The Best American Poetry

Grace Schulman Remembers Harold Bloom

from the current issue of Literary Matters, this excerpt from Grace Schulman's eloquent "Remembering Harold Bloom":

<<<
Harold Bloom had been my friend since 1989, when I received bound proofs of The Book of J. David Rosenberg, who translated it for Harold’s interpretation, asked for a blurb, and I wrote one with deferential zest, feeling humble before it. My heart beat faster when I read phrases like “King David, open to more life, more grief, more guilt and suffering, more dancing in exuberance before the Ark of Yahweh.” Then I met Harold. I saw an amiable man with a delicate, Byronic profile and melancholy eyes over a substantial, Falstaffian body encased in a stylish leathery jacket. I heard his attractively high-pitched voice  talking, in carefully enunciated tones, about writers from Whitman to Anne Carson, and about professors he referred to as “uncle” and “aunt.” When asked to see one of my poems, he read it in minutes. I was suspicious of his enthusiasm, not yet knowing that he read at lightning speed. But yes, his response told me he’d taken in every word.

At that time, he taught at New York University as well as at Yale. His second home was in Washington Square Village, just a few blocks from where I lived with my late husband, Jerome Schulman. The four of us became fast friends. We went to see Shakespeare: The Tempest on Broadway, and Richard III, with Ian McKellan, at BAM. To my surprise, Harold was usually delighted rather than critical. We had dinners at neighborhood restaurants or take-out meals at home. Usually, that is: once or twice Jeanne led me on walks through Noho and Chinatown to shop for dinner, and, when I balked at women’s home-making roles, she replied, “No, we’re hunters and gatherers.”

Harold’s books filled our shelves. In them I found insights I’ve memorized. Like this:

Our lives are perpetually renewed by that
ordinary process of hallowing the commonplace
that Wordsworth had first described in poetry.

And this:

We are our imaginations and we die with them.

And this:

The Blessing gives more life, awards a time
without boundaries, and makes a name into
a pragmatic immortality.

I can’t say that they influenced my own work, at least not consciously. Once I showed Harold a poem I wrote called “Names” with an epigraph that he quoted from Nietzsche: “that which we find names for is that which  we cannot hold in our hearts.” His look told me I’d proved a point he’d made. “It’s a lovely poem, but you have Nietzche all wrong. The epigraph means the opposite of what you wrote.” When I recalled Harold’s theories of misreading, I dropped the epigraph.

I was never his student, but I did attend his lectures in New York. At the Fales Library, shortly after the publication of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he woke a crowd by speaking of Shylock as a comic villain, who should be directed on stage to act “like a hallucinatory bogeyman.”  In a class he invited me to attend, I heard him talk on Wallace Stevens while looking closely at his students with occasional asides of how handsome they were. Once when he taught John Ashbery’s poetry, John, the poet himself, strode into the room. Students looked up from their books amazed, nudging one another. Was it pre-arranged? If so, it was successful.

Although Harold’s fame is widespread — his best-selling books, his adherence to the Romantic imagination, his original, often controversial, critical views — very little has been written about his wife, Jeanne Gould Bloom. Her mother was a sculptor, Dina Melicov, carver of weighty dynamic figures in bronze and wood. Much of her work was done for the Federal Art Project, WPA, a late nineteen-thirties New Deal plan to fund the visual arts. Jeanne went to the Little Red Schoolhouse in Manhattan, the first “progressive” school founded on John Dewey’s advanced principles, encouraging non-rigid, creative thinking rather than rote, and discouraging blind submission to the rulebook.

Jeanne attended Swarthmore and earned a Ph.D. at Yale, with a dissertation dealing with American colonial administration in the 17th century. She went on to win an M.A. in psychology and to work with students in the Branford, Connecticut, public schools. In New York, I’d seen her excited after attending a Metropolitan Opera matinee, which she did weekly. In Harold’s last months, when she became a hundred caregivers in one, driving, preparing meals, being mom to their two sons, she was still reading widely, and her insights into poetry were exquisitely sensitive.

Being a liberal Jew can be complex for any intellectual, and Harold was no exception. His allegiance to Judaism is legend. Raised in an Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish home of the East Bronx, he remained devoted to poets who wrote in Yiddish — his anthology, American Religious Poems contains work translated from the Yiddish of Moyshe Leyb Halpern and H. Leivick, alongside that of Whitman, Dickinson, and the Cherokees. His chapter on “The Hebrew Bible” in Ruin the Sacred Truths is deeply meaningful, and elsewhere he’s eloquent on the mysterious doings of Yahweh.

At the same time, he said repeatedly that he was not “a normative Jew,” which I interpret to mean acceptance of the freedom Judaism allows to follow as one can. For him it meant fealty to Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, the J text as he interpreted it. In that freedom, he resembled my husband, Jerry, a scientist who identified with Judaism but with neither standard belief nor observance. Once the four of us attended a synagogue where Harold was to talk on The Book of J. In the service that preceded it, the rabbi had the congregation stand for prayer. I heeded the command — but not my three companions.

Nevertheless, Harold was a man of great faith. In words. In aesthetic standards. In the power of books to make us think clearly, to know ourselves and others. “Poetry is awe,” he writes. “Read deeply, not to believe, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.” I’ll add that for him, poetry was love. And it was inseparable from his affection for those close to him. “Zumba!” he’d often exclaim, and though I never knew exactly what it meant, I heard his voice ring with zeal. As I was leaving New Haven one day, he took my hands in his enormous hands, looked into my eyes, and said, “Gracie, don’t ever stop coming to see me.” I didn’t, until he became very ill and I was told to put off my visit. But I’ll never stop seeing him, there, with Jeanne, surrounded by books, visiting students, friends. Their house is my temple.

>>>

For the rest of Grace's piece, please link here.

Grace Schulman has recently been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016, she received the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry, awarded by the Poetry Society of America. Her recent memoir is Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage (Turtle Point Press), and her seventh collection of poems is Without a Claim, (Mariner). Editor of The Poems of Marianne Moore (Viking), she is Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, C.U.N.Y. About her poems, Harold Bloom wrote, "Grace Schulman has developed into one of the permanent poets of her generation." Schulman is former director of the Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1974-84, and former poetry editor of The Nation, 1971-2006.

A Grateful Reminiscence of Harold Bloom [by Willard Spiegelman]

The current issue of Literary Matters includes "A Garland for Harold Bloom."  For the other entries, click here.

<<<In one of my earliest years as an assistant professor, the man who hired me at SMU brought to campus Harold Bloom (his friend and former colleague at Yale) and Geoffrey Hartman, for a weekend of lectures, seminars, conversations, and meals.

