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

Factless

From Vox, Ezra Klein writes about the las Republican debate:

"The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media," Ted Cruz said with considerable disgust. "This is not a cage match."

Cruz ticked off the insults the CNBC moderators had lobbed Wednesday night at the assembled Republicans. "Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don't you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues?"

The crowd roared. Republican pollster Frank Luntz reported with some awe that his focus group gave Cruz's riff a 98. "That's the highest score we've ever measured," Luntz tweeted. "EVER."

Cruz's attack on the moderators was smart politics — but it was almost precisely backwards. The questions in the CNBC debate, though relentlessly tough, were easily the most substantive of the debates so far. And the problem for Republicans is that substantive questions about their policy proposals end up sounding like hostile attacks — but that's because the policy proposals are ridiculous, not because the questions are actually unfair.

The Republican primary has thus far been a festival of outlandish policy. The candidates seem to be competing to craft the tax plan that gives the largest tax cut to the rich while blowing the biggest hole in the deficit (a competition that, as of tonight, Ted Cruz appears to be winning). And the problem is when you ask about those plans, simply stating the facts of the policies sounds like you're leveling a devastating attack.

Take the question to Trump. He wasn't asked if he was a comic book villain. He was asked why his policies sound like "a comic book version of a presidential campaign." And the question was specific. Moderator John Harwood asked, "Mr. Trump, you have done very well in this campaign so far by promising to build another wall and make another country pay for it. Send 11 million people out of the country. Cut taxes $10 trillion without increasing the deficit."

Trump declined to explain how he could cut taxes by $10 trillion without increasing the deficit. Instead, he appealed to another CNBC personality for support. "Larry Kudlow, who sits on your panel, who's a great guy, came out the other day and said, 'I love Trump's tax plan.'"

As for the wall, Trump didn't get very specific there, either. "A politician cannot get them to pay. I can." That is ... not an answer.

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Rio Piedras Murals

Vallejo Nocturno 2015 - carlotapelota

A mix by Aris Kokou

 

The moon went back into its night: Frank Stanford

From The Poetry Foundation, an essay on poet Frank Stanford:

Some lives are too easy to read backward. Frank Stanford’s is one of those: the last page is now read as the first page—sometimes as the only page—and the first becomes illegible without the last. You may already know how Stanford’s story ends; I won’t spoil it for you if you don’t. Let it suffice to say that a literary reputation once glittering with promise has faded into a myth that grew larger than the man himself—the hard-living, fast-loving Ozark sage, spawn of Lao-Tzu and Whitman by way of Vallejo and Breton. We’re left with three books that you won’t find in many stores—a slender volume of selected poems called The Light the Dead See, an obscure but often wonderful collection of short stories titled Conditions Uncertain and Likely to Pass Away, and a legendary 15,283-line epic poem called The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You—as well as eight other books of poetry, all long out of print.

Frank Stanford’s story begins on the first day of August 1948 at the Emery Memorial Home for unwed mothers in Richton, Mississippi. But the beginning is a hole. Emery Memorial burned to the ground in January 1964. Its records burned with it. Stanford’s adoptive mother, born Dorothy Gilbert, who took him in as a single divorcee and who died in 2000, told Frank next to nothing about the circumstances of his birth. His adoption papers reveal only that he was born Francis Gildart Smith and that “soon after the birth of said child it was permanently surrendered by Dorothy Margaret Smith, mother and only living parent of said child.”

The two Dorothys confuse. The surname “Smith” feels less than honest. No matter: Stanford would never discover anything concrete about his origins. “Night has put her coins over my eyes,” he would later write. “I don’t know my past.” When the boy was four, Dorothy the Second married a wealthy Memphis engineer many years her senior named Albert Franklin Stanford, who also went by Frank. He died after a lengthy illness when Frank the younger was 15, but it wasn’t until he was nearly 20 that Dorothy finally revealed that she and he shared no blood, and that the man he had been told was his father was not.

