Blues for Central Avenue

Last night I saw Will Manus's play Blues for Central Avenue, which celebrates Los Angeles's famous Central Avenue after World War II, at Write Act Repertory Theater, 6128 Yucca Ave, Hollywood. During the 1930s and early 1940s Los Angeles was a Jim Crow town, with severe housing segration written into housing convenants all over the city and with blacks confined to the Southcentral ghetto. African-Americans created on Central Avenue the hottest night life in Los Angeles with jazz clubs, restaurants, hotels that regularly hosted Duke Ellington, Count Basie, T-Bone Walker, and Lionel Hampton as well as birthed the next generation of jazz greats like Charlie Mingus. By the late 1930s and 1940s whites including Hollywood elite would go to the Central Avenue clubs just as some whites in 1920s New York went uptown to the Harlem clubs. The most original music out of Los Angeles has for decades come from Southcentral.

The playwright Willard Manus in the notes said he learned about Central Avenue listening to Johnny Otis's radio show in the early 1980s where Otis, himself a wonderful musician, had on his radio program "such Central Avenue stalwarts as artist Cal Bailey, sax player Buddy Collete, trumpeter Dootsie Williams, vocalist Caroline Harlson, and dancer Clarence 'Frenchy' Laundry talk about their experience" on Central Avenue. The play's director Ken Cosby also reminesces in the notes that after he graduated high school in 1989 he jammed with his idol Jimmy Knepper, who had been Charlie Mingus' s trombonist. The notes also has reproduction wonderful paintings by Rich Hyman of musicians playing in Central Avenue. African-American artists in Los Angeles through this play are paying homage to their past and to our past.

The play is not caught up nostalgia for the past but focuses on the crucial turning point for Central Avenue right after World War II. Then black servicemen returned to Central Avenue like the play's hero Lowell Swift, a wounded veteran, returns with the dream of founding a recording company to record new Central Avenue singers. Black woman like the heroine Roberta Youngblood had war jobs making good money but were laid off as she complains to Lowell so the jobs could go to returning veterans. Zoot suits are still in fashion, as the hero has to shed his army clothes for a zoot suit. Roberta enters the singing contest at Club Alabam and wows the audience, leading to Lowell making her first record as these characters rush for their dreams in post-war Los Angeles. Wallace Demaaria acts wonderfully as Lowell Swift showing his charm, his dreams, his persuasiveness, his love for Roberta, and his frustration that his record company has no distribution so he can't pay his singer anything. A Hollywood producer and his entourage come to the club, hear Roberta, and the producer convince her to leave Central Avenue to go uptown to be in the movies, leaving Lowell devasted.

The play's bittersweet climax is when one character rushes in saying the courts outlawed Jim Crow housing convenants allowing blacks for the first time the right to buy or rent any property anywhere in Southern California. The play's characters celebrate this great victory, now having even bigger dreams of going to live in rich white neighborhoods. Yet this moment of triumph is bittersweet as Lowell Swift says in a great monologue to the audience. In Central Avenue and Southcentral blacks had built their own clubs, hotels, restaurants, nightlife, newspapers, and insurance companies, but by 1955 Central Avenue would end as blacks moved out over the city. The whole nightlife scene would vanish. The play celebrates the Last Hurrah for Central Avenue in the last 1940s and early 1950s and illuminates why and how the Black Broadway of Los Angeles ended.

Blues for Central Avenue

Write Act Repertory Theater

6128 Yucca, Hollywood, 323-469-3113

Run through March 7.

The War Economy, the MLA, and My Brother Who Has Parkinson’s

In the late 1970s I was involved in the anti-nuclear movement, wanting to work to reduce military budgets after the Vietnam War was over. I read Seymour Melman who predicted in that huge military budgets of what Melman called The Permanent War Economy would bankrupt the two Superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. Melman predicted that the two Superpowers, putting most of their resources in military hardware, would have declining education and health services until they bankrupted themselves. Few people in the Superpowers were listening to Melman and his small groups of followers in 1980.

In the late 1980s the Soviet Union had declining health for its population, was bankrupt, and finally collapsed, with whole provinces spinning off into independent states. Melman’s prophecies about Superpower #1 going bankrupt was right.

In 1980 the United States began the 1980 Regan military buildup and has had ever increasing military budgets along with declining wages and declining health care. I’ve very concerned with health care since my brother got Parkinson’s in 1998. At that time the United States was at peace; Congress had allocated for the first time $100 million for research in Parkinson’s. Researchers told my brother with five-ten years there would be big breakthroughs in Parkinson’s treatment or even a cure. In 2003 the Iraq War stated. I knew immediately that the money wouldn’t be spent on research and that there would be no big breakthroughs in treatment in this disease.

December 2003 my brother, a dedicated father who lived ½ time with his 10-year old daughter, was given by a Safeway pharmacist a wrong medication, overdosed, and nearly died. First, he went to the hospital in rural California which misdiagnosed him twice. Locals make jokes that you go to this hospital to die. He survived because he was helicoptered 50 miles away to the nearest trauma center.

I flew up to visit him in the hospital, and then went to the MLA convention in San Diego. I am member of the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association, the largest association of professors in languages—English and other languages. Pat Keeton and I were going to present to the MLA Delegates Assembly our Radical Caucus resolution: the MLA should come out against the Iraq War and ask the money spent not on war but instead on health and education.

Before you present a resolution the MLA, you document it. Keeton and I presented 60 pp of documentation showing decline of public spending of higher education from 1980-2003 (13% decline in state spending on higher education; 1% decline in federal spending = 14% in spending). We also showed statistics on U.S. health as measured by infant mortality and how long men and women live comparing the U.S. versus other countries. In 2003 U.S. has worse health statistics than any other industrialized nation . We were about the same in our health statistics as Costa Rica.

I show up at the MLA to help argue for our resolution. The Delegates Assembly, the Congress of the MLA, approves our anti-war resolution. Hurrah. A few months later the Executive Committee of the MLA throws out the resolution. They say our documentation hadn’t proven that the Iraq War spending caused cuts in health and education spending. They said that such a resolution was not sanctioned by the MLA Constitution and was out of bounds.

My brothers out of the rehab hospital, gets out of a board and care and struggles on insufficient funds to take care of himself, but is never able to live again ½ time with his daughter. He gets pneumonia in winter 2007. He goes to the small rural hospital which was unable to diagnose pneumonia and is again saved because he was helicoptered out to the nearest city hospital. He gets pneumonia in summer 2008 and nearly dies. He makes it through both times. In fall 2008 Joseph Stiglitz, Noble Laureate economist, publishes a book The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict saying the spending on the Iraq War is ruining our economy, There have been no breakthroughs in Parkinson’s research—I was right about that. Many Parkinson’s patients die from pneumonia.

Now it’s not just some marginalized peaceniks saying this but a leading U.S. economist. Now 50 million U.S. citizens have no health insurance and another 50 million had such inadequate insurance that they forego getting treatment regularly. That’s 1 in 3 Americans lack health insurance and adequate health care. Most rural health care is pathetic. Melman was right in 1980! Oh yeah, Melman thinks deindustrialization of the United States along with our Permanent War Economy has helped bankrupt our country. Our Permanent War Economy has led the U.S. to bankruptcy and led to suffering from disease of our citizens and our death for many.

Laying Off Teachers/Throwing Away Students

Laying Off Teachers/Throwing Away Students
by Julia Stein

February 18, 2009, 9:40 am

Throughout the fall of 2007 and winter of 2008 I've been hearing stories of teachers being laid off in Orange County, Bay Area, Sacramento, Florida, and of small groups of trade unionists fighting to save teachers jobs. I teach at a junior college, and only now this spring have a small number of classes been cut at my junior college for the first time.

