INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Novelist Beverly Gologorsky Was Shaped by Sixties, Feminism, and The Bronx

Novelist Beverly Gologorsky. Photo by Marion Ettlinger.

An Interview with Beverly Gologorsky:
Novelist and long-time activist's
new book shouts its presence

“Working people are as ubiquitous as Blue Jays. When they fly they’re beautiful."

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 16, 2013

No one wants to be saddled with labels from the past, certainly not that ubiquitous species known as the creative writer. But even writers -- or perhaps especially writers -- have emotional attachments to moments and to spaces from the past. That’s true for Beverly Gologorsky, the author of the 1999 novel, The Things We Do to Make it Home -- and a new novel, Stop Here (Seven Stories; $16.95), the title of which practically shouts its presence.

A long-time activist, Gologorsky edited two anti-war publications -- Viet-Report and Leviathan -- that made a difference by informing and inspiring. She also played a part in the women’s liberation movement in New York in the 1960s and 1970s.

But before the long decade of defiance and resistance to the war and to the patriarchy, she was shaped by her blue collar and pink collar neighborhood in The Bronx where she grew up like everyone else in her generation, in the shadow of war: World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War. Moreover, like the women characters she writes about in Stop Here, she worked as a waitress.

I’ve known Gologorsky since about 1970 when, if I remember correctly, we rallied in the streets and sat through interminable meetings. I interviewed her in 1999 when her first novel came out. “Writing is the only thing that really makes me happy,” she told me then. When asked the same question recently, she said, “I should have said -- and I feel now -- that I don't always understand myself. Writing is my connection to the universe.”

In many ways, she’s a perfect perfectionist. She writes and rewrites and rewrites some more. Sometimes she’ll rewrite a chapter 12 and 13 times. She’ll put a book away for years, then come back to it and start anew. In her new novel, Stop Here, she writes with the ears of a poet and the eyes of an historian, with compassion and love and with a sense of solidarity, too.

“There’s no way to ignore the warmongering on Fox News, though Ava is trying,” her new book begins. From the start, you know where you’re at, though you don’t know where the book will take you or how it will end. There’s no stopping the momentum of the story once in starts and the characters are unstoppable, too.

Labels are rather limited -- and yet they’re also essential. You could call Gologorsky a daughter of the working class, a feminist and a novelist shaped by the New Left. That’s all true. Still, I’d suggest that you read her novels and forget about the labels. In Stop Here, you’ll want to linger at Murray’s Diner, meet the customers and the employees, and watch as the drama of their lives unfolds against the backdrop of war and resistance.

If you want to read a novel by a radical from the past who’s still a radical, read Stop Here. And if you weren’t a radical then and aren’t one now but you’re curious about the lives of Americans who watch Fox news, this novel has your name written all over it.

 

Jonah Raskin: Here it is September 11 again. What do you remember about that day in 2001? Where were you?

Beverly Gologorsky: I had just turned on the news in my Upper West Side apartment and after the first sentence the station (NPR) went dead. That was the first plane. Never before have I experienced New York City as quiet of traffic and airplanes as it was in the next three days. Never before had I seen actual shock on ordinary people's faces as I did that day.

Was it a pivotal point in your own life? If so how?

No, though I must admit it remains unforgettable. Particularly, the few days after the event, the sense of burning bodies, the smell, and the sadness of it did permeate all else. No one I knew could work or think about anything except the death and destruction. My doctor friend ran to a hospital to help out, but hardly any bodies needed attending. Horrid. After two days, I went with friends and came as close to the devastation as permitted. The feeling of loss was palpable.

What if anything have Americans learned from 9/11?

Mostly, I fear, the wrong lessons. What should have been seen as a criminal act became a war on state terrorism. So many unnecessary deaths occurred and still do on a lesser basis. Fear was ratcheted up among the populace here, which allowed so much to be done to others in our name that wasn't necessary and was in fact evil. I speak here in particular of Iraq.

It seems to me that American history for the past 80 years or so is a record of war, bombings, invasions, and mass death? How would you describe this last phase of history?

Unfortunately, what you say is true, however, I maintain that people, lots of them, can change policy. It takes a village and it takes patience.

You have written about the impact of war in two novels, The Things We Do to Make it Home from 1999 and your new novel, Stop Here. Why have you focused on war?

I don't see myself focusing on war, per se. Rather, the characters that speak to me happen to be for the most part working class men and women and it has always been their lives that have been affected by war. Also, in my novels, I speak of their relationships to one another not only to the results of war.

The War in Vietnam really was different wasn’t it, as wars go? The opposition was immense, the friendship between the Vietnamese and the American ran really deep, and the solidarity of the global community was awesome. Was that time an aberration in history?

I hope not, and I don't believe so. There are too many reasons for me to go into here, but let me say that many factors keep movements from forming or from not forming.

When I hear writers say that their characters are made up I don’t believe them because we usually find out that their characters -- I’m thinking of Hemingway, for example, or Willa Cather -- are based on actual people. What can you tell us about your main characters?

They are figures from my imagination and composites of various people I've met. But as Gustave Flaubert, the French novelist, said, "Every character, C'est moi."

Much of your new book takes place in a diner -- that all-American institution. It’s what the café is to France and the pub to England. How did the idea of the diner come to you?

It was always the cheapest place to eat, the one where you could sit and rap with your friends or family for hours. I love diners.

One of my favorite authors, B. Traven, said that working people were far more interesting from a novelist’s point of view than rich and famous people? What do you think of that comment?

