'The Controversity'

Film of the Month:Pulp Fiction

2009-11-09T22:52:26+01:00

One of my favorite films and since I did mention a Tarantino directed film next,here is one that I found online accidently while looking for the more recent 'Inglorious Basterds'(the dvd will be fine). It will be a good film to sort of get back into Postmodern mode of narrative with Tarantino being an innovative director to watch on this particiularly. I am sorting through,finding,viewing,watching a lot of material related to this genre as it is vital that I use other mediums which further support what I will be expressing in my writings. I would like to post PULP FICTION,while I am of course,busy busy busy with my studies. I hope to find time later to write on it.

...Will be back with more later...

PULP FICTION 1994

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVpwra1TJDY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1ms_ZblbR4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJLOGRiV_WA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8MvB9LaQPY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnfSyxUFg3w&feature=fvw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7n7UN45hz4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVGg7r2xm4k&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha_rmo7BuXk&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHpbi1CSCAI&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWwrOnQIVNM&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSzjHJ-FdPY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7T52tsJfvQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLcJokN3D78&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSn1G018kak&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXiH6ueZTG8&feature=related

Comments

IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUSES,LOUIS ALTHUSSER:A REMINDER (1)

2009-11-05T10:34:00+01:00

I have recently read a lot of literary theory which stems from the writings of Louis Althusser. He is one of the many theorists I am working on reading at the moment. I remember reading Ideological State Apparatuses something like 4-5 years ago which is a great work to familiarize yourself with his ideas. I am sleepless and reading and writing on various novels and of course sorting through and conprehending the very difficult theory is a very tiresome activity as well. Since I am reading such related work,I want to skim through and remind myself of Ideological State Apparatuses. This post is just for me I am further confirming that I don't have time to search for other content

IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUSES,LOUIS ALTHUSSER:A REMINDER (1)

Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses
(Notes towards
an Investigation)

O N T H E R E P R O D U C T I O N O F T H E C O N D I T I O N S
O F P R O D U C T I O N[1]

I must now expose more fully something which was briefly glimpsed in my analysis when I spoke of the necessity to renew the means of production if production is to be possible. That was a passing hint. Now I shall consider it for itself.

As Marx said, every child knows that a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year.[2] The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production. This may be 'simple' (reproducing exactly the previous conditions of production) or 'on an extended scale' (expanding them). Let us ignore this last distinction for the moment.

What, then, is the reproduction of the conditions of production ?

Here we are entering a domain which is both very fam-

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. This text is made up of two extracts from an ongoing study. The sub-title 'Notes towards an Investigation' is the author's own. The ideas expounded should not be regarded as more than the introduction to a discussion.
2. Marx to Kugelmann, 11 July 1868, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, p. 209.

page 128

iliar (since Capital Volume Two) and uniquely ignored. The tenacious obviousnesses (ideological obviousnesses of an empiricist type) of the point of view of production alone, or even of that of mere productive practice (itself abstract in relation to the process of production) are so integrated into our everyday 'consciousness' that it is extremely hard, not to say almost impossible, to raise oneself to the point of view of reproduction. Nevertheless, everything outside this point of view remains abstract (worse than one-sided: distorted) -- even at the level of production, and, a fortiori, at that of mere practice.

Let us try and examine the matter methodically.

To simplify my exposition, and assuming that every social formation arises from a dominant mode of production, I can say that the process of production sets to work the existing productive forces in and under definite relations of production.

It follows that, in order to exist, every social formation must reproduce the conditions of its production at the same time as it produces, and in order to be able to produce. It must therefore reproduce:

1. the productive forces,

2. the existing relations of production.

Reproduction of the Means of Production

Everyone (including the bourgeois economists whose work is national accounting, or the modern 'macro-economic' 'theoreticians') now recognizes, because Marx compellingly proved it in Capital Volume Two, that no production is possible which does not allow for the reproduction of the material conditions of production: the reproduction of the means of production.

The average economist, who is no different in this than

page 129

the average capitalist, knows that each year it is essential to foresee what is needed to replace what has been used up or worn out in production: raw material, fixed installations (buildings), instruments of production (machines), etc. I say the average economist = the average capitalist, for they both express the point of view of the firm, regarding it as sufficient simply to give a commentary on the terms of the firm's financial accounting practice.

But thanks to the genius of Quesnay who first posed this 'glaring' problem, and to the genius of Marx who resolved it, we know that the reproduction of the material conditions of production cannot be thought at the level of the firm, because it does not exist at that level in its real conditions. What happens at the level of the firm is an effect, which only gives an idea of the necessity of reproduction, but absolutely fails to allow its conditions and mechanisms to be thought.

A moment's reflection is enough to be convinced of this: Mr X, a capitalist who produces woollen yarn in his spinning-mill, has to 'reproduce' his raw material, his machines, etc. But he does not produce them for his own production -- other capitalists do: an Australian sheep farmer, Mr Y, a heavy engineer producing machine-tools, Mr Z, etc., etc. And Mr Y and Mr Z, in order to produce those products which are the condition of the reproduction of Mr X's conditions of production, also have to reproduce the conditions of their own production, and so on to infinity -- the whole in proportions such that, on the national and even the world market, the demand for means of production (for reproduction) can be satisfied by the supply.

In order to think this mechanism, which leads to a kind of 'endless chain', it is necessary to follow Marx's 'global' procedure, and to study in particular the relations of the circulation of capital between Department I (production of

page 130

means of production) and Department II (production of means of consumption), and the realization of surplus value, in Capital, Volumes Two and Three.

We shall not go into the analysis of this question. It is enough to have mentioned the existence of the necessity of the reproduction of the material conditions of production.

Reproduction of Labour-Power

However, the reader will not have failed to note one thing. We have discussed the reproduction of the means of production -- but not the reproduction of the productive forces. We have therefore ignored the reproduction of what distinguishes the productive forces from the means of production, i.e. the reproduction of labour power.

From the observation of what takes place in the firm, in particular from the examination of the financial accounting practice which predicts amortization and investment, we have been able to obtain an approximate idea of the existence of the material process of reproduction, but we are now entering a domain in which the observation of what happens in the firm is, if not totally blind, at least almost entirely so, and for good reason: the reproduction of labour power takes place essentially outside the firm.

How is the reproduction of labour power ensured?

It is ensured by giving labour power the material means with which to reproduce itself: by wages. Wages feature in the accounting of each enterprise, but as 'wage capital',[3] not at all as a condition of the material reproduction of labour power.

However, that is in fact how it 'works', since wages represents only that part of the value produced by the expendi-

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. Marx gave it its scientific concept: variable capital.

page 131

ture of labour power which is indispensable for its reproduction: sc. indispensable to the reconstitution of the labour power of the wage-earner (the wherewithal to pay for housing, food and clothing, in short to enable the wage earner to present himself again at the factory gate the next day -- and every further day God grants him); and we should add: indispensable for raising and educating the children in whom the proletarian reproduces himself (in n models where n = 0, 1, 2, etc. . . .) as labour power.

Remember that this quantity of value (wages) necessary for the reproduction of labour power is determined not by the needs of a 'biological' Guaranteed Minimum Wage (Salaire Minimum Interprofessionnel Garanti ) alone, but by the needs of a historical minimum (Marx noted that English workers need beer while French proletarians need wine) -- i.e. a historically variable minimum.

I should also like to point out that this minimum is doubly historical in that it is not defined by the historical needs of the working class 'recognized' by the capitalist class, but by the historical needs imposed by the proletarian class struggle (a double class struggle: against the lengthening of the working day and against the reduction of wages).

However, it is not enough to ensure for labour power the material conditions of its reproduction if it is to be reproduced as labour power. I have said that the available labour power must be 'competent', i.e. suitable to be set to work in the complex system of the process of production. The development of the productive forces and the type of unity historically constitutive of the productive forces at a given moment produce the result that the labour power has to be (diversely) skilled and therefore reproduced as such. Diversely: according to the requirements of the socio-technical division of labour, its different 'jobs' and 'posts'.

How is this reproduction of the (diversified) skills of

page 132

labour power provided for in a capitalist regime? Here, unlike social formations characterized by slavery or serfdom this reproduction of the skills of labour power tends (this is a tendential law) decreasingly to be provided for 'on the spot' (apprenticeship within production itself), but is achieved more and more outside production: by the capitalist education system, and by other instances and institutions.

What do children learn at school? They go varying distances in their studies, but at any rate they learn to read, to write and to add -- i.e. a number of techniques, and a number of other things as well, including elements (which may be rudimentary or on the contrary thoroughgoing) of 'scientific' or 'literary culture', which are directly useful in the different jobs in production (one instruction for manual workers, another for technicians, a third for engineers, a final one for higher management, etc.). Thus they learn know-how.

But besides these techniques and knowledges, and in learning them, children at school also learn the 'rules' of good behaviour, i.e. the attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour, according to the job he is 'destined' for: rules of morality, civic and professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination. They also learn to 'speak proper French', to 'handle' the workers correctly, i.e. actually (for the future capitalists and their servants) to 'order them about' properly, i.e. (ideally) to 'speak to them' in the right way, etc.

To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the

page 133

workers, and a reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression, so that they, too, will provide for the domination of the ruling class 'in words'.

In other words, the school (but also other State institutions like the Church, or other apparatuses like the Army) teaches 'know-how', but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its 'practice'. All the agents of production, exploitation and repression, not to speak of the 'professionals of ideology' (Marx), must in one way or another be 'steeped' in this ideology in order to perform their tasks 'conscientiously' -- the tasks of the exploited (the proletarians), of the exploiters (the capitalists), of the exploiters' auxiliaries (the managers), or of the high priests of the ruling ideology (its 'functionaries'), etc.

The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its 'skills' but also the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology or of the 'practice' of that ideology, with the proviso that it is not enough to say 'not only but also', for it is clear that it is in the forms and under the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labour power.

But this is to recognize the effective presence of a new reality: ideology.

Here I shall make two comments.

The first is to round off my analysis of reproduction.

I have just given a rapid survey of the forms of the reproduction of the productive forces, i.e. of the means of production on the one hand, and of labour power on the other.

But I have not yet approached the question of the reproduction of the relations of production. This is a crucial question for the Marxist theory of the mode of production.

page 134

To let it pass would be a theoretical omission -- worse, a serious political error.

I shall therefore discuss it. But in order to obtain the means to discuss it, I shall have to make another long detour.

The second comment is that in order to make this detour, I am obliged to re-raise my old question: what is a society ?

I N F R A S T R U C T U R E A N D S U P E R S T R U C T U R E

On a number of occasions[4] I have insisted on the revolutionary character of the Marxist conception of the 'social whole' insofar as it is distinct from the Hegelian 'totality'. I said (and this thesis only repeats famous propositions of historical materialism) that Marx conceived the structure of every society as constituted by 'levels' or 'instances' articulated by a specific determination: the infrastructure, or economic base (the 'unity' of the productive forces and the relations of production) and the superstructure, which itself contains two 'levels' or 'instances': the politico-legal (law and the State) and ideology (the different ideologies, religious, ethical, legal, political, etc.).

Besides its theoretico-didactic interest (it reveals the difference between Marx and Hegel), this representation has the following crucial theoretical advantage: it makes it possible to inscribe in the theoretical apparatus of its essential concepts what I have called their respective indices of effectivity. What does this mean?

It is easy to see that this representation of the structure of every society as an edifice containing a base (infrastruc-

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4. In For Marx and Reading Capital, 1965 (English editions 1969 and 1970 respectively).

page 135

ture) on which are erected the two 'floors' of the superstructure, is a metaphor, to be quite precise, a spatial metaphor: the metaphor of a topography (topique ).[5] Like every metaphor, this metaphor suggests something, makes some thing visible. What? Precisely this: that the upper floors could not 'stay up' (in the air) alone, if they did not rest precisely on their base.

Thus the object of the metaphor of the edifice is to represent above all the 'determination in the last instance' by the economic base. The effect of this spatial metaphor is to endow the base with an index of effectivity known by the famous terms: the determination in the last instance of what happens in the upper 'floors' (of the superstructure) by what happens in the economic base.

Given this index of effectivity 'in the last instance', the 'floors' of the superstructure are clearly endowed with different indices of effectivity. What kind of indices ?

It is possible to say that the floors of the superstructure are not determinant in the last instance, but that they are determined by the effectivity of the base; that if they are determinant in their own (as yet undefined) ways, this is true only insofar as they are determined by the base.

Their index of effectivity (or determination), as determined by the determination in the last instance of the base, is thought by the Marxist tradition in two ways: (1) there is a 'relative autonomy' of the superstructure with respect to the base; (2) there is a 'reciprocal action' of the superstructure on the base.

We can therefore say that the great theoretical advantage of the Marxist topography, i.e. of the spatial metaphor of

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5. Topography from the Greek topos : place. A topography represents in a definite space the respective sites occupied by several realities: thus the economic is at the bottom (the base), the superstructure above it.

page 136

the edifice (base and superstructure) is simultaneously that it reveals that questions of determination (or of index of effectivity) are crucial; that it reveals that it is the base which in the last instance determines the whole edifice; and that, as a consequence, it obliges us to pose the theoretical problem of the types of 'derivatory' effectivity peculiar to the superstructure, i.e. it obliges us to think what the Marxist tradition calls conjointly the relative autonomy of the superstructure and the reciprocal action of the superstructure on the base.

The greatest disadvantage of this representation of the structure of every society by the spatial metaphor of an edifice, is obviously the fact that it is metaphorical: i.e. it remains descriptive.

It now seems to me that it is possible and desirable to represent things differently. NB, I do not mean by this that I want to reject the classical metaphor, for that metaphor itself requires that we go beyond it. And I am not going beyond it in order to reject it as outworn. I simply want to attempt to think what it gives us in the form of a description.

I believe that it is possible and necessary to think what characterizes the essential of the existence and nature of the superstructure on the basis of reproduction. Once one takes the point of view of reproduction, many of the questions whose existence was indicated by the spatial metaphor of the edifice, but to which it could not give a conceptual answer, are immediately illuminated.

My basic thesis is that it is not possible to pose these questions (and therefore to answer them) except from the point of view of reproduction.

I shall give a short analysis of Law, the State and Ideology from this point of view. And I shall reveal what happens both from the point of view of practice and production on the one hand, and from that of reproduction on the other.

page 137

T H E S T A T E

The Marxist tradition is strict, here: in the Communist Manifesto and the Eighteenth Brumaire (and in all the later classical texts, above all in Marx's writings on the Paris Commune and Lenin's on State and Revolution ), the State is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus. The State is a 'machine' of repression, which enables the ruling classes (in the nineteenth century the bourgeois class and the 'class' of big landowners) to ensure their domination over the working class, thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion (i.e. to capitalist exploitation).

The State is thus first of all what the Marxist classics have called the State apparatus. This term means: not only the specialized apparatus (in the narrow sense) whose existence and necessity I have recognized in relation to the requirements of legal practice, i.e. the police, the courts, the prisons; but also the army, which (the proletariat has paid for this experience with its blood) intervenes directly as a supplementary repressive force in the last instance, when the police and its specialized auxiliary corps are 'outrun by events'; and above this ensemble, the head of State, the government and the administration.

Presented in this form, the Marxist-Leninist 'theory' of the State has its finger on the essential point, and not for one moment can there be any question of rejecting the fact that this really is the essential point. The State apparatus, which defines the State as a force of repressive execution and intervention 'in the interests of the ruling classes' in the class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its allies against the proletariat, is quite certainly the State, and quite certainly defines its basic 'function'.

page 138

From Descriptive Theory to Theory as such

Nevertheless, here too, as I pointed out with respect to the metaphor of the edifice (infrastructure and superstructure), this presentation of the nature of the State is still partly descriptive.

As I shall often have occasion to use this adjective (descriptive), a word of explanation is necessary in order to remove any ambiguity.

Whenever, in speaking of the metaphor of the edifice or of the Marxist 'theory' of the State, I have said that these are descriptive conceptions or representations of their objects, I had no ulterior critical motives. On the contrary, I have every grounds to think that great scientific discoveries cannot help but pass through the phase of what I shall call descriptive 'theory '. This is the first phase of every theory, at least in the domain which concerns us (that of the science of social formations). As such, one might and in my opinion one must -- envisage this phase as a transitional one, necessary to the development of the theory. That it is transitional is inscribed in my expression: 'descriptive theory', which reveals in its conjunction of terms the equivalent of a kind of 'contradiction'. In fact, the term theory 'clashes' to some extent with the adjective 'descriptive' which I have attached to it. This means quite precisely: (1) that the 'descriptive theory' really is, without a shadow of a doubt, the irreversible beginning of the theory; but (2) that the 'descriptive' form in which the theory is presented requires, precisely as an effect of this 'contradiction', a development of the theory which goes beyond the form of 'description'.

Let me make this idea clearer by returning to our present object: the State.

When I say that the Marxist 'theory' of the State available to us is still partly 'descriptive', that means first and fore-

page 139

most that this descriptive 'theory' is without the shadow of a doubt precisely the beginning of the Marxist theory of the State, and that this beginning gives us the essential point, i.e. the decisive principle of every later development of the theory.

