Isak

I Just Heard:

Utah Phillips died this week. This musician-storyteller pitched his life and art in his peace, labor rights, and anti-poverty vision.

He also was an archivist, a historian and a traveler, playing guitar and singing almost forgotten songs of the dispossessed and the downtrodden, and keeping alive the memory of labor heroes like Emma Goldman, Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World, “the Wobblies,” in a society that too soon forgets.

That's from Amy Goodman's remembrance over at Truthdig, which goes on to recall Phillips' connection to a movement close to my heart, the Catholic Workers:

After three years in the Army, he went back to the state that earned him his nickname, Utah. There he met Ammon Hennacy, a radical pacifist, who had started the Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City, inspired by the Catholic Worker movement. Hennacy guided Utah Phillips toward pacifism. Utah recalled: “Ammon came to me one day and said, ‘You’ve got to be a pacifist.’ And I said, ‘How’s that?’ He said, ‘Well, you act out a lot. You use a lot of violent behavior.’ And I was. You know, I was very angry. ‘You’re not just going to lay down guns and fists and knives and hard angry words. You’re going to have to lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.’ If there’s one struggle that animates my life, it’s probably that one.”

Hennacy, it might be noted, inspired some of Dorothy Day's most interesting reflections in her writing that appears in the volume of her work, listed in the sidebar here.

More recently, Phillips collaborated with Ani Difranco in a super-duo of independent musicians. They're work was nominated for a Grammy award. Phillips also married DiFranco a few years back.

I'm pretty new to Phillips' songs, but its true that you're not going to hear much like it anywhere. Full of stories that are true, told in a strong voice you want to trust, with music that lures you to listen to what otherwise might feel like a speech. Maybe this is something that the progressive movement has lost in recent years: the songs embedded in it.

People associate "We Shall Overcome" with the civil rights movement, and drumming circles with communes. Back in Boston, Haley House celebrates an annual Christmas concert with Charlie King, a musician that was part of the Worker community there. It's a wonderful time when folks from the early days of Haley House come and socialize with the new generation of it. And King's show is one of those interactive folksy types--there are refrains, and those of us gathered on chairs and on floors and leaning against walls are invited to join in.There are singalongs and choruses. Charlie doesn't want us to listen to him and his guitar strictly; he sees himself as a song leader, rather than a singer.

And here's the thing: us younger types, including me, are consumed in bashfulness at the sing-a-long parts, while the older generation leaps in with joy. I remember some brand-new Haley volunteers assuming an air of irony, a smirking smile. I, and others, were afraid of sounding bad. It took a long time for us to let down our guard and just start singing with the group and having a good time--even at my second and third Charlie King shows.

Why? Because song isn't as fundamental to communities in the progressive movement today, especially among the younger generation, as it was in the past. And this is a terrible loss. Because not only is song a source of joy, not only does it bring people together in what can sometimes be a bitterly divided struggle, not only is there something ancient and spiritual when a group of people sing together in a common vision of hope, but song in the progressive movement is disarming.

That is, as Utah Phillips manifests, song is a way to tell our stories and our histories, a way to re-vision our future, in a way that invites you into it, in a way that speeches and editorials cannot. People put their guards up when they feel they are being lectured. Not so when they hear songs. And yet, as evidenced by song's place in the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and other communities, it has extraordinary and active power in sustaining our struggles. In creating a more peaceful world.

Utah Phillips was among the few folks I know of who fuse storytelling and music in a way that manifests the world we want to live in. Pete Seeger's another, and Charlie King, of course. Buffy St. Marie did it; and the Indigo Girls have a great cover of St. Marie's song, "Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee." Bob Dylan has done it. Most importantly, there are the many musicians who pick guitars in the vans that drive down to rallys and the drummers who pick up beats during strikes and the many other nameless folks who keep music with us. But they are too few.

I want the songs to come back

As Goodman writes, the music is fundamental to our collective memory.

But Utah Phillips was a living bridge, keeping the rich history of labor struggles alive. He told me: “The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. You haven’t gotten it in your schools. You’re not getting it on your television. You’re being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. Mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we’ve been through and trivializing important events. No, our people’s history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions.”

