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

Dordrecht - Mei 1940

grebbeberg @ flickr

Katharina Gruzei

Katherine Gruzei

Postcard with added photo, 1923

juffrouwjo @ flickr

Baiju Parthan

LUNCH BREAK 1 (MEMORIAL SERIES)  2010

Like being back in the Seventies

Interview with Terry Eagleton at New Statesman:

There's a good deal of nostalgia in your new book, The Task of the Critic, for the "socialist culture" of the Seventies.
What's wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press. One of Walter Benjamin's extraordinary achievements, for example, was to make a kind of revolutionary virtue out of a certain concept of looking back, or nostalgia. As a tutor at Oxford during that period, I could see all kinds of energies that simply had no outlet - all kinds of radical impulses that were rather inchoate, but certainly present. So I think nostalgia is justified to some extent.

There was at least one outlet for those energies, though: the Marxism seminar you ran at Wadham College, which you describe as a "hostel for battered leftists". The left took even more of a battering in the intervening 30-odd years, didn't it?
I think the Gramsci formula about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will gets at something. But I was struck, when I spoke recently at King's College London, by the extraordinarily diverse number of militant projects and campaigns that were being either conducted or planned. It was like being back in the Seventies, or the late Sixties.

One of the leftist Oxford students from the earlier period whom you mention by name in the book is Christopher Hitchens. What do you make of his political trajectory?
I just turned down the offer of a public debate with him in the States. I've said what I want to say, and we wouldn't have got anywhere - it would only have been a sort of bloodsport.

Even then, Christopher was mesmerised by the idea of America. He always wanted a bigger scene.

What was definitive for him, politically, was the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989. I think that was
the turning point. The deep Islamophobic impulse he has stems from that. But he's still an idiosyncratic mixture of various political attitudes that don't always go together.

And I wouldn't for a moment underestimate his formidable eloquence and intellectual resources. I think he is a superb writer. But I think that the radical was always at war with the public school boy who wanted to succeed.

Two years ago, you had a very public disagreement with Hitchens's close friend Martin Amis.
For a long time, they were quite divergent politically: Hitchens was still some kind of socialist and Amis was vehemently anti-communist in an uninteresting, cold war kind of way. But they've since converged. And now they're old cronies backing each other up - instant responses to attacks on the other.

I'm interested in the way a whole stratum of the liberal literati (Rushdie, to some extent Ian McEwan, A C Grayling, obviously Amis and Hitchens) - the very people you'd have expected to be guardians of the liberal flame of tolerance and understanding - have, at the very first assault, rushed into these caricatured postures driven by panic. I'm very struck by how those who are making ugly, illiberal, supremacist noises about the superiority of the west are precisely the sort of literary and liberal characters from whom you'd expect more imagination, openness and sensitivity.

Do you still read those writers?
I liked early Amis a lot, but I stopped reading him some time ago. I admire Hitchens on literary topics - I think he is very astute. McEwan, I read a bit. But I suppose it's more the ideological phenomenon that they represent together that interests me.

More

Dorothy Golz

La belle ferronnière

Hatred unchecked

Chris Hedges writes at TruthDig.com:

The unraveling of America mirrors the unraveling of Yugoslavia. The Balkan war was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds. It was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia. The petty criminals and goons who took power harnessed the anger and despair of the unemployed and the desperate. They singled out convenient scapegoats from ethnic Croats to Muslims to Albanians to Gypsies. They set in motion movements that unleashed a feeding frenzy leading to war and self-immolation. There is little difference between the ludicrous would-be poet Radovan Karadzic, who was a figure of ridicule in Sarajevo before the war, and the moronic Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin. There is little difference between the Oath Keepers and the Serbian militias. We can laugh at these people, but they are not the fools. We are.

The longer we appeal to the Democrats, who are servants of corporate interests, the more stupid and ineffectual we become. Sixty-one percent of Americans believe the country is in decline, according to a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, and they are right. Only 25 percent of those polled said the government can be trusted to protect the interests of the American people. If we do not embrace this outrage and distrust as our own it will be expressed through a terrifying right-wing backlash. . . .

