Hugh Nicoll's Blog

Ishaq has just published a pointer on the poetics list to nocturnes, a literary review, published in Oakland, CA. The third volume, which includes a CD has just been published. The premier issue was published in 2001, volume 2 in 2002. Back issues are available from , and subscriptions are available from the nocturnes web site. Looks like a fascinating journal, which I wasn’t aware of before.

Here’s a copy of the list of Relief Agencies on the Apple web site.

• American Red Cross International Response Fund
• AmeriCares South Asia Earthquake Relief Fund
• Direct Relief International International Assistance Fund
• Médecins Sans Frontières International Tsunami Emergency Appeal
• Oxfam Asian Earthquake & Tsunami Fund
• Sarvodaya Relief Fund for Tsunami Tragedy
• UNICEF South Asia Tsunami Relief Efforts

Barlow serves up hot, deep writing from Austria, reflecting on the ski accident his daughter Amelia has just survived. His characterization of this first decade of the 21st C. as the “Uh-Ohs” is as spot on as his marvelous descriptions of his new Austrian family connection.

Taking a partial time out from my university responsibilities, I’ve been reading Dan Morgentern’s Living With Jazz (2004), which collects a number of the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Director’s essays, liner notes, and pieces published when Morgentern was editor of DownBeat, which features a number of freely accessible articles from their archives.

The announcement page for the book at Rutgers includes a link to a flash slide show, that is a leisurely celebration of his career, and features the piano of Ray Bryant.

I have especially enjoyed “Introduction: Reminiscing in Tempo,” an account of Morgenstern’s European childhood and adolescence as well as the essays surveying the careers of Armstrong and Ellington, but the liner and concert notes are fun, too. Check out this review by Alfred Appel, Jr. for other commentary.

“Full scale of the disaster” “unimaginable power” “A catastrophe” & the U.N., according to a BBC report I watched on television this morning, now fears that up to five million could die of disease and malnutrition in the aftermath of the December 26 earthquake. The initial reports triggered shock, horror, and recollections of how profoundly the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 troubled the imaginations of Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and the six year old Goethe. Such events force us toward reflection on the nature of the universe, knowledge, and evil. See, for example, the preface to Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought.

President Bush, meanwhile, remains on holiday in Crawford, provoking questions from Juan Cole, who links to a Washington Post article by John F. Harris and Robin Wright. The Post reporters note, among other things, that Bush has missed an opportunity to demonstrate sympathy and solidarity with the muslims of Aceh province, and that the U.S. is the among the least generous of the world’s wealthiest nations. The attempt to take a swipe at former President Clinton by Bush’s spokesperson elicited a hoot from Josh Marshall, and questions about “our priorties” from Mark.

Susan Sontag, 71, has succumbed to her long battles with cancer. Tim Rutten’s remembrance is a loving and clear minded testament her “uniquely American life.”

Meditating on her passing inspired me to search the archives of The New York Review of Books. One of her latest pieces there is her remarks on receiving the Jerusalem prize in 2001, “In Jerusalem,” which includes timely reminders on the importance of doing your homework, of thinking, and on doing the hard work of expressing the truth.

“The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth…and refuse to be an accomplice of lies or misinformation. Literature is the expression of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to help make us see the world as it is, which is to say, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.”

“Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions—whenever asked—cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to perceive complexity.”

Sontag’s response to 9/11 remains available from The New Yorker’s archives, along with other writer’s comments in the “Talk of the Town” column from the issue of 2001-09-24.

Ken Hagler, one of my fellow Tinderbox Weekenders in San Francisco last October, posted a link to a Common Dreams article by Thomas Hartmann, Hyping Terror for Fun, Profit — And Power, which reports on the Adam Curtis documentary aired by the BBC last October and November. Streaming video versions of The Power of Nightmares are available on line, as are transcripts. A larger screen version of the third program with better audio can be found on Alex Jones’ Prison Planet site.

The documentary is very well researched, as Hartmann noted, and makes one of the the best arguments against the nonsense the passes for mainstream political discourse these days. As Donny Trivette used to say, “Scare me, boy!”

