tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-52613405090731544732024-03-13T06:51:14.023-04:00Broken TurtleLiterature and Politics from a microcosm called Delaware. Here all the multifaceted players across the great capitalist contradiction are reduced to a few actors: a handful of banking and chemical oligarchs squatting in châteaux, a stable of artists downwind who either take inspiration for amnesia and roses or take a stand, challenging the living to repair a polluted world.Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.comBlogger101125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-77350025649916671732023-11-03T13:52:00.000-04:002023-11-03T13:52:18.658-04:00Palestine and Israel: Give to all their daily bread<span style="font-size: medium;"><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisblZHyTK-9DnytkD4czQSmQeWEj0QWPSb6pwLRvyY4xRHybxUpDFSA8ACwtSV-qJr7oHZgj4Rp7qBLDp4RLregCB_xbGM_ch6oFXtTeRaARsk9K2HFDKXWPvcylx4FKVGhyphenhyphen1SQvU08QvVDb_wErhaud-PfKKtNT88kjhFWWdG0YePeYP9DVcrJafBM8yC/s2102/Gaza%20Woman%20AP.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1496" data-original-width="2102" height="510" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisblZHyTK-9DnytkD4czQSmQeWEj0QWPSb6pwLRvyY4xRHybxUpDFSA8ACwtSV-qJr7oHZgj4Rp7qBLDp4RLregCB_xbGM_ch6oFXtTeRaARsk9K2HFDKXWPvcylx4FKVGhyphenhyphen1SQvU08QvVDb_wErhaud-PfKKtNT88kjhFWWdG0YePeYP9DVcrJafBM8yC/w717-h510/Gaza%20Woman%20AP.png" width="717" /></a></div>What is Palestine, now exploding at the Gaza/Israeli frontier? It is a crossroads of three continents. There a braided river of Canaanites, Philistines, Samaritans, Jebusites, Jews and more have been interbreeding and religiously converting for millennia. They also bear traces of succeeding empires: Babylonian, Greek, Roman, Tartar, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, British, and Zionist. Much about the place persists, however, unchanging as flatbread from an ancient taboon oven. That’s Palestine.<br /> <br />Like flatbread, resistance to empire is ingrained by legendary struggles: of Maccabees, of Fedayeen, of that rebel Yeshua himself. To Palestinians, Zionists from Europe had no more right to colonize Palestine and impose apartheid as Brits and Boers did in South Africa. Nor, for that matter, as Europeans to ethnically cleanse Native Americans and thrive off African sweat.<br /> <br />Americans now lament our conquests and mitigate our victims’ modes of resistance by recalling our own crimes. Did Natives wipe out whole white families and mutilate blue-coated corpses at Little Big Horn? Well, we massacred women and children at Wounded Knee, spurred the Trail of Tears, kidnapped Native children, robbed Native lands and resources, and were faithless in all treaties with First Peoples.<br /> <br />When it comes to Palestinians, we disregard a comparable past. Geopolitical exigencies, media cowardice, political opportunism, and incessant Zionist propaganda have combined to devalue Palestinian human rights and demonize advocacy in their defense.<br /> <br />While powerful states concoct solutions based on self-interest, the ongoing Naqba, or catastrophe that began with the terror-driven 1948 expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians to create a majority-Jewish Israel, continues. Since 1967, Israel has imposed the longest military occupation in history, blockading Gaza, executing journalists—including American—killing hundreds of mostly peaceful Palestinian demonstrators at the Gaza/Israeli perimeter, rigging a court system to forbid Palestinians from building or improving homes, demolishing thousands of homes built despite that rigging, proliferating illegal settlements, protecting settler violence (including destruction of ancient olive trees), building giant walls on Palestinian territory, imposing checkpoints impeding normal movement, imprisoning children without due process, frustrating every non-violent protest by Palestinians, and maintaining what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Israeli Human Rights organization B’Tselem call the “crime of apartheid.”<br /> <br />Like the Israeli occupation of Palestine, refugee camps that house 1.5 million Palestinians across the region are unsustainable. Bourj el-Barajne, the peaceful and well-run Palestinian camp in Lebanon where my spouse and I befriended a loving family, now shelters thousands of Syrian refugees. Longing for their human rights of return after seventy-five years in crowded camps breeds desperation and bitterness.<br /> <br />B’Tselem kept score of the killings from year 2000 to last month: 1,330 Israelis, 10,649 Palestinians. I am horrified by any notion that Israelis should suffer as the Palestinians do, as in the wanton bloodletting by Hamas a few weeks ago. My Palestinian and Jewish friends alike are weeping. Both sides must know: what flew in bygone Jericho is now proscribed by international law.<br /> <br />Tragically, instead of recoiling from the primrose path of unconditional aid and support for Israel, U.S. politicians are doubling down on a road to hell as Israel doubles down on war crimes. U. S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken quickly replaced his tweet on X, “We urge all sides to refrain from violence and retaliatory attacks,” with boilerplate “Israel has the right to defend itself.” “[I]t’s time to be cruel,” declared Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich. Knesset member Ariel Kallner called for a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza Israel, denying them water, food, and fuel. Israel is bombing apartment buildings, mosques, refugee camps, schools, clinics, crops, and hospitals in Gaza, according to B’Tselem.<br /> <br />Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza, including those hospitalized, in incubators, old, or disabled, to abandon northern Gaza within 24 hours and head to the unsafe south, an aggravated “forcible transfer.” Relentless bombing has now killed over 9,000 Gazans, almost 3800 of them children, all named by Hamas and verified by AP, Save the Children, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, Al Jazeera, and your own eyes. These are clear war crimes, punishable by the International Criminal Court. Stats current 11/3/2023.<br /> <br />It's time to end the age of emperors and colonists who treat indigenous subjects as barbarians unworthy of human rights. We must insist that our politicians be bold and reject the illegal proclamations and actions of Israeli leaders. Demand a cease-fire on all sides and the release all hostages. Give to all, Jews and Palestinians alike, their daily bread, their equal and inalienable human rights from the river to the sea.<br /><br /></span><br /></span><p><style>@font-face
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-68074478870806122952022-09-05T00:31:00.009-04:002022-09-05T07:28:38.509-04:00A Labor Day Message: The Hammer of Solidarity<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-indent: 0.3in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRv0M3Atm8w8pu4f3eufDGkKa2K0-kJr8ANVIV-PBJePNzRGCQO9fbVfTq1obs7WAqALcwzgbdrJsEMEnIaCZjQrMTxVBJpm-e-AZVebk7SFBq7toOBP8IKIFbhHY4zYjkZRvBy0GkS1Mj975f6jMRgV6yRaLwHiMaEwLJoCt3oGa5sKzCMRUhI01o0Q/s330/Hammer%20of%20Solidarity.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="302" data-original-width="330" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRv0M3Atm8w8pu4f3eufDGkKa2K0-kJr8ANVIV-PBJePNzRGCQO9fbVfTq1obs7WAqALcwzgbdrJsEMEnIaCZjQrMTxVBJpm-e-AZVebk7SFBq7toOBP8IKIFbhHY4zYjkZRvBy0GkS1Mj975f6jMRgV6yRaLwHiMaEwLJoCt3oGa5sKzCMRUhI01o0Q/w200-h183/Hammer%20of%20Solidarity.png" width="200" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Labor Day is a time to remember the
value of work and the best tool in labor’s toolbox: Solidarity. Fair wages,
dignity on the job, security for our families—and these days—even democracy
itself depend on that Hammer of Solidarity. But Solidarity has been taking a
beating from all sides recently, deforme</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;"><span>d by fear and distrust. The head’s been
dislodged by callout culture and the handle gouged by resentment. Mostly these
harms come from outside, sometimes by those with good intentions, but often by
those determined to destroy us. When we parrot their calls, however, it is we who
harm ourselves. </span></span></p></div><p style="text-align: justify;"></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Callout culture relies largely on
commercial and social media to convert real or perceived grievances into a
cancellation campaign. There’s no due process, no proportionate penalty, and no
quality of mercy in this form of justice. While some say it impowers the
powerless, it is, in fact, a dis-empowering distraction, focusing on individuals
rather than systems, substituting divisive cheap shots for the enormous efforts
required to organize the working class. Think about the arduous campaign of a
previous generation of radicals to spread industrial unionism throughout the auto,
steel, and mining industries in the first half of the last century.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">“Divide and rule” has always been
the way conquerors and corporations protect power and profits. Hence, corporate
media is happy to promote this sort of divisive “empowerment.” </span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Fortunately, there is push back
against such a detour from real organizing. For example, the veteran African
American feminist Lorretta Ross has promoted “calling in,” “a callout” she
explains, “done with love and respect.”</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">The powerful who abuse their
station and influence should still be called out, but callout culture often targets
those with no real power and relies on the exploiter to enforce its cancel campaigns.
</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Recently, liberal media has begun
to pay attention to Lorretta Ross’s message, but they minimize the progressive
nature of her arguments. They neglect to mention what she says about the far
more significant cancellation of progressive and labor voices and the way cancel
culture is exaggerated by the corporate far right to promote resentment.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">How many activists and union
leaders do you see interviewed on Public Television? How many thousands of
workers are fired illegally—canceled—every year for union activity? How many
non-union “at will” employees are terminated for somehow offending the boss?
Don’t expect to see it on the Six O‘Clock News, much less Fox News.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Now, I worked for three decades at
Chrysler’s Newark Assembly Plant (NAP) in Delaware and was a member (and
sometimes officer) in UAW Local 1183. In our plant we had men, women, whites,
browns, Italians, Blacks, gays, trans, Christians, Muslims, guys who wore the
Stars and Bars on their backs, and left-wingers like me. Not that there were not
tensions sometimes, but by and large we worked peacefully side-by-side on the
assembly line, partied together at social functions, and swung that hammer of
solidarity together on the picket line. The callout crowd would have been
outraged by how one African American trans sister was known affectionately as
“Sweet Thang,” and one of the few Jews in the plant was nick-named “A-rab.” A
woman we dubbed Sarge would have reacted to sexual harassment with a knuckle
sandwich, not a tweet. That’s not to say that we should not have been more
sensitive, and we were in more formal situations, but shop talk around machines
that could rip your head off tended to be as brutal as that welding gun pelting
your skin with white-hot slag.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Those tensions that we expressed
insensitively at times are now weaponized by the most dangerous, undemocratic,
and anti-union forces in American history. </span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">In the name of Solidarity, we need
to think twice before taking their poisoned bait.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Just as Loretta Ross warns us not
to call out those on our same class level, we should be wise to those in the
far-right media who call out our class siblings for perceived advantages.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Take the reduction in student debt
just accomplished. The far right claims this is a favor to the bourgeois elite.
If that were true, I would resent it, too, just as I resent the $987,237 in
Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans forgiven for Pennsylvania Republican
Rep. Mike Kelly, who tweeted regarding the student loans, “Asking plumbers and
carpenters to pay off the loans of Wall Street advisors and lawyers isn’t just
unfair. It’s also bad policy.” </span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Does he hear himself?</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Sorry, Mike, plumbers and
carpenters take out student loans, too, along with freight haulers, medical
technicians, home care workers, and physical therapists. As Jim Tankersley
<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/us/politics/biden-student-loans-middle-class.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes">notes</a>, “the people eligible for debt relief are disproportionately young and
Black. And they are concentrated in the middle band of Americans by income,
defined as households earning between $51,000 and $82,000 a year.” The cost of
the program is <a href="https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/government-verify/inflation-reduction-act-not-medicare-cut-drug-price-savings-bill-congress-senate-democrats/536-5f2427b9-daa5-499a-987b-f1e7557036fc">offset</a> by Medicare savings in reduced drug prices, while PPP (only
a <a href="https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/2022/jul/was-paycheck-protection-program-effective">quarter of which</a> actually supported jobs that would otherwise have
disappeared) came out of the taxpayer’s pockets and was rife with <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/biggest-fraud-generation-looting-covid-relief-program-known-ppp-n1279664">fraud</a>. Note
that since Ronald Reagan, government support for social goods like college
education has plummeted, exploding the cost of enrollment—eighteen
times at the University of Delaware since the early 60s, when I first attended.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">And it is social goods that the
fake pro-worker ultra-right politicians are after, such as <a href="https://larson.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/republicans-are-coming-after-social-security-democrats-take-note">social security</a>,
<a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/workers-amazon-starbucks-gop-union-labor-republicans-cruz-hawley-rubio">collective bargaining</a>, and—spoiler alert—taxing the billionaire class.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Now, both liberals and their
ultra-right adversaries are responsible for caving in to (Libs) or coddling
(Repubs) capitalists in the de-industrialization of America and shipping our
jobs overseas. Recent climate legislation, however, is reversing this trend, in
tech production and infrastructure, not just brain work. The ultra-right fought this legislation,
as well as every other bill proposed by the current administration and meant to
help the American people, and they lie about climate change in the face of
thousand-year-record droughts and floods. </span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">It is the working class, of course,
that drives progressive change in America, not capitalists or their politician
enablers. Union drives are sweeping the nation, from Starbucks to Amazon to the
unionized auto industry, re-energized by the drive to sweep out the corrupt leaders
who negotiated the two-tier wage structure. Talk about a means for the suits to
stoke resentment!</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">On the wall of our old union hall, there
used to be a painting, <i>Arsenal of Democracy, </i>representing the role of
industrial labor in fighting European fascism and defending American democracy.
Now we have “semi-fascists” at the gates, baiting the working class with the
poison of resentment, covert and overt racism, and lies.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium;">Don’t spread the bait. When social
media memes get you steaming with resentment, consider who that resentment
serves and what class sibling it scapegoats. Safeguarding Solidarity safeguards
our heritage and honor. This Labor Day, let us cherish our Hammer of
Solidarity: “It’s the hammer justice / It’s the bell of freedom / It’s the song
about love between / Our brothers and our sisters / All over this land.” (“If I
Had a Hammer,” Lee Hays and Pete Seeger)</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><style>@font-face
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{page:WordSection1;}</style> </span><br /></p>Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-43966505293794257002022-08-06T10:06:00.002-04:002022-08-06T10:30:15.661-04:00Disarming Tome of Trans Childhood<p class="MsoNormal"><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKSef9DGyhWsud6iFGpxIXFu8GZCKOxsqv1qjeLYxXlgxDmJL5jUaIUcvTaI0Vz3WHF_tYtOW1b8eBhsRMs3SRu2zcec-KaUWGWfQ1GePURpDqkiZ9lYlEKI0GuMyfGK67PqxjT8Xkynj4OQEtrk3UTLsinXAJFmfDoLsZSAeCqdfRIXHRN4zXpK7ZYQ/s2476/My%20Rainbow%20Cover.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2476" data-original-width="1980" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKSef9DGyhWsud6iFGpxIXFu8GZCKOxsqv1qjeLYxXlgxDmJL5jUaIUcvTaI0Vz3WHF_tYtOW1b8eBhsRMs3SRu2zcec-KaUWGWfQ1GePURpDqkiZ9lYlEKI0GuMyfGK67PqxjT8Xkynj4OQEtrk3UTLsinXAJFmfDoLsZSAeCqdfRIXHRN4zXpK7ZYQ/s320/My%20Rainbow%20Cover.jpg" width="256" /></a></i></div><p></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i>My Rainbow </i>(Koala Penguin Random House, 2020)</span></span></div><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">by Trinity and DeShanna Neal</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">Illustrated by Art Twink</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">DeShanna Neal has crafted a
disarming and instructive tale about trans kids, specifically, her daughter and
collaborator in the tome, Trinity.</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">The whole issue does need
disarming, having been heartlessly weaponized by capitalists and their allies sowing
fear from a commercialized pulpit. As well, folks of a certain age like me need
instruction, old dogs that we are, tripped up by pronouns.</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">With beautiful illustrations by Art
Twink, the story opens in the living room of Trinity’s African American family.
Trinity, a child with autism, sooths herself—DeShanna calls Trinity “her” and “she”—by
stroking the soft pelt of the family’s pet pig, Peter Porker. But Trinity is
troubled. She sees herself (identifies as?) a trans girl, so, she informs Mom,
she wishes she had long hair. </span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">Now, in the adult world, this
suggests a host of fraught issues: about Black hair, about gendered hair
lengths, about living with a host of other marginalized traits.</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">The reader, as well as Trinity, is
quickly put at ease as DeShanna navigates these issues with the equanimity of a
Buddhist—DeShanna is a Buddhist, by the way—and the tenderness of a loving
mother. “We are all a little different from one another,” she tells here
daughter. “You’re a beautiful rainbow.” As much as Trinity wants long hair,
however, “it made her itchy when it was growing out,” Mom reports. Still, says
wise Mom, “Trinity knew herself best of all. And if she said she needed long
hair, she NEEDED long hair!” </span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">Exactly how our happy ending
unfolds, I’ll let the reader buy the book, but the final page says, “When each
of your colors has space to shine, you light up the whole sky.” </span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">Incidentally, DeShanna’s book has
been banned in Texas, home of nation-wide schoolbook cancelling for decades.
The enormous number of library and schoolbooks cancelled by a few right-wing
activists in Texas—the dominant market in the USA—makes the small number of
works some progressives have challenged pale into near insignificance. All the
same, as a socialist writer and publisher, I think the cancelling tends to
skirt due process, validate corporate and state censorship, and favor calling
out over organizing the multiracial, multi-gendered working class. </span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVRzxF8Ap__nwRHLtNfhW3R7VeRjSILOQMnlxUtaMHCkVpJz9G8EfrYj_d7KEk5L3c1jHa_9-Di-q3cdKJAllrMiTldECn5YC9_9l5RsuYW-4KqRxRMakTiLp3bSsX_4bhhGCzgj013Eb7BnyX5Ga42rKECbJ89abPIUSJO3ofVgRqZ_S8rExpvGNV6w/s534/June%2030th,%202016.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="476" data-original-width="534" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVRzxF8Ap__nwRHLtNfhW3R7VeRjSILOQMnlxUtaMHCkVpJz9G8EfrYj_d7KEk5L3c1jHa_9-Di-q3cdKJAllrMiTldECn5YC9_9l5RsuYW-4KqRxRMakTiLp3bSsX_4bhhGCzgj013Eb7BnyX5Ga42rKECbJ89abPIUSJO3ofVgRqZ_S8rExpvGNV6w/w200-h178/June%2030th,%202016.jpg" width="200" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: times;"></span><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">And DeShanna’s work deals only with
a mother’s wise and compassionate response to her trans-identifying daughter’s wishes
for long hair. It’s not about medical treatments, about which, in the non-fiction
world, DeShanna has been a champion. Texas attempts to deny the mere reality of
a trans-childhood, lest it become socially contagious, a claim made in a recent
paper by Lisa Littman called “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults
perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.” Littman interviewed
only the confounded parents of trans teens, not trans teens themselves, and not
trans teens driven from their families by such confounded parents, teens
rendered homeless, sexually exploited, suicidal. </span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;">
</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">Now, Delaware’s big-hearted author
DeShanna Neal is nationally celebrated as an activist, having advocated for trans-inclusive
policies in the Red Clay Consolidated School District’s Diversity, Equity, and
Inclusion (D.E.I) Committee.</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">Haters often try to obscure the working-class-based
intersectional solidarity in such activism. Pink-washing corporations often
implement D.E.I programs for good P.R. and lawsuit-avoidance while continuing
to funnel campaign support to fascists and LBGTQ-plus-phobes to fight unions
and corporate taxes.</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">As DeShanna puts it in her campaign
literature, “Currently, a conservative vocal minority and multi-millionaire
corporations dominate the conversation in Dover. I believe in the power of
individuals speaking for themselves.”</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">Did I forget to tell you DeShanna
is running for office in Delaware Representative District 13, covering Elsmere?
