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Close Guantanamo Prison: No Justice
as Obama Force-Feeds Prisoners
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| Sep 27, 2013 By Matt Richards |
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When President
Obama ran for election in 2008, he proudly proclaimed, “America does not
torture!” With public disgust at the Bush administration’s policies of torture
and extraordinary rendition running high, Obama pledged to end the torture of
foreign detainees and close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Now, after almost a year into Obama’s second term as president, it has become clear that these promises remain unfulfilled. The prison at Guantanamo Bay remains open, with over 150 prisoners being held for the past 11 years without being accorded due process or given a fair trial. In response to these injustices, the prisoners began a hunger strike in February, 2013. The Guantanamo prisoners were captured in Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded in October, 2001, in response to the terrorist attack in New York City on 9/11. It is suspected that many of these prisoners have, at best, a tenuous link to international terrorism. Many were simply turned over to U.S. forces by rival political factions as a means to settle old political scores. Others were falsely accused of terrorist activity and turned over to U.S. forces in exchange for ransom. Out of over 100 Guantanamo prisoners on hunger strike, it is reported that over 45 are being force-fed. Force-feeding is considered a violation of human rights law due to the violent and painful nature of the process. To be force-fed, a prisoner’s arms and legs are chained to a chair. The head is then strapped to the back of the chair, rendering the prisoner immobile. A feeding tube is then inserted into a nostril and forced through the sinuses, down the throat, and into the stomach. According to one detainee, Samir Moqbel, “I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can't describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t.” There was agony in my chest, throat, and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment on anyone (“Down The Tubes: The 2013 Hunger Strike at Guantanamo Bay” (www.reprieve.org.uk)). If a detainee refuses to be force-fed, beatings are common, along with the forced administration of nausea-inducing medications or time in solitary confinement. Besides falling under the United Nations' definition of torture, force-feeding also constitutes a violation of medical ethics. On Wednesday, July 24, 2013, a Senate Judiciary Committee was held on closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Retired Brigadier General Stephen N. Xenakis, M.D., explicitly stated that the force-feeding of detainees violated medical ethics, our international legal obligations, and amounted to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (www.commondreams.org, 07/25/2013). In response to this inhumane treatment, over 150 doctors issued an open letter to President Obama. This letter was published in the Lancet medical journal last June. In the letter, the doctors recognized that the detainees did not trust the military doctors who attended to them at Guantanamo. These military doctors are accused of force-feeding the detainees, who requested that civilian doctors be allowed to treat them and aid in their rehabilitation (www.cnn.com, 06/18/2013). President Obama’s response has been typically noncommittal. In a major foreign policy speech on May 23, President Obama reiterated his promise to close the Guantanamo prison as well as release 86 prisoners who were cleared to leave by his interagency task force back in January, 2010. As of this writing, these prisoners have not been released. Additionally, more than 40 prisoners continue to be force-fed and have not been granted their request to be attended to by civilian doctors. This type of inhuman and unconstitutional treatment is symptomatic of the current national surveillance state. Following the NSA surveillance revelations and the police crackdown on Occupy and other protests, the Guantanamo prison constitutes a microcosm of how the ruling elite intends to deal with threats to its political and economic interests. Activists and socialists need to recognize that the fight of the hunger strikers is also our own. We call for:
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Wednesday, October 23, 2013
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Jill Stein and Matt Gonzalez: A
Call to Action in Support of Two Independent Candidates
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| Oct 22, 2013 By Clay Showalter |
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Jill Stein
was the 2012 Green Party nominee for President of the United States. Matt
Gonzalez knows how to challenge the Democratic Party's establishment. In 2003 he
ran for mayor in San Francisco and in 2008 he became Ralph Nader's running mate
for vice president of the U.S. Here is their letter of support for our
campaign:
A CALL TO ACTION IN SUPPORT OF TWO INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES As the American public is confronted with the latest example of two-party dysfunction, exemplified by the current government shutdown, two candidates running in local municipal races, in two different cities, pose an opportunity for the Left to govern and show the American people what we can accomplish when given a chance. Both candidates self-identify as socialists and both are running unabashed left/progressive campaigns. They are serious candidates and we ask that all Independents, Greens, Libertarians, and others interested in forging a wider discourse in American politics consider financially supporting them. We believe that their success will ultimately bode well for the emergence of a multi-party state this country desperately needs. The two candidates, Kshama Sawant in Seattle and Ty Moore in Minneapolis, are already supported by unique coalitions that include Green Party, Socialists, Independents and break-away unions that are frustrated with current political leadership. Ty is backed by the SEIU Minnesota State Council, representing over 30,000 workers. Kshama has been endorsed by six unions. Kshama is also strongly supported by Seattle’s second largest newspaper, The Stranger. Both campaigns are building social movements. Kshama is at the forefront of the “Fight for 15 and a Union” in Seattle, building support for fast food strikes and raising the minimum wage. Ty helped found and lead Occupy Homes in Minneapolis, a group that fights the foreclosures carried out by the big banks. Click here and here to see inspiring videos of Ty helping to lead successful protests against evictions. These two campaigns can win, but only with your help. So far Kshama has raised $70,000 and Ty $35,000 in grassroots contributions. Neither campaign takes corporate money. But to answer the lies and distortions of their heavily funded opponents they urgently need money to send out mailers. The Kshama campaign believes they need to raise another $50,000 to send 150,000 mailers, while Ty's campaign estimates they need another $20,000 to send multiple mailers to every voter in his ward. The maximum donation to Kshama is $700 and the maximum donation to Ty is $300. Please consider giving all you can. Donate to Kshama here and for Ty here. Politics in this country is not going to change by complaining about it if that isn't also coupled with action. Supporting these candidates even with a small contribution increases the chance that they win and have an opportunity to articulate progressive ideas in opposition to what the other parties believe are intractable problems. The election of independent working class city council candidates in Seattle and Minneapolis would be an enormous step forward, providing an important platform to popularize the idea of more independent anti-corporate candidates running in a time of tremendous upheaval. Please donate to Kshama and Ty’s campaigns today. Join us, Matt Gonzalez former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Jill Stein 2012 Green Party nominee for President of the United States P.S. You may also contribute by sending a check to “Vote Sawant” at P.O. Box 85862, Seattle, WA 98145, or to “Ty Moore for City Council” at 3401 Pillsbury Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55408. If you have given over $100 to a campaign, the law requires you include your occupation, employer (if self-employed list the name under which you do business), employer’s city & state. | ||
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***Artist's Corner- "Nighthawks " -The Work Of Edward Hopper
and Tom Waits' Nighthawks At The Diner
Click below to link to site that has information about the famous American realist (?) artist Edward Hooper. Tom Waits lyrics and Edward Hopper's art (at least his famous "Nighthawks At The Diner") definitely fit together.
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hopper.html
and Tom Waits' Nighthawks At The Diner
Click below to link to site that has information about the famous American realist (?) artist Edward Hooper. Tom Waits lyrics and Edward Hopper's art (at least his famous "Nighthawks At The Diner") definitely fit together.
