por hablar, que una equivocación vaya y pase, a cualquiera le sucede, pero un error así...

Me quedé mudo. Me vi venir lo peor. Yo acababa de publicar un libro sobre fútbol en un país, mi país, donde todos son doctores en la materia. Cerré los ojos y acepté mi condenación:
--El Mundial del 30--acusó la voz, gastada pero implacable.
--Sí--musité.
--Fue en julio.
--Sí.
--¿Y cómo es el tiempo en julio, en Montevideo?
--Frío.
--Muy frío--corrigió la voz, y atacó:
--¡Y usted escribió que en el estadio había un mar de sombreros de paja! ¿De paja?--se indignó--. ¡De fieltro! De fieltro, eran!

La voz bajó de tono, evocó:
--Yo estaba allí, aquella tarde. 4 a 2 ganamos, lo estoy viendo. Pero no se lo digo por eso. Se lo digo porque yo soy sombrerero, siempre fui, y muchos de aquellos sombreros...los hice yo.

Eduardo Galeano, Bocas del Tiempo. p.137


[The Hat-Maker

The telephone rang. I heard the cracked voice: there's been a mistake, I can't believe it, listen to me, I'm not talking just to talk, mistakes are part of life, they can happen to anyone, but there's been a mistake...

I stayed silent. I saw the worst coming my way. I had just published a book about soccer in a country, my country, where everybody is a Ph.D. in the subject. I closed my eyes and accepted my judgement:
--The 1930 World Cup--accused the voice, worn out but relentless.
--Yes--I muttered.
--It was in July.
--Yes.
--And what's the weather like in July, in Montevideo?
--Cold.
--Very cold--corrected the voice, and attacked:
--And you wrote that in the stadium there was a sea of straw hats! Straw?--He exploded. Felt! They were felt!

The voice lowered, described the scene:
--I was there that afternoon. We won 4-2. I can see it now. But I'm not telling you all this because of that. I'm telling you because I am a hat-maker--I always have been--and many of those hats...I made them.

Eduardo Galeano, Voices of Time, p.137]

Pym's Publicity

"How should anything be sacred to an advertiser?" demanded Ingleby, helping himself to four lumps of sugar. "We spend our whole time asking intimate questions of perfect strangers and it naturally blunts our finer feelings. 'Mother, has your Child Learnt Regular Habits?' 'Are you Troubled with Fullness after Eating?' 'Are you satisfied about your Drains?' 'Are you Sure that your Toilet-Paper is Germ-free?' 'Your most Intimate Friends dare not Ask you this question.' 'Do you Suffer from Superfluous Hair?' 'Do you Like them to Look at your Hands?' 'Do you ever ask yourself about Body-Odour?' 'If anything Happened to You, would your Loved Ones be Safe?' 'Why Spend so much Time in the Kitchen?' 'You think that Carpet is Clean--but is it?' 'Are you a Martyr to Dandruff?' Upon my soul, I sometimes wonder why the long-suffering public doesn't rise up and slay us."

Dorothy Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, p.63

Hiroshima in the White House

Lyndon Johnson rarely referred to Hiroshima. On one dramatic occasion he consciously tried to avoid it, but Hiroshima came to the White House, anyway.

The year was 1965. Johnson invited a wide range of painters, sculptors, and writers to the White House for a one-day festival of the arts. Five authors and poets were asked to read from their works. The poet Robert Lowell, protesting the Vietnam War, declined the invitation, explaining that the U.S. "may even be drifting on our way to the last nuclear ruin." But a decision by one of the other writers, who opposed the war but elected to attend the festival, caused just as much anguish at the White House. John Hersey, invited as a novelist, announced that he would read instead from Hiroshima, and he planned to update his account with statistics on the destructive power of existing nuclear weapons.

After discussing the matter with her husband, an enraged Lady Bird Johnson summoned the festival organizer, historian Eric Goldman (then a consultant to LBJ), to the White House. She recited one of the passages Hersey intended to read, which described Truman's announcement of the Hiroshima bombing. "The president is very close to President Truman," she explained icily. "He can't have people coming to the White House and talking about President Truman's brandishing atomic bombs." Then, coming to the point, she complained that her husband was being criticized "as a bloody warmonger. He can't have writers coming here and denouncing him, in his own house, as a man who wants to use nuclear bombs." Goldman explained that Hersey did not believe that Johnson wanted to use nuclear weapons, only that in the nuclear era any war was extremely dangerous. She replied: "The President and I do not want this man to come here and read this." Twice more he objected and twice more she responded with the same words.

Goldman refused to tell Hersey what to do, and the invitation stood. President Johnson, meanwhile, ordered a media blackout of the festival. He also requested FBI background checks on some of the guests.

When Hersey appeared behind the podium at the White House, Lady Bird Johnson was right there in the third row. Hersey prefaced his reading from Hiroshima with the following statement: "We cannot for a moment forget the truly terminal dangers, in these times, of miscalculations, of arrogance, of accident, of reliance not on moral strength but on mere military power. Wars have a way of getting out of hand." Occasionally he lifted his eyes from his text and looked at Lady Bird for emphasis. When Hersey finished, he was greeted by vigorous applause. "The First Lady, who clapped for all other readings, sat motionless," Goldman later reported. And when the president heard about Hersey's reading (and some other activities he viewed as hostile) he cut short his appearance at his own festival.

Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, pp.217-218

The World's Full of Stories....

The world's full of stories....All you need may be a character or two, or a conversation, or a situation, or a place, and you'll find the story there. You think about it, you work it out at least partly before you start writing, so that you know in a general way where you're going, but the rest works itself out in the telling.

Ursula LeGuin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew, p.118

Colchester on a Snowy Evening

I began to half-wheel, half-drag the bike up the hill. Hythe Hill was almost impassable at this point. It smelt of anger, inexperienced drivers and burning clutch fluid. It wasn't pleasant. At the Brook Street lights, three yobs threw snowballs at me. They missed, I suspect, only because they were drunk. All along the road to St Botolph's, still in heavy snow, I kept passing under-dressed men, cans in hands, in drunken trances. At Colchester Town station, a courting couple were having a romantic screaming match by the wall. It was eight p.m. and half of Colchester, it seemed, was already trollied.

At the Arts Centre, amazingly enough, all three performers made it in and performed to a reassuringly three-quarters full house. "Anyone in from Wivenhoe, tonight?" I asked. Answer came there none. After ten p.m., therefore, once again, Nanook of the North wheeled his bike out of the place and set off back home. The snow had stopped and the town centre now looked like a Klondike gold-rush town on payday. The tourist brochures won't tell you this stuff but someone ought to, so I will. On the Saturday before Christmas 2010, Colchester High Street was full of large teams of raucously-drunk pond-life acting as if they ran the town.

At the top of Queen Street, I caught the attention of a group of about fifteen of them. They were so drunk that they were holding each other up. One of them screamed at me: "Oi mate. Why're you on a ******* (please insert password) bike?" I called back to him, "I've just finished work. I'm trying to get home." Whilst they considered my answer, I escaped. After a perilous descent of East Hill, just past the bridge, a smaller group of idiots threw a lump of ice at me, in a further attempt to unseat me. They missed.

Now look, if we can't do anything as complex as regulating the sales of I.Q. reducing liquids to these simians, can't we at least put a couple of snipers on the Town Hall roof on Saturday nights instead? This is my modest proposal. Because there seems little point in building the new Cultural Quarter in the town unless we do so.

Martin Newell, "Deep and Crisp and Even," in The Stars on a Tray, pp.15-16

The Empress of Blandings

Mingled with a victor's triumph was the chagrin of the conscientious man who sees a task but half done. That he had properly put a stopper on Impostor A was undeniable, but he had hoped also to deal faithfully with Impostor B. He was wondering if the chap was hiding somewhere and if so, where, when there came to his sensitive ear the sound of a grunt, and he realized that it had proceeded from the bathroom.