This provoked a crisis in Stanford. “From the time we found out we were adopted,” recalled his sister, Ruth Rogers (who was herself adopted one year later from the same home), “it was like day and night—Frankie just wasn’t the same.” People who knew him before he learned he was not the Southern blueblood he had grown up believing himself to be, remembered a cheerful, outgoing, charismatic youth, an athlete. People who met him afterward remembered him as a quiet man, easygoing but somehow removed, funny but always from a distance. Before and after, women found him irresistible. “He was handsome as the sun,” recalled the poet C.D. Wright, who lived with Stanford for the last three years of his life. In the few surviving photos, he looks either stubbornly defiant or wistful, as if he’s laughing at a joke that he doesn’t plan to share.

But for a young man already obsessed with poetry and myth, the discovery that his life began with a blank page also provided an opportunity. “He felt that he was a bastard,” said Wright. “The only advantage to that was that he could create his own identity.”

The beginning was a hole. Frank Stanford dove in, and never landed.

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Humboldt's Gift

From NYRB review of several books on Alexander von Humboldt :

Humboldt’s most consequential findings, however, derived from his conception of the world as a single unified organism. “Everything,” he said, “is interaction and reciprocal.” It seems commonplace today to speak of “the web of life,” but the concept was Humboldt’s invention. Into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thinkers like René Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Carl Linnaeus were still echoing Aristotle’s view that “nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man.”

Particularly heterodox was the implication that the decline of one species might have cascading effects on others. The possibility that animal life might not be inexhaustible had been proposed by the German anatomist J.F. Blumenbach (who taught Humboldt at the University of Göttingen), but was not widely accepted. “Such is the œconomy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct,” declared Thomas Jefferson in 1784, an opinion shared by most naturalists. Convinced to the end of his life that mastodons still existed in North America, most likely in the “unexplored and undisturbed” regions of the continent, Jefferson urged Lewis and Clark to look for them during their expedition.

Humboldt traveled so far, saw so much, and observed so closely that he began to notice similarities across continents. Rhododendron-like plants on the mountains near Caracas reminded him of alpine trees in the Swiss Alps; a sea of cacti, seen from the distance, recalled the grasses in the marshes of northern Europe; a moss in the Andes resembled a species he had found growing in German forests.

This comparative approach allowed him to take staggering intellectual leaps. He looked beyond the characteristics of organisms and tried to determine the structures underlying nature, leading him to formulate the idea of ecosystems. He was the first to understand that climate emerged from the “perpetual interrelationship” between land, ocean, wind, elevation, and organic life. He introduced the idea of classifying plants by climate zones instead of taxonomy, taking into account altitude, temperature, and other conditions related to location. He invented isotherms, the lines used on maps to connect regions with the same average temperature and atmospheric pressure. The similarity of the coastal plants in Africa and South America led him to postulate an “ancient” connection between the continents, anticipating plate tectonic theory by more than a century. He also studied how different systems interacted with one another. Nobody before Humboldt, for instance, had been able to explain how forests, by releasing oxygen, storing water, and providing shade, have a cooling effect on climate.

In the Llanos, the vast grasslands that stretch from the Andes to the Amazon River, Humboldt noticed with wonder how many species found food or protection from the occasional Mauritia palm tree. It sheltered insects and worms from the wind, provided fruit to monkeys and birds, retained moisture and soil, and generally spread “life around it in the desert.” The Mauritia palm was what, two centuries later, would come to be known as a “keystone species,” an organism on which the health of an entire ecosystem depends.

If everything in nature interacted, then it stood to reason that the natural world was not stable but prone to dynamic changes. It followed that man, by disrupting the natural order, might inadvertently bring about catastrophe. Humboldt was among the first to write of the perils of deforestation, irrigation, and cash crop agriculture, asserting that the brutal repercussions of man’s “insatiable avarice” were already “incalculable.” During his yearlong expedition to Russia in 1829, he gave a speech at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg calling for a vast international collaboration in which scientists around the world would collect data related to the effects of deforestation, the first global study of man’s impact on climate, and a model for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, assembled 160 years later.