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hopper.html
| Nighthawk Postcards (From Easy Street) (Tom Waits 1975) | |
|---|---|
| Goodness gracious...my bass player should be chained up somewhere I wanna take you on a kind of inebriational travelogue here Well, ain't got no spare, you ain't got no jack, you don't give a shit you ain't never coming back Maybe your standing on the corner of 17th and Wazee Streets, yeah Out in front of the Terminal bar there's a Thunderbird moving in muscatel sky You've been drinking cleaning products all night Open for suggestions It's a kinda about eh...well it's kinda about going down to the corner and say 'Well I'm just going down to the corner to get a pack of cigarettes I'll be back in a minute' Yeah, check out the street and it looks likes kinda of a... kinda of a blur drizzle down the plateglass And there's a neon swizzle stick stirring up the sultry night air Looks like a yellow biscuit of a buttery cue ball moon Rollin' maverick across an obsidian sky As the busses go groanin' and wheezin', Down on the corner I'm freezing On a restless boulevard in a midnight road I'm across town from EASY STREET With the tight knots of moviegoers and out of towners on the stroll The buildings towering high above Lit like dominoes or black dice Used car salesmen dressed up in Purina Checkerboard slacks And Foster Grant wrap-around Pacing in front of rainbow EARL SCHLEIB $39.95 merchandise Like barkers at a shooting gallery They throw out kind of a Texas Guinan routine "Hello sucker, we like your money just as well as anybody else's here Come on over here now Let me put the cut back in your strut and the glid back in your slide Now climb aboard a custom Oldmobile and let me take you for a ride" Or they give you the P.T. Barnum bit "There's a sucker born every minute you just happened to be comin' along at the right time you know come over here" Well you know, all the harlequin sailors are on the stroll In a search of "LIKE NEW," "NEW PAINT," And decent factory air and AM-FM dreams And all the piss yellow gypsy cabs That stack up in the taxi zones and the're waiting like pinball machines To be ticking off a joy ride to a magical place Like truckers welcome diners With dirt lots full of Peterbilts and Kenworths and Jimmy's and the like They're hiballin' with bankrupt brakes Man, the're over driven and the're under paid The're over fed and the're a day late and a dollar short Christ I got my lips around a bottle and I got my foot on the throttle And I'm standing on the corner Standing on the corner like a "just in town" jasper I'm on a street corner with a gasper Looking for some kind of Cheshire billboard grin Stroking a goateed chin, using parking meters as walking sticks On the inebriated stroll With my eyelids propped open at half mast But you know over at Chubb's Pool Hall and Snooker Well it was a nickle after two, yea it was a nickle after two And in the cobalt steel blue dream smoke Why it was the radio that groaned out the hit parade And the chalk squeaked and the floorboards creaked And an Olympia sign winked through a torn yellow shade Old Jack Chance himself leaning up against a Wurlitzer And he was eyeballing out a 5 ball combination shot Impossible you say? Hard to believe? Perhaps out of the realm of possibility? Nah Cause he'll be stretchin' out long tawny fingers Out across a cool green felt in a provocative golden gate He got a full table railshot that's no sweat And I leaned up against my bannister And wandered over to the Wurlitzer and I punched A-2 I was lookin' for maybe 'Wine, Wine, Wine' by the Night Caps Starring Chuck E. Weiss or maybe... Maybe a little something called 'High Blood Pressure' By George 'cryin' in the streets' Perkins, no dice "Cause that's life," that's what all the people say Your riding high in April, seriously shot down in May But I know I'm gonna change that tune When I'm standing underneath a buttery moon That's all melted off to one side It was just about that time that the sun came crawlin' yellow out of a manhole At the foot of 23rd Street and a dracula moon in a black disguise Was making its way back to its pre-paid room at the St. Moritz Hotel (scat) The El train tumbled across the trestles And it sounded like the ghost of Gene Krupa With an overhead cam and glasspacks And the whispering brushes of wet radials on wet pavement With a traffic jam session on Belmont tonight And the rhapsody of the pending evening I leaned up against my bannister And I've been looking for some kind of an emotional investment With romantic dividends, yeah kind of a physical negotiation is underway Well, as I attempt to consolidate all my missed weekly rendezvous Into one-low-monthly payment, through the nose, yeah With romantic residuals and legs akimbo But the chances are that more than likely Standing underneath a moon holding water I'll probably be held over for another smashed weekend | |
***From The Archives (2010)-On The 50th Anniversary (2013) -" The New York Review Of Books" Graphic Artist Extraordinaire David Levine Passes Away
Click below to link to a "Daily Beast" obituary for the great graphic artist from "The New York Review Of Books", David Levine.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/tag/david+levine+obituary/?cid=bsa:related13
Markin comment:
Many a smile came around this blogger's face when thumbing through the pages of the "The New York Review" over the years seeing how David Levine skewered the famous, and not so famous. The big question, however, is what will next year's calender look like. I have come to depend on Levine's creations to spruce up my office space.
David Levine, Biting Caricaturist, Dies at 83
His death, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was caused by prostate cancer and a subsequent combination of illnesses, his wife, Kathy Hayes, said.
Mr. Levine’s drawings never seemed whimsical, like those of Al Hirschfeld. They didn’t celebrate neurotic self-consciousness, like Jules Feiffer’s. He wasn’t attracted to the macabre, the way Edward Gorey was. His work didn’t possess the arch social consciousness of Edward Sorel’s. Nor was he interested, as Roz Chast is, in the humorous absurdity of quotidian modern life. But in both style and mood, Mr. Levine was as distinct an artist and commentator as any of his well-known contemporaries. His work was not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one; he was, in fact, beyond his pen and ink drawings, an accomplished painter. Those qualities led many to suggest that he was the heir of the 19th-century masters of the illustration, Honoré Daumier and Thomas Nast.
Especially in his political work, his portraits betrayed the mind of an artist concerned, worriedly concerned, about the world in which he lived. Among his most famous images were those of President Lyndon B. Johnson pulling up his shirt to reveal that the scar from his gallbladder operation was in the precise shape of the boundaries of Vietnam, and of Henry Kissinger having sex on the couch with a female body whose head was in the shape of a globe, depicting, Mr. Levine explained later, what Mr. Kissinger had done to the world. He drew Richard M. Nixon, his favorite subject, 66 times, depicting him as the Godfather, as Captain Queeg, as a fetus.
With those images and others — Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon in a David-and-Goliath parable; or Alan Greenspan, with scales of justice, balancing people and dollar bills, hanging from his downturned lips; or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. carrying a gavel the size of a sledgehammer — Mr. Levine’s drawings sent out angry distress signals that the world was too much a puppet in the hands of too few puppeteers. “I would say that political satire saved the nation from going to hell,” he said in an interview in 2008, during an exhibit of his work called “American Presidents” at the New York Public Library.
Even when he wasn’t out to make a political point, however, his portraits — often densely inked, heavy in shadows cast by outsize noses on enormous, eccentrically shaped heads, and replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o’clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles — tended to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg.
“They were extraordinary drawings with extraordinary perception,” Jules Feiffer said in a recent interview about the work of Mr. Levine, who was his friend. He added: “In the second half of the 20th century he was the most important political caricaturist. When he began, there was very little political caricature, very little literary caricature. He revived the art.”
David Levine was born on Dec. 20, 1926, in Brooklyn, where his father, Harry, ran a small garment shop and his mother, Lena, a nurse, was a political activist with Communist sympathies. A so-called red diaper baby, Mr. Levine leaned politically far to the left throughout his life. His family lived a few blocks from Ebbetts Field, where young David once shook the hand of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who became a hero, as did his wife, Eleanor. Years later, Mr. Levine’s caricature of Mrs. Roosevelt depicted her as a swan.
“I thought of her as beautiful,” he said. “Yet she was very homely.”
As a boy he sketched the stuffed animals in the vitrines at the Brooklyn Museum. He served in the Army just after World War II, then graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with a degree in education and another degree from Temple’s Tyler School of Art. He also studied painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and with the Abstract Expressionist painter and renowned teacher Hans Hofmann.
Indeed, painting was Mr. Levine’s first love; he was a realist, and in 1958 he and Aaron Shikler (whose portrait of John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House) founded the Painting Group, a regular salon of amateurs and professionals who, for half a century, got together for working sessions with a model. A documentary about the group, “Portraits of a Lady,” focusing on their simultaneous portraits of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, was made in 2007; the portraits themselves were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery.
Mr. Levine’s paintings, mostly watercolors, take as their subjects garment workers — a tribute to his father’s employees, who he said never believed that their lives could be seen as connected to beauty — or the bathers at his beloved Coney Island. In a story he liked to tell, he was painting on the boardwalk when he was approached by a homeless man who demanded to know how much he would charge for the painting. Mr. Levine, nonplussed, said $50.
“For that?” the man said.
The paintings are a sharply surprising contrast to his caricatures: sympathetic portraits of ordinary citizens, fond and respectful renderings of the distinctive seaside architecture, panoramas with people on the beach.
“None of Levine’s hard-edged burlesques prepare you for the sensuous satisfactions of his paintwork: the matte charm of his oil handling and the virtuoso refinement of his watercolors,” the critic Maureen Mullarkey wrote in 2004. “Caustic humor gives way to unexpected gentleness in the paintings.”
Mr. Levine’s successful career as a caricaturist and illustrator took root in the early 1960s, when he started working for Esquire. He began contributing cover portraits and interior illustrations to The New York Review of Books in 1963, its first year of publication, and within its signature blocky design his cerebral, brooding faces quickly became identifiable as, well, the cerebral, brooding face of the publication. He always worked from photographs, reading the accompanying article first to glean ideas.
“I try first to make the face believable, to give another dimension to a flat, linear drawing; then my distortions seem more acceptable,” he said.
From 1963 until 2007, after Mr. Levine received a diagnosis of macular degeneration and his vision deteriorated enough to affect his drawing, he contributed more than 3,800 drawings to The New York Review. Over the years he did 1,000 or so more for Esquire; almost 100 for Time, including a number of covers (one of which, for the 1967 Man of the Year issue, depicted President Johnson as a raging and despairing King Lear); and dozens over all for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and other publications.
Mr. Levine’s first marriage ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Hayes, his partner for 32 years whom he married in 1996, he is survived by two children, Matthew, of Westport, Conn., and Eve, of Manhattan; two stepchildren, Nancy Rommelmann, of Portland, Ore., and Christopher Rommelmann, of Brooklyn; a grandson, and a stepgranddaughter.
“I might want to be critical, but I don’t wish to be destructive,” Mr. Levine once said, explaining his outlook on both art and life. “Caricature that goes too far simply lowers the viewer’s response to a person as a human being.”
