Tomorrow May Day, May 1, I'm going to two protests. From 8:30-9:30 a.m. I'm going to picket with my union, Faculty Association at Santa Monica College, for a wage increase (we haven't had a raise in 3 years) and a contract. My union has been negotiating for months with the administration and still no raise and no contract. Since we've had inflation for the last three years, without a wage increase our real wages have gone down. I think it's time for us to have a raise.

Then at 4:00 I'm going to meet up with, march, and photograph the immigrant march. There are two marches for immigrant rights in Los Angeles:

1. 12:00 noon- Broadway/Olympic- march north to City Hall- sponsored by March 25 coalition
2. 3:00- Wilshire and Alvarado- marching down west to LaBrea tar pits- sponsored by MIWON and others. MIWON is an alliance of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of L.A. (CHIRLA), Garment Worker Center (GWC), Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de Californi (IDEPSCA), Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates (KIWA), and the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern CA (PWC)

Of course, I want to make a statement against HR4437, which I think is the most horrible bill I've ever seen in my lifetime.

Also, Santa Monica College faculty aren't the only working people to see our wages decline: wages have declined in the United States. In the United States we have the greatest income equality today in any time in the last 70 years. You'd have to go back to 1930s to see such income inequality. What has caused this growing inequality in the U.S.?

A number of factors. According to Michael Lind writing in Harpers, " corporate elites continue to use the imperatives of global free trade as a means of driving down American wages and nullifying the social contract implicit in both the New Deal and the Great Society. U.S. corporations now lead the world in the race to low-wage countries with cheap and politically repressed labor forces." Second, Lind says that elites in the United States have shifted the taxes from the extremely wealthy to the working people. Thirdly, wealthy elites have cut spending on services including police, education, and health care.

Mexicans have also suffered greatly from global free-trade. In Mexico, wages have gone down 25% in the last 11 years. Then elites in both countries pit desperate Mexicans who have their jobs destroyed in Mexico against whites and blacks in the United States who have seen jobs destroyed, taxes raise, and living conditions deterioating.

We've had 25 years of Reagonomics, and all it has done is destroyed parts of the middle class and destroyed most of the high-paying union jobs in the United States. Enough is enough. I think that the immigrant marches are for everyone who wants to stop the decline of wages and living conditions in North America.

As wages and living conditions decline, the right-wing offers up the immigrants as scapegoats, blaming them for the decline. That's a lie. The right-wing assault on immigrants is scapegoating them for the failed right-wing economic policies dominating the United States and Mexico for the past two decades. Impoverished immigrants did not make global trade policy to drive down wages. These immigrants didn't vote to shift the tax burden onto working people. These immigrants didn't vote to defund higher education over 10% in the last twenty years.

Rather than causing any decline in wages, Mexican immigrants in paticular have suffered mightily as NAFTA encouraged U.S. huge agri-business to drive over 2,000,000 Mexican small farmers out of business and U.S. retail giants like Wal-Mart destroyed the toy, candy, and other industries in Mexico. I think we should all march May Day to say we're against scapegoating. If right-wing is allowed to scapegoat 1 group, then all people are endangered.

If we are ever to raise wages in U.S. and Mexico, we need to get both governments to stop making it nearly impossible to form unions, which when organized help raise wages of all people in that industry. We need to radically change NAFTA so it has a social contract. If you want a raise, then find someway tomorrow to show solidarity to the immigrant marches.

End NAFTA: Solve the Immigration Problem

The whole debate over immigration in the United States has ignored NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which is the crux of the problem. After NAFTA was signed between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, the treaty starting in 1995 allowed U.S. huge agricultural corporations to to dump their corn and beans into Mexico, bankrupting 2 million small Mexican farmers who were driven off the land. Many remaining small farmers in Mexico are nearly destitute. Tens of thousands of these farmers immigrated north to the U.S..

NAFTA also allowed Wal-Mart to sell in Mexico low-price goods made in China, destroying most of the Mexican shoe, toy and candy firms . Roger Bybee and Carolyn Winter said, "An estimated 28,000 small and medium-sized Mexican business have been eliminated." After NAFTA, wages in Mexico have fallen 25%. Bybee and Winter say, "NAFTA essentially annexed Mexico as a low-wage industrial suburb of the US and opened Mexican markets to heavily-subsidized U.S. agribusinesses, blowing away local producers."

Before NAFTA there were 2 million Mexican undocumented in the United States, but after NAFTA passed in 1995, 8 million more Mexicans migrated North. NAFTA was sold as designed to improve the Mexican economy but it has done the opposite: driven down Mexican wages. Also U.S. corporations opened low-wage factories (maquiladoras) along the border which pollute heavily. So Mexicans suffer not just the low wages but also the pollution, horrible housing such as as card board shacks, lack of sanitation seen in open sewers. Further, Mexican government lacks resources for improving services, hiring enough police, erecting streetlights.

There is an alternative to NAFTA and all its ill effects: the European Union and its "social charter." When European countries joined in a free-trade zone similar to NAFTA, they did it totally differently. They insisted on adopting a "social charter" that demanded decent wages, heath care, and investment in all countries. Bybee and Winter said, "Before then-impoverished nations like Spain, Greece and Portugal were admitted, they received massive EU investments in roads, health care, clean water, and education. ... The underlying concept: the entire reason for trade is to provide impoved lives across borders, not to exploit the cheapest labor and weakest environmental rules." EU countries also invested in Ireland, another impoverished country, improved its highway system. This improved highway system helped ignite the Irish economic boom of the 1990s, which drew back to Ireland many exiles.

Bybee and Winter argue that the huge immigration from Mexico to the U.S. is a symptom of the problem caused by NAFTA. The only way to deal with it is to change NAFTA to a social charter like the European Union's. If we don't, the situation will worsen with the Central Amerian Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with five Central American countries, which will do to Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador et. what NAFTA did to Mexico.

Of course, HR 4437 should be voted down. A guest worker program should be eliminated from the Senate bill. A social contract should be added to NAFTA.

The U.S. should start immediatley investing in Mexican sanitation systems, housing, education etc. The Mexican government should stop repressing its trade union movement. Industries in Mexico such as the dairy industry should be protected from competition with U.S. giants. Both U.S. and Mexico should enforce strict environmental rules on U.S. companies on the border and start a cleanup of pollution. Such measures may sound utopian now, but the European Union has done similar work for over a decade. Such measures are the only way to solve the immgigration problem.

To read Rogert Bybee's and Carolyn Winter's excellent article "Immigration Flood Unleased by NAFTA's Disasterous Impact on Mexican Economy" go to http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0425-30.htm

Art of Empowerment /L.A.

I went to the opening of the "Totems to Turquoise: Native American Jewelry Arts of the Northwest and the Southwest" at the Autry National Center, which is a splendid show. The jewelery was some of the most beautiful I've ever seen; in addition, many pieces incorporated the myths and beliefs of the Native Cultures. What astounded me about the Native jewelry was it just wasn't for show-off or adornment but the many pieces connected the wearers to identity, spirit and culture. The show, through August 20, is splendid.

I went to the UCLA Fowler Museum to see "Carnival in Europe and the Americas: Photographs by Robert Jerome" and "Carnival!"--both shows ended on April 23. I also saw the carnival at UCLA including stilt walkers, costumed krewes, a best costume contest, and music and dance. The two exhibits portrayed carnival in eight cultures: Spain; Berne, Switzerland; Venice, Italy; Brazil; Bolivia; a Caribbean city; Mexico; and New Orleans. What was fascinating is that though there were common elements--costumed groups portray mythical creatures--each country changed carnival and made the celebration its own. The Indians in Bolivia snuck in their native deities and made cutting comments on the upper (Spanish) classes. The Fowler show was amazing. Again and again street people use costumes to satirize those in power and to celebrate themselves and their own populist cultures.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (L.A.C.M.A.) I saw the "Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings From the collection of Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer." Adele and Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer were wealthy Austrian Jewish art patrons who befriended and supported artists in 1920s Vienna. Klimt made two wonderful portraits of Adele Bloch-Bauer. In both portraits Klimt portrays Bloch-Bauer as a intelligent, sophisticated and beautiful woman. Growing up I never saw such a portrait of a artistically sensitive Jewish woman, who befriended the leading painters of her day as well as buying their works.

Adele Bloch-Bauer died before World War II; during Nazi period her husband Ferdinand fled to Switzerland, leaving his art collection behind. The Nazis basically confiscated the collection, and after the war the Klimt paintings wound up in a Vienna gallery. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer had willed his Klimt paintings to his neice Maria who in the last decade sued the Austrian government for the paintings and won 5 out of 6 of them. I agree with this court decisions. L.A.C.M.A. is exhibiting them to the public for the first time. Through June 30. The Klimts, particularly the two portraits of Adele Block-Bauer, are gorgeous paintings. It's good to see how a citizen was finally able to triumph over a government to get control of her artistic inheritance.

The next day I stopped by to see the new Ruth Weisberg show at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, 357 No. LaBrea, thruough May 31. Ruth Weisberg is my contemporay favorite painter; her paintings are on the cover of my last two books of poetry. I think of her as a present-day counterpart of Chagal--a splending Jewish-American woman artist. She has a long career of over 40 years from the 1960's to the present doing both paintings and drawings including a wonderful series on the shtetl which she made into a book.

In her paintings and drawings of the 1960s you see a young woman exploring sexuality and politics of the 1960s including paintings of Che; in the 1970s she became a mother, so many of the paintings show pregnant woman swimming and then celebrate young children. Over the decade she has many wonderful paintings on both art historical and biblical themes but she always makes them new--shows these subjects in the eyes of totally modern woman.

Weisberg's painting "Wrestling with the Messenger" of an adrogynous figure wrestling with the angel is on the cover of my book Shulamith while her painting "Exile and Exodus" of a strong woman figure walking barefoot into the unknown is on the cover of my book Walker Woman. Weisberg gently criticizes the male gaze of macho artists through her own portraits of naked women such as the pregnant bather who is not a sex object but enjoying swimming through water.

