http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGH5IyKQn98   Elsewhere: Rashad Shabazz, 'Black Militancy: Notes From the Underground' For a generation of young activists, the reality of war, imperialism, racism and the growing fragility of democratic liberalism was too much to handle. Force became a means to wrestle with this tension. As the discourse of a "country torn" finds its way into mainstream political analyses (for many the deep divisions in this country are not a new political reality), we should reflect on the writings of political dissidents and radicals. We should recognize the diversity of political analysis that is very much alive. The histories of armed struggle, if taken seriously, provide us with a means to think more critically about the center, and complicate its claims of moral and political right. David Manning, 'A Tale of Two (or Three) Marches' Unlike 1968, this [2003] march was… Read More...

The University of Chicago's Center for International Studies has scheduled an upcoming talk by University of Utah law professor Amos Guiora titled 'Legitimate Target: A Criteria Based Approach to Targeted Killing.' Billed as an oration on the criteria of targeted killing, Guiora highlights the 'moral' frou-frou of state assassination: Targeted killings represent both the contemporary weapon of choice and, and likely, the weapon of the future. From the perspective of the nation-state, the benefits of targeted killing are clear: aggressive measures against identified targets can be carried out with minimal, if any, risk to soldiers. But while the threat to soldiers is minimal, there are other risks that must be considered. Particularly, there is a high possibility of collateral damage as well as legitimate concerns regarding how a target is defined. Clearly broad legal, moral, and operational issues are at… Read More...

Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet, translator, anthologist, editor, and educator Jerome Rothenberg. I first read Rothenberg's celebrated collections rather blindly, long before I knew enough to know about him: first, in a linguistics class, the seminal compilation Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania (UC Press, 1968) and much later on his blog Poems and Poetics, conceived as ‘a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus.’ Samizdat devoted an entire issue to exploring Rothenberg and Pierre Joris' poetics after they jointly edited the anthology Poems for the Millennium, Volumes One and Two (1995). Robert Archambeau commented in the editorial note: In our own time the discourse about poetry, if not poetry itself, seems to have suffered through a… Read More...

For Jaime A. Salazar White morning, full of praise. Before every thing wakes from sleep I wake first, thinking some Whatever thing. Clumsily I pull back the blinds: Blare of wondrous light! Anticipatory sky! It's all there in cashmere, Milky Way, Eastman Kodak white, Enveloping the brushes and stop signs. This blanket covers them all. Even my Interior lake is frosted in the blast of its Whiteness. In the accumulation of life, In things and places outside the window, In our little igloo, Chaos makes a metamorphosis into quietude. No miraculous sounds: geese, car mufflers, couples walking: None are heard. And I stop breathing so that nothing Sound while you're asleep, so that No thing dare break The oceanic mystery of the antemeridian.   Read More...

Pontificating on solutions to poverty (best read in all-caps: SOLUTIONS TO POVERTY) is a familiar topic of the New York Times mélange of millionaire columnists. Perhaps none are as keen on seeing it alleviated through rigorous familial oversight than Nicholas Kristof. Kristof’s ideal unit is the nuclear, middle-to-upper class, two active-duty parental household. It is indirectly projected as a panacea, and families (specifically, poor mothers) that fall short of this utopian arrangement have to answer for it. If the Fed is endowed with the ambiguous power of enacting national monetary policy, the low-income, low-resources family is tasked with issuing hugs. Lots of them, and over many years of effusive columns. For all his prescriptions downplaying, or more accurately, ignoring the structural and historic legacy of American poverty, the blithe repetition of those prescriptions can still surprise. 'For Obama's New Term, Start… Read More...

Their predatory skill fascinates and frightens humans, even though their survival is threatened by human-related activities. [shark]           A 33-ton shark tank in a Shanghai mall exploded, injuring up to 16 people and leaving three sharks and dozens of turtles and fish dead. It was a ghastly event that makes for an ecologically apocalyptic moving image. Going beyond the real-life scenario of such a thing happening—and 'such a thing' has actually happened—I've been grappling with its symbolic power, that is, some way to answer for the fact that I watched it on loop a dozen or more times. (That's more times than Open Water and Open Water 2: Adrift, but not much more.) The what of the image is clear: what is the how of what it's doing? It is a truthful moving image not only because it is real (in contrast to… Read More...

Larry Donnell Andrews was in prison serving a murder sentence (for which he turned himself in) when The Wire, featuring the character Omar Little based on his life, first aired. Donnie died after an aortic dissection last week. Few who only knew about his life from its fictional depiction would have guessed that the 'real' Omar Little would live twice as long as the fictional one. Magazine and newspaper profiles flatten the life of their subject, speeding up certain parts and slowing down others in order to fit a manicured narrative. Despite that tendency, Donnie Andrews' life—in print and onscreen fictionalization—reads like a composite of several different lives, enlarged and textured by seeming extremes. Redemption and mercy play supporting roles. Donnie's childhood beginnings in North Carolina formed the background to the first dead body he saw at age four. It… Read More...