Click below to link to a "Daily Beast" obituary for the great graphic artist from "The New York Review Of Books", David Levine.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/tag/david+levine+obituary/?cid=bsa:related13
Markin comment:
Many a smile came around this blogger's face when thumbing through the pages of the "The New York Review" over the years seeing how David Levine skewered the famous, and not so famous. The big question, however, is what will next year's calender look like. I have come to depend on Levine's creations to spruce up my office space.
David Levine, Biting Caricaturist, Dies at 83
His death, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was caused by prostate cancer and a subsequent combination of illnesses, his wife, Kathy Hayes, said.
Mr. Levine’s drawings never seemed whimsical, like those of Al Hirschfeld. They didn’t celebrate neurotic self-consciousness, like Jules Feiffer’s. He wasn’t attracted to the macabre, the way Edward Gorey was. His work didn’t possess the arch social consciousness of Edward Sorel’s. Nor was he interested, as Roz Chast is, in the humorous absurdity of quotidian modern life. But in both style and mood, Mr. Levine was as distinct an artist and commentator as any of his well-known contemporaries. His work was not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one; he was, in fact, beyond his pen and ink drawings, an accomplished painter. Those qualities led many to suggest that he was the heir of the 19th-century masters of the illustration, Honoré Daumier and Thomas Nast.
Especially in his political work, his portraits betrayed the mind of an artist concerned, worriedly concerned, about the world in which he lived. Among his most famous images were those of President Lyndon B. Johnson pulling up his shirt to reveal that the scar from his gallbladder operation was in the precise shape of the boundaries of Vietnam, and of Henry Kissinger having sex on the couch with a female body whose head was in the shape of a globe, depicting, Mr. Levine explained later, what Mr. Kissinger had done to the world. He drew Richard M. Nixon, his favorite subject, 66 times, depicting him as the Godfather, as Captain Queeg, as a fetus.
With those images and others — Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon in a David-and-Goliath parable; or Alan Greenspan, with scales of justice, balancing people and dollar bills, hanging from his downturned lips; or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. carrying a gavel the size of a sledgehammer — Mr. Levine’s drawings sent out angry distress signals that the world was too much a puppet in the hands of too few puppeteers. “I would say that political satire saved the nation from going to hell,” he said in an interview in 2008, during an exhibit of his work called “American Presidents” at the New York Public Library.
Even when he wasn’t out to make a political point, however, his portraits — often densely inked, heavy in shadows cast by outsize noses on enormous, eccentrically shaped heads, and replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o’clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles — tended to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg.
“They were extraordinary drawings with extraordinary perception,” Jules Feiffer said in a recent interview about the work of Mr. Levine, who was his friend. He added: “In the second half of the 20th century he was the most important political caricaturist. When he began, there was very little political caricature, very little literary caricature. He revived the art.”
David Levine was born on Dec. 20, 1926, in Brooklyn, where his father, Harry, ran a small garment shop and his mother, Lena, a nurse, was a political activist with Communist sympathies. A so-called red diaper baby, Mr. Levine leaned politically far to the left throughout his life. His family lived a few blocks from Ebbetts Field, where young David once shook the hand of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who became a hero, as did his wife, Eleanor. Years later, Mr. Levine’s caricature of Mrs. Roosevelt depicted her as a swan.
“I thought of her as beautiful,” he said. “Yet she was very homely.”
As a boy he sketched the stuffed animals in the vitrines at the Brooklyn Museum. He served in the Army just after World War II, then graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia with a degree in education and another degree from Temple’s Tyler School of Art. He also studied painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and with the Abstract Expressionist painter and renowned teacher Hans Hofmann.
Indeed, painting was Mr. Levine’s first love; he was a realist, and in 1958 he and Aaron Shikler (whose portrait of John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House) founded the Painting Group, a regular salon of amateurs and professionals who, for half a century, got together for working sessions with a model. A documentary about the group, “Portraits of a Lady,” focusing on their simultaneous portraits of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, was made in 2007; the portraits themselves were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery.
Mr. Levine’s paintings, mostly watercolors, take as their subjects garment workers — a tribute to his father’s employees, who he said never believed that their lives could be seen as connected to beauty — or the bathers at his beloved Coney Island. In a story he liked to tell, he was painting on the boardwalk when he was approached by a homeless man who demanded to know how much he would charge for the painting. Mr. Levine, nonplussed, said $50.
“For that?” the man said.
The paintings are a sharply surprising contrast to his caricatures: sympathetic portraits of ordinary citizens, fond and respectful renderings of the distinctive seaside architecture, panoramas with people on the beach.
“None of Levine’s hard-edged burlesques prepare you for the sensuous satisfactions of his paintwork: the matte charm of his oil handling and the virtuoso refinement of his watercolors,” the critic Maureen Mullarkey wrote in 2004. “Caustic humor gives way to unexpected gentleness in the paintings.”
Mr. Levine’s successful career as a caricaturist and illustrator took root in the early 1960s, when he started working for Esquire. He began contributing cover portraits and interior illustrations to The New York Review of Books in 1963, its first year of publication, and within its signature blocky design his cerebral, brooding faces quickly became identifiable as, well, the cerebral, brooding face of the publication. He always worked from photographs, reading the accompanying article first to glean ideas.
“I try first to make the face believable, to give another dimension to a flat, linear drawing; then my distortions seem more acceptable,” he said.
From 1963 until 2007, after Mr. Levine received a diagnosis of macular degeneration and his vision deteriorated enough to affect his drawing, he contributed more than 3,800 drawings to The New York Review. Over the years he did 1,000 or so more for Esquire; almost 100 for Time, including a number of covers (one of which, for the 1967 Man of the Year issue, depicted President Johnson as a raging and despairing King Lear); and dozens over all for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and other publications.
Mr. Levine’s first marriage ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Hayes, his partner for 32 years whom he married in 1996, he is survived by two children, Matthew, of Westport, Conn., and Eve, of Manhattan; two stepchildren, Nancy Rommelmann, of Portland, Ore., and Christopher Rommelmann, of Brooklyn; a grandson, and a stepgranddaughter.
“I might want to be critical, but I don’t wish to be destructive,” Mr. Levine once said, explaining his outlook on both art and life. “Caricature that goes too far simply lowers the viewer’s response to a person as a human being.”
***Our Homeland, The Sea- Work Songs Of The Old Tars
CD REVIEW
Blow Boys Blow, Ewan MacColl & A.L. Lloyd, Tradition Records, 1990
This review is a little off the beaten path for this writer. Oh no, not on the subject matter of the sea. There are a thousand primordial links between me and that great swirl of ocean which I will mention below. No, what is unusual is that I would discuss sea shanties, a form of musical expression that is not normally in my world view. I have explored the roots of rock & roll and engaged in the polemics about whether rhythm & blues, rockabilly or country formed the basis of that music revolution. I have gone on and on about the various manifestations of the blues, country and urban, acoustic and electric. I have endlessly discussed the urban folk revival of the early 1960s, ad nauseaum.
I have, moreover, tipped my hat to the precursors of that folk revival by reviewing the work of the likes of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly in the course of which I have discussed work songs, prison labor songs, cowboy songs, songs of the Spanish Civil War and so on. I have gladly thrown a bouquet or two to jazz singers, and to an occasional scat artist like Louis Armstrong. I have even gone down and dirty in bayou country to praise Cajun music. But nowhere have I previously been inclined to give mention to the work songs of the old tars, the sailor/workers of the age of the wooden ship which was the means of "globalization" of international commerce in the early days of capitalist development. I make amends here to the boyos who sailed, slaved and survived on the wide oceans.
As mentioned above, this is a rather strange previous musical omission. I have many serious links to the sea. I grew up in a town so close to the ocean that I probably smelled sea air from an open hospital window the day I was born. From one house I grew up in I could tumble down a hill to the beach. In another I didn't need to even tumble. I have walked more beach miles than I care to recount. I have stood as hurricane winds came up and drove the waves over two double sea walls in an off-hand demonstration of her power. I have, from land and sea, seen cays, bays, narrows, wide empty expanses, and every other form of ocean creation. I have seen oceans as blues as the heavens, and as dark as the darkest night.
All of this is by way of saying, as I have on other occasions in discussing the old hobo skills of `riding the rails' in the days when trains were the common form of fast transportation, the old sailors, as least in their youths (if they had not been shanghai-ed, a common form of impressment), were trying to go THERE in order not to be HERE. And that, my friends, is the link that binds me to the work and off-time songs of the old salts and to their miseries and, few, joys.
So here in these CD selections we get a second-hand chance to listen to what Jack Tar was singing about in the days when men were made of steel, and ships of wood. Or so the lads would have us believe. One can appreciate, as an almost universal proposition, that music makes the hard task of work easier. But behind the singsong nature of the music lies some kind of undefined longing that has haunted humankind since it first walked on two legs. Here, that return to our homeland, the sea. In the meantime though the talk was of getting the sails up; getting a few hours of sleep or sneaking some; worrying over an impeding storm and its effects; dreaming, always dreaming of port and the girls left behind (or to be avoided); and that eternal thirst for that ration of rum, the `nectar of the gods' to benighted seaman (check to "All For Me Grog" for the inside dope on that subject). Listen up, mates.