Working people are as ubiquitous as Blue Jays and when they fly they are beautiful.

You wrote for and edited Leviathan and for other anti-war publications. What did you learn about writing from that experience?

A great deal about challenge and about patience. Many of the encounters with other writers were learning experiences. It was the period in which I was gathering my own worldview.

Women writers talk about the gender imbalance in publishing, reviewing, and publicity. While women read more books than men, buy more books, belong to more book groups, male writers are reviewed more often and get more space. It looks like the patriarchy controls a lot of the book industry. Does that affect you?

Yes. Newspaper and magazine review space has dwindled. It’s barely there, and what little space there is isn't shared evenly, so we need to keep up the pressure so the inequitable coverage will change. We can do that. We have in the past, around other male-dominated venues. So I'm hopeful.

What is it that women today most need to know and appreciate about the women’s liberation movement from the 1960s and 1970s?

Women need to continue to educate other woman about the progress, as well as the failures: to say what needs to be done and perhaps even how to do it.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University and the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman and American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : October Interviews with Poppy Northcutt, Maneesha James, Seth Holmes, and Thomas Zigal

Frances "Poppy" Northcutt with Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer in the studios of KPFT-FM in Houston, Friday, October 25, 2013. Photo by Guy Schwartz / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcasts:
Thorne Dreyer interviews Poppy Northcutt,
Maneesha James, Seth Holmes, and Tom Zigal

Our October guests address Texas feminist history, issues involved with death and dying, the plight of migrant farmworkers, and the post-Katrina craziness.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / November 11, 2013

Thorne Dreyer's guests on Rag Radio in October 2013 included pioneering Houston feminist Frances "Poppy" Northcutt, president of both the Houston and Texas chapters of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a historic figure in the women's movement; psychotherapist, meditation facilitator, and death and dying counselor Maneesha James; anthropologist Seth Holmes, author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies about the plight of migrant farmworkers; and novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Dreyer and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.


Frances "Poppy" Northcutt

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with Houston feminist Frances "Poppy" Northcutt here:


Houston attorney Frances "Poppy" Northcutt is president of the Houston and Texas chapters of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Northcutt, who has played a central role in the women’s movement since the mid-Sixties, was the City of Houston’s first Women’s Advocate in 1974-75 under Mayor Fred Hofheinz. In that role she initiated legislative and executive proposals to eliminate sex discrimination in the police and fire departments and elsewhere in city government.

She was also the founding chair in 1974 of the Harris County Women’s Political Caucus. Northcutt was on-site coordinator for the historic National Womens Conference, sponsored by the U.S. State Department and held in Houston in November 1977, drawing 20,000 participants.

Northcutt first gained national attention during the Apollo missions in the mid-Sixties when, as a mathematician and engineer, she was the first woman to work in flight support at NASA’s Mission Control. In a September 1970 Life magazine cover story titled “Women Arise,” Northcutt was one of eight women profiled as "succeeding in a man’s world.”

She was singled out in a 1969 AP story about women playing key roles in the space program and was also featured in Mademoiselle, Ms. Magazine, and other publications. Northcutt won a number of awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom Team Award for work in the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew.

This episode of Rag Radio was produced in the studios of KPFT-FM in Houston with the assistance of KPFT news anchor Marlo Blue.


Maneesha James

Maneesha James with Rag Radio's Thorne Dreyer (left) and Tracey Schulz at the KOOP studios, October 18, 2013.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with death and dying counselor Maneesha James here:


Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, in 1947, Maneesha James offers "psycho-spiritual support in living and dying." She has a background in nursing (general, midwifery, and psychiatric) and is a psychotherapist and meditation facilitator. Maneesha, who lives in London, is co-founder and co-director of the Sammasati Project, which offers a vision of living and dying based on awareness and celebration.

Through her years of meditation and living in the meditation resort of the contemporary mystic, Osho (she was his chief editor), Maneesha has developed and facilitated workshops worldwide on a meditative way of living. She works with people who wish to go through the process of dying with as much awareness as possible -- working on an individual basis with those who are facing imminent death and in workshops with those who want to explore their issues with dying while they are still relatively healthy.


Seth Holmes

Anthropologist Seth Holmes in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, October 11, 2013. Photo by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with anthropologist Seth Holmes here:


Seth M. Holmes is a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley where he is Martin Sisters Endowed Chair Assistant Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology. Holmes is the author of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. The book, which “weds the theoretical analysis of the anthropologist with the intimacy of the journalist,” is an “ethnographic witness to the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants.”

The book is based on five years of field research during which time Seth lived with indigenous Mexican families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals, participated in healing rituals, and mourned at funerals for friends.

Holmes traveled with migrants through the desert border into Arizona, where they were apprehended and jailed by the Border Patrol. After he was released from jail, and his companions were deported, Holmes interviewed Border Patrol agents, local residents, and armed vigilantes.

Tom Philpott wrote in Mother Jones about Holmes' book: “Here in the U.S., we both utterly rely on immigrants from south of the border to feed us, and erect walls and employ militias to keep them out. In this groundbreaking new book, Holmes goes underground to explore what this bizarre duality means for the people who live it. A brilliant combination of academic rigor and journalistic daring.”


Thomas Zigal

Novelist Thomas Zigal in the KOOP studios in Austin, Friday, October 4, 2013. Photo by Carlos Lowry / The Rag Blog.