She hopes to replace House Majority Whip Rep. Larry Mitchell, a former police
officer opposed to police accountability legislation and protections for the
most basic human rights for people without housing. </span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">Having graduated from Concord High-School
(<i>go Raiders!</i>), Deshanna holds a master’s degree and is endorsed by
Progressive Democrats of Delaware, the Working Families Party, Moms Demand
Action/Gun Sense Legislation, and Delaware Democratic Socialists of America.</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">A person with DeShanna Neal’s
courage, principles, and effectiveness will be an equally effective
Representative for Elsmere.</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i>My Rainbow is </i>available at
all major book outlets, including Amazon Kindle.</span></p><span style="font-family: times;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;">To get involved in DeShanna Neal’s
campaign click <a href="https://www.deshanna4district13.com">https://www.deshanna4district13.com</a>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6pt; text-align: justify;"> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVktqfHgUZwm71UDc4Ro1bO_l5VTavdatAWoy19qtz3SnwAavjpUl8D7Q9SwUEXA9g5-_3JS5062pYG96LKNxPaK-JRdWhModQdnKtC4sRmfi01mV69VlAN7LdKZ0pNtSJfv73jchxG9bQtKFx9y7R5DaUHDgAQ28uoh8yqi5OaES4uczQgwfWwWhBlg/s1806/whole%20sky.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1806" data-original-width="1420" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVktqfHgUZwm71UDc4Ro1bO_l5VTavdatAWoy19qtz3SnwAavjpUl8D7Q9SwUEXA9g5-_3JS5062pYG96LKNxPaK-JRdWhModQdnKtC4sRmfi01mV69VlAN7LdKZ0pNtSJfv73jchxG9bQtKFx9y7R5DaUHDgAQ28uoh8yqi5OaES4uczQgwfWwWhBlg/w314-h400/whole%20sky.jpg" width="314" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-59680962520940689892021-10-09T12:22:00.005-04:002021-10-09T14:26:20.902-04:00Why I support One-Person-One-Vote in the upcoming UAW referendum<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right; text-indent: 0.3in;">By Phillip Bannowsky <br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">“AND ARE WE A FIGHTING UNION?”
called UAW Vice President General Holiefield to hundreds of Chrysler’s Newark
(Delaware) Assembly plant workers. The “General” no doubt expected a resounding
martial response. None came. Maybe nobody in this 2007 special meeting of UAW
Local 1183 workers heard him. I retired from Chrysler in 2001, but I was there.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">“AND ARE WE A FIGHTING UNION?”
Holifield repeated.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">A few titters here and
there—crickets, basically.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghnmEdubnYgUnB6QgLf7T5btO0-UUaaZLS46TewLxAp_oFKlixb15TGydjWD5zy7dweQJrfm6XjDX-Rd6Vk7M6d-uTqpYLTjwkm4MPLiiKXcDTwGMMSFk_7edxeXLV7c9jW_oxajvIgKNs/s856/general+holiefield.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="856" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghnmEdubnYgUnB6QgLf7T5btO0-UUaaZLS46TewLxAp_oFKlixb15TGydjWD5zy7dweQJrfm6XjDX-Rd6Vk7M6d-uTqpYLTjwkm4MPLiiKXcDTwGMMSFk_7edxeXLV7c9jW_oxajvIgKNs/s320/general+holiefield.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">What, I wondered, did he expect,
having come basically to shove a s**t sandwich—the two-tier wage structure—down
our throats? New hires would get half-pay indefinitely.<br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Undeterred, Holiefield continued
his pitch. The global economy was circling the drain. Detroit automakers were
bleeding cash. This was only temporary. It would affect only a special class of
workers, not those on our current jobs.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Having experience in local
collective bargaining, I was inclined to be sympathetic. We were always
squeezed between the rock of a good contract and the hard place of a shut-down.
In the Q and A, I expressed my sympathy but argued that the two-tier violated
UAW principles of solidarity and was contrary to the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, Article 23, paragraph 2: “Everyone, without any discrimination, has
the right to equal pay for equal work.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Turns out that Holliefield did not
exactly abide with that principle when he took the lion’s share of some <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-68e44047f214af4517603fe765b57b25">3.5
million dollars in bribes</a> doled out to UAW officials by Fiat Chrysler Auto
(FCA) and laundered through the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center (NTC). Since
the capitulation, the UAW International Executive Board (IEB) was serving
itself up ever move lavish vacations and gifts with union funds.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Now ten UAW officials, including
two former presidents, have been sentenced for corruption, and the Union barely
escaped a federal take-over by signing a <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-edmi/pr/united-states-reaches-settlement-united-auto-workers-union-reform-union-and-end">consent
decree</a> (CD) agreeing to a membership-wide referendum on whether to continue
electing our national leadership by convention delegates or do it by an
all-member one-person-one-vote (1P1V) system. Essentially, claim advocates of
1P1V, “To stifle dissent, the AC has bribed, pressured and intimidated
convention delegates and their locals to force them to vote for their
candidates.”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">I am not inclined to doubt it.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">UAW members should be receiving
their ballots on October 19. Still, some members have fallen off (or been
dropped off) the union's LUIS information sharing application. Ballots must be received by November 29, 2021. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">An <a href="https://www.uawmonitor.com/">independent monitor</a> is in charge of this
process, and members should contact them or their local union if they don't get a ballot, although some
locals have been less than responsive.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">All sides agree that a lack of
transparency and accountability has led to this disaster. But there is a third
factor that the sides do not agree on: the stranglehold on the UAW by the
Administration Caucus, which was founded in the late forties by UAW pioneer Walter
Reuther.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span></span>Walter and his brother Victor were
both members of the Socialist Party and part of a broad coalition of
progressives who built the UAW. It made sense that those organizers should make
sure that new leaders should share the social vision of its founders. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrvjo2Ki-FG7hcQ8FL_P516PR9pnm0vX57BMEEvEvfnRcnBLIDdRQpkY7a7vVesItKsljPBGHrTRpBFVbNYpfpp6tE0o9Wt3wykY0Q1tjt3etLUE4-1EhW3UNvNMM9xXHgxIWXH-SQvO2W/s376/main_reuther.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="250" data-original-width="376" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrvjo2Ki-FG7hcQ8FL_P516PR9pnm0vX57BMEEvEvfnRcnBLIDdRQpkY7a7vVesItKsljPBGHrTRpBFVbNYpfpp6tE0o9Wt3wykY0Q1tjt3etLUE4-1EhW3UNvNMM9xXHgxIWXH-SQvO2W/s320/main_reuther.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">I chanced to run into the son of an
early UAW VP at a bar in Cape Cod, and he told me how it worked in the old days.
“My dad had to ask a union leader if he could run for steward. Dad was a smart
guy with a college degree, and he said OK, but most of his constituents were—let
us say—not Jewish, he explained, and would be unlikely to vote for a Jew. On
election day, the leader ran up to him, profusely apologizing that they had
misspelled his name on the ballot. Now it looked not-Jewish, and he won.” Such
shenanigans might seem understandable: Why should prejudice among new union
members trump solidarity? </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">And indeed, the UAW system won us
great pay, benefits, defined-benefit pensions, and a modicum of due process
dealing with management.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">So, when I began working for
Chrysler in 1969, I was able to enjoy these benefits due to some hard
bargaining and costly strikes.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">At the same time, the working
conditions were appalling. There were contaminants and crushing dangers everywhere.
Some folks roasted between paint ovens while sloshing toxic solvents over car
bodies and themselves. A man working in a pit near me was crushed to death by
an overhanging fixture moving down the line. Some foremen were just plan nasty
or incompetent buffoons—unnecessarily, because some were decent guys. Maybe two
women in a shop of 300. Few foremen were Black, and all were men. The
highest-ranking Black employee was a safety manager who sold safety shoes and
was there to take a fall when disaster struck. And it was pure, numbing
drudgery. We were treated like dumb children because it was dumbbell work.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Despite his social conscience,
Reuther's Administration Caucus was built to forestall rivals. And his unionism
tended toward what’s called business unionism. Focus on economics and let the
corporations manage. Reuther referred to auto factories as “<a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/uaw-history-militant-corruption-concessions-gary-jones-indictment">gold-plated
sweatshops</a>.” </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Still, Reuther took progressive
social positions. He supported the Civil Rights movement. He opposed nuclear
energy. But he could not control what others would do with the Administration
Caucus after he was killed in a plane crash in 1970.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">When Leonard Woodcock took over as
UAW president, he fired the anti-nuke staff and began hobnobbing with the
corporate elite. He became a diplomat after Doug Frazer took over the UAW
presidency. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Frazer confronted a great turning
point in the labor movement when the capitalists went on the</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA4slchon0JcM-gp9o26t6SgyRcXfqrYYH2nKeby6SpmcaVSkmWB4-iuwVPezgB7hhTJ6QWhrKeLOkAaGXvs36tC56X538EAhJwf03iUeRo9fLwFgoUBK0AKZHewbBQ2lESz2U9zliQ-68/s720/634px-Douglas_Fraser%252C_ca._1981.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="634" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA4slchon0JcM-gp9o26t6SgyRcXfqrYYH2nKeby6SpmcaVSkmWB4-iuwVPezgB7hhTJ6QWhrKeLOkAaGXvs36tC56X538EAhJwf03iUeRo9fLwFgoUBK0AKZHewbBQ2lESz2U9zliQ-68/s320/634px-Douglas_Fraser%252C_ca._1981.jpg" width="282" /></a></div> offensive. Frazer
had joined the Labor-Management Group, set up under the Nixon administration to
seek cooperative solutions to labor-management problems. But then Frazer saw
the light and quit in 1978, warning of “a one-<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/002365603200012928">sided</a>
class war." He declared, "I would rather sit with the rural poor, the
desperate children of urban blight, the victims of racism, and working people
seeking a better life than with those whose religion is the status quo, whose
goal is profit and whose hearts are cold."<p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Our contracts had been improving
dramatically up to this period. We were up to 12 days paid personal leave each
year, in addition to our holidays, sick days, and supplemental unemployment
benefits during model change and other layoffs. But then came a series of
strategic attacks on the better union contracts. A fiscal crisis hit New York
City in 1978, and a special board dominated by financial bigwigs like Felix
Rohatyn “negotiated” concessions with city unions, all as part of a “rescue
plan.” The next year, Chrysler was facing bankruptcy, and another special board
concocted a rescue plan entailing dumping those personal days and exacting a
loan from union members in the form of delayed pay. <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=WI5XDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA403&lpg=PA403&dq=Felix+Rohatyn+approved+of+chrysler+rescue&source=bl&ots=HbNxSQ6-FX&sig=ACfU3U0YLCqb48Fim_R8C7SLsDulYuv6vg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi49pHb073zAhWkGFkFHdoKDNkQ6AF6BAggEAM#v=onepage&q=Felix%20Rohatyn%20approved%20of%20chrysler%20rescue&f=false">Rohatyn
had advised</a> on this rescue, as well. The “one-sided class war” that Dough
Frazer feared was being won by the one side fighting it. In 1979 union
membership was at its peak. It has plummeted ever since.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">I wrote a poem about this disaster
called “The Crisis at Chrysler, 1979”:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.3in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;">An economic
system’s in disarray and fast decline,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;">And Chrysler
Corporation has the sickest bottom line</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.25in; text-align: justify;">But that
doesn’t say</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.25in; text-align: justify;">That Chrysler
can’t pay</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>When you
calculate the kickback:</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;">While the
bankers, executives, lawyers and ad agents</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;">Get interest and
rents, bribes, and dividend payments,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.25in; text-align: justify;">It’s crack
that whip</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.25in; text-align: justify;">And here’s
your pink slip</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-align: justify;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>For Joe and
Sally Sixpack.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><b> </b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Since that fateful year, UAW
membership has declined from 1.5 million to 400 thousand.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">I entered union politics during the
70’s when an SDS comrade and I joined up with some African American brothers to
challenge the sitting local president. He was part of the Green Slate caucus
that dominated our local and was a pipeline to the Administration Caucus. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">The Green slate had much to admire. They were very diverse,
they were mostly very capable, and their rough and tumble tactics can be
partially excused by the rough and tumble realities of working-class life and
confronting the boss. Management is always trying to take away everything
you’ve won, and you get hard representing your constituents, and you will kick
hard at anyone who tries to challenge you politically. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Still, there were few Blacks in
skilled trades, safety was pathetic, and we were a bunch of radicals who wanted
to bring back that socialist vision largely abandoned since Reuther. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">I decided to run for shop steward
and won two votes. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">By 1980 we had a new caucus, The
Progressive Movement. For several years we passed out flyers on safety, women's
rights, labor history, affirmative action in skilled trades, internationalism,
and socialism. In 1982, I won an upset election for Committeeperson. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">At that time, the UAW might have
been autocratic but, by-and-large, it was not corrupt. "Spend it, don't
steal it," was what one international rep told me, regarding the perks of
office. What corruption I saw was a petty crook here or there: a former
committeeman who was a loan shark, another officer who was said to be a company
plant. Some skimming of interest from a union fund we were told was not
interest-bearing. Cheating on skilled trades exams. 300-dollar monthly stipends
for committeepersons—until I was elected, that is. And management played
favorites with their patsies, resolving a train of grievances for offering the
wrong guy overtime with money damages, while telling the rest of us, “we’ll
make it up next time.” </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">Oddly, the international union
broke up the caucuses in the locals around 1984, calling joint slates
“undemocratic.” <br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixerojmIlbbV1MXhZ4QaF-KlU4ssfu6uLtESKcyUSMxe-fWN_W0q9EnCD4jb-XNhJUc9hyphenhyphenSquz0A1KIycF6oYlkca3RPE4qGQF8NYUgV9PSRmYh9qgvUamwh_nzFHtRZ2nrBZFCfsjjLWs/s300/jerry_tuckeruw-46-27_jim_west.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="300" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixerojmIlbbV1MXhZ4QaF-KlU4ssfu6uLtESKcyUSMxe-fWN_W0q9EnCD4jb-XNhJUc9hyphenhyphenSquz0A1KIycF6oYlkca3RPE4qGQF8NYUgV9PSRmYh9qgvUamwh_nzFHtRZ2nrBZFCfsjjLWs/s0/jerry_tuckeruw-46-27_jim_west.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><p><br /><span> </span>I am told that delegates to the
national convention are threatened and shouted down if they don’t support the
anointed AC candidates or are promised jobs with the International for going
along. I am not inclined to doubt it. The only time anyone outside the AC was
elected to the IEB was when Jerry Tucker was elected as Director Region 5 in
1986. This, however, was only after the National Labor Relations Board threw
out the first election because <a href="https://casetext.com/case/brock-v-international-union">the AC had cheated</a>.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;"><span> </span><span> </span>But would AC officials sell us out
with a s**t sandwich for a bribe? I would have doubted it then, but now we
know.<br /><span> <span> </span></span>The problem is we can’t leave it to
Administration Caucus to clean up their act. As reported in a 2019 <i>Detroit </i><a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2019/10/04/former-uaw-communication-directors-call-resignation-union-board/3870952002/"><i>News</i></a>
article, two former UAW communications directors, Rev. Peter Laarman and Frank
Joyce, “broke what they called an ‘institutional code of silence’ to give a
scathing rebuke of the UAW leadership . . . [and] called for the resignations
of the UAW's entire international executive board. . . . All of them. Senior
staff assisting current officers and board members are themselves 'see no evil,
hear no evil,' enablers. They too should resign."</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">This is not to say every local or
regional official is culpable. I am forever grateful for my local president who
supported my leadership of a forty-organization coalition that worked to restore
voting rights to former felons in Delaware. However, even Laarman and Joyce
admit that, like frogs in a gradually warming pot of corruption, they were slow
to hop out. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">In the debate held by the UAW Monitor
on October 7 of this year, Administrative Caucus arguments were weak. They
complained about all the old people speaking and claimed most UAW members don't
even know who the UAW President is, much less how the union should be run. Their
strongest arguments relied on the UAW’s tremendous record before the decline. See
for yourself at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FGy-rxlCSc">UAW
Monitorship Webinar</a>. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">By the way, the idea put forward by
Administration Caucus defenders that outside money (like Fiat Chryser’s!) could
influence a 1P1V election is dead on arrival. The Consent Agreement holds that
if 1P1V is chosen by the rank and file in the referendum, the manner in which
the 1P1V election will be carried out will be negotiated between the Monitor
and the present UAW IEB. Supporters of 1P1V like <a href="https://uawd.org/">Unite
All Workers for Democracy</a> (UAWD) have called on the monitor to impose
spending limits and reporting requirements. If the current IEB is worried about
outside money, they can support those limits and requirements, too.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.3in;">The UAW is great because we had
great founding principles of solidarity, we had great leaders, and we had a rank
and file brave and bold enough to seize the plants until the Big Three accepted
the union. It will take an enormous effort to rebuild the UAW. Only the rank
and file can do it. We have an opportunity and a duty to recharge the labor
movement and to do that, we need to step up and select a new leadership
ourselves. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.3in;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">In our hands is placed a power
greater than their hoarded gold,</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Greater than the might of armies,
multiplied a thousand-fold.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">We can bring to birth a new world
from the ashes of the old</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">For the union makes us strong. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Solidarity forever!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">—Ralph Chapman, “Solidarity Forever,”
UAW Anthem</p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-19894308120204937972021-06-28T12:00:00.005-04:002021-06-28T12:03:26.553-04:00Booklist Out, Books Back, Jacobo Published<p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0TNWyZDn2wUilv_xhowHNE-6AiDfTsnwIbzQTterTALQHF989NDA_yYOE0i_rgegBXSJOTiF5cYA95VvCeREc8S3pz4QGM4bpStUaix60hJyjbsnKIIODDSHp33d_UCaOon11CZCvrgaE/s2028/bannowsky_jacobo_cover.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2028" data-original-width="1342" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0TNWyZDn2wUilv_xhowHNE-6AiDfTsnwIbzQTterTALQHF989NDA_yYOE0i_rgegBXSJOTiF5cYA95VvCeREc8S3pz4QGM4bpStUaix60hJyjbsnKIIODDSHp33d_UCaOon11CZCvrgaE/s320/bannowsky_jacobo_cover.png" /></a></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: medium;"><span> </span>Broken Turtle Books is coming
back, but Broken Turtle Booklist is set to be retired, with one last featured author,
ME.</span></div><p></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: medium;"><span> </span>A confession, Broken
Turtle Booklist was a great idea: to catalogue all Delaware authors in one
place and feature specific authors from time to time, but it was an overly
ambitious project. In the meantime, Broken Turtle Books, a publishing company
created by the editors of <i>Dreamstreets,</i> gradually stopped publishing,
and I assumed the assets and debts, roughly a wash, but for a few ISBNs. With
the publication of my latest work, <i>Jacobo the Turko: a novel in verses,</i> I
have revived the company. I intend to revive promotion of works we published
previously, such as Steven Leech’s <i>Untime </i>and Douglas Morea’s <i>Letters
to You, </i>as well as works by other authors in the <i>Dreamstreets</i> collective,
such as Franetta McMillians latest novel, <i>The Hololounge of the Mundane.</i>
A new website, Broken Turtle Books, will serve that purpose, but it is now “under
construction.” The old Broken Turtle Booklist is still up, with my brooding mug
soon to cast its shadow over the homepage.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: medium;"><span> </span>As for my latest opus, <i>Jacobo
the Turko</i> explores the braided rivers of human kinship by tracing the misadventures
of Jacobo Bitar, a young Ecuadorian of blended heritage and naïve dreams.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: medium;"><span> </span>With snippets of news,
scholarship, and a host of classical and experimental forms, this hybrid,
tragicomic novel shows how Jacobo, an Ecuadorian youth of Indigenous and Lebanese
parentage, lands summer work at a Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, Pizza joint, loses
his pay and passport, cuts wings at a Georgetown poultry plant, scrambles to
evade ICE, is rescued by an African American artist of Wilmington, bakes donuts
on the graveyard shift at Dunkin’, and gets nabbed and deported to Lebanon
(where he’s never been), and is ultimately jailed at Guantánamo. </span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: medium;"><span> </span><i>Jacobo</i> earned me the 2017
Delaware Division of the Arts Established Artist Fellowship in Literature:
Poetry.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: medium;"><span> </span>For stylistic inspiration,
I drew on the works of Nicolás Guillén, Eduardo Galeano, William Carlos
Williams, Rita Dove, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The more I think of it,
however, I realize how all sorts of bad actors intrude on my esthetics—you
know, Pound, Eliot, and such, maybe Keats, maybe that ad copywriter Don
Blanding’s cheap encomiums to Waikiki beach, hula dancers, and coconuts I read
in the fifth grade when my Navy pilot dad was stationed in Hawaii.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino; font-size: medium;"><span> </span><span> </span>Check out my <a href="https://phillipbannowsky.com/">webpage</a> for more on Jacobo and other
works, including videos of my performances of and at this and that.</span></p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;">
<span> </span></span></div><p><style>@font-face
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-47776786251282623182020-09-20T12:42:00.003-04:002020-09-20T18:33:39.956-04:00RBG: Don't Despair; Defy!