Indeed, I shall call the descriptive theory of the State correct, since it is perfectly possible to make the vast majority of the facts in the domain with which it is concerned correspond to the definition it gives of its object. Thus, the definition of the State as a class State, existing in the repressive State apparatus, casts a brilliant light on all the facts observable in the various orders of repression whatever their domains: from the massacres of June 1848 and of the Paris Commune, of Bloody Sunday, May 1905 in Petrograd, of the Resistance, of Charonne, etc., to the mere (and relatively anodyne) interventions of a 'censorship' which has banned Diderot's La Réligieuse or a play by Gatti on Franco; it casts light on all the direct or indirect forms of exploitation and extermination of the masses of the people (imperialist wars); it casts light on that subtle everyday domination beneath which can be glimpsed, in the forms of political democracy, for example, what Lenin, following Marx, called the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

And yet the descriptive theory of the State represents a phase in the constitution of the theory which itself demands the 'supersession' of this phase. For it is clear that if the definition in question really does give us the means to identify and recognize the facts of oppression by relating them to the State, conceived as the repressive State apparatus, this 'interrelationship' gives rise to a very special kind of obviousness, about which I shall have something to say in a moment: 'Yes, that's how it is, that's really true!'[6]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6. See p. 158 below, On Ideology.

page 140

And the accumulation of facts within the definition of the State may multiply examples, but it does not really advance the definition of the State, i.e. the scientific theory of the State. Every descriptive theory thus runs the risk of 'blocking' the development of the theory, and yet that development is essential.

That is why I think that, in order to develop this descriptive theory into theory as such, i.e. in order to understand further the mechanisms of the State in its functioning, I think that it is indispensable to add something to the classical definition of the State as a State apparatus.

The Essentials of the Marxist Theory of the State

Let me first clarify one important point: the State (and its existence in its apparatus) has no meaning except as a function of State power. The whole of the political class struggle revolves around the State. By which I mean around the possession, i.e. the seizure and conservation of State power by a certain class or by an alliance between classes or class fractions. This first clarification obliges me to distinguish between State power (conservation of State power or seizure of State power), the objective of the political class struggle on the one hand, and the State apparatus on the other.

We know that the State apparatus may survive, as is proved by bourgeois 'revolutions' in nineteenth-century France (1830, 1848), by coups d'état (2 December, May 1958), by collapses of the State (the fall of the Empire in 1870, of the Third Republic in 1940), or by the political rise of the petty bourgeoisie (1890-95 in France), etc., without the State apparatus being affected or modified: it may survive political events which affect the possession of State power.

page 141

Even after a social revolution like that of 1917, a large part of the State apparatus survived after the seizure of State power by the alliance of the proletariat and the small peasantry: Lenin repeated the fact again and again.

It is possible to describe the distinction between State power and State apparatus as part of the 'Marxist theory' of the State, explicitly present since Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire and Class Struggles in France.

To summarize the 'Marxist theory of the State' on this point, it can be said that the Marxist classics have always claimed that (1) the State is the repressive State apparatus, (2) State power and State apparatus must be distinguished, (3) the objective of the class struggle concerns State power, and in consequence the use of the State apparatus by the classes (or alliance of classes or of fractions of classes) holding State power as a function of their class objectives, and (4) the proletariat must seize State power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois State apparatus and, in a first phase, replace it with a quite different, proletarian, State apparatus, then in later phases set in motion a radical process, that of the destruction of the State (the end of State power, the end of every State apparatus).

In this perspective, therefore, what I would propose to add to the 'Marxist theory' of the State is already there in so many words. But it seems to me that even with this supplement, this theory is still in part descriptive, although it does now contain complex and differential elements whose functioning and action cannot be understood without recourse to further supplementary theoretical development.

The State Ideological Apparatuses

Thus, what has to be added to the 'Marxist theory' of the State is something else.

page 142

Here we must advance cautiously in a terrain which, in fact, the Marxist classics entered long before us, but without having systematized in theoretical form the decisive advances implied by their experiences and procedures. Their experiences and procedures were indeed restricted in the main to the terrain of political practice.

In fact, i.e. in their political practice, the Marxist classics treated the State as a more complex reality than the definition of it given in the 'Marxist theory of the State', even when it has been supplemented as I have just suggested. They recognized this complexity in their practice, but they did not express it in a corresponding theory.[7]

I should like to attempt a very schematic outline of this corresponding theory. To that end, I propose the following thesis.

In order to advance the theory of the State it is indispensable to take into account not only the distinction between State power and State apparatus, but also another reality which is clearly on the side of the (repressive) State apparatus, but must not be confused with it. I shall call this reality by its concept: the ideological State apparatuses.

What are the ideological State apparatuses (ISAs)?

They must not be confused with the (repressive) State apparatus. Remember that in Marxist theory, the State Apparatus (SA) contains: the Government, the Admin-

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7. To my knowledge, Gramsci is the only one who went any distance in the road I am taking. He had the 'remarkable' idea that the State could not be reduced to the (Repressive) State Apparatus, but included, as he put it, a certain number of institutions from 'civil society ': the Church, the Schools, the trade unions, etc. Unfortunately, Gramsci did not systematize his institutions, which remained in the state of acute but fragmentary notes (cf. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, International Publishers, 1971, pp. 12, 259, 260-3; see also the letter to Tatiana Schucht, 7 September 1931, in Lettre del Carcere, Einaudi, 1968, p. 479. English-language translation in preparation.

page 143

istration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc., which constitute what I shall in future call the Repressive State Apparatus. Repressive suggests that the State Apparatus in question 'functions by violence' -- at least ultimately (since repression, e.g. administrative repression, may take non-physical forms).

I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions. I propose an empirical list of these which will obviously have to be examined in detail, tested, corrected and re-organized. With all the reservations implied by this requirement, we can for the moment regard the following institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses (the order in which I have listed them has no particular significance):

-- the religious ISA (the system of the different Churches),

-- the educational ISA (the system of the different public and
private 'Schools'),

-- the family ISA,[8]

-- the legal ISA,[9]

-- the political ISA (the political system, including the
different Parties),

-- the trade-union ISA,

-- the communications ISA (press, radio and television, etc.),

-- the cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.).

I have said that the ISAs must not be confused with the (Repressive) State Apparatus. What constitutes the difference?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
8. The family obviously has other 'functions' than that of an ISA. It intervenes in the reproduction of labour power. In different modes of production it is the unit of production and/or the unit of consumption.
9. The 'Law' belongs both to the (Repressive) State Apparatus and to the system of the ISAs.

page 144

As a first moment, it is clear that while there is one (Repressive) State Apparatus, there is a plurality of Ideological State Apparatuses. Even presupposing that it exists, the unity that constitutes this plurality of ISAs as a body is not immediately visible.

As a second moment, it is clear that whereas the unified -- (Repressive) State Apparatus belongs entirely to the public domain, much the larger part of the Ideological State Apparatuses (in their apparent dispersion) are part, on the contrary, of the private domain. Churches, Parties, Trade Unions, families, some schools, most newspapers, cultural ventures, etc., etc., are private.

We can ignore the first observation for the moment. But someone is bound to question the second, asking me by what right I regard as Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions which for the most part do not possess public status, but are quite simply private institutions. As a conscious Marxist, Gramsci already forestalled this objection in one sentence. The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its 'authority'. The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is 'above the law': the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are 'public' or 'private'. What matters is how they function. Private institutions can perfectly well 'function' as Ideological State Apparatuses. A reasonably thorough analysis of any one of the ISAs proves it.

But now for what is essential. What distinguishes the ISAs from the (Repressive) State Apparatus is the following

page 145

basic difference: the Repressive State Apparatus functions 'by violence', whereas the Ideological State Apparatuses' function 'by ideology '.

I can clarify matters by correcting this distinction. I shall say rather that every State Apparatus, whether Repressive or Ideological, 'functions' both by violence and by ideology, but with one very important distinction which makes it imperative not to confuse the Ideological State Apparatuses with the (Repressive) State Apparatus.

This is the fact that the (Repressive) State Apparatus functions massively and predominantly by repression (including physical repression), while functioning secondarily by ideology. (There is no such thing as a purely repressive apparatus.) For example, the Army and the Police also function by ideology both to ensure their own cohesion and reproduction, and in the 'values' they propound externally.

In the same way, but inversely, it is essential to say that for their part the Ideological State Apparatuses function massively and predominantly by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression, even if ultimately, but only ultimately, this is very attenuated and concealed, even symbolic. (There is no such thing as a purely ideological apparatus.) Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc., to 'discipline' not only their shepherds, but also their flocks. The same is true of the Family. . . . The same is true of the cultural IS Apparatus (censorship, among other things), etc.

Is it necessary to add that this determination of the double 'functioning' (predominantly, secondarily) by repression and by ideology, according to whether it is a matter of the (Repressive) State Apparatus or the Ideological State Apparatuses, makes it clear that very subtle explicit or tacit combinations may be woven from the interplay of the (Re-

page 146

pressive) State Apparatus and the Ideological State Apparatuses? Everyday life provides us with innumerable examples of this, but they must be studied in detail if we are to go further than this mere observation.

Nevertheless, this remark leads us towards an understanding of what constitutes the unity of the apparently disparate body of the ISAs. If the ISAs 'function' massively and predominantly by ideology, what unifies their diversity is precisely this functioning, insofar as the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of 'the ruling class'. Given the fact that the 'ruling class' in principle holds State power (openly or more often by means of alliances between classes or class fractions), and therefore has at its disposal the (Repressive) State Apparatus, we can accept the fact that this same ruling class is active in the Ideological State Apparatuses insofar as it is ultimately the ruling ideology which is realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses, precisely in its contradictions. Of course, it is a quite different thing to act by laws and decrees in the (Repressive) State Apparatus and to 'act' through the intermediary of the ruling ideology in the Ideological State Apparatuses. We must go into the details of this difference -- but it cannot mask the reality of a profound identity. To my knowledge, no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses. I only need one example and proof of this: Lenin's anguished concern to revolutionize the educational Ideological State Apparatus (among others), simply to make it possible for the Soviet proletariat, who had seized State power, to secure the future of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to socialism.[10]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10. In a pathetic text written in 1937, Krupskaya relates the history of Lenin's desperate efforts and what she regards as his failure.

page 147

This last comment puts us in a position to understand that the Ideological State Apparatuses may be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle. The class (or class alliance) in power cannot lay down the law in the ISAs as easily as it can in the (repressive) State apparatus, not only because the former ruling classes are able to retain strong positions there for a long time, but also because the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself there, either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle.[11]

Let me run through my comments.

If the thesis I have proposed is well-founded, it leads me back to the classical Marxist theory of the State, while making it more precise in one point. I argue that it is necessary to distinguish between State power (and its possession by . . .) on the one hand, and the State Apparatus on the other. But I add that the State Apparatus contains

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
11. What I have said in these few brief words about the class struggle in the ISAs is obviously far from exhausting the question of the class struggle.
To approach this question, two principles must be borne in mind:
The first principle was formulated by Marx in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy : 'In considering such transformations [a social revolution] a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic -- in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.' The class struggle is thus expressed and exercised in ideological forms, thus also in the ideological forms of the ISAs. But the class struggle extends far beyond these forms, and it is because it extends beyond them that the struggle of the exploited classes may also be exercised in the forms of the ISAs, and thus turn the weapon of ideology against the classes in power.
This by virtue of the second principle : the class struggle extends beyond the ISAs because it is rooted elsewhere than in ideology, in the Infrastructure, in the relations of production, which are relations of exploitation and constitute the base for class relations.

page 148

two bodies: the body of institutions which represent the Repressive State Apparatus on the one hand, and the body of institutions which represent the body of Ideological State Apparatuses on the other.

But if this is the case, the following question is bound to be asked, even in the very summary state of my suggestions: what exactly is the extent of the role of the Ideological State Apparatuses? What is their importance based on? In other words: to what does the 'function' of these Ideological State Apparatuses, which do not function by repression but by ideology, correspond?

Comments

Film of The Month:Seoul Train

2009-11-04T08:17:31+01:00

As part of my Amnesty Human Rights watch I would like to post a documentary about the conflict situation and the struggle for basic human rights in North Korea with the refugee crisis. There was a screening of it at my university and I am so glad that I found it online to watch over again. I highly recommed that all watch. For further details please visit http://www.amnesty.org
----------------------
INFO

Directors: Jim Butterworth, Aaron Lubarsky, & Lisa Sleeth
Documentary. 2004. USA. 54 min. Korean, subtitled.

With its riveting footage of a secretive “underground railroad,” Seoul Train is a gripping documentary exposé into the life and death of North Koreans as they try to escape their homeland and China.

Seoul Train also delves into the complex geopolitics behind this growing and potentially explosive humanitarian crisis. By combining verité footage, personal stories and interviews with experts and government officials, Seoul Train depicts the flouting of international laws by major countries, the inaction and bureaucracy of the United Nations, and the heroics of activists that put themselves in harm’s way to save the refugees.

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

Seoul Train

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3106006574810733031#

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3106006574810733031#docid=728362452327473863

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3106006574810733031#docid=712408891865534656

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3106006574810733031#docid=8200478660655924400

Comments

WWF Update

2009-11-01T05:36:34+01:00

It has become certain now that I no longer find time to blog as I would like to. Readers following my blog should have noticed I have many things that I would love to have the opportunity to write on and share my ideas on this blog and while I look to my left,right and front of me on my desk covered in novels,theory books and literature related material I could not imagine a book review sunday. However,the past few months have been a huge increase in my reader statistics and the month of october being the most read
month ever. I thank all those passing by who read and occasionally comment.Reaching the 1,000th viewer in only one a month,I feel a need to keep posting on. Not only because of this but also because I feel I have a lot to share. I never do go a day without knowing what is going on around the world and visiting some alternative news sites,enviomental sites and places of activism as well as the many literary,cultural websites I've found along the way. So,while I definitely will not be able to provide my own views all I can manage for this blog is seriously some articles,campaigns, or just information on things I find important.

As I have continously been writing about THE WORLD WILDLIFE FUND is a great enviromental organization along with the hardline Greenpeace. I am a member of WWF,mainly because it does a great job of using the capitalist market and the system to actually help out. I do support Greepeace as well but the fact that WWF gets large companies who usually don't give a shit about anything to donate and help the cause...sometimes they do it for the PR of it but I figure since the main aim is to make a difference for the cause then this is a good way of going about business. However,my ideas do correspond to Greenpeace more. The fact that the percentage of success through wwf is the reason I have remained a loyal supporter. Also,WWF has specific other causes of interest which most other enviromental groups do not.

If you go on WWF and sign up you can participate in campagins to get your voice heard on a wide range of issues from Climate Change,Rainforest destruction,Endangered Speicies and other enviromentally vital issues which must be discussed and firm action must be taken for risk of the dangers it may bring on the future. I urge readers,if you do have an interest and ambition to participate in them. The campaigns include sending emails to government officials,parliament,congress etc,signing petitions,writing and promoting enviromental issues and taking pledges on various matters. If not you can simply sign up to be at least a little informed on the enviromental world. For further information please visit http://www.wwf.org and http://www.wwf.org.uk

Here is the latest newsletter sent earlier in the week...I will be back soon but really I am very busy and fully concentrating on my main work.

>> Emergency Climate Action! – call for help to make Copenhagen count
>> Get ready for the Wave! – the London Wave on December 5 and the Mexican Wave today
>> Stand up for your river – a vital opportunity to support your local river
>> Success and thanks from Malaysia – your campaigning is getting good results
>> A small step forward for bluefin tuna – a glimmer of hope for endangered tuna
>> Save a billion trees! – we’ve partnered with Sky to help save Amazonian forests
>> PLUS win an eco-refurb worth £15,000, the YouTube generation, and other news

Emergency climate action needed!
Write to your MP today and ask them to speak to Gordon Brown. We need to show him that he has the public support to keep pushing global leaders at this week’s EU climate talks – WWF’s Vote Earth campaign has over 12,000 signatures already.

With less than 50 days until the Copenhagen climate summit, there are worrying signs that a lack of political nerve could prevent the world from achieving a strong and legally binding climate deal – with devastating effects for both people and nature.

This week’s EU climate talks are a key step on the road to an effective deal at Copenhagen in December – so please tell your MP to talk to Gordon Brown.

Don’t forget – you can still Vote Earth! Sign our call for a global climate deal

Get ready for the Wave in London!
On Saturday 5 December 2009, you are welcome to join us in London for the Wave. This will be a huge family-friendly event where you can join tens of thousands of people to send a strong signal to world leaders - that they need to do more at the critical UN climate talks in Copenhagen.

Here’s something cool to do right now…
It’s a serious issue, but we’re having fun doing a virtual Mexican Wave for the climate right now! Show you care about climate change by sending a video of yourself doing the Mexican Wave.

See yourself as part of the virtual Wave – and don’t forget to tell friends and family to do the same!

Last chance to ‘Stand Up For Your River’
You may not realise it – but your local river needs support. With only a quarter of our rivers of ‘good status’, the government needs to do more about cleaning up its act.

The Rt Hon. Hilary Benn is currently deciding the future of rivers in England and Wales and in December will publish plans detailing how all our rivers could be restored to health.

Join our growing number of river adopters and ensure the government doesn’t miss this unique opportunity to improve our rivers.

Success and thanks from Malaysia
Many thanks to all of you who kindly signed our petitions to strengthen the legal protection of Malaysian wildlife and marine turtles.

The latest from the WWF Malaysia office is that the Malaysian Natural Resources and Environment Minister has announced a new Act will be tabled during the next parliament sitting.

A great result and thanks again for taking action.

Latest on Atlantic bluefin tuna
After some years of campaigning pressure – which many of you have been part of – WWF welcomes the proposal to ban international trade in endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna.

WWF now appeals to CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) to vote for the trade ban proposal. The current management regime is a total failure and is inadequate to guarantee the recovery of this iconic species. Only a stop to global trade can give bluefin tuna the breather it so desperately needs.

Help save a billion trees in the Amazon
WWF and Sky have started a new ambitious campaign to save 1 billion trees in the Amazon – the project’s goal is to ultimately cover an area of over 3 million hectares in Brazil.

The Rainforest Rescue project is asking for public donations – just £10 could help save 500 trees, protecting part of the world’s biggest tropical rainforest along with the endangered animals – like jaguars, black caiman and pink river dolphins – that live there.

