Today's Stories

July 17-19, 2009

Nikolas Kozloff
Chiquita in Latin America: From Arbenz to Zelaya

July 16, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
What Economy?

Afshin Rattansi Iranian Planes and the Hidden Toll of Economic Sanctions

Gregory V. Button
The Search for Environmental Justice in Perry County, Alabama

Evan Knappenberger
Profile of a Deserter

Michelle Bollinger
Why is Leonard Peltier Still in Prison?

Russell Mokhiber
White House to ABC News: No Obama Single-Payer Doc

Belén Fernández
Iranian Penetration, Oh My!

Alice Walker
What is Torture Like? A Letter to Obama

Nicholas Dearden
Paying the Climate Debt: the G-8's Troubling Model

Albert Osueke
Sotomayor and the Identity Mountain

Website of the Day
Sotomayor for the Prosecution

July 15, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Assassination Bureau

Vijay Prashad
A Political Recession

Dean Baker
Stimulus Arithmetic

Ray McGovern
Cheney Sweating Bullets

Jonathan Cook
Jenin's Model of "Economic Peace"

David Rosen
Shouts From the Gallery: the Sotomayor Hearings and the Culture Wars

Eric Walberg
Uighurs vs. Afghans: a Study in Contrast

Greg Moses
Three Dimensions of a Complete Stimulus Plan

Sousan Hammad
Decolonizing Israel

Binoy Kampmark
The Trial of Charles Taylor

Tracy McLellan
The Story of My Arrest

Website of the Day
11 Days in Saudi Gitmo

July 14, 2009

Eamonn McCann
The Emperors of Bombast: Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism

Joanne Mariner
Obama's New Euphemism

Franklin Spinney
The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

Steve Heilig
Walking Mount Tam: an Interview with Gary Snyder

Ali Abunimah
Hamas' Choice

Dave Lindorff
The End of "Nice" Health Care Reform

Nikolas Kozloff
The Politics of Destabilization: McCain and Honduras

Ellen Brown
From Golden State to Subprime State

Alice Slater
How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks With Russia

Ron Jacobs
Protest U.S. Aggression

Joe Allen
The Fight to Save James Hickman in Jim Crow-Style Chicago

Website of the Day
Mel Brooks Does the French Revolution

July 13, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Essence of the Regime

Mike Whitney
The Deflating Economy

P. Sainath
How the World Depression Hits Orissa

Gareth Porter
A US / Iraq Conflict on Iran

Paul Moore
Rap in the Streets, Rap in the Suites

Tim Wise
Off the Deep End: Private Clubs, Public Prejudice

Andy Worthington Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

David Macaray
Cartoon Voices: Serf's Up in Hollywood

Cal Winslow
The Healthcare Worker War

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Spring in the Time of Obama

Website of the Day
Washington's Deep Game with China

July 10-12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Biden Problem

José Pertierra
The Cuban Five: a Cold War Case in a Post-Cold War World

John Ross
After the Honduran Coup

Conn Hallinan
The Settlements and the Quartet

Nikolas Kozloff
C Street Band: Sex Scandals, Moral Hypocrisy and the Far Right Agenda in Latin America

Clifton Ross /
Marcy Rein
U.S. and Honduras: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Good Neighbor

Carl Ginsburg
Summers' Clouded Crystal Ball

Michael Neumann
Say It Loud, Say It Proud: There is No God!

Gilad Atzmon
The Left and Islam: Thinking Outside of the Secular Box

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Parable of the Golden Parachute

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California Dreamin': How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes

Jim Goodman
Rural America Needs More Than Listening Sessions

Christopher Bickerton
Europe's New Politics of Hard Times

Wendell Potter
Health Care Industry Adopts Tobacco Lobby's Tactics

Dave Lindorff
CIA Lies: Why Isn't Congress in Open Revolt?

