Poetry still plays an integral part in Iranian life, even in the midst of the protests and chaos. In a widely circulated blog post out of Tehran, a protester notes:
“Placards that people carried were different; from poems by the national poet Ahmad Shamlu to light-hearted slogans against Ahmadinejad. Examples include: ‘To slaughter us/ why did you need to invite us / to such an elegant party’ (Poem by Shamlu). ‘Hello! Hello! 999? / Our votes were stolen’ or ‘The Miracle of the Third Millennium: 2 x 2 = 24 millions’ (alluding to the claim by Government that Ahmadinejad obtained 24 million votes), ‘Where is my vote?’, ‘Give me back my vote’ and many others.”
Can you imagine protesters in Florida after the 2000 carrying placards with quotes from Mary Oliver? Billy Collins? John Ashbery?
Clearly, poetry and politics intersect differently over there.
There are (at least) two different issues at play here: the Atlantic cover and the manipulated images on Greeberg’s web site. First about the ‘doctored’ image in the cover:
The Atlantic opted not to use the distorted McCain shot on its cover, selecting instead a more straightforward portrait. ‘We stand by the picture we are running on our cover," said Atlantic editor James Bennet. ‘We feel it’s a respectful portrait. We hope we’ll be judged by that picture.’
But Bennet was appalled by Greenberg saying she tried to portray McCain in an unflattering way.
1b) In fact, the problem (if there is one) can only come from the fact that it wasn’t doctored after being taken. The lighting was manipulated to get the, for lack of a better term, the Greenberg-ian effect and then left that way. I saw the photo on the newsstand and immediately knew it was Greenberg, but it didn’t stand out as being flattering or unflattering. To me it looks like most of her pictures of people, which is to say in some way unreal. More importantly, it passed through the hands of all the editors at Atlantic who saw no problem with it. Are they all partisan? Or:
1c) Is the real problem here psychological and ideological? It doesn’t appear that a significant number of people had any problem with the photo until Greenberg’s other satirical photos came out. What was just an artsy-looking photo suddenly became cast as the product of partisan tampering. And:
1d) Admitting that Greenberg is a partisan, shouldn’t the photograph be assessed on its own? What does her partisanship ultimately have to do with it and the sudden change in perception of the McCain photo?
2) When was the last time anyone venting about this complained about the doctoring of a magazine cover? They are, practically speaking, all manipulated and retouched. Or is it only a problem when someone is made to look bad. Or is it only a problem when the manipulation doesn’t lean with our bias? Who, of those upset by this photo, are speaking out against the obvious air-brushing and retouching on the cover photos of Sarah Palin and McCain and Palin together? Or anyone else for that matter? For the record, I thought the Left’s outrage at the Obama New Yorker cover was also misguided.
3) Where is all the outrage with the unquestionably more damaging and constant media manipulation when it comes to representation of women in the media? Look at any magazine rack and you will see 10 times more crass, sexual misrepresentation of sex and body image than anything remotely political.
As far as the images on Greenberg’s site go, they are a decidedly mixed bag as art or propaganda. A few are more or less standard representatives of political satire; a few are simply tasteless. Greenberg is a fine photographer, but the McCain manipulations are juvenile and not reflective of her skill and talent, including those expressing political positions I agree with. However, as far as I’m concerned, Greenberg can do whatever she wants to on her site with the photos she takes and has rights to, agreeable or not. We are fortunate to live in a country where the State doesn’t deem what is appropriate art and what is not, as was the case in the U.S.S.R and still the sad case in places like Cuba and Taliban-governed areas through the Middle East. As fervently as some of Greenberg’s detractors might wish they could erase her photos from the world, I imagine they would hope and/or pray with equal fervor that someone like me not be allowed to make similar decisions for them.
I’m no fan of Sarah Palin, but I’ve received numerous messages this morning purporting to contain a list of books Palin attempted to have banned from the Wasilla city library when she was elected mayor. This is clearly a myth.
First, this list has been circulating, in various incarnations, for ages and is just one of many lists of commonly banned books. Simple googling reviewed the most likely source.
The list in question, one of books commonly objected to by Christian activist groups, might well represent books Palin would like to have banned… and it wouldn’t surprise me if she had used such a list when inquiring about banning books. But there is no evidence that she did so, nor any evidence that she ever actually banned a book.