Listen to or download the podcast of Rag Radio's interview with novelist Thomas Zigal here:


According to Kirkus Reviews, Novelist Thomas Zigal writes “page-turners with a conscience.” His latest book, Many Rivers to Cross, is set in post-Katrina New Orleans. The White League was also set in New Orleans, as will be a third novel to come. His three popular crime novels, featuring hippie Sheriff Kurt Muller, take place in Aspen. Author Jan Reid wrote that Many Rivers to Cross "is awe-inspiring. Thomas Zigal has entered New Orleans' heart of darkness after Katrina. His story is brave, frightening, and so dramatic that at times you have to get up and walk around the room."

Zigal was born in Galveston and grew up in Texas City where his father worked in an oil refinery. He graduated from the University of Texas -- where he was “an anti-war hippie and an avid reader of The Rag.” He got his masters in creative writing at Stanford and “hung out with writers like Raymond Carver, James Crumley, and Scott Turow.”

He published a literary magazine, The Pawn Review, and was an editor at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Zigal has served as a speech writer for one UT-Austin chancellor and four of the university’s presidents. He is a member of the Authors Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, the Texas Institute of Letters (of which he is a former vice president), and the Writers League of Texas.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Dreyer was a founding editor of the original Rag, published in Austin from 1966-1977. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. (CDT).

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, November 15, 2013: Staffers from the original Rag in '60s Austin: Doyle Niemann, now a leader in the Maryland House of Delegates, and poet/activist Mariann Wizard.
Friday, November 22, 2013: Empowerment activist Sam Daley-Harris, author of Reclaiming our Democracy: Healing the Break Between People and Government.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Award-Winning Novelist and Screenwriter Stephen Harrigan

Noted Texas writer Stephen Harrigan in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, September 6, 2013. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Award-winning novelist, screenwriter,
and journalist Stephen Harrigan

The author of the New York Times bestseller, The Gates of the Alamo, Harrigan has been selected to write the initial title and centerpiece work in an ambitious 16-volume history of Texas to be published by the University of Texas Press.

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / September 17, 2013

Award-winning author, screenwriter, and journalist Stephen Harrigan was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 6, 2013.

Rag Radio is a weekly syndicated radio program produced and hosted by long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, and recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of our September 6 interview with Stephen Harrigan here:


Stephen Harrigan, the author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction,  has been selected to write the initial title and centerpiece work in an ambitious 16-volume history of Texas -- tagged the Texas Bookshelf -- to be published by the University of Texas Press.

Harrigan is the author of  The Gates of the Alamo, a New York Times bestseller and the recipient of the Spur Award for the best Novel of the West. Harrigan's novel, Remember Ben Clayton, also won the Spur Award, as well as the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians for best historical novel.

The Eye of the Mammoth, a career-spanning collection of Harrigan's essays, was published in 2013 by the University of Texas Press.

Stephen Harrigan, left, with Rag Radio's
Thorne Dreyer and Tracey Schulz.

Steve Harrigan is an award-winning screenwriter who has written many movies for television. A longtime contributor -- and contributing editor -- to Texas Monthly, his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of publications.

Also a Faculty Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Steve is a founding member of the Texas Book Festival and of Capital Area Statues, Inc. Harrigan will be featured at the 2013 Texas Book Festival and is one of three writers being honored with the Austin Public Library Friends Foundation's 2013 Illumine awards for excellence in literary achievement.

On Rag Radio, we discuss the special demands of researching and writing historical fiction -- especially when the subject is an iconic event like the Battle of the Alamo, and Harrigan's revealing and often very funny experiences as an "A-List writer of B-List productions," while writing made-for-TV movies.

We also talk about Steve's participation in the massive Texas history project being undertaken by the UT Press; about the unique role that Texas Monthly magazine has played in encouraging and nourishing Texas writers; and about the recent death -- and significant legacy -- of Texas literary giant John Graves.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, September 20, 2013: Environmental researcher and climate change activist Bruce Melton.
Friday, September 27, 2013: In their first father/daughter interview, Newsman Dan Rather and Austin-based environmentalist Robin Rather.
Friday, October 4, 2013: Novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross.
Note: Our interview with Chicago-based activist Michael James, originally scheduled for Friday, September 20, will be rescheduled on a date to be determined.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : An Interview with Novelist and Immigrant Rights Activist David McCabe

Novelist and immigrant rights activist David McCabe at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, March 8, 2013. Photo by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio Podcast:
Novelist and immigrant rights activist 
David McCabe, author of 'Without Sin'

"When love for family is stronger than fear /
when the desperation sets in /
A man will cross any line that is drawn, /
and who's to say it's a sin?"
-- Slaid Cleaves from "Borderline," epigraph in Without Sin

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / March 18, 2013

Novelist and immigrant rights activist David McCabe was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 8, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with David McCabe here:


David McCabe is the author of Without Sin, a novel inspired by actual events in Oceanside, California, where federal and county officials shut down a sex trafficking ring that exploited young, undocumented women. The novel chronicles the exploits of a young border patrol agent and a 17-year-old Mexican prostitute as they struggle to come to terms with the increasing violence and changing politics that govern the borderlands dividing their countries.

David is also an educator and an activist in the immigrants rights movement.

Without Sin won the Book to Action award from the California State Library and the California Center for the Book, and was a semifinalist in the New Orleans Faulkner Society's William Faulkner-Wisdom Competition.

From left: Thorne Dreyer, David
McCabe, and Tracey Schulz.

Marisa Ugarte wrote that in Without Sin, David McCabe "renders personal the horror that thousands of young undocumented women experience daily," and Rosemary James of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society, called it "a must read for all who would understand the complexities, as well as horrors, of the lives of undocumented immigrants in the United States."

