“At 77, it is time to be in earnest …”

Me and Clarycat, spring 2013, photo taken by Jim

Dear Friends and Readers,

If I’m not mistaken, this was the hardest birthday I’ve had to get through since Jim died, 10 years ago — 2013, when I was 67. I could, of course, have sat all day and cried, and sometimes I was very near tears. For example, when I thanked Norma Reck for organizing the luncheon for the Theater Group at a splendid restaurant tucked away in an older beautiful house, one I’d taken Izzy to several times when she was part of an Adult Aspergers Club. I always drove her there and back; now I got to go for the first time, and it was a yummy meal. I could feel that Norma felt my intense emotion. Why didn’t I? For the same reason as I’ve never sat for hours weeping over Jim. It’s just so useless –besides which it’ll exhaust me.  And such acts won’t bring him back, and nor cannot bring Clarycat back either.  With her passing, though, another of the fundamental presences which I’ve felt for years loves me, and who has been my companion is gone.

Funny, I have less to do: there is less food to put out, the litter box is not as full; going through morning tidying up takes less time: no one to provide a snack for when I get to the enclosed porch. She would sit there waiting for it. When we’d done in the kitchen, she’d come with me to this study for the day’s activity — mostly mental — me sitting reading, writing, her looking out one of the windows mostly, or half-sleeping.  Morning was a thing we did together.

I had a bad night, bad dreams, and took a half a sleeping pill to get through.

I did it by having things to do or places to be with others around. So part of usual routine was posting to the lists, paying a bill (fraught because I have to do most of them online and thus have to have user name and password accepted &c), tidying up (as usual) and then the finding the place. I left way early.

A two hour luncheon where I listened to (and myself spoke sometimes to the people near me) all their plans (Norma’s) for the coming year. When I had left, Ian had stared at me going out — looking astonished and unhappy. I had told him “I won’t be gone long; I’ll be back before 3,” and so I was. He hopped out of the cat-bed with a wall around it, slightly too small for him, which he’s been preferring since Clary died. Meowing at me. It took a while to settle back, and then there was a zoom chat at 4-5 (again from OLLI at Mason), this one about stress.

What a topic. I thought it was supposed to be stress at holiday time, but it seemed it was to be about stress in general just as much. Perhaps I gave away a bit too much of myself, but probably not. The wonders of zoom include how structured it is, how it does distance people so though I told twice of Clary’s death, and at one point the conversation was about what we were to do when very old and if we were preparing for it, and I said, no, as I hadn’t the money for good assisted living, and had no one to turn to who understood me, so I hoped to pop off all at once so as to obviate any need for killing myself. I did say something like that. Others took us in other dire directions, even the slaughter of the Palestinians over the past 6 weeks, and fear (very real) of Trump winning as a Hitler. After all most of them don’t find holiday time especially stressful.

I had hoped that I had a third distraction: a young male friend said he would be singing in a choir, reachable by zoom at 7:30 pm. Izzy obligingly made supper a little earlier, and with cooking, talking, the dishes, I was busy until just then. I waited 7 minutes and then realized it was 9/5, not 11/29. I made this mistake this past Saturday when Izzy and I went half-way to the Folger before I realized our tickets were for 12/9, not 11/25. The Oxford trip I had us coming in a day too early, I had us not having the full 5 nights booked for the week in London that we needed. Last minute arrangements were managed though — at considerable expense. This time we just had to turn round and go home — Izzy took another train to the movies.

So I turned to the real source of quietude and ordered thought amusement that was taking me through the day: Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, which I am truly enjoying. I read it on and off. I’ve just finished the fourth episode of the Ian Carmichael serial, Five Red Herrings — the movie much better than the book, from re-arrangement, re-emphasis on the characters, and the alluring scenery of Scotland. In both forms her forms of wittiness are so engaging.

Closing moments of Five Red Herrings — Lord Peter fishing, Bunter painting (Glyn Houston rightly got second billing) — what fun they might have taken it to drive all around that part of Scotland in 1920s luxury cars

I then watched DemocracyNow. org and learned of another massacre of civilians (just going from house to house, killing all the men, raping women first) going on in Darfur: the open genocidal slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza has set a dreadful precedent. And I read a wonderful essay on Protest Literature in American — a volume called A Political Companion to John Steinbeck, online book — a real lucky find because since he was a true protester, he has been utterly sidelined in publishing and curricula assignments in schools throughout the US. I have to get myself to try Of Mice and Men; I suspect I won’t like the depiction of the disabled man; and I don’t like Steinbeck’s way of depicting women.

But it was Sayers who kept me cheered. Laura wrote more than once, sending me photos of her cats; maybe over 50 people wished me a happy birthday on FB and my listserv. Again it’s so easy from afar; when I told anyone in person today, they rushed past that information.

10 years and now I’ve lost my second beloved. Ian is a different sort of cat: he is attached but he shows it far more distantly. For example, he sleeps elsewhere in the house, not in the bed near me.

An old photo of Rosalind Carter — my guess is she knew what it was herself

I also learned (from Amy Goodman) of how Rosalind Carter worked hard and effectively to make real help for people with mental health problems. She was very concerned that the stigma associated with this should be wiped away. I doubt it has because people fear mental distress, depression, sadness, anxiety, panic (and yes stress too). But she has made it less acceptable to reject and ignore people needing mental help. A stubborn woman who lucked into a good marriage with a man who acquired a lot of power and respect and shared it with her. She could not know but perhaps suspected how many people have such problems who don’t begin to bear true witness to it.

I’ve always been in earnest in life — I do hope when it’s time to go, I go quickly. I see now that I did the kindness thing I could for Clarycat. I gave her as much precious life as she could enjoy and then endure.

The local vet practice sent me a card where the two vets, the one I saw twice for Clary, and the one who sat with me and kept me company and basically did the euthanasia, wrote a paragraph each. In long hand. Kind, assuring me I’d done the right thing, spared Clarycat much suffering. This is better more humane treatment than Kaiser ever provided.

Posy Simmons’ image of Mrs Scrooge and her cat on Christmas eve — I shall have to dream of Clary that night

Ellen

Clarycat — Interim Update — with a poem to Tazzi

Clarycat this past April 2023, shortly after she had her stroke

To all my and Clarycat and Izzy’s dear friends who have responded or read the last blog with concern:

Let me say that after all, I probably will not take Clarycat in for euthanasia today or tomorrow. She began to eat again Monday morning and while she staggers far more than she walks and she falls back a good deal, she is now trying to get about again. She is drinking, she is sitting on my lap when she can. She smiles at me.

Most of all Izzy is against it — In fact it is Isobel’s view which has prevailed. On Sunday night she said I was giving up too soon. She says Clary will have bad days and we have to live with these — when she gets up she is weakest. I did wrong over my dog I know. She is just now struggling to sit near the grate. I have not yet reconciled myself and Izzy has even less. This is hard time for Ian who is made very uncomfortable, stays at a distance except when he is on my lap or takes her cat-bed (quite deliberately I think).

Today again she took up a toy and had a hard time carrying it but she tried. She is getting about this morning, it’s a struggle — slow steps, leaning against walls — but she does it and is just now back to sitting near me.

Yes in three days she might let us know but with Izzy here Clarycat’s signal (not doing anything but lying, no eating, no drinking, little response but eye contact) will have to last a couple of days at least. Izzy also said let us see if she loses weight: she has not lost any weight since we brought her home this past time —
Let us recall about all death (and Yes I mean to refer to the slaughters in Gaza and West Bank and Ukraine too — every single one of those 8000+ people)

when we are dead, we are dead for a long time.

I have long been grateful that Izzy lives with me.