Finally, this afternoon I went to see the opening show for the Hannah Wilke at Solway Jones, 5377 Wilshire Blvd., Tuesday-Saturday, 11-6, through May 20. Wilke was a leading American Jewish performance/conceptual artist. She used the body as the site of art from the 1960s to her death from cancer in the 1990s. In Wilke's "I Object: Memoirs of a Sugar Giver, 1977-78" is a "Performalist Self-Portrait" she did in Spain near Marchel Duchamp's home. The work is a critique of Marcel Duchamp's objectification of women. What I like about Wilke's work is her agressiveness in-your-face confrontration as she says, "Here am I! Here is my naked body! Here is my authority!" Wilke is assaulting the male gaze as well as male authority in art.

I admire Adele Block-Bauer as art appreciator and support, but Wilke as well as Weisberg are no longer like Bauer-Bloch the subject of the art but both are makers of the art. Both artists are using arts to explore their exile from dominating male traditions of art, to show how they are taking an exodus from those alienating traditions, and are entering into a new land where they empower themselves as artists.

Ruth Weisberg at Jack Rutberg Gallery, 357 N. Labrea thru May 31, 10-5 Tuesday=Sat

Hannah Wilke at Solway-Jones, 5377 Wilshire Blvd. Tuesday-Saturday 11-6 thru May 20

5 Klimt paintings from the Bloch-Baur collection, Los Angeles County Musuem of Art, thru June 20, 5905 Wilshire, M, Tu, Th noon-8 Fri noon-9 (Friday after 5 free), Sat & Sun 11-8 pm

Totems to Turqouise: Native American Jewelry Arts of the Northwest and Southwest through August 20, Autry National Center, 4700 Western Heritage Waym, LA Tues-Wed, Fr,-Sun 10-5 Thurs 10-8

HR 4437 is a disaster of a bill

In the last week the nation has begun to debate immigration. Currently, there are 12 million undocumented workers in the country. The House of Representatives has passed HR 4437. What HR 4437 does is scapegoat Mexican workers for the failures of the United States economy. HR 4437 makes it a felony to be an undocumented worker it this country, and also criminalizes the act of helping undocumented people. The bill also includes provision to build a 700-mile wall along the border.

I heard a pro-HR 4437 spokesman say that that illegal immigrants take away the jobs of Americans. It is untrue that illegal immigrants take away anyone's jobs. HR 4437 will never improve the number of jobs available nor will it increase the wages of jobs. HR 4437 will, in fact, do the opposite, helping to drive down wages. The results of HR 4437 will be more job insecurity and lower wages.

How will that happen? The quickest growing part of the trade union movement is immigrant workers. Attacking immigrant workers will only hurt trade unions which fight every day to improve wages. Hurting trade unions helps to drive down wages. If people want to raise wages, they should work for an amnesty for undocumented workers. An amnesty would help immigrant workers work with workers born in the United States to raise wages for all.

Undocumented workers do some of the worst paid, most dangerous jobs in this country. Currently undocumented workers make the bulk of the agricultural workforce, picking fruits and vegetables that the rest of the country eats for incredibly low wages, and much of their working conditions are extremely dangerous. Many live in the worst kind of housing--chicken shacks and shanties. If HR4437 passes, it makes the lives of workers even worse. Worse means slavery such as the Mexican Zapoteca Indians who were brought over the border in 1984 and enslaved in Somis, California, to a flower grower. When people allow some workers to be pushed down to below minimum wage, that starts a downward press on wages. Having a section of the labor force making incredibly low wages totally dependant on their employers will help increase the movement to push wages down for workers born here.

HR 4437 supposedly will make the border more secure through the 700-mile wall, but the 9/11 hijackers flew into the country on tourist visas rather than come across the Mexican border. Terrorists have never crossed from Mexico to the United States across the Mexican-U.S. border. One terrorist did get caught crossing into the U.S. from Canada. It makes more sense then to put a wall across the Canadian-U.S. border, but then terrorists could just fly into the country. It's simply absurd to put think by putting up a wall on the border it will protect the U.S. from terrorists.

HR 4437 also makes it a crime to help undocumented workers. Thus priests, nuns, doctors, nurses, teachers, social workers who help illegal immigrants could be arrested for giving mass or running a food bank or teaching a class. Also threatening people helping illegal immigrants with arrest would produce incredible social divisions in this country. Criminalizing being an undocumented worker would produce great social divisions. Already undocumented workers do the worse jobs, live in some of the worst housing, and have the worst medical care. Making the harsh lives even harder would produce great anger. Nobody will be any safer if this law is passed.

Another myth is that undocumented workers cause great increase in government spending. Most undocumented workers pay taxes just like documented workers, but never get tax refunds. Study after study has found that they put much more money into government through their taxes they pay than they take out. Scapegoating will never improve the United States economy but is a fantasy solution causing great harm.

Finally, what hasn't been discussed is how United States trade policy starting with NAFTA helps produce undocumented immigrants in this country. NAFTA not only allowed factories to move out of the U.S. to Mexico but also deluged Mexico with agricultural produce from U.S. agricultural corporations. Small Mexican farmers couldn't compete with US agro-corporations and were bankrupted. When our corporations bankrupt Mexican farmers, then farmers if they stay will starve, so instead they move north to the United States working at pitiful wages for these same agricultural corporations. NAFTA gave free movement to corporations but not to the workers whose livelihood was destroyed.

If people want to improve the economy in the United States, they can begin by modifying NAFTA until it is like the trade agreements of the European Union. Within the European Union (EU) both workers and companies can move across borders. If NAFTA were like the EU, then all those workers from Mexico would be legally in the United States. Further, the EU invested into poorer countries like Ireland helping to improve its transportation system which was crucial to producing the boom in the Irish economy in the United States. As the Irish economy improved, then Irish in exile returned to live in Ireland because they could finally make a living in their home. If the United States actually helped improve the Mexican economy rather than act to destroy whole parts of its rural economy, then Mexican workers would be more likely to stay in Mexico. The Irish example shows that such a strategy can work.

Throughout the 19th century and 20th century in California through every economic recession people blamed the recession on immigrant groups, starting with the Chinese, the Japanese, the Mexicans etc. Blaming an immigrant group for a recession never helped 1 person get a job, never stopped any economic recession or depression, never did anything but scapegoat a completely innocent group. We shoud learn from our past mistakes and not blame Mexican and any other undocumented worker for the job problems in this country: that's scaepgoating. It's wrong.

Short History of California Poetry

This blog has dealt with 19th century California poets: Native American John Rollin Ridge who adapted 19th century British romanticism to demand racial equality in his poems about the frontier of California; Ambrose Bierce who uses traditional 18th century British poetics--wit, parody, epigrams--to satirize political corruption; and Edwin Markham, a late 19th century naturalist poet who wrote about suffering of farm workers.

I've also written about three modernist masters: Robinson Jeffers whose envirnomentalist defined 1920s California verse; Kenneth Rexroth who was California's leading poet in the 1930s and 1940s, and George Oppen whose best work was published in the 1960s. Jeffers and Rexroth were fierce environmentalists while Oppen and Rexroth were populists who brought a concern for the common person back again into California poetty. Rexroth led the way to the beats who dominated 1950s and 1960s poetry in the state and who brought innovations into American poetry. Snyder and Ferlinghetti continued in the tradition of writing of Jeffers and Rexroth in writing environmental poetry. Gary Snyder aso followed Rexroth in translating Japanese and Chinese poetry as well as exploring Asian cultures and relgions. Bob Kaufman contributed to the development of a jazz poetry. Lew Welch and Ginsberg contributed to a confessional poetry where poets described their mental breakdowns, suicidal impules, alchoholism, drug use etc.

During this same period American poetry was divided between rebels--Beats, New York school, and Black Mountain (North Carolina) poets--and the traditionalists who wrote a more polite, well-crafted poetry. A leading California traditionalist would be Ivor Winters at Stanford who left free verse for a tight neoclassical style in metered verse.

Ione Noguchi from Japan at the turn of the century came to California and published poetry books in Engish combining traditional Japanese poetry such as the haiku and American poetic influences such as Whitman. By the 1930s Japanese-American poets were writing modernist haiku in Japanese in haiku clubs in Fresno and Modesto. I also looked at such poets as Violet Kazu de Christoforo who developed the modernist haiku in Japanese to describe the internment experience in of Japanese-Americans in California.

In the early 1970s Lawson Inada also wrote brilliant poetry about the internment but in English free verse, and he joined with other Asian-American writers in the Bay Area to begin an Asian-American literary renaisance that continued for the next three decades. At the same time Ishamael Reed organized multi-cultural writers to produce Before Columbus Foundation, to give annual awards, and edit a number of mult-cultural antholgoies; he also wrote his brilliant poetry which had the translated black power into verse. Inada, Reed, and many others created the multi-cultural poetry of the last 35 years.

In the Bay Area women's poetry and gay poetry also flourished and intersected multi-cultural poetry, producing the most innovative poetry both in California and the United States. Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Thom Gunm all courageously created a gay male poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. The first important feminist poet, Judy Grahn, innovated a working class woman's voice in her splendid Common Woman poems as well as in lesbian poetry. The Bay Area produced brilliant multi-cultural poets: African-American Ntozake Shange, Filipino Jessica Hagedorn, and Japanese-American Janice Mirikatani. The working class feminists were also doing amazing work: the late Karen Brodine, Nelly Wong, and Carol Tarlen.

During the last 30 years the Bay Area, though still the leading poetry area in the state, was not the only one. Three other regions have developed distinctive poetries. In Los Angeles working class poet Charles Bukowski described the down-and-out of the flatlands of Los Angeles. His down home voice inspired Anglo vernacular poets such as Ron Koertge or Gerald Lockhlin. Wanda Coleman created a new gritty urban black feminist voice. Marisela Norte and Luis Rodriguez were the ambassadors from urban avant-garde in East Los Angeles while Aleida Rodriguez wrote elegantly of her exile from her home in Cuba. Asian-Americans Amy Uyematsu wrote a wonderful books 30 Miles from J-Town about growing up 3rd generation Japanese-American in the suburbs 30 miles from Japantown.