McCabe, who lives with his wife and son and a menagerie of animals on a small ranch in Southern California, has worked in public education for over 20 years -- as an elementary school teacher and a principal -- and currently serves as a school board trustee at the Nuview Union School District and as an associate professor of education and coordinator of the Teacher Preparation Program at Pasadena City College.

McCabe, who has also written and spoken extensively on education-related issues, is the author of Toward a More Perfect Union: Creating Democratic Classroom Communities. He recently spoke at St. Edward's University in Austin and at Texas A&M University about human trafficking, xenophobia, immigration, and the abuse and sexual exploitation of children.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, March 22: Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin, Sports Editor at The Nation and author of Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.
Friday, March 29: "Bronx Butch" poet, performance artist, and memoirist Annie Rachele Lanzillotto.
Friday, April 12: Sixties activists and Yippie founders Judy Gumbo Albert and Nancy Kurshan.

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Rag Radio : Suspense Novelist David Lindsey on the Private Intelligence Industry

Suspense novelist David Lindsey during broadcast of Rag Radio, Friday, Sept. 23, 2011, at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin. Photo by Tracey Schulz / Rag Radio / The Rag Blog.

Suspense novelist David Lindsey on Rag Radio
with Thorne Dreyer. Listen to it here:

Novelist David Lindsey discussed his writing -- and the booming private intelligence industry, which is the subject of his latest work -- with Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio, Friday, September 23, 2011.

Lindsey is an Austin-based author who has written 14 novels in the mystery, thriller, and suspense genres. He is a native Texan who was born in Starr County, near the Mexican border, and grew up in West Texas, in the oil fields and ranches of the Colorado River valley, north of San Angelo.

His first book, A Cold Mind, published in 1982, was the first of five novels featuring Houston homicide detective Stuart Haydon. Lindsey, who was active in a human rights organization that monitored political assassinations in Guatemala, set his fifth Haydon novel, Body of Truth (1992), in that Central American country. Body of Truth won Germany's Bochumer Krimi Archiv award for the best suspense novel of the year.

Mercy, released in 1990, was also set in Houston and featured a female Hispanic detective, Carmen Palma. The book was a New York Times bestseller, and was made into a motion picture starring Ellen Barkin. Mercy was a pioneer in the suspense sub-genre featuring serial killers, and Lindsey is one of the first to have dealt with the issue of criminal profiling in his work. Lindsey has also set his fiction in the international world of criminal intelligence and assassinations, and some of his more recent work has been set in Austin and Central Texas.

In 2007, David Lindsey, started researching the astonishing rise of government outsourcing of national intelligence. Privatized spying has become a multi-billion dollar industry and private contractors now command 70 percent of the national intelligence budget. According to Lindsey:

By outsourcing our national intelligence responsibilities to private, for-profit enterprises, the government has fundamentally altered the structure and behavior of the business of spying.

A two-year investigation on this subject by The Washington Post resulted in a blockbuster series called "Top Secret America." The Post said:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it, or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

The private intelligence industry is the setting for David Lindsey’s latest novel, Pacific Heights. Written under the pseudonym Paul Harper, it is the first novel in the Marten Fane story cycle, a serial novel set in the hidden world of private sector intelligence contractors.

Rag Radio -- hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer -- is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, and streamed live on the web. KOOP is a cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin.

Rag Radio, which has been aired since September 2009, features hour-long in-depth interviews and discussion about issues of progressive politics, culture, and history. After broadcast, all episodes are posted as podcasts and can be downloaded at the Internet Archive. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio is also rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (Eastern) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is produced in the KOOP studios, in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

The running time for this interview, with music and underwriting announcements removed, is 53:56.

Pacific Heights, written by David Lindsey under the pseudonym Paul Harper, is the first novel in the Marten Fane story cycle, a serial novel set in the hidden world of private sector intelligence contractors.
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Alice Walker : Why I'm Joining the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza

Poet and Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker in Gaza City in 2009. Photo from AP / The Guardian (U.K.).
Why I'm joining the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza

Pulitzer prize-winning American writer Alice Walker is on board an international flotilla of boats sailing to Gaza to challenge the Israeli blockade. Here she tells why.

By Alice Walker / The Guardian (U.K) / June 27, 2011

See 'After the excitement of the Arab Spring, has the Palestine issue slipped out of view?' by Emine Saner, Below.

Why am I going on the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza? I ask myself this, even though the answer is: what else would I do? I am in my 67th year, having lived already a long and fruitful life, one with which I am content. It seems to me that during this period of eldering it is good to reap the harvest of one's understanding of what is important, and to share this, especially with the young. How are they to learn, otherwise?

Our boat, The Audacity of Hope, will be carrying letters to the people of Gaza. Letters expressing solidarity and love. That is all its cargo will consist of. If the Israeli military attacks us, it will be as if they attacked the mailman. This should go down hilariously in the annals of history. But if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us, as they did some of the activists in the last flotilla, Freedom Flotilla I, what is to be done?

There is a scene in the movie Gandhi that is very moving to me: it is when the unarmed Indian protesters line up to confront the armed forces of the British Empire. The soldiers beat them unmercifully, but the Indians, their broken and dead lifted tenderly out of the fray, keep coming.

Alongside this image of brave followers of Gandhi there is, for me, an awareness of paying off a debt to the Jewish civil rights activists who faced death to come to the side of black people in the American South in our time of need. I am especially indebted to Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who heard our calls for help -- our government then as now glacially slow in providing protection to non-violent protesters -- and came to stand with us.