Note: Probably the most interesting song here is "Handsome Cabin Boy" about the twisted fate of a beautiful young girl who shipped out as cabin boy, whose looks caught the attention of both the captain and his wife aboard ship (to speak nothing of the sex-hungry sailors), and who became pregnant (mysteriously?). I would think that it would take some serious psychological study to get to the "inner" meaning of that little ditty in the psyche of the closed-in sailor. Also give a close listen to "Paddy West", "Blow Boys Blow", and "South Australia".
"The Handsome Cabin Boy"
It's of a pretty female
As you may understand.
Her mind being bent for rambling
Unto some foreign land,
She dressed herself in sailor's clothes,
Or so it does appear,
And she hired with a captain
To serve him for a year.
[The captain's wife she being on board,
She seemed in great joy
To think the captain had engaged
Such a handsome cabin boy,
That now and then she'd slip him a kiss,
And she'd have liked to toy,
But 'twas the captain found out the secret
Of the handsome cabin boy.]
Her cheeks they were like roses
And her hair rolled in a curl.
The sailors often smiled and said
He looked just like a girl.
But eating of the captain's biscuit
Her colour did destroy,
And the waist did swell of pretty Nell,
The handsome cabin boy.
It was in the bay of Biscay
Our gallant ship did plow.
One night among the sailors
Was a fearful flurry and row.*
They tumbled from their hammocks
For their sleep it did destroy,
And they sworn about the groaning
Of the handsome cabin boy.
"Oh doctor, dear, oh doctor,"
The cabin boy did cry.
"My time has come, I am undone,
And I will surely die."
The doctor come a-runnin'
And a-smilin' at the fun.
To think a sailor lad should have
A daughter or a son.
The sailors when they saw the joke
They all did stand and stare.
The child belonged to none of them,
They solemnly did swear.
The captain's wife, she says to him,
"My dear, I wish you joy,
For 'tis either you or me's betrayed
The handsome cabin boy!"
[Now sailors, take your tot of rum
And drink success to trade,
And likewise to the cabin boy
That was neither man nor maid.
Here's hoping the wars don't rise again
Our sailors to destroy,
And here's hoping for a jolly lot more
Lyrics To South Australia
In South Australia I was born
To me heave away, haul away
In South Australia round Cape Horn
Chorus
We're bound for South Australia
Haul away you rolling kings
To me heave away, haul away
Haul away, you'll hear me sing
We're bound for South Australia
2. As I walked out one morning fair
To me heave away, haul away
'Twas there I met Miss Nancy Blair
Chorus:
3. I shook her up and I shook her down
To me heave away, haul away
I shook her round and round the town
Chorus:
4. I run her all night and I run her all day
To me heave away, haul away
And I run her until we sailed away
Chorus:
5. There ain't but one thing grieves me mind
To me heave away, haul away
To leave Miss Nancy Blair behind
Chorus:
6. And as we wallop around Cape Horn
To me heave away, haul away
You'll wish to God you'd never been born
Chorus:
7. In South Australia my native land
To me heave away, haul away
Full of rocks and thieves and fleas and sand
Chorus:
8. I wish I was on Australia's strand
To me heave away, haul away
With a bottle of whiskey in my hand
Chorus:
Paddy West
Lyrics:
As I was walking down London road
I come to Paddy West's inn
He taught me the ropes of a seafaring swob
While he filled my glass with gin
He said there's a ship that's waiting lad
And on her you quickly sign
Her mate is a black-guard her bow is worse,
But she will suit you fine
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Well when I had my drink my boys
The wind began to blow
He sent me up in the attic
The main royal for to stow
But when I got up in the attic
No main royal could I find
So I turned around to the window
And I furled the window blind
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Now suppose we're on the starboard boys
To Frisco we'd be bound
Oh Paddy he called for a length of rope
And he laid it on the ground
We all step over and back again
And he says to me "That's fine"
Now when they ask if you ever been to sea
You can say you've crossed the line
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Now there's a more thing for you to do
Before you sail away
That's to step around the table
Where the bullock's horn does lay
And when they ask "Were you ever at sea?"
You can say "Ten times ´round the Horn"
And Be Jesus you were a sailor
Since the day that you was born
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Blow Boys Blow Lyrics
A yankee ship came down the river.
Blow, boys, blow!
A yankee ship with a yankee skipper.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And how do you know that she's a yankee clipper?
Blow, boys, blow!
Her masts and yards they shine like silver.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And who do you think is the captain of her?
Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, it's Bully Haines, th' hoodlum scoffer.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And who do you think is the mate aboard her?
Blow, boys, blow!
Santander James is the mate aboard her.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Santander James, he loves us sailors.
Blow, boys, blow!
Yes he does, like hell and blazes.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Santander James, he's a rocket from hell boys.
Blow, boys, blow!
He'll ride you down as you ride the spanker.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Blow, boys, blow - the sun's drawing water.
Blow, boys, blow!
Three cheers for the cook and one for his daugher.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Oh, blow ye winds. I long to hear you.
Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, blow ye winds. I long to hear you.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Traditional, arranged by Peter Webster.
Blow Boys Blow, Ewan MacColl & A.L. Lloyd, Tradition Records, 1990
This review is a little off the beaten path for this writer. Oh no, not on the subject matter of the sea. There are a thousand primordial links between me and that great swirl of ocean which I will mention below. No, what is unusual is that I would discuss sea shanties, a form of musical expression that is not normally in my world view. I have explored the roots of rock & roll and engaged in the polemics about whether rhythm & blues, rockabilly or country formed the basis of that music revolution. I have gone on and on about the various manifestations of the blues, country and urban, acoustic and electric. I have endlessly discussed the urban folk revival of the early 1960s, ad nauseaum.
I have, moreover, tipped my hat to the precursors of that folk revival by reviewing the work of the likes of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly in the course of which I have discussed work songs, prison labor songs, cowboy songs, songs of the Spanish Civil War and so on. I have gladly thrown a bouquet or two to jazz singers, and to an occasional scat artist like Louis Armstrong. I have even gone down and dirty in bayou country to praise Cajun music. But nowhere have I previously been inclined to give mention to the work songs of the old tars, the sailor/workers of the age of the wooden ship which was the means of "globalization" of international commerce in the early days of capitalist development. I make amends here to the boyos who sailed, slaved and survived on the wide oceans.
As mentioned above, this is a rather strange previous musical omission. I have many serious links to the sea. I grew up in a town so close to the ocean that I probably smelled sea air from an open hospital window the day I was born. From one house I grew up in I could tumble down a hill to the beach. In another I didn't need to even tumble. I have walked more beach miles than I care to recount. I have stood as hurricane winds came up and drove the waves over two double sea walls in an off-hand demonstration of her power. I have, from land and sea, seen cays, bays, narrows, wide empty expanses, and every other form of ocean creation. I have seen oceans as blues as the heavens, and as dark as the darkest night.
All of this is by way of saying, as I have on other occasions in discussing the old hobo skills of `riding the rails' in the days when trains were the common form of fast transportation, the old sailors, as least in their youths (if they had not been shanghai-ed, a common form of impressment), were trying to go THERE in order not to be HERE. And that, my friends, is the link that binds me to the work and off-time songs of the old salts and to their miseries and, few, joys.
So here in these CD selections we get a second-hand chance to listen to what Jack Tar was singing about in the days when men were made of steel, and ships of wood. Or so the lads would have us believe. One can appreciate, as an almost universal proposition, that music makes the hard task of work easier. But behind the singsong nature of the music lies some kind of undefined longing that has haunted humankind since it first walked on two legs. Here, that return to our homeland, the sea. In the meantime though the talk was of getting the sails up; getting a few hours of sleep or sneaking some; worrying over an impeding storm and its effects; dreaming, always dreaming of port and the girls left behind (or to be avoided); and that eternal thirst for that ration of rum, the `nectar of the gods' to benighted seaman (check to "All For Me Grog" for the inside dope on that subject). Listen up, mates.
Note: Probably the most interesting song here is "Handsome Cabin Boy" about the twisted fate of a beautiful young girl who shipped out as cabin boy, whose looks caught the attention of both the captain and his wife aboard ship (to speak nothing of the sex-hungry sailors), and who became pregnant (mysteriously?). I would think that it would take some serious psychological study to get to the "inner" meaning of that little ditty in the psyche of the closed-in sailor. Also give a close listen to "Paddy West", "Blow Boys Blow", and "South Australia".
"The Handsome Cabin Boy"
It's of a pretty female
As you may understand.
Her mind being bent for rambling
Unto some foreign land,
She dressed herself in sailor's clothes,
Or so it does appear,
And she hired with a captain
To serve him for a year.
[The captain's wife she being on board,
She seemed in great joy
To think the captain had engaged
Such a handsome cabin boy,
That now and then she'd slip him a kiss,
And she'd have liked to toy,
But 'twas the captain found out the secret
Of the handsome cabin boy.]
