Sunday, December 12, 2004

Free Speech , a Radical Church, and Community Farms Need Saving

December 11, 2004, I attended “Tour L.A.: Past Forward,” organized by the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, a 40-year old private library located in South Los Angeles that documents social justice movements in this city. Twenty of us tour participants met at 8:45 a.m. by the kiosk in the Plaza south of Olvera Street where people were decorating for the festival for the Virgin of Guadalupe to be held that evening at Our Lady Queen of the Angels Church next door: yellow, rose, and blue paper cut-outs were hung between the trees; vendors were setting up food and craft tables; stage hands were building a stage for music.

First we went to the brown brick Hellman/Quon building to hear historian William Estrada talk about the hidden free speech history of the Plaza. Estrada told us that from 1781 when Los Angeles was founded to 1881 the Plaza was the town’s center: Our Lady Queen of the Angeles Church, located here, was the first and leading church; adobes and then brick residences for the town’s elites stood here; the city’s main shops circled the Plaza. The Spanish officials and pobaldores (colonists) built a zanja madre, mother ditch, from the Los Angeles River down to the pueblo to water their fields. After the Anglo elite shifted the city’s center a few blocks southeast after 1880, the Plaza became the center of the immigrant working people: Mexicans and Italian immigrants lived right west and north in neighborhood called Sonoratown; Chinese immigrants lived directly east in Old Chinatown.

Estrada said that the Plaza and its nearby streets were the center of rallies, meetings, and speechmaking: Sun yat-sen, future leader of China, spoke to 700 Chinese at a nearby restaurant to gain support for the future Chinese Revolution; the Flores-Magon brothers, leaders of the anarchist Partido Liberal Mexicano, held many rallies at the Plaza for a Mexican revolution; the I.W.W., radical trade unionists who led L.A. trade union movement, had their office at 420 Los Angeles Street; anarchist Emma Goldman, Job Harriman who ran for Socialist mayor of Los Angeles, and famed Socialist author Upton Sinclair, all spoke here.

A few minutes later as we walked again through the Plaza I could hear the ghostly voices from 1912 of radical Mexican and Italian immigrants discussing the latest strikes in L.A. A few minutes later at Our Lady Queen of the Angels Church (La Placita) by the mural on the northside we listened to Father Steve Niskanen. During the 1980s Father Oliveres led La Placita into declaring itself the first Catholic Church to be a sanctuary for refugees from the civil wars in Central America; defying the I.N.S.; and making this a church for the poor and homeless.

The Claretian order, which runs the church, transferred Father Oliveres to Bolivia in 1990, ending La Placita’s radicalism, but the Claretians changed their minds by 2002. Two new priests, Father Steve Niskanen and Arnold Abelardo, who arrived in 2002, revived this radical heritage. The two priests redeclared the church as a sanctuary for immigrants; denounced the government’s raids on immigrants; started within the church Centro San Juan Diego del Immigrante (San Juan Diego Immigrant Center) to give legal and medical aid to immigrants; and again are feeding and helping the homeless. Father Niskanen, who is a tall, gangly Anglo, said he came from a conservative background but is changing while being pastor at La Placita.

Leaving Father Niskanen, we boarded the bus to get off at Spring Street, walk a block to Biddy Mason Park just south of the Bradbury Building at 304 South Broadway. If you walk through the Bradbury Building to the gallery at the back on the 1st floor and then go right, you see a pocket park with leafy green camphor and jacaranda trees, benches, and then a wall dedicated to Biddy Mason. Mason, who was a black slave in 1851, walked to Los Angeles with her master’s wagon train.

There, she sued in 1856 for her freedom in court, and was helped by blacks in the tiny black community. She won! Inscriptions on the wall tall the story of this pioneering African-American Angelo: she was a talented midwife, helping to birth hundreds of children. She bought land and had a house right on this spot. At her house she and other blacks held meetings for Los Angeles’s first black church, the African-American Methodist Episcopal Church, which was built a few blocks down, on land she owned and donated to the church.

From Biddy Mason’s Park we walked a few blocks down Spring Street, the old Wall Street of Los Angeles with its stock exchange and leading banks before they moved to Bunker Hill; we arrived at Gallery 727 at 727 South Spring Street to see the photography show “South Central Farmers: Photographs by Don Normark and Don Rogers” (www.gallery727losangeles.com.” At 41st Street and Alameda Avenue in South Los Angeles South Central Farmers for 12 years have created small garden plots in a community gardens. The city of Los Angeles originally condemned this land by eminent domain for the “good the community” to build a huge incinerator opposed by concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, then let 360 farmers create garden plots. After promising that the land would be used for the good of the community, City Hall in a “sweetheart deal” decided gave the land back to its previous owner Ralph Horowitz to build a warehouse, so in December 31, 2003, the South Central Farmers have received their first eviction notice.

They have been fighting for a year including getting a court injunction to keep their farms (www.saveourgarden.com). We see photos of a few of the 350 families who are fighting City Hall and a millionaire real-estate dealer. The photos were stunning, showing these adults and children’s pride in their corn, chayote, cactucs they’ve grown as well as how they pass on food traditions--including building wonderful scacrecrows-- to the next generation. Looking at these photos, I thought of original small farming village of El Pueblo where farmers also laboriously built a long irrigation ditch, the madre zanja, to water their crops and then took pride in their vegetables they grew. Yes, the South Central Farmers who are carrying on this same food and farming two-hundred year old traditions deserve our support. You can fill out their petition at www. pettiononline.com/lagarden/petition html.

Sunday, December 05, 2004

Michael Rochin captures old L.A.

I have read an amazing novel by Michael Jacob Rochin called Cascaron about Californios (Mexicans) in Southern California in the 1850s. Cascaron is the best fictional story I've ever read to recreate the life on the Mexican ranchos of the 1840s and and 1850s which dominated California's coastline. Don Diego Antonio Arboleda owns a huge rancho near Santa Barbara in 1857 in the last years of the ranchos before the whole way of life was destroyed. He sends his nephew Dario, the novel's hero and a foreman on the ranch, on a long journey to L.A. to arrange a deal for Arboleda's cows to help save the rancho. Dario is a wonderful horseman and an even better dancer--the one who gives the girls their first dance at their coming out party.

The whole intricate way of life on the rancho is wonderfully created: the life is full of strong families who lived together on the rancho, who had love of the land, who had a rich dance and music culture. When Dario rides with two retairners to the mission, Rochlin has created a lovely evocation of the beauty of the land of Southern California, the mission where they stop for a meal, and the dangers along the road. The novel for its first 90% creates this amazingly rich life of the ranchos including Dario's love for a daughter of a neibhoring rancho and the festivals at the ranchos which included a bear-and-bull fight. Arriving in L.A. the trio face more dangers in a wild western town of 1857 to finally make the deal to sell the beef and keep the rancho from financial troubles.

This is a tagic novel, as the Southern California ranchos' brief prosperity of 1857-8 which came from selling beef to the miners in Northern California was their last prosperity. By 1864 the Arbeleda family lost a good part of their land to the Anglos and Don Antonio, the patriach, had died. The novel describes how by 1864 with disease and a terrible drought destroying the cattle, most of the large ranchos were were lost by "legal technicalities, tax sales, and foreclosures."

Dario does survive in Santa Barbara until 1908, when Anglo children call him Don Dario but he knows he was never a don like his uncle Don Antonio. The Anglos get Dario, now an eighty-two-year old, to participate in "full folk regalia" and to dance in the festivities celebrating the "Spanish" heritage of Santa Barbara. The novel says, "So what if costumes like this had never bee worn and music like that had never been played ...Don Dari smiled and stared out but he could no longer see.... A woman demanded that Don Dari stomp like the flamencos and a man whooped a war dance like he'd seen ina motion picutre." In the end the wonderful dancer Dario becomes a tragic participant in the Anglos caricaturing the Mexican culture they neither understand nor appreciate.

Michael Rocholin is an archicture and historian of Los Angeles who has written a wonderful series of books about history and architure of this city. In his novel Cascaron he includes maps of 1850s Los Angeles with zanga madre, the mother ditch from the Los Angeles River, as well as other irrigation ditches and vineyards near oldtown. Rochlin has also written Ancient LA, is a spendid essay how the Indian villages are the sites of towns all over Southern California: he digs up a lost past and shows how the influence of this past on the present.

In Rochlin's Arcadian L.A. talks about three powerful women who owned large estates and who were devoted to the natural beauty of the land and the arts--the opposite of the macho land developers who destroyed vast areas of Southern California. Arcadia is the name of a rural paradise in ancient Greece.

The first woman, Anita Baldwin, owned her beautiful estate Anoakia at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains where she bred horses and commissioned prominent California painter Maynard Dixon to do the "Jinks room" murals which are now in the Fisher Gallery at USC. Baldwin's estae was unfortunatley destroyed by developers in 2000. May Rindge and her husband bought all of the Malibu rancho, one of the last Mexican land grants, so they owned all of Malibu; after her husband's death Rindge fought to keep out homesteaders, developers, and the state of California. In order to provide tiles for the her and her daughter's homes, May Rindge brought in the finest craftsmen and established the Malibu Tile Works, one of Southern California's best tile works. Part of the old Rindge estate survies as Malibu Lagoon State Park which includes a musuem showcase of Malibu history including the internationlly famous hand-made Mediterranean-style tiles used in buildings throughout Southern California.

Aline Barnsdall had her estate in the heart of Hollywood where she had Frank Lloyd Wright build her the splendid Hollyhock house and had a short-lived arts colony; Barnsdall donated to the city of Los Angeles this estate which became Barndall Park with a Los Angeles municipal art musuem and arts programs so Barsndall's support of art, architecture, and open space continues in the park named after her. Rochlin shows how three women were all good stewards of the land as well as promoted the arts and how their influence is still with us today. In these books Rochlin tells of the almost lost Los Angeles--of vaqueros and three-day Mexican fiestas, of females who created natural paradises along with arts and theater. Rochlin has proven to be one of the most lyrical and orginal writers in California.


Rochlin's book are published by a small press and are available from them:
Unreinforced Masonry Studio
P.O. Box 33671
Los Angeles Ca 90033

Cascaron
ISBN 0-9648304-5-0

Also try amazon.com



Thursday, November 25, 2004

Native Artists/New Mexico

Last weekend I went to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a few days.

I went to hear Pat Smith at the Zimmerman Library of the University of New Mexico (UNM) do American Indian storytelling. Pat along with her husband John Crawford, my publisher, were my hosts. Pat is part Micmac (Indians who lived in New Brunswick, Canada, and in Maine) as well as part French Canadian and Irish. She had recently published along with Michael B. RunningWolf the book Glos’gap Stories of the Micmac Indians (Persea Books), and told us stories about Glos’gap, a mythical hero of the Algonquin peoples. The stories she told were delightful, particularly the one how Glos’gap tamed a womanizer male Indian.

I also read Pat’s essay “Grandma West to Smith All Right: But She Went from Nine to Five” from Working Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory. Pat’s Micmac grandmother was a maid at Smith College, so Pat was able to go on scholarship for daughters of former employees. After Smith, she got a Ph.D. in English from Yale where she became a scholar of Edgar Allen Poe and then got a job teaching English at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. At the same time she was raising her two small sons.