Sky will match your donations pound for pound, so please help and donate to save a billion trees for our future!

Win a £15,000 refurb! YouTube generation? Also in the news

Win a whole home refurb worth at least £15,000 with 10:10 and the Great British Refurb campaign.

The YouTube generation takes on climate change – watch Eddsworld, Custard Productions and Ted Crusty.
Oil slick hits thousands of marine animals

Fines fail to stop river polluters (The Times)

UK’s worst cycle lanes (Guardian)

Comments

Amnesty International:South Korea

2009-10-25T15:23:06+01:00

Undoubtedly I have much to say and I am aware of meetings and events taking place at many Amnesty International centres on the matter and the other issues which must be discussed. Here is the current issue of urgency. Please visit http://www.amnesty.org on how to help take action and for the nearest Amnesty centre you.

I will be back with more. However,as I have mentioned my literary studies mean very long hours of reading,thinking and writing. For the moment I will provide the information and leave the rest to you.

Migrant workers treated as 'disposable labour' in South Korea

Visiting booth at Hwaseong detention centre, South Korea, November 2008.

21 October 2009

Please visit the following document:

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA25/001/2009/en/8bc729f6-39d7-4ce9-aeab-86eea173451c/asa250012009en.pdf

Many migrant workers in South Korea are beaten, trafficked for sexual exploitation and denied their wages for long periods despite the introduction of rules to protect their rights, said Amnesty International in a report issued on Wednesday.

In the 98-page report, Disposable Labour: Rights of migrants workers in South Korea, Amnesty International documented how migrant workers often work with heavy machinery and dangerous chemicals without sufficient training or protective equipment and are at greater risk of industrial accidents, including fatalities, and receive less pay compared to South Korean workers.

“Migrant workers are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation largely because they cannot change jobs without their employer’s permission,” said Roseann Rife, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Deputy Programme Director. “Work conditions are sometimes so bad that they run away and consequently, lose their regular status and are then subject to arrest and deportation.”

South Korea was one of the first Asian countries to legally recognise the rights of migrant workers and granted them the same status as Korean workers with equal labour rights, pay and benefits.

However, five years on from the implementation of the Employment Permit System (EPS) that was meant to better protect the rights of migrant workers; many continue to face hardships and abuse.

In September 2008, there were an estimated 220,000 irregular migrant workers in the country.

The government of South Korea pledged to half this number by 2012, launching a massive and sometimes violent crackdown on migrant workers. Immigration officers and the police are accused of sometimes using excessive force against migrant workers and operating outside the law.

“Disposable Labour” documents how the South Korean government has not sufficiently monitored workplaces, with high numbers of accidents, inadequate medical treatment and compensation, and unfair dismissals.

Amnesty International interviewed migrant workers who described how their employers forced them to work long hours and night shifts, without overtime pay, and often had their wages withheld by their employers.

“Despite the advances of the EPS system, the cycle of abuse and mistreatment continues as thousands of migrant workers find themselves at the mercy of employers and the authorities who mistreat them knowing their victims have few legal rights and are unable to access justice or seek compensation for the abuse,” said Roseann Rife.

Amnesty International research shows that women are at particular risk of abuse. Several female workers recruited as singers in US military camp towns have been trafficked into sexual exploitation, including the sex industry, by their employers and managers.
Amnesty International spoke to trafficked women who said they had no choice but to remain in their jobs because they were in debt to their employer and did not know where to turn to for help. If the women ran away, they risked losing their legal status and being subject to deportation.

“These women are double victims, first they are trafficked and then they become “illegal” migrants under South Korean law when they attempt to escape from their exploitative situation,” said Roseann Rife.

Amnesty International calls on the government of South Korea:

to ensure that employers respect, protect and promote the rights of migrant workers through rigorous labour inspections so that the workplace is safe, training is provided and migrant workers are paid fairly and on time;
to protect and promote the rights of all female migrant workers and stamp out sexual harassment and sexual exploitation;
to allow irregular migrant workers to remain in South Korea while accessing justice and seeking compensation for abuses by employees;
to ensure that during immigration raids, immigration authorities adhere to South Korean law requiring them to identify themselves, present a warrant, caution and inform migrant workers of their rights, and provide those under their custody prompt medical treatment when needed or requested.

Comments

Climate Change Action

2009-10-21T20:42:09+02:00

I will return to the topic I had set last week of climate change and human rights. Unfortunately due to my studies I will not be able to write very much on the subject and make my ideas heard to the increasing number of readers on my blog. However,I will do everything possible to keep you informed as my enviromental and human rights newsletters are arriving as usual. Please take action for necessary measures to be taken.

MORE COMING SOON...

For further information please urgently visit..

http://www.350.org/

http://www.350.org/files/materials/350_general_poster_ltr_compressed.pdf

Also please visit WORLD WILDLIFE FUND for more information on other enviromental issues and join PASSPORT for information on how to take action...latest campaign as follows..

On October 24, join people from all over the world in taking a stand for a safe climate future.

As an active, valued member of WWF's online community the end of this year will be a busy one for you.

This is because more than ever, we need your voice to make sure 2009 goes down in history as the year we stood up to the climate challenge!

Global Action Day!

This time round, we are helping our friends from 350.org and asking you to organize and/or participate in the Global Action Day on October 24.

To be a part of this global action simply place the number "350" at an iconic place in your community, then upload a photo of your event to the 350.org website. These images from around the world will be collected and delivered to the media and world leaders.

Why "350"? Where can you find actions near you? How can you upload photos?
Answer to these questions and more

Want to do more?
Check out our online guide to climate action

Or join the discussion around climate change (and get a chance to win a trip to the Copenhagen summit)

Save Talamone Bay in Italy

Told you it would be a busy time!

You see we also need your help in asking a local Italian authority to reconsider their plans and stop new marina developments at Talamone Bay: an historic Tuscan village situated near the outstanding Maremma Nature Reserve.

If these new developments go ahead, they will heavily undermine the critical stability of this world renowned ecosystem.

Take action now: send an email to the Mayor of Orbetello urging him to reconsider the new developments!

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

What does the number 350 mean?
350 is the most important number in the world—it's what scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Two years ago, after leading climatologists observed rapid ice melt in the Arctic and other frightening signs of climate change, they issued a series of studies showing that the planet faced both human and natural disaster if atmospheric concentrations of CO2 remained above 350 parts per million.

Everyone from Al Gore to the U.N.’s top climate scientist has now embraced this goal as necessary for stabilizing the planet and preventing complete disaster. Now the trick is getting our leaders to pay attention and craft policies that will put the world on track to get to 350.

Is 350 scientifically possible?
Right now, mostly because we’ve burned so much fossil fuel, the atmospheric concentration of co2 is 390 ppm—that’s way too high, and it’s why ice is melting, drought is spreading, forests are dying. To bring that number down, the first task is to stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere. That means a very fast transition to sun and wind and other renewable forms of power. If we can stop pouring more carbon into the atmosphere, then forests and oceans will slowly suck some of it out of the air and return us to safe levels.

Is 350 politically possible?
It’s very hard. It means switching off fossil fuel much more quickly than governments and corporations have been planning. Our best chance to speed up that process will come in December in Copenhagen, when the world’s nations meet to agree on a new climate treaty. Right now, they’re not planning to do enough. But we can change that—if we mobilize the world to swift and bold climate action, which is what we're planning to do on October 24th.

What is the day of action?
On October 24, the International Day of Climate Action will cover almost every country on earth, the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history.

There will be big rallies in big cities, and incredible creative actions across the globe: mountain climbers on our highest peaks with banners, underwater demonstrations in island nations threatened by sea level rise, churches and mosques and synagogues and ashrams engaged in symbolic action, star athletes organizing mass bike rides—and hundreds upon hundreds of community events to raise awareness of the need for urgent action.

Every event will highlight the number 350—and people will gather at some point for a big group photo depicting that all important message. At 350.org, we'll assemble all the photos for a gigantic, global, visual petition.

The thousands of events on October 24 will drive 350 and all that it represents into the human imagination, and change the negotiating environment as we head towards the crucial UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen in December of 2009. Copenhagen may well be the pivotal moment that determines whether or not we get the planet out of the climate crisis, and your actions on October 24 will help our leaders realize we need a real solution that pays attention to the science

How will this make a difference?
October 24 will put the focus where it needs to be: on the science and the citizens, not the special interests and the backroom deals.

On that day, people will send in thousands of images of citizens gathering at important places around the world—from the melting glaciers of Mt. Everest to the sinking beaches of the Maldives—displaying the number 350 in a creative way. 350.org will be getting those pictures and putting them on the big screens in Times Square and projecting them at the UN headquarters. We'll also be getting them into newspapers large and small on October 25th—the same newspapers that politicians all over the world use as a barometer of public opinion.

But more importantly, we'll be able to use them in the weeks before the huge UN Climate meeting in Copenhagen to remind our leaders that they need to take physical reality—and not political expediency—into account when they're making decisions about our collective future. 350 is a clear and specific goal (unlike vague demands to "stop global warming") that helps move the negotiations in the direction science and justice demand.

We'll also deliver copies of the images—and the stories that go with them—to national delegates and heads of state the world over. We'll make sure your voice is heard and this debate is re-framed in time to make a difference.

We're coordinating a distributed day of events for 24 October, uniting the world around a common call to climate action--and we're asking you to help.

Use the form below to register an event in your town, city, village, neighbourhood or community for October. Before you do, think about searching for an existing local action that you can join or help plan.

After filling out the fields below (or making any changes to your action) make sure to hit the "Post to 350.org" button at the bottom of the page.

Comments

Interesting videos :)

2009-10-21T01:10:39+02:00

So,I'm doing some research on a novel and its relation to British Politics at the time it was written and this concept of Thatcherism is quite interesting. Shit! I was here in England when she was prime minister but what the heckkk??? She was one scary woman you know! I'll save my arguements and interpretation on the concept in relation to the novel for my essay(I'll have a lot to say my Brits!) but thought I should share a few videos with my bloggers as well. Will be continuing with Amnesty later...

Very interesting indeed

ELVIS COSTELLO-TRAMP THE DIRT DOWN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-BZIWSI5UQ

I saw a newspaper picture from the political campaign
A woman was kissing a child, who was obviously in pain
She spills with compassion, as that young childs
Face in her hands she grips
Can you imagine all that greed and avarice
Coming down on that childs lips

Well I hope I dont die too soon
I pray the lord my soul to save
Oh I'll be a good boy, I'm trying so hard to behave
Because there's one thing I know, I'd like to live
Long enough to savour
Thats when they finally put you in the ground
I'll stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down

When England was the whore of the world
Margaret was her madam
And the future looked as bright and as clear as
The black tarmacadam
Well I hope that she sleeps well at night, isnt
Haunted by every tiny detail
cos when she held that lovely face in her hands
All she thought of was betrayal

And now the cynical ones say that it all ends the same in the long run
Try telling that to the desperate father who just squeezed the life from his only son
And how its only voices in your head and dreams you never dreamt
Try telling him the subtle difference between justice and contempt
Try telling me she isnt angry with this pitiful discontent
When they flaunt it in your face as you line up for punishment
And then expect you to say thank you straighten up, look proud and pleased
Because youve only got the symptoms, you havent got the whole disease
Just like a schoolboy, whose heads like a tin-can
Filled up with dreams then poured down the drain
Try telling that to the boys on both sides, being blown to bits or beaten and maimed
Who takes all the glory and none of the shame

Well I hope you live long now, I pray the lord your soul to keep
I think I'll be going before we fold our arms and start to weep
I never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheap
cos when they finally put you in the ground
Theyll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down

Margaret Thatcher: Free Society Speech (1975)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK3eP9rh4So&feature=related

But then again '
'THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SOCIETY'

THATCHER:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand"I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or"I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and[fo 1] there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate—" It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it" . That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people:"All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!" but when people come and say:"But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!" You say:"Look" It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!"

There is also something else I should say to them:"If that does not give you a basic standard, you know, there are ways in which we top up the standard. You can get your housing benefit."

But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society.[fo 2] There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate. And the worst things we have in life, in my view, are where children who are a great privilege and a trust—they are the fundamental great trust, but they do not ask to come into the world, we bring them into the world, they are a miracle, there is nothing like the miracle of life—we have these little innocents and the worst crime in life is when those children, who would naturally have the right to look to their parents for help, for comfort, not only just for the food and shelter but for the time, for the understanding, turn round and not only is that help not forthcoming, but they get either neglect or worse than that, cruelty.

How do you set about teaching a child religion at school, God is like a father, and she thinks"like someone who has been cruel to them?" It is those children you cannot … you just have to try to say they can only learn from school or we as their neighbour have to try in some way to compensate. This is why my foremost charity has always been the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, because over a century ago when it was started, it was hoped that the need for it would dwindle to nothing and over a hundred years later the need for it is greater, because we now realise that the great problems in life are not those of housing and food and standard of living. When we have[fo 3] got all of those, when we have got reasonable housing when you compare us with other countries, when you have got a reasonable standard of living and you have got no-one who is hungry or need be hungry, when you have got an education system that teaches everyone—not as good as we would wish—you are left with what? You are left with the problems of human nature, and a child who has not had what we and many of your readers would regard as their birthright—a good home—it is those that we have to get out and help, and you know, it is not only a question of money as everyone will tell you; not your background in society. It is a question of human nature and for those children it is difficult to say:"You are responsible for your behaviour!" because they just have not had a chance and so I think that is one of the biggest problems and I think it is the greatest sin.

Thatcher: "No! No! No!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2f8nYMCO2I&feature=related

Margaret Thatcher on Socialism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okHGCz6xxiw&feature=related

Thatcher's Last Stand Against Socialism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv5t6rC6yvg&feature=related

Margaret Thatcher - Popular Capitalism - One People

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IChzzAPT7k&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMSGW0otfrs&feature=related

Privatisation, Consumerism and Thatcherism in the 1980's.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcGV_7clARY&feature=related

Economic Policies of Margaret Thatcher's administration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD826-_x-z0&feature=related

Margaret Thatcher: Globalisation and the Next Move Foward

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBIWS4O6HyQ&feature=related

Margaret Thatcher: The Crusade of Popular Capitalism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMSGW0otfrs&feature=related

TO BE CONTINUED...

Comments

Break

2009-10-15T18:42:49+02:00

http://www.chetanbhawani.com/images/C/cartoon-airplane.jpg

Will be back after the break...

BLAIR-HAVE FUN GO MAD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk7PdBkkyRU

Comments

APPEALS FOR ACTION 1

2009-10-14T06:36:48+02:00

I call on all bloggers and readers to take action as a human rights supporter on the following issue:

I will be back with my views on these issues and to discuss about human rights..

Agenda:

Global Warming and its effects- Hear what Enviromental organizations have to say and how I will attempt to put it into perspective on what should be done...

For more information on how you can help please visit http://www.amnesty.org

Please visit the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWrstBidAXg

Upholding human rights while confronting climate change
29 September 2009

Unless states take prompt, adequate action to address its effects, climate change could become a major threat to the realization of human rights, with those already living in poverty feeling the effects sooner and more acutely.

As global attention turns to the upcoming round of climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in December, it is more essential than ever to bring human rights to the table.

Observed and projected changes attributable to climate change include the contraction of snow-covered areas; shrinking of sea ice and melting of polar ice caps; rise of sea levels; increased frequency of hot extremes and heat waves; increase in areas affected by drought; and increased intensity of tropical cyclones.

There is an intrinsic link between such environmental impacts and the ability to realize a range of human rights. State failure to act effectively to curb climate change could result in widespread violations of the right to life, right to health, right to water, right to food, and the right to housing. Acute water shortages and decreased crop yields in the poorer region of the world, to take just two examples, would undermine the rights of millions of people.

State responses to the threat of climate change must ensure that human rights are protected. Strategies for adaptation (preparing for the foreseeable adverse effects of climate change) and mitigation (slowing climate change and reducing its harmful effects) must be firmly rooted in a human rights analysis of the legal obligations of states. Amnesty International believes that the following rights and principles must be an integral part of efforts to address climate change:
Non-discrimination: The effects of climate change will be felt disproportionately by those who are also vulnerable to human rights abuses because of their poverty, age, gender, race, ethnicity, disability or other status. Climate change policies must not discriminate and must ensure protection against discrimination, particularly of the most vulnerable groups.
Freedom of information: Access to information is critical to addressing climate change. States must promote and facilitate the flow of information on climate change and measures taken to address it. States have a duty to disseminate information about environmental risks.
Right to active participation: States must conduct adequate and meaningful consultation with affected people, involving them in decision-making on the policies that would shape their lives. States must ensure participation of civil society, including representative of vulnerable groups, in the design of national adaptation and mitigation strategies
Rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly: The right to peacefully protest against government action or inaction in relation to climate change is a crucial safeguard that must be respected and protected. Individuals must enjoy the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, and must not be persecuted or otherwise harassed for exercising these human rights.
Accountability and the right to effective remedy: Where states’ actions and omissions in relation to the impacts of climate change result in human rights violations, victims should have access to an effective remedy.

Comments

Amnesty International Introduction

2009-10-13T08:41:22+02:00

I will begin on my posts about Amnesty International. It is very interesting that I have learned about Amnesty societies all around universities in the world. These societies organize events,actively promote and campaign on campuses.As a current subscriber,I am also very interested in joining this However,there is also a lot of individual campaigning to be done and with this I will do my best to introduce the organization,campaigns and write on various human rights issues over a period of time.

For more information on the organization and how you can join the fight for human rights please visit http://www.amnesty.org

Coming up next Human Rights issues and terminology...followed by the issues that need to be addressed...and the appeals for action...