If Los Angeles poets were a multi-cultural stew reflecting that region, in San Diego an Chicano/Tijuana avant-garde led by poets Alurista and Ginza Valdez inhabited the same space with an Anglo avant-garde of such poets as Steve Kowit and Maggie Jaffee. The border was a dominating force in San Diego as well as the more repressive atmosphere of militarization along that border.

The fourth area of California poetry is the central valley literature collected in the anthology Highway 99: A Literary Jouranal through California's Great Central Valley. Detroit poet Phillip Levine taught at California State University at Fresno from the 1960s through the 1990s inspiring a generation of poets. One of the earliest Fresno poet was Anglo poet Larry Leavis whose family owned a ranch and who developed a social conscience like Steinbeck's. Valley poets include self-taught Okie farmworker Wilma Elizabeth McDaniels who became The poet of Okie culture.

Multi-cultural poets grew up in or were educated Fresno including Lawson Inada; AfroAmerican Sherely Anne Williams; and Chicano Gary Soto and Omar Salinas. Nearby Jose Montoya taught for many years at Sacramento State University while Alan Chong Lau grew up in Oroville not far away. Of course, many of these poets left the Central Valley as their careers developed, but whether they stayed or left they created a disinctive poetry describing this area. California poetry in the last three decades of the 20th century grew in these four distinct regional centers--Bay Area, Central Valley, Los Angeles, and San Diego/Tiajuana.

In California there were also distinct divisions and quarrels among poetry schools in California reflecting national quarrels. In the 1970s besides having multi-cultural poetry, Bay Area poets also developed post-modernist poetry called Language School. Language poets were influenced by French post-modernist philosophy as well as were in rebellion against political repression in the United States. These poets rebeled against meaning as coercive, so they produce a poetry of non-meaning. During the 1980s Language poets enganged in sharp polemics against other poets in the Bay Area Poets and Writers newsletter. Leading California language school poets are Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Michael Palmer etc.

Another quarrel devloped in the East Coast. Every year a volume called Best American Poetry is published showcasing the well-behaved poets who follow early 20th century modernists. In 1996 Adrienne Rich, the country's leading feminist poet, was appointed editor and instead of chosing the usual suspects instead including many black, Hispanic, Asian, women--straight and gay etc. In 1997 Yale professor Harold Bloom wrote an essay introduction to The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997 attacking Rich's selection of poets of color, women, gays etc as a betrayal of the Western tradition and as unfit to be included in these volumes. Bloom, who adhered to European-American classics from Ancient Greeks through early 20th century modernism modernism, rejected multi-cultural/women's poetry as well as Language School.
In spring 1998 poets responded with lively letters in the Boston Review.

In California there have been many academic modernists including Robert Haas, a fine poet, elegant translator, and former poet laureate of the United States. Haas himself has sidestepped the whole debate but Steve Kowit responded from California with a polemical essay against Bloom criticizng difficulty in poetry and asking for an engaged poetry that enlarges the spirit of its readers.

A fourth poetry school in California was the development of a New Formalism. In Los Angeles, California State University professor Timothy Steele published in 1989 his Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems written in traditional poetic forms and meters. Steele argued that form helps one live with one's emotions, and he also argued for a return to 18th British poets use of wit and reason. In Steele's critical work Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990) Steele argued for a return to using meter in poetry. New Formalists have produced anthlogies of their verse and more critical work. Steele has taught and encouraged the work of Leslie Monsour, anotherfine Los Angeles New Formalist.

While most poets--multi-cultural modernists, post-modernism, academic modernists--together refused to follow New Formalism's return to pre-modernist poetry, a more rhymed verse did occur in the streets of big cities of California: rap/hip-hop/slam poetry. Rap poets like Tupac Shakur combined the tradition of African-American boasting street talk with a creative use of rhymed couplets they developed. Rap poetry, issued on CDs through record companies, was the only truly popular American poetry in this period, having international influence. Rap poetry also give voice to those locked into big city poor neighborhods like Compton in Los Angeles. By 2005 academic critics at both the Western American Literature conference in Los Angeles and the MLA in Washington D.C. had panels on the poetry of Tupac Shakur, the first sign of mainstream literary recognition of rap poetry.

California poetry of the last part of the 20th century has diversified, both geographically across the state and also in terms of ethnicity, race and gender. Competing schools of poets have argued with each other: multi-cultural and women's/gay poetry, Language School, New Formalists, hip-hop, and traditional academics. The latter part of the 20th century has seen great growth and diversification in California poetry. In the later part of the 20th century California has become a hotbed of innovation in American poetry.

Lawson Inada Starts a Renaissance

Lawson Inada, born in Fresno, California, spent part of his childhood in concentration camps for Japanese-American during World War II in Arizona and Colorado. After the war, he finished high school in Fresno, living in the poor neighborhood of Japanese-Americans, blacks, Chinese, Armenians Filipinos, Okies, where he grew to love black music and became friends with Chicanos and blacks. He enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley where he spent much time listening to jazz greats in San Francisco. Jazz is a major subject of his poetry and inspiration for his style. Returing to Fresno, he studied with poet Phillip Levine at California State University at Fresno and published in an early anthology of Fresno poets.

Inada's first book of poetry Before the War: Poems as They Happened (1971) was a pioneering book of poetry in the United States published by an Asian American. In 1974 he as well as three other Asian-American writers--playright Frank Chin, novelist Shawn Wong, and Jeffrey Chan--published Aiieee: An Anthology of Asian American Writers., this first anthology edited by Asian Amerians including a reconstruction of their own literary history.

Inada continued to produced pioneering work when he published in 2000 Only What We Could Carry: The Japaense American Internment Experience. His second book of poetry is Legends from Camp, which won an American Book Award. Literary critic and novelist Shawn Wong says that "if there were such a position as Poet Laureate of Asian America, Inada would be unanimously elected to the post." After teaching at a college many years in Southern Oregon, he was elected Poet Laureate of Oregon, but California claims him also.

Inada has redefined America as neighborhood he grew up in Fresno, with its mix of blacks, many different Asians, Chicanos, Middle Eastern and poor white. He defines jazz as America's greatest contribution to the world. He uses the repetitions and rhythms of jazz in his poetry, and often reads accompanied by jazz musicians. He's a poet close to Whitman in his musiciality and his seeing America as many up of different voices singing varied songs. Inada has defined Asian-American poetry as directly within the most vital current of American poetry.

Inada like many other Japanese-American writers has found internment an major inspriation of literature. This literature is similar in some ways similar to huge outpouring of Jewish writing about Holocaust. In Lawson's poem "IV. Legend of Lost Boy" from his book Legends from Camp he begins discussed how the boy "had another name, a given name--/at another, given time and place--but those were taken away." In these repetitions Inada describes how the boy in losing his home in internment lost his name.

Those loss of identity occurs in the 2nd stanza when all marks of identity--the boy's dog, the road he lived by, the food, his house--were taken away. Repetitions continue of of the all these things taken away in stanza two and then the "The boy was taken away" in stanza three. In the boy's new home in the fairgrounds, the counters of identity--houses, trees, streets--are missing in stanza 6. Inada recates the confusions of the initial stage of intenment where the boy in following a big water truck finally losings his way completly.

What helps the boy finally is Old Man Ikeda founds him and "bawled him out." One other interned person connects with the boy, gives him a name "Lost boy," walks him through the camp to his mother. Then his mother "called him/"Lost Boy." Finally, with this reconnection to the community of other people--Old Man Ikeda, his mother--Lost Boy "thought he was found." Inada teaches that the community of others helped those lost or despairing, reintegrating them back into the human family. The larger Japanese community began caring for its members, helping them deal with the hardships of camp. The repetitions throughout the poem give it a musicality, as if Inada played a sad song ending in a touch of hope.

Inada's work is similar to Tadeusz Rozewicz, the Polish poet who stunned the literary world with his stunning poetry about World War II in Poland published in English translation in "The Survivor" and Other Poems. Inada like Rozewicz in dealing with brutality during World War II avoid the "traditional" resources of poetry--metaphor, simile, irony, symbolism--instead turning to repetitions and facts in what Polish critics have called "the naked poem." While critics have hailed Rozewicz as creating a special genre of Polish poetry, American critics have only begun to see how Inada uses jazz poetics to create a new American poetry of Asian America.

Since Aiii, many other anthologies of Asian-American literature have been published. By the 1990s antholgies focused just on poetry: Garrett Hongo's The Open Boat: Poems From Asian America (New York, Anchor Books, 1993); Walter Lew's Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (New York: Kaya Production, 1995); and Eileen Tabios' interviews with Asian American poets in her Black Lightening: Poetry in Progress (New York: Asian American Writers Workshop, 1998). Lawson and his colleagues who published Aiieeee have indeed begun a renaissance in Asian-American literature. Inada's poetry breaks paths in creating a new American literature.

Ishmael Reed's black Gods

Ishmael Reed is a major American poet, novelist, editor and publisher. He grew up in Buffalo, New York, worked as a reporter for a black newspaper, and since 1967 has lived in Berkeley/Oakland. For the last three decades he has worked tirelessly for a rainbow-colored American literature.

He and poet Al Young founded the influential magazine Yardbird, and then in 1976 he founded the Before Columbus Foundation, "a mutli-ethnic organizing dedicated to promoting a pan-cultural view of America." The Before Columbus Foundation gives annual American Book Awards to promote multi-ethnic American literature. He also served as general editor for HarperCollins's four-volume "Literary Mosaic Series" which further promoted multi-cultural American literature. Reed along with Gundar Strads and Shawn Wong also were editors of Before Columbus Poetry Anthology, an anthology of poets who received awards from the annual Americal Book Awards.

