Thorne Webb Dreyer and Sarito Carol Neiman : Bon Voyage, Doctor Keister

Dr. Stephen R. Keister, 1921-2012.
Dr. Stephen R. Keister, 1921-2012:
Bon Voyage, Doctor Keister

By Thorne Webb Dreyer and Sarito Carol Neiman / The Rag Blog / April 12, 2012

It seems the cancer always wins! Tomorrow I go to the Manchester Presbyterian Lodge for final care by Great Lakes Hospice. I am beginning to hear the splash of Old Charon's oars in the waters of the Styx. It ain't all that bad with the memories of all of you fine folks to take along.” – Steve Keister, in a message to his friends and his colleagues at The Rag Blog, February 2, 2012

Dr. Stephen R. Keister left us late Friday night, April 6, 2012, after a long-running bout with prostate cancer. He died in hospice care in his longtime home, Erie, Pennsylvania, at the age of 90.

The cancer may have won but we seriously doubt that Old Charon, the ferryman of Greek mythology (who carried souls of the newly deceased into the world of the dead) succeeded in transporting Steve all the way to Hades.

Steve, ever the philosopher and the reformer, probably recruited the wizened old seaman to his own cause of universal health care and they’re out there now, organizing for a single-payer system in the Afterlife.

Steve Keister, who turned 90 last October, was a retired physician who practiced internal medicine in Erie, PA, from 1950 until 1991, specializing in rheumatology; he was the region’s first practicing rheumatologist.

He attended Duke University where he became interested in the writings and philosophy of Moses ben Miamon, Voltaire, and Sir William Osler. He obtained his M.D. from the University of Maryland and did his postgraduate training at the Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh and Hamot Medical Center in Erie.

His medical honors were many and after retirement he remained active in scholarship and volunteer work. And Steve found a second passion late in life, dedicating himself to progressive social change, and especially to the cause of universal health care, working with Physicians for a National Health Plan and other activist groups, and writing about health care reform for The Rag Blog.

According to his daughter, Cindy Hepfer, "Steve has always been a voracious reader, continued to play tennis until his 60s when he took up golf instead, and enjoyed having friends in in the evening for drinks and conversation."

And, “after retirement,” Cindy said, “Steve continued his family’s tradition of trying to preserve the tenets of the nation’s Founding Fathers by active membership in People for the American Way, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and Amnesty International.”

In a eulogy, Steve's friend Don Swift said that Keister was not only a "gentleman scholar," but that he was also "a mensch, a person of integrity and honor," and that he was "all about trying to heal a broken world."

Fellow Pennsylvania activist and writer Carl Davidson said, “We knew him well here in Western Pennsylvania, especially as an unwavering voice for Medicare for All, and then some. He supported PDA's [Progressive Democrats of America’s] efforts here, but his own views were with the socialist left. Raise a fist and a red rose for him this May Day. He will be missed.”

About her father’s involvement with The Rag Blog, Cindy Hepfer said, “You have certainly given him a mission in these latter years of his life! I thank you for giving Dad a creative outlet and a way to share his goodness and intelligence with others.”

Keister's heavily-researched opinion pieces published by The Rag Blog were rich with personal reference and backed up with facts, figures, and links. They were erudite, yet peppered with wonderful colloquialisms reminiscent of an earlier era, and always filled with quotes and observations from great thinkers, scientists, and philosophers ranging from Rabelais, Pliny the Younger, and Confucius, to Aldous Huxley, Sir William Osler, John Ruskin, and Will Rogers.

And, if you read a column by Dr. Stephen R. Keister, you never had any doubt about where the author stood on the subject.

Though always full of hope personally, Steve became increasingly disillusioned with the medical system in this country and the growing dominance of the pharmaceutical and health insurance companies.

In his writing, he often reflected on the lessons of a lifetime in medicine.

“I entered the practice of medicine in 1950, an idealist, believing in the lesson of the Good Samaritan,” he wrote. “I believed that all persons should be provided with medical care…”

But, “Somewhere in the 1980s medical care, with great planning and premeditation, was usurped by the health insurance cartel in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry. Medicine was changed from a proud profession to a business, and the physician degraded to a ‘health care provider.'"

In his final column for The Rag Blog, entitled “I Cry for My Country,” Dr. Keister wrote:

Having passed the age of 90 I wish that my final days could be days of happiness and good wishes for those about me; however, it appears that fate has ordained otherwise. It would be a great course of satisfaction to see an enlightened, progressive United States as a homeland for my grandchildren. Instead we find a nation that is descending into quasi-feudalism and subservience of the many to the few.

At the time Steve submitted his final column, we at The Rag Blog were aware of his worsening physical condition. We included the following introduction to his piece:

Our dear friend, Dr. Stephen R. Keister, turned 90 on Sunday, October 9. For the last three years Steve has written -- with a unique and singular voice -- dozens of columns about the sad state of our health care system. And in that time he has become the heart and soul of The Rag Blog. He claims this is his last column, but we promise not to hold him to that commitment! We hope he will continue to share his wisdom with us for many months to come.

But we knew it wasn’t likely.


Steve Keister approached death much as he handled life, with vigor, intellectual curiosity, and an open mind. According to his daughter, “He was analyzing the dying process for as long as he could and communicating his thoughts to those around him.”

“He had observed repeatedly to several of us that he was not afraid… and that he always liked to sleep.” Cindy said. "I told him how brave I thought he was and that he shouldn't be afraid to reach out for the sleep that he wasn't afraid of.”

We communicated with Steve during his final weeks and he shared his feelings and observations about the process of dying.


Saying goodbye

"Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life." -- Thomas Merton

"The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?" -- Dorothea Day

How do you say goodbye to a friend? We mean really goodbye -- not “so long, see you later.” Saying goodbye, really, is an opportunity one doesn’t have often or early in life.

When we are young and a friend dies it is usually sudden, unexpected. One day the person is here, the next day that person is gone. And even when we know that death is coming, our culture as a whole does not tend to support the ceremony of saying our goodbyes while that person is still alive. Instead we are supported to remain in denial -- “you can beat this thing, I know you can!”