Still I wasn't aware of how many teachers were threatened with losing their jobs nationally until I read Nicholas D. Kristoff's editorial "Our Greatest National Shame" last Sunday, Feburary 15 in the New York Times who quotes a University of Washinton study that "the recession would lead to cuts of 574,000 school jobs without a stimulus." In the stimulus package just passed through Congress was $100 billion toward education, so this stimulus will save some of this 574,000 endangered jobs. Probably not all jobs will be saved. How many teachers jobs will be cut in 2008? I have no idea.

I've been teaching as an adjunct in higher education, and have survived layoffs in my job four times. Since I started teaching in 1990, I was just hired in time to face the layoffs in the recession of the early 1990s where the ESL program in a Southcentral Los Angeles junior college I was teaching in was threatened to be totally cut three times. Three times we instructors and students saved the program. I used these experiences to write a series of poems about teaching during cutbacks and layoffs in my last published book of poetry Walker Woman.

After the book was published, I got a better teaching job and sincerely hoped my period of fearing for my job was over. I didn't want the poems to be prophetic of teacher job cuts in the future. No way.

No such luck. In 2003 California had another budget emergency. Santa Monica College, where I now was teaching, had a president in spring 2003 who wanted to cut 400 teachers, staff, and downsize the college 6,000 students. The president also wanted to end the vocational programs like auto repair, tourism, fire safety for future firemen, or criminology for future policemen through which students got job in Santa Monica. The faculty and staff fought for months to save the jobs and save the vocational programs but we lost.

I was one of the lucky ones who kept my job but I had a friends who were laid off. The faculty and staff both had votes of no confidence in the president where we voted 8 to 1 no confidence. After the cutbacks I had discussions with students who said their friends who wanted to take vocational educational classes which had been cut were sitting at home looking for jobs or waiting until they were old enough to get jobs as policemen or firemen.

About a year and a half later our president voluntarily left and we got a much better president. I noticed that with the better president at my college and more amicable relations between faculty and administration we faculty turned our energy to developing new curriculum including a new class on California literature in our English Department--that's where we should be putting our energy. Again, I hoped never to see such layoffs again.

Nowe we face massive national layoffs of teachers. Yes, the federal stimulus package will help but still many teaching jobs have already be lost and more teachers will lose their jobs in 2008. We should have discussions on how to save teaching jobs. Of course. We should talk to our legislators. Of course.

We should remember the 1930s. Alfred Hayes published a wonderful poem in 1934 "In a Coffee Pot" about the young people who had no future at that time:

The bright boys, where are they now?

Fernando ... the school's big brain

He's a bus boy in the eat-quick joint

At seven per week twelve hours a day.

His eyes are filled with my own pain.

His life like mine is thrown away.

Reading 1930s Literature, Watching 1930s films, Looking at 1930s Photos

If one wanted to look at 1930s culture, a good way to start would be to watch two films:

1. Tim Robbins' The Cradle Will Rock is a fun account of the government's failed attempt to censor Mark Blitzstein's musical- everybody shows up in the film from Diego Rivera to Orson Wells to Rockerfeller

2. John Ford's Grapes of Wrath- Ford was a great American film director and this film is an excellent rendition of the novel.

As for poetry, Carey Nelson's wonderful Anthology of Modern American Poetry included such poets as Genevieve Taggard, Joseph Freeman, Lucia Trent, Sterling A. Brown, Kenneth Fearing, Langston Hughes, John Beecher, Kay boyle, Joseph Kalar, Richard Wright, Edwin Rolfe, Sol Funarof, Tillie Lerner Olsen, and Muriel Rukeyster. To me, the three most important 1930s poets are Langston Hughes, Muirel Rukeyser's US 1 with its great poem "Book of the Dead" about silicosis lung disease among West Virginia miners, and Kenneth Patchen.

Any look at 1930s culture should include photographers such as Dorthea Lange and Walker Evans, especially the photos from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men written by James Agree.

For a good anthology , Paul Lauter's Heath Anthology of American Literature Modern Period 1910-1946 Volume D 6th edition has an excellention selection of poets and fiction. The book has "A Sheaf of Political Poetry in the Modern Period" including Joseph Kalar, Kenneth Fearing, Alfred Hayes, Tillier Lerner Olson, Kay Boyle Langston Hughes, Lola Ridge, Edwin Rolfe and Genevive Taggard. The fiction includes a selection from Michael Gold's Jews Without Money, John Dos Passos' USA, Albert Maltz's short story "The Happiest Man on Earth," and Meridel LeSueur's "Women on the Breadlines," an excerpt from Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, two Richard Wright short stories, and an excerpt from Pietro Di Donato's Christ in Concrete, one of the great works of Italian-American literature. The book also includes the 1930s most popular play Clifford Odet's "Waiting for Left," which was performed all over the country in union halls and community centers. Students can perform it in a classroom in about an hour and a half.

If one was interested in United States women writers of the 1930s, look at Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz's excellent Writing Red: An Anthology of American Women Writers, 1930-1940. The book has three sections: fiction, poetry, and reportage, theory, and analysis. The book argues that the 1930s was a period of great growth for women's writings as women in the 1930s no longer just wrote about domestic issues. The female reporters like their male colleagues covered strikes, wars, revolutions. During the 1930s women made great strides as journalists, covering the world: Josephine Herbst reported from Cuba; Agnes Smedley from China; Tillie Olsen on the San FRancisco general strike; and Elaine Ellis on "Women of the Cotton Fields."

A hard-to-find but wonderful anthology is Jack Salzman's Years of Protest: A Collection of American Writings of the 1930s (1967, Bobbs-Merril Educational Publishers). The book includes a great range of 1930s poets, fiction writers and critics who included social or political issues in their writing in Part I: Alfred Hayes, Erskine Caldwell, Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, James Agree, Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Clifford Odets, Hemingway, Auden and even Ezra pound. Part II titled the "Social Muse" includes argument by left, center, and right literary critics of the 1930s including Michael Gold, Archibeld MacLeish, John Crowe Ransom, James T. Farrel, and Malcolm Crowley. The last section "Blazing Sun" includes 1930s writers who avoided politics such as Henry Miller, Robins Jefferson, William Saroyan, Daniel Fuchs, Nathanel West, William Saroyan, and Henry Roth. Hopefully a publisher should reprint this excellent anthology.

For teaching an Introduction to Literature class, the anthology Understanding Literature edited by Walter Kalaidjian et al has a good selection "Critical Perspectives: A Casebook on Poetry and social Activism Between the Wars" including poets Kenneth Fearing, Langston Hughes, Alfred Hayes, Tillie Olsen, Genevieve Taggard, Edwin Rolfe, Mureil Rukeyser, and Joseph Kalar. The anthology also does a good introduction to postmodernist theories good for freshman students.

Two other films:

1. Scarface (1932) with Paul Muni starring, Howard Hawks direction, and screenplay by Ben Hecht-one of the very best on the 1930s gangster films

2. Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936)- Chaplin's wonderful comedy about the assembly line

Reading 1930s literature and looking at 1930s film can remind ourselves that despire the Great Depresion American fiction writers, poets, playrights, critics, filmmakers, and photgraphers did brilliant innovative work. Life carried on.

Anybody else have any ideas about favorite 1930s writers? films? photogrpahers?

I Was a Writer for the Government!

In 1980 I got a job as a writer on an oral history unit of CETA (Comprehensive Education Training Act). The Federal government during the really bad recession in the 1970s established CETA, which was a revival of the WPA of the 1930s. Both the WPA and CETA gave jobs in a variety of fields and job training including jobs for writers, artists, and performers. In the 1930s WPA was the biggest employer in the United States.

My oral history project was called American Profiles. We were housed in Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley and were part of American Dance Theater, which was a folk dance group in CETA directed by Joyce Aimee. We were supposed to interview senior citizens who had lived a long time in Los Angeles about their lives to gather information about Los Angeles history from 1900-1980. I was told that one could have the job for eighteen months, and the previous writers had done oral histories of Los Angeles seniors downtown and Culver City but not the San Fernando Valley, so we were supposed to find people to interview in the Valley.