After what was, for me, the intellectual wasteland of my graduate school experience, this weekend provided a shot in the mind’s arm. I was jolted, delighted to be in the presence of men thinking–to quote Emerson–and I was grateful to learn how greatness dealt with greatness, in this case Bloom and Hartman on the Romantic poets and their legacy. Harold had just published The Anxiety of Influence, so we in the audience felt that even in provincial Dallas we were close to the cutting edge.

Over the years, I saw and heard him occasionally. The last time was two weeks before his death, in New Haven. He was failing, but very much alert mentally. We made plans for a future visit, which, alas, never happened.

Mostly, I read him, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with perplexity or frustration. He was large, of course, in many ways, and he repeated himself. As a writer and as a thinker he vacillated among three stylistic modes: the opaque, the vatic, and the epigrammatic. He did not, like John Hollander and Helen Vendler, “explain” things. Literary style was of little interest to him.

He remains a model of titanic energy, prodigious memory, and insatiable intellect, an example of a now seemingly old-fashioned, passionate commitment to literature as a high art.

-- Willard Speigelman. For other articles from "A Garland for Harold Bloom," click here.

from "Literary Matters," A Poem by A. F. Moritz: "High Windows"

High Windows

This is the job
that finally
they gave me:
in spring, in autumn
to sweep up the bodies
of finches
around the bases
of the crystal-windowed
towers.

When I used to sleep
on the streets,
it was similar: one of us
died, the body
would be picked up
but as long as we lived,
never.

It was as though
there were someone somewhere
who said: Let them live.
Let them be
always. Let them
alone. Let us have them
with us
as they are
forever.

So strange it was,
and seemed, at first:
one of us disappeared,
no trace, or just
the filthy crumpled
bag of stuff
left in a corner,
but where was she?—until
it ceased to appear,
so often it happened,
a wonder.

Seasonal work,
a job for a while,
to search the long planters
and bases of the walls for birds
who break against windows
in the times of migration:
unable to see
the hardness in the shining
image of the new
more perfect world’s
openness.

In the future there are people
who will have to imagine
what world these
words of mine
are living in—imagine it
from their day
in which there is no longer
the knowledge of what
were towers.

A. F. Moritz's The Sparrow: Selected Poems appeared in April 2019. A Canadian poet, he has won the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, and several issues of the Best American Poetry anthology series. He is Blake C. Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society at the University of Toronto, Victoria College. 

A  question for the author: why the allusion to Philip Larkin?  

Click here for the current issue of Literary Matters.

Rosanna Warren on Harold Bloom [from "Literary Matters"]

A section of the new issue of Literary Matters (ed. Ryan Wilson) is devoted to elegies for Harold Bloom, who died last Autumn. Here is what Rosanna Warren wrote:

<<<<
In his writing, his speaking, his very being, Harold Bloom was a great Teacher: provocative, often outrageous, and to use one of his favorite words, daemonic. Expounding Shakespeare or Emerson, the Bible or Cormac McCarthy, he invited his listeners to scorch our hands in the fire of literature and to accept the elemental encounter. It wasn’t a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with Harold: it was a matter of participating. As he wrote in the just-published The American Canon, “Poems matter only if we matter.” His parting has made, as Shakespeare wrote in Antony and Cleopatra, “a gap in nature.”
>>>

For the other pieces on Bloom -- by such as Grace Schulman and Willard Spiegelman -- gathered under the heading "A Garland for Harold Bloom," click here.

"Everyone Says I Should Write a Love Poem" [by Didi Jackson]

 

Editor's note: this week we are highlighting some of the works appearing in the new issue of Literary Matters edited by Ryan Wilson. Click here for the table of contents.

Everyone Says I Should Write a Love Poem

but I am too busy. My dog is too loyal.
A war could break out any minute;
it might be a Civil War.
I don’t know how to make charms
and I’ve never owned an amulet.
These horns and hooves never let me
rest comfortably. It is better
when looking at sculpture and fine art
to keep moving. The moon is a pod
of milkweed, the seeds are the stars.
An emerald beetle is destroying ash trees.
Blood pools in surprising areas away
from the mortal wounds. In death,
his eyes were closed and glued.
He could not see me even when he
was alive. My father wanted to be a preacher.
So did his father. Now, when I make the bed
I have to tap his pillow four times
just like this:
……………………. I find clementines too bitter.
My son remembers the last words he said
to him. My scars feel like fish moving
under my flesh. The winds are too strong
in my new home. We lose power often.
I have fallen in love
………………………………. with the snow.

from the current issue of Literary Matters edited by Ryan Wilson.

from "Literary Matters": "In Memoriam" [by Chester Johnson]

from the current issue of Literary Matters, ed. Ryan Wilson.

<<<
Note: The following is an excerpt from Chapter 8, “In Memoriam”, from the book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson. Damaged Heritage is being published in May, 2020 by Pegasus Books. The Elaine Race Massacre of 1919, which occurred one county removed from where the author grew up white in southeast Arkansas, serves as a backdrop for much of the book’s commentary. As an excerpt, the following article also contains certain clarifications, modest in size, to provide context and linkages that do not appear in Chapter 8 of the original work.

In October, 2010, I was in Fayetteville, Arkansas, located in the extreme northwest corner of the state and home of the University of Arkansas, to receive the University’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. As part of this campus visit, which lasted several days, the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, an entity of the University, interviewed me through Scott Lunsford, associate director of the Center, for upwards of ten hours. At some point during the extensive interview, we began to explore the issue of race and its impact on my life, and as the discussion progressed, I veered toward the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 that occurred among the rich cotton fields of Phillips County, Arkansas, in the Mississippi River Delta: more than a hundred and possibly hundreds of black sharecroppers and members of their families were killed. By this time, the Massacre had already begun to occupy a good deal of my intellectual attention, as well as my time, including a considerable amount dedicated to research on the particulars of the conflagration and its legally significant aftermath.
>>>

for more of this piece by J. Chester Johnson, please link here.

Johnson has written extensively on race and civil rights.  Several of his writings are part of the J. Chester Johnson Collection in the Civil Rights Archives at Queens College. Educated at Harvard College and the University of Arkansas, he is one of the fifteen writers showcased in October 2019 for the inaugural Harvard Alumni Authors’ Book Fair.