ClaryCat resting in my workroom this afternoon, 5 pm

I have added a photo of my good friend, Martin’s cat to whom he wrote a poem in her late age

Ellen

Stepping out and staying in: are we post this pandemic? Online theater continues …

From the mantelpiece in our front room

While writing what I did below, I did not forget what is happening to the Palestinians: Dahlia Ravikovitch

A Baby Can’t Be Killed Twice

On the sewage puddles of Sabra and Shatila
there you transferred masses of human beings
worthy of respect
from the world of the living to the world of the dead.
Night after night …

Dear friends and readers,

How can you tell when the pandemic is coming to an end? For us it has not been Biden and his CDC’s sudden switch in attitude: all the Fully Vaccinated can go without masks when they are outside, inside most places when not too crowded. To mask or not to mask? The point seems to be to make it clear that the vaccines work, and those who are not vaccinated are depriving themselves … keeping themselves at risk!  It’s for free, people, and available everywhere. Don’t you want to unmask thyself with a certainty you are safe from hard illness and/or death or maiming in some way?

So, no, the sense of release, of relief, has come from the stepping out. The last week or so we have gone out almost everyday and a couple of times out for a couple of hours! This past Friday evening we celebrated Izzy’s birthday (and mother’s day too) with Laura and Rob by going out together and eating a scrumptious meal in a nearby fine Italian restaurant (not that expensive but good food) where we ate outside. Happy talk and Saturday Laura returned to give Izzy her present, which is also for me: a funko pop Jane Austen doll. Izzy and I put it on our mantelpiece where we have other meaningful objects (some treasured). The Jane Austen doll does not wiggle and she is reading a tiny copy of Pride and Prejudice, wearing a long blue dress. Across the way (inbetween a Native American doll I bought in the American Indian museum 2 summers ago, Jim’s reading glasses, and a DVD picturing his life, and an issue of an 18th century newsletter, the Intelligencer where there appeared a lovely obituary for Jim; and a seashell Izzy picked up on some family vacation we had at a beach) an action figure I was given by a class of people at OLLI at AU: the notorious RBG, alas without her tiny gavel (which fell out of her hand).

Saturday all day the two girls went together to a mall (sans masks), buying sandal shoes for summer and had a lunch in cosy place. Mother sat home reading Howards End once again (how can one tire of such a book) so as not to intrude on sister time togetherness. It is spring and on the awning over my study room window, two sparrows, grey breasted (mother) and red (father) have built a nest and the mother bird now sits patiently for the eggs to hatch. We (the cats are part of this) hear them twittering (w/o being on twitter) and chirping. I wish I could take a photo of the two birds moving about, flying in and out, the cats trying to get at them but the screen in the way so settling down in the cat-bed to watch. At the moment I come to the awning, both birds fly away.

Laura and Izzy two years ago and many years ago

Win some, lose some though. I had one of my nervous failures yesterday. It was probably that I was ambiguous about going to the memorial service as after all Phyllis Furdell (a once friend from OLLI at Mason after Jim died) had dropped me, and when a couple of times I tried to make contact again she had spoken to me in ways that were mildly contemptuous. It was her ex-husband who found my name and called and asked me to come, so I felt I was letting him down — but I have never met him nor spoken to him before. Still it was the right thing to do even if I had been treated unkindly.

I realized as I got into my car it was the first time in a long time I was trying to find a new place. Mapquest said it was 15-20 minutes away and I left 40 minutes but the whole incident ended up that it was 10 to 2 and I was at least still 12 minutes away when I turned to go back home and the thing was to start at 2.

I had printed out street directions (Mapquest), determined to take the streets but then I put on the Waze too as back-up (but had had trouble doing that, I was sticking it the cord from the cellphone into the wrong place and Izzy had to come out to show me where was the right slot). Then I discovered I made a wrong turn (I don’t know my left from my right) by both the Waze and the paper so had to go all the way home again (lost well over 10 minutes) and tried again.

Now I encountered in the streets a horrendous accident — no one can get through. A mad house with trucks everywhere — crazy lights. Traffic piling up. The Waze is repeating I should get on the highway — I make a difficult UTurn to get to the other side of the street. I know if I follow the Waze directions, I’ll be going in the wrong direction on the nearby highway because I can’t get to the right direction but I don’t have a back up paper for the highway (remember what happened to me trying to get to Politics and Prose from OLLI at AU without the backup print-out). What if I do something wrong again?

I am so nervous by this time and I’ve now only 10 minutes to get there. I felt bad because I promised the ex-husband and also I know a couple of people from OllI at Mason might be there but I remember her sour sharp tongue to make me feel bad. I was going also to prove to myself I could do this — this has often been a motive in the last 8 years for going places — to prove to myself I can as much as anything. But as I drove towards the highway my nervousness increased — there was not enough time to return and get a Mapquest print-out for the highway. So I returned and now am home and went back to my usual quiet literary work — this time my last set of lecture notes for this spring.

This is me — why travel is an ordeal so I can’t do research in libraries around the world literally except someone comes with me — and Jim never really did. It’s a lot to ask and it costs money to do these things.

I did have to get one place by myself I didn’t know how to and had to use the Waze w/o a paper Mapquest and made a wrong turn at least twice but I truly needed to get there: Izzy was there waiting and it was to do our taxes with AARP. I did manage that though came later for the appt.

An image of the cover of the book I ended up reading after I finished my lecture notes and became calm. I do like Hattie MacDonald and Kenneth Lonergan’s film adaptation and am re-watching it too. Roslyn Sulcas’s take on book and film seems to me to be spot on insofar as it’s social POV about capitalism and hard-nosed realities — there are other emphases one could take (like on a home to live in).

Today though success. Izzy and I went to Sheila, my hairdresser who works in a salon about 7 minutes away by car. I’ve been there so many times before; even so, for a minute now and again I felt I could not imagine the next street. You see I know the way supposedly by heart, hardly know the names of the streets. Again I wish I could take photos, for Sheila has made my hair pretty again. After a several months the color of the Overtone on my hair had turned sour (orangey, brass). Sheila preferred not to peroxide (strip or bleach it) and instead cut it a bit shorter with her dye making the grey parts the lovely silver blonde again, and those parts with the dye still there are now a silver mahogany. I shall go back in 6 weeks (rather than nearly 3 months) to have it dyed and cut again. Izzy’s is lovely bowl of hair around her shoulders.

Then later in the afternoon I took myself to Dr Wiltz at Falls Church. I’ve had more deterioration. My arches have fallen (flat feet) and I am wearing bands around my feet with a flat cushion underneath, my legs are weaker I find, and the chest pains sometimes very strong. So I returned to Wiltz and he tested and found nothing awry — just being 74. That’s good news. I went home with a muscle relaxant pill. On the way back many more cars than I’ve seen in a long time, more people out and about, many without masks … all signs we are getting past this pandemic.

And late in the afternoon I was re-reading The Remains of the Day again. I seem to be getting so much more out of both books since I taught it so hard last winter; I sure hope this will shine out in close reading with the class at OLLI at AU I mean to do both with next month. How I love it, & Ishiguro’s early novels (including now the terrifying Never Let Me Go)

But it is not easy to step out again, out to work (Izzy loves going in once a week now), and many hesitate, not only worried at lingering mutant viruses, but that they’ve gotten used to being home, and are re-thinking how they’d like to spend their working lives.

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Still some more staying in pandemic experiences — the silver lining of watching productions from home, joining in on virtual lectures, book groups, theater. Two Friday nights ago, a magnificent Uncle Vanya on PBS “great performances” — they have too few of these. Don’t miss it. I was reminded of how I love theater and wish I could go to live performances regularly once again. (I cannot as I can no longer drive at night.) Cast outstanding: I re-watched the next night when I realized my friend, Rory, had sent it as a DVD. I’m beginning to have a better understanding of it than ever before: I have always bonded with Vanya: he is the man who cannot negotiate from the world what his talents and deep sense of responsibility procure and create; he asks only to be appreciated — and finds that’s too much. But some of his close associates love him.

This time I found myself also loving Sonya’s last words: they help me find the strength to get through life calmly: to bear it all patiently and while patient and thoughtful you find your peace. Two more reviews: Arifa Akbar from The Guardian; Demetrios Matheou in The Hollywood Reporter. If there had been no pandemic, it’s possible this production would not have been videoed, or the video would not have been made so generally available (in order to pressure people to come to the theaters).