The idea that human beings might be interfering with the natural order of things was a radical rejection of prevailing views about man’s dominion over nature. These views were most forcefully expressed by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who wrote with disgust of primeval nature; his Natural History is replete with words like “grotesque,” “filth,” “nauseous,” “pestilential,” and “terrible.” Buffon’s views echoed those of William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth Colony, who described the new world as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men,” and the English naturalist John Ray, who wrote of man’s duty to bring nature in line with God’s design through settlement and cultivation. To Humboldt, however, man was “nothing” in the larger scheme of things. Wulf notes that nowhere in his five-volume magnum opus, Cosmos—his attempt to summarize his thinking on the natural world, the universe, and the entirety of human history—does Humboldt mention God.

By casting aside religious and political ideology, Humboldt was able to diagnose plainly the cruelties of colonial rule. The sight of the slave markets in the Spanish colonies made him a fervent abolitionist. He told Americans (though not Jefferson himself) that slavery was a “disgrace” and that the oppression of Native Americans was a “stain” on the nation. Humboldt was the first to make the correlation between colonialism, with its crude emphasis on extracting resources and disregard for indigenous populations, and ecological devastation.

Humboldt wrote figuratively, with high emotion, of the beauty he found in wilderness. Wulf calls his rhapsodic Views of Nature “a blueprint for much of nature writing today.” Just as his scientific views influenced Darwin and Marsh (who warned in Man and Nature that “climatic excess” might lead to the “extinction of the [human] species”), Humboldt’s lyricism served as a model for Thoreau, Haeckel, and Muir. Wulf dedicates a chapter to each of these figures, all of whom idolized Humboldt and drew liberally from his work.

Darwin stands out as the most slavish of his acolytes, writing in his journal that Humboldt “like another Sun illumines everything I behold.” Darwin wrote that it was Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, a seven-volume subsection of Voyage, that inspired him “to travel in distant countries, and led me to volunteer as naturalist in her Majesty’s ship Beagle.” He brought his copy of the Personal Narrative on the Beagle with him and read in it Humboldt’s discussion of the “gradual transformations of species.” Humboldt wrote that plants and animals “limit each other’s numbers” through “long continued contest” for nourishment and territory, with only the strongest surviving—an idea, Wulf notes with some understatement, “That would become essential to Darwin’s concept of natural selection.” Wulf also points out that the final, crowning paragraph of Origin of Species is a nearly verbatim plagiarism of a passage in Personal Narrative.

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Witches in Action

From The Atlantic:

It began among children. In the village minister’s house, two little girls crawled under the furniture, made silly noises, spread their arms out like wings and tried to fly. The strangest thing—to any person who has spent more than 10 minutes on a grade-school playground—is that it was strange at all.

But standards of behavior for young girls were more exacting in 17th-century New England than they are today. The primary sources adopt a tone of perplexity. Nine-year-old Betty Parris, the parson’s daughter, and her 11-year-old cousin, Abigail Williams, had always been model children, “well Educated and of good Behaviour,” according to one chronicle. Soon, word spread through Salem: They had been bewitched. Clergymen came, then constables.

This was in January and February 1692. By autumn, it had all developed into very grown-up business. Twenty men and women, ages 20 to 80, had been executed under the imprimatur of the highest officials in Massachusetts. (Contrary to popular memory, however, no one was burned alive. Nineteen people were hanged, and one man was pressed to death with large stones in a failed attempt to extract a confession.) As many as 165 more, in two dozen villages and towns, had been publicly accused of sorcery; they ranged from an American Indian slave to one of the richest merchants in the colony.

Then, suddenly, as 1692 turned into 1693, the executions stopped, the accusers fell silent, the jails emptied. Stolid farmers’ wives no longer gibbered and convulsed; New England skies were no longer vexed nightly by the aerial traffic of witches and demons. For the next 300 years and more, people were left wondering exactly what had happened.

If 17th-century accounts of the events in Salem seem convoluted, contradictory, and blinkered by the preoccupations of their era, so too do many of the later explanations. There have been feminist interpretations, of course, and Marxist ones, and Freudian ones. Arthur Miller, in the opening pages of The Crucible (1953), described the witch scare as a kind of reactionary political spasm in response to the changing conditions of early America, “a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom.” In the 1970s, a behavioral psychologist suggested that the Salem villagers’ rantings and ravings were caused by a hallucinogenic fungus on moldy rye bread—that colonial Massachusetts was, in effect, just having a really bad trip.