From Eroticism to Extinction 8 | 83 | 22 | 00 | 44 [by Katie Peyton Hofstadter]

8 years | 83 days | 22:00:44

I recently gave an art-tour to a group of graduate design students. It was the week of the Climate Strikes, Greta Thunberg was at the UN, and our President was mostly skipping school for a discussion of "Religious Freedom" (unless you're Muslim, I'm assuming).

After some soul scratching, I decided to twist the classic theme of love and death, in a way that spoke to this week. Here are a few stops in the tour, From Eroticism to Extinction.

The first stop is Greene Naftali gallery, where we see Paul Chan's The Bathers Dilemma. Industrial fans blast air upwards into nylon air dancers, which dramatically stiffen and wilt, over and over again, in a simulation of sex and flags and, hey, let’s say freedom (religious or otherwise).

In other words, they respond to pressure by dancing.

The androgynous bather's tiny (tiny!) suits draw attention to what is hidden (the tiny, but oh so important, bits these turgid tube balloons definitely do not have). "Progress takes a toll, especially on those who want it most," writes Chan. From his statement:

Resistance wears down the spirit, and makes a mess of the body and mind. It is a shame that it feels natural to expect suffering in oneself for the sake of ending it in others, and commonplace to accept this terrible symmetry as the price one pays for progress.

The bather in art breaks with this terrible symmetry by offering an image of another way forward. Works that take up this motif invite us to reflect on how pleasure renews us. They are reminders that pleasing and being pleased – without aggression or guilt – expands our capacity for fellow feeling. 

This "other way forward" channels the words of poet Audre Lorde, who said in 1978:

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

The most-discussed piece is an air dancer in a glass case. Is it happy, my students want to know? Is it trapped in the display, or does it enjoy being watched? We spend a moment watching the wiggler in its double bikini bottoms, contemplating our own gazes. It feels like we are in school and getting away with something.

We end with a passage from writer, scholar and activist adrienne maree brown (from Pleasure Activism). "Feeling good is not frivolous," writes brown. "It is freedom.”

The exit leads through a beach installed outside the gallery. Our feet crunch in the white sand. Across the street, we climb up to the High Line, Chelsea’s award-winning park, built on an old elevated freight rail line.

Ruth Ewan's monumental Silent Agitator is installed at 24th Street. It celebrates historic labor victories, like the five-day work week and eight-hour workday. (Victories being eroded by the decades-long right-wing assault on labor unions and the more recent rise of the "gig economy”) 

Ewan’s installation is inspired by Ralph Chaplin's classic turn-of-the-century illustration for the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. They feature a call-and-response, echoed in Ewan’s work: "What time is it? Time to organize!" The illustrations were distributed as “stickerettes” (drawings and slogans printed on small slips of gummed paper), which were also called "silent agitators."

Ewan’s Silent Agitator is funded by members of the Mugrabi family, whose 5-billion-dollar empire and aggressive art-trading and market-making (think: 800 Warhols in a warehouse) pretty blatantly undercut the idea that an hour's work entitles a laborer to a fair slice of our planet's finite wealth and resources.

Speaking of the planet's finite resources, we are now on to the Extinction part of the tour.

Earlier that day, a group of artists (full disclosure: I regularly see one of them naked in my apartment) had launched ClimateClock.world, an effort to put carbon budget countdown clocks up all over the world. Responding to a special request, they’d also custom-built one of these clocks for Greta Thunberg, but when she attempted to bring the physical clock into the UN for her speech, it was confiscated by security. (It did, after all, kind of look like a bomb.) Anyway, the clock is up and running here. It's open-source, so you can install the digital clock widget, or use the maker-kit to build your own physical clock.

This climate clock was erected in Berlin by Fridays for the Future just a few weeks ago.

 

Every morning, my phone tells me exactly how much time has passed (2019 years, 10 months, 9 days, 8 hours, etc) since some god-like dude was born in a manger. It's standardized for our global techno-capitalist economy, and accurate enough for high-frequency trading—but is it helping us survive?

Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931 96

 

My students love clocks. They love Dali’s Persistence of Memory. They love Ewan’s Silent Agitator. Since they were young, they've been told they were going to "save the world." How about a clock for that?

 

 

Event: Tomorrow at 6pm, comedic performer Morgan Bassichis will host an event at the Silent Agitator monument, called "There's a better life and you think about it, don't you?" The title is taken from Dolly Parton's 9-5. The event will feature Tayo Aluko, Ruth Ewan, Brooklyn Women’s Chorus, the New York City Labor Chorus, the Sing in Solidarity Chorus, and Lynn Marie Smith “aka” The Motown Diva. It will celebrate "the uplifting significance of song in the exhausting work of labor organizing,” and it’s billed as an “evening of fun, lively performances” that “invites musicians and organizers from across the city—and the world—to come together in affirmation that the time we have together need not be all work and no play."

Credits:
Paul Chan, installation shots from The Bather's Dilemma
Ruth Ewan, "Silent Agitator," photo by Timothy Schenck
Fridays for the Future, carbon clock at the Gasometer, photo by Euref AG/Schwarz
#ClimateClock widget available here

Kent Johnson asks "Could Someone Tell Me Why?"

Kent Johnson has written an eight-page poem about The Best American Poetry, the American poetry scene and his place in it. "It is all in the honorable, august traditions of satire," he says. The poem is entitled "Could Someone Tell Me Why?" Click here to read the poem, which he prefaces with these sentences:

<<<
Yeah, so some of the people who were my former
friends are now dead. I feel bad about that, but then I
think to myself, Hey, life is short and at least you were
published in the Best American Poetry! No, I don’t
really mean that, just kidding, I’ve never thought that,
and never would I.
>>>

Chrstopher Beha on "Winning the Peace"

<<<
If you’re worried that the election of a populist demagogue with no apparent respect for democratic or constitutional norms has put the United States on the road to fascism, bear in mind the defining feature of totalitarian societies: they are places in which all modes of life are subsumed under the political, in which each citizen’s most important relationship must be his or her relationship to the state. This is why totalitarian governments reliably shut down or take over religious groups, trade unions, and other voluntary associations. The ultimate aim of scaling back our political attention is not apathy but the creation of autonomous space for social, spiritual, and aesthetic experiences. If creeping totalitarianism is your worry, such work is not a form of acquiescence but a form of resistance.
>>>

from Christopher Beha's brilliant "Easy Chair" piece in Harper's (May 2019)

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/winning-the-peace-political-obsession/

a poem from The Awl by Brandon Amico [posted by Mark Bibbins]

This poem is at least as relevant today as it was when Brandon wrote it three years ago, alas. [—M.B.]

 

“A New Gun Folds Up to Look Just Like a Smartphone”

                                                        —Huffington Post, March 30, 2016 

 

Gun that folds up into a teddy bear.

