"Like in Star Wars, We’re the Small Rebel Force"

Notes from the US Social Forum

I’m writing these notes 95 days into the Gulf Oil Disaster. Supposedly BP has just capped the well, but that’s cold comfort to the people along the coast who are out of jobs and not much consolation to all the dead sea turtles. It’s been nine years since the War in Afghanistan began, and it feels like a very long time since the economy went south in Michigan. It’s difficult to be optimistic, and perhaps the best we can do, as the poet from Saginaw Theodore Roethke wrote, is hope that in a dark time the eye begins to see.

I first heard about the US Social Forum last November when I was in Oaxaxca, Mexico, from Michele Gibbs, a poet and former SNCC organizer. On Thursday evening during the Social Forum I had dinner with her and some other friends near Cobo Hall. Edith Lewis showed me Michele’s poem “I Would Like to be Wrong, But…” from Harvest From the Field, a new collection. It contains these lines:

the facts i need
don’t seem to be recorded;
or at least, are in dispute

This feeling resonates with anyone who has ever suspected they will never be part of the conversations surrounding decisions regarding their lives. What facts do we need to live better lives? Why haven’t they been recorded? If they have been recorded, why can’t we find them? What tools do we need to sort through the trash and toxic distractions that assault us every day so that we might see things more clearly? What is to be done?

Over 15,000 people showed up in Detroit June 22 through 28 for the US Social Forum to try to answer these questions. Attendees wore day glow orange bracelets stamped with the statement Another World Is Possible, a hopeful slogan in this twilight era of late capitalism.

The US Social Forum is a national version of the World Social Forum, which was launched in Porto Alegro, Brazil, in 2001 by groups “opposed to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational corporations and…governments…at the service of those corporate interests.” They were “committed to building a planetary society directed toward fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth.”

The first Social Forum in the U.S. was held in Atlanta in 2007. Detroit was chosen as the second site because, among other reasons, “it is a post-industrial environment with the fastest growing urban garden movement in the country.” Organizers scheduled over 1,000 workshops and nearly 50 People’s Assemblies, placing the highest priority on groups that are actually doing grassroots work. “This is… a process built from the ground up.” According to the program guide, the Social Forum “is not a conference. It is a political process,” a space for people to exchange their experiences and a forum for debate.

I drove into Detroit on Tuesday morning with Jon Swanson, who was leading a workshop on the history of Gaza, and Don Watanabe, an activist from the south side of Chicago. We parked in a nearly deserted lot on top of Cobo Hall for the shockingly low price of $5 a day. Cobo was filled with people, especially young people and people of color. The place looked like a hip United Nations. The registration line moved in stops and starts, but no one seemed to mind. People were energized by being in the presence of so many other activists who shared their political commitments.

Behind the registration area was a huge hall for vendors. Exhibitors spanned a broad political spectrum, including the Evil Twin Booking Agency (“We’ll Teach You How To Change Everything”), the Detroit Marxist-Leninist Study Group, the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, the Indigenous Environmental Network, various anarchist and anti-authoritarian organizations, the International Socialist Organization, the Catholic Worker and Tikkun magazine, among many others. Even the U.S. Census Bureau had a table, but it didn’t appear to be busy.

I stopped by the Technology Inc. table because it seemed to be somewhat of an anomaly—quaintly utopian and retro 1950s—given the complex social and political challenges of the 21st century. Under the Technology Inc. program, private property and banks would be abolished and everyone would be issued a personal lifetime consuming power card based on their “measurable energy input.” The MEI determination would be non-negotiable. Leaders would be chosen by a system called “the vertical alignment method.” This would be similar to “the way that industry now selects its supervisory staff. Promotion would involve recommendation from below and appointment from above.” This felt to me like Ayn Rand meets the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. “Work less to have more” was their motto. Technology and “the scientific design of social operations” was their solution to our problems. “The dreamless, mindless machines… (are) immune to want or need.” I am less optimistic about the benign power of technology, but I’ve undoubtedly been poisoned by the Terminator and Matrix films.

I gravitated to the AK Press bookseller table and purchased a copy of Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, a collection of papers by David Graeber, an anthropologist and direct action group participant. The last essay in the book is “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture.” I felt that chapter title alone was worth the price of the book.

* * *


Marilyn Sinkewicz, Ben Burkett (President, National Family Farm Coalition), Jess Gilbert.

I drove into Detroit from Ann Arbor on Wednesday morning with Marilyn Sinkewicz, UM Social Work prof, and Jess Gilbert, an Environmental Sociologist from the University of Wisconsin. I was anxious to be on time for Other Worlds Are Possible: Visionary Fiction, Organizing & Imagining the Future because I figured this session would be about the progressive possibilities of Science Fiction, my genre fiction of choice ever since I picked up Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint at the Civic Park Elementary School Library in Flint in 1956.

The workshop was sponsored by Left Turn magazine and was led by Walidah Imarisha, who has guest edited a special section on Visionary Fiction for the Jan/Feb 2010 issue. Ms. Imarisha told the thirty five people in attendance that she felt the need for a new term to separate work whose intent it is to spark social change from regular science fiction and fantasy. She described Visionary Fiction as having the following characteristics:

-explores current social issues
-conscious of identity/power issues
-change comes from the bottom up
-power is in the hands of the oppressed
-not neutral

This struck me as slightly formulaic. Art in the service of a specific political agenda usually doesn’t work for me, but I still take her point. I think science fiction is a wonderful way to get outside our usual conceptual frames around issues like race, class, gender and the social implications of new technologies.

Someone said that sci fi “tends to be dominated by white dudes,” which is undeniably true, but Ms. Imarisha mentioned Octavia Butler, the African American MacArthur Foundation winner who wrote Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents (two novels I admire very much), as an author who wrote Visionary Fiction. Ms. Butler read at Shaman Drum Bookshop a year before she died. I recall she was somewhat shy but unfailingly gracious, especially to the young people who attended the reading.

“Like in Star Wars, we’re the small rebel force!” an energetic young woman informed us fiercely. I was definitely down with this given that it’s always been my dream to attend a Science Fiction Con costume ball dressed as Yoda.

“This is the sci-fi geek session. If you’re not here to geek out, you’re welcome to leave.”

Everyone stayed, although a nervous librarian left when we broke into groups to collectively write Visionary Fiction.

The exercise was fun, if not entirely successful. Despite my commitment to build a communal vision, I’m not convinced that writing collectively works (although I have heard from reliable sources that television situation comedies are all written by committee).

The issue my group chose to explore was militarism. We settled on killer drones and robots as our central characters, but we ran into trouble when we tried to build the story. We couldn’t decide on the setting and we weren’t clear about the conflict. Were the killer drones sentient? Or were they controlled by human beings back at military headquarters, far from the battlefield? Given the right plot twist, if they were sentient they might experience a collective crisis of conscience. I suggested we end the story with the mass suicide of the drones, but this didn’t get much support.

The second group reported their issue was lifeboat ethics—as in who gets to be on the lifeboat when the ship goes down. The main character was a queer and pregnant starship commander. This detail was the occasion for a burst of applause in the room. She gives birth to twins who can time travel, but then the story got a bit too muddy for me to follow.

The third group imagined a ravaged earth in which humans were divided into three castes. The ruling class lived in sky cities and controlled the technology, the lower class was left to work on the polluted surface of the earth, and a third group acted as intermediaries, transporting goods from the earth to the sky. This all sounded promising until the group spokesperson revealed that the main character, who was a member of the transporter class, could communicate with the spirits and energies of people who had died. I’m quite willing to suspend disbelief, but this revelation of special super powers sent me over the edge.

