January 6th and the 14th Amendment

Let’s start with the Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution which prohibits anyone who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” from running for federal office. This was essentially meant to stop Confederate soldiers and officers from holding or reclaiming office after the Civil War, but if we hold that January 6th was an insurrection (i.e. there was a goal of stopping Joe Biden from being certified as president in order to keep Trump in power), then anyone who gave “aid or comfort” to those who participated in January 6th would be barred from holding office. There’s a test case that’s currently being run on this with Marjorie Taylor Greene, presumably in part for making statements like this:

Jan. 6 was just a riot at the Capitol and if you think about what our Declaration of Independence says, it says to overthrow tyrants.

Or perhaps it’s because reporting has suggested that she along six other members of congress met with the organizers of the January 6th “Stop the Steal” rally in advance of the event.

The results here will be interesting to see not just because they may prevent Greene from continuing to hold office, but also because this precedent could be used to prosecute and remove from office any number of people who have direct connections to the multiple efforts to undermine and overthrow the legitimate results of the 2020 election. This includes Trump, of course, but also potentially includes any state election officials who have taken off specifically with the intent of undermining the democratic process (which many of them are likely stating openly and indeed creating a platform based on it).

Keep an eye out for what happens here, because it could tell us a lot about what’s coming in November and beyond.

Art

Flag by Rodney McMillian

I was painting tonight, so I thought that I might sit for a few minutes and write about Art.

Art is more accessible than at any time in history, and its boundaries have been stretched inconceivably by the invisible hand of the market. Artists now produce and sell works that are freely available to everyone as digital images that cannot and do not have any connection to a tangible object.

I am glad that artists are getting paid for their digital works, and I applaud them for working outside the bounds of the scarcity model of value.

Still, this is ownership that means little other than being able to proclaim oneself an owner as what one owns if often freely available to everyone and can never truly be captured. The owner is not able to gatekeep or control access to what they own. This is not ownership at all, but rather bragging rights dressed up as ownership—just as wealth itself amongst the wealthy is little more than bragging rights.

Does this system have value in the production of art?

1. There is the supporting of the artist financially, a necessity under Capitalism.

2. The assigning of value to the work of the artists, in any form, can be a value boost to the creative process. Artists may undertake more ambitious projects as the result of the valuing of their work. There certainly could and should be other means of assigning value, but demand for the art from a public is a good means of assigning value if we believe that art is for the people.

I have begun to feel dubious that we will be living too much of our future lives in the Metaverse, so I don’t know how much value NFTs might potentially have as digital residence decorations.

There is so much digital art, and endless rabbit hole of it. I’ve spent my share of time in the rabbit hole (which gives me a good idea for another blog post category just posting collections from my archive of screenshots), but I don’t know that I really want to be in it anymore.

I would like to write a bit about The Whitney Biennial, as experienced virtually, so expect that to dribble out in this space over the next few weeks, months, or however long it takes me.

I’m going to conclude by sharing some of my own art from 2011-2013:

News Roundup (4.5.21)

Trump, Etc.

• Trump aide seeking NH House seat voted in 2 states in 2016

  He voted in two primaries in 2016 for different people (originally a Christie guy). It astonishes me that someone wrote that this might leave ‘him at odds with the Republican Party’s intense focus on “election integrity.”’

  I don’t know what to do with journalists who take “election integrity” at face value from Republicans. I suppose there are scare quotes here, but it really seems like next to nothing.

Eco-Climate-World

• We have the tools to save the planet from climate change. Politics is getting in the way, new IPCC report says

  “funding is currently three to six times lower than it needs to be to ensure that the global average temperature does not rise beyond 2 degrees Celsius.”

  Honestly, I’m shocked that the funding gap is so small. I would have guessed the situation was much worse, so maybe there’s still some small measure of chance?

  I do appreciate the IPCC countering doomsday scenarios and framing the problem as one of politics and resource allocation. Warnings about warning can create an air of inevitability. One can hope this inspires some small measure of action, political action.

  On the other hand….

• Exxon signals record quarterly profit from oil and gas prices

  Rising oil prices don’t bode well for the politics of climate investment.

War Machines

• Up-Close Ukraine Atrocity Photographs Touch a Global Nerve

  The execution style murder of civilians is more tangible and understandable perhaps than the countless deaths due to relentless shelling. It’s easier to believe that someone who pulls a trigger in this way is evil than someone who fires a middle or drops a bomb from an unmanned drone in Nevada.

  Personally, I think all war is criminal.

  War crimes do take a while to prosecute though even if we can agree what they are:

• 200,000 Dead, One Lone Defendant as Darfur Trial Begins

  His lawyers seem to be arguing that this is all a case of mistaken identity…

  “the Kushayb case has underlined the limitations of the International Criminal Court’s reach. For all its ambitions, the founders gave limited powers to the permanent court, whose mandate is to try the worst crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide and aggression.”