Gun that folds into a bottle.

Gun that folds into a dozen roses.

Gun that folds into a condolence card.

Gun that folds into a conference pass, a baseball ticket, a ticket to anywhere.

Gun that folds into your golden retriever, the usual tail wag. The jolt of electricity

     through the tail when you say its name.

Gun that folds into another gun.

Gun that folds into a prerogative, into an absentee ballot.

Gun that folds into a bulletproof necktie.

Gun that folds into rope.

Gun that folds into a grin without a face.

Gun that folds into legislation, and folds and folds again until so thick it can’t

      physically be folded again.

Gun that guns into a fold.

Gun that folds into an opening.

Gun that folds quietly.

Gun that folds into a weather forecast, a travel agent.

Gun that folds into a car key.

Gun that folds into a door key.

Gun that folds into a body.

Gun that folds into a mirror,

that shatters.

Gun that folds into a crane, into another crane, into a history lesson.

Gun that folds into an anti-NRA sign.

Gun that folds into a picture frame.

Gun that swaggers into an argument.

Gun that folds into a pen. Gun that unfolds an ink cartridge.

Gun that folds white as paper, that writes its wishes.

Gun that folds its fingers into a steeple.

Gun that folds into a pantry.

Gun that folds into a knife fight.

Gun that folds into a sitcom episode without an ending.

Gun that folds into itself, that becomes more gun.

Gun that folds in err, in human.

Gun that folds into a cell phone; gun that calls your children home.

 

Brandon Amico is the author of Disappearing, Inc. (Gold Wake Press, 2019). He is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Regional Artist Grant, and the winner of Southern Humanities Review’s Hoepfner Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, and New Ohio Review, among other publications.

from "An Enemy of the People" [by Paul Berman]

People have been asking: since when, and for what reason, has Zionism become a dirty word? Paul Berman speculates on this question and reports on recent alarming events in France:

<<<
The Yellow Vest sidewalk mini-riot against Alain Finkielkraut [pictured right], the French philosopher, in Paris a few weeks ago—widely and even internationally reported in the press—deserves an additional commentary, apart from the obvious remark made by many people at the time, to wit, that manias against the Jews have gotten out of hand in France. Finkielkraut was walking in the street, when a group of Yellow Vests discovered him, and, recognizing his face, famous from a thousand talk-show appearances, shouted at him, “France belongs to us! Damn racist! You are a hatemonger. You are going to die. You are going to hell. God will punish you. The people will punish you. Damn Zionist!,”—along with “Go back to Tel Aviv!,” “Get lost, dirty Zionist shit!,” “We are the people!,” and other such cries, expressed with an air of violent menace—until he was rescued by a more sympathetic Yellow Vest and by the police.

<<
The sidewalk attack ought to remind us, in short, that Zola’s phrase (in his immortal J’accuse) was “imbecile anti-Semitism,” and not something adjective-free. Imbecility undergirds the phenomenon. If the attack on Finkielkraut revealed anything new, it was only by showing that imbecilities of different provenances can blend together—a loathing of the Jews compatible with the leftist tone of Yellow Vest economic protest; a loathing in the populist mode, with its rhetoric of “the people” against the Jews; and, as it happens, a touch of Islamist loathing, to boot. The most vituperative of the Yellow Vests shouting at Finkielkraut turned out to be an Islamist, known to the French police. The Yellow Vests on the sidewalk must have found the combination very exciting.
>>

<<
The American universities have become famous for those melodramatic scenes, with crowds of undergraduates convincing themselves that Satan or Joseph de Maistre is about to deliver a lecture, and must be stopped. But student fads are the least of it. In our era, the loftiest of intellectual journals have been known to execute their own editors at noon. If the French version of this sort of thing is different, it is chiefly because the best-known of writers, and not just the academics, can find themselves on trial now and then, not just in the “court of public opinion,” and not just in the American closed-door Title IX university hearings (which is bad enough), but in courts of law.

This has been Michel Houellebecq’s situation, brought up on charges in France some years ago for having insulted Islam, which, of course, he had done—Houellebecq, whose novel Submission, is routinely denounced as racist (though an exposé of anti-Semitism is one of its principal themes). Pascal Bruckner was obliged more recently to defend himself in court, not once but twice, because of his analytic dissections of the Islamist controversies in France—Bruckner, the author of An Imaginary Racism, whose crime can be guessed at from the title of his book. Georges Bensoussan, the historian of the Jews in the Arab countries (in a compendious 900 pages), was brought up on charges for having said in a radio interview that, among Arab families in France, “anti-Semitism is imbibed with one’s mother’s milk”—though, like Houellebecq and Bruckner, Bensoussan managed to avoid conviction (in his case because he had quoted someone else, and the court ruled that he had merely misspoken, and his intentions were not criminal).
>>

To continue reading the essay, published in Tablet, click here.  See also David Lehman's review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission here.

a poem from The Awl by Josh Bell [posted by Mark Bibbins]

As many readers will be aware, the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference is currently in full swing. We are ever on the lookout for Josh's "free-range / angels slumped out / on conveyor belts" here. —[M.B.]

Vince Neil’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, As Transcribed by Josh, in a Crowded Hotel Bar One Afternoon, Being a Poem Spoken in the Future, During the Upcoming AWP Conference of 2014, in Seattle, Washington

1.

Of the latter heroes I was most

supine, handed out

warnings to women who were pregnant

or were likely to become pregnant,

hope tucked bloodless

into saddlebag, neither hunter

nor borrower, sometimes

referred to myself as It—

as in charity is

its bird machine—a strap-on fashioned

out of bits of the foregone cross

coming at me from the future

in the tiniest and the most

lineal of dreams, my preferred

haruspex pondering

her retirement and my new

address as quickly

dirty as the last, in times of war

immune to alarum,

at least fifteen minutes away

from sword and armor, the valves of my heart

opening and closing slowly

like the wings of a new butterfly

at rest upon the battlements

of overweening Troy, and all

the maidens and immortals

2.

and the handful of princes who,

in those days, took time away

from their own troubled narratives

to stop and save me from myself or from

the ancient boy-scout Death

are now themselves long dead

by natural and/or

mythological causes. Don’t mention it

they seemed to say with their great

careful bodies

as they turned them from me in departure.

