Please note that the poems and essays on this site are copyright and may not be reproduced without the author's permission.


Saturday 30 August 2014

College Pigskin Preview: The New Amazing Return of A Crazy American Girl


.
ROYAL CROWN COLA
LIFE
11/13/1944
p. 77
 
Nehi Corporation advertisement for Royal Crown Cola: Life, 13 November 1944 (Gallery of Graphic Design)


Pumped for a rhyming line into air
A football falling through registration,
Here I come: That’s Cathy’s Clown,
A song by Don and Phil in her
Consciousness. And mine. A beverage
Passes between lips, they’re her lips;
I am that beverage. Her Royal Crown
Classes break on the hour
Bar, O falcon of the lecture!
Fall, footballs, through the leaves!
We clown in airs of each other’s consciousness:
I bring hers stealthy cigarettes,
Between-halves tears; she brings mine
Contemporary milk of the lectures.

TC: A Crazy American Girl, 1960
 

File:Kooning woman v.jpg
 
Woman V: Willem de Kooning, 1951-52 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra)
 
File:Woman3.jpg

Woman III: Willem de Kooning, 1951-53 (private collection of Steven A. Cohen)

LONGINES WATCHES
LIFE
10/13/1941
p. 106

Longines Watches advertisement for Longines Watches: Life, 10 October 1936 (Gallery of Graphic Design)
 


Junge Frau (bunt) / Young Girl (coloured)
: Gerhard Richter, 1965, oil on canvas, 80 x 65 cm (Gerhard Richter Art)
 
ROYAL CROWN COLA
LIFE
03/12/1945
p. 123 
 
Nehi Corporation advertisement for Royal Crown Cola: Life, 12 March 1945 (Gallery of Graphic Design)


Don Everly sits laughing at the table while Phil dances with a friend to the jukebox, 1950s
: photo by Alamy, c. 1959
 
File:Red Grange Field.jpg

Red Grange Field, Wheaton, Illinois: photo by Dhalls, 31 May 2006; image by BKLuis, 8 November 2009
 
CHESTERFIELD CIGARETTES
LIBERTY
11/29/1936
BACK COVER  
 
Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company advertisement for Chesterfield Cigarettes: Liberty, 29 November 1936 (Gallery of Graphic Design)

Friday 29 August 2014

Robinson Jeffers: Point Joe


.

Seagull at Point Joe: photo by deb1edeb, 17 August 2009


Point Joe has teeth and has torn ships; it has fierce and solitary beauty;
Walk there all day you shall see nothing that will not make part of a poem.





The restless sea: rock formations at Point Joe, central California coast: photo by California Dreamin' 77, 23 June 2009


I saw the spars and planks of shipwreck on the rocks, and beyond the desolate
Sea-meadows rose the warped wind-bitten van of the pines, a fog-bank vaulted

 
Forest and all, the flat sea-meadows at that time of year were plated
Golden with the low flower called footsteps of the spring, millions of flowerets,

 
Whose light suffused upward into the fog flooded its vault, we wandered
Through a weird country where the light beat up from earthward, and was golden.





Breaking waves and ice plant at Point Joe, central California coast: a point where the sea surges due to submerged rocks: photo by California Dreamin' 77, 23 June 2009


One other moved there, an old Chinaman gathering seaweed from the sea-rocks,
He brought it in his basket and spread it flat to dry on the edge of the meadow.




China Rock, Monterey peninsula #4: a landmark named in honour of the Chinese who settled in the nearby fishing villages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: photo by California Dreamin' 77, 23 June 2009


Permanent things are what is needful in a poem, things temporally
Of great dimension, things continually renewed or always present.





Hazy day, Monterey peninsula: photo by California Dreamin' 77, 23 June 2009


Grass that is made each year equals the mountains in her past and future;
Fashionable and momentary things we need not see nor speak of.





The restless sea: underwater rocks create crashing waves at vista point: photo by California Dreamin' 77, 23 June 2009


Man gleaning food between the solemn presences of land and ocean,
On shores where better men have shipwrecked, under fog and among flowers,

 
Equals the mountains in his past and future; that glow from the earth was only
A trick of nature's, one must forgive nature a thousand graceful subtleties.

