From the River to the BBC: Carnage and Complexity in Gaza

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CNN fired a photojournalist who was embraced by the leader of Hamas.

Like many Jews, I’ve read things about the bombing of Gaza, seen things on TV, and heard things shrieked in the streets that have horrified me in starkly contradictory ways. The truth about this awful sequence of events is as hard to come by as it is complex, but the slogans mask as much as they proclaim, and the coverage does something even more ominous: it simplifies. Every day I’m glued to my TV, gripped not just by the unbearable images that the carnage has produced, but also by the stimulation of my senses, the spectacle of mass death. It’s what I’d call visceral news, which compels me to watch, and it’s all true. But it’s not the truth. That requires context, which isn’t a visual.

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Julia Sebutinde

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As soon as I heard the verdict of the International Court of Justice last week and heard the vote of 15-2 against Israel, I knew it had to be a woman. Who else could stand up to 15 men and vote with the old Israeli man?

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Stuck and Moving (“Read Mosab Abu Toha’s Poetry & Go to War-torn Gaza”)

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I have been reading and writing poetry ever since I was a boy growing up in Huntington, Long Island, not far from where Walt Whitman was born and raised, and where he founded the newspaper, The Long Islander, which published my column on high school sports. At the age of 82, I still turn to poetry more often than to newspapers for news of the world, local, national and international. Recently, I read and reread the timely and (perhaps) timeless poems about Gaza in Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, published by City Lights.

That book appeared in print at about the same time that the author and members of his family, including his wife and children—and thousands of other Gazans—were detained by Israeli soldiers. Fortunately, Toha’s wife and children were released and allowed to travel to Egypt where the poet joined them, and then wrote and published an eye-opening account of his own harrowing arrest, incarceration, and interrogation. That narrative was published in January 2024 in The New Yorker. In a short time, it has alerted readers around the world to Toha’s poetry and to his own newsworthy story.

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Talk Therapy (or Lip Service)?

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Twitter dialogue between…

Fania Oz-Salzbarger [“Mom, Israeli, Jewish, humanist, History prof. Loving daughter of Amos Oz. Tel Aviv U (BA, MA), Oxford U (D.Phil), Uppsala U (Dr. h.c) Democracy must win.”]

&

Ambassador Majed Bamya [“Deputy Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the UN, New York. Palestinian from Yaffa. Refugee. The time for freedom is always right now!”]

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On the Road to “Black Majority”

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“Which of Britain’s thirteen North American colonies was more than half Black long before the American Revolution?” Retired Duke University historian Peter H. Wood finds that he can still stump groups of students, teachers, and parents with that question, even though it has been fifty years since he published Black Majority, his landmark study of slavery in colonial South Carolina. Today that book is taking on a fresh new life and proving more pertinent than ever.

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“…and Cleveland’s Cold”

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Townes Van Zandt. “Pancho and Lefty”

I became aware of Cleveland when Lou Boudreau played shortstop and my Aunt Sylvia, who, to my six-year-old eyes, was really neat, perversely rooted for the Indians against her hometown Braves. I liked Marion Motley and Mac Speedie (good names!), when they came along a couple years later too, but I hadn’t thought much about Cleveland since. I certainly hadn’t registered it as a petri dish for disintegration and despair, capable of occasioning both vicious protest and futile resignation, from which would arise a musician capable of pinning lunch meat to his chest, blowing his nose in a slice, and eating it.

Then Aaron Lange’s Ain’t It Fun: Peter Laughner & Proto-Punk in the Secret City landed.

SPLAT![1]

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Last Hour of Every Angel

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I

…If you were a goddess, Xylea said, what goddess would you be? She paused to think for a second. If you were a goddess, you’d be the goddess of beauty and illusion…
…That haunted me, for some reason. The reason was that my life had, without my noticing, been drained of reality, or the pretense to reality. I was a celibate, anhedonic whore (let’s say a depressed whore). Sex itself meant nothing to me, having become mere performance, empty enchantment. I fell in love with ghosts, or people who soon became ghosts, whose names I no longer remembered shortly afterwards.

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Sturdy New Acquisitions

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Forgive me if I’m committing the sin of self-promotion, but I’d like to add an annex to my piece last month about the MET’s class-focused New Acquisitions show. There’s a trio of music videos—with soundscapes evoking hoods all across the world—that could have added a contemporary flash to that MET show.

“Ghetto Phénomène” Houari’s Le Chant des Ra ta ta—with its bass pace, main string riff, and Houari’s amped but unvocodered voice—was a constant on my Marseille rap playlist. Yet I didn’t realize the song was more than just catchy until I watched the video.