I’m glad to see attention being paid to the scourge of book bannings (and don’t forget Banned Books Week at the end of this month), but it’s being overplayed here. Innocent until proven guilty. There are, however, plenty of other well-sourced facts about Palin demonstrating that she is a professionally unsuitable and personally and morally objectionable candidate…
David Foster Wallace’s essay on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign is being re-issued as a book called McCain’s Promise. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, DFW responded to the question of whether he had changed his mind about his assessment of McCain:
"The essay quite specifically concerns a couple weeks in February, 2000, and the situation of both McCain [and] national politics in those couple weeks. It is heavily context-dependent. And that context now seems a long, long, long time ago. McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It’s all understandable, of course—he’s the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing."
Some other good stuff there about the book (and about signing a bazillion advance copies of Infinite Jest).
Another comic I forget because I can’t subscribe to it (though that is supposedly going to change real soon) is the almost always amusing– and often scary– Get Your War On. A pair from late last month:
This brief documentary on the rise of Neo-Nazis and other hate groups in Russia is powerful and disturbing… and perfect for the web where it isn’t censored as it would undoubtedly be on television.
“Poetry can save the world by transforming consciousness,” he argues in “Poetry as Insurgent Art,” a slim hardback pocketbook manifesto of prose epigrams, seemingly addressed to poets and those who might be.
“I am signaling you through the flames,” he begins in the new section from which his book takes its title. “The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.” Poetry, in this vision, must be a political statement, arrows slung for freedom of expression, thought and resistance. “Write living newspapers,” he counsels. “Your poems must be more than want ads for broken hearts” – in other words, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, to write mere “love poetry” in such times is “almost a crime.” So “challenge capitalism masquerading as democracy”; “Liberate have-nots and enrage despots”; “Don’t cater to the Middle Mind of America nor to consumer society.” And so on, in variations of his admonition to “be committed to something outside yourself.”
I understand Ferlinghetti’s sentiment, but political poetry– by which I mean poetry written to make a political point– is usually so bad. Overtly political poems often share most of the attributes of ordinary bad poetry with a slathering of jingoistic rhetoric. When something becomes obviously ideological it stops being poetry. We’ve seen it in scores of mediocre political poems (not to mention poems by politicians). I don’t need more of those.
And it is ultimately this that signals the greatest difference between the two poems. One expresses a relatively conscious set of relations to life within the contradictions of late capitalism, and the other blithely shrugs the contradictions off and gloats. Form comes into the equation only as a necessary adjunct to the reigning emotional timbre of each poem: in the one case, an uneasy apprehension of one’s tenuous position in a booby-trapped system, and in the other, a narcotized sugar-coating of bad faith, complete with anthropomorphic Disney candles.
rubbed me wrong then and it still does because of the very plain assumption that a poem needs to engage in a specifically political engagement (let’s not get lost in the rabbit-hole of seeing every act, even acts of omission, as political– I’m assuming a reference frame of intentionality here.
Billy Collins isn’t intrinsically a bad man unless Kasey likewise is given that Kasey is a (presumably) middle- to upper-middle class, well-educated University professor… Kasey is excoriating Collins for writing a poem reflective of a life that, to a large extent, he apparently shares. Nor is making a poem that is interesting and evocative enough. The poetry must be political. Collins isn’t merely writing a poem that is spolitical, he is (to paraphrase) gloating in narcotize, sugar-coated words. He isn’t writing something that is simply other than a rumination about the “booby-trapped system” he must– he must– be actively shrugging it off and implicitly denying the existence of the system. This would be a completely stultifying philosophy of poetics were it not for the fact that these kinds of accusations seem limited to times of convenience… when favored poets write poems that are apolitical it passes by without notice.
I’m not quibbling with the notion that an important part of the cutting-edge’s conception of poetry involves politics on multiple levels. I do maintain that a lot of the poetry created in that mode suffers because, as part of one level of political act, it unwisely dispenses with some of the methods that make poetry interesting and important in the first place. I (perhaps in error) feel that I’m typical of a pretty large group of readers and I have to wonder if an aesthetically satisfying political poetry is even possible. Maybe it’s better to engage in politics in other, more direct ways… because when it comes to political poems the choice seems to be between the obvious and the incomprehensible, or the unintentionally or intentionally artless.
Patriotism. It’s become a distasteful, even shameful, word to me. I don’t know when it changed, at what point in the evolution of my thinking the mere invocation of the word started to make me shiver.
I love this country, though not to the exclusion of all others. The United States is a good place to live, for which I am thankful. There are other great places too. The American experiment—and aren’t all nations really experiments?—is noble and well-intentioned. For all its faults, I feel fortunate to live in the United States. The relative safety, the material comfort, the continued existence of open spaces… I try to be mindful of the gratitude I should feel. And the art! Just as there could have been no Dostoevsky without the panoramic panoply that was (and is again) Russia, the languorous sprawl of Whitman, the concise blinding insight of Dickinson, and the trickster enlightenment of Frost could not exist without the essential largeness—the oversized aspirations, the appetites, the sheer bulk—that is the United States of America.
