bookofdays

the mother of all impossible deadlines

Last night, I met my summer creative writing students -- a grand group, many of whom are taking the class to get the elusive "urban studies" credit (how do you make a creative writing class worth the time of a community college student? By making it one of the ways s/he can engage more deeply with his/her city). There are 22 of them, and it's going to be a dance helping each discover her own voice.

And next week, I'm back where I was when  began this blog: teachind Voltaire's  Candide, and rest of that impossible World Humanities class -- this time compressed into four weeks.

Not the best time to decide to finish revising a novel of about 600 pages. (The Suicide Project, of course. What else?)

But with the J-School bootcamp sniping at my heels (classes begin August 8, or approximately 72 hours after I teach my last class),, I'm loath to let this novel, which I had made my agent put aside "while I fix it," remain on the shelf for another year. So far I've only got 125 pages revised, but that was when it was a side project for which I had set no deadlines, subject to the more hysterical pressures of both teaching and journalism.

So here I am, back at this impossible book -- and trying to get most of the 400+ pages left revised in six weeks. It's still that point of view experiment -- but given that this is a text that merges fiction and nonfiction (I was under the influence of Milan Kundera when I conceived of it), it also makes me fact-check myself all over again. And to see what I can cut, what's not essential or even additive, what facts are turned prosey and dead.

And now, after warming up with Book I (San Francisco) and Book II (Rome), I'm today looking at Book III (Jerusalem). You can only imagine what a text that has so much to do with suicide, and a suicidal character that is sent on a business trip to Jerusalem, could include: and how the 5 years since I last worked on it have brought forth even more grist for that mill. But my job isn't to add more, not without taking away. And I need to not get sucked into the vortex of current Middle East politics, as much as my theme of collective suicide feels shouted from its depths.

I need to stay with Judith -- or rather, just behind her and to the side, as I work to open the narrative beyond her self-obsessed, hyperactive brain. I need to notice what she doesn't, and notice when the accretion of detail obscure the arcs of her discoveries. And I need to think about, but not say out loud, what it means now for a book whose frame narrative takes place in Vietnam (Judith's father is a vet) to embrace a sub-narrative,  that brings her down the Via Dolorosa, past the Dome of the Rock,  Al-Aqsa and  Masada.

Can I do this with approx 15 weekday hours and 12 weekend hours available each week?  Even with all the grading involved with 22 classroom hours a week? When I write all that down, it sounds patently absurd.

But I bet I can get much of the grunt work done on it -- get close enough that it'll be ready for careful feedback from my friends (and my agent) as I cast off for this entirely new adventure.

Will it cut into blogging? Likely, though I'm not likely to give up my chance to keep up the commentary entirely. 

Besides, I'm counting on you to spot  me.

I may post bits of the new TSP  on another blog: let  me know if you'd like to see. (I'm also going to start a journalism-school blog when the time comes: the title I'm thinking of is "Crayons to Chaos," if that's not just too Eminem.)

but I can't spell the word surprize

We were definitrely overdue for a blog thing -- rhis one courtesy of the BBC! Thanks to Liz, who is far cooler than I, though her resuts showed her as a fellow word geek. Proof: she's spending the summer in my other home town, San Francisco. Go take the quiz and let me know how it came out?

You are a Linguistic Thinker
		Linguistic thinkers: Tend to think in words, and like to use language to express complex ideas. Are sensitive to the sounds and rhythms of words as well as their meanings.
Like linguistic thinkers, Leonardo made meticulous descriptions in his journals. He also made an effort to learn Latin - a foreign language		Other Linguistic Thinkers include William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Anne Frank Careers which suit Linguistic thinkers include Journalist, Librarian, Salesperson, Proof-reader, Translator, Poet, Lyricist

How would other people score?  Can you imagine friends or family members who might think differently to you?

what we owe them

Yesterday morning, I spent  a few hours on the complex and interactive site compiled for the World Tribunal on Iraq after their indictment had been handed down. Many of you may have heard Arundhati Roy (jury foreman) summarize the findings:

The Jury defined this war as one of the most unjust in history: ‘The Bush and Blair administrations blatantly ignored the massive opposition to the war expressed by millions of people around the world. They embarked upon one of the most unjust, immoral, and cowardly wars in history. The Anglo-American occupation of Iraq of the last 27 months has led to the destruction and devastation of the Iraqi state and society. Law and order have broken down completely, resulting in a pervasive lack of human security; the physical infrastructure is in shambles; the health care delivery system is a mess; the education system has ceased to function; there is massive environmental and ecological devastation; and, the cultural and archeological heritage of the Iraqi people has been desecrated.’

On the basis of the preceding findings and recalling the Charter of the United Nations and other legal documents, the jury has established the following charges against the Governments of the US and the UK:

• Planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.
• Targeting the civilian population of Iraq and civilian infrastructure
• Using disproportionate force and indiscriminate weapon systems
• Failing to safeguard the lives of civilians during military activities and during the occupation period thereafter
• Using deadly violence against peaceful protestors
• Imposing punishments without charge or trial, including collective punishment
• Subjecting Iraqi soldiers and civilians to torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment
• Re-writing the laws of a country that has been illegally invaded and occupied
• Willfully devastating the environment
• Actively creating conditions under which the status of Iraqi women has seriously been degraded
• Failing to protect humanity’s rich archaeological and cultural heritage in Iraq
• Obstructing the right to information, including the censoring of Iraqi media
• Redefining torture in violation of international law, to allow use of torture and illegal detentions

The Jury also established charges against the Security Council of United Nations for failing to stop war crimes and crimes against humanity among other failures, against the Governments of the Coalition of the Willing for collaborating in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, against the Governments of Other Countries for allowing the use of military bases and air space and providing other logistical support, against Private Corporations for profiting from the war, against the Major Corporate Media for disseminating deliberate falsehoods and failing to report atrocities.

The indictment of the Security Council is particularly interesting, given that the United Nations proper just had a milestone birthday -- one that everyone ignored. And that this proceeding might be said to belong in the building on First Avenue.

now the ghosts will mosh

So exactly a week after my plea to preachers, politicians and military men to stop taking the names of the dead in vain, the 9/11 rhetoric has ratcheted up to levels we've not seen since last summer's Republican Convention. And the newest, most blatant, and most obscene offender is Karl Rove, who previous to placing his protege in the White House rarely left Texas. While  writing this, I learn that the Families of September 11 have risen to rebuke him:

As families whose relatives were victims of the 9/11 terror attacks, we believe it is an outrage that any Democrat, any Republican, any conservative, or any liberal stakes a "high ground" position based upon the September 11th death and destruction. Doing so assumes that all those who died and their loved ones would agree. In truth, some would and some would not. By definition the conduct is divisive and, because it is intended to be self-serving and politicizes 9/11, it is offensive. We are calling on Karl Rove to resist his temptations and stop trying to reap political gain in the tragic misfortune of others. His comments are not welcome.

Such calm, measured words: I can onlyapplaud them. And, perhaps, help voice the rage they've suppressed in order to get results.

Like the clown with the bullhorn, whose White House jumped to defend his words yesterday, Rove used the image of the flaming towers to assert that the simplistic worldview he's been so busy selling now reigns supreme:

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble."

And reading that makes me angry all over again.  On September 11, Rove wasn't watching the Towers crumble, except in TV replays. He was on Air Force One, flying all over the South after the "My Pet Goat" fiasco,  and that morning may have been the first time he, who'd rarely left Texas before placing his pet in the White House,  spoke of New York except in scorn. He didn't stand, as I did, on First Avenue and watch the plume of smoke from above my head suddenly drop to my feet, didn't hear the shout - "The second tower's down!" He didn't spend time in the ER at Bellevue, as my roommate Dianne did (see comments on this post). It was all a movie to him, one in which he immediately thought to star his boy, who had so far been tanking in the polls. Restraint was not what he felt. But neither, at bottom, was grief or even rage.

journalists in chains, now in iraq

Dahr Jamail doesn't blog that often,  and now I know part of what's kept him lately. Who among us has remembered about the World Tribunal on Iraq? 