The fourth group was interested in prisons and race. In their scenario, three corporations ruled the world, each with its own skin color. It was illegal to look different. The conflict comes when suddenly everyone could change their skin color, like chameleons. A financial crisis occurs and all the poor people are radicalized. The story seemed a bit too schematic for my taste, and the resolution was predictable.

Whatever. We did the best we could, and after all we only had an hour to mind meld and create fully realized stories. I believe that if we’d had enough time, our ideas would have evolved into something more coherent.

* * *

During the noon break I returned to the vendor area and stopped to chat with Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn near the Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs Center booth. They both were delighted by the number of young people at the Social Forum.

Someone handed me an invitation to a workshop entitled Art Criticism—Betrayed, sponsored by the Platypus Review, a Chicago broadsheet whose mission is to reconsider “what is meant by the Left.” The flyer was a passionate call to “restart the dynamo of modernity…through…the recovery of emancipator politics (and) the necessity of revolution.” Contemporary cultural critics were called to task for betraying or failing their mission. “Critics have…pimped themselves for hire as cultural boosters.” Pimped? This was tough talk. Were these folks an aging cadre of disgruntled comrades from the Partisan Review, setting the ideological stage to spank the daylights out of the cultural poseurs and bourgeois philistines in our midst? I figured I needed to check this out.

When I finally located the meeting room, I felt I’d wandered into a Modern Language Association panel discussion. The speakers were young, serious and smart. The small audience of a dozen or so people was intensely attentive. The panelists read formal papers. We didn’t break into small groups.

It turned out the Platypus crowd is committed to reconnecting people with the arts, a project I can certainly get behind. They want to reinvigorate interest in literature, art and theater by creating a “criticism that exists outside the horizon of capitalism.”

This wasn’t an attempt to reduce art to political propaganda. We were told that “art shouldn’t be subsumed into the concrete world of politics.” Instead, the panelists wanted to explore the way contemporary art is bound up with social relations in a market economy. They were also interested in the relationship of artistic practices to political movements. They argued that these issues aren’t being discussed and that art criticism has degenerated into arts journalism. Criticism has become merely descriptive and it is ignored by the public. Critics are hobbled by a vocabulary that is no longer relevant. Art works are being produced now that the critics don’t understand.

One of the panelists rather plaintively asked, “What happens when we look at an art work and don’t know how to interpret it?” Well…we struggle with it. And sometimes we walk away from it.

I admired one of the panelists for stating that “anti-elitism is problematic,” but their angst regarding critical betrayal and the failure of modernism to save us left me slightly puzzled. Does our experience of art always require that it be mediated by critics? Sometimes it does, but I worried the panelists were inflating of the role of the art critic or the possibilities of art criticism. And aren’t there already a number of excellent critical voices—John Berger, Rebecca Solnit, the people at Adbusters magazine come immediately to mind—who speak from “outside the horizon of capitalism”?

Of course, the panelists were ultimately interested in reconstituting leftist politics. They wanted to “shake it up and move it forward”, as one of them put it. They were motivated by a fear that “the actual political possibilities to change the world are shrinking.” This should worry all of us.

The question and answer session was dominated by a young man who defended the political philosopher Slavoj Zizek against a panelist’s charge that Zizak was an unintelligible jester with a
meandering contrarian style.

I was more interested in a question posed by another person in the audience who asked, “What can poetry do for Detroit?” Although I don’t believe poetry needs any justification, there are many interesting answers to this question. Earlier one of the panelists said that the arts “offer us certain new possibilities,” which I liked.

Following the Platypus session, I purchased Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology, by Roland Boer, after I noticed the book contained a chapter on Zizek. I hoped it would bring me up to speed on Zizek, whose writing I find difficult. In his introduction Mr. Boer describes him as “a Leninist with a Protestant emphasis on grace.” ‘Nuff said!

* * *

I drove into Detroit late Thursday morning with my wife Dianne to attend the Interfaith People’s Movement Assembly: From Internal Reflection to External Action. It was sponsored by Jubilee USA, an alliance of religious and community groups that works to fight poverty and injustice in Asia, Africa and Latin America by calling for the cancellation of international debt. Our meeting was facilitated by Brooke Harper, a Jubilee National Field Organizer.

Despite the scandals and disappointing failures of organized religion, I believe many religious communities offer just about the only organized resistance to consumer capitalism these days. In the interest of full disclosure, I should reveal that I’m a Soto Zen Buddhist practitioner who feels at home in Christian communities that struggle with social justice issues. I’m currently a member of the Church of the Incarnation, a small Episcopal congregation in Ann Arbor.

The twenty-five workshop participants divided into groups, established norms (“to insure that all faiths are respected”), and introduced ourselves. I was in the group with Brooke, who grew up Methodist; John, a “cradle Catholic”; Jim, a Presbyterian; and Mary, who described herself as “active in the interfaith community.”

We worked through a series of grounding exercises. I was most interested in naming the core values we want to lift up in building the Movement. My group came up with some fine suggestions:
--emphasize hospitality rather than tolerance
--have a preferential option for the poor
--express anger nonviolently
--stress mutuality rather than differences
--build a foreign policy based on generosity
--create a long term vision

I volunteered two core religious values:
1. Pay Attention
2. Stay Curious

Paying Attention is an important core value with the Soto Zen crowd and is predicated on the assumption that most of us spend our waking lives in a kind of fog, either fretting about the past, being anxious about the future or just daydreaming. Whatever, we’ve checked out of the present moment. This isn’t helpful if we’re trying to do social change.

For me, Staying Curious means being open to experience rather than shutting down. My mother passed away a week and a half before the Social Forum, and so I’d been thinking about the gifts she gave me by the choices she made in her life. She lived most of her adult life within a one mile radius of where she was raised, in Flint’s Civic Park neighborhood. It was what we might call a sustainable life-style—modest, supportive and responsible, with a focus on community and family.

However, there is a downside to this. People who never leave the old neighborhood sometimes end up suffering from the Gated Community syndrome. They become small minded and stunted. My mother managed to avoid this trap by nurturing her curiosity about the world through her love of reading and her engagement with contemporary art. This deeply impacted my life. What would our lives be like if religious leaders taught us that curiosity is something positive, a core religious value? I suspect the world would be a better place.

We moved on to discuss spirituality, which Brooke suggested means “getting beyond ourselves.” It is experiential rather than a rational idea. Our group came up with adjectives like healing, nourishing and interconnecting, which we associated with spirituality.

I regret that we couldn’t stay for the second half of the People’s Movement Assembly. We missed the Large Group Amendment and the Resolution Process. Michele Gibbs was reading her poems at Hart Plaza.

Mary told our small group her grandmother had advised her that “You need to pray with your life.” This may have been the most important thing anyone said during the afternoon meeting.

* * *

Friday morning I hustled in to the Motor City and caught a shuttle bus from Cobo Hall to the Woodward Academy to attend Community Supported Publishing: Print Media Strategies for Movement Building, a session sponsored by AK Press. This was the Social Forum meeting I was most interested in.

I’ve spent most of my adult life working in independent book stores. In the last decade and a half big box chain bookstores, Amazon, the explosion of entertainment alternatives to reading, and e-books have made it more and more difficult for independent bookstores to survive.

I fear the independent bookstore is about to become a boutique business rather than a central public space where people gather to discuss ideas and celebrate literature. This culture is about to become a counterculture, which would be a great loss to the arts and letters in America. And if we assume there will be bookshops in the future (a leap of faith, I fear), what will they look like?

The twenty or so people gathered in the classroom represented AK Press, Left Turn magazine, AREA Chicago, Charles Kerr Publishers, the Red Emma Collective, a radical bookshop in Philadelphia, and a newsletter for incarcerated youth in Olympia, WA, among others. I hoped that they might have some answers or at least some new ideas.