We are encouraged in so many ways, subtle and not so subtle, to save our goodbyes for when it’s too late for the person who’s leaving to hear them. And by the time we are old enough to see (if we dare to look) the glimmer of our own departure on the horizon, we have no practice in saying goodbye, either as one who is leaving or as one who will remain.

Stephen Keister was a friend. His contributions to The Rag Blog over the past three years have been rooted in a rich lifetime of experience as a physician and proud “secular humanist” and, as such, his insights have been invaluable as we have collectively wrestled with all the implications of the crisis in health care that has plagued the United States now for decades.

His passion for his subject was not abstract or ideological; it was his very life. In his first Rag Blog column, published on Nov. 17, 2008, Dr. Keister was clear where he stood on the question of healthcare reform:

To take the burden off future generations this country must get in step with Western Europe in quality and extent of health care for all. According to the Commonwealth Fund our health care rates 26th in the world and as of Nov. 13 [2008] … U.S. patients, compared to seven other countries, suffer the highest number of medical errors. 44% of chronically ill patients did not get recommended care, fill a prescription, or see a doctor when sick because of costs. 41% of U.S. patients spent more than $1000 in the past year on out of pocket costs, compared to 4% in Britain or 8% in the Netherlands.

We must make sure our elected representatives are not taking baksheesh from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and support single payer, universal health care devoid of insurance company participation. The nation and your family depend on you not sitting idly on your butt. Call, E-mail, demonstrate!

We lost that battle, obviously. But the war is not yet over, as the sad compromise that became “Obamacare” now finds itself in the Supreme Court. Steve Keister did not live to see the outcome of the current scuffle. But it’s clear, no matter what the outcome, there is still no cause for sitting idly by.


When we heard that it was time to say goodbye to our friend Stephen Keister, we wanted to find a way to honor the occasion. Not to respond with denial, nor to save all our tributes till after he was gone.

So we did what anybody might do if they just found out that a wise and beautiful friend was about to leave for good. We sent him a list of questions, hoping it would offer the opportunity to share what is happening with him now. True to form, he responded both as a scientist and as a humanitarian, the rare combination that has made it such an honor and privilege to publish him over the years.

Here is his response, in his own words. In a sense, this is Steve Keister’s final column. We would like to thank writer and educator -- and Steve's close friend -- Don Swift, for facilitating our final communication with Steve Keister.

Recently I’ve received a request from Thorne Dreyer and his many friends at The Rag Blog, to give him some insight into the situation in which I am involved -- that is, terminal cancer of the prostate, under the care of the good people at the local hospice organization.

Initially, I think we’d better discuss what hospice exactly covers. In my last article in The Rag Blog, entitled “I Cry for My Country,” I refer to several instances of hospices run purely for the financial benefit of the folks in charge. In other words, once again we are faced with the terrible American attitude of money above all else. Therefore, I would suggest that anybody who is interested in legitimate hospice care get a copy of the pamphlet entitled, “When Death Is Near: A Caregiver’s Guide.”

Hospice in the United States is a reasonably new organization, and the hospice in Erie was one of those founded on the basis of charitable giving. Some 25 years ago, Dr. David Dunn, a very capable general surgeon who had spent time in Great Britain during the war, became interested in the hospice movement and spent several months studying the technique as utilized in the U.K. Subsequently he came back to the United States and established a purely volunteer movement, which was soon overburdened, and ultimately taken over by his son, Dr. Geoffrey Dunn at the Great Lakes Hospice, where it remains today.

I became involved in this personally, having been diagnosed with carcinoma of the prostate some 12 years ago. This was treated initially by irradiation and subsequently hormone therapy. Approximately mid-2011, bone scans showed spread of the cancer to the various bones of my body. I tended to ignore this, which was possibly a mistake on my part, because of several factors. At the age of 90 I was enjoying the company of both the Edinboro University retired faculty group, and an 89-year-old lady, who was the best of companions, on the 8th floor of my building.

The question arises, why did I resort to hospice care?

I was not fully aware of the signs of the deteriorating effects of metastatic cancer. I was aware of the fact that we develop painful areas in the bones, but I completely ignored the systemic symptoms of the disease, which are: 1) increased fatigue; one will sleep up to 18 hours a night; 2) complete loss of appetite; one desires nothing, even a glass of milk, for a meal; 3) desire for solitude and lack of interest in things of everyday origin.

These taken together mean something to an alert physician and, happily, Dr. Jeffrey Dunn of hospice stopped by one evening to discuss books, and I discussed my symptoms with him. He said, “Gee, Steve, you’re a candidate for hospice care -- your cancer is spreading.” So the next day I was a hospice patient, and have never regretted it to this day.

Hospice nationally will provide 90 days of care under Medicare. They do not provide inpatient care in a convalescent or nursing home, but otherwise, medicine, equipment, medical care, etc., is provided by the program. I currently am in the Presbyterian Lodge in Erie, and everything is going according to program. I realize I have not long to live, but realize too that I have much to be thankful for throughout my 90 years.

I am also asked how I have rationalized the facing of death, and the question mentions that Socrates, the Zen masters, Jesus, Buddha have all offered alternatives. However, I have somehow avoided these alternatives and looked at this as a purely biological process. We are born in pain, we live largely in pain, and hopefully we can avoid dying in pain.

I’ve been assured by several of the hospice workers that the easiest people to care for are those that are the “secular humanists” who approach each stage of life as a natural event and do not interfere or complicate matters with various philosophical pictures.

While is it true that good hospice care professionals, if possible, provide a role of helping family and friends come to terms with the impending loss of a loved one, some of us are beyond that stage. At the age of 90 we have few living relatives and depend entirely on friends. Happily, I have been blessed with many, many friends in my recent lifetime -- perhaps more so than earlier in my life.