David Ker Thomson
Switchbacking Toward Bastille Day

Anthony DiMaggio
The Michael Jackson Feeding Frenzy

Raymond Lawrence
Michael Jackson as Sexual Pervert: the Calumnies of Peter King

Walid El Houri
Neda and Marwa: a Tale of Two Murdered Women

Stephanie Westbrook
Yes, We Camp

Roger Gaess
The Shades of Highgate Cemetery

David Yearsley
Tara, America's Dream House

Kim Nicolini
Caution: Men at Work, Robbing Banks

Poets' Basement
Five Poems From the Japanese

Website of the Weekend
Free Tiga and Hugh!

July 9, 2009

Ronnie Cummings
How Industry Giants are Undermining the Organic Foods Movement

Jonathan Cook
Two-State Solution, Israeli-Style

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduran Destablization, Inc.: Otto Reich and the International Republican Institute

James Bovard
McNamara's Other Body Count

Norman Solomon Afghanistan: the Escalation Scam

Allan Nairn
Indonesia Gets to Pick Its Killer

Andy Worthington
Revamping the Military Commissions

Tomas Borge
The Sadsack Soldiers of Honduras

Nadia Hijab
Palestinian Titanic

Paul Krassner
How Jeff Goldblum Didn't Die

Website of the Day
Dave Lindorff Wants Your Money--Will Give Good Reports

July 8, 2009

Saul Landau
In Amazonia

Dean Baker
The Green Shoots are Dead: Why the Economy Needs a Third Stimulus

Winslow T. Wheeler
Gates, Congress and the F-22

Eric Walberg
Obama in Russia

Ray McGovern
Is Texas Harboring a Torture Decider?

David Rosen
When Sadism Goes Systematic: Prison Rape as Policy

Dr. Mona El Farra
Gaza From a Distance

Ron Jacobs
McNamara and the Post: When Idiocy and Hubris Merge

Benjamin Dangl
High Stakes in Honduras

Alan Farago
How I Almost Pitched McNamara Into the Sea

Website of the Day
Ayatollah So

July 7, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank

Uri Avnery
Israeli Court Rebukes Military

Brian M. Downing
Crossing the Helmand

Gary Leupp
Biden, Israel and Iran

Gregory A. Burris
My Brush With Homeland Security

David Macaray
When in Doubt, Blame a Labor Union

Laura Flanders
Obama Hushes Health Care Advocates

Alan Farago
Princple Over Principal

Greg Moses
Texas Patels Take Over Dallas Bank

Dan Bacher
Three Big Lies About the Peripheral Canal

Website of the Day
Tragedy at Toncontin

July 6, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Hussein's FBI Interviews

Diana Johnstone
Zionist Fanatics Practice Serial Vandalism in Paris

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduran Coup to Venezuelan Coup: Same Old Globalizers and Torture School Grads

Gary Leupp
Operation Khanjar Begins

Jonathan Cook
Israel Calls on Ultra-Orthodox Jews to Stop "Arab Takeover"

Tim Wise
Of Fireworks and False Memories

Franklin Lamb
Cynthia McKinney and the Kidnapping of the Spirit of Humanity

Charles R. Larson
Sarah Palin, Plain and Tall

Carlos Benemann
California's Bingo Bondage: Getting Paid in IOUs

Shepherd Bliss
The Soulless Machine: Caught in the Cellphone Snare

Jerry Kroth
Stuart Levey and World War III

Karyn Strickler
A Fell-Swoop Moment Missed

Website of the Day
The Rise in Military-Backed Public Schools

July 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Gob Smacked

Eamonn Fingleton
Detroit's Collapse: the Untold Story

Jeffrey St. Clair
Is the Bald Eagle Really Back?

Mike Whitney
Running on Empty

Pam Martens
The Parable of Michael Jackson's Debts

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Counter-Revolution Will Not be Tweeted

Paul Craig Roberts
The Big Whorehouse on the Potomac

Patrick Cockburn
The Haggling Over Iraqi Oil

Anthony DiMaggio
A Perilous Path: Iraq and the Language of De-Escalation

Roger Burbach
Honduran Coup: Target Left?