These movements are not yet full-blown fascist movements. They do not openly call for the extermination of ethnic or religious groups. They do not openly advocate violence. But, as I was told by Fritz Stern, a scholar of fascism who has written about the origins of Nazism, “In Germany there was a yearning for fascism before fascism was invented.” It is the yearning that we now see, and it is dangerous. If we do not immediately reincorporate the unemployed and the poor back into the economy, giving them jobs and relief from crippling debt, then the nascent racism and violence that are leaping up around the edges of American society will become a full-blown conflagration.

Left unchecked, the hatred for radical Islam will transform itself into a hatred for Muslims. The hatred for undocumented workers will become a hatred for Mexicans and Central Americans. The hatred for those not defined by this largely white movement as American patriots will become a hatred for African-Americans. The hatred for liberals will morph into a hatred for all democratic institutions, from universities to government agencies to the press. Our continued impotence and cowardice, our refusal to articulate this anger and stand up in open defiance to the Democrats and the Republicans, will see us swept aside for an age of terror and blood.

Children of Gaza Documentary

The African Roots of Latin Music

From The African Roots of Latin Music:

The first African slaves were brought to the Americas in the 1500’s; African music survived in a subliminal stage for almost two centuries, transmitted in a semi-clandestine way among slaves crowded in barracks and dying of exhaustion. African music in Cuba emerged from this larval stage during the nineteenth century, with the massive importation of slaves—especially from Nigeria, Cameroon, Benin and the Congo-- that marked the sugar boom in the island as Cuba took over the sugar market that had been vacated by the Haitian revolution and the newly independent former British colonies. . .

In Cuba, slaves were able to preserve their religions and transmit them from generation to generation by way of their music. Slaves were allowed to dance in the streets on certain occasions, such as the Epiphany, the Carnival and the Feast of St. John, which coincided with the summer solstice and the feast of the powerful Yoruba god Oggún. This process of syncretism accelerated the absorption of African music and rituals into the national culture of Cuba. Cuban music developed along three fundamental lines: (1) religious music, which remained almost intact since its inception and kept very close to its African models; (2) dance hall music, which kept European instrumentation and structures but gradually added African rhythmic cells and percussion and (3) street music, which was performed regularly in the poor communities known as solares, and during the carnival.

This line of development was greatly influenced by French and Haitian colonists and nationals who fled the prosperous colony of Saint Domingue after the slave rebellion of 1793. In Cuba the job of musician was overwhelmingly performed by blacks and mulattos. The 1827 census in Cuba shows that among 16,250 white workers, only 44 were musicians. However, 49 out of 6,754 free blacks and mulattos were musicians (Díaz-Ayala, 38). While whites rejected such jobs as lowly, blacks sought them as a social ladder and a means for survival. Most orchestras were soon dominated by colored musicians who gradually transformed the structure and even the instrumentation of the dance hall pieces they were hired to play. By 1798 there were about 50 dance halls in Havana dominated by colored musicians who were already leaving their mark on European forms like the contradanza of the 1820’s and gradually transforming it into the danza of the 1840’s and the danzón of 1879, the first truly Cuban creation and the ancestor of the 20th century salsa rhythms (Carpentier, 211-221; Galán, 122-126).

The descendants of the African slaves played a double role in the development of Latin music: they kept alive and transformed African music, but they also imbued the “white” music played in dance halls, churches and theaters with “black” elements. The Haitian contredanse, a syncretic dance which introduced the West African cinquillo, or five-note rhythmic cell, gave rise to the Cuban contradanza, from which the danza, the habanera, and the danzón ultimately developed. A third line of musical development took place in the solares or communal tenements where former slaves lived after abolition, mainly in urban Western Cuba (Havana, Matanzas and Pinar del Río). The dwellers of solares were at the bottom of the social scale and lived and worked in the most abject conditions as street sweepers, coal sellers, and street vendors. Their contacts with white society were minimal, and their music was almost entirely devoid of European influence. This is the environment that gave rise to the rumba in Western Cuba and the son in the more rural province of Oriente, in Eastern Cuba.

Ruben Blades in D.C.

Vallejo Nocturno 2010-Ruben on Target