Actually, this was a great job. At first we read histories of Los Angeles (though living in L.A. since I was a baby I didn't know Los Angeles had a history!). I read Carey McWilliams great history about the region "Southern California: An Island in the Sun." I read Robert Gottlieb's and Irene Wolt's "Thinking Big," a great history of the Los Angeles Times newspaper, which had dominated Los Angeles for nearly a 100 years. My whole view of my hometown was transformed! The only available histories of the San Fernando Valley were a couple short, superficial books, but I read those too.

In one of these books I saw a photograph of the Neggens family; the caption said that the Neggens were one of the first families to farm in Northridge circa 1910. After Los Angeles city fathers brought the water into Los Angeles first through the San Fernando Valley, the owners of large parcels of Valley property broke down the property into smaller parcels and sold off family farms. In the Neggens photo was a father, mother, and bunch of little kids. I figured one of the little kids was about 6 in 1910 he would be 76 in 1980. I looked in the phone book for Northridge, found a Menton Neggens, called. Yes, he had been a child in the photo. I interviewed him about growing up in a family farm 1910-1930, and then learned about his long career in the LAPD in the Valley.

I interviewed Abe Maymudes who had been an immigrant Jewish radical organizer in Boyle Heights in the 1930s-1940s and then a chicken farmer in Canoga Park in the 1950s. I interviewed Marion and Lucille Johnson whose grandparents, father, and uncle had homesteaded in the 1880s in the Big Tujunga canyon area of northeast Valley and who had grown up on a small farm in Big Tujunga canyon. I interviewed Robert Rowley, who father owned the first store in Sunland in the northeast Valley when Sunland was dirt farmers. I was the only one in my unit interviewing children of the farm families in the Valley. I was the only one I know about who interviewed these farmers in the Valley. By the 1940s developers were buying up the farmers, building suburban tract homes, and destroying all the farm life. I interviewed the last generation who remembered these small family farms which by 1980 had completely vanished.

As we were doing our research, interviews, and editing, President Regan was elected and one of his first acts was to end the CETA program. We were told instead of eighteen months we had been promised we would only have the job for 6 months, and had a month or two to finish up our interviews. I had published parts of my Maymudes interview in the "Big Valley" magazine. We could have published more if our program wasn't ended. Our director and editor made plans for all the oral histories to be housed in California State College Northridge archives and also in the Sunland-Tujunga library. As far as I know they are still there. We were pressed to finish editing down our interviews and our project of three writers, one editor, and a photographer produced a 249 page volume titled "Valley Portraits: The Living Past" which has ll interviews detailing history of all areas of the San Fernando Valley. Our publication was Volume III of our oral histories.

This job gave me a lasting fascination for history of Los Angeles. I kept on learning and read Los Angeles poetry and literature. I hiked through Los Angeles and learned the geology and botany of the area. When I begin teaching at Santa Monica College, I used my background in Southern Californian history to develop new English curriculum. I made out a list of 100 historical sites around Los Angeles and had my students research one site for a research paper as I was teaching the research paper. Some of my students did brilliant original research learning about buildings in their neighborhood for the first time. A couple years ago I was in the library and picked up a new history of San Fernando Valley, a much better history. Low and behold the author quoted my interview with Menton Neggens. I think it was important to interview the people we did and catch their history because they died.

The original WPA writers interview elderly people who had been slaves, and you can still read these interviews in the Library of Congress. Later historians took these WPA interviews and published books on African-American history. We in Los Angeles also interviewed elderly people capturing their history and helping later historians understand the history of Southern California. Without these two programs an important part of the history of the American people would be lost. The WPA Writers/artists Program should be revived as it made invaluable contributions to American culture.

Shuttin' Detroit Down

Heard the song "Shuttin' Detroit Down" by John Rich on the radio while driving yesterday. Rich wrote the first great song of the the economic recession. On the tune the fiddle is really good, the band sounds good, and this is a tune you can dance to. Here's John Rich's web site where you can listen to him sing "Shuttin' Detroit Down."

http://www.johnrich.com/

Here's some of the song:

In the real word they're shuttin' Detroit down.
While the boss man takes his pay and jets out of down
DC's bailing out them bankers while they ground the farmer down.
While they're livng up on Wall Street in NY city town
here in the real world they're shuttin' Detroit down.

Stimulus Plan Needs to Include Writers and Artists

from Institute for Policy Studies website
http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/974

Arts Stimulus Plan

Declaration by John Cavanagh, James Early, Barbara Ehrenreich, E. Ethelbert Miller, Marcus Raskin, Andy Shallal, Melissa Tuckey. Published December 18, 2008 12:00AM

Here’s a detailed call for the stimulus plan to include a program that will support artists and writers.

Programs that paid thousands of artists and writers comprised one of the most creative aspects of the New Deal. Thousands received relatively small outlays of funds for their work, and the nation’s artistic heritage was greatly enhanced. The same kind of initiative is needed today.

Congress needs to recommend that the government spend one percent of the stimulus plan on arts and culture (that would mean $6 billion if the final package is $600 billion), building on the New Deal’s Federal Art Project and the Federal Writers Project. Below, we offer 11 ideas on how the money could be spent. We also support ideas that link different parts of the stimulus package; for example, new murals and sculptures could adorn the new schools that will be built.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was created in 1935 to bring jobs to those who had become unemployed or underemployed during the Great Depression. Since artists and writers were also hit by the economic hard times, two divisions of the WPA were assigned the task of creating suitable jobs for such people — jobs that would not only take advantage of these individuals' talents, but would also serve to enrich America's cultural heritage and embellish public spaces. The grouping of the largest of these programs is collectively known as the “Federal Project Number One.” Included in this collective were the Federal Writers’ Project, the Historical Records Survey, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Art Project. All of these programs were divisions of the Works Progress Administration. Out of the approximately $4.8 billion allocated to the Works Progress Administration, Congress permitted $27 million to fund the Federal Project Number One projects.

The Federal Art Project, along with several other WPA-backed programs, created well over 5,000 jobs for American artists. These artists created over 2,500 murals, over 17,700 sculptures, 108,000 paintings, and 240,000 prints. The project's legacy still lives on, since it supported artists like Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and many other abstract expressionists whose work helped shift the most dynamic center of the art world to shift from its traditional location in Europe to where it now resides, in the largest cities of the United States.

The Federal Writers' Project created over 6,600 jobs for writers, editors, researchers, and many others who exemplified a given level of literary expertise. Established on July 27, 1935 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) operated under journalist and theatrical producer Henry Alsberg, and later John D. Newsome, compiling local histories, oral histories, ethnographies, children's books and other works. These writers created over 1,200 books and pamphlets, and they produced some of the first U.S. guides for states, major cities, and roadways. In addition, the FWP was responsible for recording folklore, oral histories, and, most notably, the 2,300 plus first-person accounts of slavery that now exist as a collection in the Library of Congress. As with the Federal Art Project, the FWP's contributions to American literature were both significant and long-lasting, giving authors like Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, John Steinbeck, Sterling Brown, and many others the opportunity to continue their work in a time of difficult economic circumstances.

Here are some of the ways the funds could be used:

1. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): Increase funding for the NEA and NEH. Increase the staff at both agencies. Maintain many of the new NEA projects started by Dana Gioia, for example: The Big Read and Operation Homecoming.

2. Archives: Support the preservation of literary archives across the country. Many collections need to interface with modern technology; staff needs to be hired at various institutions. We don't want to lose our past.

3. A Secretary-level post for Culture/Arts: We support the idea of Bill Ivey, former NEA Chair under President Bill Clinton, and head of the arts/culture Obama Transition Team for a Secretary level post for Culture/Arts. Indeed, the United States and Germany are the only wealthy nations without a Minister or Secretary of Culture. Ivey’s initiative involves the refocus and revitalization of the extant Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which could be a better interim and/or long-term mechanism for new arts and culture policies.