<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxF6xfweb2chuw1pMUAVxh0JUm7_yQLNRTP9fJws7itZLwlh9kHlLO_9jIvcICrdvaM5vUgt10vhGdA5nC7hML5VBzauqMtj48oflfzAqc9BpWeCRkN6qm-F9Uj3JnfSUiJHT-VzdhD40u/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="259" data-original-width="460" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxF6xfweb2chuw1pMUAVxh0JUm7_yQLNRTP9fJws7itZLwlh9kHlLO_9jIvcICrdvaM5vUgt10vhGdA5nC7hML5VBzauqMtj48oflfzAqc9BpWeCRkN6qm-F9Uj3JnfSUiJHT-VzdhD40u/" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Ruth Bader Gins-<br />burg’s passing is a good time to choose
action over despair. </span></span><p></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Like others, I felt her death as a tightening of the right’s
death-grip on the country, a shrinking of what’s left to save, an impulse to
give in to Trumptopian Covid depression.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>But no. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>No!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Hell, no!</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Tomorrow I do something, with no time to worry it’s not
enough or not good enough. If we must rage against the dying of the light, let
us rage with action. Even if it feels feeble and feckless, at least it’s
defiant. For example:</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Register and Vote. For Biden, of course. Assistance can be found in <a href="https://www.facebook.com/votinginformationcenter">Facebook</a>, or Steven
Colbert’s State-specific <a href="https://www.betterknowaballot.com/">videos</a>
on registering, requesting absentee ballots, and voting early in Covid America.
In short, have a plan.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Multiply your vote with <a href="https://d1h4zokikhjm0v.cloudfront.net/content/Vote-Tripling_Toolkit.pdf">Vote
Tripling</a>, a personal approach much superior to texts from strangers. Get
three friends to get three friends to commit to voting, and then remind them as
the election nears. Three times three times three <i>ad victoria.</i></span></span> </p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Adopt a battleground state and help turn out targeted new
and/or infrequent voters, a proven and efficient method of boosting turnout of
folks on our side where it matters most. <a href="https://crooked.com/articles/pollercoaster2020-biden-leads/">Crooked
Media</a> can guide you.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Call your Senators now and demand they REFUSE to consider
any Supreme Court Justice until the new president is inaugurated. <a href="https://indivisible.org/demand-your-senator-refuse-confirm-any-new-supreme-court-justices">Indivisible</a>
makes it easy.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Demonstrate for causes like Black Lives Matter with
discipline to fit the times.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Oh, yeah, and if you got it, give money. I suspect those
texts from strangers are telling you how.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Every conversation these days tends to fall off down that
black hole of Trump-sickness. As soon as he comes up, say, “I am doing A, B,
and C, about it. What will you promise to do?</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>Optimism is sometimes defined as a belief that things will turn
out better than what’s probable and thereby improve one’s chances. Antonio
Gramsci spoke about “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the spirit.” He
wrote that from a fascist prison, and you are not there, yet. So, take heart,
defy the odds, and fight back!</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>If you got a better idea, tell it, spread it, and,
especially, DO it.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>
</span></span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span>When I was pessimistic about you sharing pics of that sad kitten, none of you did. </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;">I am betting that many of you will share this one, now. </span><br /></span></span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style><div class="separator"><p style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> </p></div>Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-46811629017439103162019-10-19T15:14:00.001-04:002019-10-19T15:31:30.293-04:00Don’t Just Call Out: Organize!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i class="">N</i><i class="">o</i><i> we don't fit in with that white collar crowd<br />We're a little too rowdy and a little too loud<br />There's no place that I'd rather be than right here<br />With my red-necks white socks and blue ribbon beer</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">-Johnny Russell</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/72387734_10217254295323749_8927462336487227392_o.jpg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_eui2=AeG4vKHmgSBAFBe_ksbSuy7fHGDMPwu0uAk5QoGFoY36CGnhPilGtx3D7yxQl0caskY2schGBT8JTEZmGE6O_BcrPy3h1hhG56IiHYhL7V7wsQ&_nc_oc=AQldYnHNIR-otPoMglSq3rIgdb8mNhtLmWrMnFXi9-M6c-CPLDDfskPqLR_b4uZZ5jA&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=84c4d10e28dc6ecd581bff5cbe139019&oe=5E1C5D90" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="No photo description available." border="0" class="scaledImageFitWidth img" data-src="https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/72387734_10217254295323749_8927462336487227392_o.jpg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_eui2=AeG4vKHmgSBAFBe_ksbSuy7fHGDMPwu0uAk5QoGFoY36CGnhPilGtx3D7yxQl0caskY2schGBT8JTEZmGE6O_BcrPy3h1hhG56IiHYhL7V7wsQ&_nc_oc=AQldYnHNIR-otPoMglSq3rIgdb8mNhtLmWrMnFXi9-M6c-CPLDDfskPqLR_b4uZZ5jA&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=84c4d10e28dc6ecd581bff5cbe139019&oe=5E1C5D90" height="375" src="https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/72387734_10217254295323749_8927462336487227392_o.jpg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_eui2=AeG4vKHmgSBAFBe_ksbSuy7fHGDMPwu0uAk5QoGFoY36CGnhPilGtx3D7yxQl0caskY2schGBT8JTEZmGE6O_BcrPy3h1hhG56IiHYhL7V7wsQ&_nc_oc=AQldYnHNIR-otPoMglSq3rIgdb8mNhtLmWrMnFXi9-M6c-CPLDDfskPqLR_b4uZZ5jA&_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.xx&oh=84c4d10e28dc6ecd581bff5cbe139019&oe=5E1C5D90" width="500" /></a>The White Working Class is not some single thing seething with macho resentment, racism, and contempt for expertise, but a contradictory conglomeration of mostly decent, hardworking people, exploited, sneered at, and abandoned by a liberal elite, who are sometimes mischaracterized as left. I say this because I am of the white working class and of the left, having humped the line for 31 backbreaking years alongside workers—both white and of color—at Chrysler’s Newark Assembly Plant in Delaware. In the early ‘80s, they voted for me, a professed socialist, to serve them in the Plant Shop Committee for three years. They’d seen the newsletters I’d distributed with my comrades at the plant gates opposing speedup, pushing for safety, and urging affirmative action in our pale and male skilled trades. Later, in the late ‘90s, they voted nearly unanimously at our UAW local 1183 meeting to support my work chairing state-wide efforts to stop denying former felons their right to vote, a disenfranchisement targeting citizens of color. One of my proudest possessions is hanging in my office: a plaque my union gave me recognizing my work.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Like me, a Texas descendant, many of these folks are of southern heritage. One of my shop-mates who wore the Stars and Bars on his back once decided it would be fun to harass me as a “Polack” until I thought we would come to blows. I knew I would come out the worse, but it was a matter of honor, so I decided on a day of reckoning and confronted him, gently. He got it, saying he believed in treating everybody with respect. And then we were friends. He taught me a lesson about honor, himself, when he declared once and for all that he was through drinking after a bad car crash, and he was true to his word, boasting, “I don’t have to go to any of those meetings; I just said it and it was done.”</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Some, I am sure, would keep those Confederate statues. I have seen the ones in Montgomery, Alabama in front of the Statehouse—Jefferson Davis and the rest. I have also seen the suspended pillars of weathering steel at the nearby National Memorial for Peace and Justice, each one signifying an American county, including New Castle, where human beings like our shop mates of color and some whites were lynched by the thousands. I am sure my white sisters and brothers would weep as I did as they read the names of the dead embossed on those rust-hued reminders.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Whites, Blacks, Latinx, male, female, gay, straight and trans worked and struggled side-by-side in the United Automobile Workers (UAW) for economic security and common dignity, just like the GM workers on strike are doing now. They did not always abandon their prejudices, but they demonstrated solidarity in ways the “woke” generation could learn from.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Now, I teach college English and have my students write essays from the angle of vision of different roles during the Freedom Rides, the 1960 struggle to integrate interstate bus transportation in the South. One role the class considers is the fictional Gavin Stevens, William Faulkner’s white Mississippi lawyer, who, in Intruder in the Dust, holds off a lynch mob with a shotgun until his African American client is cleared of murder. Stevens imagines lecturing a northerner who wants to civilize the red neck crowd. Says he (with punctuation added for clarity), “’Come down here and look at us before you make up your mind,’ and you reply, ‘No thanks, the smell is bad enough from here,’ and we say, ‘Surely you will at least look at the dog you plan to housebreak.’”</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Calling out from a distance may feel like a blow against oppression, but winning someone over to a common struggle is what makes history.</span></span></div>
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Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-77803760693714254392019-04-12T11:26:00.000-04:002019-10-19T15:02:52.302-04:00Chelsea and Julian: When Poetry Crosses with Coverup<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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One of the yet unpublished poems from my novel in verse <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jacobo the Turko </i>is called “Wikileaks: JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment.” It comes early in my story, and it gives me a chance to use the form of a Gitmo detainee assessment to outline the course of Jacobo’s life as well as the absurd fabrication by which his tormentors justify his imprisonment. I can thank Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange for my material. Anyone who peruses the <a href="https://wikileaks.org/gitmo/">Guantanamo Files</a> will soon see how the truth is more absurd than my somewhat absurdist fable of an Ecuadorian indigenous who is mistaken for a Middle East terrorist. The pursuit of the files’ leakers reveals the lengths the intelligence community will go to to equate anyone who exposes them with the accused terrorists whose human rights they have trampled. Sometimes I wonder if fear of government persecution has deterred publishers from publishing my book. Or maybe it stinks, although half the poems in the book have been published by over a dozen national and international journals and anthologies, just not the prestigious lit rags.</div>
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The greatest crime of Chelsea Manning was to reveal to Julian Assange and thence to the world the murderous nature of the U.S. military’s campaign in Iraq (see “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0">Collateral Murder</a>”), the bogus nature of U.S. claims against the vast majority of prisoners at Guantánamo, and the towering arrogance at the U.S. State Department, especially when conflating our national interests with empire. Julian has just been arrested at London's Ecuadorian Embassy, and Chelsea has been returned to prison, where she is tortured with solitary confinement, on the yet to be proved pretext that she and Julian went a step beyond downloading secrets to hacking the password of a secure military server. This last charge, partially spelled out in a March 6, 2018 <a href="https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/754-assange-indictment/d093e7dc7982f7fe4c24/optimized/full.pdf#page=1">sealed indictment</a>, gives great comfort to the war criminals who have murdered, tortured, and set the world on fire and wish to reverse the direction of opprobrium back to the smarmy Assange, as well as to Manning (and perhaps to President Obama, who pardoned Manning). It also gives some relief to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times,</i> who published the same documents as did Assange, and lets the mainstream media return to making Assange the scapegoat for Hillary Clinton’s loss. It also gives some distress to those of us who see the arrests of Manning and Assange as an attack on freedom of information and the press and a warning to all who challenge imperialist policy and state-sanctioned mayhem.</div>
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I invite you to peruse Andy Worthington’s 2017 <a href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2019/04/01/supporting-whistleblower-chelsea-manning-imprisoned-for-refusing-to-testify-in-grand-jury-case-against-wikileaks/">characterization</a> of what the Guantanamo Files reveal. The cult of secrecy, so often defended with cant about methods and means, is there exposed as a cover for incompetence and crime.</div>
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We who have been around a while have seen this before. For decades, everyone to the left of Richard Nixon was tarred as an ally or dupe of Russia. Communists were branded as traitors, not dissidents, and anyone whose opinions could be tied to the soviets, from the liberal Helen Gahagen Douglas to the red Dalton Trumbo, was smeared, blacklisted, or jailed.</div>
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Make no mistake, Russia today is ruled by a criminal clique of former apparatchiks who seized the property of the Russian people after the apparatchiks had run the socialist system into the ground. However, attempts to paint Trump or Assange as Russian assets is an opportunistic case of historical acid reflux disease. I remember how Khrushchev and his gang got rid of Stalin’s vile henchman Lavrentiy Beria without accusing themselves: they charged him with being a British spy. Similarly, American media accuses Trump, without admitting their own predilection for talking heads trumpery and establishment talking points over substantive news. One can hardly blame Americans for seeking news from alternative sources.</div>
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For example, there’s RT America, funded by the Russian Government. While often inserting Russian propaganda, it also broadcasts several distinguished Americans such as the commentators Chris Hedges and Larry King and the comic Lee Camp. Of course, Liz Wahl famously broke with RT when RT blipped out her question to Ron Paul about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. On the other hand, RT’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Breaking the Set</i> host Abby Martin condemned the Ukrainian invasion on-air, but stated RT backed her. You can accuse those remaining of being opportunistic or can doubt their ethos, but that’s too easy a way to dismiss their views. Personally, I prefer <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/">Democracy Now</a> </i>with Amy Goodman and Juan González<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. </i>At least there you may learn that if Trump pulls out of the START treaty with Russia, it will be the first time since 1972 that nuclear weapons are totally unregulated. Slim Pickens rides again!<br />
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If we let our dismay over our national disaster get highjacked by corporate media’s reductionism we may soon find ourselves swept up in the narrative of those, liberal to conservative, who backed the Iraqi war crimes Wikileaks exposed.</div>
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We love Chelsea Manning. Will we let her be tortured and destroyed? We hate Julian Assange. Is that a sufficient reason to accept DOJ claims about an incomplete password Assange might have sussed? Remember that the greater crime, the crime of the century, is the invasion of Iraq and the dismantling of human rights by the nation that proselytized human rights. Will we, poets or politicos, collude in the coverup?</div>
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Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-21411132813418521662019-01-14T04:53:00.000-05:002019-01-14T05:26:49.649-05:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Eulogy for Vic Sadot<br />
Presented at his Celebration of Life<br />
Ashland Nature Center<br />
Hockessin, Delaware<br />
January 13, 2019</div>
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by Phillip Bannowsky</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ-Pzsbe3gOiNQ-QKByk2ccldfhBpEVes4saQeXr7qZg6RMmdlm58-9VzHqAYUnxWLU14LUkWFrgWxZ2uR7DNRZE3BxnCpY6as3uMltUGbEOF6NFlyRejhdG4tnjfpGoQaWpHlcSK4aVcU/s1600/Vic_Sadot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="376" data-original-width="486" height="154" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ-Pzsbe3gOiNQ-QKByk2ccldfhBpEVes4saQeXr7qZg6RMmdlm58-9VzHqAYUnxWLU14LUkWFrgWxZ2uR7DNRZE3BxnCpY6as3uMltUGbEOF6NFlyRejhdG4tnjfpGoQaWpHlcSK4aVcU/s200/Vic_Sadot.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vic Sadot<br />
July 21, 1947-October 6, 2018</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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Vic Sadot’s musical career is charted beautifully by his
brother Rob in his remarks and <a href="https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/delawareonline/obituary.aspx?n=victor-rene-sadot&pid=191168243" target="_blank">obituary</a>, from Vic’s founding of the Americana
and folk-rock Crazy Planet Band to its re-incarnation as the Cajun-Zydeco
Planete Folle, and we learn how Vic so often performed at events in the
struggle for peace and social justice. I’d like to fill in a little with what I
know about the political activism integral to his musical career. When I’m
done, we’d like anyone else who has something to share about any aspect or
incident in Vic’s life to come forward.</div>
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Victor Rene Sadot. “Vic,” was a musician, writer, publisher,
social worker, disc-jockey, autoworker, and above all a revolutionary patriot.
A son of an autoworker who had come to America after his French home had been
force to quarter Nazi soldiers, Vic shared his father’s love for his adopted
home, in spite of the economic insecurities of working class life. It is
rumored (and now verified by his brother Rob) that he even led the Young
Republicans at the University of Delaware. However, like so many of us from of
that era, he was badly disillusioned as the truth about America’s aggression in
Viet Nam came to light and as peace and black liberation struggles met with
repression, but he was inspired by the protest, folk, and rock music of the era
and by the first principles of America’s founding mothers and fathers. A 1968
article in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Review, </i>official
student newspaper at the university, lists Vic Sadot as a speaker at a rally
opposing the firing of Professors Rob Bresler and Al Myers. A year later, Vic
was named “Outstanding Senior” at a Student Government Association banquet
where then Governor Russell Peterson castigated students who disrupted classes.
Inside scoop: Peterson’s son was a conscientious objector and member of Students
for a Democratic Society.</div>
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I remember really getting to know Vic in Washington DC at a
peace demonstration in the early seventies. Around that time Vic and his
brothers Joe and Rob had been arrested at the Fort Belvoir Army base in
Virginia for leafleting the troops during an Armed Forces “Open to the Public
Day.” He was the public, an American citizen, and whether they liked it or not
he was going to act in the spirit of the nation’s founders. Joe, by the way,
used to publish a satirical newsletter called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Crazy Planet,</i> hence the name of Vic’s band.</div>
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Back to what the founders had to say, their words inspired
Vic to become an organizer for the Delaware People’s Bicentennial Commission, a
group founded by Jeremy Rifkin that crashed various official parties put on in
1975 and 1976 and applied what founding patriots like Thomas Paine said about
King George to the corporate kings who had taken over. Vic recruited me and about
a dozen others to shake thinks up in the Company State. Once, the city of
Newark held a public bicentennial-slash-renaissance fair celebration, and of
course Vic and the rest of us showed up to exercise our free-speech rights, but
they tried to kick us out, trying to claim it was actually private. The brouhaha
revealed that one of the City Council members had a financial interest in the
event, even though she hoped that news would not be made public, but that’s
your corporate Queens for you. We had a lot of fun in PBC, a somewhat gonzo operation
in Delaware, where Vic set the tone.</div>
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Ovelapping somewhat with these activities, Vic began working
for Chrysler in Newark and was one of the founding members of what we called
the Progressive Movement, a rank-and-file faction of the United Automobile
Workers Local 1183 that agitated for civil rights, women’s rights, safety,
union democracy, and a return to the union’s first principles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, Vic inspired one of our first
campaigns, the distribution of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Labor’s
Untold Story, </i>by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais. Vic wrote a review
in the Progressive Movement’s newsletter, and we managed to sell maybe a dozen
copies. These stories of radical agitators who built the labor movement had a
positive influence on the political environment at Newark Assembly where
several of us eventually won union office, although after Vic left.</div>
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One day while we were passing out our newsletter at the
front gate, a couple of guys from the leading faction showed up, clearly
looking for trouble, but we can’t completely blame them for what happened. We
had been on a short strike a couple weeks before and Lyndon Larouche’s phony
U.S. labor party showed up claiming that the strike was a plot by the C.I.A.,
that they were members of the University’s SDS chapter<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">—</span>they were not<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">—that </span>they
had many of their members in the plant<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">—</span>they did not<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">—</span>and they were taking over. Long
story short, these two union guys tried to tear the flyers out of Vic’s hands
and throw him over the rail, where most certainly he would have broken some
bones. Vic pulled away, fortunately, and started explaining to the guy
rationally how we were union brothers simply expressing our opinions blah blah,
but these guys had got themselves good and drunk to elevate their courage and
suppress their rational thinking. In 1979, Vic expanded into publishing. Carrying
on the tradition begun by the late 60s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heterodoxical
Voice</i> and the early 70s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Purgatory
Swamp Press, </i>in 1979<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Vic founded
the Delaware Free Press, changed to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Delaware
Alternative Press</i> after the first issue was hit with a cease and desist.