WHO WE ARE

Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all.

Our supporters are outraged by human rights abuses but inspired by hope for a better world - so we work to improve human rights through campaigning and international solidarity.

We have more than 2.2 million members and subscribers in more than 150 countries and regions and we coordinate this support to act for justice on a wide range of issues.

You can help make a real difference by becoming a member or supporter of Amnesty International.

Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights to be respected and protected for everyone.

We believe human rights abuses anywhere are the concern of people everywhere.
So, outraged by human rights abuses but inspired by hope for a better world, we work to improve people’s lives through campaigning and international solidarity.

Our mission is to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated.

Our members and supporters exert influence on governments, political bodies, companies and intergovernmental groups.

Activists take up human rights issues by mobilizing public pressure through mass demonstrations, vigils and direct lobbying as well as online and offline campaigning

CAMPAIGNING

Campaigning for those who need help
“They carried guns all the time. I was afraid of the guns. Actually, I was in constant fear.”
Fereh Musu Conteh, 13 years old, abducted by an armed group in Sierra Leone
Our campaigning remains firmly rooted in the power of individuals working in support of others who need protection or support.

Working with and for individuals the world over, we campaign so that every person may enjoy all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We undertake research and take action aimed at preventing and ending grave abuses of these rights, demanding that all governments and other powerful entities respect the rule of law. It means we campaign globally and locally where ever we can make a difference. For example, we take action to:

Stop violence against women
Defend the rights and dignity of those trapped in poverty
Abolish the death penalty
Oppose torture and combat terror with justice
Free prisoners of conscience
Protect the rights of refugees and migrants
Regulate the global arms trade
Thousands of Amnesty International members respond to Urgent Action appeals on behalf of individuals at immediate risk. Publicity through the news media and the internet takes our message in many languages to millions of people.

Campaigning can change people’s lives – of victims and survivors of human rights abuses, of human rights activists and defenders and even of the abusers.

Click here to donate to Amnesty International
Independent and democratic
We have a number of safeguards in place to protect our autonomy. We are:
Independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion
Democratic and self-governing
Financially self-sufficient, thanks to the generous support of donations provided by individual members and supporters
We do not support or oppose any government or political system and neither do we necessarily support or oppose the views of the victims/survivors or human rights defenders whose rights we seek to protect.

How You Can Help
Amnesty International doesn’t just reveal the outrage of human rights abuse but inspires hope for a better world through public action and international solidarity.

We help stop human rights abuses by mobilizing our members and supporters to put pressure on governments, armed groups, companies and intergovernmental bodies

There are many ways you can help us, including making a donation, joining Amnesty International and taking action.
JOIN AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
Join Amnesty International and help us build pressure for change - your contribution will make the world of difference.

Join now

TO BE CONTNUED WITH APPEALS FOR ACTION...

Comments

Music Break:Rage Against The Machine

2009-10-12T22:24:36+02:00

To the Shadows

...And the shadows they follow,shadows they haunt,shadows I'm free,they want to pull me back down to the past where they control me,where they win over me,shadows,no,never will you trick me,shadows I stand,shadows I rise,shadows I am the present and the future,shadows take your dirty eyes off me! Shadows I'm aware and shadows I've grown,shadows you and me no more...

Guliz

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

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDUBKIKvhCM

WAKE UP

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1T8xgHdMEM

FREEDOM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqcM5lVoteQ&feature=related

STREET FIGHTING MAN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TvpGw7xDv8

TESTIFY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arCgCyfth10

BULL'S ON PARADE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-58-36lSqG4&feature=related

Comments

Book Review Sunday:'Brothers',Yu Hua

2009-10-11T19:28:03+02:00

The semester has begun so I'm actively studying literature at the moment,finding course books and reading as well as gathering knowledge on the situation of the texts I will read and theories I will work with,my thoughts and views at the moment are at brain storming stage and I will need to think and write on them. With this,it will not be a good idea to write on material outside of what I am assigned. However,I browse around to literary organizations because the situation of contemporary literature sits there very solidly and I can clearly understand and even carry the knowledge of them onto my course work. I would love to have time to review myself on them but this year will be a time for me to work specifically on assigned readings,write and to spend my time with that.

This novel is one that I chose because of my awareness of a certain social,political and cultural struggle taking place in China. It was an issue I wanted to write another article on the other day as the current American presdient Obama was to meet with President Hu Jintao and I read that he prosponed his meeting with the Tibetean activist the Dalai Lama.Although a spiritual leader the tibet freedom movement is not allowed a political leader as it is described as dictated by China. The struggle for human rights in china gave a new meaning to my understanding of the PEOPLE'S Republic of China...Especially after the Mao era I sense this version of socialism has gone worse and is far from the socialism I have read with Karl Marx,Frederich Engels and the list of Postmodern critics contributing to my understanding of what it should look like. Firstly the Charter 8 of which has become a stepping stone for freedom and democracy in the country the Tinanmen Square protests and controversy of the basic attitude within the Chinese authorities have turned by attention to the literary output and cultural works of chinese writers and artists of all genres. How this will be reflected into their works is something which we must observe in the coming years. Therefore,it is my pleasure to introduce a novel which tells the story of this cultural revolution which continues today in China. I am also happy that the reviewer is of Queens,New York-the place of my birth and where I spent some time in. As I recall the population of this place especially the area of Flushing,New York is home to the main Chinese and other Asian population. A good book to read and research for those who have the time. I am also reading an excellect novel and I apologize to my readers for not having the time to write more on this specific novel. I hope those who are interested will read and do a bit of their own research.

Note:The viewer statistics last month and this past week has been better than the past and I thank all readers and guests droping by for taking the tiime to read and even in some cases commenting...I will be back with more soon...

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

Review courtesy of Words Without Borders...

Yu Hua's Brothers

Translated from the Chinese by Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas
Pantheon, 2009
Reviewed by Brendan Patrick Hughes

It is a shame that Groucho Marx is not available to appear on film in the role of Baldy Li, the ridiculous, hedonistic, almost vaudevillian main character of Brothers, Yu Hua's epic comic novel of China's thirty-year transformation from Maoist horror show to capitalist horror show. Only Groucho could convincingly ham his way through Baldy's life, from his early days of humping telephone poles and hanging out underneath the town toilets to peek at women's bottoms to his role as hymen inspector at a beauty pageant and rise to scrap metal millionaire and astronaut-tourist. Packed with gags, word games, and quotations from Mao's “Little Red Book," Brothers makes absurdity its hallmark—and why not? As Baldy Li and his unfortunate brother Song Gang demonstrate, to have come of age during both the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping's market-based reforms is to have grown up absurd.

The novel begins quite literally in the toilet. Hanging by his feet over a cesspool, Baldy Li glimpses the bottom of Lin Hong, the town's beauty, when he is pulled up suddenly by Victory Zhao, the town poet, and admonished for his unseemly behavior. Baldy Li is fatherless—his father attempted the same toilet-peeking maneuver but fell in, drowning in excrement—and thereafter Baldy Li is recognized, to his mother’s shame, as “a chip off the old block." When his mother, Li Lan, marries Song Fanping, a school teacher and father of Song Gang, who is "a year older and a head taller" than Baldy Li, the two boys become inseparable. Much is made by both the boys and the townspeople of their brotherhood when in fact they are not technically brothers at all.

Hua's novel has a sprawling cast—upwards of twenty by my count, and those are just the major characters—but the eponymous brothers are the focus, and Hua means for them to stand for their generation: those Chinese born after the rise of Mao and before the Cultural Revolution who lived through the economic reforms of the 1970s and 1980s, those who had the experience of both arbitrary violence and arbitrary affluence. Hua himself is a member of this generation and has said that the experience has given him "the soul of a hundred-year-old man." That idea of arbitrariness lives at the center of Brothers. When the Cultural Revolution arrives, the boys' father, Song Fanping, is hailed as a revolutionary leader one day and the next denounced as a scion of the landlord class because his father owned property. Unable to understand the revolutionary fervor run amok, Baldy Li and Song Gang join in instead, wandering "through town like a couple of stray dogs. They followed one brigade after another, repeatedly yelling 'Long live!' after one and 'Take down!' after another. They shouted until their tongues were parched and their throats were raw and swollen." It seems like great fun and excitement until the mob turns on Song Fanping and beats him to death.

During the Cultural Revolution, a person could, like Song Fanping, be denounced just on the word of his or her neighbors, and so language became a very powerful weapon. It could be used to settle scores or inflict senseless violence under the guise of enforcing Maoist ideology. Hua delights in wordplay throughout Brothers, probing the gap between what is said and what is meant, between professed motives and underlying ones. A recurring gag is Baldy Li's exploitation of his "brotherhood" with Song Gang in order to get what he wants. In one scene, after Song Gang has won over Lin Hong, Baldy Li collapses in tears and then tries to coerce Song Gang into leaving her. "Song Gang rushed at Baldy Li saying, 'If it were you, what would you do?' 'If it were me,' Baldy Li shouted back, 'I would slaughter you!' Song Gang looked at Baldy Li in surprise and, pointing at himself, said, 'But I'm your brother!' 'Even as a brother, I would still slaughter you,' Baldy Li immediately retorted." It’s enough to wrangle Song Gang into giving him one last shot at getting the girl, but the threat is prophetic.

Song Gang takes care of Baldy Li after their mother dies and selflessly renounces Lin Hong out of concern for his brother, but their paths soon diverge. While Baldy Li is entrepreneurial and self-absorbed, his brother is reserved, even diffident, and always puts family first. Song Gang aspires to be a writer but gives up after a colleague criticizes one of his stories. Baldy Li, on the other hand, is consumed by an impulse to build and acquire. After Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, he starts a scrap business and eventually becomes a millionaire. Song Gang, on the other hand, drifts through a life of poverty, contracting a lung infection and working as a traveling salesman of breast enhancing cream (in another of Hua's comic flourishes, Song Gang gets breast implants in order to demonstrate the product and improve sales). When he returns home and finds that Baldy Li has taken up with his wife, Song Gang commits suicide by throwing himself in front of a train. At the end of the novel, Baldy Li, who has paid $20 million to be launched into orbit in a Russian rocket, prepares to take his brother's ashes into space, and the reader starts to sense the creeping entropy. The book doesn't so much end as spin out to the sound of crazed, raucous laughter.

It is interesting to compare Brothers to Yiyun Li's novel The Vagrants, which covers some of the same historical ground. Both authors are Chinese-born (Li is twelve years younger than Hua), but Li's novel is relentlessly grim and serious, a sharp contrast to Brothers, which despite its spasms of horrific violence hardly goes a page without Baldy Li hatching a new harebrained scheme. Both are powerful in their own ways, but the dissolute grip of Brothers is harder to shake and its dark comedy contains a more powerful critique of post-Cultural Revolution Chinese culture. In the novel's closing chapters, the unnamed narrator muses on Baldy Li's and Song Gang's disparate lives and fates: "Thus was life: Someone who was walking toward death might linger over the setting sun's glorious rays, while two others who were hedonistically pursuing pleasure might be completely oblivious to the beauty of the sunset." In the China of Brothers, it's the acquisitive pleasure-seeker, not the wandering beauty-lover, who survives.

Brendan Patrick Hughes was born in Boston. His writing has appeared in Next American City, the Believer, and on his Web site, brendanpatrickhughes.com. He lives in the borough of Queens in the city of New York.

Comments

PEN UPDATE

2009-10-08T11:12:41+02:00

Here are the main events taking place at PEN American center. I will also post the upcoming PEN events in the UK and around the world. It will give us an idea of where our contemporary writers are,what they are doing these days and how they are managing with today's world and trying to bring social awareness to the issues that must be discussed. This brings our attention to the main point that literature is very much alive and a part of the contemporary world. Of course,if you live close to the places of these events,you should definitely join them for the readings,discussions or other events of interest.if you do not, videos,recordings and articles on the events will be available which everyone must follow...

p.s They all take place in NEW YORK...How amazing is that...

Back soon with more...

Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the “War on Terror”
When: Tuesday, October 13
Where: The Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th St., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

With Matthew Alexander, Jonathan Ames, K. Anthony Appiah, Paul Auster, Ishmael Beah, David Cole, Don DeLillo, Eve Ensler, Nell Freudenberger, Jenny Holzer, A.M. Homes, Jameel Jaffer, Susanna Moore, Jack Rice, George Saunders, Amrit Singh, and Art Spiegelman

Tickets: $15/$10 for PEN/ACLU Members and students with valid ID at www.smarttix.com. Tickets may also be purchased at the door. For discount code, please contact Lara Tobin at lara@pen.org.

PEN and the ACLU will join forces to address the acts of torture and abuse carried out on behalf of the United States government since 9/11. At a time when the world’s eyes are on America and the Obama administration has taken some important steps toward addressing the abuses that have occurred over the past eight years, writers and artists will take the stage with lawyers, a former U.S. interrogator, and other special guests.

In an evening of readings and responses, these Members and friends of PEN will read from the recently-released secret documents that have brought these abuses to light—memos, declassified communications, and testimonies by detainees—and reflect on how we can move forward as a nation.

This event is a first step in the long process of national reflection and reconciliation

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

When: Monday, October 26
Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street (between Sullivan & Thompson), NYC
What time: 6:30–8:30 p.m.

With Paul Auster, Roxana Robinson, and other special guests

Free and open to the public.

Celebrate "make believe"—and writers who make us believe in the worlds of their own creation—with PEN America, PEN's award-winning literary magazine. Join recent contributors—including Cynthia Cruz, Said Sayrafiezadeh, and Lynne Tillman—to toast our newest issue, Make Believe; Paul Auster and Roxana Robinson will read.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Bearing Witness in Chechnya: The Legacy of Natalia Estemirova
When: Thursday, October 29
Where: Proshansky Auditorium, CUNY Graduate School, 365 Fifth Ave., NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

With Salman Rushdie, Michael Arena, Keith Gessen, Tanya Lokshina, Elena Milashina, and Zarema Mukusheva

Free and open to the public.

Co-presented by Human Rights Watch, the Committee to Protect Journalists, CUNY’s School of Journalism, and Witness

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

PEN American Center joins forces with the Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), CUNY’s School of Journalism, and Witness to pay tribute to Natalia Estemirova, the award-winning human rights activist and journalist murdered on July 15, 2009, as she was working on "extremely sensitive" cases of human rights abuses in Chechnya. Since 2000 Natalia Estemirova had been working for the highly respected Russian human rights organization Memorial in Grozny, Chechnya, where she documented the extrajudicial killings, abductions, rapes, and other abuses perpetrated by various armed forces since war between Russia and Chechen separatists erupted in 1994.

This free public event will feature readings and conversations to honor the legacy of Estemirova, while calling attention to the situation regarding freedom of expression in the provinces of the North Caucasus and Russia in general. Participants will include author Salman Rushdie, Michael Arena (former investigative reporter), Keith Gessen (co-editor-in-chief of n+1), Tania Lokshina (Researcher at Human Rights Watch), Elena Milashina (journalist), and Zarema Mukusheva (filmmaker and human rights activist).

---------------------------------------------------------
Breakout: Voices from Inside
When: Monday, November 9
Where: WNYC Greene Space, 44 Charlton Street, NYC
What time: 7 p.m.

With Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, Patricia Smith, and other special guests

Tickets: Collaborator: $75/Friend: $50.

Collaborator ticket covers the expenses of one-on-one mentoring services between a PEN member and an incarcerated man or woman for one year. This premier ticket includes the best views and a reception following the program.

Friend ticket covers the postage and printing costs to provide eight incarcerated men and women with a free copy of PEN’s Handbook for Writers in Prison. This ticket includes a reception following the program.

PEN Members and friends will read the award-winning work from PEN’s Prison Writing Program. Breakout: Voices from Inside, the Program’s second annual benefit reading and reception, will feature readings by Mary Gaitskill, Eric Bogosian, John Turturro, Patricia Smith, and others. As an installment of WNYC’s signature series “The NEXT New York Conversation,” this event will be broadcast and live-streamed, allowing incarcerated men and women with radio and/or internet access to listen to the event and join our audience.

For more than 30 years, PEN’s Prison Writing Program has been dedicated to helping make the harsh realities of American imprisonment part of our social justice dialogue. PEN’s Program has also been on the front-lines of prison reform, helping inmates in federal, state, and local penitentiaries cope with life behind bars, gain skills, and have a voice while they are there. Breakout: Voices from Inside will help raise much-needed funds to enable our important program to continue its most important mission into the future—helping incarcerated men and women to see themselves in a new way: as writers.

To be contiued with

-November 14:Freedom To Write

-November 30: Conversation: Javier Marias and Paul Auster

-December 2: Beyond Margins Celebration

Comments

Film of the Month:Memento

2009-10-04T15:10:38+02:00

**Book Review Sunday will be back after the break...Next film Tarantino directed

What kind of World does it depict?

What is the relation of this film to the postmodern genre?

How is it linked to Oldboy?

MEMENTO...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfLooGcvU6A&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpvrllK6jJQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKu6QsDaZN4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBcTCE9pMs&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpmu_gptThw&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Wx9tXijBjs&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1-0Wln0fgU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri35eUsIC-o&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbP1WSOCbaA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1z-K4-hd9g&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoy4fSRsH2o&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6dDJ_DjnIY&feature=related

Comments

WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS NEWSLETTER

2009-10-01T15:00:20+02:00

An update of the main events and stories from Words Without Borders:

For further information and details please visit...

http://www.wordswithoutborders.org

Foreign Correspondents: International Reportage

The October Issue

This month we present eyewitness accounts from around the world. In the spirit of the great Ryszard Kapuściński, our contributors record far more than just the facts, blending genres and filing dispatches from both political and literary frontlines. From the killing fields of Cambodia to the swarming streets of Tehran, on the ground and in the trenches, the writers here chronicle the news of the world with artful urgency. See how Nanni Balestrini, Karl-Markus Gauss, Gébé, Elham Gheytanchi, Peter Fröberg Idling, Wojciech Jagielski, Erwin Koch, François Vallejo, and Abdourahman Waberi deliver news that stays news.