Every purification ritual requires its own warning label. The most decidedly honest opening to an essay on Nick Kristof is already taken, so perhaps Kathryn Mathers won't mind if I borrow her totem: 'I do not want to write about Nicholas Kristof.' Mr. Kristof, to anyone not among his hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans, 1.3 million Twitter followers, Times subscribers, or back-of-the-bus vocal mockers, is a male Homo sapien (the only extant species of their genus, Homo sapiens originated in Africa). Mr. Kristof's large brain-to-body ratio and his ability to grasp and maneuver objects such as a pen and notepad while he engages in bipedal locomotion is noteworthy. Twice a week since 2001, he has used his neocortex, prefrontal cortex, and cerebral cortex to write columns for The New York Times. Human beings are particularly known for their social interactions, as well as their inclination… Read More...

Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series continues with poet Elaine Equi. At the risk of bordering on superlatives, which this project has taken care to avoid, her renderings of material life are among the most exquisitely witty and awake in contemporary American poetry. She herself has characterized her writing as 'willfully direct in a minimalist sort of way,' though she could have said, without a trace of immodesty, that it is a kick in the gut followed by an equally unexpected, wry smile. Her decades-long work submerges itself in a capacious range of topical matter. What genuinely makes one its frequent visitor, however, is the will to adopt a decentered style as a style of its own. Many have discarded the unit of a stable or cohesive poetic 'self,' yet that stance has seldom been followed by a… Read More...

To Evan Calder Williams Three speeds of life: animal, vegetable, mineral.¹ It is the last two that shape time in childhood. You stare at a photograph of yourself as a child and whistle that familiar whistle, When was anyone ever so young. Time ever slow. Slower than molasses, slower than raw honey: turbinated sugar-time. Devoid of speed, life moved at the pace of number of books devoured, Japanese cartoon series and American teen comedies allowed, maneuvers in sibling spats, apartment bombings dodged, carton boxes and crates filled up for the next move. Friends were everything. Tell me when this stratospheric dash began. I am caught without shelter in its advancing armies of minutes, tripping over the seconds hand on the clock face (one revolution per minute.) There's a relay race and time is wearing my team's uniform but it stretches the baton always… Read More...

Gaza is not the most beautiful city. Its shore is not bluer than the shores of Arab cities. Its oranges are not the most beautiful in the Mediterranean basin. Gaza is not the richest city. It is not the most elegant or the biggest, but it equals the history of an entire homeland Because it is more ugly, impoverished, miserable, and vicious in the eyes of enemies. Because it is the most capable, among us, of disturbing the enemy’s mood and his comfort, Because it is his nightmare, Because it is mined oranges, children without a childhood, old men without old age, And women without desires, Because of all this it is the most beautiful, the purest and richest among us And the one most worthy of love... — Mahmoud Darwish, excerpt from 'Silence for Gaza' Read More...

Beyond purely instinctual attraction, at least two things draw me to street art. The first is that despite international crossings of artists, motifs, and even movements since at least the early 1980s, graphic representations still retain cultural specificity. The all-purpose term visual culture can flatten the differences between what pixacão on buildings in São Paulo signifies versus the constant overlay of work on a single, ever-changing wall in Central Square. Street art inherently demands a comparative perspective. The second is the unfixed, non-predetermined, and non-universalist meanings attached to that activity. Your predispositions are unmoored in a serious way. To give an example of what I mean: when street art in Tehran was taken up as a topic here before, it was in a personal/familial (even anguished) way: graffiti deployed in opposition (and later, punishment) rather than beautification. My uncle's prison sentence after spraying anti-IRI graffiti as a teenager was an entryway… Read More...

Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with Michael Davidson, poet, critic, literature professor, and editor of George Oppen's collected works. I read a blurb written by Davidson on the back cover of a poetry volume recently, and it distracted me (in the best sense) from the book itself. He has argued, in lengthy essays and in the book Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (University of Michigan Press, 2008), for a poetics and politics of disability that 'defamiliarizes not only language but the body normalized within language.' Such a move would go beyond an interest in depictions or themes of disability (Davidson is himself hearing impaired) and 'dependence on ableist models.' It might ask, as Davidson does, 'What would it mean to think of Charles Olson’s “breath” line as coming from… Read More...

shibboleth |? sh ib?li?; -?le ?| noun. a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people. ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from Hebrew ????? šibb?let ‘ear of corn,’ used as a test of nationality by its difficult pronunciation. (From 'The Shibboleth Incident,' Judges 12:6, King James Bible: 'Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.') ?   ?   ? 'Over a five-day period, as many 20,000 Haitians were horrifically massacred by Dominican soldiers and civilians wielding machetes, bayonets and rifles. It was called the Parsley Massacre because the Dominican border guards would conduct a linguistic test of all dark-skinned people to see who was Haitian—they would… Read More...