v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Hearing Aids

From TruthOut:

In February, it was revealed that the rooms in which attorneys meet with their clients at Guantánamo were equipped with listening devices made to look like smoke detectors (even though smoking is not allowed there). The attorney-client privilege is part of federal law, and the Supreme Court has interpreted the right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment to include the right to effective counsel. It is well established that an accused does not enjoy the effective aid of counsel if he is denied the right of private consultation with him. Yet there is no provision in the MCA that addresses the monitoring of communications between the accused and his attorney.

At the hearing last week, the defense asked Judge Pohl to temporarily suspend the proceedings until the defense could be fully informed of the extent of any third party monitoring of defense communications during legal visits with their clients. The defense also asked that necessary precautions be taken to ensure that such monitoring not take place in the future.

Neither of the two witnesses who testified at the hearing had knowledge of any eavesdropping on defense communications. But Navy Capt. Thomas Welsh, the Staff Judge Advocate for the Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay (JTF-GTMO) testified that guards denied to defense counsel that any monitoring occurred because they feared they "could end up in court." The defense raised dangers of such an "insecure" system

Flores

Vallejo nocturno 2013 - San Isidro flowers

Interview with Juan Cole

Interview with Juan Cole from La Prensa from Panama City:

RM: How is Syria different from Libya?

Syria is different in so many ways… first of all, it’s not clear that a majority of Syrians necessarily want the government gone of at least that they would prefer the rebel forces to the government. Syria is a much more diverse country than Libya, in Syria you have 10-14% Christians, another 10-14% Shiites, and you have a large sector of urban, middle-class, relatively secular Sunni Muslims, and together they could easily form the majority of the country. And while they may not like the more authoritarian aspects of the Ba’ath government, they might prefer a secular government to a religious one. Many of the rebels, as things have developed, are invested in a Muslim Brotherhood, or even some of them have affiliated themselves with Al Qaeda. So I don’t think the moral clarity is apparent in Syria in the way that it was in Libya.

Secondarily, there is no UNSC authorization for the use of force in Syria, and I would have opposed a Libyan intervention if the UN hadn’t authorized one. I think international law is very important, I think the one thing that was wrong with Bush’s invasion of Iraq was that there was no UNSC authorization. If you undertake a military operation at a large scale in the Middle East without the support of the world, then it’s probably doomed to failure.

So there’s no authorization –Russia and China don’t want an intervention— and then Syria’s geography is not like Libya’s, the tanks are not out on desert roads, they are inside the cities, you couldn’t take out the artillery and the tanks without risking hitting apartment buildings with these large bombs and killing a lot of innocent civilians.

So, for all kinds of reasons I don’t think that an intervention in Syria is wise. I deeply regret the daily massive loss of life, and I wish there were a way for the international community to stop this carnage, but I feel helpless, I just don’t see a way.

RM: You were speaking about the importance of international law. Do you really think it’s possible to control the anarchy that exists at a supranational level?

JC: Historians who study the development of international of law and international treaties are not typically cynical. They find that even when there’s reluctance to abide by international law, that it’s claims are often consequential. Even though governments routinely disregard it or break it, international law still has a lot of weight in world affairs, and you can tell this because even the governments that do contravene it, deny that they have done so, they’re embarrassed about it, they get pressured… I’m not entirely sure that without international pressure, without the weight of international law, that the apartheid regime in South Africa could have been made to fall. And I think that the fact that George W. Bush went to Iraq without international law on his side meant that a lot of countries –France and Germany— were unwilling to help him, and he lost a lot of international support, and that was one of the reasons why he failed.

I understand why there would be cynicism about international law because it is often disregarded. But I think it often also has weight, and over time forms a point of pressure that does have consequences.

RM: The whole world is talking about the NSA scandal. How bad is it? Should we be worried?

JC: Well yes, I’m worried! I’m alarmed… of course, this is not in fact a new revelation, we’ve known about this for some time. Government surveillance is a problem, it violates basic norms of democracy when it is carried out without a warrant, without evidence of laws been broken.

On the other hand, they can’t actually surveil everybody. It’s impossible to monitor everyone. Technically, this information that they’re gathering is not that they’re watching you or me –- well, they might’ve been watching me —- but most people are not singled out for surveillance. It’s data mining, they’re looking for macro patterns, for certain kinds of connections, but the thing that displeases me it’s not that they’re spying on everybody at the time, it’s that the potential for abuse it great. And I don’t believe there’s probably sufficient oversight to forestall abuse. So, if a politician has a friend in the NSA and wanted the reputation of his rival to be destroyed by illegal surveillance, I think that’s something that can happen, and if it can happen it probably will happen. So that’s what I’m worried about, the politics of reputation coming out of this destruction of the whole idea of privacy.