Phillips was 73 years old.

Image credits: Americans Who Tell The Truth; Haley House; Amazon

Gabriel García Márquez is Brilliant

Okay, so that's not exactly news. But in the last few days, as I came to the end of the books I've been reading (review of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is coming soon), I've had the itch to peruse my books--to read a little here, something there, to just follow along wherever my interest wanders and callously reject, for a few days, such restrictive notions as reading all the pages between two covers.

And where my interest dwelled was with Gabriel García Márquez I re-read his interview in my copy of The Paris Review Interviews, Volume II. I read a hallucinatory chapter in One Hundred Years of Solitude (and mentally committed myself to reading the whole book again soon). I took in a few--slow--pages in a Spanish copy of Crónica de una muerte anunciada. And then I sat myself at my computer to read García Márquez's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

What wonderful perusing. Let me offer you some of the fruits I picked, without obliging you to the logistics:

Why is the originality so readily granted us (Latin Americans) in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?
~Nobel Prize speech

In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That's the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer.
~interview with The Paris Review

It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay.
~One Hundred Years of Solitude

"They felt that they had been the victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
~One Hundred Years of Solitude

Michigan Inspiration for Theodore Roethke

It's been a century since Theodore Roethke was born in Saginaw, MI. NPR seizes the day with a look at Roethke, his poetry, and how his childhood home fed into his writing.

I first came to know Roethke by the prize in his name at the University of Michigan for a long poetic series. And I've enjoyed his work, but at a distance. I don't know it well, and I think I've felt a little intimidated by it. No good reason (is there every a good reason for feeling intimidated by a poet?). But I think it was the poet Marianne Boruch who told me that she took a pilgrimage to Roethke's former home in Saginaw, and that it was a wonderful and fun and revelatory time. Maybe a trip like that would be a nice way to let myself sink into his writing, get to know this Michigan poem-writer a bit better. A little ritual never hurt anyone.

Via

How the Third-Longest War in American History Lost its Newsworthiness

Sherry Ricchiardi has a thoughtful and distressing piece in American Journalism Review about how we've watched "stories about Iraq move from 1A to the inside pages of his newspaper, if they ran at all."

During the first 10 weeks of 2007, Iraq accounted for 23 percent of the newshole for network TV news. In 2008, it plummeted to 3 percent during that period. On cable networks it fell from 24 percent to 1 percent. ..

The numbers also were dismal for the country's dailies. ... during the first three months of this year, front-page stories about Iraq in the (Sacramento) Bee were down 70 percent from the same time last year. Articles about Iraq once topped the list for reader feedback. ...

A daily tracking of 65 newspapers by the Associated Press confirms a dip in page-one play throughout the country. In September 2007, the AP found 457 Iraq-related stories (154 by the AP) on front pages, many related to a progress report delivered to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. Over the succeeding months, that number fell to as low as 49. A spike in March 2008 was largely due to a rash of stories keyed to the conflict's fifth anniversary ...

During the early stages of shock and awe, Americans were glued to the news as Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in Baghdad ...

By March 2008, a striking reversal had taken place. Only 28 percent of Americans knew that 4,000 military personnel had been killed in the conflict ... Eight months earlier, 54 percent could cite the correct casualty rate.

The challenge, of course, is how to face the powerlessness that these stories fill us citizens with--and lead us to avoid Iraq news. One source in the AJR article notes that after five years, with no end in sight, most people have come to their conclusions about the U.S. war in Iraq, and they're unlikely to change it or get new insight when they hear about another market bombing on the radio.

As well, it's a challenge for news media to tell the stories of Iraq in ways that transcend mind-numbing casualty lists--especially when the presidential election offers a glittering news alternative. The Bush administration doesn't make coverage easy, with it's ridiculous efforts to keep the media distanced from American casualties by banning on-base photographs of coffins and roping off reporters at Arlington funerals.