4. Arts Education: Educational institutions, especially public school systems in low-income and underserved communities, would hire artists and writers. Funds would be made available for artist and writer-in-residence positions.

5. Arts in Public Spaces: Support for the arts in public places; especially parks, metro stations, airports, etc. Every major city and community should have access to concert series and readings in their major parks, especially in times of economic hardship.

6. Workplace: Funds to bring poets and writers into the workplace. Build literacy by enlivening the reading public. Contemporary writers would bring their work to the people. Readings could be held around noon at workplaces.

7. Document history: Document U.S. literary and cultural history on a city, state and national level. This would be similar to the old WPA program. Interview major writers and painters. It could be done by doing a series of films.

8. American Artists Overseas: Money should be set aside to send American artists overseas for three-six month periods, with an emphasis on countries where the United States has been at odds. They would serve as cultural ambassadors and give lectures and performances. They would also collaborate with artists of the host country to produce cultural events.

9. Fellowships/Scholarships awarded to working/low income individuals who wish to enroll in creative writing programs: Many older people wish to return to school to pursue careers in the arts but have no money for tuition.

10. Black colleges: Money should be set aside to develop creative writing programs at historically black colleges. No creative writing program exists at any black college. This would create teaching jobs for many African American authors.

11. Libraries: We should support library infrastructure and provide writer and artist-in-residence programs for our libraries, especially those in low-income communities. Our nation's libraries are public treasures and many have been closed in recent years. Money is needed to keep our libraries open and alive.

Interviews with artists of WPA artists program

Watch "Soul of a People: Raw Selects" which is interviews with two people who worked in the 1930s on the WPA artists program; Studs Turkel and Stetson Kennedy, who along with Zora Neale Hurston collected spirituals

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2HGuIkJing

Republicans cut arts out of stimulus package

>> Republicans With Support Of Feinstein & Feingold Eliminate Funding To Aquariums, zoos, golf courses, swimming pools, community parks, museums, theater, art centers and highway beautification


>>from Americans for the Arts
>> February 6, 2009
>>
>> Breaking News
>> This afternoon the U.S. Senate, during their consideration of the economic recovery bill, approved an egregious amendment offered by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) that stated “None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project.” Unfortunately, the amendment passed by a wide vote margin of 73-24, and surprisingly included support from many high profile Senators including Chuck Schumer of New York, Dianne Feinstein of California, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, and several other Democratic and Republican Senators.
>>
>> If the Coburn amendment language is included in the final conference version of this legislation, many arts groups will be prevented from receiving economic recovery funds from any portion of this specific stimulus bill. It is clear that there is still much work to be done in the Senate and in the media about the role that nonprofit arts organizations and artists play in the nation’s economy and workforce.
>>
>> Plan of Action
>> * Arts advocates need to quickly contact Senators who voted for the Coburn Amendment and express your extreme disappointment with their vote. We need these Senators to know that their vote would detrimentally impact nonprofit arts organizations and the jobs they support in their state. We have crafted a customized message for you to send to your Senators based on their vote on the Coburn Amendment. The correct letter, customized to each of your Senators will appear when you enter your zip code. If your Senator voted for this funding prohibition, you can send them a message expressing your disappointment and ask them to work to delete this language in the final conference bill with the House. If your Senator voted against the Coburn Amendment, you can thank them for their support of the arts.

>> * We need as many news articles as possible this coming week to publish stories about the economic impact of the nonprofit arts industry and how the recession is negatively affecting arts groups across the country. Please click here to customize an opinion editorial to your local media. We have provided you with easy-to-use talking points.

>> * Next week, Americans for the Arts will be sending you another action alert that targets the White House and the soon-to-be-named Senators and Representatives who will serve as conferees to the final economic recovery bill. Please be prepared to take action on this alert as well.

>> * Americans for the Arts itself is submitting op-eds to several national newspapers and online blogs. We are enlisting high profile leaders to co-sign these letters as well.

>> * Americans for the Arts is purchasing full-page ads titled “The Arts = Jobs” in Washington’s top political newspapers in Roll Call, Politico and The Hill on Monday and Tuesday of next week. We encourage you to post the ad on your social network sites.
>>
>>

Inventing the Future

Last night I went Los Angeles Eco Village to hear Chris Carlsson speak about his new book "Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclers, and Vacant lot Gardeners are Inventing the Future." Carlsson has long been a leading figure in the California underground/counter-culture.If you want to know about the California underground check out Carlsson's website and the book:

http://www.processedworld.com/carlsson/nowtopia_web/index.shtml

Carlsson and his merry friends put out in the 1990s an infamous magazine Processed World, which was the voice of San Francisco's unhappy bike messengers, disgruntled financial workers, and subversive computer workers. The magazine proudly called themselves the magazine with the bad attitude. Actually, Processed World, which also put out an anthology, is hilarious as if Charlie Chaplin were running amuck in information processing jobs. I was a fan.

Next, Chris Carlsson and merry friend started Critical Mass, the monthly bike rides in San Francisco where thousands ride en mass; last night he showed us slides on how Critical Masses' bike rides have spread around the world.

As he spoke to a rapt audience, he explained about the bike culture he helped to build with it's huge bike rides and its non-profit bike repair shops. Residents at LA Ecovillage, a large group living in an apartment house near downtown Los Angles, started Bicycle Kitchen which helped people for free make and repair bikes. The Bicycle Kitchen grew so successful it moved into a storefront near Los Angeles City Garden. God knows Los Angeles needs less cars and mass bicycling.

Carlsson told us about the revival of urban gardening happening across the United States as well as the past history of U.S. urban gardening. Los Angeles has had a huge struggle over Southcentral Farms, a large urban garden which was destroyed. Now a film about this struggle called "The Garden" is up for an Academy Award in the documentary section.

What was also fascinating was Carlsson's telling about ground-up science and popular interventions in scientific culture: perma-culture, a grassroots science about biology and agriculture; the 1970s women's health movement which was grassroots women starting clinics and improving women's reproductive health care; and the 1970s anti-nuclear movement which helped stop the building of U.S. nuclear power plants; the free software movement where programmers developed and then gave away free software. He tried to empower the crowd that we all can do science and make our voices known about science and technology that affects our lives.

Carlsson is talking about the non-consumer society and people regaining skills such as gardening, fixing bikes, etc that we once have. Now that the country is in a recession, these ideas are even more important.

James Joyce a Feminist

James Joyce was never a favorite writer of mine. I had to push myself to read all of "Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man," which was assigned in college; Irish Catholicism was totally foreign to me, and I had little understanding of its strength. I was, however, deeply moved by the stories of trapped Irish lives in Joyce's short stories in "Dubliners." I always felt I should read "Ulysses," but could never do it.

Brenda Maddox's 1988 biography of Joyce's wife titled "Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce" really changed my idea of Joyce and informed me about Nora, who was usually called not very intelligent and a bad cook. Maddox basically argues that Joyce was a feminist, was inspired by Nora to write strong portraits of Irishwomen which helped liberate downtrodden women in Ireland.

What I learned from Brenda Maddox's biography of Nora Joyce was how hard Nora and Joyce's lives were. They gave from impoverished families--the grinding poverty of 1900 Ireland-- and both had alcoholic fathers. Joyce did capture that desperate poverty and feelings of being trapped in Ireland in "Dubliners," but he and Nora courageously left the country to start a new life outside. I do admire both of their courage tremendously. Moreover, Nora ran away with him in 1904 and lived with him without marriage until he actually married her in 1931. For an Irishwoman woman to run away with a man and then live without the marriage ceremony was utterly scandalous.

Though living without a marriage license, Maddox shows they had an incredibly strong, loving marriage. Though seen as libertines, Nora and Joyce were always sexually faithful to each other. They simply insisted on choosing their life rather than following traditions they disagreed with.