  What does it say about our society that we limit the powers of those who seek to bring justice to those guilty of genocide?

Economical

• The U.S. Economy Is Booming. So Why Are Economists Worrying About a Recession?

“Economists, however, are notoriously terrible at predicting recessions.”

…and yet we keep listening to them, it’s baffling.

How to Be a Dick in the Twenty-First Century (by Chris Struck)

from Give My Love to the Savages

I’m switching it up today by reviewing a short story instead of a poem. This one is a twist on Kafka’s Metamorphosis where instead of waking up as an insect, our protagonist wakes up as a giant penis. Clearly meant as satire, “Dick” as he conveniently already known is a prototypical tech-bro billionaire who happens to be black, and we’re given early on in the story a laundry list of reasons why this could be some sort of karmic justice for him (womanizing, asshole behavior that you might expect from such a figure). After he’s drugged, raped, and taped by someone whom he had previously done the same to, Dick enters a period of seclusion where he attempts to construct an AI to understand what has happened to him. While waiting for the answer, he becomes addicted to pills. After he manages to rehab himself to discover that his computers have crapped out into a Blue Screen of Death, he begins to try to rehabilitate his life, captured in the following paragraph:

I sold most of my worldly possessions. I found a recipe for a natural non-habit-forming stimulant on the internet. It was just a smoothie with veggies and fruits and nuts. I guzzled them by the glass. I began hanging out with my lesbian friends again. I took the time to learn their names and not just think of them as lesbians. I went back to nature. I learned how to ferment things. I started smoking cannabis, a fair amount of it. It regulated my moods and gave my life a lustrous merry sheen. I undid my creative legal web-spinning and made my skyscraper into affordable housing for single and abused mothers. I moved myself into a small brownstone on the Upper West Side and rented out the top two floors to Jamison and his family for dirt cheap. I started calling him by his real name, Cleetus, which he seemed to appreciate. I’d totally forgotten why I’d give him the name Jamison to begin with.

The whole thing is pretty absurd.

The Blue Seuss by Terrance Hayes

from Wind in a Box

Blacks in one box
Blacks in two box
Blacks on
Blacks stacked in boxes stacked on boxes
Blacks in boxes stacked on shores
Blacks in boxes stacked on boats in darkness
Blacks in boxes do not float
Blacks in boxes cut their losses
Blacks on boat docks
Blacks on auction
Blacks on wagons
Blacks with masters in the houses
Blacks with bosses in the fields
Blacks in helmets toting rifles
Blacks in Harlem toting banjoes boots and quilts
Blacks on foot
Blacks on busses
Blacks on backwood hardwood stages singing blues
Blacks on Broadway singing too
Blacks can Charleston
Blacks can foxtrot
Blacks can bebop
Blacks can moonwalk
Blacks can beatbox
Blacks can run fast too
Blacks on
Blacks and
Blacks on knees and
Blacks on couches
Blacks on Good Times
Blacks on Roots
Blacks on Cosby
Blacks in voting booths are
Blacks in boxes
Blacks beside
Blacks in row of houses are
Blacks in boxes too

I should probably preface any other discussion of this poem with the fact that it was published in Wind in a Box in 2006, before the most recent controversy around Dr. Seuss’s racist imagery. Although that context perhaps adds extra significance onto this poem which effectively adopts a Seussian voice to narrate an extremely simplified version of black history in the United States. This is one of many poems in the book titled “The Blue <Person>” where the people emulated run the gamut from Amiri Baraka to David Bowie to Jorge Luis Borges.

There’s so much to like about this poem, from its structural conceit to the way that single words are phrases are used to evoke historical events (“busses” invoking Rosa Parks for example) to how Terrance draws so much sonically in single lines (“Blacks in boxes stacked on boats in darkness”).

I don’t know that I want or need to say much more other than Terrance Hayes is amazing, and you should read everything you can by him.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

A Promise Land by Barack Obama

I listened to all twenty-one hours of Barack Obama reading the first volume of his presidential memoirs which covers begins with his childhood and ends with the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The first part of the book devotes a lot of time to Obama’s desire to make an impact, his frustration that each move he makes to try to have it ends up feeling fruitless, and how his increasing ambition takes a toll on his relationship with his wife and children. This culminates with his run for the presidency.

The second part of the book largely takes the form of Obama run through a laundry list of various incidents and situations that he dealt with during his first term in office from Afghanistan, the global financial crisis, birtherism, and so on and on.

Each incident is recounted through a series of anecdotes, check-ins with how his family seems to be doing, descriptions unrelated events happening around the same time (presumably meant to give “a day in the life of the President” feel to things), and insights into Obama’s thinking during the time period.