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Wrong Equation

From CounterPunch:

Reading the New York Times, Washington Post, and other allegedly liberal major media outlets, one could be forgiven for thinking that the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is tit-for-tat, that it is the product of an ongoing cause-effect-countereffect relationship. That is precisely how the conflict is portrayed in nearly all so-called ‘respectable’ papers.

Take, for instance, an article published in America’s “paper of record,” the New York Times, just hours after the incident with the headline Stabbings, and Deadly Responses, Add to Israel’s Security Challenge. In deconstructing the headline alone, it is clear where the bias and deception lies; the Times imbues the very headline of the article with a presumption of guilt on the part of the Palestinians. According to the syntactic logic of the headline’s construction, it is the “stabbings” (presented first) which are the root of the problem and, therefore, the “deadly responses” are just that, responses. The effect is to justify the murder of Palestinians by portraying them as simply responses to an external factor: violence against Israelis.

But of course anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of the issues knows that the stabbings are themselves responses to the attacks by Israeli settlers and security forces on Palestinians, as well as the predictable outgrowth of seemingly endless brutality and occupation, poverty and despair. The history of colonialism is replete with such examples.

And yet Israelis, and the Israeli state itself, are presented as the victims. The headline frames the issue as being one of a “security challenge” for Israel, rather than, say, a colonialism problem, or a vicious occupation. So, taken in total then, the headline and accompanying article have the cumulative effect of making the victims into perpetrators, and perpetrators into victims, thereby inverting the oppressor/oppressed relationship. This inversion is absolutely necessary in order to whitewash Israel’s crimes, and absolve the state and its fanatical, fascist far right of guilt.

Even the allegedly even-handed treatment of the issue by a presumably moderate liberal outlet such as NBC News, belies a dishonest treatment of the conflict and the recent violence. In covering the incident, NBC News published a story about the Ahmed Manasrah shooting and subsequent taunting with the headline Viral Video of Shot Ahmed Manasrah Sums Up Israel-Palestinian Conflict. The article purports to present the issue fairly by presenting the events surrounding Ahmed’s heinous shooting as emblematic of the entire conflict. Essentially, NBC News here tries to present the competing narratives of Israeli and Palestinian sources as indicative of the broader struggle for public opinion, trying to convince readers that the ongoing allegations and counter-allegations are just more of the same, and that the truth is simply unknowable; after all, Israeli sources say X, Palestinian sources say Y. I guess we’ll never know.

The reader of the NBC article is left with the utterly dishonest, though politically very useful, conclusion that both sides are equally guilty, equally worthy of blame, and that the conflict itself is beyond critical analysis. Moreover, in presenting the issue in this way, the outlet, in this case NBC, is seen as fair, as having provided a balanced accounting. In reality however, it has simply obscured the true nature of the conflict: one between a colonial oppressor and its victims, displaced and dispossessed systematically for seven decades.

But false equivalence aside, by obscuring the truth of the issue, NBC News here inadvertently reveals something fundamentally true about the conflict; that, indeed, this incident very much “sums up the Israel-Palestine conflict.” Though they didn’t intend it this way, NBC News correctly exposes the fact that the behavior of the Israelis on camera is clearly emblematic of the broader society of Israel, one which sees Palestinian children as “dogs,” and “sons of whores” unfit to breathe, unworthy of living.

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NRA's Responsibility

From Salon:

Thanks to the NRA, it is no accident that the United States ranks first in the world — by a wide margin — in gun-related civilian deaths and injuries. Compared with every other democracy, we have the most guns per capita and the weakest gun laws. Although the United States accounts for only about 4.5% of the world’s population, Americans own about 45 percent of all civilian-owned firearms in the world. Americans own about 300 million firearms.

But the danger isn’t simply the number of guns; it is the type of guns we allow people to legally purchase. Other countries permit hunting rifles. But the NRA believes that Americans have a right to own assault weapons.