Toby Jones as Uncle Vanya, and Richard Armitage as Dr Astrov

Again Armitage and as Yelena Rosalind Eleazar

The way we have been going to the theater just now (soon ending). Jonson’s Sejanus at the Red Bull (NYC, perhaps on 10th Avenue). I thought it was not as effective as Hannah Cowley’s Belle’s Strategem (sometime in February, this later 18th century play turned out to be picturesque and intensely passionate underneath the seemingly conventional wit) because Cowley’s play demanded so much stage business, the company had to come up with equivalents: they somehow manage to suggest dancing through the manipulation of the zoom images; they used heightened gestures, flamboyant costumes. That made the production livelier than this Sejanus — it must be admitted I once saw it as a Play of the Week on Channel 13 (pre-PBS, a year of magnificent plays on Friday evenings), with a young Patrick Stewart as Sejanus. I did find the use of imaged different and famous ancient backgrounds still extant around Rome and elsewhere (Mary Beard stuff) changing from time to time alluring and since the play is about something that occurred in the 1st century, written in the first year of the 17th and now played 2021, it added significance. And the second half held my attention more forcefully because of what had been built up and what was happening.

Yes to their assertion that it’s relevant. I found myself wondering what happens in the GOP as everyone stands around fawning over Trump. What are the secret cabals and thoughts people might have. They can’t go so far as to murder one another the way Tiberius can exile and/or murder his family members, and then Sejanus and his — but they can destroy one another’s careers or do some equivalent. Also how and why the individuals form groups or are seen to adhere to someone. The acting was good and the language strong and interesting — superb Renaissance verse. It’s been there for 4 days and still one to go, and you can watch for free — though I did pay the suggested amount ($44). The actors and company need the money. Next month: Jonson’s Volpone. Now how would I see this otherwise?

The use of just a mask sometimes for one of the heroines in Belle’s Strategem was effective

The Sejanus cast

And I must not forget the delightful every-other-week zoom meeting of the London Trollope Society. Right now we are reading The Way We Live Now — a truly powerful and great book. Dominic Edwards has asked me to do a talk on Trollope’s gem, the story Malachi’s Cove, whose film adaptation is suddenly once again (with the pandemic channels are seeking previous films) online. I’m to take it from my blog.

Mally and Barty gathering seaweed in competition

Late addition: the Great Performance Romeo and Juliet from the London National Theater via WETA Great Performances

Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor as our thwarted and destroyed lovers

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Sheila did tell me a couple of scarifying stories of people getting sick from Covid and almost dying. It last February seems her niece worked in an office where the boss was saying all had to come in — this was when Trump was still claiming the pandemic was a “Democrat hoax,” “just” a flu. Well, “everyone in the office caught it,” says Sheila, and her niece became very ill, began to have blood clots one day and phoned Sheila’s sister, who rushed over, and taking a look at her daughter, rushed her to the hospital. Saved her daughter’s life. This does give insight into what lies behind the statistic of over 550,000 dead. I don’t know enough people who had to go to work daily. Have I told you that I have been going to Sheila for my hairdos for 20 years, and that she and I first met when she was 53 and I 54? I came to her for Laura’s wedding. This year and one half is the longest I’ve never seen her. I know a lot about her life and she knows something about mine.

Laura’s Charlotte now near one year old — I have never seen them physically and they are (Laura says) singularly unused to being alone, and show it

So we slowly come back out, step out and begin life as traveling about to get together physically once again. I do hope that many of these zooms will stay. A zoom from OLLI at AU of the owners of Politics and Prose telling the history of their buying the store, what such a business is like, how they survived during this quarantine, and how successful the classes were even in a classroom that was small and how much more successful now spread beyond space and time. I just finished a satisfying course reading and discussing three novels by Edith Wharton and for the summer I’ve signed up for 7 or 8 weeks of Middlemarch and for two weeks of Jhumpa Lahiri. They will be given at night so there is no way I could take them unless they come via zoom on the computer.

From thinking about and rereading Lahiri, I have added to my summer course at OLLI at Mason on “Post-Colonialism and the Novel,” Mira Nair’s Namesake, a movie I love still (nowadays especially for Irffan Khan, who died so young, only 53 this year): Nair says in its feature she was actuated to adapt the book in order to realize a story of people living in two different worlds, two different cultures at once, and the difficult of this blending/coping. As her hero, Gogol wants to escape the identities imposed on him (American or Indian) and her heroine does through becoming French out of her studies, so Lahiri is trying to make herself into an Italian – she speaks of it as if her parents imposed on her the culture they were when she was born. How to hold onto an identity, how to make a new one for yourself the way I have tried to do also — I believe I have partly succeeded in escaping my white working class US identity — and that I could only do not only by stepping out of my house but going to live in another country, England and marrying a person of another culture I so longed to be part of — out of or as I understood it from my books of course but then living there too.

My life is a now slow journey, inward with and by books (and good movies), for me to find my paths (several at a time), coping with, enduring, enjoying life. But it has been such a help to have supportive friends and most of them who have meant most (after Jim) have been made on the Internet. I teach so frequently at the two OLLIs because they give me a place to belong in the world and (I hope) a function useful to others as well as myself.

Ellen

Spring snow: A Separation, Gospel at Colonnus; Austen done, return to Poldark, Kedi and cats

My front yard this morning after a night and morning long rain of icy-snow — daffodils in snow!

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you — A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh [he speaks for me now when I think of Jim whose Latin copy of this book I have in my house]

Friends,

About a month ago I wrote about an Iranian film by Ashgar Farhadi, English title, Salesman (2016); I praised it highly and urged people who wanted to begin to learn something of Iranian and Muslim culture to see it. Last week I watched another earlier film by Farhadi, A Separation (2011). It won many awards, and is a better film because it’s not shaped by a “whodunit?” format (who assaulted the wife), and there is no climactic pathetic denouement. In this case I had rented a DVD which enabled me to change the language so I could listen to the actors speaking in French and as the film went on began to pick up a good deal (as I cannot from Farsi) partly using the subtitles. Reviews more or less uniformly credited the film with presenting a portrait of a modern nation during a troubled period attempting to live under Islamic or religious law

The opening shots: the two are facing the judge, she reasoning with him …

The story is quite complicated because so much nuanced reality is brought out: we have a couple whose marriage is shot; Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to leave Iran in order that her daughter, Termeh (Sarian Farhadi) be brought up in a culture with different norms; Nader (Payman Mooadi) sees his father’s needs as primary (the old man has advanged Alzheimer’s disease). When she files for divorce and it’s not granted (her complaints are said to be trivial), she goes to live with her parents as she does not want to leave without her daughter. Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a devout Muslim woman desperate for money to stay with his father and care for him all day; the work is arduous, she has a small daughter with her and it emerges is pregnant. He comes home in the middle of the day to find her gone, his father seeming near death tied to a bedpost to prevent him wandering out of the house, and a sum of money equivalent to her salary gone. He goes into a rage and when she returns and has no explanation, he shoves her out of the house. A little later Razieh’s sister informs Simin that Razieh has miscarried. So this is the core event about one quarter into the film. The rest is consequences.

Razieh’s husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), a violent man initiates a prosecution for murder. A long series of scenes brings a number of witnesses to a judge (a teacher, neighbors, the daughter) and among other suspicions, it may be Hodjat hit Razieh, she may have gone to a gynecologist on her own (regarded as very suspicious); we learn Hodjat is vitriolically angry at his lack of a job and incensed at his wife at every turn (she never asked permission to work), and he is pressured by his family into accepting “blood” money, only to lose it when Nader asks Razieh to swear on a Quaran that she believes he caused her miscarriage. Razieh cannot get herself to tell a lie lest God punish her. Continual bickerings go on, the judge’s attitudes towards the men (Nader begs the judge not to jail him), the inflexibility of the laws, all around these people the busy streets, cars and bikes everywhere, the run-down buildings, the expensive schools (with girls kept in), everyone else seeming to be on the edge of quarreling, male shouts, women in burkas following behind men in modern clothes; little girls with covered heads following the mother. As with Salesman, these people live in these tight-knit groups, almost never apart. As with Salesman we see how human nature works its way through and is exacerbated by Muslim norms. No one is seen as criminal (in the way the man who assaults the woman in Salesman is). The film ends with similar ambiguity: it seems the old father is dead, Simin is again asking for divorce and permission to take her daughter out of the country; this time divorce is granted and Tehmen is asked which parent she chooses. She won’t speak in front of them. We see them waiting on the opposite side of a corridor with a glass wall between them. The film has come to its end.