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The City and the Commons: A Story for Our Time

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The essay posted below is the one that brought Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! home to your editor (who morphed into a “New York City man” many years ago). Linebaugh’s case for “commonizing” the city seemed fresh and audacious, though he almost lost me when he invoked the panopticon. (Bentham? Again?) But Linebaugh wasn’t content to reheat Foucault’s leftovers.

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A Dylanist’s Diary (“sugar and salt/ if you never listen to the basement tapes/ it’s your own damn fault”)

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Originally posted here in 2016… 

11/7

My monthly income is $500. I just spent $130 of that on the newly released Dylan Basement Tapes. My daddy thinks I’m no good with money.

They haven’t arrived yet so I’ve been listening to the bootleg of those 6 CDs I bought in ‘93 in NYC. One thing now occurs to me—this is boy music. It’s like a frat party of geniuses. It’s a lot of fun to be invited.

My friend in NYC and I were discussing the relative merits of the 2CD release vs. the 6CD box.  How many times do you have to hear 3 takes of “Open the Door Homer” (wherein Homer’s name is Richard)?? I explained my sense that the 2CD set is the trailer, and a damn fine one, and the 6CD set is the documentary. (I didn’t mention I already have 3 copies of 3 takes of “Open the Door Homer.”)

I’m not a fanatic nor a cultist—it just seemed obvious to me get the box. Also I was stoned when I ordered it. My daddy thinks I’m not good with money.

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Invisible Republicanism (Redux): Greil Marcus’s Negro Problem (Circa 1998)

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I published the following piece in a tabloid issue of First in 1998 and then posted it at this website after Bob Dylan released Love and Theft in 2001.  I took it down once Greil Marcus became an occasional contributor to First. In the era of Substack, though, journos’ back pages find new readers and it seems timid rather than tactful to hide “I.R.” in a memory hole.

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U.S. Telos

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The author posted this at the top of 2024, before the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary, and the E. Jean Carroll judgment, but his forecast for ‘24 is still ripe…

Three years ago today we witnessed the natural end of the Republican Party. I don’t mean a chronological end. As long as there’s FOX News and people eager to tune in, there will be the ignorance and outrage levels necessary to nurture Trumpist conservatism.

I mean end as in the Greek term “telos,” which evokes a phenomenon’s essence — its reason for being. In that sense January 6 three years ago, in its lusty dance with violent ignorance, in its recognition, however dully, that the future of Trumpism did not line up with the future of democracy, indeed demanded its overthrow, all this was the completion of Trumpism, the full Donald.

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Donald Trump and the Machinery of Fame

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Let’s take a trip back to June 16, 2015, the day that Donald Trump announced he was running for president the first time. I’m taking you back that far because I want to see if I can find something…anything…normal about it.  Not normal psychologically – we all know how that search would go – but normal politically.

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Eye of the Hunter

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“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

I don’t want to argue with the American Scholar, but if you’re Hunter Harris — the wittiest millennial? — your obsessions are beyond objections…B.D.

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Like the Night

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He chose friends for wit, his bride for beauty.
She always erred on the side of beauty.

Punk soul in a Father’s body, Hopkins
wrote the motley an anthem –- Pied Beauty.

Mary Oliver’s speaker walks with awe
through the world. Dickinson’s died for beauty.

“From the inside.” “Eye of the beholder.”
Well-meaning parents lied about beauty.

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Liebe Macht Frei

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…I walked by the Sacramento River the day before my thirty-eighth birthday, along the train tracks to an old rusted truss bridge. It was the first time I’d been alone, I mean alone in physical space, in a long time. I’d spent the Christmas holidays with Harvey, who had an excruciating toothache and no health insurance, and with Amber, this trans girl Harvey had just started seeing. Harvey never complained about the toothache, though. They wandered around their bedroom trying on different outfits, showing off their possessions, infinite sentimental relics, displaying their favorite dick pics on their phone (especially the cum vids), making jokes and asking surreal philosophical questions, while Amber fawned over them, which annoyed Harvey, though they kind of liked it, too. Harvey wanted to be seen, to be loved for their capacity to be seen, for their mere appearing in this world, epiphanic ephemera, the brute autistic weirdness of their creature-existence, but they didn’t really like being complimented, compliments made them uneasy, always seemed silly if not outright suspicious, and they liked being romanticized even less, though they knew it was this resistance to romance in themselves that invited it from others.

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X Factor

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The author emailed this response to Leila Zalokar’s December 1 post, “Planet X,” under the heading, “Awesome.”

Starts with a bang! [couldn’t help myself]

And right off the bat, I can’t think of a word, but that melancholy, ironic, hopefulness(?)

…still, the desire to fuck / morning cigarettes…

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