In his poem "I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra" Reed creates a black hero who fights through the centuries against opressors of blacks. The poet uses Egyptian mthology about the black God Ra/Horus who fights Set, the god of foreign opressors. In Eyptian myth the Sun God passes through the waters of the underworld in a boat each night so he can emerge in the morning without being extingished by the waters. Also, the Egyptians had to drive out the foreign opressors and their God Set in order to resture their true black Sun God. Reed combines Egyptian mythology with American Western outlaw stories and with African-American culture including boxing, jazz greats such as tenor saxaphonists Sonny Rollins etc. Reed also contests in his poem the "untrustworthiness of [white] Egyptologists" views about African dieties.

In the open stanza Reed uses one of of us puns in the "saloon of fools," play on "ship of fools" and "saloon" of the old west. The hero, the cowboy in the boat of Ra, is in the saloon of fools, and gets bit by a sidewinder, a rattlesnake, and rides out of town, but isn't recognized by ignorant Egyptologists who are, of course, fools and school marms with bad breath. The black hero moves back and forth between many centuries in the whole poem, from bedding down with the great Egyptian mother Goddess Isis to sticking up Wells-Fargo stagecoaches in the 19th century West, to becoming a great black boxer as well as jazz great in the 1950s America in stanzas 3 and 4.

Reed's poem has a plot: the Set, evil god of foreign opressors, has driven the black god hero out of town (both Egyptian temple and Western town), and the cowboy's face is one a wanted poster. He spends his time in exile "[b]oning-up in the ol West i bide my time" by shooting at tin cans and "write the motown long plays for the comeback of/Osiris." Motown was the black music company in the 1960s which produced some of the most wonderful black popular music. The black god hero is plotting the return of the true god of Egypt Osires.

This voice is exile tells us he is half-breed son of the stars but "I hold the souls of men in my pot/I do the dirty boogie with scorpions" as he dances with scorpions. He asks for his magic elements he needs before returning to combat evil Set who drove him out:

bring me my Buffalo horn of black powder
bring me my headdress of black feathers
bring me my bones of Ju-Ju snake
go get my eyelids of red paint
Had me my shadow
I'm going tonto town after Set.

Here Reed has the black God prepare himself with the Buffalo horn of gun powder from the West, the Ju-Ju snake from black folklore, the red paint of Native Americans before going into battle with Set. The poem ends with a war cry against Set as the cowboy promises "to Set down Set" in another wonderful pun. The poet calls Set the "usurper of the Royal couch/imposter RAdio of Moses' bush ... vampire outlaw of the milkway." The poem ends with a war cry against Set, calling him usurper God of Egypt, imposter taking over Moses' prophet's burning bush to vampire outlaw of the whole galaxy. The whole poem is a battle dance/song before the cowboy goes back into town to get the bad guy and right wrongs.

Reed in his poetry, his editing and his publishing has tried to replace the old opressive Gods with new more accurate vision of American life and literature.

Haiku from the Internment Camps: Violet Kazue de Christoforo

Vilet Kazue de Christoforo is one of many Japanese-American poets who wrote haiku in Japanese while interned in camps during World War II. She was born Kazue Yamane in Hawaii, educated from 8-13 in Japan, and then went to high school in Fresno, California. During World War II, she and her husband, Shigeru Matsuda, and their three children were interned in Jerome, Arkansas, and then she and the children were interned at Tule Lake camp in California.

Starting in 1915 two Tokyo poets Ippekiro Nakatsuka and Kawahigashi Hekigodo had developed a modernist haiku called "kaiko." Japanese-Americans in California had formed haiku-writing clubs to write these moderist haiku in Japanese. De Christoforo is a historian of these pre-World War II haiku clubs: One of the haiku clubs was in Fresno while the other one was in Stockton. The modernist haiku were not restricted to the vocabulary of the seasons and the strict 5-7-5 syllables of traditional haiku. The haiku poets worked hard on their writing, putting it up to serious critcism in the clubs, and they also collected Japanese literature. De Cristoforo says that right before the internment the Japaense-American poets in Stockton and Fresno destroyed their collections of haiku and much Japanese literature--a tragedy for Japanese-American literature. Yet the internment these Japaense-American poets kept writing haiku in Japanese which they published in camp newspapers

De Christoforo's is the best known of the haiku poets of the Japanese-American internment camps. Her Poetic Reflections of the Tule Lake Internment Camp, 1944, was published after 1984. She also collected and translated the concentration campu haiku in her book There is Always Tomorrow: An Anthology of Japanese American Concentration Campu Kaiko Haiku (1996). Only 15 of Kristoro's haiku from the camps survived.

Christoforo's haiku don't follow the 5-7-5 pattern but do use naturalistic imagery. In this haiku:

"Like-minded people gather
new shoots sprout from the pine tree
early summer sky."'

she likens the people gathering. to "new shoots" from a pine trees, giving an image of hope during the desperate times.

In "Tenth Wedding Anniversary (July 3, 1944)

"Misty moon
as it was
on my wedding day"

the moon brings back poignant memories of her own wedding.

In this haiku

"Myriad insects
in the evening
my children are growing"

she matter of factly tells about endurance: the insects endure while her children grow up.

Cary Nelson's wonderful anthology Modern American Poetry has 29 more haiku from eighteen poets from the internment camps as well as a good, short introduction. The 29 haiku are incredibly moving. Like de Christoforo, the other haiku poets adapted the naturalistic vocabulary of the haiku to capture the sadness, courage, and stamina of those in the camps in amazing poems.

George Oppen Struggles for the Truth

George Oppen was poet, Communist and soldier. He came from a wealthy Jewish-American family who had settled in San Francisco. He came into an inheritance young, which allowed him and his wife to go to France, where Oppen wrote and he and his wife started a small poetry press, and published in the early 1930s some of the best American young modernist poets--W.C. Williams, Ezra Pound, etc. At first Oppen was an imagist following Pound.

With the increasing Depression, Oppen returned to the U.S., joined the Communist Party, started organizing the unemployed, and quit writing poetry for over two decades. He also volunteered for service in the U.S. army, fought more than any other American poet in difficult battles, and was in a group of U.S. soldiers than liberated a concentration camp. When he returned to the United States after the war, the FBI investigated him repeatedly, so he and his wife went into exile to Mexico. He returned to live in San FRancisco in the late 1950s, returned to writing.

When he returned to poetry he criticized his mentor Pound who had become a fascist and who had made broadcasts for Mussolini during World War II. Oppen's of the late 1950s and 1960s is committed to creativing a democratic culture, and Oppen was now calling himself a "populist." His book The Materials ends with the poem "Leviathan" that 'truth also is the pursuit of it,' that 'we must talk now." Oppen's work is often difficult to understand but I think the struggle is worth it. In his poems he struggled to make imagism deal with moral truth. Obviously Pound was such a failure when it comes to connecting imagism to moral ideas, often writing a dogmatic polemic, but Oppen of the 1960s was committed to connecting the poetry of modernist tradition to moral truths necessary for democratic culture. Since Pound's imagism is so influential in 20th century American poetry, I think that Oppen was strugging with central questions for modern American poetry.

In the "Bicyles and the Apex," written in the 1960s, captures the mood that all the gadgets and machines that fascinated in the 1930s, the 1940s, and the 1950s are now taken for granted. Oppen seems to be showing how we longer are in love with all the gagets and machines that we once were. He starts with saying "How we loved the/Once, these mechanisms/" but now the poet no longer loves bicycles but sees them as part of "the platitude/the gadgets" as if too many gadgets were producing "our discontent." He compares hungry Van Gogh with shoe salesmen who envy him now.

He argues that neither slums nor tract homes are "the apex/Of the culture/They are the barracks." He does see basic elements--barracks, food, garbage,. tires--as needed but still producing disconent, particular with gangs in the slums and John Birch Societies, right wing groups, in the suburbs. He returns in the last stanza to saying "But we loved them once/" adding the "once," as if to emphasize we no longer love these gadgets. The poem captures an important intellectual mood in the 1960s.

In "The Building of the Skyscraper" Oppen compares a steel worker building a skyscraper who is trained not to look down with a writer who knows not to look for certain words that are empty and meaningless. If we look at these words we like the steel worker "are on the verge/Of vertigo." He says that, although certain words "mean nothing/But there is something to mean." The poet must find that meaning, what he calls "the thing/Which is. It is the business of the poet/To suffer the things of the world/and to speak them and himself out." The poet must find kernels of moral truth out of his difficult experiences. That's what Oppen tried to do in his poetry.

Robinson Jeffers: Poet for Now

I'm reading the current issue of the New Yorker the article "Watermark: Can Southern Louisiana be Saved" that discusses how much of Southern Louisiana is sinking into the sea--an appaling thought. At the same time I'm reading Robbinson Jeffers' nature poet, and thinking that Jeffers is the only environmentalist poet who got it right for 2006. He captures the ferocity of nature better than any other poet I know.

In poems like "November Surf" and "Hands" Jeffers speaks of how nature wipes out human habitation just like the hurricanes wiped out acres of land in Southern Louisiana. Jeffers' "November Surf" speaks of the "great waves awake ... come and cover the cliffs with a violent cleaness ...." he could be easily speaking of Hurricane Katrina but, of course, he isn't since he wrote these poems over 60 years ago. He describes all the summer trash--"orange peel, eggshells, paper, pieces of clothing"--on on these cliffs that the great waves wipes clean off, but the waves in "November Surf" do more than just clean off junk in the poem--they also wipe out cities.

After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, we respect more Jeffer's description of the waves ability to take out a city and have less pride in our ability to control the waves. Jeffers in these poems tries to teach us that humility toward nature. Also, the poet teaches us to accept what hapens when "the river mouth to source pure." He calls us "the two-footed mammal" who, after the waves cleansing of the land, have "The dignity of room, the value of rareness." He believes that less people might even have some parts of the land.

In the poem "Hands" he speaks of hands on a cave in a canyon near Tassajara. "A brown shy quiet people" made these many hands and then vanished, but the poet says the people speak through their hands, warning those who now inhabit the land: "enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down/And be supplanted; for you are also human." Again, Jeffers tells us that we may not be able to remain on the land, to save all that we want. Years after Jeffers wrote these poems we most likely have to accept losing part of Southern Louisiana to the sea. Jeffers is asking us to accept something very difficult.