Pol Pot's Smile
Peter Fröberg Idling on the seeds of the killing fields
Translated by Silvester Mazzarella
Four Swedes who had visited Cambodia at a time when almost no one was allowed over the border. A land where a well-lubricated, hellish machinery was working ceaselessly and more than a thousand children, women and men were dying every day. more>>

Dear Torturer
Erwin Koch asks: How does one become a torturer?
Translated by John K. Cox
Evil wears no gloves. You turned red with shame when the slice of cake tipped over onto the tablecloth. Because you've known for a long time what is appropriate in a German cafe. The waiter hissed: "The broom's included in the price." You understood this command, said nothing, and cleared the food from the table, vigorously, quickly. more>>>

from Towers of Stone
Wojciech Jagielski watches Chechen refugees on a train to nowhere
Translated by Soren Gauger
From far away you got the impression that the train had stopped because of some breakdown, or had simply taken a break in the journey due to the passengers' request. The people walked up and down alongside the cars, staying near to it, as though afraid of the train making off without them. They were stretching out their numb arms and legs. The men gathered in groups and smoked tobacco, the women bustled about, calling after the scattered children. more>>>

When Chaos Came to Salzburg
Karl-Markus Gauss on virtual revolutions and real states of emergency
Translated by John K. Cox
Pentecost, the peaceful holiday, had come, and Salzburg was something akin to a city under a state of emergency. By Friday, even schoolgirls from good homes did not make it all the way to school, if they were found to be out and about in the wrong kind of clothes; and heedless apprentices, their hairdos looking like something from a "wanted" poster, were collared in the street and shipped straight off home. more>>>

Rwanda, the Flame of Hope
Abdourahman Waberi returns to Rwanda after fifteen years
Translated by Nicole Ball and David Ball
Nearly fifteen years after the Tutsi genocide, it is still very difficult for foreign observers and the international community to follow the development of this country with a neutral eye and without being prejudiced or excessively emotional.
more>>>

A Revolutionary Tradition: Shoars in Iranian Street Politics
Elham Gheytanchi parses Persian political slogans
Even if Iran's political institutions have so far remained intact in the face of the recent agitation, its political culture has forever changed, perhaps even reverted to the revolutionary state of 1979, a shift reflected in the slogans chanted by people in the streets. more>>>

The Front
Gébé reflects on war and the French psyche
Translated by Edward Gauvin
The peacetime press pursues the politics of an ostrich. Head buried in the sand of petty intrigues, high-society trifles, and foreign wars, it deliberately ignores the front. more>>>

From The Burning of the Chiado
François Vallejo witnesses an old Lisbon neighborhood go up in smoke
Translated by Edward Gauvin
It goes quickly. Lisbon burns. The Frenchman has followed the fire's progress since morning. He was sleeping in his pension, Rua do Ouro. A roar outside, he pulled the curtains back. It should've been day out already, a summer's day, and not this gray fog, almost blue, August 25, 1988. more>>>

From Sandokan
Nanni Balestrini's novel of growing up in the shadow of the Camorra
Translated by Antony Shugaar
during these two or three months of summer I spend fifteen or twenty days at the fruit dump more>>>

Elsewhere this month, Mahmoud Darwish meditates on tragedy, and Maria Constanza Guzmán interviews Suzanne Jill Levine.

Bookshelf
New Reviews

Fado
by Andrzej Stasiuk
Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009

Reviewed by Bob Buckeye
The Other Europe no longer exists, its past no more than a memory, its life marginalized in the new world of runaway capitalism. more>>>

Music Break:Tracy Chapman

2009-09-28T17:59:39+02:00

NOTE:THIS PAST MONTH,SEPTEMBER 2009,GULIZSAHDUR.BLOG.CO.UK HAD THE HIGHEST VIEWER LEVEL EVER. I THANK YOU FOR VISITING...BACK WITH MORE AFTER THE BREAK...

NEW BEGINNING

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fNYEQYNjtg&feature=related

CHANGE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drXwsVYrd20

TALKIN BOUT A REVOLUTION

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKYWOwWAguk&feature=related

WHY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4bBff9aBRw&feature=related

GIVE ME ONE REASON

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2kEx5BLoC4&feature=related

CROSSROADS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3PX267adKs&feature=related

Comments

Film of the Month 3:OLDBOY

2009-09-27T11:16:50+02:00

Other postmodern films which explore this theme of time,narrative and structure are more psychologically related to subjects such as amnesia,memory and identity. These include Memento,Muhollad Drive or Peppermint Candy....

The film Oldboy is a South Korean film directed by Park-Chan Wook which is an example of this pyschological deep trend in some film within the postmodern genre. Also an excellent film to discuss along with Memento and write about in relation to to the genre...

Coming up next:Memento directed by Chistopher Nolan (comparision with Oldboy)

OLDBOY Enjoy

(English Subtitles)

PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmBDTMM31EU&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=0

PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YKPjRANxxk&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=1

PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhb6t-8KQXk&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=2

PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyXsBhivnJ0&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=3

PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLxKuIrp0y8&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=4

PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYwhhSD5l-E&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=5

PART 7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zM5zuYKoIRI&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=6

PART 8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6ZDKl3tpgk&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=7

PART 9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUMIt6VMdmk&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=8

PART 10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUMIt6VMdmk&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=8&ytsession=GosqNxJw6584rNYnGvHFwWyAo_pR-OXTwrsdMsTvRpnH4EtR4jx96U12ENma1zTW8ZTgOiyo3iisLBz-0WMQdJ1pBtK-WkGI6fuPW41zPCaWV3nik7966FbL8PIKuA5yWHvo1P9jBCJX9xyazK9cNRZHoKfWxNrF0dNjo-oLTpjZ-qfwJ7y4o18opSkulAiR0rUQKOP6oxIfQlRoICLLnp2fl2GN2raUpv2pCY4ACZXhYt5yRLoM7g2crsLWFyWElxM46oWshyGI88ElhYtiYdikFxTFChFNbD_iqxmGpNkJeYGtpi4TI7i7MLTUqrZpa4vAmUUCYuAJDJFpSZnykaX2UiV3S-AnfPL5KxferBQ

PART 11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0k9PWCPOiE&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=10

PART 12

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHxHhlUIZGI&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=11

PART 13

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpcAL_uW9KQ&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=12

PART 14

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIkPi_GYZAY&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=13

PART 15

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiRg2LWyyJY&feature=PlayList&p=5F90ECCB1A4BF62E&index=14

Comments

GLOBALIZATION: The End IS HERE!

2009-09-24T20:51:09+02:00

News and videos of protests as they are being tear gased:

http://www.gnn.tv/headlines/21227/Tear_Gas_Fired_at_G20_Protesters

Yahoo News Article: A Word Game!

BY:GULIZ SAHDUR

Note:I agree with the previous article's assesment that the only positivity to come about is the election of President Barack Obama,not only for his representation of racial diversity in America but also his policies and principles by which he has so far carried himself. However,it is inevitable that many years of capitalized and globalized world destruction which has brought about the current economic failure is no match for an individual who has been brought to office and is only allowed to play within that same system. With that,I admire the stance he has taken on many important issues of the U.S and the world. Perhaps it is change as change is only but permitted to be change...
For reputation of the United States police forces which have been clashing with the protesters please ask African Americans...My dear president Obama,does the name Rodney King ring any bells?!

As the previous article on the issue pointed out,the langauge of globalization which masks the social,political,cultural and therefore ideological agenda of the G-20 and globalized world's agenda appears in it's finest in this news article. As I have previously shown with a few documnetaries:In the current state of the world,the role the media plays upon this should never be underestimated. Here is the Yahoo news article on the G-20 resistence and protests...

Firstly,what are the protesters called? ANARCHISTS! Of course,on the mainstream level and read by the average American,the word anarchist does not refer to the political doctrine. It is a symbol very carefully constructed and construed by the same media outlets and
various other ideological control mechanisms firmly in place by now (A very Althusserian interpreation for certain but...) it exemplifies the point very well. What are these Anarchists who have 'come out of nowhere to Pittsbugh' doing there? They are disrupting the summit! So,Anarchists disruptive,bringing chaos,terror,destruction of peace,law and order(as we can see,in the article the citizens are scared and running away).They,the only ones against the way the world is being run and even further the public has fear of them!.

The language used from these souces,I especially monitor very well. The main reason is that I have realised through this that articles and other propaganda sources do this to distract attention away from the issues that matter. The resistence project,while on the most simple level protesting the reality of the summit is actually a resistence against the personal circumstances of individuals,families,communities and nations. We live through it everyday of our lives. Workers,students,nations plagued with war,conflict,political,religious and economic divide stand togther to resist the G-20. It wouldn't work if they called them ordinary citizens would it? It wouldn't work if they called it the majority of America and the majority of the world who suffer from the doings of the capitalist system.

No sign here about the source of the riots or why it is important. No mention of the policies of which the leaders are discussing,failing to discuss or the interests which the summit stands for. This,protest or no protest,should be pointed out with a certain critical perspective so as to achieve a sense of what is going on in American people's lives:Job cuts,buisness bankruptcy,need for loan and financial assistance for the majority of the population:And this is only in the most capital run country in the world. Globalization means a reliance on the system of high level consumerism,enviromentally,cultually unaware and ignorance for bliss kind of lifestyle. While,they would love us to believe the fundamental goal of a gloalized world is to bring us closer to one another and intergrate our potential intellectual,cultural and economic capabilities,it has proven though the years to play a more dividing,conquoring and a power interest for the economic elite. The current state of the American and world economy should give us a better understanding that the ideology behind globalization even with its fancy blocs and carefully set up organizations to uphold the system,that the globalizing project has failed. It has not taken into account the average people and their needs. It is the reason why a power nation can invade and cause war in places like Iraq,Afganistan and Pakistan. It is the reason why ecological,enviromental chaos,plants and animals are under destruction,the reason America can morally and financially aid Israel for the killings of the innocent in Palestine. The reason they have the economic and world dominating power to sanction,embargo,recognize and unrecognize any nation state in the world. That God given,unquestionable authority that is exercised through them.

The G-20 does not discuss the issues,it discusses the interests of the political and economical elite. The large corporations,buisnesses and the situation of stock exchange:Wall Street,goods,services,technological advancements,immigration policies and how these elite nations are to keep a strong hold on the issues. What I ask is what has this forceful pact achieved? How is the rest of the world and the people who suiefffer the consequences to cope?

So,what are the main concerns of the world today which the leaders of the summit will not discuss,lets have brief look:According to statistics,at least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day.Source 1,
More than 80 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where income differentials are widening.Source 2,The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.Source 3,According to UNICEF, 25,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life makes these dying multitudes even more invisible in death.”Source 4,Around 27-28 percent of all children in developing countries are estimated to be underweight or stunted. The two regions that account for the bulk of the deficit are South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa,If current trends continue, the Millennium Development Goals target of halving the proportion of underweight children will be missed by 30 million children, largely because of slow progress in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.Source 5,Based on enrolment data, about 72 million children of primary school age in the developing world were not in school in 2005; 57 per cent of them were girls. And these are regarded as optimisitic numbers.Source 6,Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.Source 7,Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.Source 8,Infectious diseases continue to blight the lives of the poor across the world. An estimated 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, with 3 million deaths in 2004. Every year there are 350–500 million cases of malaria, with 1 million fatalities: Africa accounts for 90 percent of malarial deaths and African children account for over 80 percent of malaria victims worldwide.Source 9,Some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
Almost two in three people lacking access to clean water survive on less than $2 a day, with one in three living on less than $1 a day.,Number of children in the world:2.2 billion,
Number in poverty:1 billion (every second child),Shelter, safe water and health,For the 1.9 billion children from the developing world, there are:640 million without adequate shelter (1 in 3)400 million with no access to safe water (1 in 5)270 million with no access to health services (1 in 7)Children out of education worldwide:121 million
Survival for children Worldwide,10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy)
1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation

The above are only a few of the poverty and water related statistics which I might add are some of the more optimistic statstics. A few other areas of interest which may be relavent for these suppossed leaders of the world to discuss:Climate change,enviromental destruction and natural habitat of animals,the overuse and abuse of natural resources of the world,Human rights violations of their respective countries,torture and abuse of political prisoners,sex trade, Children forced to work in sweat shops for little or no money,Racism,Gender issues:for women,gays,lezbians and homosexuals. The right to speak freely,the marginalization of certain minorities. While they are tear gasing,arresting and harrassing protesters,I would like for the leaders to discuss police brutality and why they are in violation of the first amendment of the United States of America for free expression and freedom of assembly. Global corporate domination and the the inequality which arises between the world's rich and poor is the subject of these protests. Unless,the G-20 produces any ideas on the world's crucial issues which they fail to address,I declare the protesters to have every right to be angry.

While I was waiting for the summit to neglect their general imperial activities as they have been exposed so many times before,I came across the President's statments on Iran's 'nuclear activities'. He demanded that that they come clean and stop their illegal nuclear activities 'to avoid any confrontation'. Britian's Prime Minister demands UN weapon's inspectors to go in. Where are the weapon's they went into Iraq for? A Dejavavu array of statements followed. It is said Obama was even briefed on the issue by the previous Commander in Chief,Cowboy George W Bush before he came to office. They will enter a diplomatic stage he says that even I know will not end very well. The result could be more sanctions on Iran. The same situation creeps up,an anti democratic Iranian regime and leader who has been protested by his own people for the past elections and the inhumane treatment of those who express themselves. However what I found most desturbing is why Iran was being discussed at this economic summit. If you can make a connection between political elite,ecomomic elite,corporations,energy,oil and industry with the imperial actiivites of this American lead pact who every so often have an urge to go venturing into Western Arab and Muslim nations of high levels of oil resources,then you will have solved the mystery about what kind of pact it really is and the meaning of the G-20 will clearly be visible without a doubt. With this my head turns straight back to the protesters outside

The aim of the protests should have been to make a statement on the current situation of the world and the crisis humanity is facing because of the policies of g-20 nation's domination. It should have been an attempt to represent the rest of the world and the public who find themselves oppressed because of the capitalist system. Unfortunately while saying that the g-20 did not address the main issues of the world,the protesters also did not do a good enough job of talking about what is going wrong and why the failure of capitalism has now become even more clear. The word capitalism stood out but what that means especially in the U.S is not well known because the majority do not read politcal,social,cultural and ideolgolical signs. The majority are the victims of it. What good will throwing a
few stones,garbage cans and confrontations with the capitalist states police officers do for change? It will,for certain,get them tear gased,injured,arrested and a criminal record without doing any good for themselves,their cause or the world. It only helps to further enforce that capitalist image of anarchy. That disruption,chaos,violence,instability and fear which they use to say:'look we provide you with order,stability,peace and security'. They dominate through the mind,body and soul. The left must change stategy,tactics for a better chance of competition. The general public are numbified and find peace with media and corporate consumer culture because it has already taken over their identity and they find confort,peace and stability through the capitalist culture. What needs to be done is better emphasis on collectivity and a left alliance to respond to the needs of humanity and for the common struggle for change. They must be unifed,strong,forceful to make an impact. The media,the books,the art and the literature,the noise and silence of change. There must be campaigns for awareness of the important issues which face humanity and why capitalism is taking away everything we ever had as people. All of this of course,not at all simple issues to put into practice as it is fairly simple for the world's dominting forces to now exercise that power whenever and where ever and however the wish to. The main question that we must ask is:As humans,what are our values?what are our priorities?who do we want to be?what is our goal?our mission for ourselves,eachother and for our planet?

I finish at the beginning...because we are at the beginning of our future,we have the choice as people to determine it. We make the choice. I ask everyone to take a look around at themselves,at their surroundings,the world.To make their decision,not with the capitalist taught ideals for money,possesions,selfishness of being here for myself and the few people around me. I ask for every individual to take a deeper look inside to the core of ourselves. That little bit of humanity we all have left inside:We are born,live and die. What else we would like to do during that life is the decision we must make. I aim not to find answers for the rest of humanity but to ask questions. It is these and questions like these which will steer us in the direction we would like to go.

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

FROM YAHOO NEWS:A WORD GAME!

The anarchists came to Pittsburgh to prepare to disrupt the G-20 summit closed-door meeting on Sept. 20. Members of the group say they have been followed, photographed, stopped and searched in the run-up to their protests of the Group of 20 meeting of the world's leading economic powers from Sept. 24-25. The 40 in the room were urged to write local lawyers' phone number on their bodies in case of arrest.

"When these events happen, there's a huge amount of propaganda that goes out from the state," Bradley told the group. "So a huge part of our effort was to reach out to people. People out there are angry, and they're angry about the same issues you're angry about." He was referring to G-20 globalization policies that he says take advantage of the cheapest labor markets and most vulnerable environments, running roughshod, in the anarchists' view, over the other 6.7 billion people not invited to this week's meeting. (Read a story about how anarchists disrupted Seattle.)

The Resistance Project has announced a Sept. 24 march on the Downtown summit site, the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, as well as scattered actions by smaller groups on Sept. 25. Resistance has kept its numbers and the make-up of its alliance a secret; it has also kept mum about the specific actions planned for Friday's big protest. Unlike the 11 other organizations (led by the Thomas Merton Center's Anti-War Committee, Three Rivers Climate Convergence and the local chapter of Codepink) hitting the streets, the Resistance Project has actively avoided applying for a city permit to protest and is likely to meet, in turn, resistance from law enforcement. (Why is the G-20 Being Held in Pittsburgh?)