"Yoicks!" cried Lord Bosham, and if he had not been a man of action rather than words would have added "Tally-ho!" He did not pause to ask himself why impostors should grunt. He merely dashed at the bathroom door, flung it open and leaped back, his gun at the ready. There was a moment's pause, and then the Empress sauntered out, a look of mild enquiry on her face.

The Empress of Blandings was a pig who took things as they came. Her motto, like Horace's, was nil admirari. But, cool and even aloof though she was as a general rule, she had been a little puzzled by the events of the day. In particular, she had found the bathroom odd. It was the only place she had ever been in where there appeared to be a shortage of food. The best it had to offer was a cake of shaving-soap, and she had been eating this with a thoughtful frown just a short while before the door opened. As she emerged now, she was still foaming at the mouth a little and it was perhaps this that set the seal on Lord Bosham's astonishment and caused him not only to recoil a yard or two with his eyes popping but also to pull the trigger of his gun.

In the confined space the report sounded like the explosion of an arsenal, and it convinced the Empress, if she had needed to be convinced, that this was no place for a pig of settled habits. Not since she had been a slip of a child had she moved at anything swifter than a dignified walk, but now Jesse Owens could scarcely have got off the mark more briskly. It took her a few moments to get her bearings, but after colliding with the bed, the table and the armchair, in the order named, she succeeded in setting a course for the French window and was in the act of disappearing through it when Lord Emsworth burst into the room, followed by Lady Constance.

P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred In The Springtime, pp.194-195

The Panda Story

This panda walked into a tea shop and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man at the next table dead, and walked out. Everyone rushed after it, shouting, "Stop! Stop! Why did you do that?"

"Because I'm a panda," said the panda. "That's what pandas do. If you don't believe me, look in the dictionary."

So they looked in the dictionary and sure enough they found Panda: Raccoon-like animal of Asia. Eats shoots and leaves.

Ursula LeGuin, Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew, p.35

"an art, a craft, a making"

Once we're keenly and clearly aware of certain elements of prose writing, and certain techniques and modes of storytelling, we can use and practice them until--the point of all the practice--we don't have to think about them consciously at all, because they have become skills.

A skill is something you know how to do.

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

There's luck in art. There's the gift. You can't earn that. You can't deserve it. But you can learn skill, you can earn it. You can learn to deserve your gift.

I'm not going to discuss writing as self-expression, as therapy, or as a spiritual adventure. It can be these things; but first of all--and in the end, too--it is an art, a craft, a making. To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It's worth it.

LeGuin, p.xi

Rollo Podmarsh

With Mrs. Podmarsh sedulously watching over her son's health, you might have supposed that this inability on his part to teach the foodstuffs to take a joke would have caused consternation in the home. But it so happened that Rollo's mother had recently been reading a medical treatise in which an eminent physician stated that we all eat too much nowadays, and that the secret of a happy life is to lay off the carbohydrates to some extent. She was, therefore, delighted to observe the young man's moderation in the matter of food, and frequently held him up as an example to be noted and followed by little Lettice Willoughby, her granddaughter, who was a good and consistent trencherwoman, particularly rough on the puddings. Little Lettice, I should mention, was the daughter of Rollo's sister Enid, who lived in the neighbourhood. Mrs. Willoughby had been compelled to go away on a visit a few days before and had left her child with Mrs. Podmarsh during her absence.

You can fool some of the people all the time, but Lettice Willoughby was not of the type that is easily deceived. A nice, old-fashioned child would no doubt have accepted without questioning her grandmother's dictum that roly-poly pudding could not fail to hand a devastating wallop to the blood-pressure, and that to take two helpings of it was practically equivalent to walking right into the family vault. A child with less decided opinions of her own would have been impressed by the spectacle of her uncle refusing sustenance, and would have received without demur the statement that he did it because he felt that abstinence was good for his health. Lettice was a modern child and knew better. She had had experience of this loss of appetite and its significance. The first symptom which had preceded the demise of poor old Ponto, who had recently handed in his portfolio after holding office for ten years as the Willoughby family dog, had been this same disinclination to absorb nourishment. Besides, she was an observant child, and had not failed to note the haggard misery in her uncle's eyes. She tackled him squarely on the subject one morning after breakfast. Rollo had retired into the more distant parts of the garden, and was leaning forward, when she found him, with his head buried in his hands.

P.G. Wodehouse, "The Awakening of Rollo Podmarsh," in The Heart Of A Goof, pp. 118-119

History's Henchmen

They heard the thud of wood on flesh. Boot on bone. On teeth. The muffled grunt when a stomach is kicked in. The muted crunch of skull on cement. The gurgle of blood on a man's breath when his lung is torn by the jagged end of a broken rib.

Blue-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed, they watched, mesmerized by something that they sensed but didn't understand: the absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The abyss where anger should have been. The sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all.

They were opening a bottle.

Or shutting a tap.

Cracking an egg to make an omelette.

The twins were too young to know that these were only history's henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness.

Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, pp.412-413

The Good Fight

Many injustices lack the visceral immediacy of young people conscripted to fight and die in Vietnam, or innocent citizens pummeled on the streets of Birmingham. Today, massive risks are often more abstract, remote, and complex. Farts disturb more people than odorless pollution or global warming. Thoughtless ethnic slights rile more people than widespread lead poisoning of children and skyrocketing levels of childhood asthma. We must awaken to the many menaces around us and dedicate some civic attention to widespread perils.

Personal irritations shrink as the magnitude of civic challenges is absorbed into one's purposeful self. When people move into the civic arena and take on a cause, they experience stress and uncertainty, but the gratification is deeper, a more truthful part of the summit of their being, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson. When Anne Witte completed a series of interviews with women who became super-active leaders, for her book Women Activists: Challenging the Abuse of Power, I asked her to identify the one over-riding impression she took away from them. Without hesitation she said, "I've never met happier people." Hmmmm.

Ralph Nader, The Good Fight, pp.32-33

Arundhati Roy

Thanks to the seductive charms of Hollywood and the irresistible appeal of America's mass media, all these years later, the world views the Vietnam War as an American story. Indochina provided the lush, tropical backdrop against which the United States played out its fantasies of violence, tested its latest technology, furthered its ideology, examined its conscience, agonized over its moral dilemmas, and dealt with its guilt (or pretended to). The Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and Laotians were only script props. Nameless, faceless, slit-eyed humanoids. They were just the people who died. Gooks.

As a child growing up in the state of Kerala, in South India--where the first democratically elected Communist government in the world came to power in 1959, the year I was born--I worried terribly about being a gook. Kerala was only a few thousand miles west of Vietnam. We had jungles and rivers and rice-fields, and communists, too. I kept imagining my mother, my brother, and myself being blown out of the bushes by a grenade, or mowed down, like the gooks in the movies, by an American marine with muscled arms and chewing gum and a loud background score. In my dreams, I was the burning girl in the famous photograph taken on the road from Trang Bang.

Arundhati Roy, "The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky," in War Talk, pp.98-99

"Anti-American"

Recently, those who have criticized the actions of the U.S. government (myself included) have been called "anti-American." Anti-Americanism is in the process of being consecrated into an ideology.

The term "anti-American" is usually used by the American establishment to discredit and--not falsely, but shall we say inaccurately--define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they're heard and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.

What does the term "anti-American" mean? Does it mean you're anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to free speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?

This sly conflation of America's culture, music, literature, the breathtaking beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people with criticism of the U.S. government's foreign policy (about which, thanks to America's "free press," sadly, most Americans know very little) is a deliberate and extremely effective strategy. It's like a retreating army taking cover in a heavily populated city, hoping that the prospect of hitting civilian targets will deter enemy fire.

