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

Vee Speers

Imortals Series

Julie Cockburn

At Seesaw Magazine

It wasn't a real freeze

From Stephen M. Walt's blog on the futility of pretending there's real negotiations going on:

At this point, Obama's Middle East team will try to come up with some sort of face-saving maneuver to keep the negotiations alive. Translated: they need a fig leaf to conceal how badly they've bungled this issue. Because putting serious pressure on Israel is anathema (especially in an election year), they will have to get Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to stay at the table even as construction resumes, so that he can watch the bulldozers make a "viable state" impossible while the talk, talk, talk continues. They may succeed in keeping the charade going, but it will be a pyrrhic victory that changes nothing.

Two key points should be kept in mind as you watch this diplomatic train wreck.

First, one of the great myths of Middle East diplomacy is the old cliché that "the United States can't want it more than the parties do." This excuse for inaction is trotted out whenever the United States fails to exercise the enormous potential leverage at its disposal, and it's just plain silly. There's no reason why the United States can't want a settlement more than Israel or the Palestinians do, particularly if the two sides are so mired in dysfunctional politics or old Likudnik dreams that they need to be pushed hard to make a deal. Unfortunately, this conflict isn't just about them; it's also about us. And when U.S. interests are at stake, we can want a solution just as much -- and maybe even more -- than they do.

The reason is simple: given the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel, the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a significant national security problem for the United States. The combination of unconditional support for Israel and the continued expansion of Israel's illegal settlements undermines America's image in many countries and is contrary to basic U.S. values. It is also one of the things that inspired terrorist groups like al Qaeda and facilitates jihadi recruitment. And as Gen. David Petraeus noted a few months ago, it makes our tasks in places like Iraq and Afghanistan more difficult. This situation, in short, is not good for the United States.

As long as that special relationship continues, therefore, it is a national security priority for the United States to get the conflict settled. End the occupation and settle the conflict, and the special relationship would not be nearly so problematic. If U.S. negotiators ignored domestic politics and put U.S. interests first, therefore, they'd be using all the carrots and sticks at their disposal to push both sides to the basic deal whose outlines have been understood for a decade or more. And if it were Israel that refused to end the occupation and make a fair deal, then U.S. leaders would begin to move away from the current "special relationship" and towards something more consistent with U.S. interests. After all, let's not forget who the superpower is around here.

Second, some critics of Obama's policy probably think the problem is that he and his team are too "pro-Israel." That's not really true. By forcing Abbas to make repeated concessions with nothing to show for them, they are undermining his already fragile legitimacy to the point where he won't be able to sell whatever deal they might eventually coerce him into signing. And by letting Netanyahu thumb his nose at repeated U.S. requests without paying any penalty, they've encouraged Israelis to think there is essentially no cost to a hardline position. But this approach isn't "pro-Israel," because Obama and his advisors are helping make a two-state solution impossible and thereby making a "one-state" outcome nearly inevitable. Thoughtful Israelis understand that this is a perilous course, and President Obama said as much during his speech to the United Nations last week. But the administration's handling of this issue has made the one-state outcome more likely, which threatens Israel's future as both a Jewish and democratic state.

John Ashberry Interview

From the Paris Review, an interview with poet John Ashberry:

INTERVIEWER

Was there ever a time when you thought you would have to make a choice between art criticism and poetry, or have the two just always worked out well together?

ASHBERY

I was never interested in doing art criticism at all —I'm not sure that I am even now. Back in the fifties, Thomas Hess, the editor of ARTnews, had a lot of poets writing for the magazine. One reason was that they paid almost nothing and poets are always penurious. Trained art historians would not write reviews for five dollars, which is what they were paying when I began. I needed some bread at the time—this was in 1957 when I was thirty—and my friends who were already writing for ARTnews suggested that I do it too. So I wrote a review of Bradley Tomlin, an Abstract Expressionist painter who had a posthumous show at the Whitney. After that I reviewed on a monthly basis for a while until I returned to France. Then in 1960 it happened that I knew the woman who was writing art criticism for the Herald Tribune. She was going back to live in America and asked if I knew anybody who would like to take over her job. It didn't pay very much, but it enabled me to get other jobs doing art criticism, which I didn't want to do very much, but as so often when you exhibit reluctance to do something, people think you must be very good at it. If I had set out to be an art critic, I might never have succeeded.

INTERVIEWER

Are there any aspects of your childhood that you think might have contributed to making you the poet you are?