John Ross
Left's Grip on Mexico City Slips

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet Jim Demint: Coup Apologist

Gareth Porter
The Iran Canard

Andy Worthington
Finally, a Trial Date in the African Embassy Bombings Case

Saul Landau
Bad Times, Worse Habits

David Macaray
How We Spend Our Money

Adam Federman
The Recovery That Wasn't

Jane Slaughter Labor's Vague Rally for Health Care

Russell Mokhiber Black Caucus Muzzled on Israeli Kidnapping of McKinney

Robert Jensen
Beyond Independence

Robert Bryce
Hey, Paul Krugman, Here are 2.4 Billion More Climate Traitors

Belén Fernandez
The Situation in Honduras

Missy Comley Beattie
Would Jesus Pack Heat?

C. G. Estabrook
La Cina e Vicina

Stephen Martin
The Fog of Economic War

Charles R. Larson
Adichie on Her Own

Lorenzo Wolff
A Voice Like a Newsreel: the Soul of James Carr and the Civil Rights Movement

Kim Nicolini
The System That Hijacked New York

Poets' Basement
Farrelly, Kazak and Stadler

Website of the Weekend
Paul Krassner v. Larry King

July 2, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
The Wall Street White House

Nikolas Kozloff
Spinning the Honduran Coup

Wendell Potter
Obama's False Friends of Health Care Reform

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California's Empty Wallet

Christian Christensen Iran: Networked Dissent?

Patrick Irelan
Lost in Patagonia

Binoy Kampmark Returning Iraq

Nicola Nasser
Ethnic Cleansing as State Policy

Brian Tokar
Climate Bill: Cap(italize) and Trade(Off)

Dan Bacher
Panama Canal North?

Website of the Day
Scheuer on Immigration: "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."

July 1, 2009

Vijay Prashad
Iran and Us

Alberto Vallente Thorensen
Why Zelaya's Actions Were Legal

Paul Craig Roberts
Pirates of the Mediterranean

Robert Weissman
150 Years

Manuel García, Jr.
The New Crisis in Aviation

Victor Figueroa-Clark / Pablo Navarrete
Honduras, a Coup With No Future

Norman Solomon
The NYT and Troop Deaths: Abstract Quality Journalism

Franklin Lamb
Remembering Amnon Kapeliouk

Martha Rosenberg
When Doctors Boo

Diane Rejman
Mothers and Military Lies

Website of the Day
The Color of the Race Problem is White

June 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Debt Deflation Arrives

Esam Al-Amin
Iran and Washington's Hidden Hand

Benjamin Dangl
Showdown in Honduras

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Doctors Collude in Torture

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah After the Elections

George Wuerthner
Beetle Hysteria ... Again: the Truth About Bugs, Fires and Ecosystems

Todd Gordon
Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Repression

Ron Jacobs
Mark Sanford, Sexual Liberation and LGBT Equality

Kenneth Libby
Conditions for Citizenship

Julian Vigo
Feeling Michael Jackson

Website of the Day
Inside the Mega-Churches

June 29, 2009

Ishmael Reed
The Persecution of Michael Jackson

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup in Honduras: Obama's Real Message to Latin America?

Clifton Ross
Coups and Constitutions: From Bolivia to Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Why Iraq is Now the Most Corrupt Country on the Planet

Uri Avnery
Between Tel Aviv and Tehran

Conn Hallinan
Dealing With North Korea: Why Threats and Sanctions Will Backfire

James G. Abourezk
Where the Money Isn't Going

Ralph Nader
The Holes in Obama's Financial Regulation Plan

Carol Miller
Why Fiscal Conservatives Should Love Medicare-for-All

Greg Moses
Jobs First

Website of the Day
Key Leaders of Honduran Coup Trained in the US

June 26-28, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Hate Crimes Bill: How Not to Remember Matthew Shepard

Jeffrey St. Clair
Meet the Retreads: Obama's Used Green Team

Doug Peacock
Elk River: History and the Yellowstone

Daniel Wolff
The Night Before: a Glimpse of the Lenape

Mike Whitney
What the Big Banks Have Won

John Ross
The New York Times and Stolen Elections

David Rosen
Cry, Hypocrite, Cry: the Tradition of Sex Scandals and American Politicians

Emily Ratner
Thoughts on Manhood From the Rafah Tunnel

Gareth Porter
Airstrike Report Belies "Blame Taliban" Line

Farid Marjai
Green, But Not Velvet

Nadia Hijab
The Rift in Iran: Memo to the "Do Something" Brigade

Paul Craig Roberts
Gun Control: What's the Agenda?