They had two children. Brenda Maddox convincingly argues that Nora Joyce was the rock on which her family rested. They had tough times. They were terribly poor for years as a young married couple with two small children. Joyce needed many eye operations, but then went blind, and Nora survived cancer. I was horrified by what they suffered and amazed by their stoicism. Their daughter Lucia went mad, which was heartbreaking for both her parents. Her grandson Stephen says that Nora "was a rock. I would venture to say that he [Joyce] could have done it it, written not one of her books without her." Maddox convincingly shows that Nora was strong and Joyce was totally dependent on her strength.

Maddox says that Marxist scholars argues that in Finnegan's Wake 'Joyce wrests English from its colonial past ... by investing his own language" out of English. He took the language of the colonialists and transformed it. Also, Joyce was inspired by his wife Nora's voice to create powerful woman's voices in "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake." In fact, Joyce barely knew Ireland outside of his hometown Dublin, so he learned about Ireland from Nora who was from Galway in the west, that part of Ireland where Gaelic customs were least stamped out by the English.

Maddox says that Nora is the Irish woman--feisty, original, humorous, strong, sexy--who inspired all Joyce's female characters, and influenced all of Irish literature and society: "That Joyce should raise Nora to the status of his personal goddess is not surprising. That the ordinary is extraordinary is the meaning of Joyce. Nora was ordinary. That is to say, she accepted life, with its madness, drunkenness, poverty; it music, it comedy, and its sexual imperatives."

Maddox quotes critic Colin McCabe, ""if young Joyce was to antipathetic to the national ideology... it was not so much to the specific claims of Gaelic .. but to their service of a notion of Irish purity ... to be more specific, the pure Irish woman ... '" Other writers like Yeats created ideologies of Irish nationalism that helped them gain independence, but "Joyce related the repression of women to male brutality in [Finnegan's] Wake." Ireland both has repressed its women and had a violent past.

Maddox argues that given the repression of women in Ireland, "Nora ... was more than Joyce's Ireland; she was Irish Woman as he thought she should be. Just as 'Finnegans Wake' creates on the page an Irish national that history has never allowed to exist. Nora combined a mixture of Irishness with female libido, two qualities that Irish society still strives to keep apart. Joyce chose her to be his companion .. because she embodied the idea of the headstrong Celtic woman who trusts her intuition and her passions ...." Maddox is convincing that on the surface Joyce never tackled politics, but his exalting ordinary people and his creation of literature about an Ireland that he wished to see with religious freedom and equality between the sexes is quite political. Maddox has written a book that revises how we look at Nora Joyce, James Joyce, and his writing.

Nadeem Aslam is like a James Joyce in 2004

Nadeem Aslem’s 2004 novel "Maps for Lost Lovers" is an extraordinarily book. Aslam, a Pakistani English writer, is similar to Joyce in his amazing use of the English language, his obsession with exile, and his concerns with lovers suffering from society’s repression.

Aslam was born in Pakistan, but moved to England when he was 14 because his father, who was a Communist, a poet, and a film director, had to flee President Zia’s regime which was torturing dissidents. Exile is one of the great themes for Aslam exiled from Pakistan as it was from Joyce who self-exiled himself from Ireland. In the novel the Pakistani immigrants call their English town Dashte-e-Tanhaii the Wilderness of Solitude or the Desert of Loneliness to symbolize their exile from Pakistan. They give all streets in their English town Pakistani names. Despite white racists, they create their own rich culture in England.

The novelist interweaves the stories of the immigrants' lives in Dashte-e-Tanhaii with their past lives in Pakistan as he recreates a new fictional universe of Pakistan England. No main characters are whites. In fact, some of the main characters hardly speak to whites at all. Just as Joyce was the first to capture the city Dublin and Dubliners in English fiction, Aslam recreates brick by brick the Pakistani English world in fiction including traumas of the past such as the riveting scene where the main character’s grandfather was a victim of British brutal attack to put down a rebellion in English India.

The novel’s hero and heroine are a mismatched married couple: the secular, cosmopolitan former-poet former Communist Shamas is married to the pious Muslim Kaukab. Though the novelist clearly sides with the husband Shams, he brilliantly brings alive the wife who is the greatest character in the novel. Since her three children have rebelled against her, she deeply suffers their absence. Though husband and wife love each other, they have been at odds ideologically for so long their marriage is more a war zone than a haven. While Shamas has had a good education and works as a social worker, his wife barely speaks English and spends her life isolated within home. Kaukab is a some ways a tragic character.

The novel interweaves the stories of four pairs of lost lovers into their story of the alienated husband and wife. Kaukab like the other pious Muslims constantly try to arrange marriages for her children, but the younger generation rebel against arranged marriage to fall in love with taboo partners. Falling for the wrong person is a tragedy as old as Romeo and Juliet but Aslam manages to make the tragedy current.

Shamas's brother Jugnu and his lover Chanda were living unmarried in Dashte-e-Tanhaii in England. Chanda’s parents married her off to a new immigrant who disappeared, so she is unable to get divorced according to Muslim law. Now Jugni and Chanda have disappeared. After their disappearance some said Chanda’s brothers killed them in an honor killing while others say the two lovers will return. The novel is part detective tale as the story of what happens to the lost lovers slowly unravels. The second pair of lost lovers is Kiran, a Sikh, who years ago in England fell in love with a Muslim Pakistani. His family split up the two lovers but they yearn for each other for decades.

A third story of lost lovers interweaved in the novel is a Hindu boy and Muslim girl in Dashte-e-Tanhaii. The girl’s family attempts to break them up, calling the girl posessed. The final pair of lost lovers is the book’s hero Shamas who has long been married to Kaukab but who falls in love with Suraya who disappears.


Just like Joyce imported Irish sensibility into the English language, Aslam has imported a Pakistani sensibility into English. The novelist has said, “I wanted every chapter of Maps for Lost Lovers to be like a Persian miniature. In these miniatures, a small piece of paper … holds an immense wealth of beauty, color and detail. Trees have leaves each perfectly rendered. Flowers are moments old and the tilework of the palaces and mosques is lovingly detailed. That was the aim in Maps...” Sentence by sentence he recreated Persian miniatures of astonishing loveliness celebrating the lighting, the butterflies, the lakeside near where his characters live—celebrating the whole natural universe. The novelists celebrates Urdu poets, Persian minatures, dissidents, Pakistani traditional foods, women using henna. Just like Joyce gave his Irish an immensenly rich inner life, so does Aslam for his Pakistani characters. Aslam is in love with being Pakistani only as those who have suffered exile can love their missing country.


This novel tells a spell binding tale of what happens to all the lost lovers. By the end we know how families have been destroyed and reunited. Lovers are killed but love reaches beyond their deaths. Just as Joyce brought alive the rich life of Dubliners into English fiction, Aslam has recreated with subtlety, compassion and brilliance in English the world of Pakistani immigrants. The novel is heartbreaking, dazzling, and original.

We Sudy California

I’m going to Berkeley today for the meeting of the California Studies Association based in Berkeley:

http://californiastudiesassociation.berkeley.edu/

I am a board member. We study California and have an annual conference In April trying to connect academics who study California, politicians, community activists, writers and artists. Last year the conference was called “Changing Climates: Class, Culture, and Politics in an Era of Global Warming.” I did a panel on new California fiction, and my panelists were novelist/poet Owen Hill taking about his detective novel The Chandler Apartments set in Berkley dealing with conflict between bohemians and dot.com yuppies; poet/playwright Judy Juanita reading poetry and discussing her plays; and novelist/journalist Rip Rense discuss his second novel The Oaks about a boy growing up in the 1960s in a brand new superb of Los Angeles trying his survive his hostile stepmother and alcoholic father.