Not long after arriving she volunteered to teach part-time on the Navajo reservation, commuting hundreds of miles to teach on small towns on the Reservation: Sanostee, Toadlena, Ramah. She said, “I learn enough Navajo to help my students begin to work with Navajo kids writing in Navajo. For three years our students in UNM’s Title VII bilingual teacher-training program graduate with Bachelor’s degrees in Elementary Ed and become luminous teachers.” She begins to include American Indian literatures into American Literature survey courses. A retired American Literature professor complains, "She’s gone native.”

But she thinks she hasn’t gone native but is only trying to teach as well as learn from Native peoples. She directed the Ph.D. dissertation of Laguna Pueblo writer Paula Gunn Allen that Allen later publishes as The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in Native American Tradition. Smith says, “Under Paula’s direction, a number of us pool essays and syllabi for the Modern Language Association’s Teaching Native American Literature: Curriculum and Course Design.” At UNM she teaches a generation of Native and Chicano writers: literary critic James Ruppert; Navajo poet and scholar Luci Tapahonso; part-Apache poet Jimmy Santiago Baca; Maidu poet-scholar Janice Gould . While taking Pat’s class Baca wrote his wonderful book of poetry Martin and Meditations on South Valley (New Directions).

Besides teaching, Pat’s published a book of poetry; criticism; and now non-fiction and fiction. Over the weekend I got to see Pat’s other recent books for young adults about Native Americans: Weetamoo, Heart of the Pocassets (Scholastic Inc) about a Indian teenage girl in 17th century Massachuttes and As Long as the River Flow: The Stories of Nine Native Americans, short biographies of nine prominent Native Americans she wrote in collaboration with Paula Gunn Allen, a major Native American poet, essayist, and anthologist.

The next morning John Crawford and I stopped at the Indian Pueblo Center, learning the history of the Pueblo peoples from being a hunting gathering people thousands of years ago to growing corn as the Indians were the first to use irrigated farming here. For the present day an exhibit showcased the arts and crafts of each of the nineteen Pueblos including Maria Martinez’s stunning black pots. In New Mexico the Catholics put their churches near their already existing pueblos, not like California where the Indians were forcibly removed to the missions. We also saw a short film about the Pueblo woman painter Pablita Velarde who made wonderful paintings of the dances at the pueblos and was a pioneering women artist; we watched her make her own paints out of the New Mexican earth. Since I had come I had been seeing the art work and hearing about the writinng of Indian women--writer Pat Smith, Navajo poet Luci Tapahonso, Laguna poet/critic Paula Gunn Allen, potter Maria Martinez, and painter Pablita Velarde.

Next at the Rio Grande Nature Center I walked the river trail about a mile to the Rio Grande River—muddy, majestic and broad--and stared at the other side of the river with heights crowned with houses. As I continued on the Bosque (forest) trail through the cottonwoods a sunburst of yellow leaves in November. Pat picked me up and pointed out the sand hill cranes in the field a few blocks from her house, making me realize this whole area was a wetlands full of birds. At her own house a large flock of sparrows perched in her front yard. Birds and Native women artists were everywhere.

In New Mexico: poets and cranes

Visiting Albuquerque at the University of New Mexico I went to hear Joy Harjo read poetry. A Creek Indian from Oklahoma, Harjo is one of the great contemporary poets. She had graduated from this campus with a B.A. where she was now reading. She read her famous poem “She Had Some Horses,” which is the title of her breakthrough book (1983). She explained her ex-husband Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz was writing horse songs that inspired her to write her horse song. She stunningly read this poem that described how her narrator had so many kinds of horses with great surrealistic metaphor. She also read a lovely piece about her daughter Rainy Dawn as well as played one of her songs from her work with a band. She has a dazzling original voice combining her Creek background, jazz, and European modernism.

After a short solo walk the next day by the Rio Grande, I went with my hosts Pat Smith and John Crawford as John drove 90 miles south on Highway 25 parallel to the Rio Grande River. On the way we passed South Valley near the Isleta Pueblo where poet Jimmy Santiago Baca lived. In an interview Baca, who identifies as part Indian part-European, talks up going up to the Isletas holy mountain to sit and talk with them but he also tries to combine his Indian background with his experiences growing up in the city. But now we were driving away from the city to Bosque del Apache, a huge national monument of marsh and birds. We saw thousands of white snow geese close together in the water, more thousands of sand hill cranes standing on their spindly little legs, hundreds of ducks, a couple mule deer, a pheasant and a juvenile bald eagle.

At dusk while we were looking at more thousands of cranes in the water ahead of us while hundreds more flew in overhead—it was breathtaking. The cranes flapped their wings hard for a few second and then glided on the wind. For the first time since Bush’s election I was utterly caught up in enchantment of looking at over masses of cranes in front of me in the water and seeing them soar ahead. New Mexico was so much like Los Angeles a hundred years ago, when there were still wetlands covered with birds.

Over breakfast Pat, John and I discussed Willa Cather’s book Death Comes for the Archbishop with Pat arguing that Cather got her history all mixed up in the novel. The archbishop that Cather glorifies is modeled on Bishop Lamy, a French clergymen in the 19th century who was patronizing to the Mexicans and Indians. Cather in her writing attacked Padre Antonio José Martinez, a New Mexican who fought for the poor; started the first seminary in the Southwest to train native clergy; started New Mexico’s first printing press, and was the true hero. Well, the visiting Anglo writer got it wrong.

The next day I took my third walk by the Rio Grande. New Mexico seemed a long thin strip of farms, towns and a city paralleling the river. My hosts lived in North Valley, about three blocks from the river that used to flood over its banks right up to the house, so a drainage ditch was dug behind the house to stop the flooding. As I walked to the river I saw this area had recently been a small Mexican-American farming village with irrigated fields. I walked besides the irrigation ditch, inspecting the metal gates that could either let in or hold the waters. I was only beginning to see how New Mexico's writers and artists were rooted in the land with it grand river, its marshes, irrigated fields, thousands of sand hill cranes, and colored soil used to make paints.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

How the Democrats Can Win

Why do all those working people people in rural America vote for the Repbulicans? Thomas Frank has brilliantly argued in Whatever Happened to Kansas why blue collar people in rural Anmerica stopped voting for the Democrats. During the last 15 years the midde class was getting smashed in many planes in rural America: small family farms were going bankrupt; small towns dependent on these family farms were being deserted; unionized jobs in such industries as meatpacking were being destroyed in Chicago as firms moved to Kansas and Nebraska setting much lower-paid nonunionized plants there. At the same time the Democratic Party unfortunately abandoned economic justice policies to help working people in the mid-1990s.

Since 1993 the Democratic Party has been dominated by right-wing group of the Democratic Leadership Council (D.L.C.) whose leaders are Clinton, Kerry, and Joe Liberman. The D.L.C. has repositioned the Democratic Party so it has abandoned economic justice issues which are very important for my family and millions of others. Thomas Frank said about Clinton, "Whether it was NAFTA, deregulation of various industries, or welfare reform, he basically adopted the Reagan agenda on economic issues." When Clinton signed off on N.A.F.T.A. he lost the House and the Senate to the Republicans in 1993. Did the Democrat Party learn enough from this? No.

Take 2004. Bush handed the Democrats an incredible issue—the high cost of drugs as well as his hypocritical pharmaceutical plan for seniors, which actually shoves billions at insurance companies and drug companies while not lowering prices of the drugs. Kerry proposed no plans for lowering drug prices. The next presidential nominee or Democratic senate candidates for the Democrats could say if president s/ he would have Medicare negotiate for lower drug prices; s/he could have seniors enroll in a government discount plan to cut costs; and s/he could said it was legal to import lower priced drugs from Candada. Well, the Democrats if they would truly fight for lower drug prices could get millions of seniors and others’ votes.

Bush’s dismal record on being the first president since Herbert Hoover losing jobs gave Kerry a great opportunity to pick up millions of votes. Kerry supported N.A.F.T.A. and W.T.O. (rammed through by President Clinton) that cement in an international system of trade laws encouraging outsourcing of U.S. jobs. Labor unions fought incredibly against NAFTA and WTO but lost. Blue collar voters, particulary in the red states like Kansas, often feel abandoned by the Democrats for supporting N.A.F.T.A. and the W.T.O. In the 1990s corporations moved millions of factory jobs overseas but after 2000 they are outsourcing middle class jobs such as information technology. According to Peter Hart, one of the leading researchers who does polls for the Democrats, “polling in battleground states showed that a bit more than half of all voters worry very often about jobs moving overseas (and three-fourths of swing voters say this loss of high-tech and white-collar jobs is a very serious problem). Ohio particularly has lost thousands of jobs; whole communities like Youngstown have been hurt.

Kerry did have a plan to give tax credits to businesses for hiring more jobs. There is no guarantee any jobs, particular middle class jobs, would be created but businesses who would hire minimum wage workers would have benefited. Kerry really offered tax credits to Wal-Mart. Giving tax credits to business to hire is a right-wing Reublican position. Kerry again lost voters in the swing states.

One easy way to generate jobs is for Democratic candidates to propose a government jobs program similar to FDR's W.P.A. program or Carter's C.E.T.A. program both of which had government jobs for the unemployed. They were both successful programs. These programs could be targeted to rural America where unemployment is high, giving rural voters in those red states a reason to vote for the Democrats. Secondly, Democratic candidates could abandon N.A.F.T.A. and the W.T.O., showing blue collar and white collar voters that Democrats are on their side. The debacle for Democrats started when Clinton signed off on N.A.F.T.A. It will send when the Demcoratic Party commits itself to getting rid of N.A.F.T.A.

As for education, I had researched how both federal and state governments had defunded public higher education by 15% from 1980-2005, making it extremely expensive for many families. Since government is giving 15% less money to public universities, they are forced to raise tuition and to get money from private sources. Kerry’s plan was giving tax credits for families for tuition, a dreadful idea when the federal government is deeply in debt. His plan would have not stopped ever increasing costs of college tuition and public universities endlessly searching for private monies. Again, his education plans did nothing for his candidacy. Instead Democratic candidates could have had a simple plan to make higher education more afforable: increase government spending to pubic universities so they cut tuition.

Regarding health care, 70% of Americas are worried about the ever-increasing health care costs. We in the United States already pay $400 billion for a waste, privatized health care system that is the most expensive in the world--$50 billion for profits and $350 billion for bureaucratic red tape of insurance companies et al. Kerry’s health care plan by having federal subsidies for low-income people to enroll them in private insurance companies was also dreadful. According to Steffie Woolhandler and Dr. David Himmelstein, “Kerry’s massive new spending would leave at least 17 million uninsured (by his own estimate) and tens of millions more with inadequate coverage, and stimulate the malignant growth of healthcare costs.” Instead of wasting more money on insurance companies, Democratic candidates should expand Medicare as Medicare is a much more economical program than insurance companies.

The Democratic Party have endorsed programs which in no way try to help rural America whose economy is worse than urban America. Instead they’ve supported policies that caused jobs to flee the country; accepted a for-profit health care system that the most expensive in the world but gives worst care than any industrialized countries; sat idly by while many public universities become out of reach of many working people. At that point many blue collar voters in rural America stopped voting for Democrats. The Republicans with their phony right-wing populism gathers in these voters for Republicans on cultural wedge issues such as anti-gay marriage or anti-abortion.