Fred Gardner
FDR's Real Defining Moment: Ending Prohibition

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Father's Day

Paul Watson
Fear and Loathing in Madeira

David Ker Thomson
Nothing

Farzana Versey
The Man in the Mirror: Michael Jackson as Tramp

Geoff Berne
Obama and Charter Schools: The Showdown at Schottenstein

Todd Alan Price
Ohio: Birthplace of Charter Education ... and Opposition to It

Ramzy Baroud
People for Sale in a Hungry World

Jeff Sher
Health Care Showdown

Dr. Carol Paris Despite My Arrest by Max Baucus, I Will Continue to Advocate for Quality Health Care for All

Walter Brasch Adultery as Family Value?

Glen Johnson
The Village and the Wall

Charlotte Laws
Hold the MSG!

Charles R. Larson
Dickens in Morocco, Sort Of

Kim Nicolini
The Erasure of Art

David Yearsley
Yankee Prof Takes on Dallas

Lorenzo Wolff
When the Songs Remain the Same

Poets' Basement
Larson, Davies, McLellan and Gardner

Website of the Weekend
Kayakers vs. Shell Oil

June 25, 2009

Kathy Kelly
Now We See You, Now We Don't

Jack Bratich
You Provide the Tweets, We'll Provide the Info War: the Media and the Iranian Protests

Wendell Potter
The Health Insurance Industry v. Health Care Reform: a Former Insurance Industry Insider Tells All

Charles R. Larson
Don't Cry for Him, Argentina! GOP Sex Scandal of the Week

Alan Farago
The Tears of Mark Sanford

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Firms Accused of Profiting Off Holocaust

Gareth Porter
Khobar Bombings: Telltale Signs of Saudi Fraud

Bitta Mostofi /
Bill Quigley
"You Will Not Get Past Us"

David Macaray
Six Ways to Reinvigorate Labor

Mark Schuller
Haiti's Elections: "Beat the Dog Too Hard"

Website of the Day
Worst Slide Story

June 24, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
How the U.S. Has Secretly Backed Pakistan's Nuclear Program From Day One

Dean Baker
Making Financial Regulation Work

Andy Worthington
The Story of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco

James Bovard
Obama and the Torturers

Diana Gibson /
Ray McGovern
Torture Eats the Soul

P. Sainath
The Age of the Everyday Billionaire

Gareth Porter
Investigating the Khobar Tower Bombing: Why Was Al Qaeda Excluded From the Suspects List?

Robert Alvarez
The Department of Energy's Nuclear Albatross

Dave Lindorff
Medicare for All

Steven Colatrella Remembering Giovanni Arrighi

Website of the Day
Protest as Terrorism

June 23, 2009

David Price
Obama's Classroom Spies

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reels Toward a New Era

James Ridgeway /
Jean Casella
Bi-Partisan Bull on Health Care: Three Ex-Senators Get It Up for the Health Care Industry

Dave Lindorff
Using the Economic Crisis to Attack Workers

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Puerto Rico: Biotech Island

Gary Leupp
Dennis Ross Moves to the White House

Brian M. Downing
The Erosion of the Mullahs' Monolith

Robert Bryce
Are Theocracies Doomed?