In "Rock and Hawk" Jeffers tells us to learn from these most inhuman elements--stones and predatory birds--for values to help us humans live. In the poem he rejects the cross and the hive--Christiantiy and the cities--instead giving us a "new emblem." He first looks at the rock which has withstood earthquakes and sea storms. No trees grow there but a falcon sits there. The new emblem is this falcon/stone: "Fierce consciousness joined with final/Disinterestedness."
He admires both the falcon's "realist eye" and massive "mysticism of stone." He wants us to live well but also accept death. Yes, Jeffers nature poetry has much to teach us. After decades of thinking we can dominate nature, ignoring global warming, ignoring warrnings about dangers to the Gulf Coast--rejecting Jeffers--perhaps we're now ready to listen to the Big Sur's poet's hard lessons.

Ambrose Bierce and Edwin Markham: Two Poets

Most 19th century California poets-- Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, George Sterling, and Nora May French--seem to be most influenced by early 19th century British romantic poets; they attempted to use this romantic poetics to describe the new California landscape and their own emotions. Their poems lack originality and are largely derivative romanticism though they do give much insight into the emotional lives of late 19th century Anglo Californians.

But by the end of 19th century a few California poets--Ambrose Bierce, Edwin Markham, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Yone Nogouchi--have finally broken with this derivative romanticism to sound a more modern note. Bierce, a Civil War soldier who fought in some horrendous battles such as Chickamauga and Shiloh, wrote some brilliant short stories giving a more realistic, non-romantic even grim view of war: "Chickamauga," about a boy discovering war in the midst of the horror of the battle; and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," about the hanging of a Southern spy. He's also known for the bitter satire of his The Devil's Dictionary. At the end of his life he went to Mexico, joined Pancho Villa's army in Mexico in 1913 and then disappearing. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes wrote a novel about Bierce titled The Old Gringo which was made into a movie.

Instead of Romatic poet's emphasis on emtion and feeling, Bierce emphasized wit, particulary satire and parody in his many poems. His "A Rational Anthem" is a parody of that patriotic song "My county, 'tis of thee." While the original song praises the U.S. as a "sweet land of liberty" and "pilgrim's pride" in 5-line stanzas, Bierce uses the same 5-line stanzas to praise "sweet land of felony" where "my fathers fried/young witches and applied/Whips to the Quaker's hide/." He uses the same verse structure and rhymes in his parody.

When the original song celebrates the "noble free" and the rocks, hills, woods, etc., Bierce instead celebrates the country "where the thief is free" and the "thieving bills." In the third stanza while the original song extols the romantic sound of music and natural beauty, Bierce the realist instead extols government employees who rob. Bierce is writing a poetry for the corruption of the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons. He was famous for his savage satires of the Robber Baron politicans and corrupt politicians of that era.

The Southern Pacific Railroad dominated California politics throughout the 2nd half of the 19th century: its director Leland Stanford was elected governor while the railorad men routinely bribed the state legislators. Bierce wrote 4-line "Two Epigrams" about this corrupt politcs. In the 1st epigram those who elected Stanford to the Upper House of the legisalator, though " dead, they were elected to the lower." In the 2nd epigram Stanford looks down on God, expected "God to hasten to meet him."

Very different from Bierce is Edwin Markham, a late 19th century schoolteacher who believed in Christian socialism popular at the end of the century. Markham befriended naturalistic writers in San Francisco--Jack London, Amrbrose Bierce, and Frank Norris. After seeing Millet's painting "The Man with the Hoe," he wrote a poem also titled "The Man with the Hoe," which was published in 1899 in the San Francisco newspaper and reprinted 10,000 times, making Markham internationally famous. His poetry is dominated by naturalism, that late 19th century literary idea that a brutal environment determines human existence.

In Markham's "Man with the Hoe" the first stanza describes the poor farmworker crushed by "the weight of centuries" of a harsh work environment. The farmer is called "brother to the ox," and is described as "bowed" with an empty face "dead to rapture and despair" and a "brutal jaw."

The 2nd stanza refers back to the epigraph quoting Genesis how God made man in his own image and refers to God giving Man "dominion" over the whole natural universe as well as the power to have grand dreams. In both the 2nd and 3rd stanzas Markham undercuts the romantic dreams and pretensions with the reality of the farmworker's life:Obviously, the beaten down worker in stanza one is far from the grand dreamer of stanza two. In the 3rd stanza Markham develops this gulf between a man too brutalized and beaten by his life to understand Plato or meditate on the Pleiades. Markham calls this a "tragedy in that aching stoop"--the brutal enviornment has betrayed humanity itself. Markham like Bierce continually undercuts romantic dreams by comparing them to the brutal reality.

In the last two stanzas the poet addresses "masters, lords and rulers of all lands" asking again and again how they can heal this beaten down soul. If they don't, he warns in the last stanza of "whirlwinds of rebellion" as if predicting the peasant rebellions of the 20th century.

Both Bierce and Markham broke with the rosy romanticism of earlier Anglo California poets. The two late 19th centruy writers weren't interest in charming physical landscape descriptions but of the brutal political, social, and encomic landscape, and found new poetic ways to describe the material ugliness in their world. '

Both used the poem as argument, not lyric; their poetic arguments cut to the bone of important issues in the 1890s. They both wrote an intellectually musucular poetry. Modernists like Pound, Elliot or Williams focused so much on lyric, they wrote a poetry that often lacked Bierce's and Markham's tough intellectual poetics. Both late 1890s writers paved the way for 20th century writers: Bierce influenced Borges and horror writers like H.P. Lovecraft while Markham was one of many California poets and novelists who describe hardship in the fields leading to Steinbeck and Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesio (Farmworkers Theater).

19th century Native California poet: John Rollin Ridge

I wish to talk about some early California poets. What can they tell us about the early years of poets in the state of California?

First, John Rollin Ridge, was part-Cherokee and member of the renowned wealthy Ridge family who argued that Cherokees assimilate into Anglo-America. Members of the Ridge family signed the New Echota Treaty of 1835 that gave Cherokee lands to the state of Georgia and accepted removal of the Cherokee from Georgia to Oklahoma. For the next 15 years the Ridges and their enemies the Ross faction fought resulting in the murders in 1839 of three Ridge family members and John Rollin Ridge killing a Ross supporter in 1849.

Thus in 1850 John Rollin Ridge left for the gold fields of California in part to avoid prosecution for the killing. After two months gold mining, Ridge left it for journalism and published in 1853 Anglo California's 1st novel Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, about the Mexican Robin Hood outlaw killed in 1853. Many scholars such as Eric Sundquist of the Cambridge History of American Literature interpret Ridge's novella has an outcry against the oppression of Native Americans and Mexicans, but critic/USC professor John Carlos Rowe disagrees.

I wish to talk here not about Ridge's novel but about his poetry. He published a book of poetry in 1868, one of the earliest books put out in the state. His poem "California," celebrates the pioneers of 1850: "those brave men, those hardy Pioneers,/Who led the way for Science, Art and Law," braving many dangers. Ridge celebrates the hardy Pioneers' deeds: "of young empire sowed the seeds?" He surely seems to be praising the conquest of California as creation of a "young empire."

Further, Ridge in the next few lines compares the hardy Pioneers as a group to "some reverend head, majestic as a seer's" arising from the mass of people like the "snow-crowned peak" of some majestic mountain rising up above the flatland. In Ridge's "Mount Shasta," a poem imitating Shelley's "Mount Blanc," Ridge had praised Shasta as the incarnation of the eternal masculine genius. John Carlos Rowe says, "The personification of genius as a divine power, predictably masculine, is typical of romantic idealizations of human rationality as 'divine mind' and it is the utopian goal of realizing such genius that justifies Manifest Destiny .... " (Rowe 108).

In "Mt. Shasta" after praising the lofty male genius of the mountains, Ridge argues California will only survive "if, /Its own Mt. Shasta, Sovereign Law, shall lift/Itself in purer atmosphere ...." He's arguing that instead of "human passions," California should be ruled by this absolute, eternal law that treats all Men equally including those socalled "foreigners" like Joaquin Murieta that the Anglos were driving out of the gold fields. The attacks on non-Anglo miners--Chinese, Mexican, Chilean--were brutal and ugly in the 1850s.

But back in the poem "California" the Pioneers for years "did fight the wild beast back/To plant their homes ..." One wonders who Ridge means by the "wild beast"--a real beast or a metaphorical beast? He likens the Pioneers dieing to pines that brave "the howling winter strong," so surely he means they survived the harsh winters and physical hardships of making a home in Northern California. But he also gives the meaning of "wild beast" as wild, unruly humans as he describes the pioneers greatest achievement as planting "Science, Art and Law" in California--making the domestic arts bloom in the wilderness.

Ridge says a "woman's hand" will save the memories of these hardy Pioneers when the female hand transmits the names to "History's Scroll." In this gender division women pioneers don't exist but a metaphorical woman acts to preserve male greatness. Unlike Whitman or Frederick Douglas, Ridge isn't an early feminist but only concerned with male fame. One example Ridge gives is the name of "Lassen" attached to that peak in Northern California is a "fit memorial of the grandest fame;" well, the fame of the hardy male empire-building Pioneers will last after all. To be fair to Ridge, he argues against racial discrimination and for laws that treat all men fairly in California. I think that Ridge's demands in his poems for equality before the law for Men was progressive in the 1850s and 1860s.

Rowe also analyzes Ridge's novel Joaquin Murieta, the beginning of a California myth, as portraying Murieta, born in Sonora, Mexico, as a heroic romantic male individual not a Robin Hood. In Ridge's novel Anglo barbaric violence against Murieta as an indivudal force him to seek to revenge himself by leading a gang of outlaws.