Razieh — characteristic shot

She also stands so silently and often from the side

The characters are granted a depth of psychological reality, the circumstances fully developed sociologically and culturally; it’s superior to the American trilogy I saw in January, The Gabriels, because there is no urge towards allegory; you cannot fit what is happening into a particular political point of view. For my part since the wife was not centrally part of the action much of the time, I didn’t bond with her as her intimate self was not seen; it was Razieh who occupies the center of many scenes of around whose conduct or presence everything swirls. One is driven to enter into the mindset of this Muslim woman who herself tells as little as she can get away with.

I mean to rent his The Past next. This also a critically-acclaimed film, and it too can be listened to as a French film with subtitles. The very least one can do now is to try to understand Muslim culture in the middle east. I have read the monster who is now the US president is hiring yet another 10,000 immigration agents to prosecute the military action of ejecting 11 million people from the US, and banning as many Muslims as the law allows him to from ever entering.

I’ll mention in passing that on Saturday night I managed to drive to see at an Arlington Theater a black spiritual music rendition of Sophocles’s third Oedipus play as The Gospel at Colonnus. I say manage because when I arrived, I discovered the wrong address, a different theater had been cited, and to go I had to rush out, using my Waze software on my cell phone (programmed by a young woman at the box office) following directions half-madly (it was dark and I kept not being able to read the street names so missing turns) to reach another theater where it was playing. For similar reasons to A Separation, everyone, especially everyone of white-European heritage should see it.

I got there late (really just on time with several others rushing over) and one of the ushers actually helped me to a much better seat as I could not see from the back, and then another patron exchanged seats with me so I could have a chair with a back (I do not look young or strong, gentle reader). It’s not great, but the depth of earnest emotion and intelligence, the strong reaching out in song, the beauty and well-meaningness of the anguished lines and powerful acting (they gave it their all) should be experienced. It’s not Hamilton but surely some of the feeling of a black ensemble was so analogous. They wore typical suits one sees young black men sometimes wear, church gowns for the choir, Ismene and Antigone exotic kinds of headgear with gorgeous gowns, the preacher well preacher-clothes and Oedipus clearly blind, a heavy man, with gravitas. I feel so profoundly ashamed to be a white person living in America today and stood to applaud as my way of endorsing all of us to live as equals, equally safe together.

So much harm is planned: to deprive 24 million slowly of health care. To cut off mental health services yet more. Many more people will now kill themselves: separated from their families and friends and lives with no recourse or help; snatched out of churches, streets, for paying their taxes; isolated. At least three Muslim and/or Indian people have been shot dead by white supremacists. Bomb threats and desecration of Jewish graves and institutions occur daily. The Ku Klux Klan wants a public rally in a major town center in Georgia. LGBT people and children in public schools now going to be subject to bullying and given less funds. This is what Trump and his regime (this is no longer called an administration) want: the Syrian president directly murders, bombs, tortures people who live in the land he wants to control; this new rump are more indirect but just as unfazed, unashamed and determined. Destroy as far as they can a whole way of life. I’ve known for a long time the Republican point of view is one which disdains compassion (why Bush fils called his brand compassionate conservativism); their scorn for protest is caught up in the word whine. Joy only for the super-rich. Beneath it all hatred for people like us.

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Emma (Kate Beckinsale) painting Harriet (Samantha Morton) (1995 Emma, scripted Andrew Davies)

This has been a very stressful week. My doctor suggested to me a 10 hour trip was dangerous; consider the 8th hour of driving, consider, he said, the 9th; how easy to tire, how easy to lose your way, and then tired and anxious, it’s a risk; even a 5 hour trip on two days was something I needed to think about and plan for by being sure to have a comfortable place to stay overnight half-way. Then when I finally looked again into taking a plane, I discovered that there was one flight to and from Burlington, Vermont, on Saturday it occurred half an hour after I was to give my paper; and I had to go through Expedia to buy the tickets. And someone from the conference drive there to pick me up and deliver me back. I worry about my cats again as a contractor and his workmen may be here while I’d be gone for 4 days. I might have to board them. Still, I almost bought that ticket but was advised by the conference head as “an older sister,” maybe not. So I finished my paper, “Ekphrastic Patterns in Jane Austen,” and think it is splendid and sent it to the organizer of the Jane Austen and the Arts conference at Plattsburgh, New York. She offered to read it aloud, sparing me a difficult arduous trip.

A watercolor by Turner of Lyme Regis seen from Charmouth (as in Persuasion)

I am turning my attention to my teaching, delving the Booker Prize phenomena in the context of modern book selling. I might set aside some of my on-going projects — though I will still write a full summary review blog of an important book, Julie Carlson and Elisabeth Weber’s Speaking of Torture and feature it in my central blog as something I can do against the present deeply harm-causing regime.

I am seriously thinking of trying a new book project, even begun work on it: a literary biography of Winston Graham, author of the Poldark books and by extension, the films; and am doing preliminary reading before writing his son to see if he would be agreeable to such a project and if he would help (for example, I would need to see Graham’s letters or private papers, the life-blood of biography). I would focus in the second half on his Poldark novels, so relationship to Cornwall, and finally the films.

The lizard, full sunlit — a paratext for season 2 of the new Poldark (2016)

One of the actresses’s cloaks …. for Demelza (Eleanor Tomlinson)

The man I hired as a general contractor has begun work on my house, and already the porch is at long last enclosed by four walls, and has two windows which match the other windows in front. The whole process, all that needs to be done, will take about 2-3 weeks he says. (At most?) My beloved cats have to be put away once more in Izzy’s room while he and his workmen are about.

Kedi (2017, film about hundreds of thousands of Istanbul cats, genre: post-modern historical)

So I end on another film I saw with Izzy and my friend, Phyllis, this Sunday. I liked it so much I’m going again on Thursday with another friend, Vivian: Kedi. Kedi is ostensibly a film about the thousands of cats who live on the streets of Istanbul. We are told the story of at least 20 different individual cats and/or groups of cat (mother and kittens), usually (this is important) by the person who is providing food and care and often affection. The emphasis in some stories is the cat, in others the cat-lover and why his or her deep kindness and the good feeling and love he or she receives in return. I imagine much filming was necessary to capture the cat’s lives, and real social effort to get the caring people to talk to the director and film-makers .The film tells as much about these individuals and why they have taken it upon themselves (some of them go to vets for medicine or seemingly regular check-ups) to keep these cats alive and thriving — as far as one can thrive while living on a street: most of the adult cats look thin, and the babies are tiny, feeble. It’s really about Istanbul and its culture: vast areas of the city are impoverished, people living on the edge in a modern city. Erdogan’s name everywhere. A thriving garbage culture. The sea central to the feel of the place: I remembered reading Orphan Pamuk’s wonderful book about this world of Istanbul he grew up and lives in now.

It’s a movie made out of a deeply humanitarian spirit: real compassion for those who need the cats (the cats are therapy for some), identification and pity for some of the cats’ actions (one grey cat never goes into the restaurant, just bangs on the window in his or her need, stretched body reaching as high as possible). One of the sweetest moments (for a person like me who values language) was when one of the cat-caretakers in talking of the cat says in the middle of his Turkish a word sounding much like our English meow. So to Turkish ears cats make the same sounds. We watch cats doing all sorts of things, climbing high, fighting, eating, drinking, seeking affection, seeking prey, far too high up on a building, hiding out in cardboard boxes set up for them. By the end the cats are us; they stand for our own hard and at times fulfilling existential lives. I loved the one man on the ship who said he was so grateful for his cat’s love. Another who felt some divinity in the whole experience of life with cats in Istanbul. I, my friend, and Izzy were touched, vivified; for myself I knew some moments of shared joy as I watched so that tears came to my eyes. I just felt better about life after it concluded.