Arundhati Roy, "Come September," in War Talk, pp.48-49

Lev

As he sat now on the hard broad root of a ringtree at the edge of the Meeting Pool, he thought of Nana, of the cat, of the silver water of Lake Serene, of the mountains above it which he longed to climb, of climbing the mountains out of the mist and rain into the ice and brightness of the summits; he thought of many things, too many things. He sat still, but his mind would not be still. He had come here for stillness, but his mind raced, raced from past to future and back again. Only for a moment did he find quiet. One of the herons walked silently out into the water from the far side of the pool. Lifting its narrow head it gazed at Lev. He gazed back, and for an instant was caught in that round transparent eye, as depthless as the sky clear of clouds; and the moment was round, transparent, silent, a moment at the center of all moments, the eternal present moment of the silent animal.

The heron turned away, bent its head, searching the dark water for fish.

Ursula LeGuin, The Eye Of The Heron, pp.50-51

Melle Aulitta

"He is a coarse man, but he seemed to mean to be friendly," Melle said. "Coarse" was as harsh a word as she used of anyone. It meant she disliked him very much. But she was uncomfortable with distrust, which did not come naturally to her. By seeing goodwill where there was none, often enough she had created it. The people of the household worked with and for her with willing hearts; the sullenest farmers spoke to her cordially, and tight-mouthed old serf women would confide their sorrows to her as to a sister.

Ursula LeGuin, Gifts, p.91

Planet Of Exile

The fact remains that in this book, as in most of my other novels, the men do most of the acting, in both senses of the word, and thus tend to occupy the center of the stage. I "didn't care" whether my protagonist was male or female; well, that carefreeness is culpably careless. The men take over.

Why does one let them? Well, it's ever so much easier to write about men doing things, because most books about people doing things are about men, and that is one's literary tradition...and because, as a woman, one probably has not done awfully much in the way of fighting, raping, governing, etc., but has observed that men do these things...and because, as Virginia Woolf pointed out, English prose is unsuited to the description of feminine being and doing, unless one to some extent remakes it from scratch. It is hard to break from tradition; hard to invent; hard to remake one's mother tongue. One drifts along and takes the easy way. Nothing can rouse one to go against the stream, to choose the hard way, but a profoundly stirred, and probably an angry, conscience.

But the conscience must be angry. If it tries to reason itself into anger it produces only guilt, which chokes the springs of creation at their source.

Ursula LeGuin, Introduction to the 1978 Edition of Planet of Exile, pp.ix-x

Feminist Ideology

An ideology is valuable only insofar as it is used to intensify clarity and honesty of thought and feeling, and feminist ideology has been immensely valuable to me in this respect. It has forced me and every thinking woman of this generation to know ourselves better: to separate, often very painfully, what we really think and believe from all the easy "truths" and "facts" we were (subliminally) taught about being male, being female, sex-roles, female physiology and psychology, sexual responsibility, etc. etc. All too often we have found that we had no opinion or belief of our own, but had simply incorporated the dogmas of our society; and so we must discover, invent, make our own truths, our values, ourselves.

LeGuin, p.xi

Marriage

One thing I seem to have dug up in my work is this: the "person" I tend to write about is often not exactly, or not totally, either a man or a woman. On the superficial level, this means this is little sexual stereotyping--the men aren't lustful and the women aren't gorgeous--and the sex itself is seen as a relationship rather than an act. Sex serves mainly to define gender, and the gender of the person is not exhausted, or even very nearly approached, by the label "man" or "woman." Indeed both sex and gender seem to be used mainly to define the meaning of "person" or of "self." Once, as I began to be awakened, I closed the relationship into one person, an androgyne. But more often it appears conventionally and overtly, as a couple. Both in one: or two making a whole. Yin does not occur without yang, nor yang without yin. Once I was asked what I thought the central, constant theme of my work was, and I said spontaneously, "Marriage."

LeGuin, p.xii

The Wrecking Crew

The Wrecking Crew had come to life again. They had stopped twittering about Chester's brassie-shot and were thinking of resuming their own game. Even in foursomes where fifty yards is reckoned a good shot somebody must be away, and the man whose turn it was to play was the one who had acquired from his brother-members of the club the nickname of the First Grave-Digger.

A word about this human wen. He was--if there can be said to be grades in such a sub-species--the star performer of the Wrecking Crew. The lunches of fifty-seven years had caused his chest to slip down into the mezzanine floor, but he was still a powerful man, and had in his youth been a hammer-thrower of some repute. He differed from his colleagues--the Man With the Hoe, Old Father Time, and Consul, the Almost Human--in that, while they were content to peck cautiously at the ball, he never spared himself in his efforts to do it a violent injury. Frequently he had cut a blue dot almost in half with his niblick. He was completely muscle-bound, so that he seldom achieved anything beyond a series of chasms in the turf, but he was always trying, and it was his secret belief that, given two or three miracles happening simultaneously, he would one of these days bring off a snifter. Years of disappointment had, however, reduced the flood of hope to a mere trickle, and when he took his brassie now and addressed the ball he had no immediate plans beyond a vague intention of rolling the thing a few yards farther up the hill.

The fact that he had no business to play at all till Chester had holed out did not occur to him; and even if it had occurred he would have dismissed the objection as finicking. Chester, bending over the ball, was nearly two hundred yards away--or the distance of three full brassie-shots. The First Grave-Digger did not hesitate. He whirled up his club as in distant days he had been wont to swing the hammer, and, with the grunt which this performance always wrung from him, brought it down.

P.G. Wodehouse, "Chester Forgets Himself," in The Heart Of A Goof, p.90

"...as women and as Native people..."

Even in the recesses of our psyches we find traces of the male definition of our very beings; it seems an insurmountable task to begin our own myth-making from which to establish role models to guide us out of historical convolution and de-evolution....

....as women and as Native people, we must reconstruct our history with what is left unsaid and not what has been recorded by those who have imposed their authority on us.

Ana Castillo, Massacre Of The Dreamers, p.119, p.111

Male Control

Male control of women manifests itself in many ways and to varying degrees in any given society. My point here is that the issue lies in an archaic system of patrimonial culture, not in "good" or "bad" forms of male protection, "good" or "bad" providers, that is, "good" or "bad" machismo.

Castillo, p.75

Ausencias

Mil colores luce la muerte en el cementerio de Chichicastenango. Quizá los colores celebran, en las tumbas florecidas, el fin de la pesadilla terrestre: este mal sueño de mandones y mandados que la muerte acaba cuando de un manotazo nos desnuda y nos iguala.

Pero en el cementerio no hay lápidas de 1982, ni de 1983, cuando fue el tiempo de la gran matazón en las comunidades indígenas de Guatemala. El ejército arrojó esos cuerpos a la mar, o a las bocas de los volcanes, o los quemó en quién sabe qué fosas.

Los alegres colores de las tumbas de Chichicastenango saludan a la muerte, la Igualadora, que con igual cortesía trata al mendigo y al rey. Pero en el cementerio no están los que murieron por querer que así también fuera la vida.

Eduardo Galeano, Bocas del Tiempo, p.308


[Absences

Death shines in thousands of colors in the cemetery of Chichicastenango. Perhaps the colors celebrate, on the flower-bedecked tombs, the end of the earthly nightmare: this bad dream of bosses and minions that death stops when, with a powerful slap, she strips and levels us.

But in the cemetery there are no tombstones from 1982, nor from 1983, which was the time of the great massacre of indigenous communities in Guatemala. The army tossed those bodies into the sea, or into the mouths of volcanoes, or burned them in who knows what mass graves.

The happy colors of the tombs of Chichicastenango salute death, the Equalizer, who treats the beggar and the king with equal courtesy. But in the cemetery those who died for wanting life to do likewise are not there.