While he doesn’t explicitly state this anywhere, one gets the sense as these recounting add up that Obama felt a consistent sense of frustration with the lack of good options available to him and the unfairness of his critics. The circumstance of the financial crisis boxed in what options were reasonably available to him, the Republicans growing obstructionism and nativism (driven by its voters in response to the election of a Black President) made the kind of bi-partisan politics that he wanted to practice and ran on impossible to achieve largely, and undoing the unilateral quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan created by the Bush administration (along with the sense of unquestioned authority that the administration had fostered in the military and intelligence communities after 9-11) proved more difficult than he imagined.

I have always appreciated Obama’s persistent sense of optimism, good humor, and pragmatic approach to politics and policy. While his legacy is not without its blemishes, I did find it helpful to review it from his perspective and with the considerations of the multiple messes that he inherited, much as Biden has inherited a number of messes from the Trump Era.

I especially appreciated the way that this memoir persistently humanizes the players involved with crafting and negotiating legislation and running the federal government and military. Remembering the human, the imperfect, in those even in places of power is something that is not easy.

A Dangerous Place by Chelsea B. DesAutels

from A Dangerous Place

It seems a beautiful spring though I spend most of it indoors

watching through warped glass small tree buds burst into full green,

the ice crystals on the edge of Lake Nokomis relaxing & spreading

into waves lapping the bottom of bright canoes & sometimes,

near the shore, for the first time this year, a large white heron

landing on spidery legs. An omen, I tell myself: a bird too smart to make

a dangerous place its home & I carry that with me to the hospital.

The conflation in this first segment of the poem of the beatific natural scenery that the narrator is watching from her window with “a dangerous place” and the movement to the hospital sets up a kind of internal tension within the poem that carries it through to the end. There are a couple of other tiny tensions like this present: the beauty of the scene vs. the narrator indoors watching through “warped glass” & the heron landing both “sometimes” and “for the first time this year”.

And I think of the heron when the doctors say congratulations

you’re pregnant, let’s shine a light to greet your baby.

And I think of the heron when they say oh sorry it seems your womb

is more cavern than nest & no, it’s no baby at all.

Presumably the narrator is thinking of the heron, in part, to remind her not to make the hospital, a dangerous place, her own home, but also perhaps to not practice attachment to an idea of what is happening with her body, avoiding a mental place that is also dangerous.

What have you been feeding this thing. And I think of the heron

skimming the lake surface with spread wings—how could I not—

as we watch on-screen the monster burst into ten thousand gray moths.

The inclusion of the phrase “What have you been feeding things thing.” is odd here, as it interrupts what had been a repeating structure of “And I think of the heron,” and I wonder if this is meant to connect us back to the spending of the spring indoors, watching life through warped glass… as if somehow the remove from the cycle of life outside had caused the birth of the “monster [that] burst into ten thousand gray moths,” (an amazing image).

And I hear the echo of wings in my belly. And I feel the fury

of wings in my lungs. And when the doctors tuck a port

above my breast I think of the heron disguising a large bed

in marshy grasses. And I imagine the white sheets as heron wings.

And the whirring machines are white eggs.

And the worried voices are sunlight on water.

The use of the repeated “And” structure works really well in this poem, giving it a cadence like a kind of invocation or prayer. The repeated reference to wings evokes the freedom of flight, escape from the confined circumstances of a hospital bed. The “white sheets” and “white eggs” contrast to the “gray moths” from the previous lines.

I do wonder about the tension between “sometimes” and “for the first time” in the beginning part of the poem, and if we’re not meant to wonder if the narrator in the first section has actually already been through the hospital and is, in part, remembering the many times of thinking about the first time that the heron came that spring and what it later came to represent for her.

Raven Gets Meta by Laura Da’

from Tributaries

Raven’s making time in the public school system.
On the first day of instruction he forgets the syllabus,

improvises, tells the class a story about himself.
How, in his younger days, he was one of the many

who helped to stipple the night sky with light. Believe it,
or don’t. Many others presumed

to use the stars
to cast connect-the-dot sketches of their own likeness

onto the endlessly beckoning blackboard,
but he threw his lights

in a five-minutes-left-of-recess-heads-up frenzy.
Raven prefers his constellations wild

and that leads to tonight’s homework:
Sneak out of your beds.

Walk barefoot outside.
Look up. Raven smirks at the orange chairs left pushed out.

The personification of Raven as a public-school teacher is a great premise for a poem, and I appreciate the couplet structure as well as it gives the poem a quick moving momentum that matches the frenzied, wild perspective of the Raven who is working to undermine “scientific” understandings of the stars (everything has its one specific name) with a more chaotic, personal understanding.