Of course I told Izzy about Christopher Smart, wrongly put into an insane asylum, treated cruelly, his only companion, a cat, Jeffrey, and read aloud to Izzy the famous lines:

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.

One of Laura’s cats looking at her with loving eyes (very well taken care of)

Miss Drake

It’s the money, “stupid”: some recent insights into the US constitution (!), women & the 47%

John Nash (1893-1977), The Garden under Snow (1924)

“And what with the high price of coal … “

Friends,

My blog is morphing again. I began it as a more or less daily account of my and Jim’s life in our retirement. When he was diagnosed with cancer, it became a cancer blog where insofar as it was humanly possible for me I told the story of his suffering and death from cancer. It morphed again into a widow’s diary. Now I must change again. It would be in bad taste for me to write as if I am indifferent to the political destruction of the US republic and any security and prosperity for 95% of its population. That is how countless Trump supporters are behaving from Wall Street and the Republican leaders and elite to those who may not have voted for Trump but don’t mind now that he’s gotten into power. I must assume from Trump’s rhetoric and quoted statements by his supporters that others are gladdened by the appointments of racists, sexists, intolerant religious people (a supreme court decision made intolerance, a right to discriminate, a religious liberty), preferably inept people as long as they are fiercely personally loyal t him, and fearfully war-mongering inefficient people at the head of agencies, a Verizon lobbyist to head the FCC. The Washington Post reported yesterday his appointments were greeted by widespread applause by his supporters.

What unites all my Sylvia blogs is I tell what is on my mind, what I am feeling as my daily life unfolds. I’ll reserve the old Sylvia blog for political activity and political arguments and essays I’ve come across, as last week I went to a rally near the Senate building. This will be thoughts affecting my general behavior, from the conversations all around me, from what will be forced on me in non-political events and spaces after say January 20th. This Friday night I went to dinner with a group of friends and we discussed the election intensely, and most places I’ve gone (teaching for example), the unfolding fascism is the topic, what forms it will take, fear over how it will affect each and every person there.

So, a central new insight I’ve had (which startled me) has been how the American Constitution is susceptible to be taken over by a dictator. It’s an 18th century document with an elected king at the center. It depends on his decency and good will to elect expert and socially conscious people to the departments and many other agencies which control many aspects of our lives. In the Parliamentary system as evolved in the 19th century the PM has to be elected by people within the party who are independent entities and have some real knowledge of the person and how the gov’t works so a Trump could not take over there, and the outspoken Brexit people didn’t and couldn’t. Here’s a story (how true it is I don’t know) placed on an 18th century studies listserv: “Kurt Godel, perhaps the most important mathematical logician of the 20th century, settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in the 1930’s. When Godel went for his US citizenship oath, Einstein was sent to accompany Godel, as Godel was known to speak tactlessly. When the judge asked Godel to swear to uphold the Constitution, Godel rose and said that there was a logical path which allowed a dictator to emerge. Einstein quickly intervened and smoothed the process, so Godel got his oath … ”

This is partly the effect of citizens united. Quite a number of these republican wins were done by huge amounts of money. Then when they get in power they gerrymander the state so it becomes very hard to take it back. While in power they ruthlessly turn back the clock — as in North Carolina. I think the US system is now rotten because it is in effect obsolete: made for conditions that no longer obtain. Like the UK at the beginning of the 19th century, the American system is now a hollow pretense. It was never one-man one vote but now the popular vote is readily overturned and every effort being made to suppress the vote further. This fairly weak (as the writer admits) set of tactics show in just what desperate straits we are: how to resist Trump and his extreme agenda.

****************************

Trump has used this development to pull off an extraordinary con trick. He’s is totally nerveless, daring and has instincts of social cunning that seem uncannily effective. Tolstoy would say he is being thrown up by forces of history much larger than himself which made his personality and now power grab possible. Yes he enacts racism, boasts of sexual assault, and so on — or he wouldn’t have been able to delude his constituency. But why this is not business as usual is all about is “the money, stupid.” Read his first 100 day plan. Trump is simply turning everything over, tax payers dollars, their internet, everything to corporations and the wealthy. That’s what he’s doing. And cutting their taxes too. All the talk about racism and yes horrible coming ruthless killings imprisonments wars even — are a distraction from what he is planning explicitly. Yet more massive tax breaks for the wealthy, the privatization of social security, abolition of medicare, repeal of Obamacare, destruction of federal jobs. I read his infrastructure plan: it’s a bonanza give away with no obligations on any corporate part to hire people even. He continues to engineer it as in the NYTimes and Post they are going on about the wrongness of identity politics – he is engineering this conversation with his appointees. Or on face-book people argue with tweets over the planting of Pence at Hamilton to engineer a provocative scene so he can hit out against Broadway, also Saturday Night Live (he holds a grudge against them for over 10 years when they dared to make fun of him) — militarized police were in the street nearby to intimate. He now plays these people on twitter and off. The ultimate aim is to repress freedom of the press and speech.

He holds no news conferences, no where he is questioned and must respond to give-and-take. I presume he will never hold a news conference with the press if he can avoid it. And there is nothing in the constitution which requires it (not that a requirement like this would necessarily bother him).

From the point of view of what vitally matters, multiculturalism (whether it can exist as a feeling which binds people together or not) is not just beside the point, but a distraction. I know (as I’ve said) how dire the situation is for the targeted people and that theoretically, ideologically (&c) whether identity politics works, is feasible, is possible (do people really identity outside their narrow cultural worlds?) but in the present time they don’t except as useless for deluding and distracting people, i.e.g, the Pence at Hamilton theater was a plant and there is a parallel in the history of Hitler’s regime. So an article like Lila’s in the New York Times saying political action dependent on group identities doesn’t work gets attention when such arguments are unimportant when it comes to what we are facing: this 18th century constitution allows for a dictatorship to emerge.

Marianne Von Werefkin (1860-1938)

The corporations of other countries, their thug dictators and the rest of the louts and globalized factories are watching to see Trump carry this out. The more decent leaders (Angela Merkel) are being pushed out by money, war, refugee crises; their whole agendas mocked and repealed (Obama); they themselves end up colluding and yet are thrown out (Dilma). Here and there a temporary win (as in Venezuela) but it’s holding actions. I understand the real terrors of US black people who face killing and imprisonment at will. I understand how crucial must be these issues to Muslims in the US who face registration, internment and deportation anywhere. People demonstrating for animal rights have long been considered eco-terrorists, and some thrown into prison and kept in solitary confinement too. How much worse each punishment will be — as the threat to resort to overt torture is realized. People disappearing. Giuliani Attorney General. Already with the high costs of lawyers, going to court, fearful demands the accused negotiate his or her way (plea bargaining) by threatening draconian sentences if you don’t give in and say you are guilty. But all these issues are secondary to stopping redistribution of income through taxes, ending all social programs and reinforcing the prison system to back it up.

What this means is the number 99% becomes irrelevant: the operative number is Romney’s 47%. He was seen shaking hands with Trump and photographed by the press (from afar). Romney said 47% of the US population are layabouts. What he meant is all these people (including me and probably some of my readers) are collecting “entitlements” (which word Romney would scoff at as a euphemisms). The plan is to cut all subsidies (as these might come to be called) from this 47%. To turn over their “entitlements” (as packages) to Wall Street to govern and use. The 47% can demonstrate, protest; the newspapers will tell the truth of what is being done to them, but can they stop it?

I read somewhere that five years ago someone predicted Trump could win the presidency. So I am behind-hand in this insight. Lots of people have had it well before me. Trump changed parties because he knew he could not take the Democratic constituency.