The final question in the submitted list is very interesting and very apropos to the present time. It is: If you could make a new Hippocratic Oath for the 21st century to be given to every student graduating from medical school, what would it be?

This I have given much thought, and do not feel intellectually qualified to answer this at the present time. But I do feel that certain factors should enter into the situation. I do think the philosophy of Dorothea Day and Thomas Merton should play a big part, and within their thinking, we who allegedly feel we are Christians should remember the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes.

In addition to that, from the ethical standpoint we should remember the teachings of two physicians of the last century: Sir William Osler and Dr. W.W.G Maclaclhan of Pittsburgh, both of whom treated people of prominence, the well-known, but at the same time never turned their backs on the poor, the underprivileged or the disabled.

I once again wish to thank my friends in Austin, Texas, my friends in my retired professors' group in Edinboro University, my children, including my daughter Cindy and son-in-law Will (both librarians), and my grandson Jonathan and his wife Alice (both modern musicians with a technique I do not understand but in which apparently they are doing great work). And finally, my dear friend on the eighth floor at 1324 South Shore Drive.

Peace. Peace to all. Thank you.

More of Stephen Keister’s last words can be found in his last columns for the Rag Blog. His final column ended with a challenge for us all to carry on the work of birthing a better world:

I cry for my country, and while asleep I hear in my dreams the mass gatherings of my youth singing, "Arise ye prisoners of starvation, arise thee wretched of the earth, for justice thunders condemnation, a better world's in birth."

Bon voyage, Doctor Keister. You will be missed.

[Thorne Dreyer edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. He lives in Austin. Sarito Carol Neiman is a freelance editor, author, and actress who lives in Junction, Texas. Together they edited Austin's Sixties underground newspaper, The Rag.]

Find articles by Dr. Stephen R. Keister on The Rag Blog.

Images courtesy of Cindy Hepfer.
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Tom Miller : Moving West, Writing East

Welcoming Arizona rattlesnake: "Cowboys amble" -- and, well, "snakes slither."

Moving West, writing East:
The life of a writer in the Southwest
of the 1960s and '70s

By Tom Miller / The Rag Blog / April 12, 2012

I moved west to escape the East. I stayed west to inform the East.

This took place in the late 1960s, when the anti-war movement and its cultural twin were both flowering. There's that window of opportunity we all have in our early 20s when there's nothing -- love, family, job, mortgage, school -- to batten us down.

"Arizona," someone suggested with a nod and a wink. "Arizona." I knew nothing about the youngest of the lower 48, except that Barry Goldwater and marijuana both came from there, and I thought that any place where those two elements are both at play is worth investigating. I jumped through that window of opportunity and landed in Tucson.

A squat two-bedroom adobe in a working-class neighborhood full of similar houses rented for $150 monthly. A friend and I took the place. My bedroom window looked out on a couple of lonely saguaro, and every morning, I awoke to a Western B-movie set.

An active anti-war movement was in place, and I found a freelancer oasis -- a fertile town with no one else writing for the underground press or sea-level magazines such as Crawdaddy!, Fusion or 2-year old Rolling Stone. I could take part in affairs that mattered and write about Southwestern mythology at the same time.

For Crawdaddy! I wrote about the real Rosa's Cantina in El Paso and the copper-smelter workers who sipped away their afternoons at its bar. For Fusion, about the acid cowboys of northern New Mexico. And the bi-weekly Rolling Stone? They put me on retainer, sending me $50 an issue simply to be on call and give them first dibs on story ideas. I arranged for a hipster country band to play for imprisoned draft resisters at a minimum-security federal prison, then wrote it up for the Stone. Like that.

The people, the issues, the land, the air, the music and, yes, the language. All these ingredients constructed my new West. I grabbed a picket sign to march for farm workers in front of Safeway. I joined another demonstration against a university's Mormon beliefs of racial inequality. (That was at a college basketball game. Boy, were we popular.)

Late one night, I ran with a secretive group called the Eco-Raiders and wrote up their efforts to combat urban sprawl. The war against Vietnam was a constant reminder of global issues, while the desert Southwest taught me the fragility and permanence of the land.

I had not just moved to the American West. I had moved to a region with an odd-angled line running through it -- the international boundary. The north of Sonora and Chihuahua had much in common with New Mexico and "dry-faced Arizona," as Jack Kerouac called it. Mexico, too, became part of my faculty, and I, one of its pupils.

I spent time in Bisbee, Silver City, Cananea, Walsenburg (Colorado, but who's counting), El Paso-Juárez, Morenci, Cd. Chihuahua, Douglas-Agua Prieta -- many of these towns with huge mining and smelting operations. They were more than just colorful destinations on the map.

I cannot explain why I am attracted to mining camps and their stories. Traveling through the towns where copper, zinc, and coal rise to the surface and get processed, I've found a genuine kinship with miners and their families. Certainly it cannot be envy: I have no desire to descend hundreds of feet underground and extract ore or calibrate explosives in a shaft, nor do I want to drive mammoth yellow equipment pitched on tires three times the size of a pickup truck. It cannot be common background, either -- the mining communities and I have no shared past.

Still, time and again, I have been invited into miners' homes and felt privileged to listen to family histories and collective memories, to hear cherished songs explained and to read unpublished letters. It's been an honor -- one-sided, as far as I can determine -- and I've benefited by it enormously.

Back in the late 1970s, the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border was a warm and inviting place (and still is, to a certain extent, though no one believes me anymore). I traveled that Third Country sandwiched between two large powers, listening to fronterizos and writing down my impressions. Only one other writer was traveling the frontier at the time, a fellow from The New York Times who invited me to contribute to his newspaper. And so I wrote about the American West for people back East -- very part-time, nothing more than a stringer, but in a region full of life and rough edges.

They asked me to report conventional stories such as court cases, regional angles on national trends, and curious university research, but what assignment editors valued most was stories pitched from the field -- all the more so, I discovered, if they evoked the Old West with dirt roads, dusty boots, and barbed wire.