Somebody had already trademarked the name.</div>
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Soon after that, Vic joined the editorial board for the historic
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Broadside</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">—</span>Sing
Out Magazine,</i> the famous mimeographed music mag from New York that printed
words and music by topical singers from Woody Guthrie to Steve Forbert to Phil
Ochs. In 1982, Vic republished in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Broadside
</i>an article he wrote for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Delaware
Alternative Press</i> called “Phil Ochs’ FBI File.” </div>
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Vic was the ideal musicologist to host the “Freewheeling
Roots Show” on the University of Delaware’s radio station in the early nineties.
He brought the spirit of Phil Ochs to Delaware’s airwaves, the spirit of “The
Broadside Balladeer,” to quote the title of Vic’s tribute song to Phil.</div>
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Over the years Vic contributed his music, analysis, and
activism to numerous environmental and social justice issues, from the campaign
to “Save White Clay Creek<span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Cambria; mso-hansi-font-family: Cambria;">—</span>Don’t Dam it” to the struggle against the suppression of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dupont: Behinnd the Nylon Curtain, </i>by
Gerald Colby Zilg, to intervening to help fellow workers at the Newark Food Coop,
to the struggle for Democracy and Independence in Haiti, to Save the Whales and
to the dangers of Fukushima.</div>
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Vic saw countless deceptions and outrages emanating from the
national security state that ruled the country he loved, from the assassination
of JFK to Gulf of Tonkin incident to the Saddam’s missing weapons of mass
destruction. Accordingly, Vic took on the mantle of “the Truth Troubadour” on
behalf of the 9-11 truth movement, which holds that the attack on the Twin
Towers and the Pentagon was a false flag operation. He composed and recorded
dozens of songs on the topic such as “The Ballad of Pat Tillman,” “Cheney’s in
the Bunker,” and “Trouble in the Rubble.” These songs can all be found under
Vic Sadot on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/TruthTroubadour">YouTube</a>.
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We lost touch somewhat after he moved to California in 2008,
but his name was always coming up in reports from the barricades. Vic had
always kept up the struggle, even when he was struggling with his own troubles.
Who knew he’d find peace in Berzerkely?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I recently learned that Vic had joined the Berkeley
Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists, where he of course became chair of their
social justice committee. I had always known him as a non-believer in religious
mythology. We had been business partners painting houses in one period and
roommates in another, and we had many discussions about science, politics, and free-thinking.
Still, I think how Vic felt can be described in the words he applied to his
brother Joe Sadot, who died in 1978 at the age of 26. In Vic’s introduction to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Green Leaves,</i> the collected literary and
sketch work of Joe’s, Vic wrote:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“He rejected supernatural spiritualism, but he embraced the natural
spiritualism of awe and reverence for the mysteries of life and the intimacies
of love and comradery.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Before I call on friends and family to share their memories,
I’d like us all to remember Vic and those of his family who have passed on in
the tradition practiced by South American revolutionaries who would call roll
for their fallen comrades. After each name, all assembled would call out <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“presente,” </i>meaning the fallen are still
present in their works and in our hearts. Let’s try it first with Phil Ochs. I
say his name and you say “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Presente! </i>loud.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Phil Ochs: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Presente!</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We’ll begin with Vic’s father, then his mother, his brother,
and himself.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Jean Sadot: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Presente!</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Eleanor Sadot: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Presente!</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Joe Sadot: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Presente!</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Vic Sadot: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Presente!</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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-->Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-19622107606140441762018-10-19T19:39:00.000-04:002018-10-19T19:39:44.350-04:00Invitation to Submit to Dreamstreets<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_pYVZqKM21g_01aFCiF_x9626Be1M73XEmLBZfAMzMuOMbw3K7YrZ5yke8mMhVqem27IjsFc4wvFzeLpV52cfWe-zYvxtfKleNuoLwiRlVbCcv8Q5RU5Tt98i2zpazMoxrDk4CEQQ8hyL/s1600/ds1cover.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1160" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_pYVZqKM21g_01aFCiF_x9626Be1M73XEmLBZfAMzMuOMbw3K7YrZ5yke8mMhVqem27IjsFc4wvFzeLpV52cfWe-zYvxtfKleNuoLwiRlVbCcv8Q5RU5Tt98i2zpazMoxrDk4CEQQ8hyL/s200/ds1cover.gif" width="144" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst" style="text-indent: 22.5pt;">
For over forty years, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dreamstreets</i> has published works by
contemporary and historical writers and artists who live in, or have a strong
connection to, Delaware. While we have at times opened for submissions, we have
usually published work among a close-knit community of artists. We believe it
is time to regularize that practice with a clear submissions process and
publication twice per year, while occasionally publishing an extra and more
closely-curated number, such as our <span style="color: black;">Summer 2018 issue
on the history of music from Wilmington in the 20th century</span>. </div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: 22.5pt;">
What are we looking
for? First, Delaware authors, those residing here and those in the diaspora. We
like everything from avant-guard to home-spun. We like art that’s progressive
and authors who are diverse. About forty years ago, we declared that we would
not publish anything fascist, racist, or sexist, which set us somewhat apart,
yet we have never been afraid of being edgy. Our purpose has always been to
promote art that is marginalized by the insular esthetic of Delaware’s
political economy, not to mention its insular geography. Take a look at past
issues, archived at dreamstreetsarchive.com, but don’t limit yourself to what
you see there. See if you fit the Delawarean criteria, check our submission
guidelines, and submit. </div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: 22.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 22.5pt;">
Submission Guidelines (Read these carefully, or you may be ignored.)</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 22.5pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: 22.5pt;">
We accept literary
submissions in any genre from Delawareans and those in the Delaware Diaspora. We
solicit our own visual art. Generally, we do not reprint previously published contemporary
work although one previously published poem in a sequence of unpublished poems
might be permissible; just make sure we know, so we can give credit. <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Our reading periods are during the months
of December and June, </b>although we may announce changes<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">.</b> Anything received outside of these submission periods will not be
accepted or answered. </div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: 22.5pt;">
Send up to 5 poems of
no more than 5 pages. Prose more than 10 pages will have to work hard to find a
place. Begin no more than one poem on a page and make your stanza breaks clear. Send
your work to sleech(at)udel.edu as a single attached document in Microsoft Word
(.doc or .docx) and write “Submission” in the email subject heading. Include a
cover page with name, address, phone number, email and a short bio of 50 words
or less, and indicate your connection to Delaware. Double space prose, single
space poetry, use 12-pt Times New Roman font, and remove extra space between
paragraphs. Align text left, except for special or unusual typography, in which
case, we may have to work with you to render it faithfully.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: 22.5pt;">
Simultaneous
submissions are fine, but please let us know in your cover letter if you are
courting another and inform us immediately if your work becomes elsewhere engaged.
We reserve first serial rights until publication, when all rights revert to the
author. Our rights include electronic as well as print publication and magazine
re-prints. Please give <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dreamstreets</i>
credit if you re-publish your work.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: 22.5pt;">
Submit only once per
reading period in each genre unless we ask for more. Our editorial committee
will review your work and get back to you before the next issue.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: 22.5pt;">
“Go at it boldly, and
you'll find unexpected forces closing round you and coming to your aid.” -Basil
King</div>
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Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-23393079429014843952017-06-27T20:14:00.001-04:002017-06-27T20:14:21.367-04:00Stealing Enchantment<div class="p1" style="text-align: justify;">
I’ve always been a bit enamored of the 1930s in spite of the crushing effects of the Great Depression that detrimentally affected so many. Yet it is that economic deprivation that brought people together. It began with sweeping Republicans out of office after their capitalist neo laissez faire policies and after decades of setting the tone for an economic life in the United States in the late 19th century through the the early 20th that allowed financial speculation to nearly lead to the downfall of an economic system designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Out of that collapse came a wave of Democratic Party leadership that favored people who deserved to have a chance to climb out of the pit dug for them by avaricious capitalism.</div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<div class="p1" style="text-align: justify;">
Even while the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted policies that provided relief and put people back to work through provisions like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), capitalists dug in their heels globally and went into a martial kind of mode to save themselves and then to regain power. This began in Italy and then in Spain and Germany.</div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<h4>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: justify;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ptYoQihvnow/WVLtwuUUKhI/AAAAAAAABmU/dD1L40BM_sMy4JC8A6Vhn7nKAZ1y6bVSACLcBGAs/s1600/Wert%2B4%2Bv%2527s%2Bc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="288" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ptYoQihvnow/WVLtwuUUKhI/AAAAAAAABmU/dD1L40BM_sMy4JC8A6Vhn7nKAZ1y6bVSACLcBGAs/s200/Wert%2B4%2Bv%2527s%2Bc.jpg" width="171" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><h4>
<span style="color: #20124d;">Charles Wertenbaker</span></h4>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</h4>
<div class="p1" style="text-align: justify;">
The growth of industrial capital, in a thinly veiled local example, is embodied in the 1950 novel by Delaware author Charles Wertenbaker entitled <i>The Barons</i> about three cousins in the early 20th century coming together to save a failing company and transform it into an industrial giant. Sound familiar?</div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<div class="p1" style="text-align: justify;">
Wertenbaker favored one of those cousins, portraying him, even in the midst of family scandal and personal foibles, as a leader who at least seemed to appreciate that the acquisition of wealth begins with hard work and not merely financial machinations or even good bookkeeping as his two other cousins believed, and who is in a position to do “a big, good thing.”</div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<div class="p1" style="text-align: justify;">
One can easily suppose that one of the major struggles of the 20th century was for capital to regain a foothold over the economic life of the world, accomplished as a result of global war. However that martial means that capital invented to save itself was ostensibly defeated after the end of World War II. That invention called fascism, which had over run Europe and threatened to supplant democracy in the United States and having already compromised genuine social progress in the Soviet Union, was never ultimately defeated.</div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<div class="p1" style="text-align: justify;">
Such was the conclusion determined in Charles Wertenbaker’s final novel, <i>The Death of Kings </i>from 1954. In the novel, the main antagonist, Louis Baron, the son of Stuart Baron from his previous novel <i>The Barons, </i>who had closely resembled A. I. duPont, resembles Henry Luce who runs a national magazine that could be easily mistaken for <i>TIME </i>magazine. Under Louis Baron’s aegis is assembled a network of political paranoia, a subterfuge of suspicions driven by villains, some of whom are unwitting, blinded by fear, and in the case of one who resembles Whittaker Chambers, outright and overtly evil.</div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WXIxPMswOqs/WVLuehULAvI/AAAAAAAABmc/ICfaU5I4l309oU_8YN1kLUMsduWXHzwZwCLcBGAs/s1600/Wertenbaker%2BB.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1164" data-original-width="1600" height="290" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WXIxPMswOqs/WVLuehULAvI/AAAAAAAABmc/ICfaU5I4l309oU_8YN1kLUMsduWXHzwZwCLcBGAs/s400/Wertenbaker%2BB.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
The story in <i>The Death of Kings </i>begins with the devastating events just before the outbreak of World War II, particularly the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It was an event that split the Left, began the process of diluting a united Left in sympathy with progressive policies of the Roosevelt administration, and ended a “time of enchantment” during the 1930s, which would have been the title of Wertenbaker’s next novel, and the middle book of a trilogy that would’ve begun with <i>The Barons</i> and ended with <i>The Death of Kings. </i></div>
<br />
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<div class="p1" style="text-align: justify;">
Shortly after finishing <i>The Death of Kings</i> Wertenbaker contracted cancer, whether because it had run in his family or was triggered by the yellow paint he and a youthful friend had found and used to paint an entire house when working as laborers for Dupont near Wilmington. In any case, Wertenbaker considered cancer a somatic personification of evil. He made little more than some notes for <i>A Time of Enchantment. </i>About the proposed novel he declared:</div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<div class="p1" style="text-align: justify;">
“In all large organizations where one man is at the top, the others near the top will fight to get there, and so the morality of that organization will be conditioned by the struggle for power, and that morality will determine the organization’s external, as well as its internal, dealings. The only way to avoid this power complex, this power struggle, is by keeping the organization small and powerless (as in a very small business or a very small kingdom) or by curbing the power of the top man by vesting power in other –– and frequently hostile –– organizations (as in the checks and balances of the U.S. government or kingship in Britain). Let loose the struggle for power anywhere, and it will destroy all other concepts.”</div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<div class="p1" style="text-align: justify;">
While the phalanx of martial capitalism threatened to consume all of Europe, meanwhile in the United States, investments of government funds into the social welfare of our citizens was fueling progressive policies. Even some corporate leadership displayed some social responsibility, but it was government that established Social Security, unemployment insurance, greater enabling of labor unions, and cultural programs like the WPA’s artists, writers, music and theatre projects that fueled speculation that the projects might morph into a cabinet level Department of Culture, and that was an enchanting notion.</div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></div>
<div class="p2" style="text-align: justify;">
However the seeds of fascism were hiding not only in the isolationist/America First woodwork, but in places like the Dies Committee of the U.S. Congress, having reared its ugly head in the attempted fascist coup d’etat exposed by General Smedley Butler in 1934. In Wertenbaker’s <i>The Death of Kings </i>we see a depiction of the right wing and fascists sympathizers gaining a foothold inside an important post war media vehicle. By the end of the novel Wertenbaker casts a wary eye at Spain with the remaining fascist regime under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The die had already been cast regarding the prospect of fascism in America. We had won the war, but we were loosing the battles, and over the next seventy years we would continue to loose battles while the legacy of Roosevelt’s policies got chipped away and the prospect of a time of enchantment faded from our consciousness. In this manner, Wertenbaker’s final two novels were not only prophetic but are now long out of print.</div>
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</style>Steven Leechhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01406656691074265661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-87811292605470700142017-03-26T19:31:00.000-04:002017-03-27T08:15:48.127-04:00Wilmington in the Nexus of 19th Century Urban Fiction<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
<div style="font: 15.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
Wilmington in the 19th century was situated, as it still is, in the nexus of other mid Atlantic cities. Because of its genteel Quaker nature and its relatively smaller size, it was unlike, by early 19th century standards, the teeming metropolises of New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore. These three cities became the source for a sub genre of antebellum literature by at least four authors with approximate ties to nearby Wilmington: Edgar Allan Poe, George Lippard, Bayard Taylor, and most recently Walt Whitman, in an obscure and nearly lost early novel. Both Lippard and Taylor hailed from nearby Chester County, Pennsylvania, and Whitman lived his waning years in Camden, New Jersey where he died.</div>
<div style="font: 15.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TCiFEIIIPSc/WNhOznbs0RI/AAAAAAAABek/emxiYCC-xo8SdetSzqToKsq45v3klUxZwCLcB/s1600/Whitman%253AEngle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TCiFEIIIPSc/WNhOznbs0RI/AAAAAAAABek/emxiYCC-xo8SdetSzqToKsq45v3klUxZwCLcB/s320/Whitman%253AEngle.jpg" width="209" /></a><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />
Our story, however, begins in Baltimore in the late 1820s with the brothers William Henry Leonard Poe and his younger brother Edgar. Estranged from one another throughout most of their youth, the Poe brothers, offsprings from the kind of rough urban life depicted in novels like Lippard's <i>The</i> <i>Monks of Monk Hall</i> and <i>The Killers</i>, Bayard Taylor's <i>John Godfrey's Fortune</i>, and Walt Whitman's <i>The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle</i>, acted as muses for one another. However, Leonard Poe died on August 1, 1831 at the age of 24, probably from tuberculosis. Examples of Leonard Poe's poetry are similar, if not exactly the same in some cases, to his younger brother Edgar's poem "Tamerlane," making it likely that both worked together, without rancor, on the same poems, though both wrote their own separate poems.</div>
<div style="font: 15.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<br />
There is a striking parallel between Poe and Delaware author and poet John Lofland. Both, at an early age, were seriously involved romantically with women, Sallie Ann Mitchell in Lofland's case and Elmira Royster in Poe's case, and both Lofland and Poe were considered bad candidates for marriage by the parents of both women. The experience of rejection, and the forced nuptials of both Mitchell and Royster, proved traumatic for both Lofland and Poe and had the affect of influencing their later work and maybe bringing the two closer together.</div>
<div style="font: 15.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<br />
In one of the few prose works to have survived by Leonard Poe entitled "The Pirate," he reflects the anger and tragedy of Elmira Royster's forced marriage by depicting the "pirate," named Edgar in the story, as an exile who can never return home because he had murdered his promised betrothal on her wedding day.</div>
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<br />
Both Poe brothers spent their short lives together in Baltimore, where in later years Edgar and John Lofland encountered one another. It's not hard to imagine the two of them sharing their experiences at being jilted by romantic attachments via intervening parents. And one gets a good sense of the seedy nature of urban life in Baltimore from Lofland's own account in his "Confessions of an Opium Eater."</div>
<div style="font: 15.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify;">
<br />
The urban environment in cities of the early 19th century are similarly depicted in early novels by Lippard, Taylor and Whitman. They are populated with con men, scam artists, poseurs, vagrants, prostitutes, and orphans. The honest and gainfully employed are mechanics, shop keepers, printers, blacksmiths, with others like lawyers, bankers and real estate agents often operating on the precarious edge of legality. In Whitman's <i>The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle,</i> the villain is a lawyer out to deprive a young woman of her inheritance and to perpetuate the orphan status of Jack Engle. In Bayard Taylor's <i>John Godfrey's Fortune, </i>the<i> </i>New York City of the same vintage as Whitman's novel seems full of fakers, shaky entrepreneurs, and women forced into prostitution by callous con men. The same could be said of Lippard's <i>The Monks of Monk Hall, </i>which depicts a hotbed of the same sorts of characters, but on steroids, close to home in Philadelphia. In early 19th century Delaware author Robert Montgomery Bird's <i>Sheppard Lee, </i>we find the protagonist hopping from body to body in the city of Philadelphia in a metempsychotic frenzy searching for a way to get rich quick.</div>
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<br />
Wilmington seemed like a refuge in the midst of ferment in the embryonic megalopolis of New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. In Delaware author John Biggs' novel <i>Demigods, </i>which occurs later in the 19th century turning into the 20th, the protagonist John Gault nearly gets swallowed up in Philadelphia's urban landscape, where he works for a while in the city's ship building yards. It is not until he moves to genteel Wilmington that he achieves any sort of success, first as a newspaper publisher and nearly so as a politician.</div>
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In real life, it wasn't until Delaware poet and author John Lofland moved to Wilmington from Baltimore and became clean and sober that he accomplished his most important and relevant literary work.</div>
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Not so with Poe. The intense urban environment in which Poe lived in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York eventually proved to be too much. It was while attempting to make his way to Richmond, Virginia to be reunited with the widowed Elmira Royster, his sweetheart from his youth, that he got caught up in the nefarious election campaign practice of "cooping" in Baltimore, where men where rounded up, liquored up, and in a drunken state led from polling place to polling place to exchange votes for drinks, and then abandoned to the gutter, where Poe was eventually found. Poe had become a victim of an urban practice that could have easily fit into those depicted in Lippard's <i>The Monks of Monk Hall</i>, Taylor's <i>John Godfrey's Fortune</i> or Walt Whitman's <i>The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle</i></div>