Her cheeks they were like roses
And her hair rolled in a curl.
The sailors often smiled and said
He looked just like a girl.
But eating of the captain's biscuit
Her colour did destroy,
And the waist did swell of pretty Nell,
The handsome cabin boy.
It was in the bay of Biscay
Our gallant ship did plow.
One night among the sailors
Was a fearful flurry and row.*
They tumbled from their hammocks
For their sleep it did destroy,
And they sworn about the groaning
Of the handsome cabin boy.
"Oh doctor, dear, oh doctor,"
The cabin boy did cry.
"My time has come, I am undone,
And I will surely die."
The doctor come a-runnin'
And a-smilin' at the fun.
To think a sailor lad should have
A daughter or a son.
The sailors when they saw the joke
They all did stand and stare.
The child belonged to none of them,
They solemnly did swear.
The captain's wife, she says to him,
"My dear, I wish you joy,
For 'tis either you or me's betrayed
The handsome cabin boy!"
[Now sailors, take your tot of rum
And drink success to trade,
And likewise to the cabin boy
That was neither man nor maid.
Here's hoping the wars don't rise again
Our sailors to destroy,
And here's hoping for a jolly lot more
Lyrics To South Australia
In South Australia I was born
To me heave away, haul away
In South Australia round Cape Horn
Chorus
We're bound for South Australia
Haul away you rolling kings
To me heave away, haul away
Haul away, you'll hear me sing
We're bound for South Australia
2. As I walked out one morning fair
To me heave away, haul away
'Twas there I met Miss Nancy Blair
Chorus:
3. I shook her up and I shook her down
To me heave away, haul away
I shook her round and round the town
Chorus:
4. I run her all night and I run her all day
To me heave away, haul away
And I run her until we sailed away
Chorus:
5. There ain't but one thing grieves me mind
To me heave away, haul away
To leave Miss Nancy Blair behind
Chorus:
6. And as we wallop around Cape Horn
To me heave away, haul away
You'll wish to God you'd never been born
Chorus:
7. In South Australia my native land
To me heave away, haul away
Full of rocks and thieves and fleas and sand
Chorus:
8. I wish I was on Australia's strand
To me heave away, haul away
With a bottle of whiskey in my hand
Chorus:
Paddy West
Lyrics:
As I was walking down London road
I come to Paddy West's inn
He taught me the ropes of a seafaring swob
While he filled my glass with gin
He said there's a ship that's waiting lad
And on her you quickly sign
Her mate is a black-guard her bow is worse,
But she will suit you fine
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Well when I had my drink my boys
The wind began to blow
He sent me up in the attic
The main royal for to stow
But when I got up in the attic
No main royal could I find
So I turned around to the window
And I furled the window blind
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Now suppose we're on the starboard boys
To Frisco we'd be bound
Oh Paddy he called for a length of rope
And he laid it on the ground
We all step over and back again
And he says to me "That's fine"
Now when they ask if you ever been to sea
You can say you've crossed the line
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Now there's a more thing for you to do
Before you sail away
That's to step around the table
Where the bullock's horn does lay
And when they ask "Were you ever at sea?"
You can say "Ten times ´round the Horn"
And Be Jesus you were a sailor
Since the day that you was born
So put on your dungaree jacket
And walk out lookin' yer best
And tell 'em that your an old sailor man
That's come from Paddy West
Blow Boys Blow Lyrics
A yankee ship came down the river.
Blow, boys, blow!
A yankee ship with a yankee skipper.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And how do you know that she's a yankee clipper?
Blow, boys, blow!
Her masts and yards they shine like silver.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And who do you think is the captain of her?
Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, it's Bully Haines, th' hoodlum scoffer.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
And who do you think is the mate aboard her?
Blow, boys, blow!
Santander James is the mate aboard her.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Santander James, he loves us sailors.
Blow, boys, blow!
Yes he does, like hell and blazes.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Santander James, he's a rocket from hell boys.
Blow, boys, blow!
He'll ride you down as you ride the spanker.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Blow, boys, blow - the sun's drawing water.
Blow, boys, blow!
Three cheers for the cook and one for his daugher.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
Oh, blow ye winds. I long to hear you.
Blow, boys, blow!
Oh, blow ye winds. I long to hear you.
Blow, bully boys, blow!
***From The Archives (2010) A Twist On The Military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy – For Gay And Lesbian Bolsheviks In The Military
The Republicans (and some Democrats, naturally) really don’t get it on the gay rights in the military issue, at least on this simple democratic issue of the right for someone’s sexual orientation not to be an issue, one way or the other, in any social setting in the first decade of the 21st century. The recent defeat of an amendment to a bill annulling that previous military policy speaks volumes. In that sense they, the august Senators, are not far removed from the punishment freaks, chattel slavery-worshippers, and other assorted denizens of the netherworld called the tea party movement. Moreover, on this issue, as far as I know from the public testimony of major members of the military general staff who were called before Congressional committees on this issue saw no further reason to continue the policy. After all, this late in the game, who knows who on the general staff is or is not gay? And what of it. So, what is the big issue?
But here is my little twist on the matter. Look, those of us of the anti-war left really do not want to advocate, one way or the other, for how the imperialists use their soldiers, as a general proposition. Except, of course, to get those soldiers, one way or the other, to stop fighting for the American imperial state. That said, we are seriously interested, imperial soldiers or not, that those soldiers, including gay and lesbian soldiers, get the same democratic rights as civilians. Thus we oppose this hare-brained “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. At least as far as sexual orientation goes.
Now what we really want to do is to turn all those soldiers through our communist propaganda into soldier-Bolsheviks, whatever their sexual orientation, for our side. Thus, while we do not support that “don’t ask, don’t tell policy for sexual orientation I think that today it is the beginning of wisdom if we do continue to has that policy for political orientation. After all that “democratic” military brass might get just a little nervous, and have horrid nightmares about those 1917 days, with the notion of Bolsheviks in the ranks, including gay and lesbian Bolsheviks. We will just keep that part our little secret, okay?
From The Marxist Archives-In Honor Of The Anniversary Of The John Brown-Led Raid On Harpers Ferry- Labor Struggles and the Capitalist State
STRIKE THE BLOW-THE LEGEND OF CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN
Reclaiming John Brown for the Left
BOOK REVIEW
JOHN BROWN, ABOLITIONIST, DAVID S. REYNOLDS, ALFRED A. KNOPF, NEW YORK, 2005
From fairly early in my youth I knew the name John Brown and was swept up by the romance surrounding his exploits at Harpers Ferry. For example, I knew that the great anthem of the Civil War -The Battle Hymn of the Republic- had a prior existence as a tribute to John Brown and that Union soldiers marched to that song as they headed south. I was then, however, neither familiar with the import of his exploits for the black liberation struggle nor knew much about the specifics of the politics of the various tendencies in the struggle against slavery. I certainly knew nothing then of Brown’s (and his sons) prior military exploits in the Kansas ‘proxy’ wars against the expansion of slavery. Later study filled in some of those gaps and has only strengthened my strong bond with his memory. Know this, as I reach the age at which John Brown was executed,I still retain my youthful admiration for him. In the context of the turmoil of the times he was the most courageous and audacious revolutionary in the struggle for the abolition of slavery in America. Almost 150 years after his death this writer is proud to stand in the tradition of John Brown.
That said, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I can recommend Mr. Reynolds’s book detailing the life, times and exploits of John Brown, warts and all. Published in 2005, this is an important source (including helpful end notes) for updating various controversies surrounding the John Brown saga. While I may disagree with some of Mr. Reynolds’s conclusions concerning the impact of John Brown’s exploits on later black liberation struggles and to a lesser extent his position on Brown’s impact on his contemporaries, particularly the Transcendentalists, nevertheless on the key point of the central place of John Brown in American revolutionary history there is no dispute. Furthermore, Mr. Reynolds has taken pains to provide substantial detail about the ups and downs of John Brown’s posthumous reputation.
Most importantly, he defends the memory of John Brown against all-comers-that is partisan history on behalf of the ‘losers’ of history at its best. He has reclaimed John Brown to his proper position as an icon for the left against the erroneous and outrageous efforts of modern day religious and secular terrorists to lay any claim to his memory or his work. Below I make a few comments on some of controversies surrounding John Brown developed in Mr. Reynolds’s study.
If one understands the ongoing nature, from his early youth, of John Brown’s commitment to the active struggle against slavery, the scourge of the American Republic in the first half of the 19th century, one can only conclude that he was indeed a man on a mission. As Mr. Reynolds’s points out Brown took every opportunity to fight against slavery including early service as an agent of the Underground Railroad spiriting escaped slaves northward, participation as an extreme radical in all the key anti-slavery propaganda battles of the time as well as challenging other anti-slavery elements to be more militant and in the 1850’s, arms in hand, fighting in the ‘proxy’ wars in Kansas and, of course, the culmination of his life- the raid on Harpers Ferry. Those exploits alone render absurd a very convenient myth by those who supported slavery or turned a blind eye to it and their latter-day apologists for his so-called ‘madness’. This is a political man and to these eyes a very worthy one.