Don’t mention it and drifted leonine

and smooth toward the assault

on their promised

constellations and perhaps

the foreign-funded rebellions

of their homicidal children,

got upon or beneath majestic animals

and graduate students, ears crisp

but not always white

as snow. And where was I—year

of the jellyfish, cossacked,

bowing feastless

before capital—when they

in their turn required me

                                                [continued]

Brexit Envy [by Leon Elson]

Our correspondent in London reports on the mood over there now that Theresa May's plan for Brexit has suffered a second defeat in Parliament --  a defeat that has been characterized as "significant," "crushing," "major," and "catastrophic." Here's Leon's dispach. DL

Dear David
The Oxbridge elite can talk of little else than Brexit -- how to manage it. The country is more politically divided than ever I can remember it to be. If the vote to leave the EU was a harbinger of the Trump election, what in the States could mirror the chaos now prevailing here as the House of Commons rejects every proposal brought to it by PM May?

Are people fed up with Theresa May [pictured left]? Hard to say. She inherited this mess from her predecessor, who called for a referendum on exiting the European Union, thought for sure the move would be defeated, was stunned when it wasn't, and promptly resigned. There is something very sympathetic about Ms May and how she has conducted herself, remained calm and carried on. She has shuttled back and forth between London and Brussels with proposals and modifications of proposals -- it's like H. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy but his worked better. 

Of course what May has in her favour is that Labour is led by Corbyn, whose anti-Semitism is so blatant that some members of his own party have abandoned it. The wonder is that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the longtime leaders of Labour, tolerated Corbyn, but that may be explained by the fact that he was an obscure backbencher who posed no threat to them or to Labour.

Poor Theresa lost her voice yesterday and there you had the perfect metaphor for her. No doubt she will continue her Sisyphean struggle to figure out how the UK can sever its European ties in a reasonable way. A "hard" Brexit with an abrupt cancellation of all existing compacts and trade agreements -- and with the probability of a "hard" border between Northern Ireland (which is part of Britain) and Ireland (which is part of the EU) -- would be unconscionable. But we could be heading that way. 

Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, and New York have benefited from the uncertainty surrounding financial institutions centered in London. The blow to London's banking preeminence in Europe is real though probably not fatal.

At high table at Balliol the other night one wit commented that he had heard there was "Brexit envy" in the United States. This was greeted with laughter, for I wager that there is absolutely no one anywhere who envies us this sad spectacle. But now, dear David, I am anxious to know how this whole debacle is getting discussed in America. -- Leon 
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Dear Leon,

I wish I could say that Americans are discussing Brexit options with great passion or with at least the sort of intense and amused curiosity that I recall in London, where I was, during the Anita Hill hearings. The general indifference to the rest of the world does us little credit. Some people I know, who like spending summers in France, may suspend this practice given what they hear of sporadic acts of violence and terrorism there. But nobody's canceling their Wimbledon tickets if they're lucky enough to have them. 

If it's any consolation we have a Congress as dysfunctional as your Parliament.

You have my sympathy and my hope that common sense will prevail as it used to do in Britain. We've got a lot of idiocy here, of course, but it's more fun talking about Byron and Shelley with you as we used to do. Do you still have that tawny port that I liked so much?

David

Poetry News from JFK by [Andrei Codrescu]

I like writing in airport lounges with two hours to spare before an overseas flight. This is the last pleasure left after airports became expensive holding cells in hell. I remember when you could run right up to the door of your airplane and they would reopen them for you if you were late. And as per Casablanca, you could part from your amor during a war. I also remember from the movies when couples parked by the airport to watch planes take off. That was entertainment in days past. I'm having these puffs of nostalgia in the lounge of British air between security warnings and threats to my luggage which, if left unattended, might sprout wings and leaves. To be sure, the Surveillance apparatus already knows that nothing in my luggage grows. Do they know what grows in my head? I saw Minority Report and I think it possible that people having bad thoughts are tagged already. But there is no way anyone can read your thoughts if you're writing poetry. For one thing, there is no poetry in your head before you write it. At least, there isn't in mine. I'm from the school of "If you want to know something, ask yourself and there it is: the answer." Most people with a question google the answer now, and there it is: the fake answer. The fake answer is actually "fake news." Google cannot and never will answer poetry's questions. Google will maybe come up with names and bios of poets and their poems, but it will never answer a real poetry question, like the one poet Ted Berrigan was fond of stating as a fact, though it was a question: "I can't wait to hear what I'm going to say next." Indeed and likewise, there is no way for me to know what I think before I write it. As I write it I know what it is. Of course, if I have to formulate a question afterwards, I lose interest. Google is incapable of googling itself, that is to say: google cannot produce a question from an answer that even I don't yet know. Poetry resides only in the Ungooglable. For an erudite dissertation on the Ungooglable, please see "The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess" (Princeton, 2009), where I sink to the bottom of this. They are about to call my flight, so I'm pasting here two of my recent ungooglables:

 

Dogs of Aphora

An ounce of premounting is worth a pound of surmounting and a ton of dismounting.

The contrarian problem: I’m Bauhaus when they are Baroque, I go for the Baroque when they go Bauhaus.

We articulate when we daydream: contra naturam

Even in the deepest boredom the darkest melancholy the hopeless depression someone with a lighter and a knife is preparing to make you forget

Only curiosity makes things better: things hold your gaze if you look

The last day arrived after my first coffee

ants
ants form colonies of dread from each other’s bodies
let this one pass let this one go let this one say the said
not one hears the labor’s so intense and dense
I probe the rope swaying under foot and step
into the void where all I thought I was I never had

 

 

Poet Spotlight: Laurie Sheck [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Born and raised in the Bronx, poet Laurie Sheck was educated at the University of Iowa. She has published several collections of poetry, including Captivity (2007); The Willow Grove (1996), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Amaranth (1981). Her poems often use myths as frames within which to explore ideas of motion and stillness, consciousness and the body. In a 2002 interview, speaking to the attentiveness, rather than narrative, that drives her work, Sheck noted, “if you create a world on the page in which things that seem not to hold together can interact with each other, they can hold, and part of what’s holding, part of what’s interesting, is the way that things don’t directly hook up.”

Her 500-page hybrid novel, A Monster’s Notes (2009), uses prose fragments and deletions, letters, and embedded texts to reimagine the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space,” observes novelist and editor Ed Park in a review for the Los Angeles Times.

Sheck’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her poems have won several Pushcart Prizes and have been included in Best American Poetry. Sheck edited the anthology Poem a Day, Volume 2 (2003).

Sheck has taught at Princeton University and the New School. She lives in New York City.