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Steven Leechhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01406656691074265661noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-87766808683649532382016-10-30T10:18:00.000-04:002017-03-27T08:20:03.537-04:00Siblings:The Story of Delaware's Literature in the First Half of the 20th Century<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It was Wilmington author Henry Seidel Canby, who was among the founders of The Saturday Review of Literature, along with his cousin Christopher Ward, author of a wide range of literature including satire, serious fiction and local history, who were most responsible for launching Delaware's literary presence for the first half of the 20th century. It was through Canby's intercession that Anne Parrish, Delaware's most prolific novelist garnered success. Her younger brother Dillwyn also enjoyed some literary success, but as suggested in my last blog article, Dillwyn's shortened life and the manner in which he presented his novels deprived him of deserved recognition. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The story of Delaware's literary art during the first half of the 20th century, in large part, is the story of three sets of siblings who wrote more than two dozen quality novels among them. However, availability of these novels runs from barely available used, and usually frail, copies to those that are no longer available. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In addition to the Parrishes, those other siblings were Charles Wertenbaker and his younger brother Peyton, and John Biggs Jr and his sister Mary. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Charles Wertenbaker is arguably the most controversial novelist to have hailed from Delaware. Of the seven novels he wrote over his career, three of them were influenced by how Delaware brought him to conclusions about America, about the thirst for political power and its influence on our social and cultural life. In his final novel, <i>Death of Kings</i>, he demonstrates how, during the Second World War and the immediate period afterwards, our social and cultural environment would morph into the early years of the domestic Cold War when the ultra right wing found the means to manipulate the news in order to whip up social hysteria in an emerging post war America. </span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J21VQipKSIM/WBX8bOozgiI/AAAAAAAABO4/4VlcAUWFiO0rIxApCwWkR9JeyEwwxYgUACLcB/s1600/Peyton%2BWertenbaker.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J21VQipKSIM/WBX8bOozgiI/AAAAAAAABO4/4VlcAUWFiO0rIxApCwWkR9JeyEwwxYgUACLcB/s320/Peyton%2BWertenbaker.png" width="192" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Charles' younger brother Peyton wrote under two names. Under his own, G. Peyton Wertenbaker, he wrote some of the most insightful science fiction to appear in the pages of the earliest issues of the groundbreaking "Amazing Stories" magazine. He wrote two novels in the early 1930s under the name of Green Peyton. The first of these, <i>Black Cabin</i>, was his side of the story that was told in his brother Charles' first novel from 1928 entitled <i>Boojum!</i>. Early in the brother Wertenbakers' writing career, as to a similar degree with the Parrish siblings, the two developed their craft by generating both subject matter and perspective from each other, and all four went on to develop their own voice in the later literature they created.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Another set of literary siblings from the early 20th century was John Biggs and his sister Mary. John Biggs published only two novels, though he reputedly wrote two others and wrote and published a slew of short stories. One of his novels, <i>Seven Days Whipping</i>, from 1928 is the most accessible. It's his 1926 novel, <i>Demigods</i>, that's the real gem, and it's nearly impossible to find a copy though the University of Delaware library has one frail circulating copy. Evidently Biggs wrote the novel at the same time that his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote <i>The Great Gatsby</i> and there are some parallel elements in both though are very different from each other. Biggs' novel is about a fanatic who is also a bit of a naïf, who at varying times runs a newspaper in Wilmington, and runs for Governor of Delaware as a Single Taxer. It's a wild, hallucinatory novel in places and establishes a kind of land-faring metaphor early on when the protagonist, John Gault, is afflicted with a visionary purpose in life while working in a Philadelphia shipyard. </span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N0JP--cCqT4/WBYAKhvLLmI/AAAAAAAABPY/DLpup3DwaZQYgX4GPITKAH9xD9WTad1owCLcB/s1600/Lily-Iron%2BTP.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-N0JP--cCqT4/WBYAKhvLLmI/AAAAAAAABPY/DLpup3DwaZQYgX4GPITKAH9xD9WTad1owCLcB/s320/Lily-Iron%2BTP.png" width="208" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Mary Biggs, in her only novel entitled <i>Lily-Iron</i>, also uses the underlying metaphor of "land-faring" as she takes themes reminiscent of Melville's <i>Moby-Dick</i>, and obliquely turns them inside out. Instead of the white whale, Biggs' protagonist, Jenson Romm, pursues a legendary race horse to which he attaches mythic attributes, after which he captures then loses and leads him to realize his own place in a world that he has caused to swirl about him. <i>Lily-Iron</i> is a masterpiece. It is the only novel Mary Biggs wrote because she died young. It is impossible to find a copy, though the University of Delaware Library has one copy. In the upcoming <i>Dreamstreets 54</i>, I'll have a longer article about Mary Biggs' <i>Lily-Iron.</i></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">The single element that runs through the story of these novels, which were published by the country's most notable publishing companies, is that the best of them is extraordinarily rare. You will not find copies of <i>Lily-Iron</i> or <i>Demigods</i>. You will not find copies of Green Peyton's (G.Peyton Wertenbaker) second novel,<i> Rain on the Mountain</i>. Dillwyn Parrish's final novel, which he authored with M. F. K Fisher, is impossible to find, and only two copies of <i>My Wives</i> appear to be available. The point is that examples of Delaware's early literary history are disappearing at the very point of discovery. In cases where copies of these novels have survived, because copies are in the neighborhood of 80 - 90 years old, they are very frail. These novels ought to, and need to, be republished before they disappear for one or many reasons. If I had the money, or if Dreamstreets had the money, or had Broken Turtle Books, they could be save through republishing. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Only one established local publisher could republish these works, a publisher that has an obligation to republish these novels because of their cultural standing in the community. That publisher is the University of Delaware Press. But will they? The answer I am sure would be a resounding NO! Delaware's literature is not worthy of any consideration, according to local academics. There is no local literary canon, except maybe for the fanciful tales of Howard Pyle. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">So what are we left with? The question is posed with incorrect grammar, but it is also rhetorical. </span></div>
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Steven Leechhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01406656691074265661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-21167962610540702222016-10-06T12:15:00.002-04:002016-10-15T16:59:20.563-04:00The Disappearing Novels of Delaware Author Dillwyn Parrish<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px;">Dillwyn Parrish was the younger brother of Delaware's most prolific novelist Anne Parrish. While Anne wrote sixteen novels, not counting the three early volumes of children's fiction on which the pair collaborated at the beginning of their careers, Dillwyn wrote only four using his own name, one written anonymously, and one written with his second wife, M. F. K. Fisher. All his novels were published by Harper and Brothers. They were <i>Smith Everlasting</i> in 1926, <i>Gray Sheep</i> in 1927, <i>Praise the Lord! </i>in 1932, and <i>Hung for a Song: </i>a novel of the lives and adventures of Major Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard the pirate in 1934. In 1929 his anonymous novel <i>My Wives </i>was published, and <i>Touch and Go, </i>written with M. F. K. Fisher was published in 1939.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />After <i>Smith Everlasting, </i>the locale of which could be Wilmington, there are parallels in the narratives of his next two novels. In the next, <i>Gray Sheep,</i> both John Rain and Dillwyn Parrish volunteered as an ambulance driver during the early stages of World War I, interrupting a college career at Harvard. Both were victims of gas attacks, which in both cases caused health problems. At the end of <i>Gray Sheep, </i>John Rain comes to terms with his feelings for a younger, precocious girl and with her heads west – destination California. That's how the novel ends. In actual life Parrish ran away with a child bride, Gertrude "Gigi" McElroy, hopping on motorcycles at the Parrish homestead in Claymont, Delaware and heading for California. In Dillwyn's and Gigi's case, after an accident somewhere in the southwest, and a recovery period for Gigi, who was injured, the couple arrived in California by train. Setting up house near Hollywood, Gigi signed a movie contract with Samuel Goldwyn and appeared in several movies in the 1930s, then getting a divorce from Dillwyn and marrying screenwriter John Weld.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />None of the references to Dillwyn Parrish that I could find refer to his secret 1929 novel, <i>My Wives, </i>which was cited in one of the the front pages of his 1932 novel <i>Praise the Lord! </i> as having been one of his previously published. As it turns out, the novel was written anonymously. It was also the only one of his novels written in the first person who is never identified by name.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />Why <i>My Wives</i> was published anonymously is open to speculation. There's reason to believe the novel may have some autobiographical aspects. The first part of the novel, and the first of three wives, "Penny," takes place in Greenwich Village. Penny turns out to be very precocious and independently mannered. After a quick and summarily contrived marriage, the narrator divorces her after it's learned she's been found to be unfaithful and a bit of a gold-digger. A bit wounded, the narrator returns home to a town never identified. Could the town be the Wilmington environs? And could the rich woman who becomes his second wife, who is a member of a very wealthy family, be someone who had been in the public eye? It turns out this second wife "Marilyn" is both petty and vindictive. The narrator gets a divorce and escapes to the Swiss Alps, to a real place where Dillwyn's actual second wife, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, lived for a short while, and which is where the pair collaborated on Dillwyn's final literary effort, the 1939 novel <i>Touch and Go,</i> using the pseudonym, Victoria Berne. But we're getting ahead of our story.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />Near the end of Dillwyn's marriage to Gigi he met Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, known as M. F. K. Fisher to those who have read her books on culinary subjects and reviews of cook books for The New Yorker during the 1960s. It was during this period that Dillwyn wrote his final novel <i>Praise the Lord!</i> about a rural kind of down home family who travel from farm country in Iowa to sunny southern California. They're trapped in the fundamentalist ethos of a religious charlatan and fast women. The mother shoots her husband because, in the context of religious hysteria, she claimed God told her to. Their deaf/mute daughter is traumatized and has to be institutionalized. Their guilt ridden, clueless son returns to the simple life in Iowa. Only a second daughter is smart enough to survive and make a life for herself in California, but only after turning her back on both her family and the crazed fundamentalist church with which they'd been involved. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />In the meantime Dillwyn had contracted Buerger disease, which is a disease of the circulatory system with neurological implications. The disease was probably a consequence of the gas attacks incurred by Dillwyn during World War I. The fact that he was a heavy smoker exacerbated the condition. At the time, the ultimate treatment was amputation of limbs. The couple travelled to Switzerland, the same locale described in the third part, "Paulette," of <i>My Wives,</i> as well as in <i>Touch and Go. </i>One reason for traveling to Switzerland is the availability of Analgeticum, which was affective in treating the chronic pain, but the pair had to return to the United States for treatments, which included an amputation of a leg. Two procedures were performed in Wilmington, and others at clinics in other parts of the country. Dillwyn and Mary Francis ultimately returned to California.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />Their novel, <i>Touch and Go, </i>published in 1939 by Harper and Brothers under the name of Victoria Berne is extraordinarily rare. Only a few copies are known to exist. About the novel, the <i>Kirkus Review,</i> in a review on May 9, 1939 wrote: "A pleasant tale, with likeable characters, a moral around the edges, intelligent though not important. The story of a widow who breaks the mother-in-law bond, and plans deliberately to have the child she craves. There's an unforeseen complication and several characters working at cross purposes, but she finds a man to love -- and marry -- and his children fill her needs and that of the wise old woman to whom she had gone at an earlier date. A rather ticklish subject well handled."</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12px;"><br />By 1941, Dillwyn Parrish's struggle with Buerger disease had become critical. Analgeticum was unavailable in the United States, and pain blocking injections with Novocaine proved ineffective. Facing more amputations, Dillwyn Parrish shot himself on August 6, 1941. It was the only way out. </span></span></div>
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Steven Leechhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01406656691074265661noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-29532619845752816202016-07-05T11:12:00.000-04:002016-07-05T11:12:02.184-04:00J. Saunders Redding: Delaware's Literary Critic of American Culture<br />
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8UGVmbzRJrs/V3vMiKSwNSI/AAAAAAAAA4Y/RQf503oZePMcGk-iPlk5d6pXrad8253yACLcB/s1600/J%2BSaundersRedding.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8UGVmbzRJrs/V3vMiKSwNSI/AAAAAAAAA4Y/RQf503oZePMcGk-iPlk5d6pXrad8253yACLcB/s320/J%2BSaundersRedding.jpg" width="244" /></a>Up until the mid 20th century only four Black literary artists from Delaware rose to any sort of notoriety. Most well known is Alice Dunbar-Nelson who, incidentally, had been one of J. Saunders Redding’s teachers when he was a student at Howard High School in Wilmington and one of those four literary artist to achieve notoriety. Another was Stanford Davis, who was an itinerant poet from the early 20th century in southern Delaware. Davis’ poem “The Voice of the Negro in America” was publicly praise by U.S. President William Howard Taft. Davis’ only book of poetry, <i>Priceless Jewels</i>, was published in 1911 by Knickerbocker Press. Another local poet, Helen Morgan Brooks from Wilmington published three books: <i>From These My Years </i>from 1945,<i> Against Whatever Sky</i> in 1955, and <i>A Slat of Wood and Other Poems</i> in 1976.</div>
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One reason J. Saunders Redding would have chaffed at being called a Black literary figure is because he saw that rising above labels was tantamount to his view of the role of Black literary artists in the larger American literary canon in particular, and as an integral part of America’s cultural identity in general. Nevertheless, his few works of literary fiction address the problem of being Black in America, a problem that has unfortunately become a big part of American culture.</div>
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J. Saunders Redding was part of an illustrious family. He was born in Wilmington on October 13, 1905. His older brother Louis B. Redding became a lawyer who was a litigant in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case before the U.S. Supreme Court. The younger brother sought a career in academia, becoming the first Black faculty member at Brown University specializing in literature.</div>
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Redding wrote one novel, <i>Stranger and Alone</i> (Harcourt, Brace 1950). In the novel Shelton Howden is a young man who was raised in an orphanage. He knows little more than that his father was white and that his mother was Black. The story begins with Shelton as a student, in the late 1920s, at New Hope College, one of any number of small Black colleges like Spelman or Tuskegee that dotted the southern United States. Its educational philosophy is patterned after Booker T. Washington’s ideas during a time when those ideas were being challenged by the writings and activities of W.E.B. duBois. In Redding’s novel Shelton Howden, in spite of his ambition, in spite of his denigration of the behavior on behalf of the effort to overcome the burden of racism within the Black community around him, can never escape. He grows bitter and more surly until he is lost in time that passes him by.</div>
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J. Saunders Redding would never consider himself part of the canon of Black or African American literature in the same way we may have considered Ann Petry, or Zora Neale Hurston, or Richard Wright to be part of that canonical sub genre, even though Redding has done much to establish, enhance and maintain the efficacy of it. Redding, who died March 2, 1988, had lived long enough to see the changes in the status of Black Americans.</div>
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The great dilemma expressed throughout Redding’s writings, both in fiction and non-fiction, is to examine and extol Black Americans’ contribution to American culture through music, dance, fashion, art and the contribution and subtleties of Black vernacular in literature that depicts the larger American experience through a Black context. If one is to be honest and unbiased, one cannot separate one sector of American culture from another, or from the whole culture. All these perceived sectors are not separate but intimately interrelated. For this reason Redding was considered an “integrationist,” especially during periods in 20th century American history during episodes of Black nationalism, like the Marcus Garvey movement during the post World War I years when lynchings, even on the scale of destroying whole towns like Rosewood, Florida in 1923 and Greenwood, Oklahoma in 1920, had reached epidemic proportions; and then again during the Black Power, Black Panther, Malcolm X era of the 1960s. Redding felt that both, similar in necessity, served to assert, preserve, and maintain strides made from the contributions of Black artists of every discipline, especially during periods like the Harlem Renaissance and the amalgamating power of late 20th century American music.</div>
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Redding’s own life and struggles against a prevailing system designed to deprive him of opportunity is reflected in his autobiographical book from 1942 <i>No Day of Triumph</i> (Harper: New York), which includes his account of growing up on Wilmington’s east side, and carries the reader through his struggle to realize his dream of being an important and unique observer of the American scene. In his Preface to <i>No Day of Triumph</i> the American author Richard Wright, referring to the “Talented Tenth,” or the prevailing Black intelligentsia, wrote:</div>
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“For a long time this book cried out to be written. I predict that it will rock the Negro middle class back on its heels; I forecast that it will set the 'Talented Tenth' on fire with its anger; I prophesy that it will be as acid poured in the veins of the smug Negro teachers in Negro colleges. <i>No Day of Triumph</i> is a manifesto to the Negro and a challenge to America.”</div>
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In an earlier time, Redding may have been considered a member of “The Talented Tenth,” but times, as Wright predicted, have changed. As late as 1970, Redding acknowledged and recognized those changes, perhaps happening too slowly but surely. He advocated the assimilation of Black Studies into American Studies, recognizing the former’s relevance without serving to diminish the contribution of Black culture or the history of Black people in America. He attributed the contribution of academia in the effort, citing works like John Hope Franklin’s<i> From Slavery to Freedom</i> and Benjamin Quarles’ <i>The Negro in the Making of America</i>, but he also cited more familiar literary works like Claude Brown’s <i>Manchild in the Promised Land</i>, Eldridge Cleaver’s <i>Soul on Ice</i>, and <i>The Autobiography of Malcolm X. </i></div>
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In the forty-five or so years since 1970, progress in the formulation for an all inclusive vision of America has been sure, even though slowed by occasional set backs, and certainly too slow for many. For serving an early and pivotal role in this important advancement in American social and cultural history, J. Saunders Redding was among the giants.</div>
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Steven Leechhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01406656691074265661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-16185615581439934002016-05-30T11:39:00.000-04:002016-05-30T11:39:16.693-04:00Sleepless
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This morning, due to an odd dream, I found myself sleepless
at 2 AM. The dream wasn’t particularly profound, just the day’s junk remixed.</div>
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Usually, I can recover from such dreams easily. I pace, try
to do some stretches, then quickly realize I’m too tired to do anything of
consequence. My head hits the pillow and I’m off to dreamland again.</div>
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But not this time. So I scrolled through Facebook. Nothing
interesting there, so I decided to check e-mail. Junk. Finally, I decided to
check my crescentseries account, my “writer’s account”, on the minute chance
there might be something juicy afoot.</div>
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I don’t check that account very often, maybe twice a month,
because, truthfully, it’s not all that active. Occasionally I get a couple of
quick notes from people I don’t know who took the time to read my book. I
always thank them, and try to answer their questions if I have time. </div>
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I had two messages. One was from my e-mail service provider
asking if I’d like to purchase some space in their cloud. Delete. The other was
from some incomprehensible string of characters and had a subject line in
broken English, something about book, world, and gorgeous. I figured it was one
of those advertisements for counterfeit Viagra. I almost trashed that one, too,
except I don’t get junk e-mail on that account because I never buy anything
with it. So I scanned it to be safe and opened it.</div>
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It was a legit message. Someone in Moscow (!) had read my
book and had lots of questions, not only about the book, but about this country’s
current political situation.</div>
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Holy crap. If I answered every question fully, I was going
to have to explain America. I hate when people ask me to do that. It’s like
when customers at work ask me where a certain store that I’ve never been in is
at the mall. When I tell them I don’t know, they get all indignant. “Don’t you
work here?” they cry. Why yes, I want to tell them, I work in this store and
when I’m done, I rush to my car and hightail it home. Do <i>you </i>hang out where you
work after hours? I’m not an expert on the mall. Likewise, just because I live
in the U.S. doesn’t mean I understand everything about it. Sometimes this place
baffles me too.</div>
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My correspondent’s command of English grammar might have
been tenuous, but his knowledge of U.S. history and current events wasn’t. He
knew things many Americans probably wouldn’t know. Basically he asked me if I
thought my book was coming true, and did I think the United States was headed
towards some type of revolution, and when was the sequel to LOVE IN THE TIME OF
UNRAVELING coming out, and what historical events did I use as a model for the
Crescent, and did I think America would survive?</div>
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Whew. Maybe I shouldn’t have checked my e-mail. Because
after I read that, my mind was racing.</div>
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Do I think my book is coming true?</div>
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Literally, no. I’m no clairvoyant. The characters in LOVE
first came to life in the wake of Katrina but didn’t start keeping me awake at
night until after Deepwater Horizon blew. I did what many writers of
speculative fiction do: I extrapolated a future from the present. I knew the
Deepwater Horizon spill would have long-lasting effects we couldn’t even begin
to imagine. I knew the effects of environmental degradation would more
adversely effect the poor and people of color. People of means would devise
some way of escaping the worst of it. I could see corporations trumping
governments and business becoming the model for what little government
remained. Crescent Region is governed by a board of rich white property owners.