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Tips for Artists

John Baldessari, “Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell,” (1966-68). Acrylic on canvas. 68 x 56 1/2 in. (172.7 x 143.5 cm). (Courtesy The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica / © John Baldessari)

a sorcerer's journey

Pueblo Libre

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - windows and doors

Transparent You

From TomDispatch:

The urge to possess you, or everything that can be known about you, has clearly taken possession of our global security state.  With this, it’s become increasingly apparent, go other disturbing trends.  Take something seemingly unrelated: the recent Supreme Court decision that allows the police to take a DNA swab from an arrestee (if the crime he or she is charged with is “serious”).  Theoretically, this is being done for “identification” purposes, but in fact it's already being put to other uses entirely, especially in the solving of separate crimes.

If you stop to think about it, this development, in turn, represents a remarkable new level of state intrusion on private life, on your self.  It means that, for the first time, in a sure-to-widen set of circumstances, the state increasingly has access not just -- as with NSA surveillance -- to your Internet codes and modes of communication, but to your most basic code of all, your DNA.  As Justice Antonin Scalia put it in his dissent in the case, “Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”  Can global DNA databases be far behind?

If your DNA becomes the possession of the state, then you are a transparent human being at the most basic level imaginable.  At every level, however, the pattern, the trend, the direction is the same (and it’s the same whether you’re talking about the government or giant corporations).  Increasingly, access to you, your codes, your communications, your purchases, your credit card transactions, your location, your travels, your exchanges with friends, your tastes, your likes and dislikes is what’s wanted -- for what’s called your “safety” in the case of government and your business in the case of corporations.

Both want access to everything that can be known about you, because who knows until later what may prove the crucial piece of information to uncover a terrorist network or lure in a new network of customers.  They want everything, at least, that can be run through a system of massive computers and sorted into patterns of various potentially useful kinds.  You are to be, in this sense, the transparent man or transparent woman.  Your acts, your life patterns, your rights, your codes are to be an open book to them -- and increasingly a closed book to you.  You are to be their secret and that “you” is an ever more global one.

More English

 

Interview with Junot Diaz from Buenos Aires Review:

¿Cómo funcionó la colaboración con la traducción al español de Eduardo Lago de tu colección de cuentos Drown?

Eduardo was incredibly sensitive about this idea that si estamos hablando de un mercado latino, tú tienes que hacer una traducción neutral, que no puede ser muy español, no puede ser muy mejicano. Eduardo quería realizar una traducción muy neutral porque hay un mercado, pero—imagínate, me tenía al lado—también quería capturar los ritmos caribeños, dominicanos. Había esa tensión. Tienes que mantener the water level, pero también tú quieres calentar la vaina un poquito.

Con la novela era diferente. El narrador de la novela es tan fuerte que no valía la pena tratar de neutralizarlo, porque el tipo es tan agresivo. Eso nos dio más espacio, más libertad.

A Eduardo le interesan mucho los U.S. Latinos. Tu nomás tienes que ver lo que él ha hecho ahí en el instituto Cervantes, todo esos programas para U.S. Latinos, por primera vez. Estamos hablando de un hombre que tenía esa sensibilidad, esa filosofía. Yo creo que eso tiene que ver mucho con su trabajo como traductor, especialmente en ese libro. No es sólo tratar de mantener sonidos, mantener la estética, ese hablar del narrador. Había una orientación U.S. Latino que fue muy importante. There’s a flexibility to his castellano that is not always present in any of us who come from countries where we imagine que nuestro idioma is completely immutable.

We also have to understand that en los Estados Unidos we have a Spanish that is deeply affected by each other’s Spanishes. That un dominicano puede usar palabras mejicanas, palabras cubanas, palabras boricuas. It was important to have that kind of flexibility. It was very useful that Eduardo was oriented around this idea that in any U.S. Latino there are going to exist multiple Spanish registers.

I think that one of the most terrible inheritances of the colonial experience for us Latinos has been our fragmentation. We don’t consider each other’s Spanishes as anything more that idiosyncratic local peculiarities that are wonderful to make jokes about, but we don’t see them as sources of knowledge and experiences. We see them somehow as signifying cultural essences or being part of a moral code or calculus, some sort of moral metric. Because the way you speak represents “Argentineness,” which is a moral position, when we should be thinking of each other’s Spanishes as enormously rich bodies of knowledge, bodies of histories, bodies of experience, and inside of them, embedded in them, there’s an enormous amount of political apparatus. It’s the heartbreak of those of us who work in languages to understand this and to try to find a way to fight it.

It’s almost 20 years since Drown was published and I still have people saying to me:

“Listen, you used a Puerto Rican word here. That’s not Dominican and therefore you’re not Dominican.”

What is the role of English in the translations of your books? If you compare Achy Obejas’ translation of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Eduardo Lago’s translation of Drown, there’s a lot more English in Obejas’ version.