Of course, even in countries with strong gun-control laws, some people will get their hands on a weapon and destroy others’ lives. In 2011, for example, Anders Breivik killed 69 children at a summer camp in Norway, which has strict gun laws. (But let’s recall that Breivik bought $550 worth of 30-round ammunition clips from an American gun supplier for the rifle he used in that massacre. Thanks to American laws, it was a legal online purchase.)

The shooting in Norway was unusual.   In fact, the U.S. is off the charts in terms of murder rates. The homicide rate in the U.S. in 2012 was 4.67 per 100,000 population compared with 0.35 in Japan, 0.81 in Germany, 0.86 in Sweden, 1.18 in France, 1.60 in Canada, and 2.25 in Norway.

Here’s where the NRA comes in. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, since 1990, the gun lobby, led by the NRA, has contributed over $35.7 million to candidates for Congress and the White House, 87% of it to Republicans. It has also invested, since 1998, more than $108 million in lobbying federal government officials.

In 2013, the NRA’s revenue totaled $347 million, according to its 990 report to the Internal Revenue Service. Although the NRA likes to portray itself as representing grassroots gun owners, much of its money comes from gun manufacturers. LaPierre, who makes $974,867 a year, is essentially a corporate lobbyist.

Gun companies like Beretta, Smith & Wesson, and Sturm, Ruger & Company are big contributors to the NRA and its affiliates. The NRA’s board members include Ronnie Barrett (CEO of Barrett Firearms Manufacturing), Pete Brownell (president Brownells, an internet arms superstore), and Stephen Hornady (whose company, Hornady Manufacturing, sells armor-piercing bullets under the slogan “Accurate. Deadly. Dependable”).

Under LaPierre’s leadership, the NRA has not only dramatically expanded its ties to the gun manufacturers, but has also linked the NRA to the far right, including the Tea Party. LaPierre is a regular presence at gatherings of extreme right-wing groups, whose paranoid warnings about the threat of tyranny and Obama’s secret plan to confiscate all guns are meant to scare Americans into buying more guns and joining the NRA. For example, in a speech at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, LaPierre said that President Barack Obama was part of a “conspiracy to ensure re-election by lulling gun owners to sleep.” Obama’s plan, he said, was to “erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights and excise it from the U.S. Constitution.”

“We must declare that there are no shades of gray in American freedom. It’s black and white, all or nothing,” LaPierre said at an NRA meeting. “You’re with us or against us.”

Only a tiny proportion of the nation’s gun owners are NRA members. About 90 million Americans own guns. The NRA claims to have about four million members. That is less than five percent of all gun owners. The NRA’s positions are at odds with those of most Americans, most gun owners, and even many NRA members.

A 2013 Pew Research Center poll found that 85 percent of Americans support background checks for private gun sales, 80 percent support preventing people with mental illness from purchasing guns, 67 percent support the creation of a federal database to track gun sales, 58% percent supported a ban on semi-automatic weapons, and 54 percent support a ban on the sale of assault-style weapons. Pew also found that 74 percent of households with NRA members support background checks for private gun sales.

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Interview with Chad Post former Editor at Dalkey press

Interview Chad Post, who was then Dalkey’s associate director, on Alexiavich's books which Dalkey published:

What struck you about Alexievich’s writing when you first read her?

That it’s very political of course. She’s writing about the way the government ruined people’s lives. People died, they knew it, and they covered it up. They didn’t care. But at the same time, her writing is made up of all these voices—there are hundreds of people are in the book, but each one is fairly distinct, and even when their stories overlap, they retain their own voices, their own particular tales. That made it feel very human. It’s miserable to read, but it’s made very human and very powerful because of the way she allows their voices to tell truths that are hard to take. When those truths in the context of a narrative, of someone telling a story, it’s much stronger than if the experiences had been reported. Instead of “Then, on April 24, this thing happened, these people died in this way,” she let someone say, “My husband brought home his firefighter’s hat, and gave it to our son, who later got brain cancer and died.” 

How did she come to your attention?