For those who like their political heroes ‘pure’, frankly, it is better to look elsewhere than the life of John Brown. His personal and family life as a failed rural capitalist would hardly lead one to think that this man was to become a key historical figure in any struggle, much less the great struggle against slavery. Some of his actions in Kansas (concerning the murder of some pro-slavery elements under his direction) also cloud his image. However, when the deal went down in the late 1850’s and it was apparent for all to see that there was no other way to end slavery than a fight to the death-John Brown rose to the occasion. And did not cry about it. And did not expect others to cry about it. Call him a ‘monomaniac’ if you like but even a slight acquaintance with great historical figures shows they all have this ‘disease’- that is why they make the history books. No, the ‘madness’ argument will not do.
Whether or not John Brown knew that his military strategy for the Harper’s Ferry raid would, in the short term, be defeated is a matter of dispute. Reams of paper have been spent proving the military foolhardiness of his scheme at Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s plan, however, was essentially a combination of slave revolt modeled after the maroon experiences in Haiti, Nat Turner’s earlier Virginia slave rebellion and rural guerrilla warfare of the ‘third world’ type that we have become more familiar with since that time. 150 years later this strategy does not look so foolhardy in an America of the 1850’s that had no real standing army, fairly weak lines of communications, virtually uninhabited mountains to flee to and the North at their backs.
The execution of the plan is another matter. Brown seemingly made about every mistake in the book in that regard. However, this is missing the essential political point that militant action not continuing parliamentary maneuvering advocated by other abolitionists had become necessary. A few more fighting abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, and better propaganda work among freedman with connections to the plantations would not have hurt the chances for success at Harpers Ferry.
What is not in dispute is that Brown considered himself a true Calvinist avenging angel in the struggle against slavery and more importantly acted on that belief. In short, he was committed to bring justice to the black masses. This is why his exploits and memory stay alive after over 150 years. It is possible that if Brown did not have this, by 19th century standards as well as our own, old-fashioned Calvinist determination that he would not have been capable of militant action. Certainly other anti-slavery elements never came close to his militancy, including the key Transcendentalist movement led by Emerson and Thoreau and the Concord ‘crowd’ who supported him and kept his memory alive in hard times.
In their eyes he had the heroic manner of the Old Testament prophet. Now this animating spirit is not one that animates modern revolutionaries and so it is hard to understand the depths of his religious convictions on his actions but they were understood, if not fully appreciated, by others in those days. It is better today to look at Brown more politically through his hero (and mine, as well) Oliver Cromwell-a combination of Calvinist avenger and militant warrior. Yes, I can get behind that picture of him.
By all accounts Brown and his small integrated band of brothers fought bravely and coolly against great odds. Ten of Brown's men were killed including two of his sons. Five were captured, tried and executed, including Brown. These results are almost inevitable when one takes up a revolutionary struggle against the old order and one is not victorious. One need only think of, for example, the fate of the defenders of the Paris Commune in 1871. One can fault Brown on this or that tactical maneuver. Nevertheless he and the others bore themselves bravely in defeat. As we are all too painfully familiar there are defeats of the oppressed that lead nowhere. One thinks of the defeat of the German Revolution in the 1920’s. There other defeats that galvanize others into action. This is how Brown’s actions should be measured by history.
Militarily defeated at Harpers Ferry, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms nevertheless continued to galvanize important elements in the North at the expense of the pacifistic non-resistant Garrisonian political program for struggle against slavery. Many writers on Brown who reduce his actions to that of a ‘madman’ still cannot believe that his road proved more appropriate to end slavery than either non-resistance or gradualism. That alone makes short shrift of such theories. Historians and others have also misinterpreted later events such as the Bolshevik strategy which led to Russian Revolution in October 1917. More recently, we saw this same incomprehension concerning the victory of the Vietnamese against overwhelming American military superiority. Needless to say, all these events continue to be revised by some historians to take the sting out of there proper political implications.
From a modern prospective Brown’s strategy for black liberation, even if the abolitionist goal he aspired to was immediately successful, reached the outer limits within the confines of capitalism. Brown’s actions were meant to make black people free. Beyond that goal he had no program except the Chatham Charter which seems to have replicated the American constitution but with racial and gender equality as a cornerstone. Unfortunately the Civil War did not provide fundamental economic and political freedom. That is still our fight. Moreover, the Civil War, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the reign of ‘Jim Crow’ and the subsequent waves of black migration to the cities changed the character of black oppression in the U.S. from Brown’s time. Black people are now a part of "free labor," and the key to their liberation is in the integrated fight of labor against the current one-sided class war and establishing a government of workers and their allies. Nevertheless, we can stand proudly in the revolutionary tradition of John Brown (and of his friend Frederick Douglass). We need to complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the Civil War, not by emulating Brown’s exemplary actions but to moving the multi-racial American working class to power. Finish the Civil War.
**************
STRIKE THE BLOW-THE LEGEND OF CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN
Reclaiming John Brown for the Left
BOOK REVIEW
JOHN BROWN, ABOLITIONIST, DAVID S. REYNOLDS, ALFRED A. KNOPF, NEW YORK, 2005
From fairly early in my youth I knew the name John Brown and was swept up by the romance surrounding his exploits at Harpers Ferry. For example, I knew that the great anthem of the Civil War -The Battle Hymn of the Republic- had a prior existence as a tribute to John Brown and that Union soldiers marched to that song as they headed south. I was then, however, neither familiar with the import of his exploits for the black liberation struggle nor knew much about the specifics of the politics of the various tendencies in the struggle against slavery. I certainly knew nothing then of Brown’s (and his sons) prior military exploits in the Kansas ‘proxy’ wars against the expansion of slavery. Later study filled in some of those gaps and has only strengthened my strong bond with his memory. Know this, as I reach the age at which John Brown was executed,I still retain my youthful admiration for him. In the context of the turmoil of the times he was the most courageous and audacious revolutionary in the struggle for the abolition of slavery in America. Almost 150 years after his death this writer is proud to stand in the tradition of John Brown.
That said, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I can recommend Mr. Reynolds’s book detailing the life, times and exploits of John Brown, warts and all. Published in 2005, this is an important source (including helpful end notes) for updating various controversies surrounding the John Brown saga. While I may disagree with some of Mr. Reynolds’s conclusions concerning the impact of John Brown’s exploits on later black liberation struggles and to a lesser extent his position on Brown’s impact on his contemporaries, particularly the Transcendentalists, nevertheless on the key point of the central place of John Brown in American revolutionary history there is no dispute. Furthermore, Mr. Reynolds has taken pains to provide substantial detail about the ups and downs of John Brown’s posthumous reputation.
Most importantly, he defends the memory of John Brown against all-comers-that is partisan history on behalf of the ‘losers’ of history at its best. He has reclaimed John Brown to his proper position as an icon for the left against the erroneous and outrageous efforts of modern day religious and secular terrorists to lay any claim to his memory or his work. Below I make a few comments on some of controversies surrounding John Brown developed in Mr. Reynolds’s study.
If one understands the ongoing nature, from his early youth, of John Brown’s commitment to the active struggle against slavery, the scourge of the American Republic in the first half of the 19th century, one can only conclude that he was indeed a man on a mission. As Mr. Reynolds’s points out Brown took every opportunity to fight against slavery including early service as an agent of the Underground Railroad spiriting escaped slaves northward, participation as an extreme radical in all the key anti-slavery propaganda battles of the time as well as challenging other anti-slavery elements to be more militant and in the 1850’s, arms in hand, fighting in the ‘proxy’ wars in Kansas and, of course, the culmination of his life- the raid on Harpers Ferry. Those exploits alone render absurd a very convenient myth by those who supported slavery or turned a blind eye to it and their latter-day apologists for his so-called ‘madness’. This is a political man and to these eyes a very worthy one.
For those who like their political heroes ‘pure’, frankly, it is better to look elsewhere than the life of John Brown. His personal and family life as a failed rural capitalist would hardly lead one to think that this man was to become a key historical figure in any struggle, much less the great struggle against slavery. Some of his actions in Kansas (concerning the murder of some pro-slavery elements under his direction) also cloud his image. However, when the deal went down in the late 1850’s and it was apparent for all to see that there was no other way to end slavery than a fight to the death-John Brown rose to the occasion. And did not cry about it. And did not expect others to cry about it. Call him a ‘monomaniac’ if you like but even a slight acquaintance with great historical figures shows they all have this ‘disease’- that is why they make the history books. No, the ‘madness’ argument will not do.