Editors were mostly upbeat but realistic about the crisis in publishing. They told us print magazines are dying because the advertising dollars aren’t there and readers are no longer subscribing. They are responding by publishing in both print and electronic formats.

Penelope Rosemont, a writer and director of Charles H. Kerr, the pioneering publisher of anarchist books, spoke about the differences in the social life of printed media and on line publications. “On the level of production, print publications bring people together whereas electronic media ruins community,” she said.

Another publisher reminded us that many people don’t have access to electronic publishing.

Max from Left Turn asked people if anyone had purchased a book or magazine in the last year. Everyone raised their hand. However, when he asked people if they had purchased an e-book in the last year no one responded.

Publishers spoke of the need to be nimble and focused in this difficult environment.

“We don’t depend on traditional sales,” one person said. “We see our magazine as a political project rather than a financial vehicle.”

This is a neat way to reframe the issue, but activists are still left with the problem of how to fund projects. What followed was a long discussion on grassroots fundraising strategies.

People described a variety of creative methods to raise funds. Staff at one magazine spent two months organizing a Fourth of July party. Another group had an auction in which people’s skills and services were raffled off. Someone mentioned the sustainer subscription program South End Publishers created as a model of community supported publishing. Financial contributors receive new South End titles as they are published. Everyone spoke to the need to build a diverse financial base by building relationships. Fundraising is relationship building.

Max from Left Turn shifted the conversation a bit when he suggested people ask, “Who is our audience? What is the Movement? What voices are we trying to put forward?” Usually white male academics write for movement publications, but Left Turn attempts to engage people on the front lines of struggle. The editors go to people who don’t think of themselves as producers of informational material and ask them to write material. “I think we get a more authentic voice,” he said.

Daniel Tucker quoted Civil Rights historian Vincent Harding: How can we be educators for an educational system that doesn’t yet exist? “We’re going to create a newspaper for a neighborhood that doesn’t yet exist. We want to make what is a loose network visible, but how then does a network become a community?”

Speakers stressed the importance of creating strategic alliances, which is probably what the anarchist Peter Kropotkin had in mind when he wrote Mutual Aid. Our ideas have strength and power. We don’t have money but we have lots of other things. We have contacts with cultural workers, we have publications and we know how to put events together. We know how to collaborate with other groups and alliances and create mutually beneficial arrangements. Both sides get something they really need. We can help make institutions more relevant to the community.

The discussion turned to organizational models. Kate from the Red Emma Collective in Baltimore, works at AK Press, which is collectively owned and operated. It is a workers collective that pays people salaries and shares editorial decisions. Daniel Tucker, editor of AREA-Chicago, said his organization has six coordinators (communications, financial, people, content, design, outreach) that are each paid to work five hours a week. Every year previous contributors to AREA-Chicago are invited to be advisors to the magazine. Finally, they can become coordinators. Tucker saw this as an organic way to build relationships.

“Our job is to come up with challenging questions that frame the issues and then attempt to discern who is coming up with interesting answers, political responses and practices” Tucker said. “We need to build community. This is a slow process. This is not theoretical.”

* * *

At 1:00 I dropped in on the Art Is Change: Art & Creative Practice for Cultural & Political Transformation workshop. One hundred and fifty people showed up. We crammed into a room that was scheduled to accommodate maybe thirty people.

The session worked largely because it was facilitated by Anasa Troutman, a Senior Fellow at the Movement Strategy Center. Ms. Troutman, who described herself as a Cultural Strategist, knows how to connect with people. Now based in Atlanta, she had worked on Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign and was a music producer for India.Arie.

Anasa Troutman and workshop participants.


“Art is my transformative religious practice,” she told us. She said she believes that politics must be rooted in personal transformation and that the arts are a powerful way to decrease the cycle of social isolation in our world.

She presented a series of exercises intended to get people to connect with their own creativity. Each of us wrote autobiographical poems and read them to another person, and we had short small group discussions about reimagining our work. In the hands of a less skillful leader, these exercises would have fallen flat. With Ms. Troutman’s encouragement, people in the room suspended their normal defensiveness and skepticism.

“Art is a way to communicate. This is the way we reimagine art, engage in creative practice and recreate the world.”

Ms. Troutman advocated for what she called narrative based organizing. “Most of the time we chase the story without asking what the story is really about,” she said. “We should ask ourselves how we would like to change the story.”

She ended the session with a series of questions. “We should ask ourselves, Who do you need to be? Who do you need to become? Who do the people around you need to be? Who do the people around you need to become?”

She suggested that we should care about the impact of our work as much as we do the outcome.

The tone and content of the Art Is Change workshop couldn’t have been more different from the Art Criticism—Betrayed session I’d attended two days earlier. I left the Social Forum Friday with a sense of the healthy variety of conversation about the role of the arts in social change.

Re:Imagining Change by Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning (PM Press) is an excellent introduction to story-based strategy, and there are two websites that showcase the range of participation by artists engaged in social transformation--www.artandstruggle.com and www.artischange.com.

* * *

I was only able to attend a tiny fraction of the sessions offered at the US Social Forum in Detroit. I missed Grace Boggs’ 95th birthday party, I couldn’t get in to South of the Border, the new Oliver Stone documentary, and I was just too tired to make it over to the Leftist Lounge Friday evening. But I was moved by what I did see. I thought the US Social Forum was terrific.

In one of the sessions I attended in Cobo the panelists decided the Left was dead. That conclusion seems premature to me given the energy level of the 15,000 plus people who attended the Social Forum.

The vibe in Detroit was markedly different from mass meetings I’d attended in the late 60s/early 70s, when most of the resistance was centered in universities and colleges. Back then, in spite of our commitment to radical democratic values, we replicated the power structures and hierarchies of academia, and too often movement organizations self destructed over ideological struggles. Activists forgot how to talk to people other than themselves, and they became superfluous.

This is a different scene now. It reflects the impact of feminism, the leadership of people of color, and the input of direct action movement activists who understand the provisional nature of political struggle. This is the New New Left.

A few of my friends were dismissive of the Social Forum. They said it was a cool scene, but they noted that a cool scene wasn’t a mass political movement. To some extent I share this concern, but no one should underestimate the energy and intelligence of the people at the Social Forum in Detroit.

Early Thursday evening when we walked back to Cobo Hall from the USSF Village, we met a young woman from Georgia. Marilyn asked her what she thought of the Social Forum.

“I kind of wandered into the first Social Forum in Atlanta three years ago,” she said. “That experience changed my life.” She told us she drove to Michigan from Georgia without enough money to stay in a motel, so she logged onto couchsurfing.com. That night she was staying someplace in Dearborn. She said she is active in progressive politics in Georgia. She said she was absolutely thrilled to be in Detroit.

If there are enough people like this around, maybe another world is possible.

At The Movies With American Youth

It’s been at least four months since I’ve had the opportunity to catch up with Maxwell Binkowski. When I last saw the young cinefile, Binkowski was repeatedly playing Kung Fu Panda on his small portable DVD player. At that time it seemed Max wasn’t particularly interested in the emotional arc of the story. Instead, it was clear that he really only wanted to cop some serious Kung Fu moves. Maxwell, who is almost three years old, knows what he likes.

Despite the PG rating for sequences of martial arts action, this wonderful animated picture has a very positive message, and I’m certain that on some level Max is grateful for being able to observe Po’s journey “to fulfill his destiny.”

The other night we decided to watch Kung Fu Panda once again, along with Secrets of the Furious Five, a short film I found in a bargain DVD bin at the local supermarket.


We were joined by Maxwell’s older sister Natalie, a graceful and articulate five year old who is also an aficionado of fine films. Her favorite auteur is the legendary Hayao Miyazaki, the eminence grise behind Studio Ghibli and the director of such sublime films as My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.