Jonathan Raban on “The Power of Nightmares”

Fast-moving, full of ingenious musical and cinematic puns, Curtis’s series is best watched as an epic political cartoon in the manner of Daumier or Ralph Steadman. It freely bends the facts to fit its vision, it distorts, it overcolors, it grossly—and entertainingly—simplifies, yet, as only a cartoon can, it captures an aspect of its subject that has so far escaped even the most skeptical observers of the war on terror.

Raban writes approvingly of the sober assessment in Stephen Flynn’s America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us from Terrorism, HarperCollins, 234 pp., $25.95.

NPR is hosting Sue Johnson and Joe Richman’s “Mandela: an Audio History” hosted by Desmond Tutu, with an introduction by Nelson Mandela. The CD of this work is available for purchase at the Radio Diaries site.

Nick Piombino’s Jackson Mac Low: A Few Images is one of the lightest but most moving of the reminiscences in the poetics blogging community. Lots of links.

Good background, texts, and sound files at the EPC Mac Low page including ordering information for the “Open Secrets” CD.
Open Secrets. Compact disc containing eight works for voices and/or instruments. Should still be available from…

Anne Tardos
42 North Moore Street
New York, NY 10013-2441.

Jackson Mac Low: Short Biography at Al Filreis’s site

Jackson Mac Low Sound Poetry at UbuWeb

Mac Low page, Academy of American Poets

I watched the BBC news this morning after my morning bath, and was horrified by Rumsfeld’s response to a soldier asking why US troops are being sent into battle with inadequately armored vehicles. Juan Cole’s column for December 9 includes quotes from the transcripts of the soldier’s question and Rumsfeld’s responses, courtesy of Reuters.

Cole goes on to detail the numbers of journalists starting to challenge the administrations distortions and lies. I’ll hope (and maybe even pray) that we won’t end up living in some sort of hybrid hell before Bush & co. take responsibility for their incompetence. The government’s policies aren’t even in the long run going to take care of the elitists they are so clearly designed to serve, not to mention the ways in which they’ll perpetuate insult and injury for ordinary working folk all over the planet. Can you imagine what it will really be like when we are all living in some warped version “Max Headroom,” “Mad Max,” and “Blade Runner?”

Stephen Vincent posted a forward of Moyers’s December 1 speech to the Poetics list this morning. The text is available on the Common Dreams site and on a number of other progressive news sites, including truthout.

As Vincent notes, a number of people who identify themselves as left, liberal, or progressive seem to still be wandering around in a post-election daze, and cautions against taking the administration’s blend of history, ideology and theology – identified by Moyers as the nexus of attitude and faith holding sway on policy in contemporary Washington, DC – lying down.

I’ve been in my usual too-busy-with-teaching daze to devote enough time to studying, thinking, and writing about the political environment. And even those efforts would be inadequate prerequisites for the action that has to be taken in order to open debates that might bring the democratic back into the process of community building and governance.

What must be done? is the awful question, and as Moyers confesses, he is sometimes hard-pressed to trust his own characteristic optimism.

In a follow up post, Vincent includes Bill Moyers’s professional email address, , in case anyone feels moved to send messages of support or praise.

Between now and next July, The Paris Review will be putting all of its 300+ writers-at-work interviews online, starting with those from the 1950s. Reviews from the 1960s are due in January, with all the interviews through the nineties to follow in February, April, and May. Another Wow!

I’ve just discovered, via another post to the poetics list the online resources at the Slought Foundation home page. Wow! A 1958 interview with Coltrance, the transcripts of the 1963 Vancouver poetry conference, a 1962 Olson reading at Goddard…

Jim Rosenberg has posted a link to an article from yesterday’s The Japan Times which summarizes a recent study in The Lancet on the death count in the Iraq conflict.

“The central message of the remarkable Lancet report is clear: High civilian death tolls are inevitable when a modern high-tech army seeks to reduce its own casualties by fighting an urban counterinsurgency campaign remotely via air and long-range artillery strikes.

No matter how precise the weapons and accurate the targeting, using long-range ordinance against densely populated residential urban areas will always cause massive civilian casualties.”

This is the moral high ground of the current and continuing administration. Shock and awe, indeed!