Whether or not John Brown knew that his military strategy for the Harper’s Ferry raid would, in the short term, be defeated is a matter of dispute. Reams of paper have been spent proving the military foolhardiness of his scheme at Harper’s Ferry. Brown’s plan, however, was essentially a combination of slave revolt modeled after the maroon experiences in Haiti, Nat Turner’s earlier Virginia slave rebellion and rural guerrilla warfare of the ‘third world’ type that we have become more familiar with since that time. 150 years later this strategy does not look so foolhardy in an America of the 1850’s that had no real standing army, fairly weak lines of communications, virtually uninhabited mountains to flee to and the North at their backs.
The execution of the plan is another matter. Brown seemingly made about every mistake in the book in that regard. However, this is missing the essential political point that militant action not continuing parliamentary maneuvering advocated by other abolitionists had become necessary. A few more fighting abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, and better propaganda work among freedman with connections to the plantations would not have hurt the chances for success at Harpers Ferry.
What is not in dispute is that Brown considered himself a true Calvinist avenging angel in the struggle against slavery and more importantly acted on that belief. In short, he was committed to bring justice to the black masses. This is why his exploits and memory stay alive after over 150 years. It is possible that if Brown did not have this, by 19th century standards as well as our own, old-fashioned Calvinist determination that he would not have been capable of militant action. Certainly other anti-slavery elements never came close to his militancy, including the key Transcendentalist movement led by Emerson and Thoreau and the Concord ‘crowd’ who supported him and kept his memory alive in hard times.
In their eyes he had the heroic manner of the Old Testament prophet. Now this animating spirit is not one that animates modern revolutionaries and so it is hard to understand the depths of his religious convictions on his actions but they were understood, if not fully appreciated, by others in those days. It is better today to look at Brown more politically through his hero (and mine, as well) Oliver Cromwell-a combination of Calvinist avenger and militant warrior. Yes, I can get behind that picture of him.
By all accounts Brown and his small integrated band of brothers fought bravely and coolly against great odds. Ten of Brown's men were killed including two of his sons. Five were captured, tried and executed, including Brown. These results are almost inevitable when one takes up a revolutionary struggle against the old order and one is not victorious. One need only think of, for example, the fate of the defenders of the Paris Commune in 1871. One can fault Brown on this or that tactical maneuver. Nevertheless he and the others bore themselves bravely in defeat. As we are all too painfully familiar there are defeats of the oppressed that lead nowhere. One thinks of the defeat of the German Revolution in the 1920’s. There other defeats that galvanize others into action. This is how Brown’s actions should be measured by history.
Militarily defeated at Harpers Ferry, Brown's political mission to destroy slavery by force of arms nevertheless continued to galvanize important elements in the North at the expense of the pacifistic non-resistant Garrisonian political program for struggle against slavery. Many writers on Brown who reduce his actions to that of a ‘madman’ still cannot believe that his road proved more appropriate to end slavery than either non-resistance or gradualism. That alone makes short shrift of such theories. Historians and others have also misinterpreted later events such as the Bolshevik strategy which led to Russian Revolution in October 1917. More recently, we saw this same incomprehension concerning the victory of the Vietnamese against overwhelming American military superiority. Needless to say, all these events continue to be revised by some historians to take the sting out of there proper political implications.
From a modern prospective Brown’s strategy for black liberation, even if the abolitionist goal he aspired to was immediately successful, reached the outer limits within the confines of capitalism. Brown’s actions were meant to make black people free. Beyond that goal he had no program except the Chatham Charter which seems to have replicated the American constitution but with racial and gender equality as a cornerstone. Unfortunately the Civil War did not provide fundamental economic and political freedom. That is still our fight. Moreover, the Civil War, the defeat of Radical Reconstruction, the reign of ‘Jim Crow’ and the subsequent waves of black migration to the cities changed the character of black oppression in the U.S. from Brown’s time. Black people are now a part of "free labor," and the key to their liberation is in the integrated fight of labor against the current one-sided class war and establishing a government of workers and their allies. Nevertheless, we can stand proudly in the revolutionary tradition of John Brown (and of his friend Frederick Douglass). We need to complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the Civil War, not by emulating Brown’s exemplary actions but to moving the multi-racial American working class to power. Finish the Civil War.
**************
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Workers Vanguard No. 987
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30 September 2011
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TROTSKY
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LENIN
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Labor Struggles and the Capitalist State
(Quote of the Week)
In fighting company union-busting, longshoremen in Longview,
Washington, are confronting anti-labor laws enforced by government agencies, the
courts and the police. Drawing some lessons of the successful 1934 Minneapolis
Teamsters strike, Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon pointed out that many
workers were learning from their own experience that the state was not neutral
but was an agency of the capitalist class in suppressing labor struggles. He
also explained that strike strategy and tactics must be guided by a realistic
assessment of the actual balance of class forces in the concrete
situation.
This spirit of determined struggle was combined at the same time
with a realistic appraisal of the relation of forces and the limited objectives
of the fight. Without this all the preparations and all the militancy of the
strikers might well have been wasted and brought the reaction of a crushing
defeat. The strike was understood to be a preliminary, partial struggle with the
objective of establishing the union and compelling the bosses to “recognize” it.
When they got that they stopped and called it a day. The strong union that has
emerged from the strike will be able to fight again and to protect its
membership in the meantime. The accomplishment is modest enough. But if we want
to play an effective part in the labor movement we must not allow ourselves to
forget that the American working class is just beginning to move on the path of
the class struggle and, in its great majority, stands yet before the first task
of establishing stable unions. Those who understand the task of the day and
accomplish it prepare the future. The others merely chatter.
As in every strike of any consequence, the workers involved in the
Minneapolis struggle also had an opportunity to see the government at work and
to learn some practical lessons as to its real function. The police force of the
city, under the direction of the Republican mayor, supplemented by a horde of
“special deputies,” were lined up solidly on the side of the bosses. The police
and deputies did their best to protect the strikebreakers and keep some trucks
moving, although their best was not good enough. The mobilization of the militia
by the Farmer-Labor governor was a threat against the strikers, even if the
militia-men were not put on the street. The strikers will remember that threat.
In a sense it can be said that the political education of a large section of the
strikers began with this experience.
—James P. Cannon, “Minneapolis and Its Meaning,” New
International (July 1934)
***Songs
To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through
World War II-Peggy Lee Backed By The Benny Goodman Band- From Deep In The
American Songbook-Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It…
*********
Let's Do It
When the little bluebird
Who has never said a word
Starts to sing Spring
When the little bluebell
At the bottom of the dell
Starts to ring Ding dong Ding dong
When the little blue clerk
In the middle of his work
Starts a tune to the moon up above
It is nature that is all
Simply telling us to fall in love
And that's why birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
Cold Cape Cod clams, 'gainst their wish, do it
Even lazy jellyfish do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
I've heard that lizards and frogs do it
Layin' on a rock
They say that roosters do it
With a doodle and cock
Some Argentines, without means do it
I hear even Boston beans do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
When the little bluebird
Who has never said a word
starts to sing Spring spring spring
When the little bluebell
At the bottom of the dell
Starts to ring Ding ding ding
When the little blue clerk
In the middle of his work
Starts a tune
The most refined lady bugs do it
When a gentleman calls
Moths in your rugs they do it
What's the use of moth balls
The chimpanzees in the zoos do it,
Some courageous kangaroos do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
I'm sure sometimes on the sly you do it
Maybe even you and I might do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
Yeah,
lets’ fall in love. Get this. After all
Argentines without means do it and a whole litany of other nationalities and
species. Got it.
**********
Over
the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space
of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince
Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. This series which could
include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come
down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the
odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain
amusing here. Listen up-Peter Paul Markin
Additional
Markin comment for this series:
Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it
meant to our parents or not, what sacred place it held in their youthful
hearts, this is the music that went wafting through the house of many of those
of us who constitute the Generation of ‘68. Those of us who came of age,
personal, political and social age in the age of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot, and
who were driven by some makeshift dream, who in the words of brother Bobby
quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson were
“seeking a new world.” Those who took up
the call to action and slogged through that decade whether it was in civil
rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle
to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture before the hammer came down. And
that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note
drifted out into the ebbing tide. But enough of that about us this is about
forbears and their struggles, and the music that they dreamed by on cold winter
nights or hot summer days.
This is emphatically the music of the generation that
survived the dust bowl, empty bowl, no sugar bowl street urchin hard times of
the 1930s Great Depression, the time of the madness, the time of the
night-takers, the time of the long knives. Survived god knows how by taking the
nearest freight, some smoke and dreams freight, Southern Pacific, Union
Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston and
Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and search for, well, search for…
Search for something that was not triple decker bodies piled high cold-water
flat with a common commode and brown stained sink, rooming house, hell, call it
what it was flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and
wines, or tumbled down shack, window pane-less, tarpaper siding, roof tiles
falling, and get out on the open road and search for the great promised American
night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.