Their notion of the Southwest was matched by my compulsive attempts to fulfill it, and soon, in deference to my editors, I put a sign over my typewriter: REMEMBER: COWBOYS AMBLE, BUSINESSMEN STRIDE, MARIACHIS STROLL.

One day, I learned about a Yaqui judge who helped a Jewish retirees' club unearth the old Hebrew graveyard at Tombstone's Boothill Graveyard. The rededication ceremony was to take place later that week. This Old West story linked Jews, cowboys and Indians -- a threefer! I breathlessly called the National Desk. Instead of the usual follow-up questions, I was immediately green-lighted with an open-ended word count and a photographer.

Interpreting the Southwest for the East, I tried to give an accurate picture, though my credibility only went so far. To file a story, we'd type or handwrite our copy, then read it over long distance to the recording room in the bowels of the old Times building on West 43rd Street. A battery of transcribers would monitor our calls as we dictated our stories into their machines.

We e-nun-ci-a-ted each word, especially names, which we'd spell out, and always spoke dis-tinc-t-ly, even giving punctuation commands. The transcribers would call back if they had any questions, period, paragraph.

In one story from the frontier's smallest border town, Antelope Wells, N.M. (population: 2), I wrote about the annual cattle crossing that attracted cowboys, livestock brokers, Department of Agriculture inspectors, ranchers and customs officials from both countries.

On my way to file from the nearest pay phone five miles away, I colored the story, describing the strong chuckwagon coffee served to gathering vaqueros at daybreak by "a few Mexican cooks." The next day, I was chagrined to read in the Times that the event attracted "a few Mexican crooks."

I liked interpreting the West for the East, and in chit-chat with an editor one warm day, he asked about the racket in the background. "Oh, that's the swamp cooler," I replied, as matter-of-factly as if I had said it was my dog barking. "The what?" I explained that a swamp cooler worked on the principle of a cool damp towel tossed over the metal grill of an electric fan. This led to a major conference among editors, all of whom were intrigued with this exotic contraption -- should they assign a piece on the poor man's air conditioner? (They did, but not until much later, and then to another contributor.)

One story I wrote included the word campesinos. A copy editor called back, insisting that I blend a translation into the article. I blanketed my exasperation and asked if he would agree that campesino is one of those foreign words that has been absorbed into contemporary English. The line went silent for a moment. "I'll tell you what," he finally said. "I'll learn Spanish if they'll learn Yiddish."

Touché.

One morning, the phone rang at 7 o'clock, usually a warning that someone on the East Coast didn't understand time zones. It was an editor at Esquire who, after describing a story he wanted pursued in Texas, asked if I would, and I believe these were his exact words, "mosey on over to Houston." I informed him that if we both started moseying at the same time, he'd likely mosey into Houston before me.

The rhythm of the Southwest, its natural continuity and occasional brute force -- I suppose that's what keeps me here. I tried to move away. Twice: once to the San Francisco Bay area, and another time to Austin, Texas. Neither venture lasted more than six months. Both times, I maintained my post office box in Tucson. I knew.

Thornton Wilder lived in Southern Arizona at various stages of his life, once in Tucson in the mid-1930s, just weeks after Our Town had opened on Broadway. One early summer day, he was asked how he liked his temporary home. "I like it very much," he answered, then tempered his reply. "There are three disadvantages, two of which would be curable. I miss a great library to browse in. I miss great music. And I came at the wrong time of year."

The library problem and lack of great music have both been cured, but not Wilder's third disadvantage. In more than four decades of living here, from my first arrival one August, I've never grown accustomed to the unrelenting heat of the summer, never liked it, and annually grumble that this summer will be the last one I spend here.

The sun bores a hole through your skull until it singes the synapses in your brain and renders you powerless and stupid. Like Thornton Wilder, I came at the wrong time of the year.

The rest of the year, I need the desert. Not all the time, please, but inhaling a good whiff of it now and then keeps the lungs satisfied and reminds me that I'm not too far from the dread unknown. I need the border for its anarchic sense of reality. I need Bisbee, population 6,800, for the stumbling satisfaction it conveys. I'd like a good river and more green, but then it wouldn't be the desert Southwest.

[Tom Miller's 10 books include Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba, and The Panama Hat Trail. He has previously written for The Rag Blog about Phil Ochs, Don Quixote, and Jerry Rubin. Read more articles by Tom Miller on The Rag Blog.]

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LITERATURE / 'Punto Final' : 'Adios' to Monsivais and Saramago

Carlos Monsivais (top), and Jose Saramago. Photos from el idiota de la familia, top, and La Nousfera.
Left writers as endangered species:
Adios to Carlos Monsivais and Jose Saramago

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / July 3, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- Jose Saramago and Carlos Monsivais, two writers who shared an enthusiasm for popular struggle and a mutual disaffection with the Catholic Church, were buried a few Sundays ago amidst tumultuous public acclaim.

Saramago, the first writer in the Portuguese language to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, drew tens of thousands of mourners in Lisbon, as did Monsivais in his beloved Mexico City, a megalopolis whose foibles he chronicled for a half a century.

Although the two writers held much in common -- they were both writers of conviction and commitment, Quijotes who tilted at the windmills of power -- they were hardly peas in a pod.

Immaculately dressed even when visiting tropical jungles, Saramago was tall and almost gaunt -- only a profound sadness saved him from generalized dourness. Monsi, as he was universally pet-named around here, was short and bumptious and rumpled. So far as can be determined, Monsivais was never photographed wearing a necktie.

If one were casting them for a play it would have to be Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot with Saramago in the role of Vladimir (played by the master character actor E.G. Marshall in the original Broadway production) and Estragon, portrayed by the comic Bert Lahr, "the Cowardly Lion," both of them stranded at a crossroads in time pondering Godot's arrival or fretful that he (she?) may have passed by before they even got there.

Saramago was not even his name. Like his father, he was a Souza, born in 1922 in the impoverished Portuguese farming town of Azingha. As the writer lovingly recalled it in The Small Memories, his father had acquired the nickname of "Saramago," a wild radish with which poor farmers fed the bellies of their families when times were tough on the land which they always were, and when the writer's father went to City Hall to register the birth of his new son, town officials ascribed him the surname of Saramago. It fit.