Eduardo Galeano, Voices of Time, p.308]

"Our Caribbean Civilization"

Since the age of Columbus, the ends of European materialist cultures have not served well the deeply private emotional requirements of the modern but still fragile human animal. The suffocating preoccupation with the acquisition of fame and fortune has directed untold numbers of helpless unreflective unfortunates to search down the wrong streets for psychic sustenance, resulting in a rabid competition of the lost between the unhappy failures and the unhappy successes, the former comparing its troubled insides to the latter's well-varnished outsides.

One sure measure of a society's relative health is its suicide rate. If a society produces large numbers of people who destroy themselves, that society cannot be described as successful under any reasonable definition of the term. Well-adjusted people, people who culturally know, ever so unobtrusively, how to simply be don't kill themselves.

Norway, a nation--as I have indicated previously--of some apparent envy, has, according to the World Health Organization, a suicide rate of 18.2 for males and 6.7 for females per 100,000 people. The United States has a slightly higher rate for males (18.6) and a somewhat lower rate for females (4.4). St. Kitts has a suicide rate for both males and females of zero. The same is true for St. Kitts' English-speaking neighbors of Antigua and Barbuda and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Perhaps there is indeed something special about what Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of St. Vincent, calls "Our Caribbean Civilization." To put a converse face on the point: Does Donald Rumsfeld look happy to you? Squint if you have doubts.

Randall Robinson, Quitting America: The Departure Of A Black Man From His Native Land, pp.25-26

The Capitol Rotunda

I thought, then, what a fitting metaphor the Capitol Rotunda was for America's racial sorrows. In the magnificence of its boast, in the tragedy of its truth, in the effrontery of its deceit.

This was the house of Liberty, and it had been built by slaves. Their backs had ached under its massive stones. Their lungs had clogged with its mortar dust. Their bodies had wilted under its heavy load-bearing timbers. They had been paid only in the coin of pain. Slavery lay across American history like a monstrous cleaving sword, but the Capitol of the United States steadfastly refused to divulge its complicity, or even slavery's very occurrence. It gave full lie to its own gold-spun half-truth. It shrank from the simplest honesty. It mocked the shining eyes of the innocent. It kept from us all--black, brown, white--the chance to begin again as co-owners of a national democratic idea. It blinded us all to our past and, with the same stroke, to any common future.

Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks, pp.6-7

Cuba and the American Media

If our government decided to hate Fidel Castro for declining to play the Latin cipher, our people with small inspiration decided to hate him for stuff they would just make up, without, I think, knowing they were fabricating rationales for their reflexive antipathies. Their comments would quite frequently make them look silly, but not to each other because they believed what they were saying no matter how baseless. Nice people, even, said these things. Not lying, because I believe they thought they were telling the truth.

We were witness to samples of such malignant blather when the Baltimore Orioles played in Havana against the Cuban national team on March 28, 1999. Baseball Hall of Famer and ESPN analyst Joe Morgan, with stunning illogic, said to an American viewing audience: "Cubans don't have access to information about American baseball but they get it." Indeed, Cubans know a great deal more about American baseball than Americans know about baseball in Cuba, which is next to nothing.

Thomas Boswell, sports columnist for the Washington Post, wrote of Havana: "Of course, almost every structure you can see from your panoramic picture window looks like it's been neutron-bombed." What quality of anger drives such extreme and, in this case, wholly unwarranted hyperbole? Havana is an attractive city in need of cosmetic repairs in a developing country saddled with shortages occasioned by our country's economic embargo. Faced with the choice of investing scarce resources in people or paint, the government chose people.

Boswell went on to write: "Maybe it's because there are no clocks in Cuba. In two days, not one clock has come into view anywhere."

Of course this is absurd and I feel somewhat diminished to need report to you that on my several visits to Cuba, the country was awash with clocks. Digital clocks in every hotel room I'd ever stayed in. Moon-faced clocks in public places. Clocks on wrists. And I hardly think Cuban officials would go to the trouble of concentrating all the country's timepieces on the walls and night tables and wrists I might likely have seen. But perhaps they might have, had they known that among all the many charges leveled at them by Americans, clocklessness would one day find its way into print.

A Washington Post staff writer, Richard Justice, wrote that "team executives jammed into a ramshackle airport this morning to board a charter flight back to the United States." There are grounds on which the Cuban government deserves criticism. But why the petty whole-cloth invention? Havana's airport is a spanking brand-new state-of-the-art facility.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, a Los Angeles Times reporter, wrote: "Havana smells like a jar of vaseline and if you stand outside for more than fifteen minutes, your skin gets coated with black goo." This is but a snippet of a screed that appeared in the Washington Post. Why would so widely respected a newspaper as the Washington Post print writing so palpably counterfactual as this? Havana does not smell like anything or anyplace in particular. In fact, I don't recall that it even has a smell.

What would cause otherwise competent journalists writing for preeminent American newspapers to produce such spectacular distortions? Did Ms. Valdes-Rodriguez in a schizophrenic moment actually believe herself to be covered with "black goo"? Did she rush screaming through Mr. Boswell's neutron-bombed streets to her clockless room to scrub off the goo? Or did she make a goo-impeded headlong rush to Mr. Justice's ramshackle airport to flee this godforsaken place netherward of hell? Did their various detached and objective editors accept en toto their claims? Black goo? Neutron bombs? Clocks? Come on. They skewed the truth and they all knew it. But what would drive a professional journalist to bend descriptions of simple things, physical phenomena, inanimate objects? Could they hate a government enough to violate the basic canons of their profession, to chance shredding their very credibility as journalists by inventing images that bear no relation to any objective reality?

Robinson, pp.153-156

The Ethics of Collecting

The practice of collecting buried bodies and cultural properties finds its origins in the paradigms of imperialism, science, racism, and the bounty of war. While some of the Europeans who settled North America came for religious refuge, others came in search of adventure, bent on discovering the exotic. In the process of leaving behind their histories in the old lands, the colonists became a people in search of a history--a desire that led many to collecting the history of other peoples. The desecration of Native American remains and sacred objects began with the arrival of Europeans in the Americas: Pilgrims looted graves after arriving in Wampanoag territory on Cape Cod, Thomas Jefferson looked into burial mounds and documented his findings, and priests and ministers often took great pleasure in collecting and then destroying sacred items.

Perhaps it is in an effort to feed the immense spiritual void inherited from its colonial past that the mainstream culture has maintained a persistent tendency toward wanting to discover, classify, and collect everything the mainstream culture considers exotic. Descendants of settlers are, in a sense, haunted by nostalgia for the lost cultures and fabled pride their forebears worked so hard to annihilate. The sociopathology of the United States rests on its colonialist history and, in particular, on the awesome weight of genocide. In attempting to dispel this burden, science has been instrumental.

Winona LaDuke, Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming, pp.75-76

Energy Junkies

Let's face it, we are energy junkies. The United States consumes a third of the world's energy resources with only a twentieth of the population. We own more major appliances, televisions, cars, and computers than we have people to use them. We even slather oil-based fertilizers and herbicides on our food crops. We have allowed our addictions to overtake common sense and a good portion of our decency. We live in a country with the largest disparity of wealth between rich and poor of any industrialized nation in the world. And, we live where economic power is clearly translated into political power. A good portion of that power is held in the hands of energy corporations. That is the story of the United States, and that is what we must change.

LaDuke, p.237

Jane Mt. Pleasant

I love the corn because it represents accumulated knowledge passed down from farmer to farmer over the millennium. I love the corn because it provides sustenance to my family and community today. I love corn because it represents our promise and commitment to the future. The simple act of planting connects me to the past, roots me in the present, and commits me to the future.

Jane Mt. Pleasant, Iroquois biologist, quoted in LaDuke, p.165

In a time....

In a time of immense violence, it only takes a short time for life to be totally transformed.