Most disturbingly, it's a challenge to keep reporters alive and healthy in Iraq, particularly when newsroom budgets are fragile. A lot of midsize papers are, quite reasonably, covering Iraq with a local angle--local military families, Brownie troops that send care packages to soldiers, a local facility that manufactures military supplies. Richiarrdi's reporting for this story revealed that newsrooms didn't seem to be making a conscious decision to lay off Iraq coverage. Some of the editors she talks with feel comfortable with the shift as simply the natural course of a news cycle--many days, there isn't anything new to say about Iraq. But I feel the falseness in that. The decision of my country to go to Iraq is probably the single most influential foreign policy decision of my lifetime--there must be more to say about it then simply filing a formula report each time a suicide bomber hits.

Happily--yes, happily--Richiarrdi notes the extraordinary coverage of Iraq that has emerged, including The Washington Post's stories on the neglect of veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center; and the same newspaper's reporting on private security contracts in Iraq. And there are others. Check it out.

Meet the "Dickens of Detroit"

Elmore Leonard gets a hefty profile in The Washington Post. When I began reading it, I at first thought the opening paragraphs were from a Leonard story; but no. The story is Leonard. Except the call him 'Dutch.' 

Dutch lives in suburban Detroit, but his world is off-kilter America, primarily a vision of the lower end of the post-Vietnam era, when the margins got thin, the morals of the nation got cloudy, and irony became a survival mechanism.

And Elmore Leonard is the winner of this year's F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature. Previous winners include Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Norman Mailer, and E.L. Doctorow.

I'm interested in Leonard, because, like Stephen King, he holds an uncommon balance between being relegated as a 'mere' popular novelist and being an esteemed 'literary writer.' The fact that successful movies have been made from their books--again and again--makes some folks sniff. The establishment about had a hernia when King won an honorary National Book Award a few years back; King rightly slammed that isolationist mentality in his acceptance speech as being a death knell for literature. 

I'm curious what the response will be for Leonard's award.

From the article:

Leonard isn't Raymond Chandler, the designated crime writer allowed to perch upon Mount Literature. He was a copy writer for an ad agency who started writing for pulp western magazines in the 1950s, getting up at 5 a.m. to crank out a couple of pages before work. He didn't have a bestseller for 30 years.

"It came down, on the final ballot, to Elmore and John Irving,' says John Moser, the conference president. "Elmore won."

I admire the writing of both King and Leonard, though I've read much more of King's writing. Leonard's Complete Western Stories and another book of his short novels sit on my shelf and welcome me to read at will. The work ethic of these two writers is irreproachable; it gives me something to aim for. And it's thrilling to see how often their hard work is rewarded with brilliant stories and sharp writing.

Thanks (again) to Chris for the link to the Leonard profile.

Love/Hate

The thing about William Grimes' little essay on 1001 Books to Read Before You Die is that it acknowledges how such lists are play on guilt and inadequacy in readers, and a show-offiness of listmakers. But it doesn't reject the concept of making these sorts of vaguely threatening reading lists. Grimes plays ball. He offers his own ideas for how'd he'd change up the list, he counts how many he's read and he tries a few titles he's never heard of. Hell, who can help it? I'm both repelled and attracted to things like 1001 Books, in the same way that I was repelled and attracted to the cool clique in school. Even as I may loathe its ways, I want to enmesh myself in it, and prove my superiority on its own terms. In the case of 1001 Books, that of course means to have read a ridiculous proportion of the list, and to have strong opinions about what should've been included and what should've been excised. In the case of the cool clique, it meant me looking cool or being cool or otherwise winning admiration from people who are cool. And then, in a true gesture of triumph, having won my stripes on the terms of 1001 Books and/or the cool clique, I dismiss them out of hand, even mock them.

This is not a healthy emotional cycle.

Thanks to Chris for the link. And the distressing revisiting of my dual nature.

Of the News

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz speaks quite plainly about the emotional cost of buyouts at his newspaper, and papers around the country. 

No one need shed any tears for the people leaving this building. The more than 100 journalists who have just taken early-retirement packages are voluntarily accepting a generous offer as the company trims its payroll -- a situation far better than at newspapers that have resorted to layoffs.