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A quite different insight and one not new, just reinforced: how men will not give up central power or authority to a woman. A woman can win a coterie vote of a group of politicians who she will be dependent upon (a Prime Minister) but not a vastly powerful presidency from millions of voters who cannot know her personally. All those men who refused to vote for her and professed themselves not to want Trump to win could live with him in power as a man. I don’t believe they didn’t want Trump; they are glad he has won rather than she and insist on how shaking things up will now produce a positive result. Delusionary and human life is short and what counts for us all is that short run, say 90 years. Reading and writing today on domestic abuse of women and children in 19th century fiction by women, I suddenly remembered how Hillary Clinton had worked hard for the rights of children and a recent case where a man brought to trial for beating a child defended himself he had the right to choose this punishment; it had been inflicted on him and so on. How sad that she couldn’t begin to convey this sort of thing at all. What was it? cowardice on presenting such a woman’s issue. Men didn’t vote for her anyway. She didn’t dare because it was controversial (how dare children have rights?!) and yet had she managed to think of some way to show it, how appealing she might have been to many. Would she have been too womanly on such an issue? She lacked the courage of who she is. No progress for children now. Oh no.

I will be giving another feminist course in 19th century novels, teach more women of letters: I was asked to at the OLLI at Mason this Wednesday. Be more outspoken in my women artist blogs. But now I see it was shooting themselves in the heart by the democrats to run a woman for president.

Mark Gertler (191-1939), Merry-go-round (from the 1920s), he was a lover of Dora Carrington who tried to get her to devote her life to him

Miss Drake

Flotsam and jetsam: Syrian child washed up; the obscene Trump

This photo of a Syrian child’s corpse, dressed so tenderly by someone, and still whole as the body washed up on a short, was everywhere on the Internet yesterday; today it’s being removed. But before people can forget and early this morning, someone put this poem on one of the sites I frequent:

“HOME,” by Somali poet Warsan Shire:

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbours running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here.

by Somali poet, Warsan Shire

Last week’s New Yorker had a worrying essay by Evan Osnos on this man who utters vicious obscenities and has become a media and campaign star. Trump with his beads for eyes in a fat face, false blonde-wig, baseball cap. Can he now buy the Republican nomination, can he win the US presidency by vilifying people fleeing the horrific wars around the earth?

Drowned with Aylan Shenu were his mother, Rihanna (she dressed him) and brother, Ghaleb. I watched on DemocracyNow.org a Muslim man rush at and wrestle down his pregnant wife, who was holding a baby and refusing to get on a hideously-over crowded train on the borders of Hungary said to be headed for Germany; he began to beat her to force her to get onto that train. She was crying hysterically that she did not want to, did not want to take her child onto that train.

Cartoon by Ben Cameron

Ellen

Charlie Hebdo: an alternative perspective

Street scene in France yesterday

Dear friends,

I have not been posting on political issues, but thought I might post an alternative wider view on the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, and then the next days the killings in retaliation and hostage taking because I have hardly seen this perspective on the news media and discussions on the Net.

On Amy Goodman’s DemocracyNow.org, she has had two different Muslim French people to argue while of course this killing was so wrong as to beyond speech even. Human beings like us, beloved by friends and family members, precious and destroyed. It was a travesty of Islam, one man, a Muslim French cleric said. He also talked about the how Muslims do poorly in French society, and attempted to show Charlie Hebdo was not aimed at everyone: he had some numbers to show hardly ever is a Jewish person or even mocked, rare Christians, though by no means wide statistics. Everyone talked in terms of impressions. He was strongly debated with when he argued it was the afflicted being afflicted. The other man, a Muslim French scholar, likened Charlie Hebdo to South Park (they mock sheerly to mock; they provoke without a serious agenda) and talked (as one should have heard elsewhere) of the hundreds of people murdered by drones, since 9/11 other mass murders involving the deaths of Muslims, the incident at Norway, what has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. Gilbert Ashcar, yet another called the two days the result of clashing barbarisms.

What struck me was the sight of France as combed with fiercely armed soldier-police, not as feroicious and not as heavily armed as we saw Boston, but along the same lines. There does not appear to have been a curfew (as there was in Boston in the night and day), so the situation again was not as bad, but the French police-soldiers did not hesitate to kill as a kind of retaliation. So we had police-soldiers killing suspects — who did flee; another situation emerged in a Jewish supermarket where hostages were taken and four died. These scenes really taking place are of murder begetting murder in the context of world-wide murders. Boko Hamar murdered hundreds of people the other day, nearly 2000 in one report; the head of that state supported by the US does nothing. He’s complicit.

There was a bombing in an old NAACP building in Colorado two days ago; no one killed but it got hardly a mention anywhere in the public media; Al Sharpton brought it up on his half hour on MSNBC.

The role of satire could be said to be the irritant, and the cartoonist himself murdered as well as the long-time chief of the magazine, but it is true (as these two murders show) that the Hebdo slaughter was a professional job — so it could be the organization supporting these men wanted to ratchet up the conflict in France which has a strong anti-immigrant party and where many Muslims are assimilated. To give Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff some credit on PBS they had a 20 minute segment on how badly Muslims are treated in Marseilles where they are a very large minority and they interviewed a French man who inveighed against feeling swamped (a la Mrs Thatcher) and Muslim woman who in a supermarket has been the target of hostile gestures, and mockery partly because she wears a burka and is originally French; that is, she is a convert to Islam.

Finally anti-semitism. If it’s true Hebdo almost never satirized Jews, the context here is this past summer’s slaughter of Palestinians. Just now Israel is withholding huge taxes from the Palestinian people for themselves because they have dared to be recognized as a state. Art Seigelman was on Amy Goodman and he could not come up with one satiric cartoon on Jews: he made a forceful presentation on the importance of cartoon satire.

Goodman has someone on her hour who appears to know the Hebdo cartoons well and he said the day after Charles de Gaulle’s funeral Hebdo mocked it as one person died yesterday (like one satiric jibe headline two summers ago on the fuss made about “Kate’s” or the Duchess of Cambridge giving birth to the presumed heir to the British throne: “Woman gives birth”), then the offices were briefly closed.

Satire set this off but was it about satire?

Just an alternative view I have not heard much; only on two nights DemocracyNow.org (Goodman had Tarif Ali talking too) and on one segment on PBS reports.

Miss Drake

Dahlia Ravikovitch, “The Fruit of the Land”

Palestinian artist Wafa Hourani imagines the refugee camp as a thriving neighborhood (an exhibition, “Here and Elsewhere” from a column in the New Yorker)

Dear friends and readers

Nine years ago Dahlia Ravikovitch died, on 21 August 2005: this poem of hers could not be more timely today — generally, not just for Gaza where it is apparent the Israeli gov’t will not lift the blockade, will not allow a Palestinian state to exist alongside Israel. It’s timely for Ferguson where the murder of a young black teenager has still not resulted in the arrest of the man who killed him, and there has been a week of nights of military occupation (see the history of the militarization of US police forces around the country; and mass incarceration by Israel and the US); — and for all the other places where people try to live lives under the bombs or in despite of unjust prison and criminal justice systems, a capitalist-run economy which refuses through an equitable tax system to provide people with good jobs, education and a hopeful future, and uses internet surveillance by those who have the power to punish.

The Fruit of the Land

You asked if we’ve got enough cannons.
They laughed and said: More than enough
and we’ve got new improved antitank missiles
and bunker busters to penetrate
double-slab reinforced concrete
and we’ve got crates of napalm and crates of explosives,
unlimited quantities, cornucopias,
a feast for the soul, like some finely seasoned delicacy
and above all, that secret weapon,
the one we don’t talk about.
Calm down, man,
the intel officer and the CO
and the border police chief
who’s also a colonel in that hush-hush commando unit
are all primed for the order: Go!
and everything’s shined up like the skin of a snake
and we’ve got chocolate wafers on every base
and grape juice and Tempo soda
and that’s why we won’t give in to terror
we will not fold in the face of violence
we’ll never fold no matter what
‘cause our billy clubs are nice and hard.
God, who has chosen us from all the nations,
comforteth with apples
the fighting arm of the IDF
and the iron boxes and the crates of fresh explosives
and we’ve got cluster bombs too,
though of course that’s off the record.
Serve us bourekas and cake, O woman of the house,
for we were slaves in the land of Egypt
but never again,
and blot out the remembrance of Amalek
if you track him down,
and if you seek him without success
Blessed be the tiny match
that a soldier in some crack unit will suddenly strike
and set off the whole bloody mess.

— translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld, from Hovering at a Low Altitude: The collected poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (NY: Norton, 20009).

From Bloch and Kronfeld’s notes: “The Fruit of the Land” (Hebrew, zimrat ha-arets), zimra means singing; in biblical Hebrew it can also mean “produce, bounty”. Block and Kronfield capture the macho voice of the defense types we constantly hear in the media rhapsodizing about Israel’s superior firepower. But nowadays they wouldn’t acknowledge they have “more than enough” and would have answered the opening question – ” You asked if we’ve got enough cannons” – with a demand for more funds for the military. There is much allusion to the Bible.

Central to the poem is the reality that things do not have to be this way. Armaments ever worse do not have to be the fruit of the earth. It’s an important idea not to let go off: things all around us do not have to be this way. Go back to More’s Utopia for one of the earliest statements of this principle.

Sylvia

The need to “lift the seige” and the rockets; Ravikovitch’s “On the Attitude towards Children in Times of War”

al-Shifa hospital

Dear friends and readers,

I had thought not to write separately on the ruthless on-going massacre of Palestinians in Gaza all this week and last (assault as of today still unrelenting). But I have been tempted and now am prompted to speak — even in this obscure blog — that the central reason for Hamas firing of rockets is not some mysterious, senseless act of a malicious group of people. From 2007 until today (seven years), Gaza strip has been turned into an “open-air prison.” The phrase “seige” derives from earlier wars where one side brought their armies up against a walled city and tried to starve those within out, leave them to disease, isolation, so that they will let the marauding army in. It is a blockade: no airplanes, no trains, no transportation in or out. Unemployment is over 50%. Goods are super-expensive; there can be no building of a life for Palestinians who live there (no family building of wealth, no futures for individuals) as long as this goes on. Water is at a premium. Before this latest attack started many Palestinians had but 4 hours of electricity a day. The Gaza strip is densely populated. It’s a ghetto being starved out.

Israel signed a treaty in 2010 in which as part of a compromise it promised to “lift the seige.” It made some feeble changes and then reversed itself. There was a treaty signed in 2012 by the Palestinian authorities with the US’s concurrence where a Unity government was to form, which while it would not include any Hamas individuals would honor their demands, one of which was to “lift the seige,” and in which both sides agreed to accept two states in the area, which would mean Palestine and Israel. When it became clear again, Israel did not mean to keep its word, the rockets began. Many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas and these rockets because they know what the rockets are aimed at: to call attention to the inhumane conditions they are forced to endure life under. The kidnapping of the three Israel boys was a pretext Netanyahu seized. He then practiced Orwellian doublespeak: he accuses Hamas of attacking Israel because it does not want Israel to exist; the reality is he has been doing all he can to destroy any Palestinian state from starting. That’s he destroys so many homes, houses, people, hit hospitals, schools, and now the one power plant. Everyone knows that the Palestinians have no where to flee from the bombs.

At this point the doublespeak of asserting it’s Hamas who is somehow killing all these people (using them as shields? where, how?) has become so laughable that it is only trotted out on Fox News. But the US mainstream media is not telling what this fight is about: the right of the people of Gaza to be left in peace to build a state and society of their own. Those who opine that what all want is peace in such a way as to suggest the both sides are equally in the wrong here and to ignore the real situation of the Palestinian do these people a disservice. If they give in again, they cannot survive. This is why Abbas, the Eygptian leader has made a condition of the rockets stopping the “lifting of the seige.” On the West Bank the settlements continue too (but that’s another aspect of destroying any remnants of Palestinian state). Al-Jazeera was hit; a UN school — Al-Jazeera reports fairly; the US is discussing on whether to accuse Natanyahu of crimes against humanity. Netanyahu was furious that the FAA wanted to stop flights to Tel Aviv because he wants the Palestinians to see that life for everyone else will carry on as it has for the last 7 years regardless of any journalism or any appalled apparently respected friends.

On the function of the tunnels the Israelis have been destroying in their ground assault: see how these have been essential in getting goods and services from outside Gaza to its people.

I also decided to bring this aspect of the conflict out because one of the translators of Dahlia Ravikovitch’s poetry sent them the following poem this morning. Chana Bloch wrote “it is just as biting” as “Get Out of Beirut.” My only qualification is that by calling attention to what often excites people’s sentimentality (helpless children, infants — some of which when bombed have have their bodies severed into bits which then arrive in different hospitals) we somehow make less of the deaths of adolescents (the 3 boys playing soccer on the beach), teenagers, older people, all the infrastructure of the country. So I include a link to an article from The Economist explaining why Israel must negotiate in good faith with the Palestinian people.

On the Attitude toward Children in Times of War

from Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch
trans.Chana Bloch & Chana Kronfeld (Norton 2009).

He who destroys thirty babies
it is as if he’d destroyed three hundred babies,
and toddlers too,
or even eight-and-a-half year olds;
in a year, God willing, they’d be soldiers
in the Palestine Liberation Army.

Benighted children,
at their age
they don’t even have a real world view.
And their future is shrouded, too:
refugee shacks, unwashed faces,
sewage flowing in the streets,
infected eyes,
a negative outlook on life.

And thus began the flight from city to village,
from village to burrows in the hills.
As when a man did flee from a lion,
as when he did flee from a bear,
as when he did flee from a cannon,
from an airplane, from our own troops.

He who destroys thirty babies,
it is as if he’d destroyed one thousand and thirty,
or one thousand and seventy,
thousand upon thousand.
And for that alone shall he find
no peace.

Author’s note: This is a variation on a poem by Natan Zach that deals [satirically] with the question of whether there were exaggerations in the number of children reported killed in the [1982] Lebanon War.
Lines 1-2, He who destroys: cf. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:5: “He who destroys a single human soul. . . , it is as if he had destroyed an entire world.”
Lines 16-17, As when a man: Amos 5:19, about the danger of apocalyptic yearnings.
See Netanyahu and Goebbels’ matching comments.

An information video interview of Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist.

Sylvia

No pretense of regard for life or humanity: Ravitkovitch’s “Get out of Beirut”

A demonstration in NYC today by religious Jewish people on behalf of the Palestinians —

Evils that befall the world are not nearly so often
caused by bad men as they are by good men who
are silent when an opinion must be voiced

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been a long while since I wrote a political blog. I feel compelled to as in the past several weeks such horrific shameless slaughtering has been happening as well as (in the US) turn back on civil and legal rights for people of the US, that to carry on describing my particular experience of a death seems an egoistic blindness. This week I came across a number of genuinely explanatory essays on the killing and destruction as well as a group of essays pretending to show hopeful progress (on cancer) where there is no such thing. At the same time in the mainstream media, reporters have disgraced themselves by not reporting the full or real story of what is happening – I do not speak of the overt lies not only on Fox News but other channels where they are spoken and not contradicted (CNN, PBS, MSNBC).

The first essay is a must-read because so filled with information and perception and is by Owen Bennett-Jones, 36:14, 17 July 2014. Bennett-Jones expects you to know that for the last 40 years the US and its imperialist allies have overthrown every secular democratic leader that came to power (and there have been several, one in Iran in 1954) lest any kind of social or economic justice fro the average person out of the natural resources of this land interfere with the huge profits to be made by oil and other corporate companies ensconced in these lands. Bennett-Jones shows how Iraq had disintegrated, how the ISIS or ISIL triumph comes from a various disparate groups of local organizations. The indiscriminate reckless slaughtering (with suicide missions) is what many may come away remembering, and (perhaps) asking how groups of young men can become such crazed people, but what I suggest the reader notice is how Bennett-Jones shows that the Islamic religious regimes do not last precisely because of their continual resort to unrestrained extreme violence and because they do not provide what the majority of people of these regions want: peace, security and jobs. The latter, the article shows, the US and its backers in world banks had not only no interest in increasing but by privatizing corrupted what networks for jobs existed.

As a side area of further information, don’t neglect Patrick Coburn on the battle for Baghdad in the same issue. Nothing has been done about a similar group of young men: Boko Haram. The difference between the US and these others is the US uses massive assault and extreme violence followed by periods of restraint when they go about to set in place their forms of unameliorated capitalism and conditions which allow their companies’ businesses to thrive. The Kurds are operating as a state because these companies are dealing with the Kurds for oil.