LaDuke, p.70

Status Of Forces Agreement

Within the political class and the media it is reflexively assumed that Washington has the right to demand terms for the Status of Forces Agreement in Iraq. No such right was accorded to Russian invaders of Afghanistan, or indeed to anyone except the United States and its clients. For others, we rightly adopt the principle that invaders have no rights, only responsibilities, including the responsibility to attend to the will of the victims, and to pay massive reparations for their crimes. In this case, the crimes include strong support for Saddam Hussein through his worst atrocities on Reagan's watch, then on to Saddam's massacre of Shiites under the eyes of the U.S. military after the first Gulf War; the Clinton sanctions that were termed "genocidal" by the distinguished international diplomats who administered them and resigned in protest, then the invasion and its hideous aftermath. No such thoughts can be voiced in polite society.

Noam Chomsky, Hopes & Prospects, p.237

We Are All Moors

The more I listened to the acrimonious dispute over the fate of illegal aliens in the United States, the more I realized the extent to which modern Western nations are still operating by the principles of Spanish conquistadors and inquisitors in their war against Islam. Spain's crusade for religious purity was not a blessing to that nation, but the delusion that a nation could regain its strength by excluding those who are different, the minorities who don't belong to the common stock, continues to drive states to the brink of folly.

Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors, p.19

Israel and South Africa

Israel's global status is already coming to resemble that of South Africa forty years ago, particularly after its invasion of Gaza in December 2008. And it is reacting much the same way as white nationalists did: with "information campaigns" to instruct the world on its errors and misunderstanding, arrogant self-righteousness, circling the wagons, defiance, reliance on the United States to protect it no matter what the world thinks, and often with extraordinary paranoia.

Noam Chomsky, Hopes & Prospects, pp.162-163

Charlie and Ira Louvin

The Louvin Brothers enjoyed success, but fell short of superstardom. Their old-school country was subsumed by the first wave of rock'n'roll--although Elvis Presley idolized the Louvins, and took them on tour--and then by the riotous cultural upheavals of the 1960s. A greater impediment was the gathering volatility of Ira Louvin. Speaking to Uncut, Charlie sighingly confirmed that every legend about Ira's volcanic temper, artistic caprice, alcoholic excess and romantic recklessness is regrettably true. "There's only a millimetre difference between an idiot and a genius," said Charlie.

He blamed Ira, though with no hint of bitterness, for depriving them of what might have been a career-transforming moment: an Elvis Presley version of one of their songs. Ira fought with Elvis' manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told Elvis his music was "trash," and sneered to the King's face that he was "a white nigger." "My brother," said Charlie, in a prize-winning understatement, "was way too outspoken."

The Louvin Brothers couldn't go on like that, and didn't. In his early eighties, Charlie still remembered the date and place precisely. "Every time we'd go on tour, Ira would say, 'This is it, I'm getting out of this rotten business,' and he'd say to me, "I don't know what you'll do, maybe you can get your job at the service station back.' I just heard this so many times, and then on August 18, 1963, in Watseka, illinois, I said on the way home--of course, I did 95 per cent of the driving--'this time, you're right. This will be the last show."

To the regret of many and the surprise of few, Ira Louvin died young, just 41, in 1965. Of all the fates he tempted, it was a car accident that claimed him, along with his fourth wife, not long after his third wife had shot him five times during a domestic dispute (and subsequently informed reporters waiting at the hospital that "If the son of a bitch don't die, I'll shoot him again.")

from "When You Listen To The Louvins, You Hear The Deep, Haunted South," Uncut magazine, April 2011

Wampanoag

One of the most exciting new developments of the past few decades is the revival of indigenous cultures and languages, and the struggles for community and political rights.

This is happening even where the indigenous communities barely survived the conquest, as in the United States, where the pre-contact population of perhaps seven million or more was reduced to a few hundred thousand by 1900.

My own department at MIT has played a significant role in the revival, thanks to the extraordinary work of the late Kenneth Hale. Apart from working on human rights issues for indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia, and fundamental contributions to the study of their languages and to linguistic theory, he also brought people from reservations who had had few educational opportunities and devoted great effort to helping them gain doctoral degrees in a very demanding program, with dissertations on their own languages that surpassed anything in the literature in depth and sophistication. They returned to their homes, and have established educational and cultural programs, several of which have flourished, revitalizing marginalized communities and helping them to gain broader rights.

I will mention only one really spectacular achievement. One of the major languages of New England before the conquest was Wampanoag. The people themselves were mostly expelled or murdered, with a bounty offered for their heads, while those who surrendered and did not want to fight were sold into slavery--men, women, and children--by the early English colonists. The last known speaker died a century ago. Hale and some of his students were able to reconstruct the language from textual and comparative evidence. Hale's primary collaborator was a Wampanoag woman, Jesse Little Doe, who helped reconstruct the language and then learned it. At a memorial for Hale, she paid her tribute to him in fluent Wampanoag, and also brought her two-year-old daughter, the first native speaker of the language in a century. There is a good chance that the culture and community will flourish and find a proper place in the larger society, a model for what might be achieved elsewhere.

Noam Chomsky, Hopes and Prospects, pp.5-6

"By and By"

Avis left the unfinished sketch or painting patiently. She said, "By and by. After a while. I must wait a little." She was still able to allure herself with the melody of this refrain, to which so many hundreds of women's lips have shaped themselves trembling; while the ears of a departing hope or a struggling purpose were bent to hear. Life had become a succession of expectancies....

Women understand--only women altogether--what a dreary will-o'-the-wisp is this old, common, I had almost said commonplace, experience, "When the fall sewing is done," "When the baby can walk," "When house-cleaning is over," "When the company has gone," "When we have got through with the whooping-cough," "When I am a little stronger," then I will write the poem, or learn the language, or study the great charity, or master the symphony; then I will act, dare, dream, become.

Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps, Story of Avis
(quoted in Tillie Olsen, Silences, p.208)

Rebecca Harding Davis

Landmarks, unless they loom large in landscapes often visited, tend to become weed-grown tombstones over the forgotten dead, noticed only by accident.

Even the sense of landmark has been obliterated. Rebecca Harding Davis is a name known today only to a handful of American Studies people and literary historians. Few have read any of her work; fewer still teach any of it.

Myriads of human beings--those who did the necessary industrial work in the last century--lived and died and little remains from which to reconstruct their perished (vanished) lives. About them as about so much else, literature was largely silent, and the charge can be levied: Nowhere am I in it.

"No picture, poem, statement, passing them to the future
Unlimn'd, they disappear."

To those of us, descendants of their class, hungry for any rendering of what our vanished people were like, of how they lived, Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills is immeasurably valuable. Details, questions, Vision, found nowhere else--dignified into literature.

Tillie Olsen, Silences, pp.113-114
(the quotation is from Walt Whitman's "Yonnondio")

Broken-Face Gargoyles

All I can give you is broken-face gargoyles.
It is too early to sing and dance at funerals,
Though I can whisper to you I am looking for an undertaker humming
a lullaby and throwing his feet in a swift and mystic buck-and-wing,
now you see it and now you don't.

Fish to swim a pool in your garden flashing a speckled silver,
A basket of wine-saps filling your room with flame-dark for your eyes
and the tang of valley orchards for your nose,
Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I cannot
bring you now.
It is too early and I am not footloose yet.

I shall come in the night when I come with a hammer and saw.
I shall come near your window, where you look out when your eyes
open in the morning,
And there I shall slam together bird-houses and bird-baths
for wing-loose wrens and hummers to live in, birds with yellow
wing tips to blur and buzz soft all summer,
So I shall make little fool homes with doors, always open doors for all
and each to run away when they want to.
I shall come just like that even though now it is early and I am not yet
footloose,
Even though I am still looking for an undertaker with a raw,
wind-bitten face and a dance in his feet.
I make a date with you (put it down) for six o'clock in the evening
a thousand years from now.

