Wednesday, October 02, 2002

By the Bey As part of the recent discussion of terrorism and art that’s been going on here, at Rayne Today and the Raven, I did a Web search on the ontological anarchist and author Hakim Bey. I guess I’m the last to hear about this, but some guy in Italy decided to bust the pretentious literati over there by cobbling together a whole bunch of nonsense (including a speech given by Stalin in 1926) and passing it off as a new work by Bey. Check out the full story of this 1996 prank and the reactions to it – it’s very amusing. 4:49:15 PM    Emphasize This! []

Poetic Justice Embattled New Jersey Poet Laureate Amiri Baraka works in the language of oppression the way artist Dale Chihuly works in glass. He builds ornate, monumental sculptures of great craft and crystalline purity, though, it must be said, the finished products are not to everyone’s taste. I was worked into a fine froth of outrage over the vile stupidity of a few lines in the work that’s gotten him in so much trouble (“Somebody Blew Up America”) until I took a moment and actually read the poem. Last month in this space, I slammed radical poet Linton Kwesi Johnson for missing an opportunity to put the power of his critical voice and vision to the current situation. Whatever you can say about Baraka, he has not shrunk from the task at hand. “Somebody Blew Up America” is a tough work – a catalog of injustices and grievances nailed to the door of white folks and a challenge to the ugly righteousness that’s been spewing out of the White House. In it, Baraka expresses solidarity with victims of all stripes, from native Americans to Jews to African-Americans and Palestinians, and if it’s not entirely successful as poetry, at least it’s an interesting read.   That said, it’s amazing that someone with so keen an eye for oppression could see nothing wrong with repeating the vile slander that Jews were told to stay away from the WTC on the day of the attack (“Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed/ Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers/ To stay home that day/ Why did Sharon stay away? Who? Who? Who?”)   Defenders of his right to speak out about this say he’s entitled to his opinion about this “theory.” Excuse me, but gravity is a theory. Supply side economics is a theory (though not a very good one). This stuff about a Jewish or Israeli conspiracy around 9/11 is a sick lie propounded by paranoid, hateful people. It’s as much as theory as the idea that black people have lower IQs or that Jews use the blood of Christian children to make matzoh. Yeah, there’s always some crank around ready to provide “evidence” to back claims like this up, but reasonable, responsible people don’t traffic in this kind of language. It’s simply the semantic subtext for violence and hatred.   I’m willing to buy Baraka’s claim that he’s not an anti-Semite. But he’s certainly a dupe and an idiot for believing this shit enough to repeat it in his work. And now he’s given the people of New Jersey cause to wonder why they should have a dupe and an idiot as their poet laureate. If he gets sacked or vilified for his poor judgment, he’ll have no one to blame for his oppression but himself. 4:09:08 PM    Emphasize This! []

Pardon the Distraction Last night, just after hanging up on a telemarketer, I was lying on the couch flipping between the Yankees-Angels playoff game and a rerun of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” drinking some tea, and attempting to read a publisher’s proof of Guarding Hanna, a newly-translated edition of the novel by Slovenian author Miha Mazzini. On TV, there was a commercial for last spring’s action movie The Scorpion King, now apparently available on DVD (can you imagine the director’s commentary?), followed by another spot advertising a service that lets you download video games to your mobile phone. I thought to myself, are we so starved for entertainment that we need to amuse ourselves with this stuff every waking minute? I mean, it’s bad enough that I have to take phone calls on my cell phone…   Around then, I came across a remarkable passage in Guarding Hanna. The narrator had read somewhere that, in the 18th century, J. S. Bach had made a special appearance to play one of his cantata at the funeral for Princess Anne, and that Bach’s performance of this beautiful piece had reduced the large crowd of assembled nobility to inconsolable weeping. The narrator tracked down a recording of the piece (not performed by Bach, alas) and thought it was pretty good, but couldn’t imagine it moving anyone to tears. After all, it was just music. Sometime later he realized that although the works of Bach were still available to us, a crucial element was missing: the silences of daily life that bracketed the rare moments of music. In his opinion, only by hearing the work rise grandly from an ocean of quotidian quietude could its full impact be felt. And so, though we could reproduce the notes, we could never reproduce the circumstances that made the work great. Who among us, after all, goes even a day – much less a week – with only the sounds of nature and the artless, commonplace din of daily life?   What a calamitous loss, I thought as I sat up and changed the channel. 8:58:37 AM    Emphasize This! []