This year the conference is will be at De Anza College in Cupertino, Silicon Valley, on Friday April 24: “an attempt to orient the vision of the Silicon Valley away from the entrepreneurial, boosterist narrative, and toward the history and culture of the political economy and its communities.” For the conference I read many novels written about Silicon Valley discovering yes, indeed, this area has a fascinating new literature. Some of the writers I discovered are novelist/journalist Po Bronson whose novels I reviewed her; journalist/short story writer Pauline Borsook, who wrote a wonderful non-fiction critique of Silicon Valley culture Cyberselfish; and novelist Pat Dillons’s The Last Big Thing, a wonderful satire on the dotcom bubble.

CSA also has frequent free dinner/talks in Berkeley where authors about California books talk along with free dinner. I’ll post the information soon for the next dinner/talk.

Janis Ian Tells All

Janis Ian became famous at fifteen years old in 1966 when her song "Society's Child" about an interracial love affair became an international hit. Her new autobiography "Society's Child" is a fascinating tale about her decades long struggle both with her personal demons and against her record companies. Her early success led to extreme personal turmoil and to her record company exploiting her; her story makes the reader look at the dark underside of how the American music industry works.

Ian is very frank about her childhood made up of equal parts personal trauma and musical riches. Her father was first a poor farmer and then a struggling left-wing Jewish high school music teacher who lost job after job when the FBI spoke to his bosses. Further, as a young adolescent she was molested by her family dentist. She grew up feeling a cultural outsider and a sexual victim, speaking about these traumas to no one.

Yet her family gave her a rich musical upbringing. Her father had started teaching her piano when she asked him to at age two and a half. Her doting parents encouraged both her reading and her music. Her parents sent her her to left-wing music camps where leading folk musicians such as Pete Seeger, Richie Havens, and Bernice Reagon were roving music counselors. Ian got exposure and connections in her early performances in the folk music clubs in Greenwich Village, but she rejected folk musicians' distrust of the big recording industry and pushed early for mainstream pop music success and fame like her idol Bob Dylan had.

She did enjoy parts of her meteoric early success such as befriending her music idols, but her life fell apart fast. Her parents fragile marriage couldn't deal with their daughter's success: she made more in a month they did by working all year. Her father charged her mother with infidelity and divorced her, soon fleeing across country. Ian felt angry at her mother, deserted by her father, and without any family, coping with the pressures of her record company to immediately produce a new album and tour tour tour. She never questioned why even though her first album was a hit she wound up owing her recording company $100,000. Instead of questioning, she crashed, got pneumonia, and had a nervous breakdown--at this point she looked like her friends Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix who lived hard and died young. Instead Ian fled music to work seriously with a therapist in Philadelphia. Her therapist helped Ian for the first time get in touch with her feelings which helped her song writing tremendously, but she was broke and a music has-been at 21. She was still alive.

During her twenties Ian repeated the whole cycle again: years of working writing songs and touring for spare change; signing with a major label and putting out albums which got her an Grammy award; touring relentlessly; her personal life exploding; and then the crash at 32. Again and again she chose to fall in love with people who leeched off her and then deserted her or attacked her. Like other young musicians from Elvis to Kurt Cobain big success seemed toxic to Ian.

Also, since Ian was 15 she had let her manager, lawyer, and tour agents make all her career decisions, so in her 30s she was stuck in a horrid contract she hated producing an album an year for seven years with a grueling tour schedule thrown in. She then walked out of her CBS contract. Since she was 15 she had let her accountant totally handle her money; when she was in her thirties the IRS went after back taxes her accountant hadn't paid; also she found out he had been stealing from her. She wound up alone, divorced, and totally broke as the IRS took a million dollars from her. Ian lays out why a famous musician could also wind up really miserable and broke.

What's remarkable is that Ian is a survivor. She moved to Nashville, got a new therapist, restarted her career and met a new woman with whom she had an adult, stable relationship. In her forties she began to seriously ponder how she had always lusted for fame and had always followed the "established pattern; manager, major label, make a record, tour behind it." Following this pattern had let to her physical and mental crashes. In 2002 most of the music industry was bemoaning how downloading songs on the Internet was hurting them, but Ian wrote an article "The Internet Debacle" saying that musicians needed the Internet to promote themselves and that the industry angered customers by charging high prices for albums they made cheaply. Many in the recording industry attacked her for this critique.

In a second article she suggested a new business model of "downloadable music, video clips, links to artists websites .... " A year later Apple was beginning to do as she suggested. She started her own record label "Rude Girl," produced her own albums, managed herself, and was for the first time she felt getting fairly paid for her recordings. She had put into practice her idea about being a musician in charge of her life and without a major record label. She found living better.

Rather than crashing until she died, Ian found a way to live with herself and with her music. Her book looks squarely at current debates in the music industry, arguing that the old way of operating was horrendously costly to musicians and fans alike so new ways would be better.

"The Exception": a Danish novel about genocide, women, and the office

Danish writer Christian Jungersen's 2nd novel "The Exception" was a bestseller in Europe and won a major Danish literary prize. Published in English in 2007, the novel uses a thriller format to investigagte the psychology of evil among Danes.

The novel focuses on four women who work for the Danish Center for Information on Genocide (DCIG), an archive of material about genocide open to the public. The four women all think of themselves as good people--human rights workers, people who care.
Danes have always prided themselves that during World War II, they were the exception to the rest of Europe who handed over their Jews to the Nazis as the Danes were the only country to save their Jews on principal.

The four women in the office think they carry on the Danish tradition of goodness. Malene, the program manager, helped her best friend Iben get the job as head of public information at DCIG; both are attractive university graduates in the late twenties. Camila, the secretary, and Anne-Lise, the librarian, are in their forties, married, with children. All four feel lucky to have their good jobs at DCIG because many university graduates have no jobs. Yet Malene, Iben, and Camilla have been harassing Anne-Lise, the newest one, for some time in the office. Malene seems to be the ringleader, taking away part of the librarian's job after the previous librarian quit and still continues to do part of the librarian's job after Anne-Lise is hired.

In the beginning of the novel three of the women get death threats, and they think Mirko Zigic, a Serbian war criminal on the loose somewhere in Europe, is the culprit as Malene and Iben have articles on the Internet condemning Zigic. The police soon loose interest in the case, so the women are left alone with their fears. Paul, the head of DCIG, is often absent trying to make sure his small center isn't swallowed up by a larger government institute so rumors of layoffs swirl around the office. Malene, Iben, and Camilla would rather not think about the war criminal sending them email death threats, so they decide Anne-Lise, who has begun to express anger over her harassment, has sent the emails. The office becomes divided into warring factions; paranoia increases. The women do outrageous acts--spy on each other, spread untrue rumours, try to get Anne-Lise fired.

Jungersen tells the story alternating the voices of the four women so one is first appaled by the woman's behavior and then one sees her viewpoint. Each woman has her vulnerabilities. Malene is battling with rheumatoid arthritis, is afraid her boyfriend will leave her, and is afraid of layoffs. Iben was recently kidnapped in Africa and acted heroically rescuing the other kidnap victims but has post-traumatic stress and is extremely paranoid. Camilla was bullied terribly as a child and is hiding the fact she had a war criminal Serbian ex-boyfriend. She will do anything not to be bullied including bullying another person. Anne-Lise is terrified if she loses her librarian job in the bad economy she'll never get another librarian job in Denmark.

At the same time Iben, the intellectual center of the book, is publishing articles about the psychology of evil in genocide which are reprinted in the novel, but the office women never see the obvious parallels between their behavior and the behavior of those who commit war crimes. Iben writes about the book "Ordinary Men" by American professor Christopher Browning which argues that German soldiers participated in genocide not in obedience to authority but out of loyalty to peers--peer pressure. Yes, office politics, particularly in economic recession, can get vicious, but does it have the same psychological elements as genocide?

At one point Iben steals Anne-Lise's CD, which is a diary of her suffering at the office. After reading the diary, Iben for the first time sympathizes with Anne-Lise; in the office next when Malene starts the harassment of Anne-Lise, Malene turns to her best friend Iben for support. Iben knows she no longer participate, but breaking ranks would meaning losing Malene, her best friend who got her the job. Iben breaks ranks, supports Anne-Lise. Malene starts screaming at her. Iben has proved to be the exception.