Which, incidentally, is how this country began.</div>
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When I was researching for a historical “feel”, I read about
the Gilded Age and the period leading up to the Civil War. Because that’s what
the present feels like to me: a combination of the two.</div>
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The Gilded Age vibe is obvious. The income equality of the
present is a mirror of that past. And while the barons might not be as bold to
deliver bags of cash to Congress anymore, they do hold secret donor conferences
and audition candidates. It’s glaringly apparent the government doesn’t work for
the “small people”. That’s one reason you’ve got Trump. (Not that he cares for
the common people either.)</div>
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The Civil War part is obvious, too. We’re still fighting
that war over a century and a half later. Racism still exists. Folks still fly
the Confederate Battle Flag.</div>
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But something else struck me when reading about the period
directly preceding the Civil War. Slavery was so ingrained in American culture,
people could not see or think their way out of it. Otherwise decent people
thought the peculiar institution was as immutable as the laws of physics.</div>
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Today most of us (and by "us" I mean descendants of masters; slaves always knew the score) recognize slavery as the great evil that it was,
but we aren’t living in the midst of it. To take a stand against something that
was so woven into the social fabric took unbelievable vision, perseverance and
courage. And even then, it took a blood sacrifice to end it.</div>
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I believe there are current institutions and systems that
will seem as evil to our descendants as slavery does to us today. Thing is:
like slavery, these practices seem as immutable to us as natural law. Only the
most visionary among us can even begin to see a way out.</div>
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Imagine: there are entire sectors of the economy that depend
on paying people far less than it takes to survive. Recently those sectors have
been shamed into changing their ways, but their stocks have suffered. Think
about that. In order to “work”, the system demands exploitation.</div>
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We massacre the environment daily, yet we seem powerless to
stop. Oh, we recycle and drive hybrid cars, but what is needed is a radical
re-visioning of energy use.</div>
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Change WILL eventually come whether we like it or not. I
think even the most clueless among us feels that in our bones. That anxiety
about the future haunts our lives. Like animals before an earthquake, we can
feel the rumblings, but because of our fear, ignorance, bitterness, and rage,
we have rendered ourselves powerless to do anything constructive about it.</div>
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So: do I think this country is headed towards revolution? I
believe we’re careening towards something and I pray it’s not a bloody mess. I
hope as Papa Z says (or will say, and that’s the only spoiler I’m dropping) it
doesn’t take a war to fix this. Because Lord knows, the Civil War didn’t fix
anything. The required paradigm shift was never completed. You don't raise
consciousness with a hail of bullets.</div>
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Will America survive? I don’t know. Something will survive;
I know that. Perhaps the country will split into regions like the Crescent,
Liberty City, and Upper Midwest. Some people will survive and they will
continue to make love, life, and art against all odds, even if they can’t go
out in their bare clothes (and even then, they’ll turn their haz suits into
high fashion).</div>
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Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, though.</div>
Franetta McMillianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16827358013628018462noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-3214236479421226302015-06-08T14:17:00.000-04:002015-06-08T15:06:06.196-04:00Delware's Pre-eminent Person of Letters<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5zgKpwAlO3JyMCsPe96r2J9u0Z1t-DI7gokZQwWgL77wdBFA6AftwYuwcdp_WuO_fRx2o4jC1WhCqpWNOVWmKeqWFjp_7B__aGeNR8z0VUZ3EpgGpRwsAfzDJg_Fuj5XLNjyXprEogz90/s1600/dreamstreets_catalogue.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj5zgKpwAlO3JyMCsPe96r2J9u0Z1t-DI7gokZQwWgL77wdBFA6AftwYuwcdp_WuO_fRx2o4jC1WhCqpWNOVWmKeqWFjp_7B__aGeNR8z0VUZ3EpgGpRwsAfzDJg_Fuj5XLNjyXprEogz90/s1600/dreamstreets_catalogue.jpg" /></a></div>
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I have long held that Steven Leech is Delaware’s pre-eminent person of letters. He is a writer, critic, editor, archivist, journalist, promoter, disk jockey, and investigator of Delaware literary, musical, and visual arts, especially works outside the canonical metropole. This summer (2015), Leech will see a vindication, of sorts, of his life of letters on the periphery through his collaboration with the Delaware Art Museum in <a href="http://www.delart.org/exhibits/dream-streets-art-in-wilmington-1970-1990/" target="_blank">Dream Streets: Art in Wilmington 1970–1990</a>, which will run June 27, 2015 through September 27, 2015. Leech edited the lit mag <i>Dreamstreets</i> almost from its founding in 1977 through issue #50 in 2006, and a commemorative <a href="http://www.delart.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/DreamStreets51-Final.pdf" target="_blank"><i>Dreamstreets</i> #51</a> is being published by the museum. Leech will be featured along with <i>Dreamstreets </i>alumni and new talent at a special Dreamstreets Downtown reading at the museum on July 18, 7-8 p.m. An early film by Leech, Having Come and Having Gone, is included in the exhibit.</div>
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Steven Leech’s scholarship uncoveres the critical edge of Delaware literature, from works that challenged Delaware’s slave economy to twentieth-century exposés of Chateau Country. Leech explains why he has chosen to take his stand outside the establishment but within Delaware boundaries in <i>The Wedgehorn Manifesto: A Cultural Treatise from the Underground</i> (2008):</div>
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It is because I see a cultural presence here that has been driven underground—so far underground that it often doesn’t recognize itself. It is a presence that is the true outgrowth, product and result of its own cultural past. It is a past that I can almost remember, but a huge social and political gash that spans the post world War II era has severed us, until only recently, from that which defines us as a cultural community.</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOzl6t4gAqxekFeyh5q4pP2F3MVwOkyDmifghO4Jltw13KoqRULcMvmHifNKdQYOgFAYlmckL3O3HIfFNh9XqRHHhq91K-XE5HA4wwSlZoWikVFBRF_ArneJROQNh5AOrTXs5vIQfIMiDZ/s1600/wedgehorn_manifesto_lg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOzl6t4gAqxekFeyh5q4pP2F3MVwOkyDmifghO4Jltw13KoqRULcMvmHifNKdQYOgFAYlmckL3O3HIfFNh9XqRHHhq91K-XE5HA4wwSlZoWikVFBRF_ArneJROQNh5AOrTXs5vIQfIMiDZ/s320/wedgehorn_manifesto_lg.jpg" width="198" /></a></div>
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In his <i>Manifesto</i>, Leech rescues Delaware’s artistic legacy from the Memory Hole. He traces the history of Delaware jazz, rock and roll, the African-American press, the counter cultural and alternative press, 19th and 20th century authors, cinema, and visual artists, not only the Brandywine Tradition of Schoonover and Wyeth, but what Leech identifies as the Christina Tradition: Edward Grant, Edward Loper, and William D. White, who was featured recently at the <a href="http://brokenturtleblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/delaware-artist-william-d-white.html" target="_blank">Biggs Museum in Dover</a>, thanks in part to <a href="http://www.williamdwhite.com/s-leech-preeminent-unknown-artist/" target="_blank">efforts</a> by Steven Leech. In the <i>Manifesto</i>, Leech calls for artists to be caretakers of the community conscience. For a free pdf copy of <i>Wedgehorn Manifesto,</i> email your request to publisher@brokenturtlebooks.com. Soon to be release is a companion piece to the Manifesto, <i>A City of Ghosts.</i></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKSEti6XIksy9YMJ_65JpJRJWVAiHzIZWP4yES-ryYZWFynlHt1C0FfnSZBZr71IV_Q7HADk2JR4_AxPVBsSiJMQFXkLThXYZ9sRfVYjOZQ8LEAW_207w5d2M5IXjy5zuvNygNtFC15kop/s1600/a_city_of_ghosts_lr_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKSEti6XIksy9YMJ_65JpJRJWVAiHzIZWP4yES-ryYZWFynlHt1C0FfnSZBZr71IV_Q7HADk2JR4_AxPVBsSiJMQFXkLThXYZ9sRfVYjOZQ8LEAW_207w5d2M5IXjy5zuvNygNtFC15kop/s320/a_city_of_ghosts_lr_2.jpg" width="212" /></a>Leech carries on a family tradition. His father, Steven Leech senior, was a writer for FDR’s Works Progress Administration and published in the 1938 <i>Delaware: A Guide to the First State. </i>The work was reprinted by the Historical Society of Delaware in 2006, and Leech the son wrote the introduction.</div>
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Steven Leech is founder of Dreamstreets Press, Broken Turtle Books, Broken Turtle Booklist, and the Delaware Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He has also published numerous personal and whimsical imprints such as Screamweets, Creamtreats, Nemocolin Xpress, and Pinhead. In addition to editing <i>Dreamstreets</i>, Leech was editor of two African American Newspapers in Wilmington, <i>The Delaware Spectator </i>and<i> The Delaware Valley Star,</i> as well as <i>Viewpoint</i>, the public face of the University of Delaware Cosmopolitan Club. He was one of the founders in 1981 of 2nd Saturday Poets, now Delaware’s longest-running poetry venue. Recently Leech founded Dreamstreets Downtown, a reading currently held 3rd Saturdays at 3 p.m. at the Chris White Gallery in the middle of our struggling burg, Wilmington.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRALmnPnuUk_z3btPitYwRy5WV30ggJBI4HNtRSIIkU8RTUPsDHFCSxI6I6h8TdAn1Pvd6_rK2JvwLg6rNZ6YZCNW2fm5cjRYQTztkKNrk2HApyEAVfpQja1LjeVnl5zASrjfY5NMES5ej/s1600/steven_leech.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRALmnPnuUk_z3btPitYwRy5WV30ggJBI4HNtRSIIkU8RTUPsDHFCSxI6I6h8TdAn1Pvd6_rK2JvwLg6rNZ6YZCNW2fm5cjRYQTztkKNrk2HApyEAVfpQja1LjeVnl5zASrjfY5NMES5ej/s200/steven_leech.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
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Leech is a leading radio personality. Folks in northern Delaware and three contiguous states know Leech through <i>Even Steven’s Boptime, </i>heard on WVUD 91.3-FM Saturday mornings from 6 to 10 p.m. <i>Boptime</i> features popular music, jazz, and show tunes in their cultural, historical, and political contexts. One of the show’s regular features is “Cliffords Corner,” where Larry Williams, Bob Fleming, and Maurice Simms join Leech to tell of personal encounters with luminaries like Betty Roché, Lem and Daisy Winchester, and Clifford Brown. Another feature is "Vietnam Rock," which Leech, a Vietnam veteran, uses as part tribute to the troops and part exposé of that dreadful conflict. Leech also produces <i>Dreamstreets 26,</i> a radio show on WVUD that has captured the voices Delaware poets and writers of the past half-century as well as readings from authors of the last 200 years. The show is currently broadcast Monday’s at 1 p.m. Leech even produced a video of this writer’s poem “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yqEvXl68u8" target="_blank">String Quartet</a>,” featuring the Delos String Quartet, for WHYY-TV12 in 1986.</div>
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Not only has Leech published many hundreds of incisive articles on politics, history, and the arts, but his fiction and poetry are as daring as anything by the predecessors he admires. Works such as <i>Raw Suck, Untime, </i>and<i> 2000 Years</i> are at times dark and painfully personal, sometimes humorous, and always prophetic. He floats his characters in and out of alternative universes, some hellish, some as life was supposed to be. His work is never lukewarm. As the Good Book says, the lukewarm the Lord spits from His mouth.</div>
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Steven Leech is the recipient of both Emerging and Established Artist fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts. Events associated with the exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum are available at the <a href="http://www.delart.org/exhibits/dream-streets-art-in-wilmington-1970-1990/" target="_blank">Museum’s Website.</a></div>
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Most of Steven Leech's literary works are listed on his Broken Turtle Booklist <a href="http://brokenturtlebooks.com/regional_authors_books_steven_leech.html" target="_blank">Page</a>. There is also an archive of some of his works and old photos at <a href="http://www.flyingsnail.com/Scrapbook/Steven_Leech.html" target="_blank">Flying Snail.</a></div>
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Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-24160844631216858932015-03-12T13:27:00.000-04:002015-03-12T19:46:27.925-04:00Delaware Artist William D. White Retrospective at the Biggs is a “Must See”<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I’ve written a fair amount about William D. White on this blog space and in other places. Now you can see for yourself the sizable collection of his art on display at the Biggs Museum of Art in Dover, Delaware. It’s all thanks to the heroic efforts of Nancy Carol Willis, who as a girl was fortunate to have known White. All during my own adolescence, growing up in Richardson Park, I had also heard about White from my father, who had known him during their years together working for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the late 1930s.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Nancy Carol Willis' Exhibition catalogue</span></h3>
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I daresay that White was one of the most important artists working in Delaware in the 20th century. As far as I’m concerned, his stature ranks with that of Edward Loper as an artist of great vision. Yet, it may become apparent why William D. White’s work was nearly rubbed out of the legacy forged by Delaware artists. Part of the reason may have been caused by White’s own nature, which was as an unassuming gentle human being who never sought to direct attention onto himself. He lived his later life in poverty, almost as a hermit, for lack of a better term, in not much more than an adobe hut in the Penny Hill vicinity north of Wilmington.<br />
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Another reason his work fell into obscurity and his artistic legacy came fatally close to becoming forgotten was the nature of his artwork itself.<br />
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Even while providing large amounts of artwork to the corporate chemical giant Hercules Company during the late 1920s and early 1930s, he largely depicted the workingman and the ordinary people who could be our neighbors. It was his artwork from the later 1930s that his depictions of his subject matter took on a greater role as social commentary. Nancy Carol Willis, who compiled the catalogue that accompanies the Biggs’ exhibit, says it best:<br />
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“He invariably chose to depict laborers rather than foremen or managers. What stands out as highly unusual for the time was his honest and empathetic depiction of society’s marginalized members. European immigrants and African Americans rarely achieved prominence in such large paintings.”<br />
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William D. White was Delaware’s first, and maybe only, true Social Realist.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">An untitled William D. White painting from my<br />own collection that's in the Biggs exhibit</span></h3>
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Nancy Carol Willis’s catalogue is essential for gaining a complete story of William D. White’s life and artistic career. Inside are reproductions of works not available for the exhibit, along with photos of White’s parents and those of his youth.<br />
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Willis, herself a fine artist who is well acquainted with the history of 20th century American art, provides examples by other of White’s contemporaries to give context to White’s artistic endeavors. We see, in much the same manner Delaware artist Edward Loper kept pace with the development of American art and new trends in its expression, how White absorbed and learned from his peers and national contemporaries. Among Delaware’s 20th century artists, Loper and White sustained their careers as artists by understanding and learning from what was going on around them in the development of American art, from the Ashcan school to Social Realism, with that which came before and that which came in between. White even took some incursions into the realm of abstract art.<br />
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With some fortunate serendipity, when the Biggs Museum exhibit ends on June 21st, opening on June 27th, the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington will present <i>Dream Streets: Art in Wilmington 1970 – 1990. </i>William D. White died in 1971, just as the art movement in Wilmington was getting under way. Much of the art produced in the Wilmington vicinity during this period has much in common with the socially conscious art of William D. White. Unavoidably, it’s easy to see how the life and work of William D. White flows nearly seamlessly into the endeavors of those who followed and launched artistic careers in the early 1970s. White’s artistic career ended in obscurity while those beginning to work in the 1970s began in obscurity, subjected to marginalization and living, often times, in poverty, yet remaining true to a vision that comprised something more progressive than the bucolic landscape and elitist sensibilities of The Brandywine Tradition that held sway over Delaware artists.<br />
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Finally, with these two back-to-back art exhibitions, we are getting a truer picture of the Wilmington art world. Beginning with artists like William D. White, Edward Loper, Edward Grant, Bayard Berndt, Jeannette Slocomb Edwards, Walter Pyle, Henrietta Hoopes and many others who painted during the period of the late 1930s, we begin to see how an earlier art community morphed into the one that blossomed on the heels of the vibrant counter-culture of the 1960s and into the 1970s. Among those earlier artists, William D. White, along with Edward Loper, embodies the greatest element of cohesion with the aspirations of a later generation of local artists.<br />
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Steven Leechhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01406656691074265661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-79838694505357746802014-11-28T11:38:00.000-05:002014-11-29T07:43:23.244-05:00George Lippard, Local Novelist and Another Friend of Edgar Allan Poe, and his Hidden Relevance for Today<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The body of canonical American literature serves to enlighten us regarding that which lies behind or beneath our American history. It serves to bring to light those conditions, incidents or events from our past. Often those events or conditions deliver a work into the canon. A good example might be Harriet Beecher Stowe’s <i>Uncle Tom’s Cabin.</i> On the other hand, works by American authors of extraordinary talent can enlighten us about the ground floor nature of our psyche that led to, or surrounded, those conditions from various periods in our history. Examples are evident in the works from authors of the post Civil War era to post World War years like Clemons, Melville, Cather, Wharton, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, just to touch upon some of the literary giants of that era. There are many others who contributed, as well, to giving us a “feel” for a broad portion of our history –– if indeed we are knowledgeable about a history from which we continue to learn its lessons.<br />
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The great fatal flaw in American history is that we are a country built on twin pillars. One pillar is the legacy of slavery, and the other is the genocide of our Native Americans, which in large part led to those imperial designs that drove our “Manifest Destiny,” to be a country “from sea to shining sea.”<br />
Of the antebellum era, three major canonical literary figures come to mind: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. With the exception of Fenimore Cooper, none gave much space or effort in addressing those issues associated with those twin pillars.<br />
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The politics embraced by Edgar Allan Poe are largely an enigma. His politics are not readily apparent or discernible from his fiction, non fiction, or poetry. On the one hand, Poe wrote many stories about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations. On the other hand, Poe, as a Southerner who grew up surrounded by slavery, did line up behind the racist writing of James Kirk Paulding. However, there is some reason to believe Poe’s attitudes were subject to revision. He certainly grappled with the issue in his only novel, <i>The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, </i>and there is some sketchy evidence that he had a friend who was black, Armistead Gordon. Otherwise, Poe rarely dwelled on the matter, though he was intelligent and well traveled enough to be capable of critical thinking.<br />
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As I have suggested in my own fiction, Poe had been influenced, or given pause to reflect, by others, particularly by Delaware author and poet John Lofland, a staunch Abolitionist. In his travels between Virginia and New England, Poe was exposed to new views and perspectives on the subject.<br />
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In 1841 – 1842, Poe was editor and critic at <i>Graham’s Magazine</i> in Philadelphia. It was in Philadelphia during this time that Poe met George Lippard. Poe and Lippard were two authors who shared literary styles. Both wrote gothic tinged subject matter, combined with a uniquely American romanticism. These were stories about the underbelly of American life. However, Lippard wrote with a different purpose.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">George Lippard</span></b></td></tr>
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Lippard met Poe early in his career when he was working as a copy editor of the newspaper <i>Spirit of the Times. </i>Poe worked across the street at <i>Graham’s Magazine</i>. There is some evidence Poe influenced Lippard’s literary style. There are also some sketchy reports that Lippard rescued Poe from some dangerous situations in the streets of Philadelphia.<br />
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Recently the University of Pennsylvania published a new edition of Lippard’s long out of print novel <i>The Killers. </i>Originally published in 1850, the novel is set during the events leading up to a race riot in Philadelphia the previous year. The time frame is also during the same election cycle, ironically enough, when Poe was “cribbed” in Baltimore in an incident that eventually led to his death.<br />