We settled down in front of a flat screen TV with fruit drinks and a large tub of popcorn for what we knew would be a fine evening of exciting entertainment.

Kung Fu Panda recounts the sentimental and spiritual education of Po, an awkward and weight challenged Panda who dreams of becoming a Kung Fu superhero. He lives above a Noodle House owned by Mr. Ping, his father, an earnest and hardworking goose who expects Po to follow in his footsteps (more accurately, his webbed-feet steps).

“We are noodle folk,” dad says. “Broth runs deep in our veins.”

Po has other plans. He secretly yearns to become a Dragon Warrior. This appears to be a wildly impractical career choice given the commonly held belief that it demands years of rigorous apprenticeship under the stern tutelage of Master Shifu at the Dragon Warrior Training Academy.

However, following a series of improbable and seemingly accidental mishaps (and many humorous hijinks), Po is named Dragon Warrior by the ancient Master Oogway, a wise turtle who holds the Dharma Seat at the Academy. This inscrutable teacher says things like Let go of the illusion of control and You are too concerned with what was and with what is yet to be and The mind is like water. Viewers instinctively understand that Master Oogway has “penetrated deeply into the essential nature of things,” as the Zen folks say.

Master ShiFu (who reminds me of what Yoda might look like if he was transformed into a small rodent) and Mantis, Viper, Crane, Monkey and Tigress—five students who have been training with him in hopes of becoming the next Dragon Warrior—are scandalized by the old turtle’s decision and they diss Po. Some readers will see similiarities between the narrative up to this point and the story of the 6th Zen Patriarch Hui Neng’s dharma transmission, but I wouldn’t push it too hard.

The villain of the film is Tai Lung, a tiger with very severe anger management issues. Years earlier he was denied Dragon Warrior status because Master Oogway saw “darkness” in his heart. Tai Lung freaked out and wound up imprisoned in a remote fortress cave inside a snow covered mountain guarded by 1,000 heavily armored rhinos for 20 years. He has become the Hannibal Lector of the big cats. Then he escapes.

Meanwhile, Po wins over Master Shifu and the Furious Five (as they are known) with his wacky combination of optimism, enthusiasm and persistence. Master Shifu trains Po at the Pool of Sacred Tears, a site where former Masters unraveled the Way of Harmony and Focus. Various secrets are revealed, and when Po meets Tai Lung for the final battle at the entrance of the Jade Palace Dojo….Well, I won’t ruin it for you.

In addition to the film, the Kung Fu Panda DVD includes “Awesome Activities and Behind the Scenes Fun”—features like How to Use Chopsticks and Help Save the Wild Pandas—but we didn’t sample these goodies.


Instead, we watched Secrets of the Furious Five, a short film that gives anxious fans the back story on Viper, Monkey, Mantis, Crane, and Tigress. It consists of a series of stories illustrating how the Five have triumphed over adversity, character flaws and their personal shortcomings. Mantis discovers the value of patience, Viper defeats an enemy because she is smart, Crane becomes confident, Monkey recovers from a crippling sense of shame, and Tigress learns to control her temper.

The Secrets DVD also includes many extra features. When we watched Learn the Panda Dance, Max and Natalie both stood and gracefully mimicked the four steps. It looked like lots of fun, but it all seemed a bit too complex for me. Fearing a loss of dignity, I declined an invitation from the young people to join them.

Following the double feature I asked the children what they thought of the films, but it was difficult to get a coherent critique from them. I suspect that may have been due to the late hour. Natalie did say her favorite character was Viper because “she’s a girl.” Max’s favorite character was Shifu because “he’s the nice one.” He said he didn’t like the scary parts.

At first glance it might appear that Natalie and Max both live in a Manichean universe of “good guys” versus “bad guys”, but if you watch them play you realize their world view is more fluid and nuanced than this. The "bad guys" switch allegiances and become "good guys" without any apparent rhyme or reason as far as I can tell. It’s a kind of surrealist theater.

Tanya, Max and Natalie’s mom, told me later that Max occasionally goes over to the dark side, racing around the house pretending to be Tai Lung.

No matter. I recently read an article in the Atlantic on Melvin Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood (Harvard University Press). Reviewer Benjamin Schwarz says Konner emphasizes the importance of play because “it may be the primary means nature has found to develop our brains.”

On June 3, 2011 the Disney Studios will release Kung Fu Panda 2: The Kaboom of Doom, an animated sequel in 3-D. The producers have reassured the Kung Fu Panda fan base that most of the original cast will return, along with exciting new characters.

As Master Oogway said, “You must believe.” We do, and we can hardly wait!

Clap Your Hands!

Except when I’ve been out of town, I’ve spent five days a week over the last four months with Gavin Morgan, my new grandson. Although he is easily distracted, Gavin has a remarkably sunny disposition and a fine sense of humor. He likes to be held and is also partial to afternoon naps. We talk often, and I believe both of us generally get the gist of what the other is trying to communicate.

His parents, his grandmother and I read to him regularly. Current favorites are Fuzzy Chick, a cloth book about animals, and the Sesame Street Elmo title Clap Your Hands!

Clap Your Hands! is a die cut board book with an Elmo finger puppet attached in the center. The designers have cleverly rounded the edges of the book so that there are no dangerous sharp curves to jab little faces!

Gavin likes to turn the pages. This requires some assistance however because he’s only recently discovered his hands are connected to his body. He is delighted to see the veteran Sesame Street characters cavort across the shiny polyester page boards—Ernie skillfully limbos, Bert dances in a grass hula skirt, etc. Everybody appears to be having a grand time. Gavin is astonished that the Elmo puppet reappears at the center of each new page.

The text is an old favorite: If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands! I know this isn’t Wallace Stevens, but it still packs a real wallop with one young person who regularly visits our home. I do a passable job mimicking Elmo’s squeaky voice, which Gavin finds quite amusing.

I consider myself an amateur as regards books for very small children, even though I raised two children long ago. I have two other grandchildren and I was once a child myself. Fortunately, Gavin will help me navigate this mysterious landscape.

Gavin clearly affirms the book as a tactile object. He loves the physicality—the being- in-the-world—of books. Even given all the seductive hype surrounding electronic media, I think he’s still—like his grandpa—old school. We both know what we like.

I almost forgot to mention the taste test. Gavin reports that the pages are good to gnaw on and the Elmo puppet’s soft hands (paws?) don’t taste that bad either.

Travel Journal: Oaxaca

for Jon Swanson and Henry Wangeman,
gracious hosts



Dos Viejos On The Road

Jon and I drove from Ann Arbor to Oaxaca in seven days. We left on a Sunday three days after Thanksgiving, driving south from Michigan through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi, west across Louisiana and Texas through Brownsville, down along the Gulf Coast of Mexico past Vera Cruz and then inland up through the clouds to Oaxaca. We logged in a little under 3,000 miles on his Toyota Tacoma.

Jon Swanson, who is a retired anthropologist and union activist, has a wry sense of humor and after all these years still retains the capacity to become nearly apoplectic with rage when he encounters social and political injustice. I find this quality deeply admirable.

Back in October Jon casually invited me to accompany him when he moved some furniture to a house he and Edith Lewis, his wife, had rented in Oaxaca. At first this struck me as a fine idea, given my current status as an unemployed person. It sure beat staring out the window waiting for the winter to arrive or watching water go down the drain. However, I started to have second thoughts when I read news accounts of the horrific War on Drugs in Mexico. Jon seemed confident the drive through Mexico would be a piece of cake. Since he’d done his fieldwork in Yemen, another country with its share of tough hombres, I figured we’d probably be fine.

In the end, I threw caution to the wind and took Rebecca Solnit’s advice in her wonderful book Hope In The Dark: “…hope should shove you out the door.”