Mid-semester, the administration calls Raven to the carpet
for a certain cavalier attitude

towards the test-prep curriculum. He slinks late
into the meeting, feathers rustling

at the Power Point projected on the bare west wall
assessing average reading scores

and annual measurable objectives.
Echoes come in from down the hall:

See the world in a grain of sand from the English classroom
and the science lab’s

butterfly flicker moving polar ice.
Raven’s been around the block, has wrapped talons

around stones so large
they made the cosmos.

I can’t help but repeat and revel in the sonic joy of “the administration calls Raven to the carpet / for a certain cavalier attitude // towards the test-prep curriculum,” and how it contrasts with the unpleasantness of the subject matter, almost like Raven is, through the language used, struggling to subvert and escape the administration.

Raven doesn’t give a shit
about his students making adequate yearly progress

on any standardized test.
But when asked to imagine seeing any one child contained

in the pixelated dot flicker on the bar graph
dancing across the projection screen,

a shrill caw
spirals up the length of him.

These tricksters.
Looking into galaxies and yearning for self-portraits.

The poem wraps up nicely by tying the constellations and stars to the pixels of the projector showing statistical averages of achievement, drawing back to that initial metaphor of the desire to use standardized measurements rather than taking joy in individual learning. The reference to the administration as “These trickers” by Raven (traditionally the trickster himself) is a nice touch, and I love the suggestion that they are really only interested in seeing reflections of their own achievements in the students rather than truly opening them up to the wonder and beauty of the world around them.

Poor Lazarus Shale by Laura Da’

Some of the themes from my previous write-up of Five Songs for Lazarus Shale provide a helpful backdrop to this post.

from Tributaries

Live long enough
and salt pork, beans,
yearling colts, honey and butter,
something will turn into a wedge
to bend your will.

Missionaries call for my sons to send off to school,
each season when the corn is green.
I tuck them into the rows
farthest to the north of my cabin.
Keep them busy with the threshing as I whisper
their true names into the ears we consume,
but I leave a path to them
like a snake
by slithering away through the sparse harvest.

Frost breaks under my mare’s hooves
when I ride to sign my name at the Neosho mission.
My sons and nephews
traded to industrial school in the north
for the release of seven barrels of winter rations.

This commerce—
makes me brother to dragons, companion to owls.

The themes of the corn as a reflection of the well-being of the people who cultivate it and the subject of names and naming continue into Poor Lazarus. This poem (like the previous one) is part of the second section of this book which is all about the period of removal.

The narrator in this poem is clearly conflicted between his desire to “tuck [his sons] away” while holding onto “their true names” whispering them “into the ears [of corn] we consume” and with the “wedge / to bend [his will]” that the “sparse harvest” increasingly creates. He compares himself to a snake, dragons, and owls in his decision to trade his sons and nephews “to the industrial school in the north / for the release of seven barrels of winter rations.”

I like the way that the poem uses the indention to specifically call attention to the narrator’s actions and feelings that move towards this trade vs. the purely descriptive language that is without indention.

The line about commerce also represents a significant typographically break from the form of the previous stanzas calling attention to the line and creatin a pivot point from which the rest of the poem moves onto the narrator’s mental state after making the trade:

Riding away from the mission,
I call to my sister’s youngest child,
the only one
still too young for school,
Come over here and ride with your old uncle.

The boy clambers up behind me,
bare toe notched into the girth for warmth and purchase.
My boots quiver along the sides of the horse’s flanks
as I endeavor to slip them into the stirrups
that frame the ground below in jerky patches.

Child, I keep repeating. Nephew.
The horse dances nervously,
sensing my frenzy.
To his credit,
the boy
keeps a steady hand on the reins.

The “jerky”, “[nervous]”, “frenzy” of the narrator’s relationship to his horse does an excellent job of conveying the mental anguish that he is suffering having traded away his children to the Indian School for rations, but I’m not entirely sure what to make of the strong image of the younger child and his stability.

I’m also not sure what to think of the title and who Lazarus is supposed to be in this poem (the narrator? one of the children sent to the Indian School? or the boy who is too young to go?), but I like the ambiguity as it emphasizes the generational nature of this kind of trauma. One of the ways it’s probably passed down is in situations like the one described in the end of this poem where a child too young to go to school is faced with the task of stabilizing and supporting his elders rather than the other way around (perhaps part of the reason for that final image?).

Five Songs for Lazarus Shale by Laura Da’

As a word of pretext, I’ve decided that reviewing books of poetry really does disservice to the poetry, so I am attempting a correction by reviewing individual poems.

from Tributaries

“It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlement is approaching to a happy consummation.”

— President Andrew Jackson, 1830

1.
There was a word for village
that meant all at once:
perfect home
perfect man
all human systems working in harmony.
A Shawnee village was a good genius society.
Names were to be guarded.