We certainly talked about this. It often takes a while for you to figure out what the fuck you actually did. I was able to do things in Drown that I didn’t understand. Then one begins to understand it and it makes it easier to create a template for the translation. By the time Oscar Wao came around I was far more aware of the game I have with code-switching, with bilinguality, but also with the, I would call it, ancient somatic tension between English and Spanish. The two languages have felt themselves threatened by each other for a very long time.

The pivot of what we call the modern was around the eclipsing of Spain and the rise of England. The two languages circled each other. At any moment one could have collapsed or taken over far more quickly. For a very long time, the English went to sleep and had nightmares of Spanish. The Spanish would go to bed and have nightmares about the English. This most ancient competition plays itself out in the New World in very interesting and novel ways.

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Sunday Photographing Experience

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - nueva leica

Suicide Campaigns

From The New Inquiry, Dan Nemser writes:

Since last July, about 20 people have killed themselves in the face of imminent eviction. These numbers should be considered a rough estimate, due to the diversity of circumstances and the difficulty of deciphering “causes.” Useful resources for tracking eviction suicides are the Wikipedia page and a blog called Los desahucios matan (“Evictions kill”). Since I started writing this piece, I’ve had to update the count three or four times. At least four hung themselves in or near their homes just hours before the police arrived to remove them. At least six jumped from their balconies in similar circumstances. On February 12, a married couple in their late 60s overdosed in their home after receiving an eviction notice. The following week, a woman walked into a bank, poured flammable liquid over her head, and lit herself on fire yelling, “You’ve taken everything from me!” (me lo habéis quitado todo). She held on for three months in the hospital with severe burns covering half her body, but passed away at the beginning of May.

Suicide is paradigmatic of subalternity. It constitutes the ultimate limit on speech: The protagonist can no longer tell her own story, explain the sequence of experiences that led to the decision, or describe the hesitation of feet at the edge or the joy and terror and speed of the fall. And yet, it is only after death that the act can be brought to life. Only when it has been silenced can that death made sense of, pieced together into a chain of events that says something about the world and how it works. While Spanish activists and politicians have sparred over how best to interpret the suicides, therefore, the tasks of narration and emplotment belong to the writer and historian. Perhaps this is why Talal Asad has suggested in On Suicide Bombing that suicide is intimately tied up with fiction and the desire to craft “plausible histories.” One way to tell this story would start from the recognition that the suicides bring into sharp relief a set of structural factors that can otherwise be difficult to see with the naked eye. With general unemployment currently at 26 percent — though the figure for youth is more than double that — it isn’t hard to imagine plausible scenarios in which spiraling interest payments converge with ever increasing desperation. Since the financial crisis hit in 2008, foreclosures have skyrocketed: Some 400,000 evictions have taken place, which amounts to hundreds a day. At the same time, the most recent census data shows that between five and six million housing units currently sit empty, approximately 20 percent of the country’s housing stock. In this way, crisis intensifies the structural contradictions of capitalism. The Spanish countryside is now littered with half-built subdivisions, carcasses of concrete, brick, and rebar, the scars of a construction boom fueled by northern European banks.

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June in San Isidro

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - caminando para el cafe

Interview with novelist Simon Crump

From 3am:

3:AM: It’s been thirteen years since My Elvis Blackout was first published. You’ve had a few more books out since then, but what has the King been up to in that time?

Simon Crump: The King has been busy being dead and knocking them ole balls around on God’s Golf Course.

3:AM: Mark Twain said truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Doesn’t My Elvis Blackout kind of put the lie to that?

SC: Well…in Elvis’ world pretty much anything was possible, and there’s a great deal of ‘unbelievable’ stuff in those stories which I didn’t have to make up. Whoever would have thought his daughter would end up married to Michael Jackson?

3:AM: By writing first about Elvis Presley and then Michael Jackson (in Neverland), you risked the fury of two of the most devoted fan-bases on the planet. Did you enjoy poking hornets’ nests with sticks when you were a kid?

SC: Some people got very pissed off indeed (I am not welcome in a particular German town) and there’s a review somewhere calling for Neverland to be banned…but fans I’ve spoken to have actually ‘got’ the melancholy and the sense of regret which runs through both of those books.

3:AM: Did you approach these personalities primarily as a fan of their work yourself, or more as a disinterested observer?

SC: I was already a fan of Elvis, particularly the early Sun Records stuff, and as I began to research Jackson, I came to respect what he’d achieved even though it’s not really my cup of tea. It probably sounds a bit daft, but My Elvis Blackout and Neverland are both intended as sympathetic portrayals of their subjects

3:AM: In as much as both Presley and Jackson were brought down by the unlimited indulgence that seems to be permitted when someone experiences astronomical success, their stories strike me as very American tragedies. Do you think such outlandish tragedies are even possible on our tiny island, or are things done differently here?

SC: In our own small way, we try. Michael Barrymore for example.
I don’t think we really need to do that here because we have a so-called Royal Family. The Princess Diana story is up there with anything America can throw at us, I reckon.

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