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The plot of<i> The Killers</i> involves Philadelphia street gangs, one of the most vicious of which was “the Killers," located in the Moyamensing district of that city. Major characters are a set of half brothers, one brought up in abject poverty and the son of an absentee rich woman who has turned to a life of crime. The other brother has become the leader of “the Killers.” The father of the former son, whom he discovers only shortly before the incidents described in Lippard’s novel, is a manipulative banker who had made a fortune off the illegal slave trade. During the riot in which the white gang of “Killers” descends upon blacks in a nearby neighborhood, burning and pillaging it, rich banker Jacob D. Z. Hicks kidnaps Kate Watson, the common law sister of his long lost and abjectly poor son, in an attempt to drive her into a like of prostitution. Through a rather complex set of circumstances, a black man variously known as Black Andy, or “the Bulgine,” saves her from a burning building.<br />
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George Lippard was a strong anti-slavery advocate, and in <i>The Killers </i>he demonstrates the extent of the greed of those who sought to benefit from the illegal slave trade, along with other illegal activity stemming from it. One is reminded of similar implications suggested by today’s illegal drug trade as well as the gluttonous and unregulated arms trade, especially in terms of spawning other out of control illegal activity. As a result, corruption was rampant even among “respectable” politicians and businessmen.<br />
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Lippard, unlike Poe, was called a “reformer” in some circles, and a “muckraker” in others. He clearly saw the relationship between chattel slavery and wage slavery. In fact, near the end of his life he formed one of America’s earliest labor unions, The Brotherhood of the Union, which drew its inspiration from the principles of the revolutions that spread throughout Europe in 1848. One must wonder at how much Lippard’s attitudes rubbed off on Poe.<br />
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George Lippard was born April 10, 1822 in a place called Yellow Springs in Chester County, which directly borders New Castle County, Delaware. He died, probably from tuberculosis, on February 9, 1854. During his short life he wrote over a dozen novels. Of them was <i>Blanche Of Brandywine, </i>set during the Battle of the Brandywine during our Revolutionary War. His most noteworthy novel was <i>The Quaker City: The Monks of Monk Hall, a Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery & Crime.</i> In this novel, Lippard exposed widespread corruption in Philadelphia.<br />
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Throughout his works, Lippard displayed progressive thinking still relevant today. At one point in <i>The Killers</i> he declares that those elected to Pennsylvania state government “might go there as especial hirelings of Bank speculators, paid to enact laws that give wealth to one class, and poverty and drunkenness to another.”<br />
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The more things change, the more they remain the same.<br />
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One wonders how our history might have been shaped had Lippard’s literary works remained in print and given greater consideration by publishers and in the halls of academia. Certainly Lippard wrote within an important historical context, especially a local one.<br />
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We don’t often understand the genesis of some of America’s historical events. For example, T. S. Arthur’s 1854 novel <i>Ten Days in a Barroom, and What I Saw There </i>was as popular as Lippard’s novels and their contemporary novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, <i>Uncle Tom’s Cabin. </i>Arthur’s novel is often credited with bringing the issue of temperance into prominence, culminating decades later with Prohibition during the 1920s. Incidentally, T. S. Arthur was also one of Poe’s acquaintances, and is an author who is largely forgotten. Thus, we are also deprived of better realizing the tightly knit nature of the literary world during Poe’s time within the confines of a smaller United States than the one from “sea to shining sea” that we take for granted today.<br />
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Our current literary canon is inadequate. We could have a better understanding of who we are by giving a better understanding of where we’ve been. Every region of our country has authors and poets who have represented, portrayed, or depicted our past experiences. If an expanded national canon might be considered too unwieldy for academia, then might we begin to build one on a regional basis? Here, in the mid-Atlantic, in the birthplace of the United States, there are plenty of forgotten authors who could tell us more about ourselves from the perspective of our past history. George Lippard is another one of those.</div>
Steven Leechhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01406656691074265661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-87261087797954857222014-11-04T10:27:00.001-05:002014-11-04T12:05:59.735-05:00Douglas Morea Featured in Dreamstreet Downtown and Broken Turtle Booklist<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Written with an “epistolary pretence,” <i>Letters to You,</i> Douglas Morea's breakthrough collection of poems, address the memories, persons, events, places, and moral preoccupations of Morea’s life. Breakthroughs are thought to be the province of youth, yet Morea has developed a new language of poetry, more intimate, but no less daring than the verses of Keats.<br />
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Douglas Morea will be featured along with the poet Pharaoh at the Dreamstreets Downtown Reading 3 p.m. Saturday, November 15 at the Chris White Art Gallery, 701 Shipley Street, Wilmington, Delaware. Morea is also November's author of the month at <a href="http://brokenturtlebooks.com/" target="_blank">Broken Turtle Booklist.</a></div>
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Douglas Morea was publishing poems in <i>The New Yorker</i> in the early 1970s when he was about the same age as Keats in his glory. Douglas and his then wife Kass left the literary limelight of New York for the moated enclave of Delaware in the late ‘70s. Douglas remained productive, releasing short run chapbooks, essays, and cartoons, and reading at local venues his longer poems, typed on sheets pasted end to end somewhat like a scroll. I have long proclaimed Douglas to be Delaware’s finest poet. <i>Letters to You </i>demonstrates, I believe, that Douglas Morea’s craft and power have grown since his youthful successes at <i>The New Yorker.</i></div>
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Right before <i>Letter to You </i>was published, I had been speaking with Douglas about John Keats, who had been so clever and daring, before he died at 25. Douglas, who has a wide knowledge of science, said it was even common for folks in the sciences to peak in their youth. I thought of Einstein, who published his Special Theory of Relativity when he was 26. So what’s new with Morea since his day in <i>The New Yorker</i> sun?</div>
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Morea’s growth can be measured by comparing “Having Children,” a brilliant poem he published in the September 16, 1974 <i>New Yorker,</i> with “Hey Canada Geese, How Come Your Babies Almost Never Get Run Over Anymore?” from <i>Letters to You.</i></div>
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In his earlier treatment of procreation amid life’s vicissitudes, Morea’s dominant metaphor is a scene where “brazen summer/wilts weeds in a city lot.” Describing the struggle of the weeds to thrive amid “gobs of tar, old tires,” Morea demonstrates youthful pyrotechnics of imagery, sound figures, and word play:</div>
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These growths are pale pith,</div>
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sweet and rank, piped in green fibre;</div>
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leaves ladder up them:</div>
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footholds gouged in the face of sheer cliff-air.</div>
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Sun pounds down on raised fingers branching</div>
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upon the ledge of bloom;</div>
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With such precocious flair, he was good then<i>, </i>but he’s even better now. In “Canada Geese,” he mutes the fireworks so we can hear a more intimate voice, one that tells a subtler tale. Noting how subsequent generations of geese have learned to protect their offspring from traffic, Morea, with defter music, work-play, and apostrophe, laments</div>
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While most of you arise by wise adults, seasoned on many seasons,</div>
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we get raised by raw near-children.</div>
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Humans mostly have but one shot parenting, then</div>
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we're shot.</div>
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Like you, we learn to keep them off the road, but often</div>
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not in time. Like yours, our wisdom grows, but ours grows only old,</div>
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and with us dies.</div>
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You can read the entirety of both poems at <a href="http://brokenturtleblog.blogspot.com/p/normal.html">Letters to You Samples</a>.<i><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Some suppose that after his Theory of Relativity, Einstein’s production was restricted to thinking deep thoughts at Princeton until he died in 1955, although he published over 300 scientific papers.</div>
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Since his last piece for <i>The New Yorker,</i> Morea has published six other collections of poetry including <i>How About Meet Me Where Nothing Has Ever Happened in the History of the World</i> and <i>Not Sterilized but You Won’t Die From It/The Even Newer Testament. </i>An essayist and cartoonist, Morea wrote <i>The Andrist: a Sexual Political Essay</i> and <i>Book of Crosses: A Thematic Cartoon Collection. </i>His works have appeared in numerous literary magazines including <i>Dreamstreets</i> and <i>The Mickle Street Review</i>, which awarded him the Doris Kellogg Neale prize in 1984.</div>
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Like Keats, Morea achieved youthful fame. Like Einstein, his later works are famous to but a few. May the publication of <i>Letters to You </i>provide a second and wider fame for Delaware’s finest poet.</div>
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Morea was born in 1945 in Queens, New York City, and grew up primarily there, marrying and moving to Delaware in his late 20s, where he with their mother Kass raised two daughters to successful adulthood. He remains here now with his second wife, Karen.</div>
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Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-57180834350696414312014-10-19T14:10:00.000-04:002014-10-19T14:10:38.672-04:00Introducing The Delaware Rock and Roll Hall of FameNot as severely marginalized as the history of local literary artists, but perhaps better known than our jazz and visual artists, are our rock and roll, blues, and rhythm & blues artists from the past. In order to remember and preserve their contribution to our current cultural environment, a Delaware Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has been established. <a href="http://www.delawarerockandrollhalloffame.com/">www.delawarerockandrollhalloffame.com</a> <br /><br /> Rock n’ roll fever caught on in the Wilmington area at a time when it caught on in the rest of the United States. Nationally, much of the new music was proliferated by a plethora of independent music labels, like Sun Records where Elvis got his start, Specialty which recorded Little Richard, and Chess which recorded Chuck Berry. According to local rock n’ roll record collector Michael Ace, in Wilmington at least two new labels were founded. One was ABS Records, which recorded a couple 45 rpm’s that are highly valued by collectors today. One of those was “Little Boy Bop” by Ralph Prescott, and “Miss Mary” by Bobby Lee. Another local independent label was Dandy, which a little later in the 50s recorded a couple of Buddy Holly cover tunes by Pat Patterson, who later went on to be a popular disc jockey on Wilmington radio station WAMS. Another local label, Ritchie, was founded in 1959 by Vinnie Rago. It’s earliest recording was with a band called Frankie and the C-Notes. Ritchie Records would have a number of close calls and near misses with national notoriety in the 1960s. <br /><br /> Only one recording artist from Delaware had a nationally charted hit in the 1950s, and that was Billy Graves with a tune called “The Shag (is Totally Cool).” It was a hit in early 1959 on the Monument label. Other than having once appeared on Jimmy Dean’s television show, Billy Graves’ whereabouts is unknown. <br /><br /> Wilmington teenage fans also contributed to rock n’ roll history. The new music’s first group dance, the Stroll, was invented in Wilmington by the kids who danced on local radio and television personality Mitch Thomas’s Saturday afternoon dance show on WVUE channel 12. <br /><br /> The Stroll was first danced to Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk.” Later Chuck Willis’ “C. C. Rider” provided the music. After the kids on American Bandstand started doing the Stroll on national television, the Diamonds had a big hit with the song, “The Stroll,” and Dick Clark did the right thing by publicly crediting the kids on Mitch Thomas’ dance show in Wilmington for coming up with the dance. <br /><br /> Another local connection to American Bandstand was Bob Clayton, then a student at P.S. duPont High School. Every day, right after classes, he’d hop in his car and high tail it to Philadelphia to dance with regular Justine Carrelli. The couple were a big hit with national fans, got write-ups in national teen magazines, and even had a national fan club. But when Bob & Justine recorded their own record in the late 50s, “Drive In Movie,” they got kicked off Bandstand. Except for some spins on local radio, the record failed and both eventually left to lead separate lives.<br />
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By the 1960s local rock n’ roll enthusiasts were building a little momentum, thanks largely to success from Vinnie Rago’s Ritchie label and its companion, Universal. Ritchie mainly accommodated the doo wop side of the rock n’ roll sub-genre, while Universal recorded flat-out rock n’ roll or rockabilly, like the Recorders’ “Rock Around the Rosie”, which was written by Rago. Another Universal recordings was “Office Girl” by Ronnie Worth, whose day job was as an accountant in Wilmington. Andy & the Gigolos recorded a song for a new dance called “The Bug” on Ritchie. Rago’s greatest success was with a doo wop group called Teddy and the Continentals, who had a national hit –– on the Bubbling Under chart –– with “Ev’rybody Pony,” which hit #101 in September 1961, but the flip side “Tick Tick Tock” is the side most aficionados prefer.<br />
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<b>Teddy & the Continentals.</b><br />Teddy Henry on lower right.<br /></h4>
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<br />Teddy Henry, the lead singer of the Continentals was a student at Conrad High School at the time, and recorded two more records with the Continentals, but by 1964 the Continentals broke up and he recorded a final solo record on Ritchie in 1965 as Teddy Continental. Like a number of other local recording artists to follow, his records are still valued by collectors and have garnered cult status in unlikely places. <br /><br /> Another near national success was a band called the Adapters with lead singer and songwriter Ed Sterling. In 1965 they recorded a tune on the Ritchie label, “Believe Me,” which charted high on the local WAMS list of hits. The Adapters achieved some national fame. According to local rock n’ roll historian Hangnail Phillips in the recent book, <i>Histories of Newark, 1758 - 2008</i>, the Adapters toured the east coast concert circuit with such known acts as Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Gary Lewis & the Playboys, Freddie & the Dreamers and the Soul Survivors. Also, according to the same Hangnail Phillips article, another local band flirted with national notoriety. The band was the Fabulous Pharaohs and they got good enough to make a national appearance on the Pat Boone Show.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CMxKmp_POfU/VEP0HZR5EjI/AAAAAAAAANg/jGqgHGdhQRA/s1600/Adapters%2B4RRh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CMxKmp_POfU/VEP0HZR5EjI/AAAAAAAAANg/jGqgHGdhQRA/s1600/Adapters%2B4RRh.jpg" height="200" width="177" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>The Adaptors</b></span></td></tr>
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<br /><br />Two other local record producers in Wilmington were Effers Bethea and James Chavis. Bethea's greatest success was the Dynamic Concepts, which was a combination of two previous local groups; the instrumental group, The Dynamics, with the vocal group, The Concepts. Their biggest hit was "The Funky Chicken." Bethea also produced a local label called Hip City. One of the groups that recorded on Hip City was the Overtones with their tune "The Gleam in Your Eye." <br /><br /> Lesser known was the Chavis label. Many of their recordings tended to be gospel tinged, but The Spidels had a popular recording with "Like A Bee." <br /><br /> As far as we know, none of these local record companies had local offices or studios. Early recordings were made at 20th Century Records or Virtue Recording in Philadelphia. Later on, many recordings, particularly those produced by Effers Bethea, were made at Ken Del Studios at 5th & Shipley Streets in Wilmington.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pKxqZF2yhNM/VEP02bL-6TI/AAAAAAAAANs/zsQ3fm1T-os/s1600/The%2BDynamic%2BConcepts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-pKxqZF2yhNM/VEP02bL-6TI/AAAAAAAAANs/zsQ3fm1T-os/s1600/The%2BDynamic%2BConcepts.jpg" height="200" width="156" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"><b>The Dynamic Concepts</b></span></td></tr>
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<br />A number of local recording artists who made a national name for themselves in the 1970s and beyond, actually learned their chops in the 1960s. One whose beginnings actually go back to the late 1950s was “Papa” Dee Allen. Papa Dee was originally a member of local jazz great Lem Winchester’s Modernists. After Winchester died prematurely in 1961, the Modernist tried to continue, but without their stellar front man they soon fell apart. Papa Dee continued for a while performing at Wilmington’s early 60s folk music clubs playing bongos and other assorted percussion instruments, but when that proved fruitless he gravitated to the west coast and joined the rock fusion band WAR. He remained with them and was the percussionist on all their recordings including the ones with ex-Animals singer Eric Burdon.A major local contribution to national rock history in the mid to late 1970s came from a number of youngsters who attended local high schools in the late 60s. One was Richard Meyers, who went to Sanford Academy, another was Tom Miller who attended McKean High School and a third was Billy Ficca who went to A.I. duPont. As Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, they and Billy Ficca took off to New York City and became pioneers in the New York punk rock music scene. Performing at CBGBs in lower Manhattan with bands like the Ramones, Blondie and artists like Iggy Pop and Patti Smith, their band Television helped forged a new genre of American rock n’ roll music. Other punk bands with which the three would perform were the Neon Boys and the Voidoids. Richard Hell also appeared in motion pictures, most notably Desperately Seeking Susan, which stared Madonna.<br />
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The biggest success story for a local rock musician is George Thorogood. Thorogood attended Brandywine High School and began his career locally doing gigs at local night spots. For a while, in the mid 1970s he performed at a regular New Year’s Eve bash at Newark’s Deer Park Tavern. In 1978 he signed with Rounder Records, which produced his first hit album, Move It On Over in 1978, and in late 1979 MCA Records released an album of songs Thorogood recorded in 1974 entitled Better Than The Rest. In 1982 he recorded Bad To The Bone on EMI America vinyl. Super Stardom was next!<br />
<br />The Delaware Rock and Roll Hall of Fame website is only a beginning. New pages will continue to be added as new material is uncovered. It is our firm hope that, while the Hall exists in virtual space, it will make the leap into actual space; in a place where people can visit and experience first hand the music that was the soundtrack of our lives. <br />Steven Leechhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01406656691074265661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-19087996373975088042014-10-02T11:57:00.000-04:002014-10-07T16:37:53.473-04:00Robert Bohm’s India: Whatever’s right in front of you<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What the Bird
Tattoo Hides: Selections from the Vijaynagar Notebooks (1974-2012)</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">by Robert Bohm</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> Artfully
crafted and off the chain, Robert Bohm’s<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> What
the Bird Tattoo Hides </i>(West End Press, 2014) is an exemplary achievement in
poetry. Blending poetry with short histories and vignettes, Bohm explores his
45 years of partial residence in the village of Vijaynagar, India, his wife
Suman’s family home. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Robert Bohm will be featured alongside Kito Shani and Franetta McMillian in
the Dreamstreets Downtown Poetry Reading at the Chris White Gallery, 8th &
Shipley Streets, October 18, 2014 at 3 p.m. <br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Bohm strives to avoid “succumbing to the
traditional western search for the ‘real’ India,” as “[t]here is no ‘real’
India,” he asserts. “Just India. Whatever’s right in front of you” (“Whatever’s
right in front of you” 79).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What Bohm
puts in front of us are villagers, family members, rivers, temples, rainstorms,
bus rides, suicide wells, miserable work, indigenous dancers, bougainvillea,
vomit, birth, struggle, murder, outrages of caste, and parallels with the Viet
Nam war, American racism, and the 21<sup>st</sup>-century banking collapse. Throughout,
Bohm struggles against the gap between the white man’s gaze and true solidarity.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
struggle took its most significant turn in 1967 when Robert Bohm met Suman Kirloskar while
she was working at the U.S. Army 225<sup>th</sup> Station Hospital in Munich,
Germany where he was stationed. From the outset, she disabused him of any
notions that Indians were all Hindu philosophy. She was caustic, earthy, and
just impetuous enough to marry Bohm six months later and then introduce him to Vijaynagar.