They got as far as the truncheons and bullets of a few "good ol' boys'" of Neshoba County, Mississippi and were beaten and shot to death along with James Chaney, a young black man of formidable courage who died with them. So, even though our boat will be called The Audacity of Hope, it will fly the Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner flag in my own heart.

And what of the children of Palestine, who were ignored in our president's latest speech on Israel and Palestine, and whose impoverished, terrorized, segregated existence was mocked by the standing ovations recently given in the U.S. Congress to the prime minister of Israel?

I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left. One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

As adults, we must affirm, constantly, that the Arab child, the Muslim child, the Palestinian child, the African child, the Jewish child, the Christian child, the American child, the Chinese child, the Israeli child, the Native American child, etc, is equal to all others on the planet. We must do everything in our power to cease the behavior that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

I once asked my best friend and husband during the era of segregation, who was as staunch a defender of black people's human rights as anyone I'd ever met: how did you find your way to us, to black people, who so needed you? What force shaped your response to the great injustice facing people of color of that time?

I thought he might say it was the speeches, the marches, the example of Martin Luther King Jr, or of others in the movement who exhibited impactful courage and grace. But no. Thinking back, he recounted an episode from his childhood that had led him, inevitably, to our struggle.

He was a little boy on his way home from yeshiva, the Jewish school he attended after regular school let out. His mother, a bookkeeper, was still at work; he was alone. He was frequently harassed by older boys from regular school, and one day two of these boys snatched his yarmulke (skull cap), and, taunting him, ran off with it, eventually throwing it over a fence.

Two black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation, and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke. Chasing the boys down and catching them, they made them climb the fence, retrieve and dust off the yarmulke, and place it respectfully back on his head.

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put -- without delay, and with tenderness -- back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.

That is why I sail.

[Alice Malsenior Walker is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, anthologist, teacher, editor, publisher, womanist, and activist. The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir by Alice Walker was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Her critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Walker won the 2010 Lennon/Ono Grant for Peace. This article was originally published in the British daily, The Guardian. A longer version appears on Alice Walker's blog, alicewalkersgarden.com/blog.]

Activists involved of the new Gaza flotilla called "Freedom Flotilla Two" at press conference on Feb. 7, 2011, in Madrid. (At left, Cindy Sheehan.) Photo by Dominique Faget / AFP / Getty Images.

After the excitement of the Arab Spring,
has the Palestine issue slipped out of view?

Just over a year ago, in the middle of the night, Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish ship in international waters just off the coast of Israel, opened fire and killed nine activists. The Mavi Marmara was one of six ships in the Freedom Flotilla, which was attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, and the actions of Israel's military brought widespread international condemnation.

This time, as Freedom Flotilla II sets sail over the next week, with 10 ships carrying many of the same activists who traveled last year, including Swedish writer Henning Mankell, American human rights campaigner Hedy Epstein, and writer and academic Alice Walker, the Israeli government's response will be closely watched.

This week Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to the UN, wrote a letter saying: "Israel calls on the international community to do everything in their ability in order to prevent the flotilla and warn citizens... of the risks of participating in this type of provocation." The purpose of the flotilla, he said, is "to provoke and aid a radical political agenda." He later added: "We are very determined to defend ourselves and to assert our right to a naval blockade on Gaza."

"The threats of violence won't deter us," says Huwaida Arraf, one of the flotilla organizers. "Nobody is going in to this lightly, but we feel it has to be done. Israel has to realize its violence against us is not going to stop our growing civilian effort to challenge its illegal policies. The size of this flotilla, the number of people involved in organizing it, even after Israel killed nine of our colleagues last year, is testament to that."

She says half a million people applied for the few hundred places: depending on how many of the 10 boats are seaworthy in time, there should be around 400 people on the flotilla.

The campaign began in August 2008, when 44 activists on two small fishing boats set off from Cyprus and managed to reach Gaza. Later that year, the Free Gaza Movement, as it became known, organized several other voyages, usually sending single boats containing small but symbolic supplies such as medicine and toys, and volunteers, including doctors, lawyers, and politicians.

Amid allegations of violence and hostility from Israel's naval forces at sea, the activists decided they would need to send a flotilla, and after months of fundraising and negotiating with NGOs from other countries, particularly Turkey, several ships met in the Mediterranean sea in May last year with the intention of reaching Gaza.

"We didn't make it to Gaza and we lost a lot of colleagues," says Arraf, "but one of the things that was achieved was that people realized what Israel's policies meant, and the violence Israel was using to maintain them. We think our action will put pressure on Israel to end its blockade on Gaza, and we hope the respective governments of all the people participating will take action and do what they should be doing, instead of having their nationals putting their lives at risk like this."

There is a danger, says Chris Doyle, director of the council for Arab-British understanding, of the Palestinian issue being overlooked -- in the west at least -- as focus shifts to countries going through the extraordinary changes in the Arab Spring. "There is a danger that people forget how important this issue is, and that it is boiling. It is still an unresolved issue. At a time when international politicians -- Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, and others-- are concentrating so much on other areas of the region, the issue of Palestine has not gone away."

"Everyone has been so amazed and shocked at the beauty of the Arab revolutions, seeing these incredibly brave and wonderful citizens, that it quite naturally seizes the attention, but at the heart of the Arab revolutions is Palestine," says Karma Nabulsi, an academic and expert on the Middle East. "I would say it hasn't been properly covered in the west, but Palestine is central to what people -- the Arab media, the people who are participating in the Arab revolutions -- talk about all the time."

