Side by Side

Bobby Keys and Jim Price put some horns on the end of “Honky Tonk Women” mixed down so low you can only hear them in the very last second and half on the fade.  Chuck Berry had a saxophone just for the very end of “Roll Over Beethoven.” We loved that idea of another instrument coming in just for the last second.  Keith Richards, Life

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Double Trouble: Dramas of American Communism

News an Oxford don has bought into b.s. about Alger Hiss’s innocence sent your editor back to Aram Saroyan’s play, UNAMERICAN, which is based on the public record of the confrontation between Whittaker Chambers and Hiss. UNAMERICAN is posted below along with the second act of My Confession, Saroyan’s “solo performance play” based on Mary McCarthy’s memoir of her encounters with Stalinists in the 30s  (which she published in Encounter in 1954).

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Trumpery

Googling “Trump fascist” yields 25 pages of hits and the caveat that “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 237 already displayed”. 

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In Transit

I was on the train last night heading home. Two young brothers–early teens–were standing in front of me. Both were wearing worn but clean clothes, one had his hoodie up, the other didn’t. Both had light jackets—too flimsy for the weather and knockoff hightop sneakers. It was a look I knew all too well. It reminded me of an entire winter I spent with a blue double-knit jacket as my “winter coat.”

They were chatting usual urban teen talk. I paid little attention until I heard one of them mention what Trump had said earlier in the day about the Pope.

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The Witnesses

Whittaker Chambers is my idea of an exemplary conservative. He dug Beats and Sorrow Songs, did in Ayn Rand in a definitive National Review piece, distanced himself from William Buckley, hung tight with his old friend James Agee, and tried to convince other conservatives Khrushchev wasn’t Stalin.

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The Revisionist Museum of Neoliberal Eternity

I was out walking, sweaty and with hair plastered/to my face/when I saw Ernesto Cardenal approaching/from the opposite direction/and by way of greeting I said:/Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven/that is communism,/is there a place for homosexuals?/Yes, he said./And for impenitent masturbators?/For sex slaves?/For sex fools?/For sadomasochists, for whores, for those obsessed/with enemas,/for those who can’t take it anymore, those who really truly/can’t take it anymore?/And Cardenal said yes. –Bolaño

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Minds of the South

It is, by now, well known that Atticus Finch, beloved hero of the late Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, is revealed to be a segregationist in Lee’s recently published novel Go Set a Watchman.

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Street Life…and Death

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy, Spiegel & Grau, 2015

I was raised during the Seventies on a cramped block of rundown tenements in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. Each building on my block was a five-floor walk-up. Each apartment–two to a floor–was a railroad-style flat. And in those apartments lived poor families raising passels of kids. Not only was this pre-gentrification but by modern hipster standards, this was downright prehistoric.

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Group Grope: The Theory of Microaggression

Eugene Goodheart has invited responses to his new First piece (posted below) which takes in student protests against microaggressions and the more macro analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.[1] I’m skeptical of Goodheart’s attempt to hook-up the world-view of those students with Coates’s World. (More on that anon.) But his critique of the protesters has pushed me to think through the theory of microaggression.

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The Price of Victimhood

Instances of police brutality and killing of unarmed Blacks, first revealed by social media, have been a catalyst for widespread expression of grievances about racism in colleges and universities.  According to 538, “the most frequently requested data by protestors was for a survey on the atmosphere in classrooms that would collect information as part of end terms evaluations of subtle forms of racism, often called microaggressions, that are committed by specific professors and lecturers.”  Microaggression: “everyday verbal, non verbal and environmental slights, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.”

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Emma Quangel’s Spooks

Just remember this. All agents defect, and all resisters sell out. That’s the sad truth, Bill. And a writer? A writer lives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is, he files a report on it. – William Burroughs

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Morning in Iowa

A report from an Iowa Caucus-goer.

It looks to be a long winter; Ted Cruz woke up this morning, saw his shadow, but then absolutely refused to go back in his hole.

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