First memory:
clambering onto a horse
toes splayed for purchase
peering over the swayed back
at a curving glimmer of tributaries.
Listing rows of corn as far as the eye could travel.

I love this initial description of the nature of the village’s “good genius society” contrasted with the turn to “Names were to be guarded.” since in a way the first stanza is opening up the name “village” and what it means to the speaker of the poem. The invocation of memory here is important as the tension between the land pre- and post-colonization, as is corn which seems to act as a bit of a stand in for the land and the culture and identity of the indigenous inhabitants.

We’ll also assume here that the “curving glimmer of tributaries” (I <3 “curving glimmer”) of the land give this book its title, so I may refer back to this poem assuming I write about more from this book (likey, as I’m really enjoying this book!).

2.
Running on spindly legs
and speaking in a bubbling rush of Shawnee
the boy fled through can breaks
when the Indian Agent called.

A child’s arrow ripped with a gar’s fin
pointed to the eddy.

In the wilted moon,
the Quakers gave him the name.
Bible held hovering out of reach
as he grasped at the inked picture
of a man shouldering out of a stone tomb.

The agent sat in the back pew, sniffing the end of a quill,
a slim flask of ink between his knees.
wet trail of letters on the ledger: Lazarus Shale.

I had no idea what a gar was when I read this, so I figured that I might not be the only one.

I love the “spindly legs” and “bubbling rush of Shanee” here. Capitalization of the “Indian Agent” (unnamed and largely undescribed except for the brilliant “sniffing the end of a quill” image that paints him as potentially trying to intoxicate himself on the smell of the ink) works to invoke the force of the state rather than the work of an individual. The same with “the Quakers” who also are brought up in relation to “the inked picture”. The multiple references to ink reinforce the conception of Western reliance on written edicts and legality strip this child of their identity and produce the new one of Lazarus Shale, the official identity of the person on “the ledger”.

The first stanza suggests names needed to be guarded, but in this stanza “the Quakers” and the “Indian Agent” are guarding names using ink. Guarding identity.

3.
Tawny coffee beans, bolts of calico, molasses,
rations passed out the back door.
Speculation at the trading post
on the topic of removal:
Lewistown first, then Lima village
Hog Creek on down the curve of the river to Wapakoneta.

Sap moon cold.
Traders walking foundered horses over coals
anticipating army requestions.

Lazarus tracing letters in the ash,
his aunt stitching rounded meadow flowers onto doe skin:
pumpkin yellow, greasy blue and green, white-heart red beads.
The baby waking every so often to press a few grains into her chubby fingertips.
Tallow flicker across their mother.

Why, Sister, you’re beading in the old style.

In the rafters,
her fingers turning back to unbraiding.
The family’s dried corn falling in dusty ropes.

The sonic movements of the first two lines of this poem deserve extra special attention, so I recommended reading them aloud if you haven’t already. Here they are again:

Tawny coffee beans, bolts of calico, molasses,
rations passed out the back door.

Bringing back our theme around names… notice that the speaker follows the word “removal” with a list of formal names (perhaps from the “map” which is another version of the “ledger”). Meanwhile, Lazarus is forming his own words in the ash, writing words that will disappear in the wind.

His aunt is stitching a map in colors, and the “old style” is invoked here, mirror the question of memory and time (from what perspective is the speaker speaking? personal memory? imaginative memory? a person alive at the time?).

The conditions that Lazarus and his aunt are living under, their relationship to the army here to remove people like them from their land is not specified directly but invoked through the corn as “falling in dusty ropes”.

4.
Journeying cake.

In the morning,
Quakers pressed wrapped suppers into their hands,
reading from the Book of Ruth over the noise of the muster.

Generic native ash-caked baked in an open fire

Dig under the crust to find the varieties of corn
in the charred fields of Wapakoneta:
dent
flint
Boone County White
Bloody Butcher

Journeying cake Shawnee cake or every man’s cake becoming jonny or johnny cake.

Walking away, south along the Scioto
looking back often
Vivid shoots of green corn
rippling along the trail in a delicate commotion.
Fingers bent against the leather satchel
pinching at grains of corn bread.
Lazarus, who else could tell his story?

Naming invoked again and again here, emphasized by the italics. The types of corn destroyed by, presumably, the army’s burning of fields (a tactic used during removal to starve indigenous people and force them to leave their land) paralleled with the transformation in name through appropriation of a “Generic native ash-caked baked in an open fire”.

The question of who the narrator is and their relation to Lazarus is specifically invoked by the final line of this section. The “Vivid green shoots of corn” that “[ripple along the trail in a delicate commotion.” are a stark contrast against the “charred fields of Wapakoneta” suggesting that the speaker is revisiting the place where Lazarus lived once and the poem itself is engaged in an act of remembering him, perhaps conjuring his memory by “pinching at grains of corn bread.”