So where does Palestine fit into the Arab spring? Doyle says: "A Palestinian spring is more than possible. Many senior people within Fatah and the Palestinian authorities have been saying this is the way to go because the negotiations are not seen as credible, and they will have to adopt different tactics. I think that, on the one hand, those tactics could be against the Israeli occupation, but also it represents a threat to the Palestinian authority itself, both to Fatah and Hamas."

The flotilla "gives people heart and encouragement, that the struggle for freedom has friends and supporters," says Nabulsi. "What the flotilla did last year, these plucky little boats, was bring the entire world to look at what [the Israeli government] were doing. Not just because of the brutality of the response of the military, but it shows how simple gestures get to the heart of the issue -- breaking through the silence and the siege, and all the things that seem so big and impossible to do. They did it and they're going to do it again, and that's what is so remarkably brave."

-- Emine Saner / The Guardian (U.K.)

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Marc Estrin : The Mathematics of Mother's Day

A novel approach:
Happy Mother's Day

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / May 8, 2010

Novelist and Rag Blog contributor Marc Estrin will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, May 11, 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

They will discuss Marc's novels, his history with the legendary Bread and Puppet Theater, and more -- including his Rag Blog scoop "Got Fascism?: Obama Advisor Promotes 'Cognitive Infiltration'" that created quite a stir on the internet.

The following is from Marc Estrin's novel, Golem Song.

Having been reminded by Debbie, one of his girlfriends, Alan Krieger walks into a drug store to buy a card for his mother.

OK, Walgreens. Let’s see, cards over there. Good! Mother’s Day still with us. Holy moly Shazam! I can’t believe it. I can’t fucking believe it. Let’s see -- one two three four five six seven eight nine ten times one two three four five sections, that’s fifty columns times one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen rows. That’s fifty times thirteen. Fifty times ten is five hundred plus three times fifty -- six hundred and fifty! Six hundred and fucking fifty! Six hundred and fifty different Mother’s Day cards! How can you have six hundred and fifty... oh, I see: categories. Different categories.

Soooo... here’s MOTHER like my mother, I guess, though who could be like my mother?... then what else? MOTHER-TO-BE. I wonder if they have “Mother-that-was” for miscarriages -- there’s a million dollar idea. HUMOROUS MOTHER-TO-BE. How about humorous plain Mother? But she's not all that funny. OTHER MOTHER. Nice rhyme. GOD MOTHER and GOD MOTHER ADULT. Is that like X-rated? Let’s see. Nope, stodgier. NEW MOTHER, ah, poor thing, should be in the condolence section with little packs of Valium attached. Oh, here’s a good one: LIKE A MOTHER. A Mother’s Day card for my “Like a Mother”? No, that would be too mean. I mean I’m mean, but I’m not that mean. Gottenu -- FRIEND'S MOTHER! One isn’t enough? You have to adopt more? I can’t deal with this. FROM MOM TO CHILDREN -- for Mother’s Day? What a rabid guilt-trip! I know you won’t remember to send me a Mother’s Day card, so I’m sending one to you, hope you feel terrible, love Mom. CARDS FROM BOTH OF US --- for the frugally-minded, no doubt. CARDS ACROSS THE MILES. Dear Mom, thinking of you from Challenger Two. Can you see me waving? SISTER, SISTER'S FIRST. RELIGIOUS SISTER For Mother’s Day? Our Lady of Fornication? Ah, NANA, ooo-la-la. Oop. We’re in the unspeakably hip section --- CARDS SUITABLE FOR SINGLE PARENT. Love them 90s! And last but not least, Ladies and Gentlemen, more lethal than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a TV commercial -- it’s SUPERMOM, who years ago, in the Orient, learned the secret of clouding men’s minds. How the hell am I going to choose? This is a Ph.D. thesis project. Limit the search, Alan. Back, back. Back, like the aging Goethe, to the simple realm of basic MOTHER.

OK, so then we've got only one two three four and a half sections of ten times thirteen rows. A little less than half the total, the exact arithmetic is beyond me at this hour of mental and spiritual exhaustion, but say three hundred cards to go through. Only three hundred? Well, we’ll do an adjectival inspection for relevance to our very own mother. Courage, Alan, this is no worse than cataloguing Saddam Hussein’s CBW holdings. “Gentle”? No. “Tender?" No. “Soothing?" Oi, oi, oi. “Guiding?" By contrast, perhaps. “Sharing." A little less would be appreciated. “Understanding." Possibly. Though what she understands is unclear. “Patient." Like an adder. “Kind." Yeah. To quadrupeds. “Undemanding.” Gimme a break. Must not be Jewish. “Dependable." Like death and taxes. “Strong." You bet, 200 proof, pH one point oh. “Warm...generous...giving...thoughtful -- though what kinds of thoughts they’re not saying -- kind -- didn’t we have that one before? -- unselfish.” Am I on the wrong planet?

"Am I on the wrong planet?" This is the fundamental question asked by hostages. And hostages are usually ignored.

"Hey buddy, am I on the wrong... I’m talkin to you, don’t walk away from me."

See?

"Asshole!"

Jesus, I’m only one row across one section. Two hundred ninety cards to go, I’ll never make it. “Always there.” Well, God knows that’s true. “Never too busy.” On the other hand, might it not be better to be been a latch-key kid? But they don’t hire corporate execs with rolled-down stockings. Oh, look at this. How sweet. She “always finds the sunshine”. And if the rains do come, she “keeps only the rainbows." Ipecac ahoy. Here’s a mom that “always shows concern for others” and “expects very little in return.”