But patriotism has become—or come to represent, or be twisted as the basis for—an essentially narrow conception of the world that values insularity and entitlement over engagement and charity. (more…)
I’m thoroughly disgusted by the party line Supreme Court decision in the Morse v. Frederick (aka Bong Hits 4 Jesus) case. I’m too angry and frustrated to write a dispassionate, analytical post. But I would like to make a few points.
Frederick was not on school grounds at the time he put the banner up and the activity he was watching was not a school event! It’s true that Frederick’s classmates were on a school sponsored trip to watch the event, but that’s no different than going to the zoo or the museum. Fredericks didn’t go to school that day; he was not the school’s responsibility at the time any more than it is the schools responsibility to discipline, punish, or reward one of my children if they are at the museum at the same time as any group of students from their school (or any other).
There is no such thing as speech that “deserves” the protection of the First Amendment. That should be the default stance. The only question is what speech might be denied that protection. That denial must only be made rarely and for exceedingly clear and well-defined reasons.
Whether you support the decision or not, the “obvious” meaning of the banner (it’s non-sensical on at least one level) is beside the point… the speech act must be considered as a whole. The majority opinion on this case is hopelessly confused. Alito writes that he supports the restriction, but “only” as long as:
(a) it goes no further than to hold that a public school may restrict speech that a reasonable observer would interpret as advocating illegal drug use and (b) it provides no support for any restriction of speech that can plausibly be interpreted as commenting on any political or social issue, including speech on issues such as the wisdom of the war on drugs or of legalizing marijuana for medicinal use
Pretty much any statement on drug use can be plausibly understood as a comment on a social and political issue if for no other reason than the fact that the legality and illegality of drugs is itself a social and political issue! Saying “Take a Bong Hit, Jesus Would Approve” is not only advocating drug use, but also a commentary on religion and drugs, on the nature of the character known as Jesus, etc. Simply saying “Take a Bong Hit!” can be easily understood not only by the “obvious” meaning, but also as a statement about marijuana and legalization. Alaska is one of many states that constantly seems to be addressing this issue, it is very easy to see how this is a kind of political speech.
And let’s not forget something else that should make school officials and teachers twitch: by Alito’s own definition, many of their existing rules prohibiting (for example) t-shirts with slogans that are racist, gang-related, or that take a position on sexuality should be protected. It’s pretty hard to argue that a shirt with the logo “White Power” or “Man on Man” is not an example of social and political commentary.
Our local paper has an article about school district officials that “applaud the decision.” Any school administrator or teacher that supports this decision is not fit to be a school administrator or teacher. Personally I think they ought to be fired, but I know that’s not reasonable. However, not only is the decision an egregious, ideologically motivated attack on free speech, but if these teachers and adminstrators think about it for a while they will realize that the decision does not only give them the extra-curricular power they seem to desire but also obligates them to be responsible for children all around them who are not in their care anytime they go anywhere on a school function. Is that really a responsibility they desire?
The whole thing makes me sick. Given this case and the nearly simultaneous decision on campaign reform (another vexing issue regarding speech and the political process) it’s not an overstatement to say that I feel despair for our country, our culture and my children, for whom this constant erosion of rights and ideologically driven acts are sadly going to be the norm. Someone on a mailing list I belong to wrote “If we save our constitution, we’ll be grabbing it at the last minute before it plunges into flames. The edges are starting to smoke.” I can’t help but agree.
I have a hard time not feeling deep contempt for anyone that supports this decision. That contempt in turn makes me question myself and how I handle such disputes. How do I should orient myself towards these things in my own life given my emerging attempts to be more “present” in my day-to-day activities. Strangely, withdrawal from even worrying about them seems like the most attractive way. I’m lost just thinking about it.
There are some powerful images in this Slate exhibit about how to approach the disappeared artistically, but none more so than this video of an artist painting– with water on stone– the likenesses of disappeared individuals, a race against time before the images inevitably fade away…
As Sartre constantly reminds us, we are what we do.
In short, existentialism is not a philosophy that allows us to feel sorry for ourselves in the midst of our malaise. It is a philosophy with which we can come to grips with these terrible times and actually change them. The recent midterm election was encouraging. What it suggests is that America is collectively recouping its existentialist roots, not because of national pessimism but because of what I hope is the beginning of a cooperative optimism and the sense that things as they are cannot stand.