I’ve been thinking about the results of the US election, making a few notes, saving a few URLs in the attempts to recover from my initial horror and gain some perspective. The notion that the election was “hacked” has been making the rounds, and just this morning I’ve read two useful pieces taking issue with the temptations to jump to conclusions and indulge in more intense forms of paranoia and conspiracy theorizing. Jesse Douglas Allen-Taylor has a piece in the Berkeley Daily Planet, and the other piece by Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating in The Washington Post. One of the internet sites critiqued, Consortium News in the article takes issues with the Post writers’ claims. Barlow offers an emphathetic way of stepping back in Magnanimous Defeat.

A few more links:

Solid suggestions from the Bull Moose, on what the democrats need to do to make the best of the election results. Thanks, as always, to Josh Marshall for the pointer.

In Thursday’s post-election assessment, Juan Cole asks “Why don’t the Democrats have county data bases as good as Karl Rove’s?” Cole is just one of the progressives making the common sense suggestion that the Democrats need to reach out to “red state voters.” Read Josh Marshall every day!

Also check out this transcript of a Thomas Mann interview
Barrett Watten has posted a work in progress, “Blue State: Reading the Election with Kenneth Fearing,” offering an alternative to journalistic perspectives.

Halvord Johnson has put a pdf version of his chapbook Coyote’s Engines online.

With the battle in Fallujah still raging, the guest editorial by William R. Polk on Juan Cole’s blog is an even more important read than when it was first published.

An excerpt:

“staying the course” … means continued fighting. France “stayed the course” in Algeria in the 1950s as America did in Vietnam in the 1960s and as the Israelis are now doing in occupied Palestine. It has never worked anywhere.

He notes, a paragraph down or so, that there are many examples of the longterm failure of this policy option, in many cases lasting generations… Ireland, Algeria, Chechnya, etc.

The Plaintext project is concerned with the agency and programming of writing technologies. Plaintext Tools is a listserv and portal for writers, artists, and thinkers, with the goal of creating and publishing original research, providing resources, and fostering community around the tools and methods of writing technologies. A full description of the project, as well as info on subscribing to the list, is on the Plaintext project web site.

This takes on additional relevance for me both as my desires to become more technically proficient with understanding the foundations of computing, and, in a mundane way, every time I have to struggle with all the formatting junk clogging student posts to course web logs when they copy and paste word documents directly into Frontier/Manila course websites.

Reconstruction 4.4 has just been published on the web. It is a fine example of the web as an alternative environment for academic publishing — issn number, reviews and scholarly articles serving the needs of the academic community without incurring the prohibitive costs of paper publication and distribution.

In some ways, however, the journal has a distinctly old media feel. The courier font and white background to the pages, with the text of the articles extending almost to the margins of the frame give it a typewriter produced feel.

Hope I’ll actually have time to dig a little deeper and see if any of the articles provide useful perspectives on the issues raised in Steven Myer’s Irrestistable Dictation: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science.

Just past eleven pm (JST) and most of the news from the States is about the election. Mark Bernstein has a wide-ranging series of links in his latest blog posting, including one to Barlow’s “How to Overthrow the Government” which is wondrous for its broadminded honesty, and for the link to Hunter Thompson’s election rant.
Ron Silliman’s post for the first of November is also devoted to the importance of this election. The divide in the United States, commented on almost everywhere in the mainstream press by pundits and editorial writers of many persuasions, does seem truly severe – closing in on the ideological and political gaps last experienced in the lead up to the Civil War, as many have already commented.
After twenty-one years in Japan, I have grown ever more conflicted about the idea of “going home.” Lots of thinking to do, but whatever happens, it may make my work with Japanese students of American Studies more challenging and more exciting.

update Juan Cole describes Bush as a revolutionary (a Robespierre), and calls Kerry a statesman who will navigate the status quo, and thus protect America’s true interests. He also cites a remark by a John Walbridge, claiming that “most Americans may not believe the rest of the world exists.” Once a traveller, or a long-term expatriate, with friends and colleagues everywhere in that wider world, the arrogance of such beliefs must at the very least be questioned. Yanks do not easily shed the habit of comparing their new environments to the the ways things are done in the USA, nor do we lose our faith in America’s best ideals, but we certainly come to question the spinmeisters.