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

KEROUAC’S 30 BELIEFS AND TECHNIQUES FOR MODERN PROSE

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

from Toxico Cultura

Photography During Times of War

Objects found on June 1, 1990 in a house that had been occupied by Sendero Luminoso founder and mastermind Abimael Guzmán in the tony Lima neighborhood of Monterrico. Clues discovered here ultimately led to his capture in September of 1992. (Photo by Vera Lentz.)

Vera Lentz

From Memory in Latin America:

Vera Lentz is the creator of some of the most well-known images of the Peruvian conflict. The one above is the cover photograph for the book of Yuyanapaq and the publicity photograph for the film State of Fear, which also features Lentz in person, discussing her work.

This image is an icon, perhaps because it is so symbolic, rather than detailed. A small passport-size photograph rests gently on the cupped hands of a relative of its subject. The man in the photograph is, of course, missing - disappeared. In his way, he stands for all the disappeared of Peru. Photographs of photographs are a huge component of commemoration of the disappeared in the absence of their actual bodies; not just in Peru, but globally.

The Threat Close to Home

From FP, Stephen M. Walt writes:

Which sparked the following question: why is the United States getting hot and bothered about the events in Mali (troubling though they are), while the problems caused by the violent drug organizations in Mexico fly mostly below the radar? As I learned at yesterday's seminar, the drug war in Mexico was never mentioned during the presidential debates, even though over 60,000 Mexicans have been murdered over the past six years and even though this violence has killed several hundred Americans in recent years too. Prominent senators like John McCain keep harping about violence in Syria and the need for greater U.S. involvement; why doesn't violence that is closer to home and that affects Americans more directly get equal or greater attention?   To say nothing of the effects that Mexican meth and other drugs have on the United States itself.

It's a serious question: why do some fairly distant and minor threats get lots of play in our discourse and command big-ticket policy responses, while more imminent threats get downplayed? Here are some possible reasons.

First, direct and deliberate threats to attack the U.S. or Americans abroad generate more attention than threats that might kill even more people inadvertently. Groups like al Qaeda deliberately target Americans (and others); by contrast, drug gangs mostly want to make money and the harm they do to others is a by-product of their criminal activities. You know: it's just business. An understandable, if not entirely rational, reason to see them as less threatening. 

A corollary reason is the fear of "Islamism" and the impact of the al Qaeda brand. We wouldn't be nearly as worried about "Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb" if it had stuck to its original name ("the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat"). No matter what your actual agenda is, putting on the al Qaeda label is a good way to guarantee you get a lot of attention from Uncle Sam.

Second, we are more likely to respond to threats when we think there is a simple, cheap, and obvious military response. This is partly because the U.S. military is well-funded, omnipresent, and good at blowing things up, which gives presidents more confidence that they might actually accomplish something they can brag about later. By contrast, we ignore or downplay problems when we know in advance that we don't know how to fix them. Trying to address the drug violence in Mexico in a serious way would require the United States to do more to reduce our society's appetite for drugs, or make the trade less lucrative by decriminalizing it (ok for pot, big problem for meth). And we can't just subcontract the response to the military, because our relationship with Mexico also involves lots of other agencies (State, Justice, INS, DHS, etc., etc.). If you're a politician and you don't have any answers, you won't bring up the issue yourself and you'll hope to God that nobody else does either.

Third, some threats get attention because somebody has done a good job of marketing on their behalf. I get several unsolicited emails a day from various Syrian rebel groups, each of them providing information designed to encourage greater U.S. participation. This is of course nothing new: the government of Kuwait hired a PR firm to make the case for U.S. action in the first Gulf War, and the British government waged an aggressive propaganda campaign to foster U.S. involvement in World War I. Threat assessment is never as apolitical as the Ideal Strategist would like; sometimes it comes down to which side has better threat-mongerers.