I would add in a heartless world that right-wing Democrats as well as the Bushes have wrought, the idea of faith is comforting. The emphasis on values for many working people is as result of the bleak economic landscape so many face: if jobs are leaving, college is expensive, health insurance premiums go up and up every year, what one can rely on but faith? In the past 150 years when peoples face economic disaster with no help in sight, they’ve often turned to faith and their local churches/synagogues/mosques for help. The churches often give real help: food, furniture, fellowship etc. If the Democrats don’t fight for economic populism, they cede working people to the Republicans.

Despite all the Republican attacks on Kerry as one of the most liberal senators, he wasn't that liberal at all but on the right-wing of the Democratic Party with a billionaire wife. The Republicans have been using this right-wing populism for decades to paint any Democratic presidential candidate as an elitist, so the Democrats should pick a candidate like F.D.R. with a proven record of fighting for progressive issues when he was governor of New York. And the candidate needs a wife like Elinor Roosevelt who had a record of helping those in need. People voted for F.D.R. because he symbolized change and hope. Kerry did not symbolize any difference. The Democrats again need to find candidates who can symbolize change and hope.

If Democrats want to ever win a national election again they need to fight for cheaper drug prices and government-run health programs because they do the best job; fight for government refunding of higher education; end their support for NAFTA and WTO; and propose a government jobs program that would actually create jobs like F.D.R. and Carter did.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

U.S. health care compared to other countries

According to U.S. Census Bureau, International Database, year 2004, U.S. is #20 in health care compared to other nations. In life expectancy, the U.S. is behind Japan, Swedan, Australia, Finland, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Israel, Austria, Greece, New Zeeland, United Kingdom and Cyprus. The U.S. in life expectancy is tied with Ireland and Denmark and actually ahead of the Czech Republic.

As for infant mortality, the U.S. is #21, behind all the above countries except Israel and Cyprus. Now when this country is behind in infant mortality 20 other countries, it really shows how really bad the health care is in this country. The U.S. is behind Portugal in both life expectancy and infant mortality--but our economy is much bigger. Under the next four years of Bush, I'm afraid these figures will all worsen, as Bush's priorities aren't health care. Under Bush's first terms another million people lost their health insurance. Remember, for this bad health care system Americans pay much more than any other country in the world.

When people say we can't have universal health care system as in any other industrialized country because it would cost too much, one most respond that we in the U.S. are pay more for our privatized health care system than people in Europe and Japan but we get worse health care.


Infant Mortality and Life Expectancy for Selected
Countries, 2004,
U.S. Census Bureau, International Database.

Country Life Expectancy Infant mortality

Japan 81 3.3
Sweden 80.2 2.8

Australia 80.3 4.8

Finland 78.2 4.4

Norway 79.2 3.7

5-Canada 80 4.8

Czech Republic 75.8 4

Italy 79.5 6.1

10-Germany 78.5 4.2

France 79.4 4.3

Spain 79.4 4.5

Israel 79.2 7.2

Norway 79.2 3.7

15Denmark 77.4 4.6

Austria 78.9 4.7

Greece 78.9 5.6

New Zealand 78.5 6

Portugal 77.3 5.1

20-United Kingdom 78.3 5.2

Ireland 77.4 5.5

Cyprus 77.5 7.4
23United States 77.4 6.6


1. Infant deaths per 1,000 live births.
2. Life expectancy at birth, in years, both sexes.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, International Database.


Friday, November 05, 2004

Bush's family values hurt families

When Bush voters were polled after voting, they said again and again they supported Bush because of his strong family values. I find this awfully perplexing because I think Bush’s health policies in particular have caused great suffering to families in this country. My brother has a chronic disease—Parkinsons—and has to pay extraordinary amounts for needed drugs. In the United States we have the highest costing drugs in the world. It harms families to have to pay so much of our incomes for drugs that people need. Further, the Bush administration has made it illegal to bring in lower cost drugs from Canada.

For seniors, the Bush administration did pass a pharmaceutical benefit for seniors which did not lower drug prices for them. The national health service in Canada negotiates with the drug companies and gets lower drug prices, but in Bush’s legislation the law forbade this government from negotiating for lower drug prices. When seniors sign up for the Bush drug plan, they are forced to stay on it for a year but the drug companies can weekly change their drug prices. Most seniors I know refuse to sign up for the plan. They feel it’s not a benefit for them at all but a giveaway of billions for the drug and insurance companies. I think again families are hurt by this Bush legislation.

The Bush administration is totally against a national health plan as in every other industrialized country, and they praise the present privatized health system. We in the United States pay more than any other country for medical care for a lousy health care system. The health of our citizens—measured by life expectancy and infant mortality—is less than any other industrialized country. We’re behind Finland, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, England, Australia, Austria, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Norway, Sweden—yes behind them all. Actually, the United States’ life expectancy is very close to Costa Rica’s but in Costa Rica the average citizen spends $250/year on health care but in the U.S. our average citizen spends $1,500. Even Costa Rica has a better health system than the United States. When even tiny Costa Rica’s health care system is better than the United States, our families are really losing.

According to Dr. David Himmelstein who teaches at Harvard Medical School and is a cofounder of Physicians for a National Health Program, Americans spend less time in hospitals than people in other industrialized countries, visit the doctors less than in Japan and European countries, and get less high technology care than in Japan and European countries.

So if our soaring health care costs aren’t going for health care, what is it going for? Dr. Himmelstein says about “$50 billion a year in profit extracted from the health care system …. In fact, we spend each year about $320 billion or $340 billion on useless bureaucratic work in order to apportion the right to health care according to ability to pay, enforce inequality in care, and enforce the collection of profit by insurance companies, for-profit hospitals, the drug industry ….”

Of course, Bush doesn’t even talk about the 45 million Americans without health insurance. What about their families? I guess their families don’t count.

Personally, I fail to say how paying $400 billion to drug companies, h.m.o.s, and insurance companies helps families. As more and more of our babies die because of inadequate care for mothers and new infants, families are hurt. As more and more seniors can’t afford drugs and die earlier than they would in other countries, families are hurt. As people with chronic diseases are forced to pay ever increasing costs, families are hurt. Bush’s health policies are harming millions of families in this country.

If a U.S. citizen wants to improve their chances of having healthy baby or having their grandparents get good health care, they can always move to Canada or, better yet, France. Frances has a much better health care system than the U.S. It’s citizens live longer. More babies survive. Grandparents live longer. Now France has real family values.

Monday, November 01, 2004

Againt Bush

100,000 Iraq dead; 1,000 American soldiers dead and 8,000 wounded.
Wrong war, wrong place, wrong time. According to 10/31 60 minutes, American soldiers sent into harm's way without armour for their humvees, without night goggles, without enough radios. The Veteran's budget was cut right before the Iraq War started.

Monday, October 25, 2004

The New Berkeley Woman in the 1960s

Jo Freeman has written a remarkable memoir At Berkeley in the ‘60s that is a wonderful ‘60s autobiography and also a fascinating history of a conflicted decade. Jo’s story is new, because the mass media exploitation of “hippie chicks” obscured what was really new about ‘60s young women. She gives us a New College Woman of the 1960s: one who has intellectual and political passions she follows. Freeman is the equal of any ‘60s young man in her devotion to being an agent of social change.

Freeman grew up in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles, raised by her single parent schoolteacher mother, to whom she credits much of her early intellectual and political growth. Her remarkable mother Helen Freeman was an Anglo Southern woman from Alabama who emancipated herself by joining the Women’s Army Corps, settled in Los Angeles to raise her daughter alone, got a M.A. from U.S.C. on the G.I. Bill, and was a fervent Democratic Party volunteer. Helen, a pro-integrationist Southern liberal, took her daughter to Democratic political events for years including the 1960s Democratic convention held in Los Angeles.

Helen also idolized education, encouraging her daughter to do so well in high school that she graduated at fifteen. Helen chose UC Berkeley, the best college she could afford, as the school for her daughter. With Helen’s guidance, Freeman escaped the stifling conformity demanded of Valley Girls where popularity was valued over brains. In part this is a mother-daughter story where the daughter at college slowly escape the influence of her demanding mother to become her own person.

Throughout the book Freeman alternates chapters describing the historical evolution with autobiographical chapters. The historical chapters help set the scene: the 1930s student radical protests, the 1940s red scare that banned all student political activities at UC Berkeley and all campuses nationwide, and then the late 1950s- early 1960s rebirth of the student movement protesting McCarthyism as well as 1950s resurgence of liberal politics of the California Democratic Clubs. Then Freeman tells how as a sixteen-year old freshman in 1961 she explored the smorgasbord of political groups on campus from anti-nuclear to socialist to Young Republican until she chose to join the Young Democrats, still her mother’s daughter.

Freeman reminds us that personal change often happens in tiny steps when she describes how in 1963 as a junior she was influenced by Jacobus ten Broek’s class where she read the classics of free speech—Milton, Mill and Meiklejohn. She has a new identity: “radical civil liberterian.” We forget that the real impetus of the ‘60s was forged in extensive study and debate on civil liberties, civil rights and later the Vietnam War. Freeman tests out her new beliefs by joining SLATE, the main dissident campus group, and with the new campus rule inagurated by UC President Kerr lifting the ban on controversial speakers on campus, she as part of SLATE tested this new freedom by organizing a series of controversial speakers on campus: Communist Miki Lima; black power militant Malcolm X; and Captain Ralph Forbes, an American Nazi Party leader.

Jo’s real break with her mother came like it did in many Democratic families came over the issue of sit-ins. Like many Southerners, her mother had a strong sense of propriety: good people don’t get arrested. As students in the Bay Area began the civil rights sit-ins in 1963, Jo as well as hundreds of others wrestled with their consciences whether or not to sit-in; she reread her political theory and philosophy classics on the issue until she decided she could sit-in. Her mother was apalled. After Jo got arrested twice in civil rights protests, her angry mother cut all financial support, but Jo is now self-supporting at eighteen, working at a minimum wage job for the Democratic Party in Oakland. If you compare Freeman to almost any college girl in American fiction or autobiography from 1900-1960, Freeman is a New College Woman: she has at eighteen assumed the independence of a young man: self-supporting, making her own decisions, determined to finish her degree as well as to make history

The Berkeley Woman as Leader

Freeman argues in her autobiography At Berkeley in the'60s when the whole adult world including her own mother came down hard on the young civil rights protestors in the Bay Area in the early1960s, it helped her and her colleagues bond together as they went through the jails and then the lengthy trials. Jo also does something “good” girls never do: she hitchhikes alone across the country to participate as a foot soldier for the civil rights in a vigil trying to get black Mississipeans a vote at the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City in summer of 1964 and as she travels from Washington to Atlantic City to New York, her new friends in the civil rights movement put her up and feed her along with hundreds of others. How do you forge a leader: by making them go overcome obstacles.

Jo was one of many summer ’64 civil rights foot soldiers who quickly became leaders on campus in the fall of 1964 when the Berkeley administration tried to end the political tables on campus. Jo is no longer like her mother, a volunteer following Democratic Party male leaders, but is now certified leader herself. What’s invaluable about the second half of the book is her description of the crucial Free Speech Movement (F.S.M.) from the point of view of a moderate leader from the Young Democrats.

