A Website of the Radical Imagination
“Here’s my testimony [in English] before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a few days ago.
رویا حکاکیان، عضو هیئت مدیره توانا:
ایرانیان حاضرند بهای آزادی خود را بپردازند#مهسا_امینی #اعتراضات_سراسری #یاری_مدنی_توانا #رویا_حکاکیان pic.twitter.com/d0mTJ9TWiC
— توانا Tavaana (@Tavaana) September 24, 2022
We’re honored to repost this (slightly adapted) excerpt from Kate Millett’s Going to Iran (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1982) — her inspiring, heartrending and newly relevant account of her time in Tehran witnessing women’s struggles against Islamist misogyny after the fall of the Shah.
A few years back Lucian Truscott tried on a writer’s experiment, posting chapters (as he composed them) from his non-fiction novel/memoir, Dying of a Broken Heart, at a word press website (here). Your editor was doing due delving since I’d always enjoyed Truscott’s stuff when I bumped into the following piece of felt history in Heart‘s second chapter. I should probably wait for some Iraq War anniversary but reposting Truscott’s memory of “Mission Accomplished” boosterism feels urgent. I’ll allow his report seems like it belongs in First as a warning to be permanently wary of consensual wisdom. Not that I’ll cop to having been a lap-top general around the time of W.’s wargasm. Still, to the extent First countenanced power of powers-that-be back then – even as this mag busted anti-anti-Islamism – me and all y’all need to suck on Truscott’s truths (all over again). He won’t stop saying it plain, btw. After you read him below, try his substack newsletter here. B.D.
No need to make invidious comparisons, but the films of Alain Tanner came closer to me than Godard’s. If you dug Jonas who will 25 in the Year 2000, click the link above and watch Jonas and Lila, Until Tomorrow, which Tanner made in 1999.
A letter from from Fr. Frechette on the day of this year’s Feast of the Assumption.
“The poor will have hope, and the evil one will be made to shut his mouth.” (Job 5:16)
In the spring of 2006, when Ellen Willis was battling the cancer that would take her life later that year, she emailed approval of First’s pieces on the Danish Cartoon terror attacks. Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d written at the start of the Rushdie affair, she wondered if we “might be interested in reprinting the editorial I wrote in the Voice as a historical affirmation of the bad road we are going down…” As Rushdie begins a tortuous comeback from the maiming that had him on a ventilator and seems likely to leave him blind in one eye, the piece of the past Ellen thought belonged in First remains horrifically prophetic.
Below “Before the War” is a passage from another First protest against Fatwas that’s still on time.
Message to a nephew on the road to Florence…
O quick and true, the best pieces of art in the world — Michelangelo’s PRISONERS, statues fighting their way out of the stone that creates them and same time jails them, they are as renaissance and post modern and perfect as art can be. Just stand and weep.
Originally published (along with August Sander’s “Photography as a Universal Language”) in the Massachusetts Review in 1978. This re-print is tuned to the Pompidou Center’s current exhibit, Germany / 1920s / New Objectivity / August Sander.
Today marks the third anniversary of the El Paso Massacre, called “the deadliest anti-Latino attack in modern American history.” A shooter motivated by what he called a “Hispanic invasion” and the racist concept of “replacement” killed 23 people and wounded 23 more.
Review of The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based Upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, by Peter Hellman (Random House, 1981). First published in Aperture 89 (Winter 1982). Reprinted in Danny Lyon: American Blood: Selected Writings 1961-2020, (Karma Books, New York).
I’m out to write something fresh about Paris after going there with my wife for four days in July to visit my son who’s doing a summer semester in the city. (If you hear a whoosh, it could be the sound of a fool rushing in.)
William Kornblum’s Marseille: Port to Port is (per Howard Becker) “a new kind of travel book.” What follows are (slightly adapted) excerpts from Kornblum’s testament to sociological imagination and soulful uses of ethnographic method…
Claude McKay’s Banjo is a true life novel about a band of black and tan outsiders living by the sea in mid-20s Marseille.
The plan was to buy a Land Rover and spend three months traveling in Europe, Turkey and North Africa. It would take the money earmarked for my tuition to carry it off. So there was a sub-plan – a way to recoup the money with a victimless crime – to import some exotic hashish and Berber marijuana. We would be taking our dog Tina, a Siberian Husky with champion bloodlines. She had to be properly crated in order to fly with the other live animals that the airlines transport and that got me thinking, “I might be clever enough to build the perfect crate, one that would hold more than just the dog.” I felt compelled by the times to take the risk.
My late brother Tom’s second mother (in law) died on Monday in D.R. Teresa Prestinary, of Monte Cristi and New York City, made 105. She had five children of her own but she raised plenty more on both islands. Per her grandson Jamie who told me that on vacays in D.R. he ran into hombre after hombre who thought of her as his own matriarch. I lived up the block from Mama Pres (when she was in New York rather than D.R.) and was often underfoot in her apartment or at my brother’s and sister (in law) Maria’s place across the street. In all that time I never heard Mama Pres say a cross word to anyone ever. The last of 20 children she seems to have been treated as a late gift from God by her family in D.R. So she grew up to grace everyone she met. She had a special connection with my wife (who is the first of 20 children). I can see them now shucking corn on my parents’ porch in the Berkshires, taking the breeze, and laughing together. Maybe they were talking about the odd DeMott fam they’d somehow got mixed up with. Or maybe they were recalling rites they’d performed to ward off witchcraft by Santerian drug-dealers who’d made my wife’s life hell when she opened a $10 clothing store on 140th and Bway back in the ’00s. (The two of them had tested my two year old son’s pee to see if it had prophylactic powers after my wife found chicken blood spattered on her store’s door.)
“Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creatus est–‘that a beginning be made man was created’ said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.” Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt’s up ender to Origins nails what autocrats fear most about humankind. It speaks to why Putin went wilding in Crimea and the Donbas after stand-up Slavs made Ukraine new in 2014.
Friday, April 22, 2022. Photo by Emilio Morenatti
Chernihiv
The caption reads, Firefighter takes a break
He sits on a swing, only thing upright
after the bombing. Hands clasped in his lap.
Lent is about learning the best way to suffer, because we cannot avoid suffering, and because suffering the wrong way can be very dangerous.
One afternoon the mid-sixties my soon-to-be wife and I were in Seattle visiting Hazel, her old Graduate Art School advisor when, in the late afternoon, there was a knock at the front door. “Get that would you please, Michael?” Hazel asked. “Diane’s there. She has a fish for us”. Diane, the student at the door, was clearly of Mediterranean decent and so beautiful that I caught my breath. “Hi”, she said, “this is for Hazel. Tell her that I can’t stay because I have a few more fish to deliver.” On that she turned and went down the stairs to the street. I closed the door and stared at the salmon wrapped in wet newspaper that Diane’s boyfriend had just caught a few hours earlier in Elliot Bay.
Sometime later when I finally met Jim Smith he was working as a shipwright and had this small boat he fished off of in the waters of Elliot Bay, and its surrounds, which formed the liquid edge of downtown Seattle.
The first thing I remember about Jim was his apology. He would begin many conversations with people he didn’t know by apologizing for having such a common name. The irony was that he was one of the most uncommon guys I’d ever met.