One thing they won't likely encounter are citizens. Fear of protesters is the talk of grocery and bank lines. At one point, local media was filled with reports of surreptitious foreigners training in a vacant building (they turned out to be a Swedish punk band on tour). For the duration of G-20, most locals are clearing out. School districts 10 miles away from Downtown have canceled classes. Even before the Secret Service announced its summit site security perimeters, businesses blocks away decided to shut down or arrange for workers to telecommute. Several storefronts have already been boarded up. And one downtown apartment-building owner advertised in Craigslist for ex-military personnel to man the fire hoses to guard against protest-related vandalism.

With so much public nervousness, the city hasn't hidden its preparations against the protests. Since Pittsburgh's May selection by the White House as the site for the summit, the city has proclaimed that it is readying up to 1,000 jail cells for protesters, importing 3,100 law enforcement officers from around the country to supplement its 900-member force, and mobilizing 2,000 National Guard troops. The City Council passed new laws (set to expire Sept. 30) targeting the possession of certain tools and "noxious substances" - items allegedly thrown or used to blockade space at protests elsewhere.

Not that the city has gone unchallenged. The American Civil Liberties Union sued Pittsburgh over police treatment of a Montana-based organization, Seeds of Peace Collective, which was setting up mobile kitchens and delivery trucks to feed protesters for free. The ACLU had alleged that police had hounded the Collective from one neighborhood to the next with a series of petty charges since Sept. 19. While ACLU lawyers failed to stop police action against the Montana group, they did successfully sue to open Pittsburgh's iconic Point State Park to groups advocating action on climate change and women's rights.

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

PROTESTERS CLASH WITH POLICE

Yesterday The clashes began after several hundred protesters, many advocating against capitalism, tried to march from an outlying neighborhood toward the convention center where the summit is being held.

The protesters clogged streets, banged on drums and chanted "Ain't no power like the power of the people, 'cause the power of the people don't stop."

The marchers included small groups of self-described anarchists, some wearing dark clothes and bandanas and carrying black flags. Others wore helmets and safety goggles.

One banner read, "No borders, no banks," another, "No hope in capitalism." A few minutes into the march, protesters unfurled a large banner reading "NO BAILOUT NO CAPITALISM"

The marchers did not have a permit and, after a few blocks, police declared it an unlawful assembly. They played an announcement over a loudspeaker ordering people to leave and then police in riot gear moved in to break it up. Authorities also used a crowd-control device that emits a deafening siren-like noise, making it uncomfortable for protesters to remain in the streets.

Protesters split into smaller groups. Some rolled large metal trash bins toward police, and a man in a black hooded sweat shirt threw rocks at a police car, breaking the front windshield. Protesters broke 10 windows in a few businesses, including a bank branch, a Boston Market restaurant and a BMW dealership, police said.

Officers fired canisters of pepper spray and smoke at the protesters, set off a flash-bang grenade and fired rubber bullets. Some of those exposed to the pepper spray coughed and complained that their eyes were watering and stinging.

About an hour after the clashes started, the police and protesters were at a standoff. Police sealed off main thoroughfares to downtown.

Twenty-one-year-old Stephon Boatwright, of Syracuse, N.Y., wore a mask of English anarchist Guy Fawkes and yelled at a line of riot police. He then sat cross-legged near the officers, telling them to let the protesters through and to join their cause.

"You're actively suppressing us. I know you want to move," Boatwright yelled, to applause from the protesters gathered around him.

Protesters complained that the march had been peaceful and that police were trampling on their right to assemble.

"We were barely even protesting," said T.J. Amick, 22, of Pittsburgh. "Then all of a sudden, they come up and tell us we're gathered illegally and start using force, start banging their shields, start telling us we're going to be arrested and tear gassed. ... We haven't broken any laws

Bret Hatch, 26, of Green Bay, Wis., was carrying an American flag and a "Don't Tread on Me" flag.

"This is ridiculous. We have constitutional rights to free speech," he said.

The National Lawyers Guild, a liberal legal-aid group, said one of its observers, a second year law student, was among those arrested. Its representatives were stationed among the protesters, wearing green hats.

"I think he was totally acting according to the law. I don't think he was provoking anyone at all," said Joel Kupferman, a member of the guild. "It's really upsetting because he's here to serve, to make sure everyone else can be protected. ... It's a sign that they are out of control."

The march had begun at a city park, where an activist from New York City, dressed in a white suit with a preacher's collar, started it off with a speech through a bullhorn.

"They are not operating on Earth time. ... They are accommodating the devil," he said. "To love democracy and to love the earth is to be a radical now."

The activist, Billy Talen, travels the country preaching against consumerism. He initially identified himself as "the Rev. Billy from the Church of Life After Shopping."

Such street demonstrations have become the norm at world economic gatherings, including a G-20 meeting in London in April. The protesters here appeared to number fewer than a 1,000, a fraction of the 50,000 that took to the streets of Seattle a decade ago at a World Trade Organization event.

Later Thursday, hundreds of protesters, including a handful of anarchists, massed near the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Garden where the G-20 summit was beginning with a welcome ceremony.

"Tell me what a police state looks like. This is what a police state looks like!" the protesters chanted as several hundred riot police blocked them from getting any closer.

Police fired smoke canisters and pepper spray on a crowd at night in the city's Oakland section, home to the University of Pittsburgh, after calling for people to disperse, calling it an illegal assembly.

Police had let the crowd, a mix of protesters and students, remain for several hours before issuing the dispersal order. Police appeared to arrest a few people, including a woman who threw her bike at police as they moved people. A window on a Quiznos sandwich shop was broken.

Dignitaries arrived in waves throughout the day, entering a city under heavy security. Police and National Guard troops guarded many downtown intersections, and a maze of tall metal fences and concrete barriers shunted cars and pedestrians.

The G-20 ends late Friday afternoon after a day of meetings at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Comments

Globalization Goes Bankrupt?The G-20 Summit...

2009-09-22T17:22:37+02:00

....Or just corrupt?

I'll be back with my views after the article from Guerrilla News Network and TruthDig...

Please read to the G-20 resistence project article...Please visit resistg20.org for more info..

To be continued...

The game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living through one of civilization’s great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us.

Globalization Goes Bankrupt

The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in the mechanisms of democratic change. You can’t blame them. But unless we on the left move quickly, this rage will be captured by a virulent and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.

Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do—stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.

“The leaders of the G-20 are meeting to try and salvage their power and money after everything that has gone wrong,” said Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the Mexican Frente Autentico del Trabajo (FAT), who is in Pittsburgh for the protests. “This is what this meeting is about.”

The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power. The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.

The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world’s wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city’s police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.

Larry Holmes, an organizer from New York City, stood outside a tent encampment on land owned by the Monumental Baptist Church in the city’s Hill District. He is one of the leaders of the Bail Out the People Movement. Holmes, a longtime labor activist, on Sunday led a march on the convention center by unemployed people calling for jobs. He will coordinate more protests during the week.

“It is de facto martial law,” he said, “and the real effort to subvert the work of those protesting has yet to begin. But voting only gets you so far. There are often not many choices in an election. When you build democratic movements around the war or unemployment you get a more authentic expression of democracy. It is more organic. It makes a difference. History has taught us this.”

Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger. Globalization has obliterated the ability of many poor countries to protect food staples such as corn, rice, beans and wheat with subsidies or taxes on imported staples. The abolishment of these protections has permitted the giant mechanized farms to wipe out tens of millions of small farmers—2 million in Mexico alone—bankrupting many and driving them off their land. Those who could once feed themselves can no longer find enough food, and the wealthiest governments use institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization like pit bulls to establish economic supremacy. There is little that most governments seem able to do to fight back.

But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living through one of civilization’s great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis. It led the G-20 to sacrifice other areas of human importance—from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution—on the altar of free trade. It left the world’s poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more important, trying to save itself. “Speculation,” then-President Jacques Chirac of France once warned, “is the AIDS of our economies.” We have reached the terminal stage.

“Each of Globalization’s strengths has somehow turned out to have an opposing meaning,” John Ralston Saul wrote in “The Collapse of Globalism.” “The lowering of national residency requirements for corporations has morphed into a tool for massive tax evasion. The idea of a global economic system mysteriously made local poverty seem unreal, even normal. The decline of the middle class—the very basis of democracy—seemed to be just one of those things that happen, unfortunate but inevitable. That the working class and the lower middle class, even parts of the middle class, could only survive with more than one job per person seemed to be expected punishment for not keeping up. The contrast between unprecedented bonuses for mere managers at the top and the four-job families below them seemed inevitable in a globalized world. For two decades an elite consensus insisted that unsustainable third-world debts could not be put aside in a sort of bad debt reserve without betraying Globalism’s essential principles and moral obligations, which included an unwavering respect for the sanctity of international contracts. It took the same people about two weeks to abandon sanctity and propose bad debt banks for their own far larger debts in 2009.”

The institutions that once provided alternative sources of power, including the press, government, agencies of religion, universities and labor unions, have proved morally bankrupt. They no longer provide a space for voices of moral autonomy. No one will save us now but ourselves.

“The best thing that happened to the Establishment is the election of a black president,” Holmes said. “It will contain people for a given period of time, but time is running out. Suppose something else happens? Suppose another straw breaks? What happens when there is a credit card crisis or a collapse in commercial real estate? The financial system is very, very fragile. The legs are being kicked out from underneath it.”

“Obama is in trouble,” Holmes went on. “The economic crisis is a structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery for Wall Street. It can’t be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it. He is doing everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end. It is a prescription for disaster, not only for Obama but the Democratic Party. It is only groups like ours that provide hope. If labor unions will get off their ass and stop focusing on narrow legislation for their members, if they will go back to being social unions that embrace broad causes, we have a chance of effecting change. If this does not happen it will be a right-wing disaster.”

G-20 RESISTENCE PROJECT
Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance ProjectBelow is the call to action from the Action Framework Working Group.

Call to Action - Resist the G-20!
September 22-25, Pittsburgh, PA

Leaders of 20 of the most powerful governments in the world, representing 19 countries and the European Union, are descending upon Pittsburgh in late September. We, concerned residents of Pittsburgh, are asking for individuals and organizations that are seeking a better world to come and show their opposition to these undemocratic, closed meetings. Our future belongs to us, not to our governments!

We are asking you to join us from September 22 through September 25. We are calling for a diversity of actions throughout the week, and we hope that you can join us for some or all of these actions, as you are able.

On Tuesday, September 22, neighborhoods in Pittsburgh will be having community picnics, where long-time residents, short-time residents, and the early-bird protesters can share a meal and talk about the better world that they want to live in. The G-20 tries to present itself as leaders getting together, but whenever they meet it seems to cost millions and involve police hitting people over the head with batons. Let's show them how a real civil gathering works: good people, good food, good times. Locals in the East End have already confirmed an Anti-G-20 Community Gathering in Friendship Park from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm Besides food, music and conversation, Rustbelt Radio, a project of Pittsburgh Indymedia, will be on hand collecting stories for its G-Infinity Media Project. The live, streaming audio project is a non-corporate, participatory media forum for the voices of the people who will not be in the room during the summit, who are affected by the G-20 economic policies but whose stories go largely untold.

Wednesday night, September 23, at 7:00 pm, there will be a spokescouncil meeting for information sharing and coordination at our convergence space, located at 4374 Murray Ave. The spokescouncil is a place for affinity groups to share decisions that they have made and identify things that they need to do and decisions that they need to make. If you are planning on attending, PLEASE READ this page on the spokescouncil format.

Thursday, September 24, will feature a People's Uprising, a mass march to disrupt the G-20 summit. We'll be starting at Arsenal Park at 2:30 pm in Lawrenceville, a vibrant working class community in the city, and marching to the G-20 summit downtown. Our theme is "Power from Below, Not Impositions from Above." Our only permit is our feet and voices. The G-20 is in the house, throwing a party. Let's crash it.

Friday, September 25, we'll be working to undermine the G-20 summit by attacking their power, making connections to the local manifestations of their neoliberal agenda. The folks that gather in the convention center represent large governments that draw their power from collusion with powerful corporations, governments that draw their wealth from resource extraction and destruction to our world, and governments that maintain their forces through the direct violence of police forces and militaries. Without these structural supports, their power will disintegrate. The G-20 is in a house of cards: let's shake the table.

The action working group of the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project has drawn up a list of 100 potential targets, and many groups will be claiming a destination somewhere in the city. We call for these coordinated actions to end at 11:30 am in which we will demonstrate: we do not need to be together physically to be together in struggle.

We encourage people to form affinity groups with those that they know and trust, to have a familiar faces to stick with in the streets and people to organize and take action with. An affinity group is when you get together with folks who are on the same page as you about what kind of action you want to do. Maybe they're your friends from work or school, maybe they're your marching band mates. What each group’s action will be on Friday is up to that person or affinity group. We ask that each affinity group send one member of that group to our spokescouncil on Wednesday night to share information, coordinate and to pick a focus for Friday, if one is not already chosen.

After the actions end at 11:30 am, there will be an anti-authoritarian contingent in the Thomas Merton Center Anti-War Committee's state-sanctioned People's March to the summit site. This contingent will adhere to the Pittsburgh Principles, respecting the tone and tactics of the march organizers.

We are working hard with many groups and individuals in order to ensure there is a solid foundation for all of these actions to be a success. We ask those who are able to contribute more than their bodies – those who are interested in helping to provide legal support, scouting, staffing the convergence center, medical support, food, housing, etc. — to do what they can to help the resistance. If you see a need that you can fill, fill it. You don't need our permission, nor should you be asking for it, to resist. If you're not exactly sure how to do that but want to try, get in touch.

Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project
www.resistg20.org

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

Latest UpdatesUpdated Information from the Pittsburgh G20 Resistance Project Legal Working Group
We have committed to providing legal support for protests against the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on September 24-25.

If you are arrested or witness an arrest please dial: 412-444-3553

During the actions, to report surveillance, harassment, brutality or any other incidents please contact the ACLU at 412-562-5015.

With any other inquires please e-mail legal@resistg20.org

Comments

Film of the Month 2:LOLA RENNT/RUN LOLA RUN

2009-09-21T14:02:20+02:00

LOLA RENNT/RUN LOLA RUN

PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y382Z602DTw&feature=related

PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaCDuYwcPvo&feature=related

PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVUNSZwa-yk&feature=related

PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYe1DAcqiHg&feature=related

PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWNseKbI0o0&feature=related

PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppqDrjAAHRY&feature=related

PART 7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyQqE6vIxiM&feature=related

PART 8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfXbFbAFZfk&feature=related

Comments

World Wildlife Fund Promotion

2009-09-19T14:01:30+02:00

Note: I will post more information,facts,news,newsletters,campaigns and other helpful enviromental stuff from the World Wildlife Fund soon...

WHO THEY ARE:

WWF's Mission Statement
To stop the degradation of the planet's natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature, by:

conserving the world's biological diversity ensuring that the use of renewable natural resources is sustainable promoting the reduction of pollution and wasteful consumption. WWF's Guiding Principles
To guide WWF in its task of achieving the mission, the following principles have been adopted. WWF will:

be global, independent, multicultural and non party political use the best available scientific information to address issues and critically evaluate all its endeavours seek dialogue and avoid unnecessary confrontation build concrete conservation solutions through a combination of field based projects, policy initiatives, capacity building and education work involve local communities and indigenous peoples in the planning and execution of its field programmes, respecting their cultural as well as economic needs strive to build partnerships with other organizations, governments, business and local communities to enhance WWF’s effectiveness run its operations in a cost effective manner and apply donors’ funds according to the highest standards of accountability.

WHAT THEY DO:

WWF's mission is to stop the degradation of our planet's natural environment, and build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature. To achieve this, we are working with our many partners to:
Save biodiversity, and
Reduce humanity’s impact on natural habitats.
We are strategically focusing on conserving critical places and critical species that are particularly important for their habitat or for people.

We are also working to reduce humanity's ecological footprint – the amount of land and natural resources needed to supply our food, water, fibre and timber, and to absorb our CO2 emissions.

It's not about keeping people out of nature.

Or turning back the clock.

Or preventing countries or communities from developing.

It is about finding practical solutions for a healthy planet.

A planet where people and nature can thrive together, in a stable environment, now, and for generations to come. WWF's Strategic Plan for Conservation
1.12 MB pdf
2050 Biodiversity Goal By 2050, the integrity of the most outstanding natural places on Earth is conserved, contributing to a more secure and sustainable future for all 2050 Footprint Goal By 2050, humanity's global footprint stays within the Earth's capacity to sustain life and the natural resources of our planet are shared equitably
Take a look at WWF's on the ground conservation projects: information delivered direct from the field.

How do we do this?
Through innovative partnerships that combine on-the-ground conservation, high-level policy and advocacy, and work to make business & industry more sustainable.

Find out how WWF works...In the face of massive, unprecedented threats to the natural world – especially climate change and unsustainable resource management – WWF will focus on truly global conservation priorities which can achieve real and lasting change.
James P Leape, Director General, WWF International
Why do we do this?
The decisions, actions and inactions of one species – ours – over the next decade will determine the fate of all life on Earth.

Across the world, biodiversity and natural habitats are disappearing faster than ever before.

Why? Because as a whole, people are using wood, water, wild animals and other natural resources more quickly than they can be replenished, polluting and altering natural habitats, and changing the entire planet's climate.

This is damaging the ecosystems that supply us – and all other life – with freshwater, food, clean air, shelter, and more.

Millions of people, in rich and poor countries alike, are already feeling the consequences – uncertainties over food and water security, increased vulnerability to natural disasters and diseases.

Things will get much worse if we keep going the same way.

Our planet is at a critical point...

