An infrequently updated catch-all page, last changed on 4/9/2003.
Poetry … and Politics
I've been writing poetry occasionally for the last several years, mostly in a workshop at The Writer's Voice program at New York's West Side Y. Major influences include Robert Bly, William Stafford and William Carlos Williams, although my recent work has taken a turn toward the surreal, inspired perhaps by Charles Simic, Mark Strand and John Ashbery. Other poets I especially admire are Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Wright, Derek Walcott and Edward Dorn.
In times of unjust war, poets' voices have often been the most prophetic and outspoken in opposition. This was true during the Vietnam War and is again the case today as the Bush adminstration implements its occupation of Iraq and seizure of that country's oil wealth. Poets Against the War is a new website that grew out of the White House's failed attempt to stifle dissent by suddenly cancelling a literary event. Poets for Peace is a similar web project. Some of the best antiwar writing has appeared in Harper's magazine; New Left Review and openDemocracy provide trenchant analysis, Common Dreams offers alternative news coverage, and Not in Our Name and United for Peace & Justice have organized against the war (see photos of February 15 rally and March 22 march in New York). Links to some key web articles are available here.
For more online poetry, visit People's Poetry Festival and their great page of poetry links. The Plagiarist maintains a web archive of some 7,500 poems by 400 poets. The United States of Poetry is an especially rich poetry website, with gems such as Ferlinghetti's "I Am Waiting". New, unpublished and obscure poets are featured on the omnivorous Poetry Superhighway site. And even you can be an online poet!
Science & Literature
I do my best to keep up with the latest developments in science, especially astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology. I'm a frequent visitor to the magnificent new Rose Center for Earth and Space and a regular at Hayden Planetarium lectures. Presiding over that venue is Neil deGrasse Tyson, an energetic popularizer and unapologetic defender of science and rationalism in the tradition of Carl Sagan. The most intriguing speaker I've heard there was probably Lee Smolin, author of The Life of the Cosmos, who suggests that the universe itself is a product of natural selection. His work parallels that of Stuart Kauffman (e.g., At Home in the Universe).
I'm also drawn to fiction in which science and scientists are taken seriously, especially the novels of Richard Powers (more Powers), Rebecca Goldstein's Properties of Light, and Don DeLillo's masterwork Underworld. Though not science-centered, David Mitchell's stunning novel Ghostwritten shares DeLillo's and Powers's themes of fragmentation and interconnectedness in a globalizing world, as does Barbara Kingsolver in The Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver's latest, Prodigal Summer, is a spicy treatise on biological diversity).
More food for thought on the troubled relationship between technological "progress" and social needs can be found in Stephen Talbott's The Future Does Not Compute and his excellent newsletter NETFUTURE; in the provocative items Phil Agre posts on his Red Rock Eater News Service; and in Zygmunt Bauman's compelling polemic Globalization: The Human Consequences. For the wittiest, most trenchant critiques of starry-eyed futurism, free-market neoconservatism, and postmodernist obscurantism, don't miss The Baffler and Doug Henwood's Left Business Observer. And for a satirical viewpoint on just about everything, The Onion is indispensable.
Here's a list of other books I've read lately. Final book note: the online magazine N.b., which used to publish my book reviews, has been discontinued and the site no longer exists. Copies of some of those reviews are still available here.
Jazz and American culture
I've become a serious jazz fan in recent years, enjoying especially the programs presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center, the world's largest program in jazz education, performance and broadcast. Trumpet virtuoso and composer Wynton Marsalis is the Artistic Director, and historian and novelist Albert Murray provides intellectual guidance. As Duke Ellington said, Al Murray is "the unsquarest person around"; his books are definitely worth checking out—especially Trading Twelves, a new collection of Murray's correspondence with Ralph Ellison. Another writer affiliated with J@LC is Stanley Crouch, who has written many insightful and provocative essays on jazz, including one on Louis Armstrong. For Al Murray's assessment of Armstrong's contributions, click here.
A sumptuous book that riffs in words and images on jazz, the visual arts and literature is Alfred Appel's Jazz Modernism. Al Murray riffs here on some of the same themes. Jazz history and cultural politics is explored in Robert O'Meally's The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. O'Meally, director of Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies, has also edited a fine collection of Ellison's jazz writings.