_________________________________________

On Textual Difficulty

Toward the end of Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Idiot, there is a scene of astonishing and transgressive beauty—the frightened, epileptic Prince Myshkin holds the murderer Rogozhin in his arms, stroking and comforting him, as they pass the night only a few feet from the bed where Rogozhin has left Nastasya’s dead body. Myshkin is horrified by Rogozhin, so much so that after that night he will never speak again. But he understands in the deepest parts of his being that if he turns from Rogozhin he is turning from everything human, suffering, radiant, ambiguous, complex.

What is termed “textual difficulty” seems to me nothing less than the attempt to be faithful to the ambiguities, extremities, and textures of experience and of language itself.

What Dostoevsky knew: nothing is more radical, more strange, than reality. Facts are astonishments. The mind seeks to briefly capture and wonder at, interrogate, what it senses. Angles into the real. A fragility of holding.

Unsettled. Volatile. Unstable.

“The artist knows there is nothing stable under heaven.” (James Baldwin).

I am moved by the unstable text. The precarious, the marginal, the de-centered, is also strong.

___________________________________________

An Introductory Note

The hybrid works I have been writing over the past decade involve interactions with one or two source texts and a large body of factual material. A Monster’s Notes involves itself with Frankenstein, the Shelleys, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and facts from a wide array of areas from robotics and genetic engineering to space travel. Island of the Mad interacts with Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, while also carrying out an investigation of Dostoevsky’s biography and the city of Venice and the Venetian plague of 1575. The following excerpt is taken from a new hybrid work in progress. The speaker is a cyborg who has been part of an experiment being carried out at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics and Bio-engineering. He has secretly left the laboratory, taking with him a stack of papers and documents. In his hiding place in a toolshed on the outskirts of Geneva, he reads through the stacks of files he stole. In the three short sections below he recounts his experiences and thoughts to an orphaned boy who has fallen into a coma.

___________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Laurie Sheck 

 

 

The more I read the less fixed and defined the world became.

In time we might not even have bodies. We would merge with cyberspace and no longer be creatures of earth.

In the dimness of the toolshed the words kept moving through me: “Like data seamlessly transferred between computers, we will find our consciousness distributed over many locations”…. “one piece of our mind here, another there, our essences will travel the information networks at will.”

And:

“Like organisms in gentle tide pools that migrate over time to freezing oceans or steaming jungles, our descendants will venture forth to leave behind this narrow realm we consider reality.”

When I first started reading, I only wanted to get some sense of what I am, what had been done to me. My origins and history. A few glimpses into the ideas that brought me into being. But now it was as if everything around me was slowly dissolving—and I was part of that dissolving. As if the mind is trapped and lonely in the body. And the earth in its own way lost and lonely, a temporary waystation.

Outside the toolshed a soft rain was falling. I had read for many hours, it was almost morning. I put away the papers. Tried to sleep.

 _______________________________________

The papers I’d taken from the laboratory were mostly incomplete and often confusing—research studies with missing pages, disordered footnotes, clipped passages, working drafts, post-it notes in nearly-indecipherable handwriting. Each night I lifted them out of the folders. I read about the brain, and about intelligent machines, data compression, informational interfaces. About how Karl Capek coined the word “robot” from the Czech word for hard, menial labor. I learned about embodied computers, cyberspace, dislocation, fears of weakness, isolation, confinement. Intense fear of the other. Norbert Wiener believed the boundaries of the human are constructed rather than given. And Gregory Bateson asked, “Is a blind man’s cane part of a blind man?” I read about disrupted categories, flows of information, neural feedback, the erasure of the distinction between inanimate and animate. About how new kinds of bodies lead to new thoughts. Sometimes several pages were only lists of titles: The Human Use of Human Beings; Posthuman Bodies; The Origins of Feedback Control; Theories and Applications of Cellular Automata; The Reinvention of Nature.

After a while, the more I read, the more an eerie feeling crept over me—I had been born at the edge of something dying. My existence signaled a world where the distinction between human and machine, animate and inanimate, owner and thing, was coming to an end. I was a death-knell but maybe also a kind of unsettling beginning.

I read on about dynamic systems and “the worlds which are possible answers to a limited set of questions,” but all the while something in me was increasingly uneasy—unseen, wary, almost invisible.

So much of what I knew of myself was excluded from the history I was seeing, a history I was assumed to be part of. There was no place for who I really am.

One night after many hours of reading I fell into a leaden sleep. Very soon I was dreaming of Laika, a street dog from Moscow, the first dog sent into space. She had been chosen because given her life on the streets had proved her resourceful and strong. Her training involved weeks of confinement inside a small, cramped capsule with no room to even turn around. On the day the space craft launched, she was sent into orbit in chains beside her bowl of gel-like food, her heart rate rising to 240 beats per minute, her breath rate quadrupling. Soon she was orbiting the earth, but the capsule’s heat shield suddenly failed and she died within five hours.

But that night in my dream she hadn’t died. All these years she had been orbiting after all, cordoned off from every living thing, her eyes turned to the stars and meteors coming and going in the slit of the capsule’s small window, her bowl empty, her brittle legs chained and withered.    

I lowered my eyes and extended my hand very slowly and quietly, being careful not to startle or scare her, thinking I would show her she wasn’t alone, would undo the chains, give her food and water, stroke her. But when I looked up again she was gone, the space craft was empty.                                                  

________________________________________

Each night I returned to the toolshed. Thought about Laika, about Muska who trained beside her but crumbled under the strain, and Albina who had completed a shorter mission months before and so was “kept on the ground out of respect.” And each night I continued to read, taking in the many facts from the stolen folders. So many pages full of strange and interesting things. The first spider web spun in outer space was in 1973. The first spider web in space was spun there in 1973. Synthetic biology is “the design and construction of new biological parts and devices, and the re-design of natural biological systems for useful purposes.” “By combining advances in DNA sequencing with the principles of modern engineering, scientists can design new organisms that produce biofuels and the precursors of medicinal drugs.” Yuri Gagarin, the first human to enter outer space, was the son of a bricklayer and milkmaid in the village of Klushino, Russia. In 1968 he died in a mysterious plane crash on a routine training flight near Kirzhach. Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Klein coined the term “cyborg” in a 1960 paper on space travel—it referred to “an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments.” Neil Harbisson is the world’s first legally recognized cyborg— an antenna implanted in his skull enhances his perception of light and color. On their 1968 voyage to the moon, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders saw the distant glow of earthrise. Haruki Murakami wrote, “Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? Why do people have to be this lonely?” The astronaut James Irwin said when he looked down on earth from space it seemed “fragile, delicate.” Murakami wrote, “I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping.” Each night as I read my eyes grew blurry but I kept going. Sometimes I stopped and listened to the rain, wished I could disappear inside it. But always I turned back to the folders. If I read long enough, maybe I would come to some hint of who I was or why I was a failed experiment. “Pure humanity has always only been an illusion.” “The cyborg does not have to be frightening or problematic. It does not have to be monstrous or deformed.” There were cyborgs whose bodies were lethal weapons, cyborgs who saw through walls, cyborgs with self-healing, sterilized blood. But the more I read something in me darkened, though I couldn’t say quite why.