Survived the Hoovervilles, the great cardboard, tin can
roof, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers, down in ravines and
under railroad trestles when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects,
robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses, robbed them
as an old-time balladeer said at the time not with a gun but with a fountain
pen, but still robbed them. Survived the soap kitchens hungers, the endless
waiting in line for scrapes, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish of ice
cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was ever
present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride when he has to stick
his hand out, stick it out and not know why. Out of work, or with little work
waiting for that day, that full head of steam day in places like Flint, Frisco
town, Akron, Chicago, hell, even in boondock Minneapolis when the score gets
evened, evened a little, but until then shifting the scroungings of the trash
piles of the urban glut, the rural fallow fields, and that gnarring hungry that
cried out in the night-want, want that is all.
Survived too the look, the look of those who in their
fortified towers tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the
fittest. Survived to slog through the
time of the gun in World War II, either carrying one on the shoulder in Europe
or the Pacific or waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some gun had not
carried off sweetheart Johnnie or Jimmy. Survived the endless lines of boys
heading off East and West, waiting for the other shoe to drop hanging in some
corner drugstore, Doc’s Rexall, name your name, sitting two by two at the soda
fountain playing that newly installed jukebox until the nickels ran out.
It wafted through the large console radio centered in the
living room of my house via local station WDJA in North Adamsville as my mother
used it as background on her appointed household rounds. It drove me crazy then
as mush stuff at a time when I was craving the big break-out rock and roll
sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played the jukebox at Doc’s
Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach. Funny thing though while I
am still a child of rock and roll (blues too) this so-called mushy stuff sounds
pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who performed
this music have passed on. Go figure.
Who has never said a word
Starts to sing Spring
When the little bluebell
At the bottom of the dell
Starts to ring Ding dong Ding dong
When the little blue clerk
In the middle of his work
Starts a tune to the moon up above
It is nature that is all
Simply telling us to fall in love
And that's why birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
Cold Cape Cod clams, 'gainst their wish, do it
Even lazy jellyfish do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
I've heard that lizards and frogs do it
Layin' on a rock
They say that roosters do it
With a doodle and cock
Some Argentines, without means do it
I hear even Boston beans do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
When the little bluebird
Who has never said a word
starts to sing Spring spring spring
When the little bluebell
At the bottom of the dell
Starts to ring Ding ding ding
When the little blue clerk
In the middle of his work
Starts a tune
The most refined lady bugs do it
When a gentleman calls
Moths in your rugs they do it
What's the use of moth balls
The chimpanzees in the zoos do it,
Some courageous kangaroos do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
I'm sure sometimes on the sly you do it
Maybe even you and I might do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
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***The American Literary Canon- The View Of The Late Norman Mailer
Click BelowTo Link To Norman Mailer "New York Review Of Books" article mentioned in commentary.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22431
Commentary
Regular readers of this space know that over the past year or so I have done more than my fair share of book reviews of the journalistic and literary works of the late Norman Mailer. It is hardly a secret that in my youth (and later, as well) I devoured anything of his that I could get my hands even as we parted political company in the late 1960’s. With that in mind, I took full note of a three-part series concerning Mailer’s correspondence with fellow writers, editors, erstwhile critics and an occasional literary lumpen proletarian in the New York Review of Book. In the third part (dated March 12, 2009, page 28) there is a letter by Mailer to and editor of “The Reader’s Catalogue”, Helen Morris, listing his ten choices for inclusion into a project whose aim seemingly was to provide a who’s who of the Western literary canon. I list those choices below:
“U.S.A.” John Dos Passos; “Huckleberry Finn” Mark Twain; “Studs Lonigan” James T. Farrell; “Look, Homeward, Angel; Thomas Wolfe; “The Grapes Of Wrath John Steinbeck; “The Great Gatsby” F. Scott Fitzgerald; “The Sun Also Rise” Ernest Hemingway; “Appointment At Samarra; John O’Hara; “The Postman Always Rings Twice” James M. Cain; and “Moby Dick” Herman Melville.
Now Mailer, when all is said and done, is a man of the Great Depression/ World War II generation, the so-called ‘greatest generation’ so that his choices reflect an earlier literary tradition that stressed his beloved male muscularity in writing, and much else in that pre-woman’s liberation world. Here is the twist though, with the exception of “Huckleberry Finn” that I would replace with Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” reflecting a generational shift on the search for the meaning of America story, Mailer’s list is the same that I would give if asked. This from a man of the “Generation of ‘68”. Go figure.
The ‘go figure’ part is actually very easy. His list or mine, these works are very strongly representative of the best in the American literary tradition. The literary canon, if you will. They DESERVE to be read, and re-read. Where the late Mr. Mailer and I would, perhaps, part company is on the questions of who else should be included, under what criteria and how expansive the canon should be. Not inconsequential questions if, however, they are really beyond the scope of what I want to say here. If one pays careful attention to his list (or mine for that matter) it is filled with the names of dreaded dead white males so feared by the literary political correctness squads. So here is a list, by no means extensive or exclusive, of a few of the ones that I would add to that list today and that I wished I had read earlier in life. Hell, though, read them all:
Richard Wright("Native Son" and "Black Boy" are a must); Langston Hughes (if you love the blues you need to read his poetry); Willa Cather; Edith Wharton (yah, I know that old Algonquin Roundtable crowd); Russell Banks; Allen Ginsberg (is there a better modern, modern poem than "Howl"); William Burroughs; Toni Morrison; William Styron; August Wilson; Joan Didion; Flannery O’Connor (she is starting to get some well deserved attention from the academy, please read her "Wise Blood"); Jimmy Breslin; Harper Lee (a million kudos for "To Kill A Mockingbird"), Lorraine Hansberry; Gertrude Stein; Eudora Welty; and, Tennessee Williams (read every play you can get your hands on starting with "Street Car Named Desire").
What no now departed John Updike? And no John Cheevers? No, but that is what makes the literary name game so much fun. Who makes your literary pantheon?
Click BelowTo Link To Norman Mailer "New York Review Of Books" article mentioned in commentary.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22431
Commentary
Regular readers of this space know that over the past year or so I have done more than my fair share of book reviews of the journalistic and literary works of the late Norman Mailer. It is hardly a secret that in my youth (and later, as well) I devoured anything of his that I could get my hands even as we parted political company in the late 1960’s. With that in mind, I took full note of a three-part series concerning Mailer’s correspondence with fellow writers, editors, erstwhile critics and an occasional literary lumpen proletarian in the New York Review of Book. In the third part (dated March 12, 2009, page 28) there is a letter by Mailer to and editor of “The Reader’s Catalogue”, Helen Morris, listing his ten choices for inclusion into a project whose aim seemingly was to provide a who’s who of the Western literary canon. I list those choices below:
“U.S.A.” John Dos Passos; “Huckleberry Finn” Mark Twain; “Studs Lonigan” James T. Farrell; “Look, Homeward, Angel; Thomas Wolfe; “The Grapes Of Wrath John Steinbeck; “The Great Gatsby” F. Scott Fitzgerald; “The Sun Also Rise” Ernest Hemingway; “Appointment At Samarra; John O’Hara; “The Postman Always Rings Twice” James M. Cain; and “Moby Dick” Herman Melville.
Now Mailer, when all is said and done, is a man of the Great Depression/ World War II generation, the so-called ‘greatest generation’ so that his choices reflect an earlier literary tradition that stressed his beloved male muscularity in writing, and much else in that pre-woman’s liberation world. Here is the twist though, with the exception of “Huckleberry Finn” that I would replace with Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road” reflecting a generational shift on the search for the meaning of America story, Mailer’s list is the same that I would give if asked. This from a man of the “Generation of ‘68”. Go figure.
The ‘go figure’ part is actually very easy. His list or mine, these works are very strongly representative of the best in the American literary tradition. The literary canon, if you will. They DESERVE to be read, and re-read. Where the late Mr. Mailer and I would, perhaps, part company is on the questions of who else should be included, under what criteria and how expansive the canon should be. Not inconsequential questions if, however, they are really beyond the scope of what I want to say here. If one pays careful attention to his list (or mine for that matter) it is filled with the names of dreaded dead white males so feared by the literary political correctness squads. So here is a list, by no means extensive or exclusive, of a few of the ones that I would add to that list today and that I wished I had read earlier in life. Hell, though, read them all:
Richard Wright("Native Son" and "Black Boy" are a must); Langston Hughes (if you love the blues you need to read his poetry); Willa Cather; Edith Wharton (yah, I know that old Algonquin Roundtable crowd); Russell Banks; Allen Ginsberg (is there a better modern, modern poem than "Howl"); William Burroughs; Toni Morrison; William Styron; August Wilson; Joan Didion; Flannery O’Connor (she is starting to get some well deserved attention from the academy, please read her "Wise Blood"); Jimmy Breslin; Harper Lee (a million kudos for "To Kill A Mockingbird"), Lorraine Hansberry; Gertrude Stein; Eudora Welty; and, Tennessee Williams (read every play you can get your hands on starting with "Street Car Named Desire").
What no now departed John Updike? And no John Cheevers? No, but that is what makes the literary name game so much fun. Who makes your literary pantheon?
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