5.
In Shawnee tradition
one is cautioned to cross a river
quickly, without looking down
to tempt swift creatures
ready to rend the body in riparian embrace.
Underwater panthers.
Left to ponder such beings,
the mind balks.
Mad River.
Scioto.
Great and Little Miami.

Shawnee translations of the rivers of Wapakoneta.
Auglaize River: the falling timbers of the river.
Blanchard’s For of the Auglaize: claws in the water.

The final section ties up the poem nicely by, in a variety of different ways, naming those tributaries that give the book its title, that feed the corn, that invoke the memory of Lazarus, and that hold in them a spectral violence the likes of which the speaker undoubtedly senses the land holds today from the legacy of removal and colonization.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (Peter Pomerantsev)

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev

A gonzo journalism account of early 21st-century Russia told by a documentary-television producer working in Russia during the time period for a television producer largely creating Russian versions of popular Western television.

Peter mixes general social commentary with journalistic portraits of friends that he makes during his time there (ranging from club girls looking to land a “Forbes” to street mafia members turned novelists to a local business owner caught in a proxy battle between government officials).

Peter paints a portrait of a Russia that is “some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends.” He is in a position to understand, to a degree, the way that the media landscape is a battlefield of what he refers to as “political engineers” who use a “new type of Kremlin propaganda, less about arguing against the West with a counter-model as in the Cold War, more about slipping inside its language to play and taunt it from inside.”

This propaganda is everywhere in the media including in the bad ports of western sitcoms. It’s not clear to what extent people truly believe it and to what extent it’s understood that everyone must act as if it was true. Peter highlights a billboard advertisement as exemplary of this phenomenon:

Got up in the style of a Nazi poster, it shows two Germanic-looking youths against a glorious alpine mountain over the slogan “Life is Getting Better.” It would be wrong to say the ad is humorous, but it’s not quite serious, either. It’s sort of both. It’s saying this is the society we live in (a dictatorship), but we’re just playing at it (we can make jokes about it), but playing in a serious way (we’re making money playing it and won’t let anyone subvert its rules).

[…]

The flip side of this triumphant cynicism […] is despair.

I find Peter’s account a compelling portrait of this culture of mish-mashed contradictions where the rules are constantly shifting but no one’s allowed to talk about it. His portrait is not a desperate one, which I think helps. He shows how many people, including himself for a time, are thriving in this environment rather than showing a scene of total misery and repression (although he certainly points to its existence in sections).

The gonzo component helps as throughout the book one is able to see him as in the mix, someone who is also profiting from the vast swathes of money being thrown around in the post-Soviet Moscow. The details from his life (like being worried about having enough money to bribe someone when many of his labyrinth of identity papers has expired) help make the world’s day-to-day experience more real.

jeen-yuhs (part 3)

jeen-yuhs (part 3)

While Part 1 + 2 benefited greatly from the kind of fly-on-the-wall inside access that Coodie (the primary filmer) had to Kanye’s struggles to achieve that first taste of mainstream success, Part 3 loses that, largely, and spends a lot of time compiling media footage and offering commentary.

Coodie reunites with Kanye to a limited extent after the release of Life of Pablo and there is some limited more verité footage from the period between 2016-2020, though the amount of it is somewhat limited and tends to not be quite as compelling.

At several points in the final leg of the film, Coodie repeatedly turns off the camera because he finds it somewhat unethical to be filming Kanye’s rambling monologues that seem to originate from a place of mental instability.

Perhaps the most noteworthy segment, for me, is a scene in which Kanye is listening to Tucker Carlson talk about the media’s perception that Kanye “is going insane” being a result of his espousing of Christian values like being against abortion. He seems to wholeheartedly agree with Tucker’s assessment.

Scenes like this one suggest that Kanye’s turn to religion is very serious for him, but also work in some way as a stand in for how any number of Trump supporters regardless of race can come to see themselves as laughed out of the public square by a media elite who have no use for their traditional values, the losers of a culture war who are looking for a champion to charge into battle on their behalf.

While I am not attempting to be an apologist for either Trump or Kanye, I do think that there is a lesson to be learned from this moment regarding the dangers of being dismissive of people’s fundamentally held beliefs and attempts to tightly constraint the limits of acceptable speech. It’s easy to be cynical about someone like Kanye and view his every move as a form of publicity stunt, but the final act of this documentary perhaps tries to first and foremost remind us that he is also a person… and that no amount of success can wipe away the human capacity for grief, frustration, and alienation.