The novel is not over. The novelist increases the tension as the women learn about Camilla's war criminal ex-boyfriend. Is he the one sending emails? Will Camilla now be the odd one out at the office? "The Exception" is a gripping novel that interrogates in tough times who will do evil acts? Who will be the exception?

"Lady of the Snakes"--a novel of the modern American woman

Rachel Pastan's 2008 novel "Lady of the Snakes" has its heroine Jane Levitsky, a contemporary American woman who is trying to start a career as a literary researcher and university professor, raise a young child, and having a loving marriage. In the novel trying to be a professor, mother and wife at the same time is difficult, very difficult.

The heroine finds herself pulled apart from the multiple stresses of being mother, wife, and professor. Levitsky founds herself pregnant in graduate school on the East Coast but her woman thesis adviser is not sympathetic to her pregnancy. After the baby is born the heroine struggles with working at her dissertation while always lacking sleep. Her family is far away in California so they can't help her take care of the baby. The problems worsen at her first job teaching at the University of Wisconsin.

Pastan brilliantly describes the multiple stresses on young mother-new college instructor. She can't afford any household held but a babysitter. One babysitter quits without any notice. It's hard to find a daycare center the heroine likes. Her department is unsympathetic to her childcare crises, and one professor tells her its "unprofessional" to talk it. Taking caring of her child, her husband, and her new teaching job leaves the heroine no time to do research for the book she needs to keep her job. She constantly has to put aside her research to take care of child, her husband, and her students. Her marriage starts to fall apart.

The novel is also brings alive the heroine's fascination with her research about 19th century Russian novelist Grigory Kharvov and his wife Masha. The heroine wants to write a new view of the ignored wife Masha, wants time to delve into Masha's dairies, wants to see if Masha had literary talent. The novelist interwines the stories of two couples: the 19th century Russian novelist and wife Masha with the 21st century American academic Jane and her husband. The young professor Jane Levitsky clashes with the male dominant professor Sigleman who thinks only the male Russian novelist is important not his wife. The novel brings alive the clash of ideas in literary research and even the ruthlessness in making careers and putting down your rivals. Can the heroine stand up to ruthless people like the male professor Sigleman to question theories and ideas she disagrees with?

"Lady of the Snakes" is a good novel that compares with A.S. Byatt's novel "Possession," a brilliant work about two late 20th century English academics--a man and a woman--researching a famous male poet and woman poet in 19th century England. In both "Lady of the Snakes" and "Posession" the modern heroine is searching for literary foremothers to give her courage.

Byatt magically brings alive both the 19th century and the 20th century couples. Unfortunately, Pastan only brings alive the 21st century wife and husband but the 19th century Russian couple don't come alive but seem like stereotyped egocentric male novelist and submissive devoted suffering wife. Only in the end does the 19th century wife and husband come alive as the stories of both couples become resolved. "Lady of the Snakes' might have some flaws but it's still excellent in its portrayal of the problems and struggles of a contemporary American woman.

Poem into Song into Rap into Video

I’m teaching an introduction to literature using the book Literature An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry and Drama by x.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. Chapter 17 Song had poems which were also songs. On a whim I decided to look up these poems/songs from the literature book on youtube, and to my surprise I found multiple videos for all of them.”

Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory” about a rich man who seemed to had everything but shot himself at poem’s end is quite famous. The poem was rewritten by Paul Simon into a song which Simon and Garfunkle sang popularizing it. On youtube I watched a 1966 video of a young Simon and Garfunkle singing “Richard Cory.” On youtube video list the second video of “Richard Cory” by Nora Rodriguez called “my first music video” was even more fascinating. Rodriguez had Simon and Garfunkle singing “Richard Cory” while they had actors act out the poem—quite a wonderful musical recreation of a poem and a song.

For Shakespeare’s poem/song “O Mistress Mine” from his play Twelfth Night the first youtube video was Ben Kingsley singing the poem/song from the 1996 movie version of the play. The Kingsley clip is quite wonderful starting out with him singing, then showing other characters in the play, and then back to Kingsley. There were many other youtube videos of “O Mistress Mine” to watch, of course.

Dudley Randall wrote a powerful “Ballad of Birmingham” about the tragic bombing of a church in Birmingham killing four black children during the civil rights movement. The first amazing video of the poem song accompanying a music video “Slavery and Civil War” with the singing accompanied by powerful photos and illustrations of slavery and civil war. Tennessee State University produced the second brilliant music video which has two wonderful singers singing the poem along with a montage of photos and film from the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The vocals are song by Santayana Harris and Kameka Woods, both of whom have amazing voices.

W. H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues” is Auden’s version of a blues. The movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral” helped make Auden’s blues famous, and you can on youtube see the section of the movie where a character at a funeral recites the poem. But even better is “Funeral Blues” W.H. Auden Tribute where a wonderful female singer sings the poem cabaret style more like Auden wrote it. Also someone did a music video of "Funeral Blues" read to photos of actor Heath Ledger as a tribute to him.

The literature book has an excerpt from rapper Run D.M.C ‘s “Pied Piper.” Of course, youtube has a video of Run D.M.C. doing the whole rap “Pied Piper” which has many literary references to fairy tales and nursery rhymes--it's really good. Yes, rap is poetry, popular poetry just like traditional folk ballads like Barbara Allen.

I gave my students a homework assignment to see the youtube videos and they seemed to like seeing poems as songs on videos. I learned something from this as I hoped they did.

Master poet of Iraq: Saadi Youssef

Saadi Youssef has been for decades just not just one of the most important Iraqi poets but also one of the most important poets writing in Arabia. His 2002 collection "Without an alphabet, Without a Face," translated from Arabic into English by Khaled Mattawa, is an moving, heart rendering book.

Youssef was born near Basra, Iraq, in 1934. His life has been one of forced expulsions and exiles. When young he became sympathetic to socialism, and after an unauthorized trip to a Moscow youth conference in 1957, he was forced to leave Iraq for Kuwait. After the 1958 Iraq revolution, he returned to him homeland, but was jailed and then left for Algeria.

He turned to Iraq again, but with Saddam Hussein's coming to power in 1979, he left the country. In 1982 he was living in Beirut writing for Palestinian publications when the Israels bombarded Beirut so he left with the Palestinian fighters. In mid-1980s he was living in socialist South Yemen, working in publishing, when the civil war started. After his home was bombed he was forced to leave. In France after 1991 he helped organize an Iraqi expatriates club in Paris, but after the French police asked him to be an informant, he left. Youssef is similar to left poets such as Neruda who was forced to flee Chile and Nazim Hikmet, Turkey's great poet who spent time in jail and years in exile.

Youssef is an 3rd generation modernist in Arabic poetry. He's influenced by poet Al-Sayyab's modernist poetics mixing love lyrics with political discourse in the same poem. Both Al-Sayyib and Youssef are also committed to free verse and experimentation. His translator Mattawa has said that Arab critics "have noted that Youssef prefers whispering to declaiming." The first poem in Youssef's collection "Night in Hamdan" describes a poor provincial village the poet lives in with "tuberculosis and date palms" but the poet whispers to his beloved, "you, in whose eyes I behold spring/ how can a friend forget you?"

His poem "In Those Days" describes his Iraqi imprisonment dwith the guards' beatings and the judge's derision but the poet never loses hope: "When we were thrown in the imprisonment that has yet to end, I vowed: 'This heart's yearning will not end.'" Nothing--not decades of exiles of expulsions--has ever diminished his hope. Youssef is a great poet of hope. The poems from his "Beirut" book are amazing accounts of living under Israeli bombardment. In the poem "A Raid" from "Daily Chores" the poet describes

The room shivers
from distant explosions
The curtains shiver.
Then the heart shivers.
Why are you in the midst of all this shivering?