Fourth, we hyper-ventilate over Mali and downplay Mexico because the latter is close by and we have lot of positive relations there that could get disrupted if we went all-out after the drug lords. Sending drones and special forces into places like Yemen or Mali doesn't threaten a lot of other vital relations with those countries (e.g., US trade with Yemen in 2012 was only $500 million), but interfering in Mexico could jeopardize our $450 billion-plus trade relationship and cause other political problems, especially given the prior history of U.S. interference there.

All of which reminds us that there's a big error term in how great powers (and especially the United States) identify and prioritize threats. We'd like to think it was based on rational assessment of cost, benefits, risks, and opportunities, but that seems to be true only in the most crude sense. U.S. leaders did (eventually) recognize the geopolitical threats posed by Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union, just as we now worry about what a rising China might portend for the future. But at the margin, our ability to prioritize lesser threats properly is pretty paltry. How else to explain why we get in a lather when North Korea tests a missile -- something we've done hundreds of times -- while downplaying more immediate problems much closer to home?

CIA Whistleblower Honored

Life as a Poet

From LA Review of Books Dale Smith writes about di Prima:

Great strength and character animated her conversation. She spoke about her visit to Ezra Pound in 1955 while he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s for his wartime radio broadcasts, and what an inspiration he had been to her. Di Prima was keen to impart foremost that we had to do things ourselves. No one else, she said, could publish the poems for us. No one would support our vision unless we acted on it. She told the story of Pound discovering Vivaldi’s music in a library in Italy, and how important it was to follow your enthusiasms. Without Pound we would not know Vivaldi, she said. The various institutions that support the arts, she was insistent to say, do not make new discoveries: poets must take charge of their curiosities — and act on them.

Such a practical vision seems also essentially idealistic when viewed from this side of the Cold War, and 10 years into a new war, now one on terror. David Meltzer argues how he “always considered the Beat Generation as a dissident movement, a kind of resistance movement, anti-materialist, pro-civil rights, early poetic ecology, a whole bunch of things, and that it came out of a very complex postwar American culture.” The term “Beat” as literary marker for larger cultural phenomena fails to convey the active public and private engagements those mid-century artists moved forward. The notion of art and life, public and private, indeed, blurred for writers like di Prima, Meltzer, and others. While Beat adventures are reanimated in popular culture through film (Viggo Mortenson as William Burroughs and James Franco as Ginsberg in separate movies), it’s tempting to idealize and celebrate people who responded to the new forms of urbanization and political control at mid-century with art. The dissonant moments are the ones that stand out though. Looking through the cracks in the narratives expose something that might be useful to reflect on now, and di Prima, in her self-invention as a woman, exposes the raw, fragilely mediated experience of a person inspired by poetry.

In an essay on the visionary modernist H. D., di Prima describes her critical process as “a circling / and a zigzagging: a backtracking in and out of the material.” While she hesitates to put her “thoughts out in this way — are they after all, ‘only’ subjective, a woman’s mind? — [she] finds an echo in her own questioning of [H. D.’s] work/her life.” The subjectivity at stake is fluid, improvised, and accessed through an effort to achieve self-perfection. “What we tend so eagerly to forget is that poesis, especially visionary poesis, is a religious path, sought and chosen,” she writes.

The “religious path” for di Prima is one of secular vision. But it’s curated by a passion to influence the immediate experience of culture. It’s hard not to read her “zigzagging” and “backtracking” as fundamental strengths in the stories she tells. Di Prima reaches into a confused and exacting moment in our cultural history to reinvent something that maybe wasn’t there at all: a genuine social commitment to cultural change through visionary poesis. Di Prima’s not so much in control of the stories she tells. Instead, she participates creatively in inherited narratives. Her poems and memoirs document relationships that often remain unresolved in terms of how we understand the Cold War era and its social manifestations. The events and relationships she describes suggest contradictory and often confined experiments with democracy in postwar culture. It comes down to how to live in a modern world based on “assault:” from drones killing children in Pakistan to guns killing them in our schools closer to home. Similarly, healthcare remains something one “owns” through a job. The struggle is to challenge the constant global aggressions that have defined in many ways the postwar period, from conflicts in Vietnam to Afghanistan, or, closer to home, the ongoing injustices of our health and education systems. Di Prima’s current situation in terms of her own health and its costs reminds us that our commitments to satisfying human needs remain uncertain. Even so, new archetypes of some future are yet to be born.