All I can give you now is broken-face gargoyles.
All I can give you now is a double gorilla head with two fish mouths
and four eagle eyes hooked on a street wall, spouting water
and looking two ways to the ends of the street for the new people,
the young strangers, coming, coming, always coming.

It is early.
I shall yet be footloose.

Carl Sandburg, "Broken-Face Gargoyles" (in Smoke and Steel )

Noam Chomsky on Ronald Reagan

Another stunning illustration of the success of propaganda, which has considerable import for the future, is the cult of the great killer and torturer Ronald Reagan, one of the grand criminals of the modern era, who also had an unerring instinct for favoring the most brutal terrorists and murderers around the world, from Zia-ul-Haq and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in what’s now called AfPak to the most dedicated killers in Central America to the South African racists who killed an estimated 1.5 million people in the Reagan years and had to be supported because they were under attack by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, one of “more notorious terrorist groups” in the world, the Reaganites determined in 1988. And on and on, with remarkable consistency.

Now, his grisly record has been quickly expunged in favor of mythic constructions that would have impressed Kim Il-sung. Among other feats, he has been anointed as the apostle of free markets, while raising protectionist barriers more than probably all other postwar presidents combined and implementing massive government intervention in the economy. He was a great exponent of law and order, while he informed the business world that labor laws would not be enforced, so that illegal firing of union organizers tripled under his supervision. His hatred of working people was exceeded perhaps only by his contempt for the rich black women driving their limousines to collect their welfare checks.

Well, there should be no need to continue with the record, but the outcome tells us quite a lot about the intellectual and moral culture in which we live. For President Obama, this monstrous creature was a “transformative figure.” If you go over to Stanford University’s prestigious Hoover Institute, he’s a colossus—I’m quoting—whose “spirit seems to stride the country, watching us like a warm and friendly ghost.” Well, painfully to record, many of the people whose lives he was ruining join in the adulation, and hasten to shelter under the umbrella of the power and the violence that he symbolized.

from an address to the Left Forum, New York City
(broadcast on the May 31st, 2010 edition of Democracy Now!)

Keith Richards at Nellcôte

Keith needed heroin. Tony Sanchez described one way they got it. He and Keith ran into Count Jean de Breteuil, who introduced himself as a friend of William Burroughs. De Breteuil's fashion signature was red suspenders, leading Keith and Sanchez to refer to him as Johnny Braces. Learning that Keith was looking for a connection, de Breteuil returned, at the wheel of a Bentley, with heroin that Sanchez describes as looking and smelling "like pink talcum powder. Pure Thai heroin."

Impressed with the quality of the goods, Keith expressed interest in a steady supply. When de Breteuil got back to London he called his dealer, a Corsican based in Marseilles, and asked him to arrange regular deliveries to Nellcôte. Tony Sanchez describes the arrival of the first batch: "They were two burly Corsicans, perspiring heavily in their Daks lightweight suits and carrying identical black fiberglass executive attaché cases. After a brief exchange of pleasantries the stouter of the two clicked open his case to reveal a polyethylene bag approximately as large as a two-pound sack of sugar....Keith cautiously snorted the mixture and after a few minutes lapsed into unconsciousness. When he came to, he said, 'Okay, I'll take the lot.'"

David Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music, p.348

Piera Valtorskar

When she left her father Piera put on her coat and went outside into the early dark, the cold and starlight of winter night. She could not stay shut in the warmth indoors. The sky was hard and the stars bright, small, multitudinous. The lake lay black. There was the queer snapping silence of frost, and the air bit throat and lungs as if instead of breathing one were drinking ice-cold water. Piera walked down to the shore and stood there under the pines looking out to the lake and the height of the winter sky. Orion hung there, the belt and sword of stars, the bright dog at heel. Piera stood still, her bare hands thrust deep into the sleeves of her coat, shivering now and then from head to foot, and in that hour she came into her inheritance. She knew the great hour as it passed. She accepted without reservation what it brought her: the passion of her generation; the end of her childhood.

If this was her world, she was strong enough to live in it. She was a woman, not trained for any public act, not trained to defiance, brought up to the woman's part: waiting. So she would wait. For any act done consciously may be defiant, may be independent, may change life utterly.

But one can act thus only if one knows there is no safety. So she thought, that Epiphany night, looking up at Orion and the other stars. One must wait outside. There is no hiding away from storm, waste, injustice, death. There is no shelter, no stopping, only a pretense, a mean, stupid pretense of being safe and letting time and evil pass by outside. But we are all outside, Piera thought, and all defenseless. There is no safe house but death. Nothing of our own building will protect us, not the jails, nor the palaces, nor the comfortable houses. But the grandeur of knowing that, the pride and grandeur of being on one's own at last, alone, under the enormous and indifferent sky, unhoused and unprotected! To be nothing, a girl, confused, grieved, frightened, foolish, shivering in the January frost, all that, yes, but also to learn at last the stature of her spirit: to come into her inheritance.

Ursula LeGuin, Malafrena, pp.242-243

Romantic Friendship

In the Victorian age, romantic friendships existed....These romantic friendships lacked sexual engagement but were rich in erotic passion. Nonsexual erotic passion has little meaning in today's world. Nowadays the assumption is that something is wrong if an individual feels intense erotic connection with someone and does not allow that eros to lead him or her to sexual intercourse. Romantic friendships differ from other forms of friendships precisely because the parties involved acknowledge both that there is an erotic dimension to their passionate bond and that it acts as an energetic force, enhancing and deepening ties.

bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love, pp.207-208

The Power of Patriarchy

The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared than loved.

bell hooks, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, p.120

Robert Fisk

Before President Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, he announced that America "has no quarrel with the Libyan people." Before he bombed Iraq in 1991, Bush the Father told the world that the United States "has no quarrel with the Iraqi people." In 2001, Bush the Son, about to strike at the Taliban and al-Qaeda, told us he "has no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan." And now that frightening mantra was repeated. There was no quarrel, Mr. Bush said--absolutely none--with the Iraqi people. So, I thought to myself as I scribbled my notes in the UN press gallery, it's flak jackets on.

Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation, pp.888-889

Mars and Venus

In the Mars-and-Venus-gendered universe, men want power and women want emotional attachment and connection. On these planets nobody really has the opportunity to know love since it is power and not love that is the order of the day. The privilege of power is at the heart of patriarchal thinking. Girls and boys, women and men who have been taught to think this way almost always believe love is not important, or if it is, it is never as important as being powerful, dominant, in control, on top--being right. Women who give seemingly selfless adoration and care to the men in their lives appear to be obsessed with "love," but in actuality their actions are often a covert way to hold power. Like their male counterparts, they enter relationships speaking the words of love even as their actions indicate that maintaining power and control is their primary agenda. This does not mean that care and affection are not present; they are. This is precisely why it is so difficult for women, and some men, to leave relationships where the central dynamic is a struggle for power. The fact that this sadomasochistic power dynamic can and usually does coexist with affection, care, tenderness, and loyalty makes it easy for power-hungry individuals to deny their agendas, even to themselves.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, p.152

The Place of Love in Life

Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure was more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work.

Rainer Maria Rilke: quoted in hooks, p.183

TOE

As long as women are not more involved in physics, they cannot play a significant role in determining the directions and goals of the science itself. This is a particularly crucial issue because in the last few decades the physics community has become almost fanatically obsessed with a goal that I suggest offers very few benefits for our society. That is the dream of finding a unified theory of the particles and forces of nature--a set of mathematical equations that would encompass not only matter and force, but space and time as well: what physicists call a "theory of everything," often simply referred to as a TOE.

Even the most ardent TOE proponents acknowledge that this theoretical synthesis is unlikely to have any application to daily human life--not even for military purposes. Physicists seek the knowledge, not because they believe it has the potential to improve the concrete human condition, but simply because they yearn to see what they believe is the mathematical plan of Creation.