But it is painful to watch from the inside. The talented reporters, editors and photographers walking out the door are part of the heart and soul of a living, breathing organism. How do you replace a Tom Ricks, one of the best Pentagon reporters ever? Or a Sue Schmidt, the investigative reporter who revealed Jack Abramoff's dirty dealings? Or Robin Wright, who's covered the Middle East for a quarter-century? What about battle-scarred editors with deep knowledge and a light touch?

I know, I know. The future is digital. The Web is a cornucopia of fast-moving video and blogs and bulletins and gossip, while newspapers are old, slow and less than hip. That's why The Post (and every other paper on the planet) is beefing up its online presence and why I write a daily blog for the Web site.

But -- and stop me if you've heard this one -- newspapers matter. There isn't a Web site around that can produce the probing work, such as the exposé of shoddy conditions at the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center that won The Post six Pulitzer Prizes this year. The economics of the Web, for now, won't support a staff that can hold public officials accountable across the region and still cover every Nationals game. So I cling to an old-fashioned, almost mystical belief in the power of ink on paper.

I hear Kurtz on this one, even as I champion the wonderful possibilities of the web world. I suscribed not to long ago to the Detroit Free Press--it's my very first newspaper subscription in my name--and it's true, I'm encountering a lot of stories that, had I seen them online, my mouse would've glided right over. Having the ink-and-paper in hand challenges my selectivity--and makes reading the newspaper all the more interesting.

In other media news, there's an interesting Politico piece on how the trouble with today's news comes down trouble with scope--trivial news lasts while tough investigative reporting passes by with nary a nod.

Rest in Peace, Sydney Pollack

The director who adapted Isak Dinesen's book, Out of Africa, into a film that I never tire of watching, has died of cancer.

The Indiana native also directed Tootsie, Jeremiah Johnson, The Way We Were, Absence of Malice, The Firm, and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, among others. One year ago, shortly before it was announced that he had cancer, he announced his intent to do an HBO film called Recount that examined the 2000 presidential election. He had to pull out of the project when he got sick, and I think we're all the poorer for it.

Pollack doubled as an actor, starring recently in Michael Clayton, and in a variety of stage and television roles.

Poem Found While Paging Through Tony Hoagland's Book of Essays on Poetry & Craft

Birthday Cake
By Paul Goodman

Now isn’t it time
when the candles on the icing
are one two too many
too many to blow out
too many to count too many
isn’t it time to give up this ritual?

although the fiery crown
fluttering in the chocolate
and through the darkened room advancing
is still the most loveliest sight
among the savage folk
that have few festivals.

But the thicket is too hot and thick
and isn’t it time, isn’t it time
when the fires are too many
to eat the fire and not the cake
and drip the fires from my teeth
as once I had in my hot hot youth.

Elsewhere

If you didn't catch it elsewhere, my article, "Society of the Incarcerated," is now up over at the website of the Atlanta Center for Policy Analysis. This think-tank is an uncommon sort, bringing together "political satire and serious comment." Which is pretty awesome.

I'll leave it to you to decide for yourself where my own article falls.

In Memorium: Unfinished Books

This Memorial Day, I see fit to mourn and honor the books that I anticipated with pleasure, began reading with enthusiasm, moved through a significant portion of the pages, and, for one reason or another, abandoned it. These are the books that I didn't put down because I was bored or nonplussed, but books that were cut off when life intervened--books that were lost, and not promptly replaced; or books that my mind moved away from them when I got consumed with a move or a heartbreak or some other life upheaval. A few of them I had I had in large, hefty hardcover editions, which diminished my ability to carry them around with ease, which in turn slowed my reading of them to a point of stasis. Another handful I was assigned to read in a college lit class, and I didn't move quickly enough through the pages before it was time to get on with the next novel.

You might say that these are books that were killed by friendly fire.

And so, in no particular order, here's to their memory. Maybe I'll get around to resurrecting them soon.

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo
• The Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaki
• Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
• The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne
• Woman: An Intimate Geography, by Natalie Angier
• Middlemarch, by George Eliot
• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
• The Adolescent, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Insulted and the Injured, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil
• Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver
• Richard II, by William Shakespeare
• Beowulf
• Sir Gaiwan and the Green Knight
• Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary by Juan Williams
• Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder
• Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, by Kevin Boyle
• Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942-1943, by Czeslaw Milosz