The Poetry Deal

Diane di Prima

Buddhist New Year Song

By Diane di Prima

I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves

seated in front of a fireplace, our house

made somehow more gracious, and you said

“There are stars in your hair”— it was truth I

brought down with me

to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden

make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature,

and it is truth, that we came here, I told you,

from other planets

where we were lords, we were sent here,

for some purpose

the golden mask I had seen before, that fitted

so beautifully over your face, did not return

nor did that face of a bull you had acquired

amid northern peoples, nomads, the Gobi desert

I did not see those tents again, nor the wagons

infinitely slow on the infinitely windy plains,

so cold, every star in the sky was a different color

the sky itself a tangled tapestry, glowing

but almost, I could see the planet from which we had come

I could not remember (then) what our purpose was

but remembered the name Mahakala, in the dawn

in the dawn confronted Shiva, the cold light

revealed the “mindborn” worlds, as simply that,

I watched them propagated, flowing out,

or, more simply, one mirror reflecting another.

then broke the mirrors, you were no longer in sight

nor any purpose, stared at this new blackness

the mindborn worlds fled, and the mind turned off:

a madness, or a beginning?

Diane Di Prima with Amiri Baraka, formerely known as Leroi Jones

From Undergound Women Writers

Diane di Prima

Rant, from a Cool Place "I see no end of it, but the turning upside down of the entire world" --------------------------------- Erasmus   We are in the middle of a bloody, heartrending revolution Called America, called the Protestant reformation, called Western man, Called individual consciousness, meaning I need a refrigerator and a car And milk and meat for the kids so, I can discover that I don't need a car Or a refrigerator, or meat, or even milk, just rice and a place with -------------no wind to sleep next to someone Two someones keeping warm in the winter learning to weave To pot and to putter, learning to steal honey from bees, ------------wearing the bedclothes by day, sleeping under (or in) them at night; hording bits of glass, colored stones, and ------------stringing beads How long before we come to that blessed definable state Known as buddhahood, primitive man, people in a landscape together like trees, the second childhood of man

I don't know if I will make it somehow nearer by saying all this out loud, for christs sake, that Stevenson was killed, that Shastri ------------was killed both having dined with Marietta Tree the wife of a higher-up in the CIA both out of their own countries mysteriously dead, as how many others as Marilyn Monroe, wept over in so many tabloids done in for sleeping with Jack Kennedy - this isn't a poem - full of ------------cold prosaic fact thirteen done in the Oswald plot: Jack Ruby's cancer that disappeared ------------in autopsy the last of a long line - and they're waiting to get Tim Leary Bob Dylan Allen Ginsberg LeRoi Jones - as, who killed Malcolm X? They give themselves away with TV programs on the Third Reich, and I wonder if I'll live to sit in ------------Peking or Hanoi see TV programs on LBJ's Reich: our great SS analysed, our money exposed, ------------the plot to keep Africa genocide in Southeast Asia now in progress Laos Vietnam Thailand Cambodia ------------O soft-spoken Sukamo O great stone Buddhas with sad negroid lips torn down by us by the red ------------guard all one force one leveling mad mechanism, grinding it down to earth and swamp to sea ------------to powder

till Mozart is something a few men can whistle or play on a homemade flute and we bow to each other telling old tales half remembered gathering shells learning again "all beings are from the very beginning Buddhas" or glowing and dying radiation and plague we come to that final great ------------love illumination "FROM THE VERY FIRST NOTHING IS."