Jose Saramago grew like dry grass, bereft and barefoot. There were no books in his home and no Nobel in his future. His first novel with the flaming title of Tierra de Pecado ("Land Of Sin") appeared in the post-World War II rush and achieved little notoriety. He did not publish again for 30 years and then inexplicably exploded, producing 32 volumes in the two decades he had left on earth.

The Year of The Death of Ricardo Reis, which put him on the literary map in 1985, is in fact his only screed in which he confronts the Salazar dictatorship that kept Portugal in chains from 1926 through 1974, the longest ruling tyranny in Europe, eventually overthrown in the Revolution of Los Claveles ("The Carnations").

For decades, Saramago was a militant of the clandestine Portuguese Communist Party, often blacklisted and dodging Salazar's secret police. But Jose Saramago had little taste for ideological palaver, considering himself an "hormonal communist," an identity he fiercely maintained until he breathed his last at 87 June 18th in Lanzarote, the Canary Islands, where he lived blissfully with his translator and collaborator Pilar del Rio in self-imposed exile.

Saramago abandoned Portugal in a moment of pique after a right-wing government, at the behest of the Catholic Church (which despised the writer) refused to nominate his Gospel According To Jesus Christ for an important European literary prize. In Saramago's Gospel, Jesus, in the throes of the Crucifixion, denounces God's crimes against the people.

The volume earned Saramago eternal damnation by the Catholic hierarchy, which never wearied of describing the writer as "a noxious weed who has placed himself in the wheat fields of the Evangelization." The Church, the Nobelist complained, had even denied him the right to speak with god -- even if he believed god did not exist.

Similarly, Carlos Monsivais was deemed an acute thorn in the side of the Mexican Church and the pompous, all-powerful Cardinal of Mexico City Norberto Rivera whom he lampooned without mercy. Raised in a Protestant family, Monsi suffered the brunt of Catholic intolerance and never missed a chance to strip bare the Church's fork-tongued moral message.

"I am a communist everywhere but in Mexico, I am a Zapatista," Jose Saramago proclaimed with pride when he touched down here in 1998, his Nobel Year. The Portuguese laureate won the hearts of many Mexicans when he traveled twice to Chiapas to meet with the Zapatista rebels in defiance of President Ernesto Zedillo who threatened the writer's arrest and deportation under Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution that provides for the removal of any non-Mexican the president deems "inconvenient."

"If we don't go to where the pain and the indignation are, we are not alive," Saramago protested. "We are compelled to go to Chiapas, the center of the pain, and look into the eyes of the Indians, the survivors of all the massacres of history." When stopped by soldiers at a roadblock in Chenalho, Saramago stood tall: "I am going to visit the Zapatistas. It my right and my obligation."

Accompanied by Monsivais, Saramago canoodled with Subcomandante Marcos and visited the village of Acteal soon after 45 Tzotzil Indians had been massacred by paramilitaries trained and armed by the Mexican army. As he hunkered down with the farmers to hear the stories of their Via Cruces, his long, grave face darkened and Saramago's kindly features seemed to absorb all the pain of the people.

In 2001, the Nobelist returned to Mexico to welcome Marcos and the Comandancia of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EXLN) to the capitol. As the huge Zocalo plaza filled with "the people the color of the earth," Saramago, a kerchief of solidarity knotted around his throat, mounted to the roof of Mexico City City Hall to display his jubilation. But later, the writer would chastise Marcos for his poison pen attacks on Spanish judge Baltazar Garzon.

Jose Saramago stood with the wretched of Fanon's earth, always at the ready to express his solidarity with those the rulers single out for punishment, whether it be the Saharan activist Aminatu Haidar, starving herself to death at the Tenerife airport because Moroccan authorities would not let her return to her homeland (his final political act) or with the Palestinian people -- Saramago was designated persona non grata in Israel after decrying the treatment the Zionists inflicted on the Palestinians as a holocaust of the dimensions the Jews had suffered under the Nazis.

Carlos Monsivais, an indefatigueable "cronista" of pop culture and its intersection with social struggle, broke into the business as a teenage participant in the watershed 1968 student strike at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) in which hundreds were slaughtered by the military in the days before the Olympic Games were to begin. Along with his longtime co-conspirator Elena Poniatowska's Noche De Tlatelolco, Monsi's Dias De Guardar ("Days To Treasure" - 1971) denounced this act of genocide before the world.

Carlos Monsivais's identification with the barrios and colonias of this monstrous metropolis (he himself lived practically all of his life in the San Simon barrio of the working class Portales Colonia) was the truth serum that validated his chronicles of civil society. In his No Sin Nosotros ("Not Without Us") Monsi's words animated the civic uprising that emerged from the ashes of the 1985 8.1 killer earthquake that felled tens of thousands here.

Carlos Monsivais was a self-confessed addict of "lost causes" (a Mexico City university once honored him with a Doctorus of Lost Causes), a Quijote-like figment who embraced every social movement to flex its fist from the 1959 railroad workers strike to gay liberation.

A disciplined, stylish writer whose baroque syntax sometimes confounded critics, Monsivais authored 50 books in 50 years, many defending popular culture against the MacDonaldization of post-NAFTA Mexico -- read his final judgment in the just-published Apocalipstick. Untranslated and virtually untranslatable because his chronicles are so focused on the little things, Monsivais remains largely ignored north of the border.

Like Saramago, Monsi was fascinated by the Zapatista rebellion, penning the prologues to five volumes of EZLN documents but later quarreled with Marcos over the Sup's gung-ho support for "ultras" who took over the 1999-2000 UNAM strike.

Although once a member of the Young Communist League, Monsi was mostly a Groucho Marxist. Unlike his Portuguese comrade, Monsivais, a critic of the cult of Fidel and Che, was not an aficionado of the Cuban revolution. Instead he walked the twisty walk of Mexican social democrats like Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in whose foiled 1988 presidential campaign he immersed himself.