Nicholas Dearden
The G8 is Dead

Yousef Munayyer
Seeing Through Israeli Delay Tactics

Website of the Day
The Great White Father of America

June 22, 2009

Michael Hudson
Obama's (Latest) Surrender to Wall Street

Esam Al-Amin
What Actually Happened in the Iranian Presidential Election? A Hard Look at the Numbers

Chris Floyd
Dexter's Legions in Afghanistan

Jack Z. Bratich
The Fog Machine: Iran, Social Networks and Genetically Modified Grassroots Organizations

Atash Yaghmaian
We Children of the Revolution

Laura Carlsen
Victory in the Amazon

Paul Craig Roberts
The U.S. Regime-Change Recipe for Iran

Vijay Prashad
Gun v. Butter: Now You are Only Poor

Fred Gardner
Charles Lynch Gets a Year and a Day (No Thanks to Eric Holder)

Andy Thayer
The Blank Check: How We Got the Obama-DOMA Debacle

David Macaray
Unions and the Newspaper Crisis

Website of the Day
The Most Spied Upon Town in America?

June 19 - 21, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
I Become an American

Jeffrey St. Clair
Firebrand: Rod Coronado's Flame War

Patrick Cockburn
Who Will Control Iraq's Oil?

Al Giordano
What the Left Should be Learning From Iran

Henry A. Giroux
The Iranian Uprisings and the Challenge of the New Media

Anthony DiMaggio
The Electoral Façade

Paul Craig Roberts
Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated "Color Revolution?"

John Ross
46 Dead Mexican Toddlers: Sacrificed on the Altar of Neoliberalism

Gareth Porter
Spinning Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Bix Fix: Placating the Bankers, Again

Tommi Avicolli Mecca
40 Years After Stonewall: From Smash the Church to Going to the Chapel

Joe Bageant
Workers' Rights: No Balls, No Gains

Serge Halimi
Protectionism: We've Been Here Before

P. Sainath
Price of Rice, Price of Power in India

Jim Goodman
The Claim Deniers: Why the Health Insurance Industry Doesn't Deserve Our Trust

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Health Care Waterloo

Rannie Amiri
Bush Jumps Over Maine, Carter Lands in Gaza

Robert Fantina
Iran, Obama and McCain

Harvey Wasserman
Big Nuke's Radioactive Hoax in Impoverished Ohio

Walter Brasch
They Got Away With Murder: 12 Angry White People

David Ker Thomson
This Moment's Bill of Rights

Charles R. Larson
No Voice: Telling Her Mother's Story

David Yearsley
Escape From the Torture Chamber

Kim Nicolini
When the Closet is the Culprit

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini and the Art of Ambiguity

Poets' Basement
Beatty and Kowitt

Website of the Weekend
Grown in Yellowstone, Slaughtered in Montana

Weekend Edition
July 17-19, 2009

Things to Tell Your Eyeballs

How Not to See

By DAVID THOMSON

Seen enough?

What would be the clincher?  Perhaps the final stain on some garment?  A bridge too far?  Third theater of war?  Michael Jackson not quite dead?

What are we looking for that we haven’t already seen?

If we can characterize the last three centuries roughly as the age of industry, spectacle, and attention (nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first, respectively) we would do well to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves in considering how to maneuver in the new attention economy, which has higher stakes than the old spectacle, which was merely saucy and bewitching compared to what’s coming on line. 

The system used to want you as a worker.  Then it added the burden of shopping.  Pay your dues, pay your Visa.  Now you have to pay attention.  And your downtime is uptime, gaze tracked, recorded, calibrated to the nth degree, as Jon Beller, the Marx of the attention economy, might put it.

I never saw the planes crashing into the towers.  Never saw the event, the footage, anything, ever.  As I write that last sentence, our southbound Amtrak rounds the bend—maybe south of the bridge below Sleepy Hollow (perhaps some readers can tell me where I am exactly)—and the sky “line” of Manhattan with its twin absences comes into view downriver, seaward. 