I suppose that at some level what I’m trying to say is that we should seek to understand first rather than to judge first when someone says or does something that is offensive to us. I’m not saying it’s easy, nor am I saying that anyone should be faulted for being unable or even unwilling to do so (goes against the entire premise of my argument, in fact). I’m saying though that perhaps it’s worth holding as an aspiration, one that might do more to change the toxicity of our culture than almost anything else.

Living Nations, Living Words (ed. Joy Harjo)

Living Nations, Living Worlds

An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry

Collected by Joy Harjo, 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate

I didn’t know until the last few years that the Poet Laureate was actually selected by the Library of Congress. Seems like a much better selection process than having politicians decide these things (as happens in Oregon as far as I can tell).

I mention this, in part, in case anyone was wondering how the first Native Poet Laureate was appointed during the Trump presidency.

This collection of poetry is a book form of a project that Joy pursued mapping Native poets from across the country.

I always think of anthologies like this as a way of discovering new voices first and foremost, and so I will provide below a list of links to more information about my favorite newly discovered poets from this collection.

• Suzan Shown Harjo

• Elizabeth Woody

• Laura Da’

• Lehua M. Taitano

• Anita Endrezze

• Denise Sweet

• Louise Erdrich (I was already familiar with Louise’s novel-writing but discovered here that she also was a poet)

• M. L. Smoker

• Kimberly Blaeser

• Kim Shuck

• R. William Bearhart

• No’u Revilla

• Tiffany Midge

• Sherwin Bitsui

• Layli Long Soldier

• Natalie Diaz (I have had a hold on her book Post-Colonial Love Poem at the library for a few months)

jeen-yuhs (part 2)

jeen-yuhs (part 2)

Part 2 pretty much begins with Kanye getting into a car accident in LA almost directly after being signed to Roc-a-Fella records. The accident breaks his jaw in multiple locations and breaks whatever interest Roc-a-Fella had in releasing his album.

…so he keeps making beats to pay the bills and scampers to record The College Dropout without any institutional support, using borrowed studio time from friends and colleagues.

There’s a scene of them going into MTV after hours to work on the equipment there to produce the video for “Through the Wire” which Kanye pays for out of pocket.

Kanye forgoes recommended surgery in order to keep pushing to take advantage of this make-it-or-break-it moment.

He self-releases the video for “Through the Wire,” and it blows up and tops the MTV charts for weeks. Suddenly, Roc-a-Fella is interested again, and we end this chapter with him winning a Grammy.

Watching the “Through the Wire” video again, I can see how the first two parts of jeen-yuhs are effectively a three-hour version of what the video distilled into three minutes. The fly-on-the-wall style continues to be remarkable, showing recording sessions, initial reactions, etc. to what would ultimately become an album that has sold over four million copies in the United States alone. It’s not hard to see that Kanye made this a reality through a kind of confident determination that none of the many obstacles in his path could deter.

I am very curious to see what kind of access and footage awaits in part 3 once Kanye has reached a kind of superstar level of success.

Liar’s Circus (Carl Hoffman)

Liar’s Circus by Carl Hoffman

There’s a lot that this book has in common with Dignity, in that the Carl goes around talking to folks in places where Trump voters tend to hang out (VFW, diners, church groups, etc.). He also makes it a point to be one of the first in line to each of the rallies that he attends and befriends several other regular early birds.

My top takeaway was his connection of Trump’s rallies to religious revival movements, and the degree to which participants (including to some degree the author himself) experience a kind of ecstatic state from the power of the lighting, sound, and demonization that are consistent throughout Trump’s rallies.

I found the bits where Carl compares Trump rallies to other “dangerous” environments that he’s covered as a journalist somewhat tedious and unnecessary.

Still, it’s a short read and probably worth it for anyone curious about the feeling of these rallies and profiles the particular type of people who attend them repeatedly.

Ukraine

Let’s start with one part of the reason that rent prices have soared in major cities across the United States and luxury condos have become seemingly the only housing being built: real estate is a great way to launder money and/or to hide pay offs.

Casinos also work well in this regard.

Why else should we care so much about Putin’s Russia?

To start with, because Putin is a key player in building a support network of authoritarian states worldwide. If you are against oligarchy and gangster capitalism, then you should be against any expansion of Putin’s power.

The United States is effectively already at war with Putin, although the combat has primarily taken place on an informational battlefield and through attacks on computer networks and systems.

I won’t claim that the United States is perfect… it’s not for nothing that Putin used the threat of Ukraine becoming a nuclear power to justify invading, an invocation of the Bush doctrine.

Many have pointed out that the day before Russia was bombing Ukraine, the United States was bombing Somalia. I don’t know enough about Somalia to comment on what’s happening there (and probably that’s systemic racism at work… the fact that I know more about Ukraine than Somalia).