While the sponsors are sort of usual suspects, they're my kind of usual suspects. From the A-C list:  Act Now for Harmony and Democracy (ANHAD) / India, Action Indict Bush-Blair / Japan,  AEPGN (Association des étudiants pour la prévention de la guerre nucléaire) / Belgium,  American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee - NY Chapter / US,  Asian Women's Human Rights Council , Asr Resource Centre Istitute of Women's Studies / Pakistan, Bastaguerra / Italy Bergen County Green Party, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation / UK/ US,  Center for Constitutional Rights / US,   Center for Development Studies / India.

Time to go read the foreign press, since we're hearing bupkis about it in our dear U.S. press. ( I love the name of that Italian peace group so much, I'm tempted to change my name.)

In any event, I'll let Dahr take the stage (as I finish drafting my response to Karl Rove's 9/11 atrocity).  He's reminding us that the White House actions against journalists ain't nothing to what they attempt overseas.   

Censorship

At long last, the culminating session of the World Tribunal on Iraq is upon us. As a witness providing testimony, like the other witnesses I’m being interviewed by many outlets. Today, one of them was by reporters for one of the larger newspapers in Turkey, the Yeni Safak Newspaper.

I’ll leave the reporters nameless, for reasons you’ll soon see.

The newspaper has been translating various articles of mine into Turkish and running them, particularly those concerning the most recent Fallujah massacre. The report who was interviewing me today told me that the former American consulate here, Eric Edelman, asked the Prime Minister of Turkey to pressure his paper to not run so many of my stories.

“Why did he do this,” I asked him.

“Edelman said it was the wrong news,” he told me with a smile.

Turns out Edelman also asked that articles by Robert Fisk and Naomi Klein not be run so often in Yeni Safak either.

He smiled at me while he watched the wheels turning in my head before I smiled back and said, “That makes me very happy, it means I’m doing my job as a journalist.”

We laughed heartily together at this, as did everyone else at the table.

Reminds me of the obtuse hate mails I sometimes receive-confirmation that I am doing my job-they always make me smile.

So the American government is pressuring foreign countries to censor their news. Aside from the fact that this act is the height of arrogance by the United States, it makes it exceedingly clear why so many Americans who rely on the corporate media for their news continue to be so misinformed/un-informed about the goings on in Iraq. If the American government is attempting to censor the news in foreign countries, you can imagine what they are doing at home.

journalists in chains: russia and new york?

And here I was going to talk about some pleasant news, regarding a new, growing consensus on same-sex couples and immigration -- when I come across two stories about our old/new bugaboo, that First Amendment,  that feel oddly similar. While neither is on its own particularly surprising,  if disheartening, they made too much of a perfect pair not to set before you, Think of them as demented bookends, or Mad Queens in a chess set with "checkmate" meaning a ticket to Guantanamo.

The first was  a new example of  he relentless targeting of journalists in parts of the world whose leaders are welcome at the White House. And it found its echo in Bill O'Reilly (easy target, I know, but he's powerful)  demanding the arrest of the Air America staff, and doing so with my favorite 9/11 obscenity.   Perhaps I'll make like Billmon and leave the parallel quotes to speak for themselves:

When journalist Nikolai Goshko went on the air the next day to suggest the then local governor and two other top-ranking officials might have been involved in the murder [of the director of Smolensk's independent Radio Vesna], he might have thought he was asking for trouble.

But he probably didn't suspect that his words would cost him five years in prison.
However, a court in Smolensk recently sentenced Goshko to 61 months in prison for defamation after the three officials pressed charges against him.

The sentence has deeply concerned media watchdogs both in Russia and abroad, particularly since the prosecution had only requested a one-year suspended sentence.