The problem is, such a theory cannot be obtained by thought alone. In order to pursue their quest, TOE physicists during the last two decades have had to build increasingly expensive particle accelerators. The sheer expense has thus transformed it into an issue for society at large--because it is our taxes that would have to pay for these machines. In expecting society to provide billions of dollars to support this quest, TOE physicists have become like a decadent priesthood, demanding that the populace build them ever more elaborate cathedrals, with spires reaching ever higher into their idea of heaven.

I believe we need a new culture of physics, one that does not place so much value on quasi-religious, highly abstracted goals; a culture that is less obsessed with particles and forces, and more concerned with human beings and our needs. One of the roles I believe women might play in physics is to encourage a shift away from the present obsessions. I am not suggesting here that women are innately uninterested in theories of particles and forces, or that male physicists have inherently different interests from females, but rather that modern physics has evolved in such a way that it now tends to attract only people, of both sexes, with certain kinds of interests and proclivities.

Let me stress, then, the problem is not that physicists use mathematics to describe the world, but rather how they have used it, and to what ends. Mathematical Man's problem is neither his math nor his maleness per se, but rather the pseudoreligious ideals and self-image with which he so easily becomes obsessed. He does not need a sex change, just a major personality readjustment.

Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras' Trousers: God, Physics, and the Gender Wars, pp.13-16

American War Crimes in Vietnam

Discussion of American war crimes in Vietnam is often sharply criticized as dishonest, or even as a form of self-hatred, if not "balanced" by an account of the crimes of the "enemy." Such criticism is at best thoughtless and at worst hypocritical; how would we respond to the claim that that discussion of the acts of the fascist aggressors in World War II must be "balanced" by an account of the terrorism of the resistance in occupied countries?

Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State, p.230

Assata Shakur

"No," the guard said, "you're wrong. Slavery was outlawed with the exception of prisons. Slavery is legal in prisons."

I looked it up and sure enough, she was right. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution says:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Well, that explained a lot of things.

Assata Shakur, Assata, p.64

bell hooks

Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions, p.xviii

Jim Hightower

By defining business in the narrowest terms of global corporate interests, we sublimate all else to their bottom line, leaving only incidental room for the multiple goals of our community, including:

Time for family and friends

Personal satisfaction of workers

Encouragement of creativity

Promotion of discourse

Welcoming of dissent

Building of strong, local relationships

Good stewardship

...and, dare we add,

Fun

Laughter

The pursuit of happiness

A sense of shared purpose and belonging

A feeling of being respected and valued

The common good

Why should we give up all that? As individuals and as citizens of a country, why should we let a cabal of greedheads and boneheads define society's goals?

(And away we go, Hightower, with another of your leftie, hate-America screeds, trying to rouse the rabble with all that pursuit of happiness crap. You know what your problem is, doncha, Jimbo? You're just antibusiness, that's what! Hey, that old president, Calvin Coolidge, got it right years ago: "The chief business of the American people is business." Get over it.)

Me, antibusiness? Hardly. I grew up in business. My parents, "High" and Lillie Hightower, owned and ran a small wholesale magazine business, along with the Main Street Newsstand, in Denison, Texas. My first job was wrangling bundles of magazines into my daddy's delivery truck.

Antibusiness? I saw and deeply admired the entrepreneurial gumption and the hard, hard work my parents put into their business. I saw them respect and fairly reward the employees who worked with them. I saw how much they enjoyed their customers, always shooting the breeze and joshing with them, thereby making a visit to their store much more than a mere commercial transaction.

The essential question to ask is this: What kind of business? Today's corporations like to cite old Cal Coolidge's business-of-America line, but they conveniently leave out his follow-up thought, which came only three lines later: "Of course, the accumulation of wealth cannot be justified as the chief end of existence." Coolidge continued with "It's only natural that people seek some level of wealth, but there are many other things we want very much more." Then he garnished his point with this flower: "The chief ideal of the American people is idealism."

You don't hear that uplifting thought quoted very much, do you? Yet in terms of business alone, there are many ways to organize commerce--so unleash your idealism!

Jim Hightower and Susan DeMarco, Swim Against The Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow, pp.11-13
additional source: Calvin Coolidge, "The Press Under a Free Government," January 17, 1925

Rosalind Franklin

You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything and think of everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training--if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralising invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience, and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they lead to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance).

I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world.

It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of a creator. A creator of what? ...I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more insignificant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith--as I have defined it.

quoted in Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, pp.60-61

Martin Newell

I was one of the inventors of the cassette underground. Being pretty much an average dumbshit Spinal Tap-type pop musician, which I was, I was interested in haircuts and girls and drugs and quite a lot of music really. I had no knowledge of politics. But I suddenly started reading anarchist tracts. I'd always been rebellious. But in this case I suppose I did have half a brain, and it started germinating about this time. I started reading. And I thought, hang on a minute. No one's so zealous as the recently converted. I became a fully-fledged agit-prop anarchist, let's buck the system, let's tear it all down, let's slash it up. I thought, the best thing is not to join in. You know that slogan that Lennon and all the others had about '70: "What if they had a war and nobody came?" Well, this was "what if they started a record company and nobody signed?"

So we said look, the equation is this: we want to make music, and there's people who want to listen to it. So how do we get our music out of our hearts, through our fingers, into people's ears without this plethora of basically parasites interfering with it? 'Cause there were parasites. And I thought, I know. As the technology improves--they'd just invented four-track portastudios--we could have the same facilities in theory as the Beatles had, in our living rooms, and we could send the stuff out. We could just mail it out to people. But Lol [Elliott, fellow member of Cleaners from Venus], who was well-staged in anarchism, said, "Look, do we have to take money for it? Can't we just do a direct swap--music for groceries?"

But I thought, there's perishables. Obviously, the thing has a self-limiting factor inasmuch as if you start sending melons or oranges and stuff. We're vegetarians, so there wouldn't be any rotting meat or anything being sent to us. But it would have to be dried goods. I think somebody did actually send us some tea bags. But that's as far as it got. Then we realized that we couldn't swap tea bags for stamps, so we couldn't mail the stuff out. So we had to modify it a bit. So in the end we just charged the lowest prices we could.

It began to get quite successful, so I got in an argument with a businessman one day, who said, "Martin, blah blah, this thing seems to be taking off for you. What happens if you become successful? You'll have to become a capitalist." So I said "No, it's not anti-capitalism. I'll reduce the prices." He said, "You can't do it." I said, "I can." He said, "What happens if it gets really really successful?" I said, "We'll give it away." He said, "What happens it gets really global? " I said, "We'll pay people to take it with the money we've made." And he got really angry, and I had to leave the pub before he hit me. People who are interested in money get very emotional about it. They don't like the idea of anyone giving it away. It contravenes some essential law in their heads.

Please read the complete Martin Newell interview with Richie Unterberger

Gram Parsons

The core of Gram's art was his courage in the face of emotional pain. While his life was consumed in fleeing or blunting that pain, his music addressed the most awful loss with singular clarity. For Gram, transcending pain meant staring it in the face, describing it in detail, owning the hurt without flinching.

David Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music, p.444

Gram Parsons II

Years spent sifting through Gram Parsons' life, tracking the course of his years, listening to those who knew him, becoming ever more immersed in his music, make it clear to me that Gram's death offers not the slightest trace of romance. It was sordid.

Meyer, p.455

Moses Fleetwood Walker

Moses Fleetwood Walker's promising baseball career was pounded to dust not by ownership but by the white players themselves. In 1887, future Hall of Famer Adrian "Cap" Anson refused to allow his team to play against Newark unless Walker and George Stovey were benched. Anson's team issued the following letter:

"Dear Sir,
We the undersigned, do hereby warn you not to put up Walker, the Negro catcher, the days you play in Richmond, as we could mention the names of seventy-five determined men who have sworn to mob Walker, if he comes on the grounds in a suit. We hope you will listen to our words of warning, so there will be no trouble, and if you do not, there certainly will be. We only write this to prevent much bloodshed, as you alone can prevent."