On that day in September long ago I thought I might have heard my neighbor’s TV say a building had fallen (is fallen, fallen, Babylon the great is fallen—a bit of the autist, artist, and prophet jangling in that head of mine) and I snatched up baby Liam and retreated to the neighbor’s attic, which is sunny and full of toys, and we played as we always did, though I was alert and poised for flight.  I then went seven fat years without seeing a picture of the event, till a single photograph tracked me down one day and got me when I wasn’t looking, so to speak.  Seven lean years to follow.

Death is a special part of our lives, I hear from my teachers, and I’d hardly want to intrude on someone else’s without an invitation.  Forty thousand children died that day, falling one way or another into the ground, and I have not seen that unfortunate series of events either.  I’ve been around, you know.  Around the block, around the world.  And oh the things I haven’t seen.
 
We drove the first part of the journey to the school of the poets last weekend, and coming under an overpass there must have been a feast of death in the oncoming lanes, judging from the rubberneckers.  Traffic on our side slowing almost to a stop for no other reason than to catch the porno, the money shot, the full-monty diorama of death and desire.  Our tongues clucking somewhere on the alveopalatal ridge between empathy and sympathy, our eyes horny for the foxy scene.  Didn’t see that either.

Is it ever okay to see and not act?  Asking the question seriously feels like a mighty inrushing wind as the troops and reporters take flight and implode towards us, abandoning distant spectacles and wars, relinquishing the conceit of current events, the staunchly American monolingual fantasy of “keeping up.”  Ripped pages of The Economist flutter to the ground. 

As the horizon recedes, the foreground becomes correspondingly focused.  In close here, you see for yourself, and there’s a chance you might act.  We advise precisely this.

As our gaze consolidates homeward, we surrender distant Iranian women to their sexist husbands and find that our own sins are more than enough to occupy us: our own cars, planes, collisions and collusions and complicities and Ram-Dodgy compromises.  We stop whingeing about and to our “leaders” and our “government” as if we were so many children who cannot see through the silliness of patronizing—hailing as father and as boss—the “representative” daddies and mommies in this or that “congress” or “branch” somewhere else.  As if it were anything more than rank nonsense to hear this or that academic or authority bobbing her head and advising us upon this or that foreign affair and upon the grave importance of that tired irrelevance, electoral politics.  As if somehow we could be free but still bound to leaders.  Having said it before, we say it again: we emancipate all such “leaders,” and free them to go home and pay attention to their own families and watersheds.  We have stopped looking at world affairs since we have noticed the length of our own noses.

Not looking, we find, is excellent, and goes well with similar instincts, like doing, which is to say thwarting, laughing, monkeywrenching, tickling. 

Still, it is hard not to see the prisons in New York state, which are everywhere and everywhere and everywhere, an immense glut of horror, and which are, especially along the Hudson, so weirdly consonant with the aesthetics of nature.  So lovely, really.  Could that be, viewed here in our downrivering train somewhere south of Philipstown, the famous Sing Sing?  And look at that facility here near Hammersberg, I think, with its flag this Friday afternoon at half mast, perhaps for one of the forty-thousand children dying of hunger today.  Look at how structurally similar it is to the tennis club a few minutes farther down here on the east bank of the river.  I suppose that both the club and the pen are medium security facilities with impeccable views.  Of America I sing, we sing sing.

Could it be that I—we—have forgotten how glorious the Hudson is, with its stone walls like ramparts, and its prisons like ramparts, its power stations like mosques with minaret smokestacks, and its steep hills not so shabby after all, though since we last were here we have been out and about in the mountains of the world?  If I have not paddled most of it by this time next year---sons Liam and Sebastian, will you come with me?—dismiss me as a dreamer.

And now here we are, yet again, right here on the dot.  Not somewhere else as the electoralists and democratists advise.  Not hankering after Washington, nor after some slick new boss of the empire.

Here at this moment it’s Manhattan, an island in America and in the Hudson, and I’m sideglancing at four on this Friday afternoon along West 35th from the corner of Eighth Ave, the rim of this canyon sunlicked.  The stud guys from Local 79 coming boisterously off work.  The brunette for whom I wait only six minutes to round out the picture and who, to my otherwise happily married eyes, tightfleshes the crosshatching of her shorts as she frets at the light.  I expand to love it all. 

