A Website of the Radical Imagination
The author wrote this brief Movement memoir in advance of participating in the upcoming conference at the University of Minnesota on the 50th anniversary of The Port Huron Statement [http://www.lsa.umich.edu/phs]. I was a child of small town Texas, and of a single parent mom, a feminist. We were poor closet liberals. Austin was my mecca. … Read more
Celine’s pessimism—his hatred, even—is diagnostic, neutral, as humanitarian in its own way as the advances in antiseptic medicine made by his idol and the subject of his doctoral thesis, the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, that ill-starred “savior of mothers.” One must always proceed deeper, lower, in Celine’s cosmos (for it is a cosmos, a perineum … Read more
The two Asian-American women to our left had come from San Jose to Berkeley’s Greek Theater because the brother of one, who was boyfriend to the other, had been a great fan of the evening’s headliner; and the women knew, if he had not died six months before, he would have been at the concert. … Read more
“You should be asking what his wife thinks of him.” That was Bob Dylan last month stiffing a Rolling Stone interviewer who entreated him to endorse Obama or at least concede racism was at the root of right-wing rage against the President. Dylan’s evasions got me thinking about who he is now and how he … Read more
People are always talking about The Creator, meaning some great abstraction beyond ourselves for whom and to whom we give deference to if we don’t want to cop to God. (When we were in the organization we use to call our weapons “Gods” so you can understand the relativity of the term.) But for all … Read more
Russell’s Way, Lin’s Path Philosopher-king Bill Russell used to say basketball is a simple game, played by grown men in short pants. As the hem-lines dropped, though, the force of Russ’s dictum waned. The Jeremy Lin phenomenon leaves one looking back to Russ’s clarities and ahead to a New Age of lucidity for homo ludens. … Read more
My Uncle Manny, a doctor, was at the Battle of the Bulge. When he came home, he lived with us on 46th Street. After he moved out, he left behind a collection of German beer steins and some books. He never talked about the war in my presence, and only one of those books pertained … Read more