The F.S.M. was always divided between the radicals (civil rights activists) and the moderates—Young Democrats, Young Republicans, young civil libertarians. Freeman shows in student politics the play of democracy, the fights over tactics, and the short-lived “right” revolt that she led. Further, she points out that the administration by threatening to expel seven students finally pushed the moderates to side with the civil rights radicals to have a sit-in and campus-wide strike. In the photo of the sit-in itself she includes two sit-inners: Don Castelberry of the Young Republicans holds up an American flag as he stands next to Jo, a leader of the Young Democrats, addressing the crowd. What Freeman shows so brilliantly is that moderate Democratic Party youth and even Republican Party youth made the ‘60s possible when they joined the civil rights and anti-war protests.

As Freeman says, the newspapers and other mass media did a terrible job reporting on the events in Berkeley saying that student mobs participate in riots and strike at Berkeley which were Communist led—all was untrue. She points out that UC President Kerr, even though he know the allegations about Communist influence was untrue, still redbaited the students in the papers. Given the blast of negative media, polls said 74% of Californians disapproved of the students in Berkeley, so the state legislature quickly rushed to punish the students with a host of bills and also two investigations, one led by State Senator Hugh Burns.

Burns issued a report slandering the Free Speech Movement saying that it was Communist-controlled and President Kerr was a Commie dupe. The next year after her graduation Freeman went to work in the South to register voters in Alabama and Mississippi where such activist had already been killed; leaflets in Alabama and a Mississippi newspaper cited the Burns report’s slanders as evidence that she was a Communist agitator. Further, the redbaiting against Kerr cost him his job as head of the University of California after Regan was elected governor. Thus Freeman showed that redbaiting slanders continued well into the 1960s still costing a few people their jobs and endangered their lives. As an historian looking back, she says that the early 1960s in Berkeley helped limit the McCarthyism redbaiting allowing democratic space to open up.

I hope she writes a second autobiography describing how she faced segregationists in the Deep South to register blacks and voters and then how she fared during the late 1960s during the Vietnam War and the beginning women’s movement. Freeman was indeed a trailblazer, so I’m interested to find where she went next.

Monday, October 18, 2004

Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather: the musician-novelist friendship

Los Angeles author Lionel Rolfe has written in The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin & Willa Cather a moving biography of his mother Yaltah Menuhin, sister of famed violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and her relationship with novelist Willa Cather. Yaltah like Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny and Mozart’s sister Nannerl showed brilliance as a musician early but was discouraged by family members and always overshadowed by her famous brother. Rolfe looks closely at what it takes for women to overcome the obstacles that family, husbands, and the larger society put in front of them having successful careers.

Rolfe’s mother Yaltah was actively discouraged by her parents Moshe and Marutha who were Russian Jewish emigres to San Francisco where Moshe was superintendant of city’s Hebrew schools. All three of their children-- Yehudi, the oldest; Hephzibah, the middle girl; and Yaltah, the youngest—were musical prodigies. At first the mother had decided the daughters wouldn’t have musical careers, but then mother relented, seeing that Hephzibah could perform well in the secondary role as accompanist on the piano when her brother played his violin. The parents then that Yaltah was too “fragile” to be a touring musician.

If you compare the three Menuhin prodigies with Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, the parallels are striking. The Mendelssohns of Hamburg, Germany, like the Menuhins of San Francisco, California, were an extremely intellectual Jewish family and both mothers were music teachers. Both Fanny Mendelssohn in the 1830s Yaltah Menuhin in the 1930s had family members telling them to give up before they started.

In fact, the Menuhins were on the 20th centuryCalifornia version of a Jewish tradition of producing prodigies going back the shtetls of Eastern Europe. So in many ways this is a western Jewish story. Moshe was a descendant of the Lubavitch Schneersohn dynasty, one of the great Hasidic religious dynasties of Eastern Europe. Rolfe’s descriptions of the Menuhins in Los Gatos, California, in the later 1930s having intrigues over who their three teenager children would be allowed to court and then marry almost sound like the intrigues of a Hassidic or European court, but music was at the center rather than politics or religion.

What’s critical in his mother’s life, Rolfe argues, is her relationship with this independent older woman novelist Willa Cather. Though the two were together only in the last decade of Cather’s life, Rolfe shows this short but intense relationship was important for both. Rolfe retells the fascinated story how his grandparents educated all three children at home, and in New York Cather was the Shakespeare tutor for the three Menuhin children.

Rolfe gives a fascinating argument that the short-lived Cather-Menuhin friendship was inspiring for both Willa and Yalta. He argues that Yaltah was the inspiration for the heroine of the novella Lucy Gayheart, which Willa Cather was writing at the same time she regularly saw the Menuhin. Further, Rolfe argues that Yaltah thought Aunt Willa was the mother that her own mother had never been. Yaltah got from Aunt Willa the image of an independent woman artist, not controlled by her parents or a husband. Yaltah alternated between obeying her dominating parents and rebelling against them. It does seem likely that the rebellion was in part inspired by Aunt Willa. While Yaltah was at first like Nannerl Mozart, Mozart's sister, letting her father choose her first husband in a marriage which lasted only six months, then Yaltah rebelled, chosing as her second husband a man her parents couldn't stand.

Yaltah and FannyMendelssohn were unlike in another way. Fanny Mendelssohn did get the support her husband William Hensel to publish her composition and performed in the weekly family musical salons. In contrast, Yaltah Menuhin, despite lack of support from all her three husbands, performed in public concerts. Though Yaltah Menuhin never had the stellar musical career of her older brother Yehudi, she did perform piano in concerts from aged 30 to 80 in North America, Europe, and England. In Los Angeles during the 1950s where Yaltah lived with her second husband and two sons she regularly took part in the “Evenings on the Roof” series performing the work of many new composers. Again, she was a woman who stood on her own two feet like her Aunt Willa. Rolfe’s book is a moving story of a fascinating Californian Jewish woman who in order to become a musician overcomes numerous obstacles.

Thursday, October 14, 2004

FSM@40 at Bekeley: Our Democracy Movement

What was remarkable about joining the Free Speech Movement in 1964 at UC Berkeley was to leave the silenced repressed atmosphere of my high school years to join the great conversation that innundated the Berkeley campus--from silence to speaking up in a democracy movement. I rejoined the conversation by attending the 40th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley Monday October 4th-Sunday October 10th, 2004, which included a noon rally that attracted 3,000 students; over 15 workshops on different aspects of civil liberties; films, a folk song night, two poetry readings, and a rock concert.

As a seventeen year old freshman I looked up to the older (ninteen and up) civil rights activists having sit-ins in the Bay Area to end job segregation, so it was walking into a old dialogue to listen to the panel “Berkeley and the Black Freedom” October 7. The five speakers all shared their histories in the ‘60s civil rights struggles that gave rise to the FSM: Taman Moncur (Traci Sims), a leader of the Bay Area sit-ins at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel to get blacks jobs in 1963; Mike Miller, the Bay Area organizer during the 1960s for Students for a Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the group who went to Mississippi to challenge the segregationists; Hardy Frye, a SNCC organizer in Sacramento and Mississippi from 1964-1967; and Cassie Lopez, an Anfrican-American civil rights organizer of jobs, education and housing in Detroit. Frye told us the lessons he learned: how to make political coalitions; how to change Mississippi and Alabama politics as well as how to challenge the national Democratic Party; and how to bring these ideas to the rest of the county.

The last speaker, Josie Heinman, a senior now at UC Berkeley and activist with the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration and Immigrant Rights (BAMN), in a powerful speech told the 1960s generation is now sharing the torch with her generation. She related how BAMN helped organize 50,000 students to go to Washington, D.C. April 1, 2004, to demonstrate for affirmative action at the Supreme Court. Concerned that too few students of color are enrolling in UC Berkeley, BAMN is trying to restore affirmative action to UC.

In Thursday evening’s panel “Focus on the FSM: Its Genesis, Meanings and Consequences” Ken Cloke, former chairman of SLATE which was a leading dissident student group at UC Berkley, said he was afraid during the McCarthy ‘50s he would never get a job if he signed a petition, but he like all the others overcame this fear. Jo Freeman, a leader of the Young Democrats in the 1960s at Berkeley, argued that, although FSM clearly came out of the civil rights movements, it’s main accomplishment was helping to end McCarthyism and redbaiting.

Michael Rossman, mainstay of FSM for 40 years, told how “I learned the difference between a ‘mob’ and a ‘public,’’ Rossman said. “We were called a ‘mob’ but we really were the first democracy that we had ever experienced.” Rossman added the UC President Clark Kerr, who saw himself as a liberal, told the newspapers that Communists heavily influenced FSM though he knew it wasn’t true. Kerr’s redbaiting boomeranged, since he gave ammunition to such right-wingers as Ronald Regan who, when elected governor in 1966, quickly fired Kerr for being too soft on the student striving for democracy.

At the noon rally on October 8 3,000, mostly students, on Sproul Plaza sat around a police car. They were reenacting the October, 1964, student capture of the Berkeley police car which had just arrested civil rights activist Jack Weinberg for sitting at an allegedly illegal political table near Sather Gate. Three months later the UC Berkeley faculty voted 8-1 that all we had asked for around the police car should be given to us as our contitutional rights. Now in 2004 speakers spoke from a wooden stage over the police car. Now student body president Misha Leybovich said that “seeing the strength of the ‘60s gives me hope and confidence for my generation…. It’s a fallacy that we’re no longer passionate. It’s a fallacy that we’re no longer active.” He apologized that the Daily Cal, the student newspaper; the administration; and the ASUC were all against FSM in 1964 but was happy that all three groups supported FSM in 2004.

As if to underscore his point, Leybovich introduced UC Berkeley’s new Chancellor Birgeneau who said that while doing civil rights work in South Carolina in 1965 he received his political education from two FSM leaders. He now warned that we need to defend free speech from censorship coming from the left as well as the right and especially guard against attempts at “political correctness.”

It wasn't "political correctness" that the next two young women speakers, Rosha Jones and Hiraa Khan, from campus Berkeley ACLU were concerned about but about government attacks on civil liberties. They said that the students had gotten the ASUC, the student government, to pass a resolution condemning the Patriot Act. This next year students will focus on ending racial profiling, defeating the Patriot Act, and restoring affirmative action.

It felt like being eighteen again for me to sit on the steps in front of Sproul Hall listening to FSM leader Bettina Aptheker remember the love and respect in FSM that has lasted 40 years. Another FSM arrestee, poet Julia Vinograd read her splendid poem “FSM Sit-In” describing how at the sit-in “Nothing went as we planned. I hadn’t planned to be there;/ part of me hasn’t left. "

Yet another FSM arrestee, State Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg told the crowd of students that she had paid nothing for her Berkeley education in 1964 and that “if all eighteen year olds and older registered and voted, you wouldn’t pay tuition either. People are working 24/7 to make you feel powerless and apathetic.” Goldberg condemned as hogwash the 30-year war on state taxes by “the wealthiest people in the world.” As she asked the crowd if they were going to keep out of politics, they screamed back, “No.” She ended her speech with a rousing “Tax the rich” which the crowd applauded.