Monsi often spoke his truth from the podiums during Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's 2006 bid for the presidency, thwarted by Felipe Calderon and the right-wing PAN in the most fraud-mired Mexican election yet. Monsi later split with AMLO, decrying the inconveniences forced upon motorists during the left candidate's three-week occupation of Reforma Boulevard.

Carlos Monsivais neither owned nor drove an automobile.

One of the few writers with face recognition on the streets of the city (dixit poet and pal Jose Emilio Pacheco), the sudden demise of Monsivais's weekly assemblage of the absurdist stupidities of Mexico's political class, "Por Mi Madre, Bohemios" (a poem his mother loved), will leave a profound pothole in the street life of Mexican journalism.

Carlos Monsivais died young enough to have been my contemporary (indeed, I was six weeks' his senior) from pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that turns one's lungs to cardboard. The cause of death is attributed to (a) Mexico City's unbreathable air; (b) Monsi's 20 beloved cats, one of whom once pissed on the world's richest man Carlos Slim (Monsi's family claims the cats killed him); (c) the dust and spores of antiquarian books for which the writer had an unquenchable Jones. Monsi did not smoke or drink anything more damaging to his health than jeroboams of Coca Cola.

Funerals and wakes with the "corpus presente" are organized quickly in Latin America. The climate contributes to quick spoilage and death is such a familiar feature of everyday life that when someone passes, everyone knows just what to do.

Hours after Monsi had gasped his last June 19th, friends and admirers gathered at the Museum of the City. "Viva Monsis!" echoed through the gloomy old building and white flowers showered his coffin. Mariachis tootled his favorite "rancheras" and "boleros" and writers reminisced into the dawn about their Monsi connection. Here's mine:

A year or so after the great Mexico City earthquake that had brought me back here, I jumped into a car with Carlos Monsivais, Hector Garcia, the consummate photographer of social strife in Mexico, and Feliciano Bejar, an eccentric sculptor, bon vivant, and early environmentalist.

We were headed to Veracruz to stop the start-up of Laguna Verde, Mexico's first and last thermo nuclear power plant. For five hours, the three artists meticulously reviewed every cantina "de mala muerte" (dive) in Mexico City, a virtual journey through the underbelly of this urban jungle I had only recently settled in.

Down in Jalapa Veracruz, Monsi schooled me in the ordering of a "Tampiquena", a slab of thin-sliced beef with intricate accessories that is a staple of northern Veracruz cuisine. I still can't lunch on a tampiquena without wondering if Monsi would approve.

Over the years, I consulted with the writer frequently on the social implications of the "damnificado" (earthquake victims') movement. We shared a mutual fascination for popular anti-heroes, masked wrestlers, and the narco lord Rafael Caro Quintero who once offered to pay off Mexico's $100 billion buck foreign debt.

In August 1994, we were both trapped beneath a sagging tent after a monumental rainstorm had ended the Zapatistas' Democratic National Convention deep in the Lacandon jungle. Herded into the only wooden structure on the premises, a rustic library filled with the books of Monsivais and Poniatowska, Carlos fell flat on his face and twisted his ankle painfully. When we finally raised him from the deepening muck, he was plastered with mud from scalp to socks "just like at Avandaro" (Mexico's Woodstock) he giggled.

Carlos Monsivais was blessed with peripheral vision -- "his chronicles put the marginal in the center" commented Salvador Novo, the chronicler of Mexico City life in whose footsteps young Monsi eagerly followed. Carlos Monsivais was a collector of things and people whose personal coterie included the likes of Tongolele, a pseudo Polynesian drum dancer (she was born Yolanda Montes in San Francisco), the roly-poly ranchera idol Juan Gabriel, aging sex kitten Gloria Trevi, and the hardcore feminist torch singers Chavela Vargas and Paquita La del Barrio ("Rata De Dos Patas").

An obsessive bibliophile and tchotchke collector, Monsi prowled the flea markets of La Merced and the Lagunilla for political and pop culture memorabilia and when his Colonia Portales' home became so cluttered with exotic bric-a-brac, he opened a museum, "El Museo del Estanquillo" (a sort of neighborhood general store), in a handsome colonial building just down the street from my rooms in the old quarter of the city.

The Estanquillo is now filled with artifacts like Mexican lottery cards, Diego Rivera's "Dream of Sunday on the Alameda" entirely fashioned from toothpicks, Spencer Tunick's photos of 17,000 naked chilangos (Mexico City residents), comic books featuring the down-at-the-heels Family Burron, Zapatista dolls, facsimile Adelitas (women soldiers in the Mexican revolution), the words to popular corridos (ballads), and reportedly an x-ray of Emiliano Zapata's skull. Dead or alive, Monsi continues to thrive just down Isabel la Catolica Street.

Although Carlos Monsivais was an ardent crusader for gay, lesbian, and transgender rights, he himself was barely out of the closet, never publicly professing his sexual preferences. Nonetheless, he was an apostle of the nation's gay liberation movement and at the official state lying-in under the rotunda at the Bellas Artes fine arts palace, when Calderon's cultural czarina Consuelo Saizar draped a Mexican flag over Monsi's bier, his disciples laid the rainbow flag representing sexual diversity on top of it, inciting momentary scandal.

The incident recalled Frida Kahlo's farewell in this same spot in 1954 when the painter's devotees rolled out a red flag with an embossed hammer and sickle upon it to the horror of Mexico's then toxically anti-communist president (Monsi had been a witness).

Felipe Calderon himself failed to attend Carlos Monsivais's funeral, perhaps because his nemesis Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was programmed to appear at the same hour. At the marking of Frida's centennial three years ago, Lopez Obrador's supporters chased the neophyte president across the esplanade of Bellas Artes, shouting "Frida Belongs To The Left!" and necessitating military intervention.