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962): Point Joe, from Tamar and Other Poems (1924)




Cypress, at the coast, Monterey peninsula: photo by California Dreamin' 77, 23 June 2009


China Rock, Monterey peninsula #3. Here and at Point Joe, Chinese fishermen built lean-tos against the rocks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: photo by California Dreamin' 77, 23 June 2009



China Rock #2: photo by California Dreamin' 77, 23 June 2009



The restless sea: powerful waves breaking on the rocks at Point Joe, central California coast: photo by California Dreamin' 77, 23 June 2009

Wednesday 27 August 2014

the daily screenshot


.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Caprock_Canyons_Mule_Deer_2005.jpg/1024px-Caprock_Canyons_Mule_Deer_2005.jpg

Mule Deer (Odocoileus hemionus), Caprock Canyons, West Texas: photo by Leaflet, 15 May 2005


Today... dry season continuing after the latest insane war... I made it down the steps oh boy... and saw a doe, in the midst of the full-on mad-dog rush-hour get-and-spend take-no-prisoners commuter traffic stream blasting up the hill to where the rich live, attempting to herd her two scared fawns across the freeway feeder.

Two trips; on the second, the more timid of the young ones finally got the message, moved by her gentle nudgings, and -- as she lagged behind, observing the imminent danger with watchful motherly caution -- somehow made it across unscathed.

But now the red light at the Alameda had again turned green, and she was stranded and beginning to panic, ears pinned, eyes wide, frantically looking for an opening; a car bearing down on her at 40 mph, she leapt over the bonnet, seeming to hang in the air one long heartstopping moment, bounded away...




gas 'n go (view from an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III about to receive fuel from a KX-10A Extender on a training mission above southern Oregon): photo by Robert Couse-Baker (**RCB**), 25 September 2013

Tuesday 26 August 2014

Erasing the Forgotten: Has Gaza Eluded the Historical Memory of Poetry?


.

The moment Al Zafer building was hit: photo via Issam Sammour on twitter, 24 August 2014



Hamid Dabashi: Gaza: Poetry after Auschwitz

'To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.' Is writing poetry after Gaza also barbaric?
via Al Jazeera, 8 August 2014

In a memorable and much cited passage in Cultural Criticism and Society (1949), Theodor Adorno, the eminent German philosopher who spent a good portion of his life in the US following the Nazi takeover of his homeland, famously said: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today."

Later in his thinking, Adorno reconsidered the assessment, but the power and shock of this thinking has endured.

What did Adorno mean, exactly, by that phrase? How could writing poetry after a calamity such as Auschwitz, and by extension a horror like the Holocaust, be something barbaric? Doesn't poetry console in moments of mourning and despair? And more to the point today: Is writing poetry after Gaza also barbaric? What would that mean?

The preeminent Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is no longer alive. But were he alive today, how would he react to the carnage in Gaza? He would have either committed suicide like the magnificent Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi who did so in protest against the brutish Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, or he would respond with his poetry.

So how would we read Adorno's pronouncement today -- after the barbaric slaughter of Palestinians by Israelis in Gaza?

First, let's put what Adorno said in context. In his essay, Adorno asserts that "the traditional transcendent critique of ideology is obsolete", meaning "there are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, only advertisements for the world through its duplication and the provocative lie which does not seek belief but commands silence".

We have, he is saying, hit a narrative cul-de-sac in our critique of ideology, for we are integral to that ideology. The insularity of that ideology has now metastasised into shades upon shades of advertisements, which engulf and transmute the very nature of our critical faculties. Ideology has become amorphous.
Adorno is after all critic of what he calls "the total society", a society where everything, including cultural criticism, has been brought into being, concretised, the critic and the subject of his or her criticism indistinguishable.

"The more total society becomes," Adorno suggests, "the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own."
In other words, you cannot save a society via a cultural critique that in its critical language continues to exacerbate that reification.

It is right here that Adorno suddenly adds: "Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today."