To grasp why the leader of Israel used the pretext of the kidnapping of Israeli young men and the resumption of rocket firing (the point of which is to call attention to and bring an end to the the seige and blockade which is destroying Gaza) by Hamas after the burning death (while alive) of a Palestinian boy, to begin killing and destruction in Gaza again (last time 2012); you need to know that Hamas has been accepted by the Palestinian groups in Gaza and was accepting the terms of a treaty that could have led to a Unity government and two states (one Palestine and the other Israel); this is what this Israeli gov’t is determined to prevent. First read Ira Chernas on Israel’s strategy and American mythology. Then for live talk an informative discussion. You can just read the transcript. I recently read an anthology recording the horrifying cruelty visited on Jewish people in the Lodz Ghetto during WW2, and myself had relatives and know of so many people murdered and enslaved during WW2, so when I read of the malicious bombing of the only rehab hospital in Gaza, it is deeply distressing. A people who have themselves known what it is to be subject to barbaric attempts at extermination have now at their head leaders doing this to the Palestinian people. The Israeli prime minister, his gov’t and his army do not think a Palestinian state has the right to exist. Orwell would not be surprised at the absurd doublespeak I have now heard repeated even on PBS that Hamas is responsible for this latest massacre.

Again filling in more information, insight, another from the LRG, much shorter than Bennett-Jones, Mouin Rabbani (much shorter), 36:15, July 31, 2014. Live coverage from Sharif Abel Kouddous on the night of the ground invasion of Gaza by the Israelis. Remember this place has been blockaded for years, occupied and as the first article pointed out starved. Helpless civilians who cannot fight back or protect themselves.

Two other areas are making the news where we see the same lack of any pretense of regard for life or humanity. The immiseration of 52,000 (I think that’s the number usually cited) children from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. These are countries with a horrific murder rate and high incidence of extreme poverty, just now enduring drug wars made far worse by recent US intervention. This immediate reality in these three countries arises also from the overthrown of elected social-democracy regimes, installation of corrupt regimes backed by death squads. In this case Obama has tried to follow the law and, using funds he asked from Congress, to provide care and a long-term solution for these children. What is happening is the illegal and irresponsible deportation of these children with any adults who can be found belonging to them.

Some rightwing opponents have targeted shelters for these children. See also Amy Goodman’s essay on Jose Antonio Vargas.

A poem by the Israeli poet, Dahlia Ravikovitch:

Get out of Beirut

Take the knapsacks,
the clay jugs, the washtubs,
the Korans,
the battle fatigues,
the bravado, the broken soul,
and what’s left in the street, a little bread or meat,
and kids running around like chickens in the heat.
How many children do you have?
How many children did you have?
It’s hard to keep the children safe in times like these.
Not the way it used to be in the old country,
in the shade of the mosque, under the fig tree,
where you’d get the kids out of the house in the morning
and tuck them into bed at night.
Whatever’s not fragile, gather up in those sacks:
clothing, bedding, blankets, diapers,
some memento, perhaps,
a shiny artillery shell,
or a tool that has practical value,
and the babies with pus in their eyes
and the RPG kids.
We’d love to see you afloat in the water with no place to go
no port and no shore.
You won’t be welcome anywhere.
You’re human beings who were thrown out the door,
you’re people who don’t count anymore.
You’re human beings that nobody needs.
You’re a bunch of lice
crawling about
that pester and bite
till we all go nuts.

— translators Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

Spectacularly, a planeload of people was shot down over the Ukraine and everyone aboard died. The plane was traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with passengers from at least 10 countries on board, including 173 Dutch nationals, 44 Malaysians and 27 Australians. As many as 100 of the world’s leading AIDS researchers and advocates were reportedly on the plane en route to a conference in Australia, including the pioneering researcher and former president of the International AIDS Society, Joep Lange. The continued demonizing of Putin obscures that there is a second area in Ukraine right now being bombed: the US installed gov’t in Kiev has been inflicting death and destruction on the people of Ukraine in its area. the only discussion of this reality not so much as reported has been by Stephen Cohen on DemocracyNow.org; his recent article is the “Silence of American Hawks on the Kiev Atrocities.” See The Nation too if you are a subscriber. We must remember that NATO was seeking to displace the Russians in control of natural resources and labor in these areas.

This is not to deny that Russian or Moscow backed rebels are strongly implicated. Later addition (7/20, 1:17 pm): it’s emerged the people who shot down the plane were rebels with arms from the Russian gov’t: they are ill-prepared untrained people who did not understand they were shooting down a civilian plane and are now trying to prevent the UN from coming in; there are guidelines which airplane companies are advised to follow to avoid conflict and in this case the Malaysian airlines were not following the protocol (as were Air France, British Airways and others). This from a PBS report I found online. It is important if you want to understand what is going on not to demonize Putin, but rather understand there is a war going on in Ukraine where the US-backed Kiev gov’t is conducting war on recalcitrant cities and with the Russian-backed Ukraine gov’t. So the plane flew into a war zone — to save time and money on fuel.

************
While on different planes of disregard for life or humanity, the first slanted news on research in cancer which is written to lull the reader into accepting the present situation as nobody’s fault and hopeless, and the second taking away rights by law from real vulnerable people and giving them to powerful people becauset they are incorporated:

I cannot resist pointing to a group of articles which purport to offer real progress in understanding cancer in the July 2014 issue of Scientific American. These articles differ from the others I’m point to tonight: they are the delusionary type one finds in the mainstream press. You know you are in falsifying territory by the opening paragraph which implies the reason we think there is a rise in deaths from cancer is that we are no longer dying from other diseases. Utterly wrong: there has been an exponential increase in cancers for all age groups, rare cancers no longer rare, far in excess of any decrease in deaths from diseases partly conquered. There’s been a 70 per cent rise in 20 years. Secondly it is presented as hopeless to eliminate the carcinogens in our environment. To the contrary read The Politics of Cancer Revisited.

The essays point to new findings in specifics of chemotherapy which may (may) help to predict outcomes for some sufferers from cancer, but as you make your way down the list, at the close you find what is important: no fundamental understanding of the underlying causes for malignant growth have been discovered: first and foremost no one can predict what will be the result of any particular cancer treatment to any person. Central to scientific understanding is to be able to predict.

What these articles show is we are still in a state of knowledge like that of the Ptolomeic picture of the universe. As astronomers added real information on bits and pieces of this and that place in the sky, a cumbrous and confusing picture emerged. Only when Copernicus revolutionized the perspective did everything fall into place. Until Darwin perceived and understood how natural selection worked (based on Lyell’s finding that the natural world is undergoing continual change and there are “laws” controlling the patterns of these changes) we were left with books like Vestiges of Creation, a Ptolomeic-like density of detail with no predictive or analogous capability. It is true that as researchers delve into this or that chemotherapy or operation someone may stumble upon or work out answers.

Anyone who has read any history of medicine will know that the result of this person’s findings which will threaten the huge income of the drug companies and doctors doing these expensive operations (the admiral called these “shows of force”) cutting away the cancers (which often don’t work and leave the person mutilated as he endures death) will find him or herself under severe attack or the subject of ridicule and dismissal. The reason for the startling lack of progress in medicine over the centuries is those making money or at the head of a craft or profession do all they can to maintain the status quo.

I do feel my beloved husband was treated as an excrescence (and thus part of Ravikovitch’s poem) as soon as it was ascertained he had a lethal cancer; before that we had a pretense of concern. There was money to be made on him for an operation, and then the shows of force to enact.

As to the Supreme Court’s decision on Hobby Lobby, see Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times. The principle that we should have a neutral public space where no religion controls what can be done or is done and none shall be allowed to impose its vision on others is being systematically effaced. Since that decision, the court has gone on to increase the numbers of companies who can refuse to grant insurance to cover women’s various contraceptive needs.

Here as a live conversation is Bill Moyers’ talking to Greenhouse and Dahlia Lithwick.

Sylvia