Inside the rococo palace, the crowd chanted Monsi's name and clenched fists shot up from wall to wall - Benito Juarez's theme song "La Paloma" replaced "The Internationale." When it was suggested that Monsivais be carried off to lie in state in the great Zocalo plaza where dozens of members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union were in the 60th day of a hunger strike protesting Calderon's privatization of electricity generation, Saizar and Education Secretary Alfonso Lujambio quickly loaded the writer's corpse into a hearse and drove it non-stop to the incineration ovens at the Spanish Cemetery.

The next noon at a celebration of Monsivais's life mounted by the capitol's left government, Poniatowska poignantly asked how the city would survive without its cronista? To add a kitsch touch to the ceremonials that certainly would have tickled Monsi's funny bone, dozens of Hari Krishnas appeared on the steps of the Theater of the City, to chant and to dance for the writer's lively spirit.

Neither Jose Saramago nor Carlos Monsivais were much invested in the afterlife. "First you are here and then you are not," the Portuguese Nobelist considered. When queried about what came next, Saramago described the process as "Nada. Punto." ("Nothing. Period.")

Saramago and Monsivais were joined in death by another of Mexico's premium left writers, Carlos Montemayor, whose ashes were stashed in his native Parral Chihuahua, Pancho Villa's one-time place of rest, on the same Sunday (June 20th) that tens of thousands saw off his contemporaries in Mexico City and Lisbon.

Montemayor's novels of Mexico's guerrilla movements, including his masterpiece War In Paradise, remain achingly pertinent today. The Chihuahua writer's analysis of the Zapatista struggle is perhaps the most penetrating study of that indigenous uprising.

Fluent in dozens of native languages, Montemayor translated Indian poets from all over Latin America and Mexico in addition to publishing translations of Sephardic literature, and the works of Virgil, Sappho, and the Carmina Burana (he performed as an operatic tenor). Carlos Montemayor's passing along with Saramago and Monsivais underscores just how endangered a species left writers have become in this age of scoundrels, hacks, and Pharisees.

[John Ross has lived in Mexico City for the past quarter of a century. His El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City ("gritty and pulsating" -- the New York Post) describes this difficult passage. You can register your complaints and/or admiration at johnross@igc.org.]

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Dick J. Reavis : Something Missing at Texas Writers' Festival?

"The Texican." Painting © Mike Aston /
mikeastonart.com .
Artaud and Arizona:
Tempest at Texas Observer's writers' fest

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / May 5, 2010

This weekend a startling email come to my inbox and to those of others who are identified with journalism in Texas. Its title line read, “To Liberal Activists Who Happen to be Latina/o/s.” Though I don’t fit either the Liberal or Latino categories, being a nosy former reporter, I read what its poster, antonioartaud@grandecom.net, had to say.

“The revered journal of Texas liberal politics The Texas Observer is having a writer’s festival,” its opening blandly began. “Guess what -- they forgot to invite any Tejana /o/s and African Americans. Impossible, you say. Que fue eso? Did we forget to show our papers? How do we prove we’re Texans too?

“And to make matters worse, they’re in cahoots with Texas Monthly,” Artaud continued. “Almost all the writers invited are either the editor of Texas Monthly or former/present Texas Monthly writers. Yes, the same magazine that has ignored us for over 25 years as personas non grata in their Texas.”

The post closed with an exhortation and a warning: “Cancel your subscription, write a letter, protest the event at Scholz Biergarten, but above all, consider yourself on notice.”

I am told that the author of the post, Antonio Artaud, is a student of journalism at a college in San Antonio. His sentiment was, to use an oldster’s term an Anglo journalist friend applied: “Right on!” Artaud knows of what he speaks -- and what he pointed to is a scandal.

Monday Artaud followed with a post containing messages of support from, among others, the novelists Dagoberto Gilb of San Marcos and the all-around San Antonio wordsmith, Gregg Barrios (who also wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin). Something was building. “Latina/o/s” were, for the moment anyway, rising to protest against business as usual in the circles of Texas journalism.

The hubbub died late Monday or early Tuesday when Artaud sent a third post, announcing that the Observer had agreed to include a Latino writers panel and issue an apology. Better late than never, I suppose. But as always in American history, it appears that no arrangement was made to include blacks.

Before the hubbub died, I did some thinking. Placing myself in the shoes of the editors of the Observer and TM, I asked what might be done to permanently integrate those publications without fundamentally altering anything.

I’d have canceled the Writers’ Festival (or “writers’ festival,” as the Observer’s announcement so graphically put it.) I’d have rescheduled it and expanded its panel to include -- two or three New York Puerto Ricans or Dominicans! After all, Nuyoriqueños are as much Latinos as Mexican-Americans, and many of them are as African-American as anybody in the United States.

If this idea doesn’t make sense, it should: the Texas nonfiction establishment has already applied the same logic to Anglo Texans.

I may get some of the facts wrong because I’ve been outside of Texas for six years, but to the best of my knowledge, the editors of the daily newspapers in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio are white non-Texans. The editors of The Texas Observer and Texas Monthly, Bob Moser and Jake Silverstein, fit the same category, even though the general report is that they’ve improved those publications.

I am less sure about the Observer, but at the Monthly, the tally is plain: the magazine has had four editors, only the first of whom was a Texan. My observations, when I was a journalist in Texas, were that at both dailies and elite magazines in Texas, only about half of the editorial staffers were Texans before they became reporters in Texas.

The Observer and the Monthly are, of course, by now “old media.” The most contemporary entry into the ranks of elite Texas journalism is the online daily, The Texas Tribune. I would note that its first and only editor, Evan Smith, is from the city of New York.

A few years ago I put together a still-unpublished statistical study of the Monthly which showed that Texans, 95 percent of the editorial staff at the magazine’s outset, became a minority during the ‘80s, and stabilized at about half during the ‘90s. The Monthly has never hired a Mexican-American staff writer and its one African-American reporter vanished within months of his engagement.

None of this should surprise anyone, I suppose. It is accepted wisdom among educated Americans today that class and regional differences don’t count for anything: we live in a placeless, classless meritocracy, people believe.