Poet Spotlight: Jennifer Minniti-Shippey [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Jennifer Minniti- Shippey is the Managing Editor of Poetry International literary magazine, Director of Poetic Youth programs, and a lecturer at San Diego State University. Her most recent collection of poetry, After the Tour, is available now from Calypso Editions, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander, Spillway Journal, Cider Press Review, and others. Visit jennyminnitishippey.com for more.

A Process Note

I’m interested in private vocabularies, private languages at work in lyric poems. There is, in the particularity of image, an assertion of individuality: only this speaker could have made the images of this poem; what emotions you draw from the arrangement of images are yours. I’m also fascinated by how pursuing a sound through a poem can add energy, mystery. When a sequence of sounds “makes sense” to me, I’m generally inclined to leave it, even if it creates unlikely connections between images or narrative points. I haven’t thought of this as “difficulty” before, but I can see the ways it asks the reader to be involved in the meaning-making of a poem. I see also how important it is to me to use my own, particular, private language in the writing of these pieces.

 *

Last Days of June 

A whole sun-skinned nation
later and I am on my knees
in the trolley, the trolley south
bound, everything dark and rattling—
June in this country comes
jacarandad and sky-bruised—and me
wailing hallelujah quite
silently, good-bye brave ponies
grazing in the green wind, good-
bye thin socks abandoned
to the soft mercies of rain,
good-bye plastic peonies on the high
heels of happiness.
I am trying, just try
ing to love this again, my life.

 *

Questions for Adam

What is love to you: the walls,
beyond the walls,
the garden, beyond the garden, the alley—

what of the words you made,
that avocado pitted,
that dog wriggling on the carpet,
that poetic form,
shorelines unmourned,
in what bright east heaving ocean you buried
your feet—

wanderer, o wanderer,
you ribless, you gutted, you
black-haired belovéd first,
what of ash stockpiled in the sideroom,
what of our mother dust,
our Juliet balcony, our aloe vera,
bright green walls and our red bookcase—

what is love to your black-penned vision
made in the shape of a god,
or some kind of cloud,
cumulous or nimbus,
what is love to your silence,
click-clack the machines of your dreams,
uncut nails of the Airedale terriers,

string of patio lights hung by your here-now
generosity, what of the garden? What of
what is beyond—

*

Third Tour

there’s waiting, then wait and
how dare you take so long to get here,

air blasted past dust and dusty blinds,
detonation of overripe, out-seasoned

vine-grown tomatoes, so
come through, blown open:

I’ll make tea, pay half the bills,
we’ll census dead birds and marvel

at their eyes still, still
unblinking into us

*

Sig Sauer

she put a gun in my hand   why else would I hold it?   I wanted her   the flags were half-masted   I wanted her so I held it   tell me about your war   I wanted her gun   in my hand, that not-heavy darkness   tell me your war, have you fed it?   here on my knees in the desert   a weightless dark in my hand   on my knees and wailing, a gun   on my knees in the desert   what danger in the market?   on my knees wailing a gun   in the purse, in her hand   what danger   a market   for desire, mark the prices   her hand inside me a gun   her gun inside, my desire   for every desire, a price   put a gun in our hearts   the trigger will pull us   the flags are half masted   we desire our war

*

When my dead meet they hold hands

 

In the land of Linnea                       and     of Sarah

red bougainvillea blossoms

            by whipping wind              are blown

through the heavy oak door.                    

 

The wind blows also through light-bodies.

 

            This one has eyes

                        she speaks

                                    On the left, she has a voice

                                                                        she watches

They crowd me.

 

Breasts press against my elbows           

                        warm palms in my back’s hollow

            a tongue in the dark                                    of my mouth.

 

A jade-green hummingbird in the red arbor,

                                                wings shiver wings in my hair

            they whisper

                                    as they lean              close above me

                                                                                                as they stay.

                     

Why

 

are the straw hats in the middle of the highway?               I shout.

 

Memory replaces nothing, not

                                    brown eyes or blue, not

                                                blonde hair or

bones or skin.

 

to my dead, living

                        to my dead, living jade-green

                                                                        to my living dead, jade-green

Léonce et Léna: due to a change in situation... [by Tracy Danison]

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It’s been 7 hours and 15 days since you look your love away/

Since you’ve been gone I can do whatever I want/I can see whomever I choose/I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant/Put my arms around any girl I see/

But nothing I said nothing can take away these blues/'Cause nothing compares/Nothing compares to you

Nothing compares to u, Prince Rogers Nelson (Sinead O’Connor)

It’s the “7 hours” that gets me. 

I wake after four or five hours. She is sitting on my chest, her pubis somehow pressing hard on my breast bone, looking down into my face, occupying my interior commentary. I start counting the hours.  I remember only later that I’ve been doing this same half-lit heart-crush now for better than two weeks.

This isn’t the only sort of vaguely psychotic repetitive behavior I can get absorbed in. Since the 1980s, I have seen Georg Buchner’s Léonce & Léna and Woyzeck whenever I’ve noticed one or the other’s being staged Paris intra-muros.

Léonce & Léna and Woyzeck started getting regular play in the early 70s, just as I did, perhaps taking the place of the Situationist International. Both pieces have Ur-propos that can be welded into almost any post-1968 conundrum. For love (or is it duty? Or lust? Or congenital idocy?) Private Woyzeck, otherwise a barber, makes himself a guinea pig to a heartless doctor and a slave to a thoughtless hussar. Prince Léonce and Princess Léna both run away from personally untenable situations. Love or its material equivalent is out there, somewhere, but neither Léonce, nor Léna, nor Woyzeck can hide from the tragedy of the situation they were born into.

I was to the MC93 – Maison de Culture of Seine Saint Denis – for a ninth anniversary performance of Alan Platel’s Out of Context for Pina (Bausch), on the evening before the foggy ragged Sunday afternoon I went to see Léonce & Léna at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, to the west of Paris.