We were accompanied on our journey by Jon’s dog Rags, who charmed the military patrols when they stopped us at various checkpoints in Mexico. They were looking for members of the Gulf Cartel, notoriously cruel narco-gangsters who control drug trafficking, kidnapping and extortion along the Mexican Gulf Coast. These are the folks who pioneered in beheading their victims.

A U.S. border policeman in Brownsville advised us not to drive at night and to avoid the small towns. He told us the Mexican military had driven cartel gang members away from the border areas and into village hideouts.

As the American and Mexican landscape flashed past us, we mostly listened to Jon’s extensive CD collection of Country and Western music. His tastes run to Golden Age artists like Hank Williams, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and Meryl Haggard. I enjoy C & W as much as anyone, but after seven days of hearing songs about alcoholism, heartbreak, betrayal, failed marriages, aging, loneliness, job loss, jealousy and desolate honky tonk saloons, I came to the conclusion that this musical genre brilliantly supports the Buddha’s first noble truth: All life is filled with suffering.

Many songs strongly suggest that everything will eventually turn to ashes:

Love Songs and Romance Magazines
Seem like their written for you
Till you’re magazine falls apart at the seams
And love songs turn into the blues.

The artists give voice to difficult truths:

It’s hard to kiss the lips at night
That have chewed your ass out all day long.

And there are terrible confessions:

Everybody’s got a hobby
Everybody’s got a shtick
Please consider me eccentric
Don’t think of me as sick
I didn’t mean to spoil your party
I didn’t mean to be uncool
But I’m standing here holding
The genitalia of a fool.

Yikes!

Clever lyrics, artfully arranged instrumentation, and the talented singers partially mitigate this catalog of horrors, but I believe Country and Western music celebrates the realm of samsara—the cycle of rebirths driven by desire and ignorance.

We also listened to IWW songs and a number of 30 minute talks from the Modern Scholars series on the HUAC hearings. When the lecturer said the American business community was behind the funding of anti-communist investigative units in police departments in the United States, Jon said, “Well that’s really a big fucking surprise!”

We stopped in Oxford, Mississippi at Square Books, one of the best bookstores in America, and in the Mississippi Delta we visited Clarksdale, birthplace of Sam Cooke, childhood home of Tennessee Williams, and site of the Blues Museum. We were hoping to catch lunch at the funky bar Morgan Freeman owns, but it was closed. We did some holiday shopping at the Cat Head Delta Blues & Folk Art Store (www.cathead.biz). Cat Head showcases art from the Delta region. It has an extensive collection of blues recordings and paintings and small dioramas of life in the Delta done by untrained local artists that are wonderfully vivid.

In Louisiana we listened to a rightwing religious talk show on AM radio (taped in Oklahoma) from someone named Brother Bob, who claimed a cabal of Marxists, Islamists and the World Council of Churches were behind a proposed Congressional investigation of hate speech.

Once we crossed into Mexico, the roads were better than I thought they’d be, although they were mostly two lanes with no shoulders. They are filled with huge speed bumps called topes. If you aren’t paying attention and you don’t see them coming, you’re in for a teeth rattling bad surprise.

We saw some beautiful country as we drove south along the coastal Mexican plains, but things got dicey when we turned inland. I tried to man up, as they say, when the trucks filled with toxic chemicals barreled past us on the cloud-covered two lane mountain roads with no shoulders and terrifying hairpin curves, but it was difficult.

On our last day on the road we stopped for the night at Tehuacan. It was after dark and there weren’t any streetlights or road signs for travelers indicating the location of lodging. We saw a ratty motel sign along a dark road and drove through a gate into a dimly lit area that had motel rooms with attached garages. This afforded maximum anonymity for the guests, whether they be lovers seeking an illicit tryst or drug cartel types looking for a new lair.

Back in Tennessee Jon and I had joked about stumbling into various Bates Motel scenarios, but this felt like the real thing. We were the only customers. A taciturn older man showed us the rooms. He didn’t look like Norman Bates, but what do I know? I was exhausted and jumpy, ready to bolt if it seemed appropriate.

There was a bad reproduction of a Salvador Dali painting on the wall in my room, and the only television channel that worked was a hard core porno station. A sign on the door informed guests that the price was 100 pesos for 6 hours. The lights were so dim that I could hardly see across the room. It was impossible to read.

As I lay waiting for the psycho/narco/slasher to break in, I wondered how anyone would explain this to my grandchildren.

“Grandpa won’t be returning from Mexico, honey. He was dismembered by some maniac in a love motel.”

The next time I drive through here, I’ll bring along some 100 watt lightbulbs

When we finally arrived in Oaxaca Jon told me a psychic back in Michigan urged him not to take the trip because she had a vision that he would be beaten senseless and I would be murdered during the road trip.

Fortunately, the prophecy turned out to be false.

The worst thing that happened to me was that I fell flat on my face on the sidewalk the morning after we arrived in Oaxaca. I was somewhat lightheaded due to the altitude and I’d gotten up early that morning. Jon, a man with nearly boundless energy, rises around 5 am, ready for a long walk. One morning, after he hooked up the speakers to his sound system, he rousted me out with a recording of the Internationale.

Happily, I wasn’t injured when I fell, and it was early enough in the morning so that only a few Oaxaquenos observed this clumsy gringo trip.

My mojo remains strong.

Oaxaca

At the tollbooth on the road into Oaxaca there were armed soldiers positioned behind walls of sandbags.

In June 2006 Oaxaca went through a period of social violence initiated by the heavy-handed policies of Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, who many people considered corrupt. He tried to crush a nonviolent teachers’ strike by ordering 3,000 local and state police to torch a tent city of 15,000 strikers camped in the zocalo. The strikers responded by retaking the center of the city. They were joined by a number of sympathetic organizations, including indigenous groups, and established the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, a counter-government.

The rebellion lasted through November 2006. There were 17 fatalities and many people were wounded. The impact on the local economy, which is partially dependent on tourism, was immediate and negative. This was followed by the swine flu scare and the 2008 world economic downturn.

The last time I was in an urban center with such a large military presence was Srinagar in 1992. The vibe there was ugly and very tense. Oaxaca, by comparison, seems normal. Life goes on in the midst of all kinds of difficulties.

One afternoon while I was there a group of striking teachers set up a barricade at a major intersection in the city. The police detoured cars around the strikers onto a backstreet, and traffic moved along in an orderly and calm fashion.

And I saw two military people armed with machine guns pull a young man off a crowded pedestrian sidewalk across the street from the Abastos market in Oaxaca. They spread-eagled him against a wall and one of the soldiers frisked him while the other covered them with her weapon raised. They told him to open his mouth, which they checked for drugs. He was clean and they let him go. The crowd walked around the scene as if this was nothing extraordinary.

* * *



When we arrived in town, the first place we stopped was the Mercado 20 de Noviembre, a huge cavernous market filled with people, flowers, pottery, bread, fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, toys, crafts and clothing. The aisles were tiny and I found it impossible to orient myself directionally. There was too much to see. We sat at a long table and had a huge breakfast of tamales, pastries and bowls of hot chocolate. It was a great introduction to Oaxaca because the traditional markets are central to social life here.

Jon, whose family were Swedish farmers, is tall, lanky and fair. He towers above almost everyone else, Max Von Sydow striding through the market. His Spanish is excellent and since he’s been here on and off over the past seven years, people know him. He looks carefully at the vegetables and asks vendors questions if he doesn’t know what something is. People clearly respect his curiosity.

On Sunday we went to Tlacolula, a town 38 km east of Oaxaca, which becomes a gigantic market once a week. It goes on and on, block after block, a coming together of thousands of people. In the midst of this purposeful chaos, we ate ice cream and watched customers bargain with vendors.