Rowe mentions that Latin American writers have revised the Joaquin Murietta myth many times. For instance, Pablo Neruda wrote Fulgar y Muerta de Joaquin Murieta (Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta, 1967). Neruda's 5-act musical drama makes Murieta a Chilean (many Chileans came to the California Gold Fields but were driven out by the Anglos) who fights for a collective "working class against Yankee imperialism .... "

Also Chicano playwright Luis Valdez wrote in 1964 his first play The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa," whose hero is Joaquin, a Robin Hood who steals from the rich to give to the poor; in the play Valdez holds out hope that the community will unite and take action to fight Anglo injustices against its communal self. Well, the issues that Ridge raise still reverberate in California literature.

Update on NYU graduate students' strike

Update on NYU graduate students strike:

A month ago Rosemary Feal, Executive Director of the MLA, announced that the Executive Council
of the MLA had sent a letter to NYU president John Sexton reaffirm the resolution of the MLA Delegates
Assembly in 2000 that "endorses the right of all academic employees—'full- and part-time faculty members, graduate employees, and support staff'—to engage in collective bargaining if they choose to do so." The letter also says the NYU has an obligation to reocognize the graduate students' union and encourages "encourages all parties to proceed in good faith, to negotiate a mutually acceptable contract, and it asks that the NYU administration not rescind stipends, withdraw teaching eligibility, or take any other action to discourage graduate employees from engaging in union activity."

Meanwhile NYU adminstration has ignored the resolutions of MLA, AAUP, and many letters it has received, and has started retaliatory action against graduate student strikers--taking away a semester or two semesters' work.

Dealing with TV

My friend asked me if I wanted her TV/DVD player which she was giving away. Since I had a 18 year old TV (no DVD player), I said, "Yes." That meant giving away my old TV which was given to me by a friend Thersia, who tragically died not long after she gave me her TV. I was very attached to my old very old TV, but someone once said I shouldn't get sentimental about a set. Finally, I was ready to let go of my old set. A few months ago I'd walked into my local video store, but they didn't have videos--only DVDs. So I thought maybe I should get a new TV?

I've never bought a TV in my life. Actually, when I was 12, my dad threw out our family TV, telling me to study, so throughout my teens and and most of my twenties I didn't have television in my house. I read a lot, started a record collection, saw great films, and made videos--wrote, directed, and produced feminist news which was broadcast. Since I was making TV, I was given my grandmother's old set. I was of the generation which fell in love with movies as ART and wanted to be video freaks, making our own video.

Makng one's own short newsbroadcast and then showing it on the air was such a rush--incredibly exciting. I even helped a colleague write a grant for a people's video editing studio. In comparison to making one's own television in the 1970s and 1980s, broadcast TV was ridiculous, a stereotypic waste of time. As TVs in the last few years grew larger & larger I thought it quite bizarre. Why on earth anyone would want such a big piece of dud in their living room?

Once the new TV was in my apartment (the same size as the old TV or about 24" wide), I looked at the manual and the remote control, and then I went to Radio Shack to get a rabbit ear antennae and some cables to hook it up. Back in the apartment, I followed the manual in hooking up my VCR to the new TV as well as the stereo receiver to the TV and also hooked on the new antennae as well as plugged it in. I turned on the TV but all it said was "no usable signal" and the remote control didn't work. After replugging and plugging the TV on , I got the DVD player to work but still no broadcast TV.

Next day I called my local TV shop in West Hollywood and asked them to make a house call to set up my TV. Well, the technician came. He immediately got the on-screen menu to work (I had been warned that the menu was very difficult to operate), and by god he got a TV signal. The picture was fuzzy but it was a real signal! Also, after he put a tape in the VCR he got the video to play. He also put one of my jazz CDs in the DVD and it played out of my two stereo speakers! He turned by rabbit ear antennae this way and that--each way some TV stations would come in but others wouldn't. He said that now TVs cost less to build than they used to but are sold for much more money. Also, he said I should get cable TV because the broadcast signals are lousy where I live.

I had cable TV once in my life but hated it. I've seen a lot of great movies in theaters, but there were few good movies on the cable movie channels--a major disappointment. No Fellini No Bergman. No Kurosawa. No Ray. No Eisenstein. What a drag this cable TV was. The biographies were 2nd rate. The documentaries weren't that good. I've seen some great documentaries from Nanook of the North to Ken Burns The Civil Wars and Jazz, but on cable they weren't showing top documentaries the 6 months I had it in the mid-1990s. For 2nd rate programming I paid $24/month plus had to watch insipid ads.

I did start watching Law & Order, the cop/attorney show on cable NBC, but it was also on the regular channel of NBC, so I stopped the cable. For years I've had this guilty pleasure of watching Law & Order on NBS. Even Noam Chomsky watches Law & Order. When I heard that, I felt pleased with my attachment to this show. On Law & Order pop culture theorizes about latest current eventssuch as gun control, radio talk show hosts, undocumented immigrants, ect.

The technician said I could get analog cable which was cheaper than the digital from my local cable company who doesn't even advertise they still have analog since they make so much more money from digital. After he left I could get the PBS station which I watch a lot; CBS which I also watch a bit; and the Warner Brothers station which I never watch. But I couldn't get or NBC or the local station KCAL in Los Angeles. So I thought, do I want just to watch CBS and PBS and forget about NBC? Can I live without NBC?

If I don't get NBC I'll never get to see Law & Order, but after years of watching Law & Order, it isn't that original but repetitive and a bit of a bore. Last year I read my way through 50 novels about Los Angeles to make up a list of the top 40 novels of L.A--the novels were incredibly exciting; in contrast, TV seemed even more stereotypic and dull. I think it a shame that after more than 60 years of television in this country it still stinks to the extent it does. I'm still my father's daughter, thinking that books, music, good movies, making ones own video are much more exciting and entertaining than canned commercial TV.

Right now I'll stick with CBS and PBS, forget about cable, save the money, and skip Law & Order. Oh, I did rent my first DVD--rapidly entering the modern era. I saw Delores Claiborne starring Kathy Bates who was excellent in this adaption of a Stephen King book. The new technology is great--yes, DVD's are an improvement over videotape; yes, it's good to hear TV concerts over stereo speakers (the rare time there's a good concert on broadcast TV). So it was worthwhile to get the new set after all in order to play DVDs.

Women of the Beat Generation

I've just finished reading Brenda Knight's Women of the Beat Generation (1996), an excellent book on women writers, muses, wives, and artists of the Beat Era. Knight's book along with an associated" Women of the Beat Generation Panel" at the San Francisco Book Festival on November 2, 1996, for the first time focused on these long neglected women.

Before reading this book I had already read three important memoirs by Beat generation women: Joyce Johnson's Minor Characters, about her years from 21 to 23 when she was writing her first novel and had a romance with Jack Kerouac; Hettie Jones's How I Became Hettie Jones largely about her romance and marriage with LeRoi Jones; and Diana di Prima's Recollections of My Life as a Woman, about her life as young poet, mother, and lover in the 1950s and 1960s. All three memoirs are superb works telling what it was like for young American woman coming of age in New York bohemia in the 1950s and 1960s. Di Prima's is really spectacular: I'd rank Di Prima's memoir along with Mother Jones's and Emma Goldman's autobiographies as the three classic tales about woman rebels in American literature.

Reading a few memoirs highlights three women's lives but not a generation.What Brenda Knight did wonderfully in her anthology was give a short biography of 27 women along with samples, for most of them, of their writing: Knight truly has produced a portrait of a whole generation.

She starts with a section titled "The Precusors" including poets Helen Adams, Josephine Miles, and Madeline Gleason, and fiction writer Jane Bowles. Poet Josephine Miles, the first female tenured English professor at UC Berkeley, is well-known as is Jane Bowles; the latter was the inspiration of her husband Paul Bowles' heroine in his novel The Sheltering Sky which was made into a few years ago into film, but the other two poets are not known at all. Adams, a Scottish immigrant, chanted her wonderful ballads that updated the traditional Scottish ballad to mid-20th century America, while Gleason organized in 1947 the San Francisco Festival of Poetry, the first such festival in the country, and wrote a musical verse exploring the realm between the divine and the commonplace. Both Adams and Gleason are fine poets deserving to be better known.

Knight's second section "The Muses" is largely about the wives of Beat generation men. Of the wives, four have written memoirs: Carolyn Cassady, Neil Cassady's wife; Edie Parker Kerouac, Kerouac's first wife; Joan Harvey Kerouac, his second wife; and Eileen Kaufman, Bob Kaufman's wife. Though all the memoirs give insight into these women's lives and their marriages, Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road is by far the finest written tale. After reading two excerpts from Cassady's work, I think Carolyn was the writer in the marriage, not Neil. Carolyn tells a tale of a heroic bohemian mother: she held the marriage together despite all Neil's abandonments, raised her three children, and worked full-time. Cassady's strength as well as her fine story telling ability shine through the excerpt of her work.

The third section "The Writers" has 15 women and their writing including, of course, excerpts from Joyce Johnson's and Hettie Jone's memoirs I had already discussed. As for the other prose writings, Bonnie Frazer (aka Bremser, poet Ray Bremser's ex-wife) had an excerpt from her harrowing memoir Troia: Mexican Memoirs about traveling peniless through Mexico with her husband and baby. Also, there is a sad but moving excerpt from the novel Trainsong by Jan Kerouac, Jack Kerouac's daughter. Jan Kerouac, who only published two novels before her tragic early death, seemed to be quite a good a writer as her father.

Of the poets, Knight has few of Diana di Prima's poems. Di Prima from adolescence on was fiercely dedicated to her writing and published her own work as well as other writers in the magazine she put out with LeRoi Jones in the 1950s. She lived a much more radical--both bohemain and political--life than her more conventional contempories Rich, Plath, and Sexton. Knight has included one of di Prima's Loba poems where she explores female Goddess energy in that epic book-long poem; critics should look again at Di Prima as I think she is a major mid-20th century feminist poet.

Knight includes six obscure women poets who deserve recognition. Elise Cowan, who was for a short time Alan Ginsberg's girlfriend, wrote a haunted poetry before her tragic suicide a 29. She like Di Prima in the 1950s lived on the edge in New York bohemia, but while diPrima was a tough survivor, Cowan's dark tormented visions echo through her amazing lyric poetry. While Cowan in her work did a dance with death, Joanna Kyger, who for a short time was married to Gary Snyder, was in her poetry fiercely dedicated to exploring spirituality, particulary Buddhism, as her ex-husband was. Joanna McClure was also married to a Beat poet: for many years she was wed to Michael McClure. McClure writes a short, lean lyric that can praise Sappho or wonder "How life can be so full at 52."