My heart stands with those that are suffering authoritarian repression or the violence that results from it (including those in the multitude of countries that are currently occupied to a greater or lesser degree by the US military).

Sky Burial (Dana Levin)

Sky Burial by Dana Levin

This poem, Spring, is representative of everything good about this book:

SPRING

Forensic Anthropology Center, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

1

The sun, in shafts and spades.

Through the pine and birches, little breeze setting off
the leaves—

Their gold green increase.

Pollen to the air, its colonial dream
of a new imperium of trees—

Snap against the wrist-skin.

And then you press down on the tongue with your gloved thumb
to let the honeybee show you the way.

2

The dark tunnel paths from light to light.

Flay the face and scoop out the eyes—you’ll see.

3

Bees in a cloud round your hand.

Egg-herder, you smell
synonymous with treasure—

Shining a light at the back of the throat
blowflies
in liquid pearls
the bees murder to eat—

And all at the lips and nose a yellow dust, pollen
they have

delivered—

You scrape it into a little sack.

4

Ripple and snap.

Bend to the O of the rigored mouth—listen:

Plastic bags, like souls, caught in trees.

5

What to harvest
from the sloughed-off suits of the dead.

Like seashells cupping the ghost-tongue of the sea,
their black mouths speak—

You crouch to the hum with a bag and a blade. You

the god it sways.

jeen-yuhs (part 1)

jeen-yuhs (1)

despite the problems with kanye (which are many-storied), it is an objectively amazing thing to have had a filmmaker following him around NYC and Chicago right before and during the time in which he ended up getting a record deal and crafting his first album.

cinema verité is the dominant mode throughout—the camera a witness and also an audience against which Kanye develops a media persona.

While I am generally skeptical of literally everything that Netflix does (television and films algorithmically optimized to be addictive), sometimes the giant wads of cash that they have to throw around result in something amazing, which I believe to be the case here.

Full judgement to be reserved till I reach the end.

Dignity (Chris Arnade)

Dignity by Chris Arnade

First of all, it’s very odd that Amazon’s image for this book has it sitting on a weathered table. This is compounded by the book itself which features blurbs from J.D. Vance (now a Republican candidate for Senate), Elizabeth Bruenig, Patrick J. Deneen, Angela Nagle (author of Kill All the Normies), and Tom Cotton (who wrote a NYT Op-Ed advocating for Trump to use the military to quash BLM protests last summer).

It’s essentially a work of gonzo photojournalism. Chris travels the country going to McDonalds, strip mall churches, bodegas, corner stores, bars, VFW, etc. in search of the “back row” of the United States He then takes pictures and riffs on themes that emerge from the stories of the people he talks to. The gist of his position is that the “front row” of the US has disdain for the lives of the “left behind” from the NAFTA era of trade liberalization and manufacturing decline.

All the dualism is really rather tiring, and this certainly comes withing the ballpark of poverty porn. Despite these setbacks and a racial analysis that is… intentionally understated, I appreciate the empathy and respect in this book. I also think it was good for me to have a chance to reflect on my own alienation from some of my roots and disdain that I might have once and sometime still feel for things like religion or fast-food chains.

The photography is not particularly interesting or impressive for the most part, and, in fact, I found all the shots of needles/people shooting up to be in poor taste in the context of this book.

3 Sections (Vijay Seshardi)

3 Sections by Vijay Seshardi

Despite the title, this book has no defined sections. It does have one poem, Nursing Home, divided into three sections which mirrors the book in a way:

1. A short, stanza-ed poem.

2. A longer prose section.

3. A medium length sequence of lines with no stanza breaks.

These are the three forms employed in the book (including a long prose entry about Pacific Ocean fishing out of the Pacific Northwest where the narrator of that section grew up).

I copied down some lines and language that particularly caught my eyes and/or ears:

the retrospective, maskless rage of inception.

How few, how paltry few, of all the beautiful apparitions pulverized to earth
were resurrected as a tulip or a rose.

the ah-weary-of-time sunflower

Don’t even get me started on our co-workers,
whose sinuosities are instinct with a prevaricating design;
or on the subway in the sand;
or on the reason why I forget what I should remember
and remember what I should forget;
or on the flamingos that dart like sparrows
and soar and dive and congregate
in this our city, birdless until now since time began.
A shimmering, as in a mirage. A darkening, as in an aftermath.
A white light, then a red light, then a black light,
and then the meaning I mean, the meaning, and its meaning,
which I am just about to grasp.
Governments are falling as we speak.

Brain scans done on her show

her perisylvian pathways and declivities
choked by cities,
microscopic mercurial cities
made from her memories

the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time

Another National Book Award winner that impressed (I’ve been working my way through the winners for Poetry in the last decade-ish).