ASHBERY

I don't know what the poet that I am is, very much. I was rather an outsider as a child—I didn't have many friends. We lived out in the country on a farm. I had a younger brother whom I didn't get along with—we were always fighting the way kids do—and he died at the age of nine. I felt guilty because I had been so nasty to him, so that was a terrible shock. These are experiences which have been important to me. I don't know quite how they may have fed into my poetry. My ambition was to be a painter, so I took weekly classes at the art museum in Rochester from the age of about eleven until fifteen or sixteen. I fell deeply in love with a girl who was in the class but who wouldn't have anything to do with me. So I went to this weekly class knowing that I would see this girl, and somehow this being involved with art may have something to do with my poetry. Also, my grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester, and I lived with them as a small child and went to kindergarten and first grade in the city. I always loved his house; there were lots of kids around, and I missed all this terribly when I went back to live with my parents. Then going back there each week for art class was a returning to things I had thought were lost, and gave me a curious combination of satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

INTERVIEWER

These are all rather traumatic things. I think of how most critics seem to see your poetry as rather lighthearted. One critic, however, has spoken of your “rare startlements into happiness.” Is happiness so rare in your work?

ASHBERY

Some people wouldn't agree that my poetry is lighthearted. Frank O'Hara once said, “I don't see why Kenneth likes John's work so much because he thinks everything should be funny and John's poetry is about as funny as a wrecked train.” In my life I am reasonably happy now. There are days when I think I am not, but I think there are probably more days when I think I am. I was impressed by an Ingmar Bergman movie I saw years ago—I can't remember the name of it—in which a woman tells the story of her life, which has been full of tragic experiences. She's telling the story in the dressing room of a theater where she is about to go on and perform in a ballet. At the end of it she says, “But I am happy.” Then it says, “The End.”

Cheryl Roy Starer

From The Park Bench

Harold Pinter Interview

From the Paris review, an interview with Harold Pinter:

INTERVIEWER

Acting was your profession when you first started to write plays?  

PINTER

Oh, yes, it was all I ever did. I didn't go to university. I left school at sixteen—I was fed up and restless. The only thing that interested me at school was English language and literature, but I didn't have Latin and so couldn't go on to university. So I went to a few drama schools, not studying seriously; I was mostly in love at the time and tied up with that.  

INTERVIEWER

Were the drama schools of any use to you as a playwright?  

PINTER

None whatsoever. It was just living.  

INTERVIEWER

Did you go to a lot of plays in your youth?  

PINTER

No, very few. The only person I really liked to see was Donald Wolfit, in a Shakespeare company at the time. I admired him tremendously; his Lear is still the best I've ever seen. And then I was reading, for years, a great deal of modern literature, mostly novels.  

INTERVIEWER

No playwrights—Brecht, Pirandello . . . ?  

PINTER

Oh, certainly not, not for years. I read Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, and Henry Miller at a very early age, and Kafka. I'd read Beckett's novels, too, but I'd never heard of Ionesco until after I'd written the first few plays.  

INTERVIEWER

Do you think these writers had any influence on your writing?  

PINTER

I've been influenced personally by everyone I've ever read—and I read all the time—but none of these writers particularly influenced my writing. Beckett and Kafka stayed with me the most—I think Beckett is the best prose writer living. My world is still bound up by other writers—that's one of the best things in it.  

INTERVIEWER

Has music influenced your writing, do you think?  

PINTER

I don't know how music can influence writing; but it has been very important for me, both jazz and classical music. I feel a sense of music continually in writing, which is a different matter from having been influenced by it. Boulez and Webern are now composers I listen to a great deal. 

The Moment

Vallejo Nocturno 2010- in Bahia at a conference

The Jazz Odyssey of Jimmy Rushing

Illustration: Tom Allen   Design: Neil Fujit

La obsesión

Poeta Juan Gelman:

"Creo que se escribe porque hay una especie de obsesión, y esto en mí se manifiesta incluso físicamente. Algo se mueve en el interior y uno no sabe qué es. Uno trata de saber qué es, escribiendo.

Ese proceso lo describió muy bien Pavese, cuando dijo que ante cada página el poeta debe estar virgen, como si nunca hubiera escrito; y a eso, supongo, Mallarmé le llamaba "el horror de la página en blanco". A medida que sucede la escritura, se va encontrando la voz más cercana a la obsesión, que nunca se funde completamente con ella; la obsesión se va agotando y la expresión poética va ganando en cercanía a esa obsesión. Hay un momento en que se cruzan las dos líneas y, a partir de ese momento, como dice Pavese, se escriben los poemas más felices.

Cuando la obsesión se agota o está a punto de agotarse, es mejor no escribir más, porque ahí empieza lo que se llama "la maquinita", en la que, por ejemplo, un gran poeta que admiro mucho, Neruda, incurrió muchas veces: se adquiere una especie de costumbre de expresión, en la que se escribe con la expresión misma y no con la vivencia que le dio origen; así se explica la cantidad de "odas elementales", que son como la recreación de una técnica conquistada por una vivencia inicial, pero ya separada de ella."

Our house is a very, very fine house

Vallejo Nocturno 2010- in Salvador