Even under bombardment, he still attends to his heart; the poet is not declaiming but is listening to his heart's shiverying.

Youssef, who translated Walt Whitman into Arabic, is most famous for his poem "America America" written after Gulf War I but seems to be written for Gulf War II. In this poem the poet quotes blues and loves jazz, Mark Twain, Mississippi steamboats, and American fields of wheat and proposes exchanges between himself and America:

Take James Bond's golden pistol
and give us Marilyn Monroe's giggle
...................................
Take the Afghani mujahadeen beard
and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussein
and give us Abraham Lincoln
or give us no one.

The poet wants these peaceful exchanges, not war, not soldiers. The tragedy is we didn't send to Iraq Whitman and Marilyn Monroe's giggle and Lincoln but instead we sent to Iraq bombers, tanks and 100,000 soldiers.

Going Green in 2008 and Saving Money

In spring of 2008 I stopped using plastic bags because I learned that millions of our plastic bags are in the Pacific Ocean killing birds and fish. In the spring at Santa Monica College I heard Marcus Eriksen read from his book "My River Home: A Journey from the Gulf War to the Gulf of Mexico" about taking a raft he made of soda pop bottles down the whole length of the Mississippi. Eriksen worked for Algalita Marine Research Foundation in Long Beach, California, which does research on plastic bags in the Pacific Ocean. In late spring he and his colleague took Junk, a raft they made out of plastic, and sailed it from California to Hawaii doing research all the while on plastics in the ocean.

I decided if Erikesen could sail the raft across the Pacific I'd quit using plastic bags. Whenever I went grocery shopping, I trained myself in a new habit of bringing my cloth bags to haul my groceries home. A lot of community groups gave out free cloth bags so I have quite a collection. I also bought organic cloth bags for $30 to bag fruits and vegetables rather than using the small plastic grocery store bags. I don't have all these plastic or paper bags cluttering up my drawers or needing to be recylcled, so cloth bags are definitely more convenient.

Also, I started composting in my mother's backyard. I took a class in composting that the L.A. Parks and Recreating holds at its Griffith Park composting facility:

http://www.laparks.org/dos/camps/facility/griffithPkCompost.htm

After the class I bought one of the low-cost big green composting bins they had for sale. Learning how to compost was very easy, and I got two households to compost: mine and my mother's. Actually it was amazing to watch how the compost reduced itself. Keeping up the compost doesn't take much time--just add more fruits, vegetables, leaves, lawn clippings and water. One needn't take a class. In a half hour Internet research one can find out how to compost. By composting, getting rid of the plastic bags, and recycling all paper, metal, and plastic in the blue bins, I've reduced my trash for landfill quite a lot.

Also in 2008 I helped plant three trees. I donated money to Treepeople to plant a tree as a memorial for two friends who had died: my mother's old friend Delores Smith and our family friend Dr. Saul Niedorf. I find it comforting that out there in Southern California there is the Delores Smith tree and also the Dr. Saul Niedorf tree growing.Treepeople, who have planted one million trees in the Los Angeles area, can be found online at

www.treepeople.org

I also got a free tree from the Los Angeles Conservation Corps which was planted in the parkway in front of my mother's house and I've ordered another tree from them for the parkway. In Los Angeles people can get free trees from either Los Angeles Conservation Corps or LA DWP as part of Mayor Villaraigosa's initiative to plant a million trees My mother's garden already has a fig tree, an orange tree, a tangerine tree, and a lemon tree, and we've ordered a fuji apple tree. I've also had bougainvillea planted around my mother's back window to shield the house from the sun.

In the spring my brother and I planted our first vegetable garden in my mother's backyard. I figured if I want to green the earth I'd start by learning about our backyard soil, so did a test to see how quickly the soil absorbs water and also put store-bought compst to improve it before we planted We used Pat Welsh's excellent book "Southern California Gardening: A Month-by-Month Guide" as our bible. We planted corn, beans, tomatoes, carrots, watermelon, strawberries, radishes, and herbs--basil, sage, parsley, rosemary. I used the basil to make pesto, the carrots to make carrot cake, and we enjoyed eating the corn. We didn't plant in the fall but I want to resume planting as soon as possible. Though a few things didn't work out--the watermelon, for instance or the zuchinni--but we learned a lot and are proud of our first vegetable and herb garden. I had to learn how to dry and store our rosemary and sage.

Lastly, when my mother's water heater broke, I got her a tankless water heater which saves energy and water. The tankless water heater does cost more than the gas water heater, but over the long run it will reduce electricity and water bills so the cost between the two water heaters will be the same. My mother's washing machine also quit, so I got a Energy star washing machine and a $200 rebate from L.A. DWP. We got a rebate for the tankless water heater also. I've been trying to buy all paper products which are recycled as well as non-toxic cleaners such as Bon Ami cleanser and Trader Jo's cedarwood and sage multi-purpose cleaner. By careful shopping at stores like Trader Jo and Vons one can find non-toxic cleansers and paper that are about the same in price as the standard cleansers and paper goods or only a bit more.

I've also enjoyed the whole process of going green this year, especially the gardening. I love to cook, and love to go to the garden, clip off rosemary or sage or tomatoes or lemons from the lemon tree--nothing could be finer. I'm sorry we let the garden go fallow in the fall but hope we'll have a bigger, better garden using our own compost. In the end I think I saved money through all these measures. Now my brother I am are planning our garden so we'll soon do a winter planting but we live in L.A. and crops grow year round!

Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante

Lily Tuck has written the first biography of Elsa Morante, post-World War II Italian novelist. Within Italy critics consider her one of post-war Italy's best novelists but outside Italy she is mostly know as the wife of novelist Alberto Moravio. Tuck does a superb change in rescuing Morante from oblivion for English-speaking audiences and recreating her central role in the explosion of Italian literature starting in 1945.

Morante had a difficult childhood. Her legal father was impotent and scorned by her mother; her mother had a long affair with a handsome rascal who fathered her four children but abandoned his offspring. At 18 Morante left home in the 1930s to support herself tutoring and struggling to write in great poverty--an act of great courage at time for a young Italian woman. Tuck shows had courage, dedication to writing, and honesty were three main aspects of Morante's character.

By 1941 she had married Moravio, who already was an established writer. Because Morante and Moravio were both half-Jewish, their lives in Rome grew more precarious toward the end of the war until the Fascist police wanted to arrest Moravio, so both fled into hiding, first with friends in Rome and then in a small mountain village south of Rome. One of the most moving part of the biography is Tuck's description of Moravio and Morante's harsh nine-month exile up in the mountains in a one-room peasant hut close to starvation waiting for the Allies to arrive.

With the liberation of Rome, Morante and her husband returned to Rome, beginning to publish novels, establishing themselves as the de Beauvior/Sarte of post-War Italian literature. They were friends with many of Italy's leading writers and filmmakers in that amazing cultural explosion directly after the war. Tuck's book wonderfully recreates the glories of this cultural explosion in Rome of the 1940s and 1950s--la dolce vita. But la dolce vita had a harsh side for Morante. Even as her novels won literary prizes, her marriage with Moravio broke up, she had a painful love affair with the filmmaker Visconti who preferred men, and her close friendship with filmmaker/poet Pasolini eventually broke up.

Tuck also gives much insight into Morante's writing, showing how she was part of the modernistic revolution in Italian literature against realism. Her writing was influenced by surrealism, Freud, the violence of World War II, and her close friendships with two leading homosexual artists. In her writing she explores the toxic effects of obsessive loves within families, homosexuality, and the horrible violence of World War II on the Italian poor. The last theme dominated her most famous novel, "History: A Novel," which showed the impact of World War II brutality in destroying a poor mother and son living in Rome. Morante is an Italian equivalent of Simone de Beauvoir or Virginia Woolf as a courageous woman writing exploring major themes of the 20th century, and Tuck's biography is excellent.