The next four poets weren't romantically linked to any Beat male. Instead Janine Pommy Vega has lived with as much risk and abandon as any male: her wild bohemian spirit pulsates through her long-lined poems. Holocaust survivor Ruth Weiss captures in her poetry the amazing tale of her escaping the Nazis; she writes poems to her women friends as well as was a pioneering jazz poet.

Mary Norbert Korte captures the moment she left the nunnery in her poem "Eddie May the cook Dreamed Sister Mary Ran Off with Alan Ginsberg" and later became a redwoods activist in Northern California recording her love of that land in amazing nature poems. Lenore Kandal's book of erotic poetry, The Love Book, provoked a raid by the police who declared it obscene. In the trial Kandel said wants to "express her beliefs that sexual acts between living persons are religious acts." Kandal's work did give women poets in the 1960s more freedom to explore the erotic.

Knight includes Anne Waldman, the only woman associated with the beats who has had a thriving national poetry career. When Lawrence Ferlinghetti published in the 1970s Waldman's book Fast Talking Woman he for the first time recognized a beat women poet writing strong feminist work. The value of Knight's work is she shows that Waldman wasn't alone: most of the other poets also explored female imagery in their work. Though the beat women were often seen as victims, Knight's anthology should correct that false impression. They were instead strong women, and many were strong writers.

Also, some critics have said that women of the beat generation did their strongest work in memoir, but memoirs, being more financially successful, were published first and received much larger audiences. If critics would look at the work of the poets as well as the memoir writers, they might find beat women produced an important body of poetry.

Knight includes also a short section on two women painters, Jay DeFeo and Joan Brown, who were associated with the beat generation in San Francisco both in their lives and their work. Both women were important painters and helped put the Bay Area in the map as a center of the visual artists. Though the anothology includes one illustration of DeFeo's massive painting "The Rose," I would have liked many more illustrations of the work by these two fascinating women.

All in all Women of the Beat Generation is a must read for anyone interested in women's writing, the beat generation, or 20th century American literature.

Pride and Prejudice

I went to see the movie Pride and Prejudice last night, which I found utterly delightful. Jane Austen's novel, which I read in junior high school, has always been one of my all-time favorites.
The film wonderfully connects with the comedy of Austen's romantic comedy about the romances of the five Bennett sisters around 1800 in rural England. Elizabeth, the second daughter and the heroine; her elder sister Jane, the family beauty, and Lydia, a fifteen-year old flirt and fool, all have romances, but are the men suitable marriage partners?

Austen portrays her heroine Elizabeth as quickly prejudiced against a possible suitor because of a small slight or rumors. Mr. Darcy, the rich young man who falls in love with her, is so full of pride that during his courtship he continually hurts her feelings. The eldest sister Jane is too restricted by convention to show Mr. Bingley, the young man that she loves, her true feelings, while Mr. Bingley lets himself be manipulated by his sister and Mr. Darcy to cut off a promising romance. So each sex has blinders on, unable to see the other's true worth. Austen portrays these romances with her wonderful comedy showing how foolish her characters are, but she allows her characters--particularly Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy who loves her--to see their errors and grow.

In graduate school my roommate Cynthia Evans wrote her paper defending Mrs. Bennett, the mother who is usually seen as a nervous idiot whose main focus in life is marrying off her five daughters. The intellectual father Mr. Bennet who has buried himself in his library reading is usually praised. My roommate Cynthia defended Mrs. Bennett and so in the film Brenda Belthyn gives us a fine Mrs. Bennett as nervous and flighty, but also very concerned for her daughters .

In both the novel and the film the Bennet family estate can only be inherited by a male heir, so the five Bennett sisters have no inheritance. They also have no education or jobs, so they must marry or be impoverished. Cynthia Evans argued that Mrs. Bennett is the wise one, trying her best to take care of her daughters, while Mr. Bennet is a narcisstic intellectual reading his beloved books and largely ignoring the girls except for his favorite Elizabeth. As Mrs. Bennet says in the film to Elizabeth, it's no easy task to marry off five daughters in 1800. Well, it isn't.

Keira Knightley, who played Elizabeth, is beautiful, lively, playful, and charming--one could quickly see why a young man would fall in love with her. In the first shot the camera follows Elizabeth rambling alone on the family farm, not the usual shot of her and the other girls cooped up in the family drawing room. Indeed Joe Wight, the director, often has shots of Elizabeth out in the open fields as if she has the freedom to roam around of 1950s romantic heroine rather than live the constricted life of a 1800 girl. What I find wonderful about Austen's novel and this film is the conflict between Elizabeth and her sisters' attempts to be emotionally freer versus the strict rules they were supposed to follow in society. Wight is giving us a new reinterpretation of the novel which focuses on this conflict between convention and freedom.

As a teenager I loved the romance of Pride and Prejudice but watching the movie I also loved the comedy. Tom Hollander did a wonderful job portraying Mr. Collins, the clergymen cousin of the Bennet's who will inherit the Benett estate. He calls calling, looking for wife, and first settles on Jane, but after Mrs. Benett tells him that Jane is half-engaged, decided after one minute reconsideration to propose to Elizabeth. Mr. Collins' proposal is funny and touching: he's such an awful suitor but he has his dignity at the same time. As he says, he is trying to do the right thing by proposing to one of the sisters whom he will disinherit. One feels for him at the same time as one laughs at his pretensions of a proposal to a young woman who clearly has no interest in him.

So go see this wonderful romantic comedy. Wonderful author Jane Austen. Wonderful novel. Wonderful film.

MLA Conflict over NYU Strike

Last week I attended the MLA, the largrest professional organization for academics in modern languages, where the biggest conflict was over a Radical Caucus’s emergency resolution to support the graduate students’ strike at NYU led by Graduate Students Organizing Committee/Local 2110 UAW (GSOC).

In 2000 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that graduate students at private universities who teach sections at their colleges have the right to unionize (graduate students at public universities like UC and University of Michigan already have that right and are unionized). Then NYU recognized GSOC union for its graduate students who teach and signed a first contract in 2002; GSOC helped get its members a raise in pay to $19,000 and better health benefits. But in July 2004 the NLRB, which had Bush appointees, reversed itself on a 3-2 party line vote, saying graduate students at private universities like NYU don’t have the right to unionize. NYU then rescinded its recognition of GSOC, refusing to recognize the union’s grievance procedure, and basically tried to destroy the union, so November 9 GSOC went out on strike.

NYU President John Sexton sent a November 28 email ordering striking students to return to work December 5. If they didn’t, he threatened striking students with loss of their spring semester stipends (their jobs); further, if they took any work action in the spring, they would lose their jobs for the next two semesters. Faced with much pressure in terms of emails and letters, Sexton postponed the December 5 deadline, but it still hangs there, threatening graduate students with loss of jobs and a blacklist. Under the 2000 NLRB ruling, NYU’s action of reprisals against unionists on strike is illegal, but now under the 2002 NLRB ruling NYU’s actions are technically “legal” but clearly unethical.

Bill Mullen of the Radical Caucus brought an Emergency Resolution in support of GSOC, and at the MLA meeting of the Delegates Assembly Organizing Committee (DAOC) on December 28^th , anybody who has resolutions or motions discusses them with DAOC before the actual Delegates Assembly (DA). Well, we members of GSOC, the Radical Caucus, and other pro-trade unionists all argued for the emergency resolution. I was there as a member of the Radical Caucus. Also, I’ve a staunch trade-unionist, having founded a trade union local once. The Radical Caucus more than any other group in the MLA has supported trade union rights for academics, particlarly non-tenure track, part-timers, and graduate students. Furthermore, my dad was a graduate of NYU. Since the MLA had already passed Motion 1999-11 supporting unionization of graduate students at both private and public universities in 2000, we thought the Emergency Resolution would pass.

At the December 28 meeting DAOC members told us that the MLA Constitution had a new amendment saying emergency resolutions “shall not name individuals or institutions in such a way that, in the determination of the committee, a response from the named party must be sought.” If persons or an institution are named, then the MLA must have the time (unspecified) to ask them for a reply, but since the DA was to vote on all resolutions within 24 hours on December 29^th, there was no time to get a reply.

After some debate, Michael Berube of DAOC proposed a compromise that the Radical Caucus revise their resolution, removing the clause that said NYU threatening sanctions against GSOC, and ask the MLA to reaffirm it’s two earlier motions supporting unionization of all graduate students. The Radical Caucus accepted Berube’s compromise for a more moderate motion urging all universities to bargain in good faith with graduate student unions and adding words to reaffirm their previous motions endorsing graduate student unions.

During the December 28^th meeting members of DAOC repeatedly urged the Radical Caucus to drop its emergency resolution and instead ask the Executive Council, the small elected ruling body of the MLA, to take action supporting the NYU strikers. Druing the lively debate that occurred DAOC members said an emergency resolution isn’t really “emergency” as first it has to be voted on by the DA on December 29^th, next goes to the Executive Committee who ensures the resolutions aren’t libelous or untruthful, next the membership of MLA votes on them and only then eleven months later in November, 2006, would the emergency resolution take place.

But we wanted to go forward, taking the emergency resolution to the DA the next day. People felt that if the DA would pass a pro-NYU strikers motion, it would help immediately the strikers, some of whom were seated there. The strikers might lose their jobs within weeks, and we wanted to give them support. That afternoon DAOC had a meeting to give it’s opinion on the resolutions.