The next speaker, Howard Dean, like many others during the weeklong events, compared assaults on civil liberties in 2004 from Bush’s Patriot Act with McCarthyism in the 1960s, but he said that the lesson of 40 years ago is that ordinary people can make a difference. In a speech that electrified the crowd, Dean launched into a tirade against Bush and also the national Democratic Party in Washington that didn’t stand up to the radical right. He then asked the members of the crowd to run for office, reminding them that Jackie Goldberg had done that. He was met with cheers. This was a Dean crowd.

A three-person 20-foot tall puppet of the Statute of Libery walked up behind the last two speakers—Tony Serra, a 1962 Boalt Hall graduate and radical lawyer, and Northern California ACLU Executive Director Bill Kearn. As both men added to the chorus of voices condemning the Patriot Act, the tall Statue of Liberty puuppet stood with a hood covering her big puppet’s face and a gag saying “Homeland Security" tied across her mouth;” the gag was untied as Kearny read the Bill of Rights.

Twice during the 1960s I was very moved to hear speakers at rallies as these very same steps to read from the Declaration of Independence. As one 1960s Berkeley student said, we were the kids in junior high school who believed in the U.S. Constitution and thought it would be part of our lives. I was amazed that after Kerr and others redbaited us and slandered our reputation in the mass media, Berkeley in the 1960s has not been seen as the democracy movement it was but as the work of rioters, outside agitators, Communists troublemakers etc etc etc. The lies never die. These lies are tiresome repetitions repeated decade after decade.

In 1964 as I had once organized at the FSM sit-in December 3rd classes on everything from Spanish to civil rights to philosophy; now FSM had three workshops on civil liberties to be held on three different areas of Sproul Steps. For hours during the sit-in students met with T.A. studing history, Spanish, political science. Now I joined the workshop on Internet and civil liberties with Dave del Tortom, who is a cyber cryptologist (maker of secret codes for the Internet) and works with Cryptorights; he told how his group helps human rights group secure privacy in their Internet communications. In the evening I sat in Pauley Ballroom in the Student Union to hear Seymour Hirsch, the reporter who broke the My Lai massacre story in 1969 and had been recently writing a stunning series of articles on Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He spoke to over 800 people revealing that Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfield knew for two months about Abu Ghraib but did nothing, revelations which propelled Hirsch onto the 11:00 Bay Area news.

The next day there was conversation continued through nine more civil liberties workshops in the Student Union from "The Media and Civil Liberties" where stalwarts from Bay Area alternative radio and media dissidents on the Internet shared ideas to "Racial Disparities" where African-American civil rights activist and professor Hardy Frye discussed how after the elections progressive could organize around health to reach a diverse number of people. Then Pakistani-American Samina Faheem of American Muslim Voice talked about how Muslim Americans, totally silenced after 9/11, were beginning to use their free speech.

Before I left I visited the FSM Café in Moffit Library. When I attended Berkeley undergraduates had no library but were second-class citizens of the main library which catered to professors and graduate students. Now Moffit Library was for undergraduates. I looked at the one whole wall on the FSM Cafe covered with photos of thousands of students seated around the police car in 1964. We were the children of Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson. We were the children of Thoreau and Martin Luther King--all had done allegedly illegal acts but were later vindicated. FSM has indeed freed students in the nation from McCarthyism in order to be free citizens enjoying the Bill of Rights on the campus and in the world. I feel exactly as Michael Rossman does in his poem “Remembering the Police Car Siege that Jump Started the FSM”: “I remain a true fool/for the spirit of liberty/exercised in democratic union.”

Friday, September 24, 2004

Who are the Californians? What's their literature?

Literature of California: Native American Beginnings to 1945 edited by Jack Hicks, James D. Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Al Young is a rather awesome anthology of both prose and poetry. It's the first anthology to be fully multi-cultural and put together by editors from different ethnic backgrounds.

Literature of California includes an excerpt from Richard Henry Dana from his book Two Years Before the Mast describing how in 1835 as a Yankee sailor visiting San Diego he spent a few weeks as a beachcomber curing hides in a hut built by the Russians whose ship had just left and manned by Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islanders. I thought about this combination of Russians, Yankees, and Polynesians working together in Mexican California in 1835. Yes, California has always had this diversity from the very beginning so it's about time an anthology finally begins to capture the literature made by its many peoples.

Section I with traditional Native California literature has the most astonishing literature. I'm not particulary interested in debates about whether or not oral literature without a name attached is literature. Of course, it's literature. "The Origins and the Way of the World" section contains creation epics from the Maidu (one long poem and a shorter prose piece); the Yokuts' "Creation of the Mountains"; two Chumash pieces "The Three Worlds" and "The Making of Man;" and a Yuki "Intiation Song" about the making of rocks in California. One of my favorite in the whole book is the Maidu creation epic poem descrbing how Coyote, laying on his belly,

He stretched out the Land with his feet
Pushing it out, little by little,
he stretched it out to where the sun rises--
first he streched it out to there.
Then to the south, and to where the sun sets,
he stretched it out, little by little-
then, to the land beyohnd, to the North Country--

So now we find out what California is so big--Coyote stretched it out. I also loved the Yokuts tale "The Origin of the Mountains" telling how in the beginning the world was all water with a pole standing up holding a lonely hawk and crow. After hawk and crow made the other kingsfisher, eagle, pelican, duck and other birds to keep them company, they "commenced making the mountains." The made the Te-hi-cha-pa Pass and made all the mountains going north-to-south up to Mount Shasta near the Oregon border. So that's how the mountains got made! What's good about this section is that the mulitple tribal voices begin to illustrate for the reader the hundreds of Native California cultures.

Sections III about California literature from 1865-1914 and Section IV from 1914-1945 are both very good. For example, Section III includes the usual Anglo suspects--Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Abmrose Bierce, John Muir, Frank Norris--whose writings put California on the national literary map. The book also includes a good section of women writers: Paiute writer Sarah Winnemuca's description of growing up Paiute; Mexican-American Maria Amapro Ruis de Burton's novel The Squatter and the Don attacking how Anglos stole the Mexican ranchos; Anglo Mary Austin's From the Land of Little Rain, the first voice defending the Southwest deserts; and Edith Maud Eaton (Sui Sin Far) with her story "The Land of the Free" on discrimination against Chinese immigrants.

Of the poetry, again, it was mostly a good selection of what is now canonical late 19th century and early 20th century California poetry: the Anglos in northern California such as Ina Coolbrith, George Sterling, Edwin Markham, and Joaquin Miller as well as from a later period Yvor Winters and Robinson Jeffers. The one surprise was the inclusion of Yone Noguchi, a young Japanese who visited California from 1893-1904, writing in English poetry as well a prose book about his wandering in America The Story of Yone Noguchi. He had a short relationship with an Irish women which produced Isamu Noguchi, the famous sculptor. The elder Noguchi returned to Japan where he became a professor and writer, so the connections between Japanese and California literature go back a century.

This book has one problem which is Section II "One Hundred Years of Exploration and Conquest 1769-1870." The opening section includes a delightful selection "The Queen of California" from 16th century Spanish writer Montalvo's romance novel about a Spanish knight.This excerpt describes an fictional island floating off the west coast of the Americas inhabited by black Amazons ruled by Queen Califa. The Spanish conquistradores must have read the novel before they named the western areas "Baja California" and "Alta California."

Unfortunately, the rest of the section sounds like one after another report from imperial scouts or imperial conquerers or new settlers coming to live in the new parts of the empire--first the Spanish, then French, then Russian, and lastly the Anglo. The scouts or conquerers or new settlers are all writing for the folks back home about life in this new province. Not one selection gives any feelings of the numerous societies already living in Alta Calfornia--Spanish, Mexican, and hundreds of tribal cultures. Not one section gives any sense either of Native American or Mexican resistance to conquest.

The section would be improved with including Pico Pico, the last Mexican governor of California, whose plainly styled narratives tell about his soldiering and his family based in San Diego. Or the book could include a selection about the Indian uprisings in 1775 in San Diego Natives and 1781 by the Yuma on the Colorado River from Padre Palou, the Franciscan who began California history with his Noticias de la California (History of California). The book could includ a differnt section from Mariana Vallejo's five volume History and Personal Memories Relating to Alta California describing the decades both Vallejo's soldier father and he fought California Indians up and down the coast. The false stereotype of California's Indians was they were peaceful people who did not revolt. If one reads the history of Pico or Palou or Vallejo one realizes that California's Indians fought against conquest starting with the San Diego Indian revolt in 1775 to the Modoc War near the Oregon border in 1873. These three writers also gives a sense of a first Spanish and then Mexican society in Alta California: a society permeated by Palou's intense Catholicism; Pico's strong family ties; and Vallejo's military pride.

The book includes two excerpts from missionaries Fray Juan Crespi and Pedro Fages about the setting up of Californias missions but the book should also include letters from Hugo Reid. Hugo Reid was a Scotsman who settled near Los Angeles and married a Tongva Indian woman. After learning his wife's experiences and talking to other Tongva, Reed published in a Los Angeles newspaper in the 1850s a series of letters attacking how the missionaries brutalized the Tongva people at the San Gabriel mission and how the Indians resisted. I'd include Reeds letters XVI-XX. Then I'd retitle Section II "One Hundred Years of Imperial Conquest and Native Resistance." The present day Native American and Chicano poetry and prose have deep roots.

Other than this one lapse, this volume is wonderful. It's the best there is out there on California literature. Read this book. It gives space to the many voices who've made up California for hundreds of years--the voices of the true California. The book is the first to give us our voices, show us who we really are.

Sunday, September 05, 2004

Arabs Invent Algebra!

A long time ago while an undergraduate at UC Berkeley I signed up for a summer school class in Medieval Islamic History with Bernard Lewis, a visiting professor from England. Lewis was considered one of the leading Anglo-American experts on Islam, but I didn't know that. I was nineteen and needed a history elective in summer school and Lewis's class was open. Lewis is generally pro-United States and has been criticized by younger Islamic scholars. He had us read the whole Koran besides history books. I suggest everybody read the whole Koran. I was moved reading this book which is about the same lenght as the New Testament.

What struck me was Lewis talking about the importance of poetry in Islamic society where political poets had important public roles. According to Eric Ceadel in Literatures of the East Arabic poetry goes back to pagan times (before Muhammed) where the poet was the “artist, journalist, propagandist and public relations officer of his tribe” Besides learning that Islamic society has a 1,400 year history of poetry (longer than the literary history of most European nations), I did a paper in college on Muslim science and mathematic discoveries. I learned that Islamic society produced the most important scientific, philosophic and mathematic writers and researchers while Europe was in the Dark Ages.

In fact, Europe had lost most of the Greek classics while Islamic countries had kept copies of these classics in their great libraries. Further, the Islamic caliphs, the head of the huge empire, encouraged the translation of Greek classics on medicine, astronomy, chemistry, logic, mathematics and philosophy into Arabic. Centuries later Arabic and Jewish translators in Spain translated most of the Greek classics from into Arabic into European languages, thus giving these works to Europe. Besides these translations from the Greek, the Muslims translated history and literary books from Persian; Sanskrit books on mathematics, medicine, astronomy and literature; Syriac books on agriculture. Islamic scholars then built on the work of Greeks, Persians, Syrians, and Indians.