That’s it. I’ve had it. My cup of irony runneth over. We’re going to do this by the random method, and grit our decaying teeth at the result. Close your eyes, Alan. Now spin twice around, moving in a trajectory to your right as you spin, trying not to make a fool of yourself by poking your finger into someone’s pupik -- there! Got it! My finger directly on a card without falling on my face. Oh praise to your semi-circular canals, Alan, for their faithful service all these years...

Why, it’s Snoopy! Yes, Snoopy, why not? It matches her literary level, and is thematically appropriate, though she won’t get the obvious reference. What does Snoopy have to say to my sainted mother? Ah, a riddle. A conundrum, as it were. “What does a mother stand for?” Snoopy, my canine-ical friend, do you really want to ask that question? Are you prepared for the answer? But... I give up. What does a mother stand for? Open the card, and the answer is... “She’s so busy she doesn’t have time to sit down.” Good try, old droopy-nose, but avoidance will get you nowhere. You have to get up pretty early in the morning to hoodwink me, and it’s already 8:14 p.m.. But Mother Legree will like such innocence, and take it as a compliment. $1.49? For this devious piece of shit? That’s three and a half White Castle hamburgers? Well, this, plus a small bag of Hershey Kisses to support her habit, and perhaps absolve me of all but one passive peck ought to do it for under five bucks. Laudamus te, oh my sweet, reminding Debeleh, who hath spared us the heartache and nitroglycerine of another forgotten Mother’s Day.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

Want to read the whole novel? Buy it for a penny!

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Marc Estrin : Skulkstack

Austin's Echelon Building, which housed offices of the IRS, was destroyed on Feb. 19, 2010, when disgruntled software engineer Joseph Stack allegedly crashing his single-prop Piper Cherokee into building.
Creepy connection:
Stack's attack and my novel Skulk

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2010

Writing fiction is a curious business. Given that most fiction is generated from one's past experience, one finds oneself stroking a lamp whose vapors snake around through lost time, evoke its smell, and sometimes even genie up the future.

Joseph Stack's alleged kamikaze attack on an IRS building in Austin was creepily like the events described in my novel, Skulk, written three years earlier:

Frustrated, well-educated, white Americans with trenchant analyses of what's going on decide to provide America with a teaching moment to kick some ass in a stuck system. They both use or steal single engine planes, and crash them into a local building creating scenes reminiscent of 9/11. They both publish manifestos of dissection and complaint.

Initially, all of this provoked merely a slight smile and a squinty-eyed shaking of my head until the final similarities began to fall into place: embryonic net-rumors of a plot behind the plot, the possible involvement of false flags and patsies and government manipulation.

(Google "stack irs oddities" for a start, or link here or here for good introductions to this material.)

It's too early, and the evidence too skimpy and tenuous to come to any conclusions about the Stack affair. But what has resonance for me is this: in Skulk, although the protagonists were involved in a pedagogic plot of their own, and stalking a possible accomplice, they were simultaneously being stalked by their stalking beast, a secretive department store Santa with an odd knowledge of martial arts, explosives, and access to tools.

Skulk might have been about a simple, if extreme, act of pedagogy. It was planned that way. But while writing, smoke from the past and a whiff of the future curled back into the text, and Santa began to infiltrate the plot, bringing gifts as usual. 
"Gift" means "poison" in German.

So I was struck by this new development in the Stack story, and wonder about how right-on predictive Skulk actually was. Is the MSM reporting as mendacious as that in my novel? Who has been black-hooded? Who benefits by the obscurity?

One thing can be said: Skulk is a lot richer and funnier than the current initial and investigative reporting. Check it out.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

• Find Skulk by Marc Estrin on Amazon.com.

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Marc Estrin : The Execution of an Elephant

Topsy the elephant:
Executed by Thomas Alva Edison

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2010

[Noted author and activist Marc Estrin will be contributing to The Rag Blog on a regular basis.]

Wait! Do not activate that video -- unless you have a stomach immune to moral indigestion. Let me tell you the story first, and then you decide if you want to click the mouse that clicks the video that clicks off the elephant.

This week marked the anniversary of the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant at Coney Island on January 4, 1903. Not the accidental electrocution, but the intentional one, by one of our American heros, Thomas Alva Edison. And for purposes no higher than winning a commercial battle with his nemesis, George Westinghouse.

I reported this incident in a chapter of my novel The Lamentations of Julius Marantz. Julius, our sweetheart, has taken the D train from Manhattan out to his homeland, Coney Island, to submit to a well-earned and inevitable suicide. But since it is a long ride, I thought my readers would like something to entertain themselves along the way. So I included a chapter called "A Study of History," which treats five FUQs -- Frequently Unasked Questions -- concerning the playland and its visitors. Here are the last two:

4. And What about Edison? Did he come too?

At last, a native American. Yes, yes he came, eight years before Freud he came -- accompanied by Westinghouse and Faraday, and Adam Smith, and Death. They came to electrocute an elephant. Forty-four years before Julius was born, they came to electrocute an elephant named Topsy.

Elephants -- the highest form of animal, symbols of strength and astuteness, emblems of wisdom, of eternity, of moderation and pity, removers of obstacles, charismatic beasts suggesting the power of Buddha: miraculous aspiration, analysis, intention, and effort. Their trunks are capable of both uprooting trees and picking the smallest of leaves, thus suggesting that humans develop their powers in both the gross and spiritual worlds.