Why that is the case? "Through the crudity and severity of the notion of causality, [cultural criticism] claims to hold up a mirror to society's own crudity and severity, to its debasement of the mind. But the sinister, integrated society of today no longer tolerates even those relatively independent, distinct moments to which the theory of the causal dependence of superstructure on base once referred."

Therefore it is near impossible for cultural criticism to find a moral space outside the culture it wishes to criticise. We are here in a hall of mirrors, where culture and cultural criticism keep reflecting each other, generating the illusion of defiance, consolation, liberation -- but in effect plunging us ever deeper into the abyss.

An open-air prison

It is here that, in an uncanny sentence written in 1949, Adorno uses a metaphor that points decades forward to Gaza:

"In the open-air prison which the world is becoming, it is no longer so important to know what depends on what, such is the extent to which everything is one."

By "open-air prison", he of course means a society in which everything is totalised, homogenised, and has become one -- and thus the fusion of the moral and the material, the ideological and the political, the superstructure and infrastructure has become a concrete totality.

But hasn't Gaza, as a camp -- a concentration or internment camp -- also become that reified totality of the world the way Adorno diagnosed it?

In his Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999), the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben examined the literature of the survivors of Auschwitz, dwelling on the ethical questions they entail. But the testimonial distance between Auschwitz and Gaza is precisely where Adorno's cul-de-sac rests its case. 

This much is all known and familiar to students of Adorno. Now the question is when we fast forward from 1949 when he wrote that essay to today, when we are witness to the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, what do we see? Today how are we to read Adorno's phrase that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"?

Look at Israeli society today, when it has unleashed its gargantuan military machine against a mostly defenceless population. Rape their women, cries one Israeli to his comrades-in-arms, kill their entire population so they won't breed more "little snakes", echoes an Israeli member of parliament. Burn them alive and watch them die, then go on a hilltop to watch even more of them slaughtered by your army.

Kill them as they play on the beach, kill them in the playground, kill their crippled, kill them as they pray in their mosque. Destroy their homes and flatten an entire neighbourhood, maim and murder them in UN school shelters and then gather gleefully to sing: "Tomorrow there's no school in Gaza, they don't have any children left."

Just for good measure, so no one could misinterpret any of this, one Israeli newspaper published a a reader's blog openly calling for the "permissible genocide" of Palestinians.

What does all of this amount to? Doesn't it come together to define what Zionism actually means today, as compared with its original potential? They said there were no Palestinians. Today, Palestinians are Palestinians, if by nothing else, by virtue of a history of unconscionable suffering and heroic defiance. What are Israelis? Who are Israelis? They are Israelis by virtue of what? By a shared and sustained murderous history -- from Deir Yassin in 1948 to Gaza in 2014. Is that not Zionism, the ideological foundation stone of being an Israeli?

'Barbarism manifest'

This macabre chorus of death is the poetry that Israelis are singing upon the graveyard of Gaza. "Death to Arabs", cry mobs in Tel Aviv -- for this is the poetry of Zionism for Gaza. This is what Adorno meant when he said, "after Auschwitz poetry is barbarism". This is what he had diagnosed, this is what he had anticipated. Israel is the puerile poetry after Auschwitz. It is barbarism manifest -- and in that it is the microcosm of the world it inhabits, from Saudi Arabia and Egypt that support it, to Iran and Turkey that feign to oppose it, from the US and Europe that arm it, to China and Russia that look for lucrative business within it. And it is precisely this world at large, crystallised in Israel, that Adorno saw, diagnosed, and feared.

But the terror of that barbaric poetry is heavy. After Gaza, not a single living Israeli can utter the word "Auschwitz" without it sounding like "Gaza". Auschwitz as a historical fact is now archival. Auschwitz as a metaphor is now Palestinian.

From now on, every time any Israeli, every time any Jew, anywhere in the world, utters the word "Auschwitz", or the word "Holocaust", the world will hear "Gaza". That is the sublime truth of Adorno's phrase, for, as Primo Levi saw it as early as 1982, in the aftermath of yet another Palestinian slaughter: "Today, the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis." Thus today Zionism -- as sung by these murderous thugs in the streets of Tel Aviv -- is the barbarism Adorno warned after Auschwitz.