According to Najib Ullah’s Islamic Literature from the 8th-12th centuries Islamic astronomers made huge contributions and “introduced new procedures, formulas, calculations, and tables, which …. were the sources of reference for the great astronomers of Europe such as Tycho Brahe, Kelpler, Galileo, and Newton." Ullah also says that algebra is considered to be a Muslim invention. Mohammed ben Musa al_Khwarazami (d. 850) was the author of the first book on algebra. Ullah also says that Muslim mathematicians made innovations in arithmetic, geometry, spheric trigonometry, and introduced the numeric system and the concept of zero.

As for chemistry and physics, Ullah describes that "Al-Hazen's work on optics was the first of its kind ... The Muslims discovered alcohol, sulfuric acid, nitirc acid, royal water, potassium, ammonia salt, silver nitrate, sublimiated corrosives, as well as the method of preperation of mercury... The words alchohol, alembic, alkali, and elixir are Arabic." Islamic researches, furthermore, contributed to the development of medicine, natural sciences, and agriculture. In medicine, for example, Ibn Zohr of Muslim Spain pioneered in the method of scientific observation in medcine, surgery, and pharmacology as well as diagnosing and treating many new diseases.

I’d like to mention one Islamic scientist/philospher Abu Ali Ibn Sinna (Avicenna) who was born in 980 and educated by his scholar father and at the great library of the kings of Bukhara. Avicenna is very much an Islamic Aristotle: he wrote over 100 books on almost all topics of science, philosophy and literature. He wrote the Shifa, a book on logic, physics, mathematics, and astronomy; a work on logic called The Book of Theorems and Warnings; The Sources of Philosophy on physics and theology; several books of poetry in both Arabic and Persian et al. According to Ullah, “He believed in the unlimited power of reason. … He made original studies on questions of time and movement, the divisibility of matter, the conduction of light and heat. etc. His book on medicine The Canon was used in Europe for centuries.His theories of vacuum were utilized by Galileo and Torricelli ….” During the 12th century, Europeans translated over 100 of his books.

So I wrote the paper on Islamic mathematics and science and learned quite a lot how scholars from the Greece, India and, of course, the Islamic world, contriubted to developing mathematics, medicine and science.

I have yet to seen a mainstream media in the United States make one reference to Islam’s history as a leader of science and mathematics as well as producing wonderful poetry. I’ve never yet seen Muslims portrayed in mainstream U.S media as men and women of reason. I'd like to see a TV show on Abu Ali Ibn Sina (Avicenna) as a great man of science, medicine, poetry and phiosophy. I think another good TV show would be on the debt Europe owes to all those Muslim and Jewish translators (many in Muslim Spain) who translated Greek classics into European languages. At that point Christain, Muslim and Jewish scholars worked productively together to enlarge scholarship. I think the mainstream U.S. media give out very stereotypic views of Islamic civilization and needs to change.

Sunday, August 22, 2004

The Return of the Natives in Los Angeles

Seven years ago the island in Alondra Park near Lawndale and Torrance, two Los Angeles’s southern suburbs, was used as a junkyard. Residents would abandon rabbits, roosters, and hamsters they didn’t want on the barren, muddy clay. There were few native plants, a little grass, and a couple of palm and pine trees. In a time of budget cutbacks, LA County had accepted this island as an ugly wasteland.

Once the whole Los Angeles plain was a garden teeming with native plants and animals. Father Juan Crespi, diarist for the first Spanish Sacred Expedition, described in 1769 camping along the Santa Ana River lined with “sycamores, alders, willows, and other trees.” Crespi reported that the land was full of wild antelope. Beside the antelope there were hares, coyotes, deer, and wild goats.

As Crespi moved over the Los Angeles plains, he noted that the plains were covered with grasses; the Indians gave the Spaniard baskets of seeds of sage and other grasses. By the Los Angeles River, the Spaniards walked through thickets of wild grapes and rosebushes in full bloom. Crespi said the “soil is black and loamy, and is capable of producing every kind of grain and fruit which may be planted.” As the Spanish party headed west to the sea, Crespi described a stream lined with herbs and watercress next to a grove of alder trees.

By the early 1990s many native plants have been wiped out or replaced with exotics in Los Angeles; large parts of the city were an ecological wasteland like the island in Alondra Park. The LA Times Times’ article “From Wasteland to Showplace for Native Plants” by Nikki Usher tells how Jeanne Bellemin, a zoology instructor from El Camino College in Torrance, got permission from Los Angeles County officials to replant 1/3 of the island at Alondra Park and encouraged volunteers from her environmental biology and field entomology classes to garden with her. For decades Southern Californian gardeners avoid planting native plants so there have been few urban native gardens, but Bellemin decided to use natives because they are tough, need little water, defend themselves well from attacks by bugs and squirrel. I wonder why this preference for exotic plants. Is it because gardeners compete with each for the showiest gardens? But Bellemin decided for the natives.

In the beginning, Bellemin had problems gets a hose to work properly on the island. During Crespi's time the Santa Ana and Los Angeles Rivers would regulary flood the plains, but now the rivers have been channelized to avoid such floods. A few times Bellamin found that the the poorly working hose flooded out sections of Bellemin’s garden. Another problem is that L.A. County gave her no money, so she spent her own money for seven years, haunting sales for native plants. El Camino College once gave her $5,000 grant while Dow Chemical gave her $700 but mostly she used her own money to buy plants.

For the garden she and her students planted the natives she bought: she chose “white, purple, and black sage, yellow native poppies and flannel bush, with soft fuzzy leaves and 2-inch yellow flowers. There are a wooly blue curl, a plant with purple flowers; California fuchsia; and island snapdragons, native to Catalina island.” The Times reported that the snapdragons have attracted “unusual varieties of hummingbirds and a rare orange-crowned warbler.” The garden has 85 different kinds of plants, 20 species of butterflies and 155 bird species have been seen there. Bellemin has even gotten a crown-beard sunflower, an endangered species, to grow in the garden.

She credits most of the work in creating and maintaining her garden to her El Camino College students, ten of whom work at the garden on Fridays and Saturdays 8-10 hours. Former students return to help out in the garden. For seven years she and her students have been gardening for free for L.A. County. The students do get credit or extra-credit for their work. “I’m trying to teach them that with a little hope and love you can turn something really ugly into something beautiful,” she said. “They’re seeing that what they can do can really make the community more beautiful.”

The Western Society of Naturalists gave her their Naturalist of the Year award while The LA County Department of Parks and Recreation said she was one of their top volunteers in 2004. But the recognition Bellemin gets she gives to her students and the park. Robert van de Hoek, Alondra Park supervisor, has recognized the wonderful work she’s done on the park: “There are so few real urban native gardens in Southern California, and Jeanne has created one worth driving to from far away to visit.

The county is thinking differently now about Alondra Park. In a time of budge cutbacks, they are talking about nature centers. “Who knows if the next nature center will be here,” Van doe Hoek said. There should, of course, be many more parks with gardens of native plants in the Los Angeles plains. Amidst the endless miles of concrete streets, freeways, factories and malls, the native gardens would be the true nature centers, helping bring at least islands of land back to the beauty it once had in 1769 at the time Father Crespi walked through the thickets of wild grapes and rosebushes in bloom, walked on plains well-covered with grasses, and and walked by rivers lined with herbs, watercress and alders.

Friday, August 20, 2004

Is There a Distinctive California Poetry?

It’s amazing that California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks, is the first such historical anthology. The anthology shows how English-language poets struggled from 1850 to today to apply the latest European poetics to talk about a natural landscape and social world in California quite different from Europe’s. California Poetry provides a good history of the state’s English-language poetry and illustrates California’s tradition of well-crafted verse. The book, which ably captures the diversity of California’s English language-poetry of the last 50 years, makes a huge contribution but also leaves out a lot.

What has been left out? In Dana Gioia’s introduction he admits “the editors lacked both the expertise and the space to examine, evaluate, and present the best work from the state’s rich American Indian literatures or the substantial Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and other traditions.” He further argues that only a monolingual volume could accomplish the book’s two purposes: “to establish California’s rightful place in the history of American poetry and to insist on the state’s position as a significant and distinct region in English-language literature.”

Gioia also mentioned California’s historical and geographical uniqueness: the state faces Asia; was formerly owned by Spain and then Mexico; has always been being dominated by huge farms, not small family farms. Yet the anthology neglects to show important poetries--Native American, Asian, Latino/a, working class/political poetry— reflect the state’s geography and history. These marginalized poetries also had histories that were crucial to creating California poetry.

In Section 1 on 19th century poetry, California Poetry rightly includes the significant Anglo poetry: Ina Coolbrith and George Sterling mainly wrote a derivative romantic poetry praising the California landscape while Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller combined frontier populist voices, English poetry forms, and Anglo nationalism. The anthology’s excellent introductions shows how poets in the late 19th century collaborated and helped guide the next generation, but there is a problem with this 19th century poetry. Gioia in an essay in My California astutely comments that British nature poetry “careful developed over centuries from close observation of nature” but English-language poets such as Coolbrith and Sterling didn’t find in California British nightingales, roses, and foxes but meadowlarks, poppies, and coyotes. Gioia feels that these Anglo poets and their descendants have been struggling for 150 years to find the “right images, myths, and characters” for this state’s literature.

After 10,000 years of living in California, the Indians have had thousands of years of closely observing nature, which permeates their literatures. In fact, the ubiquitous coyote is a comic star in Native myths while the meadowlark as well as Coyote sings the world into existence into the Maidu creation epic. Besides writing poetry saturated in the natural world, Native singers created love lyrics, dramatic narratives, mourning songs and vision chants. This poetry emerged out of spiritual visions and is alive with mythic characters. Including this astonishingly brilliant Native traditional poetry would help show how truly distinctive California’s poetry is. Since Malcolm Margolin published The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories and Songs, his book began to make this wonderful literature available to an English-language audience.

Despite the abscence of Native traditional poetry, the anthology does include poems by two famous turn-of-the century prose writers, Ambrose Bierce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Their two poems are Section I’s most delightful surprises. Bierce’s “A Rational Anthem” smartly satirizes turn-of-the century political corruption while Gilman’s “Matriatism” contrasts the violence of men fighting for the “fatherland” with the peacefulness of women struggling to create the “motherland.” Happily, the anthology includes Edwin Markham, the most successful poet from this era, as he decries the exploitation of farmer laborers in his “Man with the Hoe,” a poem published in newspapers worldwide. Markham’s poem as well as Frank Norris’s novel The Octopus began California’s literature of protest against the Octopus—the railroad and large landowners—which dominated the state.

Bierce, Gilman and Markham—all riding the wave of late 19thand early 20th century protest—wrote a new, original California poetry. Yet a few good poems don’t make an original literature in California. There’s really little distinctive about this 19th century California poetry until you add in poems from the California Indian languages and translations from poems written by Californios in Spanish. Then, California becomes a its own poetic region from 1850-1900 with three distinctive poetries: English; Native American languages; and Spanish.