Next day the Delegates Assembly took place in a large ballroom at the Marriott in Northwest Washington D.C. The elected delegates sent in the front of a ballroom while the non-elected (again GSOC strikers were there, members of the Radical Caucus, and, of course, other interested MLA members) sat in the back of the room with the Executive Council (EC) members at the front podium. Bill Mullen again introduced the revised NYU emergency resolution that was a compromise. Next Michelle Massé of DAOC said they had “a prolonged, intense and deeply divisive discussion” in their meeting and they had deadlocked: some members believed that NYU should have the chance to respond to the revised resolution while others thought that a response from NYU wasn’t needed

Next the parliamentarian ruled the NYU emergency resolution was out of order for a second reason: Robert’s Rules of Order forbid organizations from voting to reaffirm previous actions. Since the Emergency Resolution asks the MLA delegates to reaffirm its two previous pro-union motions, it is 100% out of order. It would be too confusing for a organization to get a chance to not affirm its previous resolutions, so any resolution asking them for such a vote is void.

Again, many people spoke at the mikes in an passionate debate. One asked if there was any way the NYU emergency resolution could be revised to bring it to a vote. The answer was “no.” Bill Mullen argued that DA is the larger and more representative elected body of the Executive Council, so it should vote on NYU resolution rather than the EC. Cynthia Young, one of the Yale graduate student strikers of that strike a decade ago, said at the 1995 DA the MLA vote to censure Yale during its graduate student strike had an immediate, positive effect to help the strikers, so similar vote for NYU voters would have also have an immediate positive effect. GSOC strikers NYU went to the mike saying how important an MLA resolution would be to them. The answers were again and again the NYU emergency resolution was dead. I got up to speak once as a non-delegate, but the chair ruled that they had run at of time and had to move on to other business.

At the very end of the four-hour meeting, after all other business had been concluded, people were still give their opinions about the NYU strike at the mikes—one for delegates in front and one for non-delegates in back. I and two others from the Radical Caucus lined up to speak (we could only speak for about two minutes). The three of us were standing there when the chair said since the meeting was nearly over non-delegates could no longer speak but only delegates.

Barbara Foley, the Radical Caucus member who was also a delegate, went to the delegates' mike saying she would give her time to let the non-delegates to speak. The chair said, “No.” The chair at the front podium said they could ask the DA as a whole to vote to extend the time of the meeting, but they needed a quorum of 36 votes. Well, 34 delegates present voted 33 to 1 to let us three in the back of the room, but it wasn’t the 36 needed for the quorum, so the chair adjourned the meeting. I never did get a chance to speak at the DA.

What can one conclude from all this? The College Art Association months again passed a resolution to support GSOC union at NYU. The press and others often call the MLA “radical, “left,” or one of the more radical of the academic professional organizations. It isn’t radical at all. The MLA isn't on the left at all. MLA is apolitical.

MLA is basically an organization devoted to scholarship and scholarly publishing which is figuring if it wants to do advocacy on and what kind of advocacy. Some members want advocacy while others do not want it do advocacy at all but concentrate on scholarship, remaining apolitical. Now the MLA is having that debate and will, indeed, debate the topic of MLA and activism at the 2006 DA. I hope that will be a productive discussion.

As for NYU, the right to organize a labor union is a basic human right—and certainly any person should have the right to unionize without fear of losing one’s job or blacklists. All the trade union bloc wanted was for the MLA to reaffirm NYU graduate students' basic human rights to have a union. We tried our best but we failed. I do hope, speaking as an individual, that the Executive Council will soon vote a strong resolution supporting NYU strikers. I also hope that the NYU strikers do not lose their jobs this spring and next year.

California Writer Goes to Washington D.C.

I just returned from a one-week trip to Washington D.C. where I did some sightseeing and went to the Modern Language Association Convention, the largest convention of higher education teachers in language. During Christmas dinner at my friend's mother's home I met an engineer and an architect: the engineer had helped create the Washingotn D.C. subway in the 1970s and 1980s while the architect had worked for years on historic preservation of older buildings in the city. The engineer said that visionaries created this subway Well, the visionaries did a fine job as the subway was excellent: it was clean; full of riders of all ethnicities and classes; and moved passengers quickly around the city. I wish Los Angeles had such a good subway system: we need visionaries to enlarge LA's small subway to make it more like D.C.'s subway.

Also, the architect and his fellow historical preservationists also seemed to be doing a good job. As I walked and bused mainly along Connecticut Avenue from northwest D.C. to the National Mall, I was impressed by the main fine looking mutli-story older dark brick buildings--from two-store family homes in northwest to three to eight-story apartment buildings and hotels more toward downtown. In the Kalorama section of Dupont Circle the two-, three- and four-story brick buildings were quite beautiful in their dark muted browns, maroons, blues. From the bus I saw many restuarants of different ethnicities ranging to Cajun to Indian to sushi to French to Italien: D.C. has a lively international food culture.

On the National Mall I particulary enjoyed visiting the new National Musuem of the American Indian where in the atreium in the lobby my friend Anne and I heard a trio of Peruvian Indians play music from Peru. Then we went to the see the exhibits of Native American cosmologies on the 4th floor, learning about cosmologies of the Mapeche Indians in Chile; the Maya in Guatemala; the Huppa in Northern California; and others. We had lunch in the fine cafeteria, eating the 5-dish sampler of Native foods: Buffalo roasted meat of Plains Indians; salmon from Pacific Northwest tribes; a cooked tomato dish as tomatoes were first cultivated by Mexican Indians; wild rice and watercress salad as wild rice is a staple of Chippewa in Northern Michican; and mashed potatoes as Inca first cultivated potatoes.

The next day I visited the National Gallery of Art, stood in the wonderful room ful of Rembrandt paintings; was entralled by the Manet and Degas works; walked through room full of Audubon drawings of birds; saw a wonderful selection of paintings by United States artists from the 1790s through the mid-20th century. The National Gallery of Art has a far richer collection of painting than the Los Angeles County Musuem of Art. Of course, many other musuems lined the National Mall--but I didn't have time to go see these other musuems. Again, I thought another group of visionaries had created these terrific musuems that ringed the National Mall. One would need a week to visit the rich collections in the many wonderful musuems of Washington D.C.

Of course, the city has its problems. Recently with the rise of prices for renting apartments as well as for buying houses, the city has like so many others a lack of afforable housing. One professor who works at a D.C. college told me that D.C. public school teachers, bus drivers, or police officers no long can afford to buy a house in the city where they work. Also, the architect I met said he owns a house in the Capital Hill district right south of the Capitol but that district of modest small worker houses is being gentrified and has skyrocketing home prices for even very small homes--15' across, long, and two-story. I was told that throughout most of the city where people of color live the schools as well as the health care systems needs to be improved. So D.C.'s problems--lack of affordable housing; schools and health care need investment--are the nation's problems.

Well, the people of D.C. has had visionaries who created their wonderful subway system and the great musuems, so hopefully more visionaries will emerge to create better housing, schools, and health care.

Yiddish Culture Made Easy

At the one-day Yiddish Experience I went to December 18 as I walked out of the classroom, I spoke with my conversation partner who asked where my people came from. I replied, "Near Minsk in White Russia in a little shtetl (little Jewish village)." She said she recently went to White Russia for a visit and suggested I go. I asked her, "What was it like?" She said, "Like 200 years ago." I said, "No cars." She said, "Right." I had visions of horse and carts like some shtetl stories I've read. When I stood in line for lunch when asked a question, I'd say "yo" or "neny" or "a denk" (yes, no or thank you).

During lunch my mom and I shared a table with one of the Yiddish teachers who looked about 40 and who spoke all through lunch in Yiddish with two of his students who were young women in their early twenties. That's the first Yiddish conversation I've heard in many decades. It was just fascinating to hear people talk and talk and talk and talk in Yiddish! On the other side of my mother was a friendly looking woman so I asked her, "Vi heyst ir?" (What's your name?) Already, a Yiddish conversation!

After lunch we went downstairs to the chapel to hear Janet Hadda, Professor Emerita of Yiddish Language and Literature at UCLA spoke about I.B. Singer and his heroes. He seemd to have a lot of heroes: his brother Israel Joshua who was a successful Yiddish writer long before I.B. Singer was; his mother Basheva; and his rabbi father. Hadda said at first many Yiddishists (lovers of Yiddish) didn't like I.B. Singer because they didn't like his openess about sexuality. Many of his male characters have multiple wives like Herman Broder in the novel Enemies, a Love Story. But the current generation of Yiddishists seems not to be put off by Singer's treatment of sexuality in his novels.

The last event of the day was a workshop by Theodore Bikel, a great singer. He was accompanied by Deborah Strauss and Jeff Warschauer as he gave a workshop about Morechai Gerbirtig, one of the greatest songwriters in Yiddish. Bikel would tell us a little about Gerbirtig's life, sing a song, and then talk a little more.

Gerbirtig was born in Kracow, Poland, in 1877 to a poor family, and became a carpenter. In his spare time he wrote wonderful poems and songs, but never recorded. Luckily, another Jew in Krawcow wrote down Gerbirtig's poems and songs in two manuscripts, and these two manuscripts miracleously survived the Holocaust: one copy wascarried to Israel while the second copy survived in YIVO, the Yiddish archive in New York. Gerbirtig himself was killed by the Nazis in 1942, but Bikel reminded us his music survived the Shoah.

Bikel sang us Gerbirtig's song "Yankele,": a mother sings to her son Yankele to go to sleep, hoping he will grow to become a great scholar but she knows it will cost her much hard work "and many tears to make a man out of you." In "Motele" there is a father-son dialogue with the father berating the son for fighting in kheder (religious school), chasing after doves, and breaking windows. The son defends himself by saying that grandfather told him that the father also liked to chase after doves and the teacher whipped the father, but dad turned out all right and so will he.

Besides these songs, Bikel also sang us two love songs: in one a non-Jewish goatherd tries a woo a Jewish girl who says that any romance in impossible because of their different religions. The final song was a spirited pro-worker march that Gerbirtig wrote. Bikel's singing was mesmerizing while the musicians who accompanied him were wonderful. I could have sat there hours more listening to Bikel who has immense knowledge of Yiddish song as well as being a captivating performer.

All in all I was inspired by my one-day Yiddish extensive to try for a whole week! Next year, a week of Yiddish language and culture.