Goshko's sentence has deeply concerned media watchdogs both in Russia and abroad, particularly since the prosecution had only requested a one-year suspended sentence.

----------------

war games vs. graveyards

Abu Ghraib is so over. It's so 2004.

That's what Donald Rumsfeld thinks, apparently, as he considers promoting General Sanchez to run the freaking Southern Command. What a brilliant political move, insiders are saying:

Senior Army officers say selecting General Sanchez would reward his loyal service in handling one of the military's toughest assignments in Iraq at a time when the military did not supply him with the full support and personnel required by Army doctrine.

Further, General Sanchez's promotion would showcase the nation's highest-ranking Hispanic officer and his compelling personal story of growing up poor in southern Texas and using the military as an escalator out of poverty, at a time when the Army is struggling to meet its recruiting quotas.

I'm actually speechless. I don't think Eric Schmitt would have written the above if his deep-background folks hadn't mentioned it, this idea of using the promotion as a recruiting tool. And there it is -- even worse (emphasis mine):

when drug company coverups hit close to home

His name is Joseph, and you've seen his face on the cover of the New York Times. His face is beautiful, kissable, with moist eyes and a blissful smile. But often that smile is fixed on nothing, it seems, as he runs across the room in pursuit of something only he can see. Or it's cast, dreamy and unfocused, in the direction of his mother or caregiver.Or it's gone and he's frustrated, unable to communicate what he needs to anyone in the family that surrounds him.

What almost no one has seen is the photo on the wall of his parents' home of Joseph and his brother Nicholas, taken about five years ago. Joey in that photo is looking directly, curiously in the camera, with a half-smile that's as no-nonsense as the current one os dreamy. "Is that from before he went in?" I ask Joey's mother. She nods.

And this is the moment I started to believe all the reports about vaccines and autism.

I was in California when my nephew was born, and never met that sprightly two-year-old. By the time I returned to New York in 2000, he was already "in," behind the veil created by his efforts to process that overlioad of sensory information we call life, and that he would call pain if he had words (or so austistic adults like Temple Grandin have reported).

I'd of course followed and attended to the initial controversies over autism and vaccines; I suspected it was too easy an answer, a kind of "ice cream at the beach causes fainting" conflation of co-incidence with causality. I think I was far too willing to accept the 2002 European study, widely publicized, that stated there was no verifiable link between the vaccines, and the mercury-laden additive used at that point to preserve them, and autism.

Salon reveals this week that those happy headlines were the product of a massive cover-up, one that makes Watergate look like a bar brawl. I'll post the whole article in the link, so you don't have to watch the commercial.

aidan's sergeant

Speaking of updates, I'd promised some people close to Aidan Delgado, the conscientious objector at Abu Ghraib, that I'd post this profile of Aidan's work -- in which, for the first time, an officer confirms that the specific abuses he described were accurate.

the snow globe of liberty

Fighting tears, she fell silent, staring at the shelf of souvenirs her family had sent back over the years: a big apple, a snow globe of the twin towers, a Statue of Liberty.

That's the last line of Nina Bernstein's follow-up piece on Tashnuba Hayder, one of the two girls I first wrote about in April, when I first learned they'd been detained on suspicion of being suicide bombers. She's since been deported to Bangladesh, where her mother begged to bring her for a "voluntary departure," rather than suffer her daughter's continued detention in a juvenile facility:

With no money for a home, Tashnuba and her mother, baby brother and little sister, Tamana, were to share an aunt's bed at her grandmother's apartment, now occupied by nine people.

For Tashnuba and Tamana, an American citizen who speaks only English, more education may be unaffordable, her mother said. Even Tashnuba's piety was challenged. Veiling is taboo among her relatives, and few Dhaka mosques allow women.

While ending with this heartbreaking portrait of a girl whose anger at the U.S. doesn't prevent her from wanting desperately to see her beloved New York again, Bernstein first, finally, lays out the story of how the FBI actually came to focus on her -- and it's not so terribly far from what I speculated back then.