She was his greatest interpreter and critic in India and was his chief
political collaborator when I first met the two of them in Delaware back in the
80s. They were a formidable team, quick to fault local activists for liberal
and white-skin myopia. Suman went to work for GM where she was elected to high
union office as a reformer. In addition to his political work, Bob often shared
his sometimes abrasive and trenchant poetry at 2<sup>nd</sup> Saturday Poets
readings and in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dreamstreets</i> magazine.
I followed his poetry somewhat desultorily, I must confess. Now I know that all
the while, Bohm has been doing what I admire most in art.</span><br />
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UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Message Header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Salutation"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Date"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Block Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Hyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Document Map"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="List Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="List Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="List Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="List Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="List Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="List Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="List Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="List Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="List Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="List Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
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<![endif]--><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"> Not that what’s in front of him backgrounds
everything in favor of politics. In “Generations,” for example, Bohm uses
evocative and even erotic images to recount how the Bhil indigenous women, whose
forbearers had left forest dwelling, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>danced
rowdily at night</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">in their colony</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">on Belgaum’s
outskirts</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">While a
long-unseen uncle tended</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">cremation fires
up north in Varanasi and the moon</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">its face flush
with lust</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">groaned while
spying on the earth’s naked belly. (45)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> In
other poems such evocative images draw Bohm to declarations of solidarity. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria;">“Mandovi River, Panaji” posits images whose subtext is memories of
empire. The river subtly conveys these memories to Bohm:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Laving its
banks, the river, penetrating soil, seeps</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">mind-like toward
roots almost, but not quite,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">too slender to
find.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The water’s
rhythm takes me to where they are. (14)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria;">What the
river passes by are the Basilica of Bom Jesus, where St. Xaviar’s dust is
resting (an artifact of Portuguese rule), a “barge loaded with ore from
Marpusa”s iron mines,” “plantation laborers [who] trudge to work at dawn,” and the
memory of a woman whose eyelids the Portuguese cut off to force her to watch
them dismember her son. Says Bohm, accepting the challenge of solidarity, “She’s
the queen of sight. / I’m her legacy” (13).</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Bohm
is quite aware of the violence inherent in a struggle against violence, but, in
“Concentric moments,” he seems to wonder how far he can go:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria;">From random flailings to more focused acts, I
rise, transcending redemption.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria;">Or do I?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-indent: -.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria;">Did I really volunteer to go beyond the
outmoded maps? (73)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> W</span>e
become attached to many of the personalities over the five decades reflected in
this poignant volume and, like Bohm, feel closer to their struggles. The fourth
section, “Comings & Goings,” contains several tributes to the passing of a
few. “Meeda Mama Dead” is a lovely memorial to a Dalit (untouchable) basket
weaver, his home, his family, and to his first wife, who leapt into a well: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">he wove her
disappearance</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">into each basket
he made so when</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">you lugged
fruits or vegetables in it</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">you always
carried an additional weight:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">her body sinking
in water. (129)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A bauxite rock Bohm has taken from the
area suggests that dead weight and what we accumulate in life: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>As with the rock</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">We all are</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">the matter we
are made of, this</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">aging flesh,
this body</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">of evidence:
pitted surfaces, traces</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">of old chemical
reactions, one</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">crust built upon
another, nothing, no matter</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">how much we
might try, completely</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">left behind.
(130)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> The
title poem, “What the bird tattoo hides,” refers to tattoos worn at the eye’s
outer edge by Bhil women (remember the dancers and the aroused moon?). Here the
eroticism is made more ambivalent and the cheeky flirtatiousness a companion to
taking justice into one’s own hands and to solidarity. The aging Bhil beauty
Godkari </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>slices open</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">a stolen
jackfruit, seeking</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">truth’s taste.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The blade she
uses is just rusted enough</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">to cut to the
chase.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Although she
doesn’t know you, she’ll give you a piece.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">She always
shares what she takes. (148)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> These
poems reflect well-tuned antennae and expert craft. But they do more. They
shatter the fetishism of the physical world as innate spirit that so many New
Agers and tourists of India espouse; instead, they articulate the human social
relations that give that world its spirit. In “Mumbai om shanti who the fuck
wants to pray anyway” Bohm pulls the legs out from under the airy-eyed: “Carrying
the history / of philosophy / in a burlap bag hanging / from his neck / a
legless man / maneuvers along / the sidewalk on / a wooden tray / with wheels.”
He continues offering a few more disagreeable delicacies and concludes with
“This isn’t / a scene / seen best from / 2 sides / or even / from all sides but
rather / one seen best / without any type / of eyes at all, being / as they are
/ always / in the way.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eat Pray Love</i>
this ain’t.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> “Mother
River,” the farewell poem, is a wonderful prayer that sums up Bohm’s quest to breach
privilege and live in solidarity (Narmada=one of India’s five holy rivers;
mai=mother): </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Narmada Mai</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">teach us to
undam water so we can learn how</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">to free the
heart and drive out</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">those who make
our bodies labor miserably</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">let your high
tides guide us, give us what</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .75in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; tab-stops: .25in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">rising
waters have: the power to breach walls, then cities. (158)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Such a quest reminds me of Martin Buber’s
injunction to see the “other” as a “thou,” not as an object of use, colored by
privilege, but as a co-equal “I.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Bohm
goes further. Once we see who and what’s really in front of us, we must act.</span></div>
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Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-6786112047359964942014-09-21T14:59:00.001-04:002014-09-21T14:59:47.323-04:00Two of Delaware's Best Living Artists<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Now that Delaware's best living artist Edward Loper has passed away, there are many still with us who deserve that mantle. The criteria for best living artist is, of course, the quality of one's work. The other would be the sheer volume of it. Did Picasso outlive Dali, or was it the other way around?</div>
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Here, I would like to submit two candidates who are among Delaware's best artists. I chose them because they have one thing in common. They are both expatriates. One is an expatriate from another country, and the other is an expatriate in another country.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nTj6uv1GqX8/VB8GdZskyCI/AAAAAAAAAMk/-kJGOT5tS34/s1600/Roldan%2BWest%2BPainting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nTj6uv1GqX8/VB8GdZskyCI/AAAAAAAAAMk/-kJGOT5tS34/s1600/Roldan%2BWest%2BPainting.jpg" height="153" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Painting by Roldan West</span></td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-q4CpP9Sa0Bo/VB8GhVl9gHI/AAAAAAAAAMs/ljzthHOIoRM/s1600/roldan-west-sax-player.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-q4CpP9Sa0Bo/VB8GhVl9gHI/AAAAAAAAAMs/ljzthHOIoRM/s1600/roldan-west-sax-player.jpg" height="320" width="245" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Sax Player by Roldan West</span></td></tr>
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Roldan West lives and works in Wilmington, but he was born in Nicaragua. The other, Jonathan Bragdon was born in Wilmington. He now lives with his family in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. As a teenager, Roldan West joined the Sandanista Revolution leading him to play a major part in their literacy program on behalf of Nicaraguan peasants. With the artist Sergio Michellini he crafted murals in Managua. He visited Mexico to learn from the murals of Sequeiros, Orozco and Diego Rivera. He studied with Mexican artists Arnold Belkin and Geraldo Cantu. Roldan traveled extensively through Europe, Asia, and Africa learning the craft of graffiti art by use of spray cans. An excellent example of Roldan West at work can be found a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tKVxNbJBcY">www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tKVxNbJBcY</a><br />
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Jonathan Bragdon left Wilmington in 1961 and moved to Switzerland and the home of an uncle who lived there. One of his earliest inspirations came after visiting the Louvre. Jonathan later attended the Ecole Superierure des Art Decoritifs, studied under the artist Biagio Frisa and received encouragement from the artist Jasper Johns. His earliest shows in the United States in the late 1960s sold very well. His success selling in European galleries have also done very well. More about Jonathan's artwork may be found at: <a href="http://www.bragdon.nl/">www.bragdon.nl</a><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lxVQEbneWYw/VB8FVbuDwNI/AAAAAAAAAMM/J1DcTOP_vI0/s1600/4%2Bblog%2Bart.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lxVQEbneWYw/VB8FVbuDwNI/AAAAAAAAAMM/J1DcTOP_vI0/s1600/4%2Bblog%2Bart.png" height="399" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">The author with Jonathan Bragdon on the left from 1959. Behind </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">us </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">is an </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">original painting by Delaware artist William D. White. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2YxGPFaOfcQ/VB8GWQu-6XI/AAAAAAAAAMU/vtBRT95Ls4E/s1600/back%2Bgardens%2C%2BDresden.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2YxGPFaOfcQ/VB8GWQu-6XI/AAAAAAAAAMU/vtBRT95Ls4E/s1600/back%2Bgardens%2C%2BDresden.jpg" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Back Garden, Dresden by Jonathan Bragdon</span></td></tr>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ypSNR3ToBqU/VB8GaHyhqLI/AAAAAAAAAMc/Q9pMtZQoZOA/s1600/Kruidberg%2C%2BSantpoort%2BNoord.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ypSNR3ToBqU/VB8GaHyhqLI/AAAAAAAAAMc/Q9pMtZQoZOA/s1600/Kruidberg%2C%2BSantpoort%2BNoord.jpg" height="305" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Kruidberg, Santpoort Noord by Jonathan Bragdon</span></div>
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Being able to achieve success in the sale of one's artwork surely contributes to the value of one's art. Doing that over a long period during an artist's career will assure the reputation of an artist after having passed from the scene. Such is true with many past Wilmington artists, beginning with Howard Pyle, through any number of the Brandywine School artists, through those who began their work during the WPA like Edward Loper, Edward Grant, Bayard Berndt and William D. White, as well as others including Gayle Hoskins and Jefferson David Chalfant. The list is large and the Delaware Art Museum has played a central role in preserving this legacy.<br /><br />
Today, the city of Wilmington has developed a downtown art district hosting a number of galleries and art schools. This assures us a plethora of gifted and living fine artists for a long time to come. Whether they been working here for a long time, like E. Jean Lanyon and Edward Loper Jr, or are fresh out of art school and intending to make the vicinity their home, both Jonathan Bragdon and Roldan West are in good company.<br />
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Steven Leechhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01406656691074265661noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-41147534313341048342014-08-29T12:14:00.000-04:002014-09-10T08:06:20.689-04:00Mullen Remembers M*****d<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLcxnTDn80eEqegHPi-pH70F9f46cKu5nVx5QwknspNthCe678UbLhqGl9htFcuRlp_rUZm6D4q2rb86D9l6fHPvp7PhDCyWpj9UcihDmveV-r1LVh5Vi4Y3Ghji_4C2rTwG_SAgdZAmgc/s1600/theres_a_house_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLcxnTDn80eEqegHPi-pH70F9f46cKu5nVx5QwknspNthCe678UbLhqGl9htFcuRlp_rUZm6D4q2rb86D9l6fHPvp7PhDCyWpj9UcihDmveV-r1LVh5Vi4Y3Ghji_4C2rTwG_SAgdZAmgc/s1600/theres_a_house_1.jpg" height="320" width="217" /></a></div>
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In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">There’s a House in
the Land, </i>Shaun Mullen chronicles how a tribe of Vietnam vets and
associated pals and gals made an old farm north of Newark, Delaware into an
island of freedom. Like his earlier work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Bottom of the Fox, </i>Mullen’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">House</i>
provides insights on the American Seventies. This time, however, he treats
those of his contemporaries inhabiting the piedmont west of Philadelpha, PA to
a wild and wonderful reminiscence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
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Thousands remember—and more wish they did—the Flag Day
parties, with their roasting pigs, the house band Snakegrinder, the socializing
of bikers with profs, the abundant garden among disused trucks and cars, the
tanker-loads of Genesee Cream Ale, and the mountains of marijuana, much grown there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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The Seventies were the shore the Sixties washed up on. Those
who climbed out of the surf were left to rebuild the American Dream, shredded
by Vietnam, JFK, MLK, THC, LSD. Who knows how many such islands of
self-reliance and rugged individualism there were in America, but few had in
residence an amanuensis as talented as Shaun Mullen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mullen shows that while American rules were shattered,
American values persevered.</div>
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Mullen chooses a sort of roman-à-clef approach, changing
almost all the names except his own, that of the band Snakegrinder, and the dog
Meatball. I, receiving an advance copy for my tangential familiarity, will not
fink, only that New Park is Newark, Delaware, and the New Park Tavern,
portrayed in its piss-smelling splendor, is the old Deer Park Hotel. There, it
is apocryphally reported, Edgar Allan Poe drunkenly cursed all who stopped in
that village of philistines that they might never leave. Still, many will
recognize lead singer “Edward,” who died on the railroad tracks while
attempting to flag down a train, subsequently appearing in a dream to tell
“Rafe,” the Weather Underground fugitive, to grab his kazoo and start singing
center stage. Many bought belts from Doctor Duck’s leather shop, but few,
beside myself, ever tasted a sub on a whole-wheat roll from his short-lived
deli.</div>
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In episodes and thematic chapters, Mullen details the
geology of “Kiln Farm,” the flora and fauna, the architecture, the dogs, the
goats and other livestock, the roles the denizens filled and the crafts they
practiced, the ambiguous status of women, the tragic crash that killed “Pattie”
and her daughter “Caitlin,” and Mullen’s road trips to Aspen and the Florida
Keys.</div>
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Eventually, the tribe moved on. They “didn’t so much grow up,” Mullen explains, “as succumb to the mechanistic gravity of the real world that compresses all but the roundest of pegs.” The vicissitudes of erstwhile freedom were neither good nor bad, but they accompanied some wonderful progress in education, ecology, and human unity. Hey, the shit-house Bible at the farm was the Whole Earth Catalogue, that “Access to Tools” for anarchists and late twentieth century pioneers.<br />
<i>There’s a House in the Land</i> may shock or titillate, but Shaun Mullen captures the spirit of a time and place. Those who were there will chuckle and maybe weep.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0boWgW1x_lZQthDyjUeXJgB449PhoCSzvyK32Rd9GmbYzttZNLhrAG2AEm7Kim73UNoNzF2DqAjxGmRHxI067BoYjzM47D_aqV7irKKkE2mwah34hsRWlt2zqxrysUlTjklq3qA6ae5XU/s1600/shaun_mullen_medium.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0boWgW1x_lZQthDyjUeXJgB449PhoCSzvyK32Rd9GmbYzttZNLhrAG2AEm7Kim73UNoNzF2DqAjxGmRHxI067BoYjzM47D_aqV7irKKkE2mwah34hsRWlt2zqxrysUlTjklq3qA6ae5XU/s1600/shaun_mullen_medium.jpg" height="200" width="149" /></a></div>
Mullen will sign copies of There's A House In The Land beginning at 1 p.m. on Sunday, September 28 at the Blue Crab Grill in Suburban Plaza off Elkton Road in Newark. Snakegrinder and the Shredded Fieldmice, a popular Newark band in the early 1970s, will reunite for the occasion. The title of Mullen's book is from a lyric in a Snakegrinder song. (Postscript Sept. 8: Due to the high demand, a second show has been added at 8 p.m.)<br />
Shaun Mullen blogs at <a href="http://kikoshouse.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Kiko’s House</a> and <a href="http://themoderatevoice.com/" target="_blank">The ModerateVoice</a>.</div>
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Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5261340509073154473.post-46686775959350376252014-08-01T09:07:00.000-04:002014-08-02T00:11:39.682-04:00Announcing the Broken Turtle Booklist<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJeX6lUFTZ8zZlN7mhhG_1D1NA1Cdh12EGshNHgSlfmpxFvD7VTjmPhOBeV4qXHAr0qsGirugQS-KFGDrK6QydPzYfHNKMAWnaoAO3tLhzCnVjG4AqiUMkigdxx4jdQCJxsDkIb8Jdj2zs/s1600/Booklist+screenshot.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJeX6lUFTZ8zZlN7mhhG_1D1NA1Cdh12EGshNHgSlfmpxFvD7VTjmPhOBeV4qXHAr0qsGirugQS-KFGDrK6QydPzYfHNKMAWnaoAO3tLhzCnVjG4AqiUMkigdxx4jdQCJxsDkIb8Jdj2zs/s1600/Booklist+screenshot.png" height="330" width="400" /></a></div>
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Broken Turtle Books is proud to announce the online <a href="http://www.brokenturtlebooks.com/index.html" target="_blank">Broken Turtle Booklist</a>, a catalogue of Delaware regional authors, local publishers, and
literary communities operating in Delaware. The Booklist includes audio and
video recordings of Delaware authors, as well as their major works. It provides
easy links to Amazon, Paypal, or publishers for folks who want to buy. <br />
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Each month we will feature a selected work by a Delaware author. In
our inaugural offering, we are featuring <i>A
Visit With Uncle Richard, </i>a compilation of the popular series written by <i>Spectator</i> columnist and Editor Pat
Gibbs. Uncle Richard is familiar to listeners of <i>Even Steven’s Boptime, </i>where Gibbs as Uncle Richard holds forth
cantankerously and provocatively on issues of the day. <i>Boptime’s</i> DJ is our own Steven Leech, of course.<br />
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There are lots of great writers in our hidden corner just off I-95.
The Broken Turtle Booklist hopes to raise our profile and contribute to your
success.<br />
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Broken Turtle Books, if you don’t already know, is a group of writer-editor-publishers
who have been part of the Delaware literary scene for four decades. Most of us
have been associated with Dreamstreets Press, which published <a href="http://dreamstreetsarchive.com/" target="_blank"><i>Dreamstreets</i> <i>Magazine</i></a>, produced radio programs on WVUD 91.3 FM (University of
Delaware), and a television clip on WHYY TV (Wilmington/Philadelphia) and
founded the 2nd Saturday Poetry Readings at various venues in Wilmington,
Delaware. We also blog occasionally on matters literary, artsy, historical, and
political at the Broken Turtle Blog.<br />
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For a while we were Broken Turtle Books LLC, intending to publish our
own and historical works through a small company that we controlled. However,
as most writers and publishers know, alternative vanity presses, small run
printers, and publish-on-demand opportunities have proliferated in cyberspace,
making our business model obsolete. Yet our mission remains the same: to
promote diversity and cutting-edge literature in a state known for its
insularity and paucity of opportunities “downwind from chateau country.”<br />
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Our list is a work in progress. We have a number of authors in our
in-box ready to be added. For the most part, we are limited to poetry and
fiction by Delaware authors who have their work available as a collection,
print or electronic.<br />
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Check out the site and see what we have added so far. If you believe
you have been overlooked, would like to recommend a Delaware author, or just
have suggestions for the website, follow the instructions at the “<a href="http://www.brokenturtlebooks.com/about_the_booklist.html" target="_blank">About the Booklist</a>” page.<br />
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Spread the word, peruse the site, and buy local books!</div>
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Phillip Bannowskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15635421147908549692noreply@blogger.com0