In Abastos, the main market in Oaxaca, I made a serious attempt to buy a cowboy hat. I was looking for something that combined a 10 gallon traditional macho gunslinger look with the cool urban breeziness of the hat Marcello Mastroianni wore in 81/2. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you ask my wife), I couldn’t find anything that combined these two disparate statements.

In the end, I settled for a light box with an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. When I plug it in, it radiates colored lights. This proved to be a great hit with my grandchildren when I returned to Ann Arbor.

D.H. Lawrence was in Oaxaca eighty-five years ago. He wrote rhapsodically about the markets here in Mornings in Mexico, and he caught the energy of what this experience is about:

An intermingling of voices, a threading together of different
wills….Only that which is utterly intangible matters: The contact,
the spark of exchange.

* * *

It turned out that Jon has rented a beautiful two bedroom house with a small unattached studio located in the oldest section of town, about a 20 minute walk from the zocalo.


It is early December. By mid morning it’s hot, but the humidity is low because we’re in the mountains, and at night there is a slight breeze. It’s not cool enough to close the windows. Despite the cacophony of barking dogs and the Oaxacan’s love of loud fireworks (the explosions peak around 9 pm), this is an extremely pleasant place.

Jon’s next door neighbors and longtime friends are expats Michele Gibbs and George D. Colman. Michele Gibbs, a poet and artist, was active in SNCC and other social change organizations. George Colman developed social justice ministries for the Presbyterian Church modeled on the worker-priest movement. They left Detroit 22 years ago, living in Grenada, Greece and Jamaica before settling in Oaxaca in 1995. Their books are available through http://www.realoaxaca.com/from-the-field/index.html or Amazon.

* * *

When I think about leaving Ann Arbor (which isn’t often) I carry inside my head a check list of things I’m looking for in a new place. At the top of my list is a good bookshop.

Just south of the Iglesia de Santo Domingo and four blocks north of the zocalo at 307-2 Macedonio Alxala is Amate Books, one of the most interesting bookshops I’ve visited in the last few years. The collection of English language books about Mexico is the best I’ve seen anywhere and the fiction section is a joy to browse. It was a wonderful surprise.

Jon asked me about my criteria for evaluating bookshops. I think it is apparent when you walk into a bookshop whether there is—or isn’t—a central organizing intelligence behind the store. Independent bookshops reflect the passions and biases of the people who choose the books that are for sale there. You can immediately feel it if the collection is coherent and exciting.

Henry Wangeman, the proprietor of Amate Books, was in the store and I told him how much I admired his shop. There is a fraternity among booksellers that I’ve seen often over the years. Henry, a generous and outgoing man, is a member of a guild of people who see books as central to a civilized life.

If you visit Oaxaca, buy a book at Amate Books. This place is a gift to the community, to all of us.

* * *

In addition to a good independent bookshop, my ideal community would include an identifiable city center (as opposed to the anonymous suburb), a diverse population that is engaged with community issues, lots of sunshine, coffee shops, decent restaurants, movie theaters that show international films, access to reasonably priced fresh food, pedestrian friendly streets, a good public transportation system, reasonably priced housing and quality medical care.

I can personally vouch that Oaxaca has most everything on this list. I didn’t have the time or the occasion to check out the last two items.

* * *

The Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca is located in a former Dominican convent, a beautiful building directly connected to the Iglesia de Santo Domingo. The entrance fee is 51 pesos (roughly $5.00). I rented an audio phone for 50 pesos and walked through the museum listening (in English) to the history of Mexico while I looked at the permanent exhibits. These included a treasure of gold, jade and silver from the ruins of the great Zapotec city Monte Alban.

There was a special retrospective exhibition on the first floor of work by the 20th century Mexican artist Lola Cueto. Among the drawings, lithographs and paintings was a collection of extraordinary puppets she created. These dream-like creatures, some of them slightly menacing, combine Mexican folk traditions and surrealism

The museum shop has a fine collection of Spanish language books, art magazines and videos.

The most direct route to the Museum from Jon’s house is a one-lane back street that’s under construction. I switched back and tried to stay on the shady side of the block. The main traffic route through Oaxaca, a busy, noisy and fast four lane highway, is a few streets over. People cross this road very carefully.

* * *

On Wednesday afternoon, Henry Wangeman drove us to Teotitlan, a Zapotec pueblo 28 km from Oaxaca. Henry told us he initially was drawn to Oaxaca because he and his wife were interested in folk art. He is an expert in Oaxacan indigenous art and is friends with many of the artists and craftspeople here. He talked about the diverse cultures in the valley. Sixteen different languages are spoken in the state of Oaxaca.

We stopped on the outskirts of Teotitlan at the studio of the Gonzales family. Emelia Gonzales was at work grinding natural dyes and preparing yarn, while her son Alberto Ruiz Gonzales was working at a treadle loom. Zapotec women prepare the yarn and dyes and the men weave the designs.

Emelia Gonzales explained that she was making a red dye from the cochineal insects found on cactus plants. Henry translated and pointed out the subtleties of fine yarn thread.

Alberto Ruiz Gonzales weaves traditional designs but he also creates his own work. When we arrived he was at work on a huge tapestry. At first glance I thought the piece was an abstract design, but next to the loom he had a computer circuit board for inspiration.

The pattern on the tapestry was an artistic rendering of a computer circuit board.

Alberto told us he believes the patterns on computer boards are connected to Zapotec codices in that they both contain information essential to our lives. I thought this was a beautiful example of an indigenous syncretic take on 21st century technology. Instead of turning away from the modern world, Alberto had incorporated and integrated contemporary technology into a traditional Zapotec world-view.

I purchased one of Alberto’s circuit board weavings—a blue and red design—as a Christmas gift for my wife.

* * *

On our return, we stopped for lunch in the open market at Tlacolula.

Henry ordered plates of lamb and pork. We cut off big hunks of meat and rolled them into tortillas and added lettuce and sliced chiles. They were delicious.

Jon mentioned to Henry that I had balked when he told me fried grasshoppers were a delicacy around Oaxaca. Henry, who was on his second shot of mescal, immediately ordered a batch. When they arrived, he wrapped some in a tortilla and offered them to us.

At this point Jon may have regretted bringing the subject up. He said he’d read the grasshoppers contained large concentrations of mercury. Henry dismissed this with a wave of his hand and a laugh. “Nah, those grasshoppers are downstream from here.”

I picked out what I thought was the smallest grasshopper and carefully ate it. It was crunchy and had a salty lime taste.

The young women working in the restaurant were quite amused by us and asked if we’d pose for a photo. We stood and smiled into the cellphone camera. I worried that brown grasshopper legs were protruding from between our teeth.

* * *

A few days earlier Jon told me about a giant 2,000 year old tree somewhere between Oaxaca and Tlacolula.

Henry pulled off the road at Santa Maria del Tule and, sure enough, we were in the presence of the biggest tree I’d ever seen. The circumference was huge and the bark looked like the flow of time itself, moving slowly in many directions at once. I saw bees swarming high up in the branches and many birds. Jon, Henry and I circumambulated the tree like pilgrims moving around a sacred mountain. The United Nations should declare this place one of the sacred sites on the planet.

* * *

When we arrived back in Oaxaca Henry invited us to a storeroom where he warehouses pieces from his collection of wooden folk art. Following the political troubles in 2006 he commissioned indigenous artists in the valley to create alebrijes—brightly painted copal wood carvings of people, animals and supernatural beings—all engaged in the act of reading. He has hundreds of these fanciful one-of-a kind figures. It is an extraordinary collection that would make a great exhibit at a library or museum.