But what about Gaza? What about poetry after Gaza -- the poetry of Palestinians, of Arabs, of any human being bearing witness to the slaughter in Gaza? The answer to this daunting question is no longer with Adorno but with another Jewish thinker of his time, who saw the dark clouds of Nazi terror gathering much sooner than all of them combined and ultimately opted to end his life before they flooded his world with their dreadful and deadly rain.

Between Walter Benjamin's suicide in 1940 on the border between France and Spain, running away from the banality of Nazi evil, and Khalil Hawi's suicide in 1982, in protest against the Zionist invasion and occupation of his homeland, the fate of all our metaphors and allegories after Gaza was written and sealed.

Where Adorno saw concrete totality, Benjamin saw ruinous fragments, and from the shattered concrete blocks of Gaza under the mighty bombs of the US and Israel, Benjamin anticipated the messianic rise of earth-shattering allegories for our future fears, foretelling our fantasies of freedom. While in Adorno the vile and diabolic Zionism that Netanyahu interprets and exercises is the confirmation of his thought that after Auschwitz all poetry is barbaric, in the very same ruins of Gaza, right next to the broken skulls of dead Palestinian children, dwells the rising seeds of our future world -- fearful, phantasmagoric, deadening, inaugural.

Hamid Dabashi is Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.


The IOF asking the people in this building near my house [Al Zafer no. 4 residential tower] to immediately evacuate!: photo via Sabreena-Gaza on twitter, 24 August 2014

Report: AlZafer no. 4 building totally destroyed: photo via WhateverinGaza on twitter, 24 August 2014
Smoke seen after a Massive Explosion nearby 7:25 pm. The entire tower was shaking: photo via Culé MD Gaza on twitter, 25 August 2014



Al Zafer building, moments after the strike: photo via Shaima' Ziara on twitter, 24 August 2014



Al Zafer building, after the strike: photo via Shaima' Ziara on twitter, 24 August 2014



13-story Al Zafer residential building razed to the ground after IOF airstrike; 16 injuries reported so far: photo via Omar Daraghmeh on twitter, 24 August 2014



13-story Al Zafer building razed to the ground after IOF airstrike; 16 injuries reported so far: photo via Omar Daraghmeh on twitter, 24 August 2014
This building used to house 360 people now they are all homeless from Israel strike to the tower..: photo via Falasteen on twitter, 24 August 2014
Nothing left to tell their stories... except melting metal: photo via Ahmed Tharwat on twitter, 24 August 2014

Some families taking tents as shelters next to their damaged flats the day after Israel's targeting of the 13-story Al Zafer residential tower: photo via Dalia Labadibi-Gaza on twitter, 25 August 2014

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Palestinians search through the ruins of their homes after Israel destroys 13-story Al Zafer residential tower: photo by Dan Cohen, 25 August 2014
 Ali Bin Abi Taleb Mosque: destroyed by israel for being a mosque...: photo via Gaza Writes Back on twitter, 25 August 2014
That moment!: photo via Mohammed Y. Ismail on twitter, 25 August 2014


More and more attacks hit Gaza... As the 50th day comes to an end, people still under attack: photo via Falasteen on twitter,  25 August 2014


Israeli occupation forces destroy an entire neighbourhood: photo via ISM Palestine on twitter, 25 August 2014

 
Israeli rockets: destruction: photo via Mohammed M Abu Sadaa on twitter, 24 August 2014

The UN says 70 percent of the Palestinians who have died in Gaza were civilians: photo via Al-Akhbar English on twitter, 24 August 2014
Nader al-Masri, Palestinian Olympic athlete and his father at the ruins of their family home: photo via Dr Bassel Abuwarda on twitter, 24 August 2014
A Palestinian is carried from the rubble of a building bombed by Israel in Gaza on Saturday: photo via Dr Bassel Abuwarda on twitter, 24 August 2014