Dawkins treats Islam as just another deplorable religion, but there is a difference. The difference lies in the extent to which religious certitude lingers in the Islamic world, and in the harm it does. Richard Dawkins’s even-handedness is well-intentioned, but it is misplaced.
If one is going to be intellectually honest, though, doesn’t one also have to take into account the less overt societal effects of religious adherence? Christians have eased up a bit on the crusades, but religious certitude is responsible for a lot of suffering and death. Isn’t the Iraq conflict largely a result of the certitude of Christian hawks wanting to spread Christianity in the name of Democracy? What is the cost to our society in senior citizens left to go hungry, the idea of rehabilitation of lawbreakers abandoned, and the cover provided by Christian morals for child and spousal abusers?
Christianity may be a quiet killer and subtly provocative, but it is (sometimes) a killer and (sometimes) provocative nonetheless. If anything, it is often that much more insidious due to the habits of many Christians to characterize assertion of personal, moralistic beliefs as the only rational and altruistic path available. I’d rather not have to choose between the shot in the face and the stab in the back, thank you very much.
It sounds better to title this post positively than to say what it’s really about: my intolerance. The common adage is that as one grows older one grows more intolerant. But when I was younger I was already extremely intolerant. Not in the grand and notable ways– I quickly outgrew my childhood racism and homophobia, borne of ignorance and small-townism– but in personal and aesthetic ways. Disliking a movie I enjoyed was like a slap in the face. Not taking my advice regarding life’s affairs was a recipe for ending a friendship. And beware the friend who disagreed with me about authors or writing!
As I’ve gotten older I’ve slowly started to change that. I’m OK with just feeling lucky that I appreciate something another may not, and I try not to give advice except in when couched in the broadest generalities.
But in other matters I have grown more intolerant. I’ve pretty much always been a raving political liberal who was unafraid to voice an opinion, but in recent years I have a hard time maintaining more than a superficial friendship with people who are part of the political opposition.
I suppose it comes down to active harm. Those who disagree with my aesthetic taste don’t really harm my own enjoyment. Those who don’t take my advice are simply acting with the same independence I probably would. But many Republicans– particularly Bush supporters– are, as far as I’m concerned, engaged in active harm against people I love and things I care deeply about.
It’s one thing to ignore differences at an aesthetic level. It’s another to ignore it at the visceral level of people and actions which attack the very foundation of the society I live in and hurt real people I am close to. I’d like to be able to ignore that giant elephant in the room when I’m around those people, but I don’t have the strength to keep it up for very long before I feel obligated to make an attempt at changing their mind.
Supporting President Bush and the Republican Administration isn’t an abstraction. It’s a position that is fundamentally and deeply morally wrong. It’s a position that is costing people their lives, their privacy, and their civil liberties. We are in a dark time that will hopefully be viewed as a sick, twisted aberration… it could well be the beginning of the end of everything that once made our system– as flawed as it is– one of the best around.
Supporting Bush and this administration is engaging in active harm: condoning torture, supporting the worst attacks on our civil and human rights (and those of citizens around the world) that we’ve ever witnessed, working against acceptance of homosexuals and homosexual couples (not to mention advocating discrimination against them), abandoning the poor and the old, systematically driving our educational system into an even deeper hole than before, and selling out on our promises to retirees and veterans. I can sit and engage in other conversation knowing we disagree about the importance of Shelley’s poetry, but I can’t sit for very long and pretend that these active, hurtful agendas don’t exist if you’ve made yourself a part of them.
This is a horrible weakness on my part, I am sure. But I feel it as strongly about it as if I had witnessed that person engaged directly in these activities themselves…
Hence it becomes more and more difficult to estimate the morality of an act leading to war because it is more and more difficult to know precisely what is going on. Not only is war increasingly a matter for pure specialists operating with fantastically complex machinery, but above all there is the question of absolute secrecy regarding everything that seriously affects defense policy. We may amuse ourselves by reading the reports in mass media and imagine that these “facts” provide sufficient basis for moral judgments for and against war. But in reality, we are simply elaborating moral fantasies in a vacuum. Whatever we may decide, we remain completely at the mercy of the governmental power, or rather the anonymous power of managers and generals who stand behind the facade of government. We have no way of directly influencing the decisions and policies taken by these people. In practice, we must fall back on a blinder and blinder faith which more and more resigns itself to trusting the “legitimately constituted authority” without having the vaguest notion what that authority is liable to do next. This condition of irresponsibility and passivity is extremely dangerous. It is hardly conducive to genuine morality.
June 17, 2009
Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 
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