* * *


On Sunday, Jon and I took the bus to Mitla, about 50 km from Oaxaca, to see what remains of the most important Zapotec religious center in the valley, which flourished between 950 and 1521 CE.

We arrived in the late morning and took a taxi from the bus stop at the center of town to the archeological site. When we got out of the taxi, Jon realized he’d left his wallet on the bus. He wouldn’t let me go back with him into town. Fortunately, with the help of the skillful taxi driver, he caught up with the bus and found his wallet untouched on the seat where he’d left it.

There were very few visitors that morning and I had the place almost entirely to myself. Mitla was soaked in light, and I had to walk quickly across the dazzlingly white stone courtyards in order to get under the shade of the walls where it was a bit cooler.

I’ve visited a number of archeological sites and ruins over the years, and if I’m patient they usually open to me. I tried to imagine what this place was like in its heyday, but I couldn’t pick up a vibe. There was no resonance. It was closed to me, and I was dizzy from the sun.

Mitla is called Lyobaa in Zapotec, which means Resting Place or the Place of the Dead. I read later that it is believed to be the gateway between the world of the living and the dead. One of the two principal Zapotec deities is Coquihani, the God of Light. Perhaps Coquihani was protecting the gateway by zapping North American tourists with blinding sunlight. Or maybe I was the one under the guardianship of the God of Light. It was certainly not my intention to enter the realm of the dead that morning.

In his book Essays on Mexican Art, Octavio Paz has written about the radical “otherness” of Mesoamerican cultures, their isolation and originality. For Europeans, the civilizations were “impenetrable.” Paz concludes:

(T)he bridge between myself and the other is based not on a similarity
but a difference. What links us is not a bridge but an abyss. Humankind
is a plurality: human beings.


Mitla is a unique Mesoamerican site because of the mosaic fretwork on the walls of the buildings. I read an excerpt from an essay by the art historian Paul Westheim reprinted in an elegant small book of photographs by Tomas Casademunt of Mitla:

The stepped fret originated in an age when men had not yet allowed
themselves the luxury of a purely decorative art. They still felt the
anguish and menace of the enigmatic and unfathomable world that confronted
them.

For Westheim, a German Jew who fled the Nazis and settled in Mexico, the 20th century must have seemed every bit as mysterious and dangerous as the world did to people living in pre-Hispanic Mitla:

The stepped fret is doubtless a sign, a sort of talisman. It is a
protective spell….(I)t may be supposed that it is a sign of magical
protection against death.

Back

On the flight from Mexico City to Detroit, I sat next to a stoic German businessman and an Assistant Professor in Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was returning after working on the Sierra Negra radio telescope, located on a 15,000 foot peak in Central Mexico.

We talked about the new CERN particle accelerator, the age of the Universe, the Vedic conception of time, the short growing season in Canada, the final stage of the Hindu life cycle and the idea of multiple universes.

When I stepped off the plane in Detroit it was very cold.

from the collection of Henry Wangeman

An Idiosyncratic Booklist

These days my reading is unsystematic, just like the rest of my life.

Here’s a list of the books I read on the trip. I call them to your attention because they deepened, broadened and extended my experience in Mexico.




Bewildered Travel: The Sacred Quest for Confusion, Frederick J. Ruf (University of Virginia Press). This is the best book I’ve read on the subject of travel. Ruf is interested in tourism as a form of pilgrimage, and he argues that we travel because we crave disorientation and rupture. We want to be confused. Bewildered Travel is a deeply insightful blend of literary criticism and cultural/religious studies.



The People Decide: Oaxaca’s Popular Assembly, Nancy Davies (Narco News Books).
Ground level reportage by Davies, an American expatriate, on the events of 2006 when Oaxaca was declared a “government-free zone.” Hope and idealism came up against political complexities and military power. For a moment, the people triumphed.



Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico, Peter Kuper (PM Press). Kuper spent 2 years (2006-2008) in Oaxaca. His visual diary is a collage of surreal juxtapositions—insects, urban street scenes, Mexican wrestlers, street dogs. This is a beautifully designed and produced book, filled with interesting information, by one of our finest graphic artists.



Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya, Dennis Tedlock (University of New Mexico Press). These stories are presented without much context—although there are extensive notes at the end of the book for anyone who wants to follow up on sources and background. I think this strategy honors the material, which is wonderfully strange and compelling. The spirit of a shaman-king is seen leaving his body to become a serpent, an eagle, a jaguar and then a pool of blood. A secret trap door inside a pyramid leads to a child whose clothing is made of pure silver. Stones that are neglected commit acts of violence. This month the University of California Press will publish Dennis Tedlock’s 2000 Years of Mayan Literature, which I look forward to reading.



The Mexican Dream, Or The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilizations, J.M.G. Le Clezio (University of Chicago Press). Le Clezio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, recounts the savage destruction of Mexico/Tenochtitlan—“the last magical civilization’—by Cortes. He calls this “the greatest disaster in human history” because it served as a precursor to the murderous colonial empires that were to come and it spread a “materialistic and opportunistic culture” over the entire world.

from the collection of Henry Wangeman

A New Novel from Barbara Kingsolver

“The only importance is beauty,” a Mayan Indian woman, Maria of the Orchids, says in The Lacuna. However, it’s clear in this terrific novel that fear, social inequality and the murderous impulse to power more often than not prevents most of us from anything but the briefest contemplation of beauty.

“The fellows running the show here are not very keen on controversial because it stirs people up,” another character says. “The authorities…force people to stop asking questions.”

There are many people in The Lacuna (events take place from 1929 to 1959) who do what they can to keep asking questions, despite their precarious circumstances, and so this is a big book that covers a variety of subjects—art, food, minority sexual identity, revolutionary politics in Mexico, the political culture of the United States, and the power of the media to shape our ideas about the world. It is a page turner that is also an astute meditation on behaving decently and living fully in an era of declining civil liberties.

The Lacuna tells the story of Harrison Shepherd, whose mother is Mexican and father American. He moves back and forth between Mexico and the United States after his parents divorce.

As a child he is taught to cook by a servant in Mexico. It is a skill which gives him an entrée into the chaotic lives of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who hire him in as a household staff member. He is also an inveterate journal writer, a device which gives Kingsolver the opportunity to describe what these two mercurial and impulsive artists were like. This section of the book brims with energy and life.

Rivera’s artistic project was heroically ambitious. He sets out to paint the history of Mexico, creating an iconic people’s art with his famous murals, which still define in the eyes of the world his country and its struggles.

Kahlo’s work was very different. She was in pain throughout most of her adult life as a result of injuries sustained in a streetcar accident. In her paintings—especially her self-portraits—she transforms her suffering into images that are sometimes difficult to look at, beautiful and entirely unique.
Both Rivera and Kahlo were active in revolutionary politics and lived large, passionate lives.

Eventually Shepherd goes to work for Leon Trotsky, who was given sanctuary and support by Rivera after he was exiled from Russia. Trotsky is portrayed as a complicated, brilliant man haunted by the murders of his family and political comrades. Shepherd is a member of Trotsky’s household staff when Trotsky is assassinated by a Stalinist agent.

He leaves Mexico traumatized by the murder and settles in Ashville, North Carolina, where he wishes to live quietly as a writer. His first and second novels, set in precolonial Mexico, are enormously successful, and his hopes for anonymity in Gringoland vanish.

His relationship with his secretary, Violet Brown, is another high point in the novel. It is a platonic love story, wonderfully imagined and delicately told.

Shortly after the end of World War II, Winston Churchill gave a speech in Missouri in which he coined the phrase Iron Curtain. The press picked it up and once the Soviets built an atomic bomb, the anti-communist witch hunts of the McCarthy Era begin. Shepherd is naïve regarding American politics and he underestimates the danger he is in given his celebrity and the notoriety of his former patrons.