Embedded image permalink
Now many injuries at Alshifa hospital after an airstrike on one of the citizens' homes in Gaza
: photo via Solidarity Gaza on twitter, 25 August 2014
Doctors, Nurses & Paramedics of Gaza...... these are my Heroes: photo via Sabry Wazwaz on twitter, 24 August 2014
Family of five killed as Israel bombs Gaza homes, mosques: photo via Falasteen on twitter, 24 August 2014
Gaza every minute...: photo via Falasteen on twitter, 24 August 2014



Israeli warplanes targeted the House of Al-Dahdouh, South of Gaza City today: photo via CemDM on twitter, 24 August 2014


Israeli warplanes targeted the House of Al-Dahdouh, South of Gaza City today: photo via CemDM on twitter, 24 August 2014


Israeli warplanes targeted the House of Al-Dahdouh, South of Gaza City today: photo via CemDM on twitter, 24 August 2014




Israeli warplanes targeted the House of Al-Dahdouh, South of Gaza City today: photo via CemDM on twitter, 24 August 2014
Rafah sky covered with smoke after the strike: Israel hit a building in Rafah just moments ago...: photo via Falasteen on twitter, 24 August 2014


The largest shopping center in Rafah city burns in the early morning of 24 August: photo via Dr Bassel Abuwarda on twitter, 24 August 2014



Good morning from Gaza, 24th August: The remnants of the largest shopping center in Rafah city: photo via Dr Bassel Abuwarda on twitter, 24 August 2014



Good morning from Gaza, 24th August: The remnants of the largest shopping center in Rafah city: photo via Dr Bassel Abuwarda on twitter, 24 August 2014


Good morning from Gaza, 24th August: The remnants of the largest shopping center in Rafah city: photo via Dr Bassel Abuwarda on twitter, 24 August 2014
Israelis bombed the Italian tower that used to house 100 families now they are all homeless...: photo via Gaza Under Attack on twitter, 25 August 2014


Italian tower that was targeted by Israel last night by Terrorist Israel!!: photo via Sara Alsagga on twitter, 26 August 2014
Remains of Italian Mall tower in Gaza, struck in overnight Israeli raids: photo via Ramy Hossain on twitter, 26 August 2014
Archived photo of the Basha building, which Israel just now completely flattened with 4 F-16 missiles: image via Linah Alsaafin on twitter, 26 August 2014
Albasha tower now: image via Occupied Air / Manic on twitter, 26 August 2014



This is AlBasha tower that was bombed more than five times last night by Israeli F16s...: photo via falasteen on twitter, 26 August 2014



This is AlBasha tower that was bombed more than five times last night by Israeli F16s...: photo via falasteen on twitter, 26 August 2014


This is AlBasha tower that was bombed more than five times last night by Israeli F16s...: photo via falasteen on twitter, 26 August 2014

 
Five Palestinians including three children killed in airstrike on Gaza home: photo via ISM Palestine on twitter, 24 August 2014
 
 
One of two twins born during this assault, killed when airstrike targeted their home: photo via Dr Bassel Abuwarda on twitter, 25 August 2014
 
 
It's not a toy -- it's a prosthesis: photo via Gaza Under Attack on twitter, 25 August 2014
 
 
"Doctor, please, I don't want to die!" this little girl said: photo via Omar Ghraieb on twitter, 25 August 2014
 
 
His eyes: "WHY THE HELL..."?: photo via Mohammed Y. Ismail on twitter, 25 August 2014
 
 
The Gaza look...: photo via Falasteen on twitter, 25 August 2014

We never forget Sara Omar Sheikh al-Eid, killed by shrapnel: photo via List of War Victims on twitter, 24 August 2014

Holding his hand & trying to convince him that one day the World might get better: photo via Dr Bassel Abuwarda on twitter, 26 August 2014 
We Don't Forget Yasser Zaki Abu Madi, killed by tank shells: photo via List of War Victims on twitter, 24 August 2014
No loss can be compared to that of a parent losing one or all of his children! A dad's cry of pain: photo via Omar Ghraieb on twitter, 25 August 2014
The day began with the new school year starting in Palestine, while remaining deferred in the Gaza Strip: photo via Shereen ElOkka on twitter, 24 August 2014
Gaza children mark first day of school, but no lessons: photo by AFP via Joe Catron on twitter, 24 August 2014