WHAT YOU LEARN:

Biodiversity - what is it & why is it important? Problems & challenges facing our planet Climate change & global warming Oceans, seas & coasts
Forests, jungles, woods & trees Rivers, lakes & wetlands Species & animals Habitats & the different places where life lives Take a look at the top 10 species & places Or you can...

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

What we are trying to do, how we are going about it - it all means nothing without your help.
And that help can come in many varied ways.

It isn't just about money, it is also about what you do.

In your life. At home. At work.

Even the smallest acts can add up to be something huge and planet-changing... after all, who'd have thought just leaving a TV on standby and forgetting to switch off a few lights would be some of the key contributors to the critical issues we now face with climate change?

If such small things can cause such huge problems, rest assured small things can also create HUGE solutions...

Here are just some of the things you could do today:
Latest action you can take...
Save turtles in trouble
Marine turtles are a globally important species, but the number of turtles has plummeted and some populations are now on the brink of extinction.

Take action now
Did this page help you?
Yes? No?

Help us improve...Make a donation
Of course, if you have any spare change, we would love for you to...
invest in our work to conserve the majesty of Life!

Take action
Take action online and help us get on-the-ground results. Does it work? You betcha!
Join WWF's online campaigning community
Spread the word
Send free WWF e-cards to your friends and family. Use one of these banners, buttons or widgets to get the message across.

Film of the Month:Sliding Doors (Postmodernism)

2009-09-16T13:02:47+02:00

This month I am posting a film which is an example of postmodern film. The development of film through the years is a very interesting topic to read about and it sheds light on other areas such as literature(language),art and visual images and music(sound,noise). The mixture of all can be seen in film which is a great medium to observe the structure of narrative,sequence,perspective,images and the audience interaction with it. For example,a film I remember watching about six years ago is Run Lola Run. It is a German language film which maybe as the sequences repeat you may get upset or bored with but the point of the film you understand very clearly and in my opinion that film was done so well that to understand the point you would not even need the English Subtitles. So,
Postmodern film charcteristics include: Intertextuality, self-referentiality, parody, pastiche, and a recourse to various past forms, genres, and styles are the most commonly identified characteristics of postmodern cinema. These features may be found in a film's form, story, technical vocabulary, casting, mise-en-scène, or some combination of these.
The best way to understand this is by viewing some of the postmodern genre of film of course there are are few which are similar to Run Lola Run in Style. So Run Lola Run was filmed in Germany in 1998 and Sliding Doors filmed in London-Hollywood made!!! the same year. In Run Lola Run the events take place three times with alterntive endings especially occuring while in Slding doors splits into parallel universes where different events occur...I think these two films should be compared when speaking about this style of film for the postmodern films...What other similarities and differences can you find? What kind of world does it depict? and how does it effect the film?

PART 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZT1B43loR0

PART 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkbqdYMgkI4&feature=related

PART 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjf0opYkrVk&feature=related

PART 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAZL9pf-TaA&feature=related

PART 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_gKYFVOBpU&feature=related

PART 6

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-JTQ5hz8v0&feature=related

PART 7

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWpCiQCyuMM&feature=related

PART 8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDYjtIspm-g&feature=related

PART 9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWXUrG1zefw&feature=related

Part 10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5lkMl01C2U&feature=related

Comments

Book Review Sunday:'Harare North',Brian Chikwava

2009-09-13T13:00:59+02:00

International PEN is back with the FREE THE WORD BOOK CLUB. This novel about a man from Zimbabwe and his immigrant life of struggles in London. A few contemporary novels already directs the attention to this idea of migrant struggles and identity and make up an important part of contemporary literature. Many novels also tell of economic struggles and just the utter force of capitalism is even more recogizable in contemporary literature. Glipses of this could be seen in modern literature but I am shocked to see the impact it has had on contemporary writing. Economic chaos and the Zibabwe's political and social struggles intertwine in this novel to paint us a detailed picture of a life,a world and a perspective. This we should analyse very well as people who live in the contemporary world as their are many nations especially in Africa that have been plagued with similar conflict and struggles and with our image reflected it should be a good way to read it. An out of place,alienated,economically and politically cripled,exiled,morally conflicted,minoritized and marginalized world is reflected over and over again in these novels. In 'Harare North' we see that the author Brian Chikwava offers us a different perspective. It shows us that with a little sense of humour and that pleasure we have to live and wage this struggle it will be alright. In other words,as well as the gloomy world reflected to us which signals external troubles,what we should continuously strive to work at is the novel's characters and their internal attitude when faced with it. does not take away from the social,political,cultural,creative and literary conflicts we face both on the external and internal but it throws a different twist to it that the novel does not ask for pity or give the human a sad profile. It gives a sense of resistence and energy of an individual fighter and survivor who is living through this on a personal level and suceeding to get by and maintain hope,integrity and self respect. This novel suggests that the strong and humorous dialogue of the main character gives he novel its main characteristic and personality. It will be an interesting read to the collection of migrant literature that we are confronted with in the recent years. I certainly have many many novels,poetry,drama and theory books to read at the moment but to hear about these works gives me better insight into the literary world as it is now.

-Guliz-
----------------------------------------------------

BRIAN CHIKWAVA

HARARE NORTH

REVEIWED BY:INTERNATIONAL PEN

Harare North offers a view of London from a Zimbabwean migrant's perspective. As the third book in our Free the Word! World Book Club series, Chikwava's tale begins with the unnamed narrator arriving in London as an illegal immigrant who hopes to make enough money to pay off his debts and return to Zimbabwe. As he watches the economy turn and the Zimbabwean dollar drop, the story becomes one of survival amongst London's underworld. Despite the realistic struggles the novel depicts, Chikwava has been acclaimed for his witty and humorous writing style. Chikwava says, 'I wasn't really trying to get people to feel sorry for them [the illegal immigrant population] or eliciting any sympathy, but just as a way of saying, here is a different life.'

‘From first page to last, the vernacular narrative of Harare North is arresting, haunting, exciting, funny. Come to this novel with an open mind and, as well as giving you much to ponder about the nature of right and wrong, exile and belonging, it will surely make you go kak kak kak.' Margaret Busby in The Independent

Each month International PEN's Book Club will feature a book selected from those presented at International PEN's Literary Festivals around the world. For more information please check the Literary Events section of this website. The festivals celebrate writing around the globe, and International PEN hopes to encourage reading across borders. In April, Brian participated in this year's Free the Word! festival in London. She has provided reader's notes exclusively for the Free the Word! World Book Club which explore both the context of Harare North as well as offering a personal insight into the story.

Here are some potential areas for conversation and discussion of Harare North below:

How reliable do you find the narrator?

How effective do you feel the portrayal of a diaspora community is?

Character and place are fundamentally linked in the book - how does the perception of London/Brixton change as the character unravels?

Brian Chikwava's personal inspiration for 'Harare North'
I would like to believe that had I stayed in Zimbabwe I would have written a completely different novel although it will probably still have been a book that addressed the crisis in Zimbabwe, which was at its height when I started toying with ideas. It is probably natural that when what you call your home is going through a rough patch, you keenly feel the need to prioritise subjects and themes that can help you come to terms with whatever is happening in that part of the world before moving on. At the same time your new home opens up creative possibilities that, allied with your desire to have a good grasp of the new country as well as understanding your place in it, draw you towards diasporic themes. So it would probably be fair to say that Harare North was born out of the two desires: to make a response to what was happening in Zimbabwe as well as understanding diaspora. But the creative spark only kicked in when I met a young Ugandan one day during one of my random walks through the south of London, something that I habitually do to clarify my thoughts and ideas.

It was a sunny summer afternoon and I was walking by the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. I had always been drawn to the people that hung out under the plane tree outside the cinema. On sunny days there would normally be people who were largely still new to the UK, were still jobless and had lots of time on their hands and were evidently from sunny climates; on days like this the yearning for the sun and open space of their native lands drove them out of their houses and council flats to open air outside the Ritzy. On this day I just sat on the grass, listening to what people were talking about. That is when the young Ugandan came to sit next to me and started telling me his story. He had been in the UK for five years after seeking asylum, and had been with the notorious Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda but had been captured by the Ugandan army and imprisoned before somehow managing to flee to the UK. He missed being with the LRA and hero-worshipped its leader, Joseph Kone. Once in a while he would get up to show me how he danced when cuddling his AK47 to his chest as one would do a baby. At first I thought he had a rather disquieting sense of humour but soon realised that he meant everything in earnest. Then I began to see in him a touching kind of naivety about the world and politics. This curious mixture of an innocent young man who had probably killed in the name of one of Africa's most notorious movements led me to think about Zimbabwe's Green Bombers. Soon enough I began to appreciate the kind of humour to be had writing about a Green Bomber in London. In a single stroke, that dealt with both Zimbabwe and the diaspora.

Harare North is a story that is narrated by a young man who is an ex-Green Bomber and it is nested in the heart of the crisis that has engulfed Zimbabwe since about the turn of the century. Many non-Zimbabweans will probably have come across news about Zimbabwe's problems over the past few decades but very few will have heard about Green Bombers, the government-sponsored militia that became notorious for its role in persecuting ordinary Zimbabwean citizens who were not sympathetic to the governing party's politics.

The Green Bomber is nothing new to history as this kind of political creature has appeared in several guises in many countries over the years, more so in those states that feel threatened by external or even internal events. China has seen the Red Guards during the cultural revolution in action, created to mobilise mass thought and action against the spectre of a capitalist order restored by counter-revolutionaries; Cambodia has seen the village militia during the years of the Khmer Rouge. Today you have to look at the Basij, in Iran, and - one could argue - the Kremlin-backed Nashi in Russia who although nobly founded as an anti-fascist organisation sometimes come across as a chilling political tool, especially with their very Green Bomberesque powers such as the right to stop and check ordinary citizens for their IDs.

Green Bombers in Zimbabwe were initially recruited as part of a government programme to ‘reorient' youths with the nation's history and ‘values'. Later they became instrumental in taking the government's nationalist and anti-colonist rhetoric to the grassroots and have actively mobilised against pockets of civic society that were regarded as disloyal to the country or sympathetic to the external ‘imperialist forces.' This mass coercion plunged the country into a crisis that saw a lot of people move to neighbouring countries, the UK and the US. But as usual with any revolution, sooner or later it reaches a point when it begins to eat its own children in way that were never intended or envisaged by its patrons. It is at this point that the narrator of Harare North has to flee Zimbabwe to seek refuge in the UK, a country that he has been drilled to regard as the Zimbabwe's archenemy. This change of direction in his life convictions are enough to trigger a psychological dissonance of a kind in any young man whose life has gone through a similar route. In London, he has the choice of being the boy of the ‘jackal breed' that he was back home or the browbeaten person that he was before becoming a Green Bomber; between these two personalities, one of them has to be murdered if he is to survive in his new environment. The story is a simple portrait of the havoc the political can wreak in personal lives when fanatically pursued.

Comments

PEN Newsletter September 2009

2009-09-12T12:52:42+02:00

Here is the the news and events featured in the Amrican PEN center newsletter for September 2009. For more information and details about the stories and events coming up...Please visit http://www.pen.org or http://www.internationalpen.org.uk

Please support PEN for conemporary literature and the future of free expression in literature and the written word. The right to speak,the right to express and the right to write is extreamely important in literature..I am a devoted supporter.

NEWS AT PEN

PEN Announces the Winners of the 2009 Beyond
Margins Award

The PEN/Beyond Margins Award celebrates outstanding books by writers of color published in the United States during the previous year. The 2009 winners are Uwem Akpan for Say You're One of Them, Juan Felipe Herrera for Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems, and Lily Hoang for Changing.

>> Check out this September's online feature for excerpts from their work

2010 Literary Awards Call for Submissions

PEN American Center is now accepting submissions and nominations for the 2010 Literary Awards. PEN’s awards program is the most comprehensive and prestigious in the nation, honoring achievements in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translation, playwriting, and editing. For a complete list of awards and submission guidelines, visit www.pen.org/awards.

ADVOCACY NEWS

Imprisoned Writers Released

PEN welcomes the release of journalist Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, who had originally been sentenced to death for blasphemy in Afghanistan, and Ilham Tohti, a member of the Uighur PEN Center who was detained in Beijing during the unrest in Xinjiang Province. >;> More

PEN Goes to Washington

Next week, PEN American Center will be on Capitol Hill pressing two of PEN’s top agenda items. Representatives of PEN American Center and the Independent Chinese PEN Center will visit House members to enlist support for a resolution calling for the release of our colleague Liu Xiaobo in China. We will also join our partners in the Campaign for Reader Privacy for meetings with senators and representatives to press for the full restoration of protections for bookstore and library records.

UPCOMING EVENTS

September 13:
PEN at the Brooklyn Book Festival

Stop by the PEN booth to meet PEN Members and staff, learn how you can get involved with PEN's mission to defend free expression in the U.S. and abroad, and check out the live recording of PEN podcast conversations. At 1:00 p.m., on the International Stage, PEN will team up with Tin House to present Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia, with Dale Peck, Francine Prose, Anya Ulinich, Vadim Yarmolinets, Emily Gould, and Dmitry Danilov. >>More

September 21:
Writers' Roundtable with Nicholas Dawidoff

Join Jennifer Vanderbes, Chair of PEN's Writers' Roundtable Committee, and Nicholas Dawidoff for a discussion on craft and the writing life. >> More

October 13:
Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the “War on Terror”

PEN American Center joins forces with American Civil Liberties Union to contront the acts of torture and abuse carried out on by the United States government since 9/11. Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and Art Spiegelman take the stage with Matthew Alexander (former U.S. interrogator and author of How to Break a Terrorist) and Amrit Singh (staff attorney at the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project) to read from the recently-released secret documents that have brought these abuses to light and to reflect on how we can move forward as a nation. >> More

Comments

Memories of My Childhood in England

2009-09-11T12:27:07+02:00

As I prepare to pack up and head to England for awhile for my studies and research,I remember my childhood. A part of my earlier years being spent in New York and a bigger part in England I get a feeling of returning to the years I was care-free and did not know so much about the people and world I now know. Again it will be in a beautiful part of England outside the busy and crowded London. Perhaps the fondest memories of my childhood was spent in Hertfordshire,Potters Bar. Those who know it,know how nice,quiet and English like the area is. I remember my school uniform and the blue and white checkered summer dress uniform. The P.E classes which we would have various athletic competitions and my girls football tornaments(hahah I was terrible),Swimming lessons and competions,the fun at break time and milk time,the autumn time with chestnuts and acorns around-to play a game called conkers,leaves on the ground and the sounds as I walked through them,the smell of the rain and of the wind and the Christmas spirit and preperations for the Christmas plays. Interesting adventures I remember invloved a camping trip with my school friends to 'Cuffley Camp' and the great fun I had there,school trips to local farms,historcial and religious outings and even the funfares and special days and My visits to friends houses and Birthday parties. Yes,just as I thought,I do have very good memories of England as a child.
I loved it
Because I also have family there it is special to me. I also remember all the memories with them. Of course,I also have many memories that are sad and things that I do not want to remember but as I think about it I realise how happy I was in my childhood and in especially England. I recall how sad and upset I was to leave England for New York and that it changed me and my peaceful lifestyle and surroundings forever. Perhaps I can say I was never that happy ever again. It is true that it is not your ethnicity,race or religion which makes a person in such situations but because of where I was brought up(perciesley in this and a similar cultural surroundings),I feel as though my future would be different in a different culture that I was brought to years later in my parents childhood country. As these very special and nice memories flash through my head,I remember the reality of the situation. I have a mission and as least one year to work hard in a beatiful part of the same country. It will not be easy for me and for my family but I feel strong enough to go and give it a try. English Literature and especailly writing poetry is something that gave me that same peace and happiness of my childhood. Maybe I did not have a good experience here in Cyprus but I know that I have an oppotunity to turn that around and to find that peace I have been looking for. Many difficulties surround me,await me and as my final days here get closer,I feel a spark of light getting nearer and nearer. For the next year it will possibly be the most important of my life. It will be th defining moment...Let's see what this year has in store for me and the adventures I will come across. I will of course,not be using this blog as much during my studies.

Note:This does not mean I did not have some fun in New York or Cyprus also but England was special because it was my first experience of school,peers and friends. It was my first experience of happiness.

-Guliz-

Comments

'Revolution'':)

2009-09-08T17:17:01+02:00

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

BY:Gil Scot Heron

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live

Your Revolution

BY:Sarah Jones

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs

Not happen between these thighs

The real revolution ain't about booty size

The Versaces you buys, or the Lexus you drives

And though we've lost Biggie Smalls

Baby your notorious revolution

Will never allow you to lace no lyrical douche, in my bush

Your revolution will not be killing me softly, with Fugees

Your revolution ain't gonna knock me up without no ring

And produce little future emcees

Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs

Your revolution will not find me in the backseat of a jeep

With LL, hard as hell, you know doin it and doin it and doin it well

doin it and doin it and doin it well, nah come on now

Your revolution will not be you smacking it up, flipping it, or rubbing it down

Nor will it take you downtown or humpin around

Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs

Your revolution will not have me singing, ain't no nigga like the one I got

And your revolution will not be sending me for no drip, drip VD shot

And your revolution will not involve me, feelin your nature rise

Or helping you fantasize

Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs

No no, not between these thighs

Oh, my Jamican brother, your revolution will not make you feel bombastic

And really fantastic

And have you groping in the dark for that rubber wrapped in plastic

You will not be touching your lips to my triple dip of french vanilla,

butter pecan, chocolate delux

Or having Akinyele's dream, m-hmm a 6-foot blowjob machine m-hmm

You want to subjugate your queen? uh-huh

Think I'm a put it in my mouth, just cuz you made a few bucks?