Going deeper into the roots of American modernism and U.S. cultural history in the 20th Century is Ann Douglas's Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York celebrates the utopian possibilities of urban modernism, as does David Gelernter's 1939: The Lost World of the Fair. Darker views can be found in Luc Santé's Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York and Eric Darton's Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York City's World Trade Center. Further critiques of modern/postmodern architecture, suburban "sprawl" and urban crisis can be found in James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere and Home From Nowhere. Kunstler aims to popularize the ideas of the architects and planners associated with the Congress for the New Urbanism, and resonates with recent books by James Scott, Robert Kaplan and Zygmunt Bauman. Acute observation of American urban places is central to the novels of Jonathan Franzen and Mark Winegardner. Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory also addresses cultural constructions of space and time, as does Michael Frayn's evocation of Bruegel's landscape paintings in his novel Headlong.
Mark Twain & Hannibal
Having spent the first ten years of my life in Hannibal, Missouri, I've long had an interest in the career and writings of Mark Twain—even while being put off by the idealization of Hannibal as America's quintessential small town and its transformation into a seedy tourist trap. An indispensable trilogy helped me come to terms with the Hannibal myth and deepen my appreciation for Twain: Shelley Fisher Fishkin's Lighting Out for the Territory, and two books by Ron Powers—White Town Drowsing: Journeys to Hannibal and Dangerous Waters: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain. Fishkin is an indefatigable defender of Huckleberry Finn as a powerful anti-racist novel that belongs in the public schools; Powers is a fellow Hannibal native—we bicycled the same boyhood streets. Gregg Andrews' City of Dust sheds additional light on the dark side of Hannibal. So too does Ron Powers' latest book, Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Any More, which combines evocative personal memoir with powerful journalism condemning the bleak situation of children and young people in contemporary America. As for Twain's own writings, a good place to start is Life on the Mississippi.
Had he lacked the good sense to desert the Confederate militia in 1861 and "light out for the Territory," Sam Clemens might have wound up like the young men portrayed in Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil, which parallels Huckleberry Finn in its starkly unsentimental yet humorous portrayal of a young German-American and an ex-slave caught up in the maelstrom of the Civil War in Missouri. My good friend Ric Averill had a small part in that film—a minor gem now surpassed by the same director's epic masterpiece, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Enron, WorldCom, …
Last year's corporate scandals started me thinking about the neoliberal economic orthodoxy that replaced New Deal liberalism, starting in the Reagan/Thatcher years. Some scholars have termed this the era of "post-Fordism," distinguishing it from an earlier set of practices known as Fordism, in which the ideal type was a well-managed, viable corporation that produced specific sorts of real goods for stable, well-defined markets and took care of its employees' welfare over the long haul. Enron in particular represented the opposite in all respects: not really producing much of anything but acting as a financial parasite on a range of volatile markets (energy, internet bandwidth, etc.) with top managers looking out only for their own profits and scamming everyone—consumers, regulators, their own employees and even Board members who were not in the inner loop. As Paul Krugman noted, more Enrons are no doubt waiting to happen. Conservatives don't want to admit it, but the affair may be about the bankruptcy not of a few rogue corporations but of the entire system of values and practices apotheosized in Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America".
In any case , it's fun to watch—perhaps the time for an Anti-Capitalist Convergence is finally approaching. One positive sign is the annual gatherings of tens of thousands of activists at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil: against the claim that "there is no alternative" (TINA), the Forum affirms that "Another world is possible."
September 11, 2001
My family and I survived intact the tragic events of September 11 in New York City. We were anguished by the death and devastation, and disturbed by the militaristic and racist response the attacks evoked. I compiled a page of links to help foster a deeper understanding of the global context, meaning and consequences of these events. For too brief a time, Union Square was a site of public remembrance and reflection for New Yorkers. An outstanding hour of music for the victims of the attacks is still available from KCRW (requires RealPlayer).
L'affaire proustienne
For a long time I used to brag about reading all five volumes of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (a/k/a Remembrance of Things Past) (well, almost all …). The point of this paragraph is really just to offer a great Proust quote about a job I used to have. The Proust kick got started several years ago during one of our frequent summer sojourns at Thompson's Point, Vermont on Lake Champlain—always a great place for extended reading, among other things.
Fragments of a Dissertation
Once upon a time I was in a Ph.D. program in Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research, writing a dissertation on 19th-century Argentina. Herewith the fragmentary results. (An expansive and idiosyncratic treatment of the same period can be found in James Dunkerley's Americana. )
The Family
Russell and Sarah's pages became badly out of date and have temporarily been taken down. Meanwhile, they appear frequently in the Photo Gallery. To get acquainted with Carol's current work, visit www.wicej.org.
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