In Section II on the California modernist the editors have happily included equal numbers of men as well as the lesser-know women poets—Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Lewis, Rosalie Moore, and Josephine Miles--and rightly evaluate two of most original voices as Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth. Again the anthology’s excellent introductions to poets in Section II, III, and IV show how modernists in Section II taught, inspired, and encouraged the rebels and traditionalist poets of Section III and IV. This anthology’s introduction to Rexroth states that this poet, the father of the beats and California alternative lifestyles, was a radical and pacifist; loved the natural world of Northern California; and translated poems from the Chinese and Japanese; Gioia calls these translations “relevant sources for a California literary identity.”

Alongside Rexroth’s poetry, this book could have included selections from the Chinese poems of those immigrants who were imprisoned at Angel Island. The poems were published in Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigration on Angel Island, 1910-1940, edited by Mark Lai Him, Genny Lim and Judy Yung. Angel Island poems are the beginning of Chinese-American poetry. During this period Rexroth as well as Pound translated from the Chinese, praising the condensed powerful imagery of Chinese poetry. The Angel Island poems have the condensed powerful imagery as well as emotional power that the early modernists so admired in the Chinese poems they translated.

Also including Japanese-American haiku poets from the concentration camps would have contributed to a developing California poetic identity. In the 1920s and 1930s immigrant Japanese joined haiku-clubs, published in Japanese-language newspapers, and competed for literary prizes. These haiku poets, who continued writing during the war, had their haiku collected and translated in Violet Kazue de Cristoforos’s May Sky—There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku. Cary Nelson has said that among the writers were members of California’s haiku-writing clubs who were writing a free-verse modernist haiku popular in the 1930s. Indeed, the haiku Nelson includes in his Modern American Poetry are stunning in their imagery, restraint, and immense sadness—they are brilliant poems. If the book had included the translations of the Japanese haiku poems from the concentration camps, it could have begun documenting the history of California’s Japanese-American poetry.

In section II and III the anthology has Japanese-American poets after World War II writing fine English-language work: Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, Lawson Inada, and Amy Uyematsu. In the post-war period two other Japanese-American poets who could also have been included are Southern California’s Mitsuye Yamada, who writes a powerful poetry about her own experiences in the camps, and San Franciscan Janice Mirikitani, who writes wonderfully about her many subjects including mother’s camp experience. These two women have been mainstays of their poetry communities for decades.

Part III should be praised for its diverse coverage of the 1940s through 1960s. The book shows the many inter-connections of poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, both beats and their allies. These poets used free verse, were political dissidents, and often went on religious quests exploring Buddhism and Hinduism. These Bay Area rebels included gay voices of Robert Duncan, Thom Gunn, and Jack Spicer as well as Gary Snyder’s imagistic environmental poetry. The anthology has a good selection of the well-crafted poems of the traditionalists, many of who were students of Yvor Winters at Stanford. It also happily includes two working class poets, Charles Bukowski and Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.

Here California Poetry’s falters, showing Bukowski and McDaniel isolated working class poets which they weren’t. That early 20th century protest culture of Bierce, Markham, Gilman also included Wobblies including Gary Snyder’s father; Kenneth Rexroth’s Christian socialist parents; Ferlinghetti’s Italian anarchist parents; and Upton Sinclair, who settled in Los Angeles where he lived the last thirty years of his life. Sinclair inspired a new generation of 1930s radicals and proletarian writers with his novels and his running for governor of California. By the mid-1930s H.L. Mencken was printing the first stories of young proletarian writers from Los Angeles such as Italian-American John Fante who inspired Bukowski more than any other writer on earth.

Tillie Olsen was another one of the young 1930s proletarian writers in San Francisco. I’d also add to any anthology on California poetry Tillie Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” a powerful political poem about exploitation of Southwest seamstresses. In contrast to Olsen, John Beecher was a descendant of the illustrious Beecher family and Harvard-educated, but he dropped out in the 1930s to work for years in factories and with sharecroppers. Both Beecher and Olsen were blacklisted in the 1950s and only emerged later in the 1960s after the blacklist receded—a tragedy that any anthology of California poetry needs to include. In Los Angeles, the poetic circle around Thomas McGrath was particularly hurt when many of the poets were blacklisted, an act which stunted Los Angeles’ poetry for a decade. One 1950s Los Angeles poet in California Poetry, Bert Myers, learned his craft not from “poets at coffeehouses” as the anthology says but from the McGrath circle of poets. The fine anthology Poets from the Non-Existent City edited by Estelle Gersgoren Novak has at long last featured these writers: Tom McGrath, Don Gordon, Naomi Replansky, Edwin Rolfe, Alvaro Cardona-Hines et al.

California’s dissident tradition was huge by the late 1960s and 1970s, producing young poets who began to publish and appreciate Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Also two poets from the working class who really need to be in section four on contemporary poetry are Judy Grahn and Ron Silliman. Grahn was far and away the most important woman poet in California in the 1970s as well as the first important lesbian poet. Her Common Woman series of poems had an electrifying effect across the state. Grahn’s work inspired a whole generation of working class women poets, began a new lesbian poetry, and influenced black poets like Ntozake Shange. The anthology excludes Silliman for leaving California but Silliman is as Californian as any poet in this book. Growing up in Berkeley, his life as well as his poetry is rooted in Bay Area dissident culture and his poetry with its deep social conscience is nourished from these roots.

Though section IV on contemporary poetry includes diverse poetry, the diversity should be broadened further to include important contemporary working class/political poets: San Franciscans Carol Tarlen, Nelly Wong, and Jack Hirschman as well as Southern Californians Fred Voss and Joan Jobe Smith. These poets write an oppositional poetry against the new Octopus of the New Gilded age of the late 20th century. All five poets, totally rooted in a hundred-year old California dissident poetry, have created distinctive voices: Tarlen’s avant-garde visionary take on the working class; Wong’s evocations of the lives of immigrant Chinese; Hirschman’s many translations from European languages and his internationalist poetics; Smith’s brilliant poetry on the sexual politics of work in the sex trade; and Voss, whom British critics have called the best Anglo-American poet of factory work.

Smith and Voss, a married couple from Long Beach, are poetic descendents of Bukowski whom Smith knew. So far, Voss and Smith have been more recognized in Britain than in California while Hirschman has greater recognition in France and Italy than just as Bukowski was first recognized in Germany before any academics in California took him seriously. Further, California working class/political poetry lacks the nostalgia for closed up factories dominating the Midwestern/Eastern poetry of such anthologies as Working Classics.

Starting in the 1970s Hirschman as well as other internationalists did important translations from Latin American poetry, often in collaboration with Latino poets: Alvaro Cardona Hines and Clayton Eschelman each translated Valejo; West End Press while in L.A. put out A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua (1988); Alejandro Murguia and Barbara Pashke edited Volcan: Poems from Central America (City Lights). Volcan had twelve translators, both Latino and Anglo. I translated El Salvadoran refugee poets. Just as Rexroth and Gary Snyder’s translations from Asian literature redefined Californian poetry, these translators of Latin American poetry are helping redefine this state’s poetry whose sources are now Neruda as well as Whitman.

In section IV though there are important Latino/a poets included—Gina Valdes, Gary Soto, Francisco X. Alarcon, Juan Felipe Herrera and Aleida Rodriguez—the anthology lacks any sense of the long historical dialogue among Hispanic poets in the state that Juan Felipe Herrera has called “The Califas Movimiento: 1964-1984.” Herrera distinguishes six parts of this movimiento: San Diego’s indigenous consciousness illustrated by Alurista’s 1971 Floricanto; the tough gritty urban avant garde of Los Angeles Chicano/as such as Marisela Norte, poetry’s ambassador from East L.A.; the Fresno school poets Jose Montoya and Louis Omar Salinas often writing about farm workers; and the San Franciscan internationalism of Juan Felipe Herrera himself, a fine poet and one of the translators in Volcan.

Herrera then mentions the strong Chicana voices such as Lorna de Cervantes and Bernice Zamora as well as the impact of some Chicano poets moving from the barrios into the university. Poets like Gary Soto began teaching in universities alongside the large generation of Chicano/a literary critics and scholars. One of these scholars, Reynaldo Ruiz, recently published Hispanic Poetry in Los Angeles 1850-1900 La Poesía Angelina, so questions can now be asked what continuities exist between 19th century, 20th and 21st/ century Latino/a poets.

Having more of a historical sense of the growth of Latino/a poetry as well as having more contemporary Native poets would both show more of the distinctiveness of Californian literature. Traditional Native American poetries are continued in the work of three wonderful contemporary Native poets: William Oandasan, Yuki; Georgiana Sanchez, Chumash; and Janice Gould, Maidu. All three write brilliantly about being Native Californians. Also the African-American poet Kamau d’Aaood, a major voice from SouthCentral Los Angeles, could be included. In the late 1960s he was a member of the Watts Writer Workshop; he has had for thirty year collaborated with L.A.’s world-class jazz musicians; is a superb poet; and founded the World Stage performance space giving 1990s black poets their stage.

Anyone interested in California literature should read this book. In his last paragraph’s Gioia says that his volume as “an historical anthology, it is only in an incomplete and retrospective sense.” Although the honesty and humility is refreshing, this book is only the first step in a journey. Now the state’s other poetries need to have their histories interwoven into the story. Gioia, Yost and Hicks have made the necessary step of creating the first historical anthology of California poets. They should be applauded for their efforts.






















It’s amazing that California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia, Chryss Yost and Jack Hicks, is the first such historical anthology. The anthology shows how English-language poets struggled from 1850 to today to apply latest European poetics to talk about a natural landscape and social world in California quite different from Europe’s. California Poetry has tremendously contributed to helping a reader understand the history of English-language California poetry and shows California’s tradition of well-crafted verse. The book, ably capturing the diversity of California’s English language-poetry of the last 50 years, makes a huge contribution but also leaves out a lot.

What has been left out? In Dana Gioia’s introduction he admits “the editors lacked both the expertise and the space to examine, evaluate, and present the best work from the state’s rich American Indian literatures or the substantial Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and other traditions.” He further argues that only a monolingual volume could accomplish the book’s two purposes: “to establish California’s rightful place in the history of American poetry and to insist on the state’s position as a significant and distinct region in English-language literature.”

Gioia also mentioned California’s historical and geographical uniqueness: the state faces Asia; was formerly owned by Spain and then Mexico; has always been being dominated by huge farms, not small family farms. Yet the anthology neglects to show important poetries reflecting these geographical and historical conditions--Native American, Asian, Latino/a, working class/political poetry—also had histories that shaped this state’s poetry. These other poetries were crucial in creating the distinctive California poetry.

In Section 1 of the 19th century poetry, California Poetry rightly includes the significant Anglo poetry: Ina Coolbrith and George Sterling mainly wrote a derivative romantic poetry praising the California landscape while Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller combined frontier populist voices, English poetry forms, and Anglo nationalism. Gioia in an essay in My California astutely comments that British nature poetry “careful developed over centuries from close observation of nature” but English-language poets in California such as Coolbrith and Sterling don’t find British nightingales, roses, and foxes but California’s meadowlarks, poppies, and coyotes. Gioia feels that these Anglo poets and their descendants have been struggling for 150 years to find the “right images, myths, and characters” for this state’s literature.