Massive and gray, they resemble dark clouds of refreshing rain. Indra's mighty elephant digs with its tusks, and reaches its trunk deep into the earth, sucking up water, and spraying it into clouds which bring forth rain. Elephants thus link the heaven above with the chthonic below, and symbolize the mist that separates formed worlds from the unformed.

Their tusks, both digging tools and weapons, linking the beast again to things supra- and sub-terranean. Elephants were named for their tusks, from elefas, the Greek for ivory. Achilles sword, in Pope's Homer, had a handle "with steel and polished elephant adorned."

They are loyal and affectionate, the elephants. Older calves help younger siblings, adults their sick or wounded comrades. They demonstrate ideals. It is said that mothers of great masters will dream of them at birth.

Most easily trained of all the beasts, they rarely forget. And when their great patience is exhausted, they have a remarkable memory for wrongs done them, and many stories are told of elephant revenge.

Mice do not scare them.

Topsy the elephant.
Topsy was 30, and weighed three tons. She began as a worker, hauling the beams and blocks that became the Island. When the parks were built, she turned entertainer, doing tricks, in pink tutu, for gawking faces. Towards the end, she became quite blind, having worn her eyes out looking at America -- and seeing nothing.

But she did see the drunken trainer who put his cigarette out against her tongue and laughed. She picked him up, threw him against the wall, then smashed his head quite easily underfoot. And thus she became "a rogue," a "man-killer," and her sentence was death.

Topsy was given a bale of carrots laced with cyanide, and scarfed them down without effect. Another helping, please? The park owners saw a chance to be tough on crime, and also make a profit. For every scratch, an itch: they announced that the murderous rogue elephant would be publicly hanged. "No, no!" cried the ASPCA. Too cruel and inhuman.

"No, no!" cried Thomas Alva Edison. Hadn't New York State just replaced the gallows with a new, humane, electric chair? "I'll come and help."

There was more to this than met the eye.

In Topsy-time the Wizard of Menlo Park was engaged in his own death-struggle with George Westinghouse for control of America's electrical infrastructure. His DC system, he claimed, was safe, while Westinghouse's was deadly. To prove it, he'd been publicly electrocuting cats and dogs for years. It was he who had convinced the state to use Westinghouse's AC for their electric chair. So much, and no more, had he accomplished: an electrocuted criminal was widely referred to as "being Westinghoused."

So what an irresistible photo-op here! How better to demonstrate the danger of his enemy's system, than to roast a full-grown elephant? Dr. Edison brought a team of technicians, and a film crew. On July 4th, 1903, before a cheering, patriotic crowd of thousands, Topsy was led to a special platform, the cameras rolled, and the switch to Coney's powerful electrical plant was thrown. Topsy's short-lived hell-on-earth lasted only 10 seconds. At six thousand volts. She convulsed, her hide began to smoke, and she collapsed. Applause. "It's a take." The great man showed the film to audiences across the nation to win his point, if not his contracts, and to help forge the created non-conscience of his race.

Whither reeleth our sweetheart?
He sang to himself, in cadence count
E non voglio più servir,
No, no, no, no, no,
E non voglio più servir, hitting on vir a low Eb -- abysmal depth, and the base tone of creation.
Non serviam.

George Orwell had warned him some time ago: "We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of civilized men."

Whither hobbles he, wandering among these ghosts?

To the towering parachute jump which -- six years before he was born -- was transferred from the "Lifesavers' Exhibit" at the New York World's Fair, the site right next to the Centaurs. He liked the parachute jump. It reminded him of his father. "It packs more thrills than any wings-in-sky interlude since Icarus," the old guides used to say. It reminded him that it takes longer to rise than to fall. Its rising and falling came to an end in '68, on a nearly vacant lot, in a moribund park on Coney Island. And now, there, in front of him, it rusted.

For Hegel, the Enlightenment meant a struggle between reason and what he called "the night of the world," that chaotic mix of hatred and irrationality which can destroy humanity and what it builds, but which is paradoxically the source of its enormous energy.

For Hegel, human history revolves around the attempt to negate the negativity of "the night of the world," and turn it to productive thought and action. He would have liked to have said, "Where there is id there shall be ego."

Final question: Which tense do you want to live in?

"I want to live in the imperative of the future passive participle," our sweetheart said, "in the 'what ought to be.'"

They hanged "Murderous Mary."
The execution of Mary

While googling for a photo of Topsy I came across an even more disturbing graphic of another elephant execution -- that of "Murderous Mary" 11 years later, for similar motives of profit. Mary, killed her keeper in a mood known only to an elephant, but apparently quickly passing. The crowd began chanting "Kill the elephant!" and a local blacksmith pumped two dozen rounds into her with little effect. Fear spread (or was spread), as it easily does, into the business community, and nearby towns threatened to ban the show if Mary was in it.

I'm sure Mary's owner was conflicted over his decision, but it's likely that the loss of his investment in Mary would be less than a potentially ruinous blacklisting, and he decided, like Edison, to kill Mary in public. Not soft on elephant-terrorists he.

Mary was sent by rail to Erwin, Tennessee, where 2,500 people paid to see her hanged like the murderer she was. Wikipedia's taciturn obit goes like this: "The elephant was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial crane. The first attempt resulted in a snapped chain, causing Mary to fall and break her hip as dozens of children fled in terror. The severely wounded elephant died during a second attempt and was buried beside the tracks."

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. Insect Dreams was recently published in German by Parthas Verlag, Berlin. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. Two novels, The Annotated Nose, and Skulk appeared in November 2008, and The Good Doctor Guillotin in September 2009. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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