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A photo essay of the great depression in America:

Bud Fields and his family. Alabama. 1935 or 1936. Photographer: Walker Evans.

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Kathleen Maher’s review of Winged with Death has gone up on the NewCritics Site.

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Mario Orlando Hamlet Hardy Brenno Benedetti, Uruguayan writer, born 14 September 1920; died 17 May 2009: “When I’m buried/ don’t forget to put a Biro in my coffin.”

The following rooms will be dedicated:

The Texas Air National Guard Room,
where you don’t actually have to show up.

The Hurricane Katrina Room,
which is still under construction.

The Walter Reed Hospital Room,
where they don’t let you in.

The Guantanamo Bay Room,
where they don’t let you out.

The National Debt Room,
which is huge and has no ceiling.

The Economy Room,
which is in the toilet.

The Environmental Conservation Room,
still empty, but warm…and getting warmer.

The Decider Room,
complete with dartboard, Magic 8-Ball, Ouija board,
dice, coins, and straws.

The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room,
(No one has yet been able to find it.)

The Supreme Court Gift Shop,
where you can purchase an election.

The Dick Cheney Cafeteria,
with catering provided by Halliburton and KBR. Try the club sandwich – a bargain at $1,500 (add $30.00 for a cup of soup and a side salad).

The Mission Accomplished Room
when you turn the door handle a trap door opens and you fall into a bottomless pit.

Note: The George W. Bush Library is equipped with an electron microscope to help locate the President’s accomplishments

The art of the 60s counterculture was almost all bad. All the flower children and peaceniks were capable of was a stream of doodlings, recycled William Morris, a little dada, co-opted Kollwitz, and so forth. The dreariness of today’s graffiti continues the tradition of visual illiteracy.

The music was a different matter. Sixties musical culture was as deep as the visual culture was shallow. All the artists you heard of were only the visible parts of an iceberg of submerged musical activity that was going on in every small town across America. Integral to the tradition, whether blues, rhythm’n'blues, bluegrass, country or folk, was protest – and protest is an essential element of freedom. Every dictator will abuse the name of freedom, will erect hideous lumps of masonry and call them Freedom This and Freedom That, or simply rename old monuments, as the King Memorial Tower in Tehran was renamed Freedom Tower. States are authoritarian structures; to call them free is oxymoronic. Freedom cannot be built, but it can be sung.

The first thing I should warn you about is that this book is not for the politically correct or the faint-hearted or those with Anglo-Saxon attitudes. It breaks down pretty much every social convention and taboo that we in the West have been raised to believe in, and turns them on their heads. Necrophilia turns out not to be dead boring after all, but more an act of an everlasting prayer to the creator. Devouring women, withered by age and time, on creaky beds and straw mattresses in dank stables reeking of animals is the order of the day; in fact the whole process brings you closer to God. You begin to see?

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When he was on the screen, it was hard to see anyone else . . .

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The Guardian reports on five Cuban men who were arrested for infiltrating groups in the US in 1998. It was alleged that they were plotting attacks on Cuba. They have not received a fair trial and two have not seen their families in the intervening ten years.

Nine Nobel laureates, including Desmond Tutu and the German novelist Günter Grass have joined forces with others to protest the US government’s detention of the so-called Miami Five.

Those warnings not to underestimate her were right. This is one sick scary power hungry person… a Pretty White Lady version of Idi Amin…. gave me chills…

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At the Kenyon Review, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky, discusses innocence and obscenity, with particular reference to Thomas Glave’s story The Torturer’s Wife, which appears in the fall issue of KR.

It’s a story about realizing you’re in bed with a torturer, and seeing exactly – with no flinching from the details – what that means: “’With pliers,’ she thinks, screwing shut her eyes, clenching her fists, ‘and other tools. Hammers –‘“ That’s obviously a timely metaphor for us all at this moment in our history, but the problem is that metaphors are also real, relying on our awareness of that doubleness of meaning as we read the story. For a story to work, the author has to imagine fully what his character can barely conceive, the reality behind that word – torture – which we’ve come to use so easily in recent years. Glave’s story is about that effort to come to grips with an obscene reality, and to find a way of speaking such things that doesn’t obscure or diminish that obscenity.

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The Guardian asked some high profile left wingers what they thought of the current world financial crisis: Hari Kunzru came up with this one:

A great financial economist and historian called Michael Hudson talks about how the US economy is basically fictitious, based on pretend earnings and pretend values. This will only genuinely become a crisis of capitalism if people generally become aware that much of the growth and prosperity produced by capitalism is a fiction, and if the consensus about where the real global value lies shifts radically. In other words, if people stop believing that apparently wealthy countries actually are producing wealth.

I don’t immediately expect to be living in some kind of Mad Max world. But this could be the death knell of the time when we were all singing the beauties of free-market capitalism.

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The Iraqi people were well on their way to freedom. The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad were breathtaking. Watching them, one could not help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. . .
It was entirely possible that in Iraq you had the most pro-American population that could be found anywhere in the Arab world. If you were looking for a historical analogy, it was probably closer to post-liberation France. We had the overwhelming support of the Iraqi people. Once we won, we got great support from everywhere. . .
The U.S. devoted unprecedented attention to humanitarian relief and the prevention of excessive damage to infrastructure and to unnecessary casualties.
The United States approached its postwar work with a two-part resolve: a commitment to stay and a commitment to leave. The United States had no intention of determining the precise form of Iraq’s new government. That choice belonged to the Iraqi people. We have never been a colonial power. We do not leave behind occupying armies. We leave behind constitutions and parliaments. We don’t take our force and go around the world and try to take other people’s real estate or other people’s resources, their oil. We never have and we never will.

From Sam Smith at Undernews.