Billy Voltz refused to concede, and even sent Walker, who was scheduled to have an off day, to right field. Anson backed down and the game was played.

At a game in Syracuse, Walker took the day off and sat in the dugout in street clothes. The Toronto manager asked Walker to leave the stadium. Heated words were exchanged. According to one account, Walker was surrounded by fans and allegedly brandished a loaded revolver and threatened to put a hole in someone in the crowd. He was arrested but released, and the next day he was in Syracuse's lineup.

But Walker--even though he is now a baseball footnote and most fans think Jackie Robinson was the first African American player--didn't fade into obscurity. The son of an Ohio doctor, Walker went to Oberlin College, a school with roots in the abolitionist movement, and later went on to both run a hotel and become an inventor of early movie cameras. He was also a spokesperson for the idea that the only way blacks could escape white supremacy would be to secede from America. Walker called for a mass exodus to Liberia: the only solution to "the Negro problem or if you prefer, the white man's problem" is "the wholesale emigration of the Negro from America.... We do not believe in the wholesale deportation of the Negro at the present time....But the time is fast approaching when the Negroes at the very least must leave the Southern states." In Walker we see a precursor to the Garveyite movement of the 1920s. In other sections of Walker's work, he writes bracingly about everything from the effect of white dolls on young black girls to the inhumanity of lynchings. The sham of baseball's "level playing field" created a man with no illusions in the promise of America. His baseball experience produced enduring scars.

Dave Zirin, A People's History of Sports in the United States, pp.22-24

Oneness

There are things human beings have known for most of our time on earth. For at least 500,000 years of human time we have known them; for about 5 billion years of earth time we have known them; for a good 13 billion years of galactic time we have known them--and, no doubt, longer than that. Set against this long galactic, terrestrial, and human time of knowing our oneness, the past four thousand years of patriarchy's institutional and doctrinal denial of our oneness, once we see it for what it was, will appear a mere aberration. Just a brief forgetting.

Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother, p.424

Abner Doubleday

It was thought for decades that baseball's creator was a prominent Union general named Abner Doubleday who in his pre-martial days was said to have invented the sport. But this was myth. Neither his personal effects (letters, notes) nor his 1893 obituary in the New York Times makes mention of baseball. The tale was born when Albert Spalding, of Spalding sporting goods, put together a panel to declare how the sport began. Spalding, a former pitcher, team owner, and antiunion zealot, trumpeted that the game's roots lay in Cooperstown, New York, a bucolic All-American postcard of a place. Doubleday, a veteran who graduated from West Point and fought Indians, Mexicans, and Confederates, seemed as good a choice as any to be the founder. The myth was powerful enough and repeated enough that Cooperstown is now the site of the baseball hall of fame. There is no evidence Doubleday ever even set foot in Cooperstown.

Dave Zirin, A People's History of Sports in the United States, pp. 15-16

Please see The Doubleday Myth to read about this story in more detail.

Moss

You might not think there would be that many people in the world prepared to devote lifetimes to the study of something so inescapably low key, but in fact moss people number in the hundreds and they feel very strongly about their subject. "Oh, yes," Ellis told me, "the meetings can get very lively at times."

I asked him for an example of controversy.

"Well, here's one inflicted on us by one of your countrymen," he said, smiling lightly, and opened a hefty reference work containing illustrations of mosses whose most notable characteristic to the uninstructed eye was their uncanny similarity one to another. "That," he said, tapping a moss, "used to be one genus, Drepanocladus. Now it's been reorganized into three: Drepanocladus, Wamstorfia, and Hamatacoulis."

"And did that lead to blows?" I asked perhaps a touch hopefully.

"Well, it made sense. It made perfect sense. But it meant a lot of reordering of collections and it put all the books out of date for a time, so there was a bit of, you know, grumbling."

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p.353

M.I.A.

The POW/MIA myth must be understood as a symptom of a profound psychological sickness in American culture. One path back toward mental health would be through an honest self-examination of how and why a society could have been so possessed by such a grotesque myth.

The bones of many Americans have mingled not just with the earth of Vietnam but also with the bones of many Vietnamese. Those who are still missing are just as dead as the husband and son of Nguyen Thi Teo, and the Vietnamese dead are just as missing as those dead Americans. When we recognize and confront all that we--and the peoples of Indochina--have truly lost and that will remain forever missing in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, perhaps we can at least recover some of our lost moral and psychological health.

As for the bone fragments recovered the first day, they were taken away by the Americans and sent to the U.S. identification laboratory in Honolulu to determine whether they were remains of "American MIAs." There is no hint in any press report that anyone considered the possibility that they might be the remains of Vietnamese MIAs, such as the husband and son of Nguyen Thi Teo.

Bruce Franklin, M.I.A. or Mythmaking In America, p.170,175

We Remember Their Names

All the while, we wrote poems, we painted, we told stories. Many women who showed great creative promise did not continue. Some were forced to stop. Some went mad. Others died. We know who they were; we remember their names.

Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers, p.94

Clair Patterson

Later in 1953, his main work done, Patterson turned his attention to the nagging question of all that lead in the atmosphere. He was astounded to find that what little was known about the effects of lead on humans was almost invariably wrong or misleading--and not surprisingly, he discovered, since for forty years every study of lead's effects had been funded exclusively by manufacturers of lead additives.

Patterson quickly established that we had a lot of lead in the atmosphere--still do, in fact, since lead never goes away--and that about 90 percent of it appeared to come from automobile exhaust pipes, but he couldn't prove it. What he needed was a way to compare lead levels in the atmosphere now with the levels that existed before 1923, when tetraethyl lead was introduced. It occurred to him that ice cores could provide the answer.

What Patterson found was that before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere, and that since that time its level had climbed steadily and dangerously. He now made it his life's quest to get lead taken out of gasoline. To that end, he became a constant and often vocal critic of the lead industry and its interests.

It would prove to be a hellish campaign. Ethyl was a powerful global corporation with many friends in high places. Patterson suddenly found research funding withdrawn or difficult to acquire. The American Petroleum Institute canceled a research contract with him, as did the United States Public Health Service, a supposedly neutral government institution.

As Patterson increasingly became a liability to his institution, the school trustees were repeatedly pressed by lead industry officials to shut him up or let him go. According to Jamie Lincoln Kitman, writing in The Nation in 2000, Ethyl executives allegedly offered to endow a chair at Caltech "if Patterson was sent packing." Absurdly, he was excluded from a 1971 National Research Council panel appointed to investigate the dangers of atmospheric lead poisoning even though he was by now unquestionably the leading expert on atmospheric lead.

To his great credit, Patterson never wavered or buckled. Eventually his efforts led to the introduction of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and finally to the removal from sale of all leaded gasoline in the United States in 1986. Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 percent. But because lead is forever, those of us alive today have about 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago.

Clair Patterson died in 1995. He didn't win a Nobel Prize for his work. Geologists never do. Nor, more puzzlingly, did he gain any fame or even much attention from half a century of consistent and increasingly selfless achievement. A good case could be made that he was the most influential geologist of the twentieth century. Yet who has ever heard of Clair Patterson?

Bill Bryson, A Short History Of Nearly Everything, pp.157-160
additional source: Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Prometheans in the Lab

Astano

Silent and proper and modest and self-contained, a perfect Senator's daughter: you had to know Astano very well to know how warm-hearted she was and what unexpected thoughts she could think.

Ursula LeGuin, Powers, p.11

Space

Space, let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically challenging distances for any traveling individual. Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona (they must have teenagers, after all), but it does seem unlikely.

Bill Bryson, A Short History Of Nearly Everything, p.27