Nanterre is the town where`68 broke out, where Situationism bore fruit, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit tapped his finger on a 500-page report on youth and observed that there wasn’t a word about sex in the whole damned thing. ‘Though that moment has been obscured by memory, the tear gas, strikes and street fighting and politics, everything that has really mattered, I think everything that’s happened since then, proves that sex and gender has mattered far more than anything else.  

undefined

The MC93 made a perfect setting for a tenth anniversary performance of Alan Platel’s Out of Context for Pina (Bausch), which included all the original cast members. Pina Bausch, died suddenly of smoking-related cancer in June 2009, though the piece is for her, not in her memory. If you’ve seen Bausch’s inimitable choreography you’ll see why that must necessarily be so.

There’s a lot of memory in the MC93, an angular bare-concrete slab building, located on the boulevard Lénine in a place called Bobigny. Thanks to Charles De Gaulle airport and its discrete but extensive underground police complex, Bobigny is site of the busiest immigration court in France. Following a foolish confusion of passports in the besotted wake of a morally shocking, day-long, all-night, series of vigorously consensual acts, I was able to create my own high-security memories there.

At the end of Out of Context, a scratchy-voiced version of Prince’s  Nothing compares 2 u reminded the cast as well as myself that nothing compares, period. Life just goes on; the performers returned one by one to the seats in the audience from which they’d hopped up onto the stage and begun the piece, becoming spectators to the ghost of their own memories.

I thought, “This play cannot ever be this play again”. A tear ran out of my eye. Probably because I don’t sleep enough.

Kaori Ito, now a much-in-view-performance-dance-choreographer with a babe in arms, was in the original cast of Out of Context. She came and sat back down in the seat next to mine; I asked her after if she felt as moved as I to reckon whatever was done was always finished forever. Ito said she did.

This time, Léonce and Léna seemed about taking your place, no matter what. That’s what I remember. So this. Is the situation now that all the Princes and Princesses, fifty years after ’68, must stand ground, make an end of the old memories while waiting for Léonce & Léna to play again?

Poets & Artists 100: all hail Didi Menendez [by David Lehman]

Poets & Artists 100 is here.

Click here and you'll arrive at a Didi Menendez's groundbreaking magazine devoted to "figurative realism" in art -- with poetry tossed in by such stalwarts as Nin Andrews, Grace Cavalieri, and Denise Duhamel.

Figurative realism is a good name for a movement in favor of representational art with the human figure  at its center. The revival of the nude as an aesthetic ideal is significant. It is especially impressive in a puritanical era and may be a harbinger of welcome changes to come. The black and white painting on the left is by Dirk Dzimirsky, who curated the "Figurative Art" show up now.

The current issue of Poets & Artists includes gorgeous, sensuous paintings by such new (to me) artists as Anne-Christine Roda, Aixa Oliyeras, Veronica Winters, Megan Read, Nadine Robbins, Conne Karlera-Sales, Daniel Maidman, Victoria Selbach, Miriam Escofet (Portrait of Sophia, on right). It's an exciting development, a cry for beauty against brutality.

-- DL

Paul Berman on Michael Walzer on "Tablet"

from Paul Berman [left] on Tablet in the second of a series of highly provocative and thoughtful essays on the American left and the dangers of anti-Semitism.

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Michael Walzer has brought out a book called A Foreign Policy for the Left, in which he argues that, when people on the American left contemplate domestic affairs, they do so in a thoughtful, sober, and serious manner—or, at least, they make what Walzer considers to be an honest effort. But when those same people turn to world affairs, they slip into a different habit of mind, as if sliding from one lobe of the brain to another. 

**

The question of world affairs arises, and the left-wing public responds by thinking: “Everything that goes wrong in the world is America’s fault.” No elaboration seems required. From that one assumption follow all the others. 

**

There is the spectacular instance of left-wing delusion about the Islamist political movement—the left-wing supposition that something has got to be progressive about the Islamists, even if the Islamists appear to be medieval reactionaries; and the further supposition that Islamism’s enemies among Muslims and non-Muslims alike must surely be the actual reactionaries, even when the enemies appear to be liberals and progressives. Here is a “politics of pretending” in a double-twist pretzel version.

**

You can read about Bernie [Sanders’s] shortcomings in Truthdig, where he turns out to be a major sellout, a non-socialist because a non-anti-imperialist, and a tool of the sinister Democratic Party. The anti-Zionists and the fantasists yearn for an American [Jeremy] Corbyn [head of Britain's Labour party]. They want a national leader who will denote as realistic their own fictions and dreams about faraway dictators; and will usher the fictions and dreams into the American mainstream; and will say nice things about Hamas and bad things about Israel; and will offer an appalling speech to the Democratic National Convention; and will stand shoulder to shoulder with the outright bigots; and will drive everyone with a Jewish soul out of the left, except for a pitiful handful.

But America has produced no such leader. America has produced Bernie Sanders. America is different. Not different at every moment, but, even so, different.

 

Scary Stuff: Paul Berman Reports On the Predicament of the Jews in France Today

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. . .in France, a great mass of Jews have lately undergone experiences that are unimaginable in the U.K. Some 50,000 French Jews, or 10 percent of the entire Jewish population, are said to have decamped from one place to another within central France (or have emigrated to Israel) during the last few years, in order to escape quotidian persecutions from neighbors who have come to accept the Islamist doctrine. The intermittent massacres and murders of Jews in France and in Belgium have added up to a low-level protracted terror.
>>>
<<<
Anti-Zionist street protests got underway [in Paris] in the summer of 2014, at the time of the most recent of the full-scale Israel-versus-Hamas wars in Gaza, proclaiming solidarity with Hamas. At a demonstration in Paris—called by one of the smaller Trotskyist parties, not under Mélenchon’s leadership, but drawing on the public that is his—a street full of marchers broke into a cry of “Death to the Jews!” And “Jew: Shut up, France is not yours!,” together with “Allahu Akbar!,” and “Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!,” which are not normally Trotskyist slogans. 
>>>
<<<
Do the many American campaigners, student councils, minor and major politicians, immigrant activists, distinguished intellectuals and vigorous chants add up to the kind of political force that anti-Zionists have amassed within the radical left in Britain and France (and elsewhere in Western Europe)? Is there a possibility that, having assembled a great many supporters, the newly cheerful left-wing anti-Zionists in America will succeed in hollowing out whole portions of the culture of the traditional liberal left in the United States, on the European model? Or is anti-Zionism in our own country mostly an annoyance, perhaps larger and friskier than a university fad, but not vastly so, and easily brushed off? Is America, in short, different?
>>>

Paul Berman, "The Left and the Jews," Tablet (November 11, 2018)