We had an intern at the time, a grad student, and later our the foreign editor, Ana Lucic, who is from Serbia and reads a number of different languages. She had heard of Alexievich or Alexievich had been recommended to her, and Anna translated a sample of Voices from Chernobyl. I remember also reading her sample of Zinky Boys and one other book of Alexievich’s we got a part of, a book about love that I don’t think has been translated. We read all of those, and we thought they were fantastic! Everyone agreed that we should publish Voices from Chernobyl because that was the most powerful of her books. Keith Gessen agreed to translate it. The whole process started in 2004.

Only Zinky Boys had been translated into English at that time?

Yes, it came out in the early nineties from Norton, but it was already out of print for the most part when we published our book. The set-up of Zinky Boys is the same as Voices from Chernobyl—she interviewed a bunch of soldiers who came back from the Soviet-Afghan war, and then converted their interviews into monologues. It’s the book that got her in a lot of trouble with the KGB because it’s critical of Russia’s role in Afghanistan. She was accused of slandering the army.

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Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth's Sounds

An example of what a collective jazz ensemble can produce and accomplish. A stellar lineup of leaders and improvisors who employ Lightcap's designs to weave a hypnotic and encouraging album of a future where sound reigns.

From The Free Jazz Collective, a review of Chris Lightcap's latest:

Compact discs aren’t usually considered a delicate medium, but if it’s possible to wear a CD out, I made a valiant effort with Deluxe. The 2010 offering from bassist Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth was a rare and heady mix of complex rhythms and near-perfect horn harmonies, an album that maintained an avant-garde pedigree but also unabashedly embraced hooks—those infectious bits of musical pleasure that normally send hardcore free jazzers screaming for the hills.

It’s exciting and relieving then that “Nine South,” the first track on Epicenter, opens with a monstrous earworm, an ostinato Wurlitzer hook that leaves a searing imprint on the brain. As Craig Taborn races around the keys, Lightcap and the dual-tenor frontline—Chris Cheek and Tony Malaby—enter with the same big, emotional melodic lines we grew to love on Deluxe. It’s as arresting as anything from that earlier album, and sets Epicenter up as more of the same. In general, this is great news.

Lightcap is a master of counterpoint, and his compositions send beautiful, interwoven harmonies over knotted, West African rhythms. The group always sounds expansive, if a bit melancholic at times. Seven of the eight tracks on Epicenter comprise a suite entitled “Lost and Found: New York.” Lightcap wrote, developed, and recorded the tracks with the help of the Chamber Music America’s New Jazz Works grant, awarded in 2011 on the heels of Deluxe’s success. Each piece is inspired by some facet of New York City, though the tunes are unmistakably Lightcap’s and would fit comfortably with any of the band’s previous work. The thematic comparisons are easy enough: Bigmouth’s mix of disparate influences as a stand in for the melting pot culture of NYC, Lightcap’s deft usage of variously paced, parallel lines of motion calling to mind the many speeds of a city that is nevertheless always moving forward.

Many of the songs reflect pop music through more than just catchy melodies, and this is where Epicenter may leave some adventurous listeners wanting. Tracks like the gently floating “Arthur Avenue” or the pounding, under-three-minute “Down East” leave little room for any kind of improvisation, instead highlighting Lightcap’s ear for sweet harmony (the former) or intricate rhythm (the latter). “White Horse” is an another oddity, a short, thematic piece with multiple overdubs, including acoustic guitar and organ contributions from Lightcap. It’s a lovely bit of music, but is entirely a creature of the studio, bereft of the living, breathing feeling of a tight jazz ensemble. In the end, however, Epicenter isn’t really about the excitement of the unknown or chasing an improvisational high—it’s about five talented musicians rallying behind Lightcap’s assured compositional voice.

Epicenter is brilliantly summed-up with a cover of Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and it’s hard to imagine a more fitting intersection of New York City, popular music, and the avant-garde. It builds to a satisfying crescendo that allows the band to finally cut loose, while losing none of the jangly, gangly swagger of the original. Five years is a long time to wait for a follow-up. Epicenter further sands down some of the band’s coarser, more venturesome edges, but it’s a welcome return that I’ll know I’ll be spinning often in the months to come.