The anthology’s excellent introductions show the continuities in this poetry from 1860 through 1910 and how poets collaborated, helping guide and inspire the next generation. Two famous prose writers, Ambrose Bierce and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, have poems that are Section I’s most delightful surprises. Bierce’s “A Rational Anthem” smartly satirizes turn-of-the century political corruption while Gilman’s “Matriatism” contrasts the violence of men fighting for the “fatherland” with the peacefulness of women struggling to create the “motherland.” Happily, the anthology includes Edwin Markham, the most successful poet from this era, as he decries the exploitation of farmer laborers in his “Man with the Hoe,” a poem published in newspapers worldwide. Markham’s poem as well as Frank Norris’s novel The Octopus began California’s literature of protest against the Octopus—the railroad and large landowners—which dominated the state.

Bierce, Gilman and Markham—all riding the wave of late 19thand early 20th century protest—wrote a new, original California poetry. Yet a few good poems don’t make an original literature in California. There’s really little distinctive about this 19th century California poetry until you add in poems from the California Indian languages and translations from poems written by Californios in Spanish. Then, California becomes a its own historical poetic region from 1850-1900 with three distinctive poetries: English; Native American languages; and Spanish.

After 10,000 years of living in California, the Indians have thousands of years of closely observing nature, which permeates their literatures. In fact, the ubiquitous coyote is a comic star in Native myths while the meadowlark as well as Coyote sings the world into existence into the Maidu creation epic. Besides writing poetry saturated in the natural world, Native singers created love lyrics, dramatic narratives, mourning songs and vision chants. This poetry emerged out of spiritual visions and is alive with mythic characters. Including this astonishingly brilliant Native traditional poetry would help show how truly distinctive California’s poetry is. Since Malcolm Margolin published The Way We Lived: California Indian Reminiscences, Stories and Songs, his book began to make this wonderful literature available to an English-language audience.

In Section II on the California modernist the editors have happily included equal numbers of men as well as the lesser-know women poets—Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Lewis, Rosalie Moore, and Josephine Miles and rightly evaluate two of most original voices as Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth. Again the anthology’s excellent introductions poets in Section II, III, and IV show how modernists in Section II taught, inspired, and encouraged the rebels and traditionalist poets of Section III and IV. This anthology’s introduction to Rexroth states that this poet, the father of the beats and California alternative lifestyles, combined his populist politics as a radical and pacifist; his love for natural world of Northern California; and his translations from the Chinese and Japanese, which Gioia calls “relevant sources for a California literary identity.”

Alongside Rexroth’s poetry, this book could have included selections from the Chinese poems of those immigrants who were imprisoned at Angel Island. The poems were published in Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigration on Angel Island, 1910-1940, edited by Mark Lai Him, Genny Lim and Judy Yung. Angel Island poems are the beginning of Chinese-American poetry. During this period Rexroth as well as Pound translated from the Chinese, praising the condensed powerful imagery of its poetry. The Angel Island poems have the condensed powerful imagery as well as emotional power that the early modernists so admired in the Chinese poems they translated.

Also including Japanese-American haiku poets from the relocation camps would have contributed to a developing California poetic identity. In the 1920s and 1930s immigrant Japanese joined haiku-clubs, published in Japanese-language newspapers, and competed for literary prizes. These haiku poets, who continued writing during the war, had their haiku collected and translated in Violet Kazue de Cristoforos’s May Sky—There Is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku. Cary Nelson has said that among the writers were members of California’s haiku-writing clubs who were writing a free-verse modernist haiku popular in the 1930s. Indeed, the haiku Nelson includes in his Modern American Poetry are stunning in their imagery, restraint, and immense sadness—they are brilliant poems. If the book had included the translations of the Japanese haiku poems from the concentration camps, it could have begun documenting the history of California’s Japanese-American poetry.

In section II and III the anthology has Japanese-American poets after World War II writing fine English-language work: Violet Kazue de Cristoforo, Lawson Inada, and Amy Uyematsu. In the post-war period two other Japanese-American poets who could also have been included are Southern California’s Mitsuye Yamada, who writes a powerful poetry about her own experiences in the camps, and San Franciscan Janice Mirikitani, who writes wonderfully about her many subjects including mother’s camp experience. These two women have been mainstays of their poetry communities for decades.

Part III should be praised for its diverse coverage of the 1940s through 1960s. The book shows the many inter-connections of poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, both beats and their allies who as a group finally did create a distinctive California poetry that was in free verse, dissident, including religious quests in Buddhism and Hinduism. These Bay Area rebels included gay voices of Robert Duncan, Thom Gunn, and Jack Spicer as well as Gary Snyder’s imagistic environmental poetry. The anthology has a good selection of the well-crafted poems of the traditionalists, many of who were students of Yvor Winters at Stanford. It also happily includes two working class poets, Charles Bukowski and Okie poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.

Here California Poetry falters, showing Bukowski and McDaniel as isolated working class poets which they weren’t. That early 20th century protest culture of Bierce, Markham, Gilman also included Upton Sinclair, who settled in Los Angeles where he lived the last thirty years of his life inspiring a new generation of 1930s radicals with his writings and running for governor of California; Wobblies who crisscrossed the West including Gary Snyder’s father; Kenneth Rexroth’s Christian socialist parents; and Ferlinghetti’s Italian anarchist parents. In the 1930s H.L. Mencken was printing the first stories of young proletarian writers from Los Angeles like Italian-American John Fante who inspired Bukowksi more than any other writer on earth.

Tillie Olsen was one of the young 1930s proletarian writers in San Francisco. I’d also add to any anthology on California poetry Tillie Olsen’s “I Want You Women Up North to Know,” a powerful political poem about exploitation of Southwest seamstresses. In contrast to Olsen, John Beecher, was a descendant of the illustrious Beecher family and Harvard-educated, but he dropped out in the 1930s to work for years in factories and with sharecroppers. Both Beecher and Olsen were blacklisted in the 1950s and only emerged later in the 1960s after the blacklist receded—a tragedy that any anthology of California poetry needs to include. In Los Angeles, the circle of radical poets around Thomas McGrath was particularly hurt when many of the poets were blacklisted, an act which stunted Los Angeles’ poetry for a decade. One 1950s Los Angeles poet in California Poetry, Bert Myers, learned his craft not from “poets at coffeehouses” as the anthology says but from the McGrath circle of poets. The fine anthology Poets from the Non-Existent City edited by Estelle Gersgoren Novak has at long last featured these writers: Tom McGrath, Don Gordon, Naomi Replansky, Edwin Rolfe, Alvaro Cardona-Hines et al.

California’s dissident tradition was huge by the late 1960s and 1970s, producing young poets who began to publish and appreciate Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Also two poets from the working class who really need to be in section four on contemporary poetry are Judy Grahn and Ron Silliman. Grahn was far and away the most important women poet in California in the 1970s as well as the first important lesbian poet. Her Common Woman series of poems had an electrifying effect across the state. Grahn’s work inspired many: black poets like Ntozake Shange, a generation of working class women poets, and also a new lesbian poetry. The anthology excludes Silliman for leaving California but Silliman is as Californian as any poet in this book. Growing up in Berkeley, his life as well as his poetry is rooted in Bay Area dissident culture and his poetry with its deep social conscience is nourished from these roots.

Though section IV on contemporary poetry includes diverse poetry, the diversity should be broadened further to include important contemporary working class/political poets: San Franciscans Carol Tarlen, Nelly Wong, and Jack Hirschman as well as Southern Californians Fred Voss and Joan Jobe Smith. These poets write an oppositional poetry against the new Octopus of the New Gilded age of the late 20th century. All five poets, totally rooted in a hundred-year old California dissident poetry, have created distinctive voices: Tarlen’s avant garde visionary take on the working class; Wong’s evocations of the lives of immigrant Chinese; Hirschman’s many translations from European languages and his internationalist poetics; Smith’s brilliant poetry on the sexual politics of work in the sex trade; and Voss, whom British critics have called the best Anglo-American poet of factory work.

Smith and Voss, a married couple from Long Beach, both are poetic descendents of Bukowski whom Smith knew. So far, Voss and Smith have been more recognized in Britain than in California while Hirschman has greater recognition in France and Italy than just as Bukowski was first recognized in Germany before any academics in California took him seriously. Further, California working class/political poetry lacks the nostalgia for closed up factories dominating the Midwestern/Eastern poetry of such anthologies as Working Classics.

Starting in the 1970s Hirschman as well as other internationalists did important translations from Latin American poetry, often in collaboration with Latino poets: Alvaro Cardona Hines and Clayton Eschelman each translated Valejo; West End Press while in L.A. put out A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua (1988); Alejandro Murguia and Barbara Pashke edited Volcan: Poems from Central America (City Lights). Volcan had twelve translators, both Latino and Anglo. I translated El Salvadoran refugee poets. Just as Rexroth and Gary Snyder’s translations from Asian literature redefined Californian poetry, these translators of Latin American poetry are helping redefine this state’s poetry whose sources are now Neruda as well as Whitman.

In section IV though there are important Latino/a poets included in section IV—Gina Valdes, Gary Soto, Francisco X. Alarcon, Juan Felipe Herrera and Aleida Rodriguez—the anthology lacks any sense of the long historical dialogue among Hispanic poets in the state that Juan Felipe Herrera has called “The Califas Movimiento: 1964-1984.” Herrera distinguishes six parts of this movimiento: San Diego’s indigena consciousness illustrated by Alurista’s 1971 Floricanto; the tough gritty urban avant garde of Los Angeles Chicano/as such as Marisela Norte, poetry’s ambassador from East L.A.; the Fresno school poets Jose Montoya and Louis Omar Salinas often writing about farm workers; and the San Franciscan internationalism of Juan Felipe Herrera himself, a fine poet and one of the translators in Volcan.

Herrera then mentions the strong Chicana voices such as Lorna de Cervantes and Bernice Zamora as well as the impact of some Chicano poets moving from the barrios into the university. Poets like Gary Soto began teaching in universities alongside the large generation of Chicano/a literary critics and scholars. One of these scholars, Reynaldo Ruiz, recently published Hispanic Poetry in Los Angeles 1850-1900 La Poesía Angelina (bilingual) so questions can now be asked what continuities exist between 19th century, 20th and 21st/ century Latino/a poets.

Having more of a historical sense of the growth of Latino/a poetry as well as having more contemporary Native poets would both show more of the distinctiveness of Californian literature. Traditional Native American poetries are continued in the work of three wonderful contemporary Native poets: William Oandasan, Yuki; Georgiana Sanchez, Chumash; and Janice Gould, Maidu. All three write brilliantly about being Native Californians. Also the African-American poet Kamau d’Aaood, a major voice from SouthCentral Los Angele, could be included. In the late 1960s he was a member of the Watts Writer Workshop; he has had for thirty year collaborated with L.A.’s world-class jazz musicians; is a superb poet; and founded the World Stage performance space giving 1990s black poets their stage.

Part IV does include a diverse group of contemporary poets, particularly the populist voice prevalent in California’s poetry today as well as given historicized the state’s Anglo mainstream poetry. Anyone interested in California literature should read this book. In his last paragraph’s Gioia says that his volume as “an historical anthology, it is only in an incomplete and retrospective sense.” Although the honesty and humility is refreshing, this book is only the first step in a journey. Now the state’s other poetries need to have their histories interwoven into the story. Gioia, Yost and Hicks have made the necessary step of creating the first historical anthology of California poets. They should be applauded for their efforts.