Please brother please

Your revolution will not be me tossing my weave

And making me believe I'm some caviar-eating ghetto mafia clown

Or me giving up my behind, just so I can get signed

And maybe having somebody else write my rhymes

I'm Sarah Jones, not Foxy Brown

You know I'm Sarah Jones, not Foxy Brown

Your revolution makes me wonder, where could we go

If we could drop the empty pursuit of props and ego

We'd revolt back to our Roots, use a little Common Sense

On a quest to make love De La Soul, no pretense

But your revolution will not be you flexing your little sex and status

To express what you feel

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs

Will not happen between these thighs

Will not be you shaking and me *yawn* faking

Between these thighs

Because the real revolution, that's right I said the real revolution

You know I'm talking about the revolution

When it comes, it's gonna be real

It's gonna be real

When it finally comes

It's gonna be real

Comments

Book Review Sunday:'Brooklyn',Colm Toibin

2009-09-06T08:15:21+02:00

This author's works I want to familarize myself with. Many writers take on different topics,perspective and show us a different part of life. It is a great misconception that most novels are fairytales written in a Hollywood manner so as to please readers with a happy ending or reflect the life of the bourgeosie. Colm Toibin,an Irish writer,as I have recently read about tells of working class sad stories of the basic personal human struggles to survive in a cold,ruthless and material world. As always the personal is the political. The most interesting charcteristic of the novel as I have noticed comes from the common Toibin theme of migration and a journey like plot. This reminds me of the most famous masterpiece of Irish literature 'Ulysses' by James Joyce. This time it takes place in a more modern location of America which brings with it many questions of race,ethnicity,gender,capitalism and the personal stuggles of our times. However the descriptive narrative style is more remeniscent of the American Realist Henry James. The difference I have noticed in my literary adventure through these few years of individual research among many things,as I have mentioned before is the closeness to 'reality' literature has become compared to other periodical literature. The closer it becomes to the reader,to the writer,to the life and language of the common people then we understand that contemporary literature is going in the right direction. The most popular mainstream books of our generation as it seems are fantasy filled stories of wizardry,magic,ghosts and the traditional 'good v's evil' plot and mind set.The employment of any intellectual ideas are very few. A 'real' life contains much disappointment,failure and many unfulfilled expectations especially in relation to power,money and status,for the lower middle and working classes. With this in mind,it is my pleasure to introduce a novel fresh off print (released in May) as many know with the Irish literary tradition,every literature student should know it by heart and should be following for any developments. We see traces of that Irish identity for certain with Colm Toibin but with a Henry James twist to it this time,it should surely be an interesting read!

-Guliz-

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

BROOKLYN

COLM TOIBIN

REVIEWED BY:RUTH SCURR

Brooklyn is Colm Tóibín’s most beautifully executed novel to date. Like The Heather Blazing (1992) it is an intimate portrait of a sad life, built up steadily from simple descriptive sentences, laid down with precision at a controlled pace. Reading Tóibín is like watching an artist paint one small stroke after another until suddenly the finished picture emerges to shattering effect.

Beginning in Enniscorthy in the south-east of Ireland in the early 1950s, Brooklyn centres on the young adulthood of Eilis Lacey, who lives with her mother and elder sister Rose, after their father’s death and three brothers’ departure to England in search of work. There are no prospects for Eilis in the town. She studies bookkeeping and longs for a good clerical post and smarter clothes like Rose’s, but the best on offer is a Sunday job in Miss Kelly’s grocery shop:

"Miss Kelly stood back, her attention divided between the door and Eilis. She checked every price Eilis wrote down, informed her briskly of the price when she could not remember, and wrote down and added up the figures herself after Eilis had done so, not letting her give the customer the change until she had also been shown the original payment. As well as doing this, she greeted certain customers by name, motioning them forward and insisting that Eilis break off whatever she was doing to serve them."

Eilis’s escape comes in the form of another job offer: this time on the other side of the Atlantic. Father Flood, back visiting his hometown after emigrating to the United States, is shocked to discover a young woman of Eilis’s potential crabbed inside Miss Kelly’s corner shop, so promises to find her work and lodgings in Brooklyn. “Parts of Brooklyn are just like Ireland. They’re full of Irish”, he reassures Eilis’s mother. “It might be very dangerous”, she replies, eyes fixed on the floor. “Not in my parish”, Father Flood continues, “It’s full of lovely people. A lot of life centres round the parish, even more than in Ireland. And there’s work for anyone who’s willing to work.”

Eilis’s journey to America is one of cumulative grief. First she goes to Liverpool where her brother closest in age meets her and takes her for a good meal, in case the food on the boat is “not to her liking”. She does not know whether or not to embrace her brother, they have never embraced before. She hugs him and he blushes, saying, “That’s enough of that now”. Jack works at a warehouse for spare car parts. She asks if he sees their other brothers, Pat and Martin, much. He tells her it’s a pity she’s not going with them to Birmingham, “there’d be a stampede for you on a Saturday night”.

This stilted exchange of sibling attachment gathers its full poignancy in retrospect, after Eilis boards the ship to New York, to find herself utterly alone among passengers selfish enough to lock a seasick person out of the lavatory. After a harrowing journey, she arrives in Mrs Kehoe’s Brooklyn boarding house, where she will live alongside a Miss McAdam from Belfast, Patty McGuire (born in upstate New York) and Diana Montini, whose mother was Irish.

These loose connections of provenance only serve to illuminate the home Eilis has lost:

"She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything . . . . Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday."

Tóibín does not write about the supernatural: the ghostly in his novels is an all-too-human projection of psychological distress. Grief especially evokes the space ghosts would inhabit if only it were possible to believe in them. There is a memorable example of his use of this device in his novel about Henry James, The Master (2004). James has returned to Venice after the death, and probable suicide, of his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson. He goes out in a gondola to dispose of her clothes in the lagoon. The clothes of the deceased are laid reverentially on the water as though on a bed, they darken, then disappear, but suddenly:

"In the gathering dusk it appeared as though a seal or some dark, rounded object from the deep had appeared on the surface of the water . . . . And then Henry saw what it was. Some of the dresses had floated to the surface again like black balloons, evidence of the strange sea burial they had just enacted, their arms and bellies bloated with water."

In Brooklyn, Eilis is young and vital enough to move beyond the experience of black despair to find friendship, even love, in her new life. She works at a fictional version of the famous Abrahams & Straus department store on Fulton Street. Clothes are the centre of her working life, a subject of intense discussion among her fellow lodgers, and, most importantly, a reminder of her sister Rose, whose poise and elegance used always to seem beyond Eilis. On the voyage out, Eilis is struck suddenly by the inappropriateness of her going to America instead of Rose; then, in a moment of awed horror, she realizes the extent of her sister’s sacrifice: someone has to stay at home, and Rose wanted Eilis to be free.

Brooklyn stands comparison with Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. Both books share a preoccupation with the conflict between personal freedom and responsibility, or duty. They both evoke feminine sexual inhibition, or fear. Despite her brother's reassurance, Eilis is a young woman with no confidence or understanding of her own sexual allure. She attends dances at home and in Brooklyn and feels like an awkward wallflower, always thinking of an excuse to leave early. When she finds a boyfriend in Brooklyn, she doesn’t know how to slow him down and explain that marriage and children are not necessarily what she wants; she doesn’t really know what she wants, but is too polite, too well schooled in the habits of kindness and embarrassed repression, to say so outright.

Eilis’s social position is far more modest than Isabel Archer’s: Tóibín’s portrait is of a 1950s shop girl, rather than a nineteenth-century heiress. But both writers are concerned with describing in intimate and intricate detail the emotional content of a young feminine life that leads to a stark, distressing, dead end. In explaining Isabel Archer’s epiphany about her marriage, James writes It was not her fault – she had practiced no deception; she had only admired and believed. She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to be a dark, narrow alley with a dead wall at the end. Instead of leading to the high places of happiness, from which the world would seem to lie below one, so that one could look down with a sense of exaltation and advantage, and judge and choose and pity, it led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and where it served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Isabel Archer’s prison is constructed by the Machiavellian motives of her sophisticated acquaintance. Eilis Lacey’s is rather the result of inherited social expectation, combined with bad luck and failure of nerve. She might have been free, she might have reached those high places of happiness – that certainly was her sister Rose’s intention – but instead she finds her life trapped on a course she has not really chosen; her only comfort to close her eyes and try “to imagine nothing more”.

With Brooklyn, Tóibín has transcended the homage he paid to James in The Master. He has returned to the themes of melancholy and grief that ran like dark threads through his earlier novels, especially The Blackwater Lightship (2000). Homesickness and rupture are the seminal experiences of Eilis’s life. The fact that what she is missing so much, even to the point of illness, is so painfully limited, only increases the pathos of her loss. Tóibín, more like Hardy than James in this respect, knows what it means to want something modest and simple at the centre of your life, but not be able to have it. Whether it is another person, society or fate, that is responsible for the deprivation, scarcely matters. There is in fact too much sorrow in the world, and Tóibín, better than any of his contemporaries, knows how to capture its timbre in fiction.

Comments

Music Break 2:Lenny Kravitz

2009-08-28T11:38:00+02:00

My dear controversity,

I will probably not have enough time to post very often about my opinions on debated controversial issues. I will post sometimes when I feel it very necessary or have something to share with readers that I cannot keep in my mind and find an urge to write about certain issues or read and view something so amazing that it must be posted. At least for the coming year this is imperative because I will be extreamely busy it seems with my studies and dissertation preperations. This year is absolutely CRITICAL for me and I cannot afford to waste even a minute on anything outside of the area I will study and other things which will surely be very difficult for me to handle. So,courses! A time to sit down and shut up for a while cos of unfamiliar literature to me is the programme I have chosen specifically. And a time to READ,READ,READ! RESEARCH,RESEARCH,RESEARCH!no sleep at night and then a time to write and speak----THE ULTIMATE FREE SPEECH of essays,assignments and dissertation....

I will be watching the world,watching my surroundings,watching people and places,most importantly,watching myself and my relation to all this....

I will be back with more after the break..

No,not jimi Hendrix it's Lenny Kravitz! He is my absoultely favourite rocker when I'm feeling good and happy.... ROCK ON PEOPLE COS LIFE IS TOO SHORT

ARE YOU GONNA GO MY WAY?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLhpHjmxNw8

FLY AWAY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvuL5jyCHOw

ROCK AND ROLL IS DEAD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqzzAyGl3zA

CAN'T GET YOU OFF MY MIND

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTzkDgD4IMc

AMERICAN WOMAN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB7-oS0SDxY

LOVE LOVE LOVE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1eXq2oCSqA

AGAIN

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW2qlKa6oHw&feature=channel

Comments

Music Break:Red Hot Chili Peppers

2009-08-24T11:58:24+02:00

The best way to stop myself from writing on world debated issues is to stop looking at my international news sources and the many web-sites of controversial content including the human rights blogs you can see on the side column. I do encourage you to read those blogs. However,I have other important things to handle while online. I will not be able to go online at all if I do not sort out housing issues and other plans for october.

We listen to music,we love music...Let it be known I listen to most types of music but still consider myself ROCKER so ROCK ON!

Red Hot Chili Peppers...I love their guitar riffs and know their songs by heart

RHCP-OTHERSIDE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp1PMo3s0dw

RHCP-SCAR TISSUE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGZLa2ieyps

RHCP-CALIFORNICATION

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abrKM1Z_te8

RHCP-THE ZEPHR SONG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30ALL9-cFMw

RHCP-UNDER THE BRIDGE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG2DGDndKmg&feature=related

RHCP-DANI CALIFORNIA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTxF7-VHyuA

RHCP-GIVE IT AWAY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhqmFKv3ow8&feature=related

Comments

Book Review Sunday:'A Thousand Deaths Plus One',Sergio Ramirez

2009-08-22T22:47:04+02:00

As I am making my final plans and arrangements for next month's trip and the beginning of a new chapter of my literary studies I remember my book review sundays. The summer heat and a need to spend as much time with my friends and family means I only have time for the internet late at night. As always I look for literature related material as that is what I will be focusing on very closely and persistently at least for the next year.
This novel is one that I chose to read because of the interrelation between the novel and theory,of visual images and language and fiction and reality and of translation . While the reviewer states that Latin American Modernismo is opposite of English Modernism it creates a confusion that I dislike as a reader. After reading various exerpts,I decided that it coicides with my understanding of postmodernism. This further makes me think this way as the reviewer has stated that this style is the opposite what we know as modernism. The novel is written as a memoir which claims to tell of historical facts of the Latin American nation of war and conflict,Nicaragua,plagued with American imperialist intentions thoughout history and the internal stuggle for identity in such conditions. Perhaps to say a colonial-postcolonial situation. It leaves us with the same question of literature...What is this thing we call fiction,creativity and imagination? A reflection of the author,narrator,reader and culture of which it is produced. Is it in fact a reality of a different kind?

ENJOY

-Guliz-

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

Translated from the Spanish by Leland H. Chambers
McPherson & Company, 2009
Reviewed by Andrea Rosenberg

Sergio Ramírez's A Thousand Deaths Plus One, translated from Spanish by Leland H. Chambers, interweaves historical fact with outrageous fiction, painstaking truth with barefaced lies. In the novel, author and narrator become indistinguishable, memoir and invention collide, and the reader becomes wrapped in a complex net of interlocking anecdotes. A Thousand Deaths Plus One is what critics tend to call a "novel of ideas," but as with any great piece of writing, its rich conceptual structure does not mean that it lacks humor, compassion, or other less esoteric elements of human experience.

The novel is divided into two sections, each beginning with a chapter attributed to another major Latin American author. The first is ascribed to Rubén Darío, Nicaragua's beloved national poet and the father of Latin American Modernismo (which, perplexingly to the Anglophone reader, is the stylistic opposite of literary modernism in English, resembling instead the baroque prose of Ramírez's novel). The second credits Colombian novelist and journalist José María Vargas Vila, known for his aggressive critiques of imperialism and conservatism. The very first words of the novel thus thrust the reader into an elaborate literary game in which truth and fiction are indistinguishable.

Ramírez was vice president of Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega, and the framing narrative of A Thousand Deaths Plus One involves a diplomatic trip—in this case, a journey to Warsaw in 1987—on which the fictionalized author discovers an exhibition of work by an obscure Nicaraguan photographer, Juan Castellón, whose photos serve as a documentation of modern European history. Fascinated by the images, Ramírez delves into the life of Castellón, who seems to him "like a character who should be in a novel." Much of the book is formed around the photographer’s narrative, which gives an account of his father's life as well as describing his own. This device ties Nicaragua irretrievably to Europe, slotting it into the broad sweep of Western history, where it is usually invisible. Thus, just as Ramírez echoes the Cervantine technique of confusing author and narrator, he has also written a national novel analogous to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.

The history of the Nicaraguan nation, as experienced by Castellón's father, is one of obscurity, and vulnerability to the whims of more powerful nations. As the hapless diplomat tries to persuade European aristocrats that his own narrow nation, rather than the more commonly proposed Panamanian option, is the better place to build the canal that will link two oceans, few of them can even find the country on their maps. The construction of the canal farther to the south dooms Nicaragua to universal oblivion, and the grandiose dream of transforming the nation from "a huge cattle ranch where flies were always buzzing around, if not bullets" into a nation of consequence on the world stage, fizzles out.

Yet A Thousand Deaths Plus One presents ways to remedy that obscurity. The novel is about how history is recorded—in official accounts, in old black-and-white photographs, in novels of ideas by former vice presidents—and about the labyrinthine links that tie major and minor narratives together, making them indistinguishable from each other. The confusion of fact and fiction, Ramírez suggests, is as endemic to history as it is to literature, and the story of an impassioned Nicaraguan spreading out maps before an imprisoned king is as consequential to the history of one nation as the building of the canal eventually was to another. Still, the documentation of history itself helps shape the content of historical narratives. As the narrator tells the photographer's grandson near the end of the novel, "If Castellón had not taken that picture, you would not exist for me."

As a parade of historical figures and anecdotes rushes past, the reader is left uncertain which elements of the novel are fictional and which based in fact. This sense of disorientation, one begins to think, would be appropriate in any encounter with either fact or fiction, as both are inevitably present in either. Even Castellón's photographs, it turns out—although we tend to accept the realism of documentary photography as being somehow the same as its reality—are not as straightforward as they appear. Throughout the novel, Ramírez also undermines exalted historical and cultural figures and established histories—presenting Darío as a raving drunk and Flaubert ravaged by syphilis, describing Nicaragua as an uncivilized backwater and Europe as a decadent imperialistic power— and thereby calls into question the grand myths upon which national identities are constructed. This weakens the myths and transforms the identities of the nations or historical figures themselves since, in being pulled down to a more human and realistic level, they are made sympathetic despite their faults and frailties.

This ambitious novel is unfortunately hampered somewhat by its translation. The exaggerated excess of Ramírez's prose is challenging to render elegantly in English, whose literary traditions are so much less forgiving of elaborate sentence structures and elevated language. Although Chambers does an adequate, even admirable, job for such a complex text, the translation nevertheless contains a steady supply of jarring syntaxes and odd word choices. Mil y una muertes, the Spanish original, is clearly a beast of a book from a translator's point of view, and it's a shame the translation was not more diligently edited.

Still, A Thousand Deaths Plus One is an intriguing and provocative novel and well worth a look. While it poses profound philosophical, cultural, political, and historical questions, its reliance on first-person narratives and human anecdotes keeps it from becoming abstruse. Ramírez has created an intricate work of literature that strains against the strictures of fact and fiction. And just as apparent fact can turn out to be fiction, fiction can reveal fundamental truths.

Andrea Rosenberg recently completed an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa, where she was coeditor of the journal eXchanges. She translates from Spanish and Portuguese.

Comments