Big love, for the dickheads and grifters and a not-so-ancient lady with a hump like backtits. The old carlots all car stackers now, like Hollywood Squares.  My eyeballs here on this island drinking and sucking and bugging out on the ends of their stalks like worms in a big apple.

And later, that second Peroni Birra Superiore in the High Line Cafe that, not minding if I do, I did. 

High Line Park itself a good idea but candy-assed by the pols.  It’s an elevated railbed gussied up to theme park status, with no public transportation around it.  Still, it’s a footpath, and a great place from which to salute its fellow traveler the Hudson. 

Swinging on shank’s mare to the north away from the stilted park, I remain on the lookout for the M20 bus north on 8th Ave—is that right?—or any bus for that matter.  Five hundred taxis in clusters of twenty pass me.  The city is overrun with these yellow exoskeletals, for all I know stuffed with rich people trying to suck up to the cabbies for a quick fix of street cred.  Get home fast and watch the “news.”

I’d left poetry school away up the Hudson earlier in the day, a few of the southbound poets gradually trickling away on the train.  Some of our group will teach at the university in Palestine, some at Bard, the American college on the Hudson.  In Palestine, an excuse from students for not finishing homework—the Israeli military broke into our home last night and held us up at gunpoint—is apparently common.  At Bard—not so much.  Wonderful, if you think about it, that Al-Quds University and Bard are co-conspirators in the front line of poetics. 

The poets are an unruly lot, exploding the poems of others by inserting their own lines, rending essays with the fierceness of their glances, composing unrhyming anthems of glossolalia at the drop of a hat.

The Language and Thinking program is to poetry what parkour is to city buildings: always keep moving forward.  Form rides content hard, without respite.  Five minutes of free writing, three minutes of Quaker-style reading, four minutes of focused free writing, six minutes reading a poem aloud for its sound rather than its sense, and so on. 

The exploding poems exercise turns out to be “writing into a poem,” meaning that everyone slides their lines in to an established poem while one reader intones the main poem.  Small group work shakes down egos, throws everyone into the foreground of the event.  I am suddenly Creon in Antigone, thinking, this will be corny, and yet I startle myself by awakening to the evil within, and am applauded for a Christopher Walken-style performance.  The poet Joan Retallack is Antigone, and in our skit she descends to the underworld by hitting the button on the elevator.  Someone in the Palestinian contingent, a young mother who has written a book on Syria, recommends tableau vivant depictions of violence, in the form called a frieze, and I consider with alarm the vision of seventeen-year-old incoming Bard students arranging themselves into tight clusters of perversion.  A long way from rhyme here.

In a small group we consider a portion of Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” where the story of Leontios—this is my version of our class version of Sontag’s version of Plato’s version of Socrates’ version of Leontios, so something might have been lost in transit—seeing the grisly bodies of criminals rotting, at first holds himself back and then, when he cannot control himself, runs up to the corpses and says to his eyes, “you unhappy creatures, feast.  Take your fill of this lovely sight!”  Our small group then proposed as a sample assignment (nine minutes focused free writing) that students be asked to compose monologues to their eyes as if they were, in quick succession (and following the essays we had been reading), Montaigne, Sontag, Said, and, fourth but not least, themselves.  “The eyeball vocative,” we called the assignment.  “Things to tell your eyeballs.”

Which is where I’ll take my leave of you, dear reader.  What would you tell your eyeballs that they hadn’t heard before?  Could you make a case for disciplined inattention?

I’m hoping you read this essay instead of some bullhicky about this or that leader, and that you read on this site instead of in the usual pulps.  But I’m also sort of hoping you didn’t read anything, because you were out on the river.  That means we’d have the same glint in our eye.

David Ker Thomson is loosely affiliated with the Bard Language and Thinking Program in Annandale-on-Hudson.  He lives most of the year in Toronto.  His latest article on Toronto family life is in next week’s NOW Magazine.  Dave.thomson@utoronto.ca

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