The Lacuna is a pastiche of letters, journal entries, news articles, book reviews and HUAC testimony. It is a bit reminiscent in its formal organization of Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy, but the voice is mostly Shepherd’s, which is decorous and restrained. This gives the book its powerful and artfully appropriate sense of understatement.

I wouldn’t hesitate recommending this book to anyone.

“An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery,” Shepherd writes. The same can be said if we imperfectly remember (or never learn) our own history. After all, a lacuna is a missing part, a gap. Kingsolver brings us “something you never knew… the heart of the story.”

For instance, I didn’t know that in 1932 General Douglas MacArthur led troops against American Veterans in Washington D.C. during the Bonus Army riots, injuring hundreds of people. I didn’t know that Diego Rivera owned a Thompson submachine gun or that the actor Edward G. Robinson purchased Frida Kahlo’s paintings before her work became widely known. John Dewey, Howard Hughes, Andre Breton, and Richard Nixon also make surprise brief appearances in The Lacuna.

One would hope that the political and social conditions that created nightmares like the House Un-American Activities Committee are a thing of the past, but we can’t make that claim. America isn’t a finished product, but a process that we’re all involved in creating, as one of the characters in this extraordinarily readable novel reminds us.

* * *

In the middle of reading The Lacuna I wanted to look closely again at reproductions of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s paintings. I went to the downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library and checked out two oversized books—Diego Rivera: A Retrospective, from the Detroit Institute of Arts (1986) and Frida Kahlo, edited by Elizabeth Carpenter, from the Walker Art Center (2007). The Frida Kahlo book contains wonderful photographs from the collection of Vincente Wolf, two of which are posted below.
Frida Kahlo (1940)
Leon Trotsky & Diego Rivera (1938)

Naked Lunch and an Ann Arbor Book Collector

This fall marks the 50th anniversary of the original publication of Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs. Grove Press has just issued a beautifully packaged slipcase cloth edition, reasonably priced, to introduce this key mid 20th century American text to a new audience.

I suppose one might describe the book as a fictionalized memoir of addiction, but it quickly transcends the genre by jettisoning a conventional story line and spinning off into what Burroughs called his routines—phantasmagoric nightmares that mimic the drug experience. Naked Lunch is hypnotic, dreamy and often very funny—Burroughs draws on the conventions of hard-boiled detective novels, horror and science fiction—but it is definitely not for the faint of heart. The book reads like Walt Whitman on a bad acid trip.

Drug addiction in this wild and ferocious narrative is a metaphor for any kind of habituation, which Burroughs says is “a drag” (as in our habits drag us into a narcotized stupor). It is uncompromisingly radical in both style and message.

There is an interesting Ann Arbor connection to the new edition of Naked Lunch. Local real estate developer Arthur Nusbaum, president of Steppingstone Properties, provided Grove Press with a facsimile of the original cover art, which Grove used for the slipcase and cloth cover of the new anniversary edition.

Nusbaum has one of the largest collections of William Burroughs work in private hands. His collection includes drawings, handwritten letters and postcards by Burroughs and the manuscript (typewritten and handwritten) of Tornado Alley, as well as a copy of Naked Lunch signed to Nusbaum by Burroughs. The Burroughs material is the core of a larger collection of Beat Generation writers that Nusbaum has been assembling for over twenty five years.

One might be forgiven for wondering how it is that someone working in real estate management was drawn to Burroughs, the most transgressive of Beat writers.

Nusbaum strikes one as the polar opposite of Burroughs, whose flat affect and gray spectral presence were deadpan funny and slightly creepy at the same time. Instead, Arthur is openly passionate in conversation and is generous in his willingness to show his collection.

He was a student in Honors English at UM from 78-80 and credits UM English professor Herbert Barrows, Jr. for encouraging his interest in reading and collecting.

“He was the first person who urged me to read widely and seriously,” Nusbaum told me.

“Professor Barrows met William Burroughs at Harvard when they were both students, but he didn’t like him—especially after Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife. He told me he felt Burroughs cloaked himself in a mystique of debauchery.”

Nevertheless, Nusbaum recalls that his first reading of Naked Lunch was a profoundly riveting experience. He was moved by Burroughs’ accurate ear for idiomatic American speech and his distinctive voice.

“Naked Lunch is funny, haunting and elegiac,” he said. “It is a vision of 1950s America that is hallucinatory in its intensity, a world filled with loneliness and alienation. Burroughs was around a decade older than Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and he wrote in the era of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, a time of robotic ‘Mad Men.’

“Burroughs felt the extremity of heroin addiction gave him a special insight into the mechanisms behind and under the surface of our lives, which were basically systems of control. He saw the relationship of pusher and user reproduced throughout our culture. All producers and customers in this society are replicating dealers and junkies according to Burroughs. His savage satires of corporate life and the military industrial complex grew out of what he called ‘the facts of general validity.’ He saw his project as an attempt to sabotage the systems of control.

“Burroughs’ impact on our culture goes way beyond the world of literature. He influenced David Bowie, Steeley Dan, Soft Machine, Dead Fingers Talk, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Robert Crumb, the Beatles and many other musicians, writers and visual artists.”

After graduation from UM, Nusbaum briefly lived in the Detroit suburbs near where he grew up, but he felt like “a square peg in a round hole.” He returned to Ann Arbor in 1992.

“I’ve always been happier here. Ann Arbor is sympathetic to the New Urbanism, which I’ve advocated for in my professional life. And I love the rich cultural life this community offers.”

Nusbaum is about to embark on a second career as a bookseller. He and Mike Fulton, the business manager at Steppingstone Properties, are launching Third Mind Books, an online internet bookstore that specializes in William Burroughs and Beat Generation items.

“I don’t want to end up with all my stuff in crates, like Citizen Kane,” Nusbaum laughs. “This will give me a chance to trim down my collection.”

Nusbaum still delights in tracking down rare books. He proudly showed me a pristine copy of the Ace paperback edition of Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, which Burroughs published under the pseudonym William Lee in 1953. Arthur purchased it at the Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair a few years ago.


One of the more amusing items in Nusbaum’s collection is a letter to Burroughs, dated 1960, from J. Roberts, who worked in the Sales Department of L Light and Company Limited in Buckinghamshire, England. He acknowledges Burroughs’ order for 2 grams of Mescalin Sulphate but regrets to inform him that “we are completely out of stock of the product.”

William Burroughs died at age 83 in 1997. Naked Lunch, his controversial masterwork, is a testament brought to us from the cliff’s edge of human experience.

William Burroughs and Arthur Nusbaum (1995)

Looking In Two Directions At Once

for Mark & Lisanne Binkowski

I.

In 6th century China it was recorded that Eshi, a Great Teacher of Meditation, said the following when Zhiyi came to study with him:

Long ago we were together at Eagle Peak and listened to the Lotus Sutra. Now, pursuing those old bonds of karma, you have come again.

Eshi was referring to a sermon Shakyamuni Buddha gave on Eagle Peak a millennium earlier. Ikeda interprets this as a gesture of kindness and respect toward Zhiyi, but what if we take Eshi’s claim literally? Did he attain such clarity that he could actually collapse time? Was he able to go back through countless rebirths and join the great assemblage at Eagle Peak when they heard the Buddha reveal the Dharma?

It is unimaginable to us.

Late in his life Zhiyi said:

The gathering on Eagle Peak solemnly continues and has not yet come to an end.

II.

Roughly a millennium and a half later, we’re planning to build a little tea house in the small pine woods behind our place. You can join us next year when it’s finished. We might talk about what these old-time people thought they were up to. Are they still there on Eagle Peak?

Or we can just quietly watch the approach of the autumn season. The quality of the light on a clear day here can pierce your heart with its beauty.