When Texas Monthly, as today, calls itself the “National Magazine of Texas” it in no way means to imply that it is the magazine of a state which sometimes imagines itself a nation. Instead, it is a magazine of national quality -- which in the publishing world, means “as good as what’s published in New York” -- that, incidentally, happens to be published in Texas.

The sensibilities of the locale mean nothing, the standard of reporting means everything. Journalism is an acultural scientific product, disconnected to land, the past, and tradition. It produces sterile news, cleansed of the smell of the dirt from which it came.

With that as the accepted wisdom, it’s clearly heresy to bring even ethnicity, as Arnaud did, into the equation. Meritocracy knows no gradations, so what difference can it make that the editor of the Tribune is from New York, the editor of the Monthly from California and the editor of the Observer from North Carolina?

I dissent from the accepted view for reasons that are as inchoate and instinctual as sometimes studied and glib. Suspicions haunt me, the latest of them because of the controversy over Mexican immigration in Arizona.

Several years ago Texas was the home to two or three border-control militias, just as Arizona was. I looked into the Texas outfits and found that even though they were led by small-time ranchers whose spreads were near the border, those ranchers -- and most of their lieutenants -- were recent arrivals from the rural Midwest.

My suspicions and speculations tell me that, Arizona being the retirement destination of the Midwest, as Florida is for New York, Arizona’s anti-Mexican hysteria is probably traceable to the state’s non-natives. In a way, it comes naturally to them: Mexico is as foreign to rural
Midwesterners as Iraq is to most Texans.

Anglo, Latino, and African-American natives of the frontera alike have traditionally regarded immigration restrictions as a joke, though in recent years they have become a real annoyance. But inlanders tend to see border walls, passport requirements, and crossing-bridge shakedowns as dignified embodiments of American law.

As reactionary as Texas may otherwise be, its last president, the Islamophobic George W. Bush, made an honest attempt at humanizing immigration law, and the state’s current governor, Rick Perry -- a lifetime member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, no less! -- has said that Arizona’s anti-Mexican ethnocentrism is not for him or his state.

I can find no other factor that uniquely explains the “progressive” character of the Bush and Perry stand except this: growing up even as Anglos in Texas, their attitudes towards Mexico and its descendants took a better-than-American form. Neither regards immigration as a merely legal or economic -- or racial -- issue, as most Americans do.

According to the theory of meritocracy common to the American empire, success and placement depend, not upon the question of national or regional origin, but instead upon one’s educational credentials. Other differences between Americans have no place in this scheme.

This is why state-supported universities, for example, conduct national talent searches for almost all faculty jobs. The same placelessness has been at bottom of the selection of editors and writers for the Monthly and the Observer and probably, the Tribune as well. If in Texas we hire editors and journalists who are often non-Texans, according to meritocratic ideology, it must be because competent writers are hard to come by in Texas; if we also wind up with editors and writers who are not Mexican-American or black, why would the same conclusion not apply? The theory that marginalizes Anglo Texans downgrades all Texans, Latinos and African-Americans as well.

In his original posting, Artaud attached a copy of the Observer’s announcement of its bash. I counted 13 panelists. Perhaps because I have been away, I recognized the names of only seven of them, among them one writer from the city of New York. I wondered to myself, “how many of these Texas writers are really Texans?” I do not know the answer yet, but my guess is that it’s more than one. Were the same sort of celebration being staged in New York, I do not believe that a single paisano would be on the billing; more than one -- certainly not! Yet Texas is today more populous than New York.

The Observer, in deciding to heed Artaud’s complaint, at least in regard to Latinos, may have decided at long last to remedy its lack of sincerity and vision -- for a month or two, anyway. But the notion that the self-expression of Texas should be the affair of non-Texans is only an extension of the otherwise-hidden hegemony which skin color makes plain.

Today I was thinking that, perhaps because I’ve been called a “horse’s ass” more than once, I should feel a little bit sorry for horses as well. In the eyes of most of them, I’ll wager, all equine magazines should be written and published -- by equines, not by their riders!

Horse sense tells me that in Texas, whites are riding on the back of a culture that has always included Mexican-Americans and African-Americans, and white non-Texans are riding on the back of the cultural mix that only Texans, of any color or ethnicity, fully appreciate or understand.

[Dick J. Reavis is a former staffer at the Moore County News, The Texas Observer, Texas Monthly, the San Antonio Light, the Dallas Observer, Texas Parks & Wildlife Magazine, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the San Antonio Express-News. He also wrote for The Rag in Austin in the Sixties. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com.]

Antonio Artaud passed along this letter, sent to The Texas Observer by UT professor Emilio Zamora:

Editors,

I published a book on Mexicans and the Texas home front with Texas A&M Press and co-edited an anthology on Latinos and Latinas in WWI with UT Press, both in 2009. I have received two awards for the first book from the Texas State Historical Association and the Institute of Texas Letters. Despite this, I was not invited to participate in your writers' festival. This is not the first time that public programs on new books have slighted me, but I have recently discovered that this time you have also overlooked other recently published authors of Latino/a descent. You may have included one of these noted authors, Belinda Acosta, but only after she pointed out the glaring problem.

I should add that Latino and Latina writers are also usually absent from the pages of The Observer and this is not necessarily due to our failure to submit materials to you. A case in point is Professor Angela Valenzuela's excellent review of Avatar which she submitted on February 5, 2010. You have not published the piece nor have you even sent her a note acknowledging her submission.

I cannot help but think that the problem of under-representation and erasure of major portions of U.S. and Texas history (women, minorities, labor, civil rights, for example) in our public school curriculum extends far beyond the Texas State Board of Education. Isn't it really a sorry shame that we should be talking like this among ourselves when major battles for equal rights (with the State Board of Education, for instance) require our undivided attention.

Emilio Zamora, Professor
Department of History
University of Texas at Austin

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Gregg Barrios: Human Mother Beasts : Tales from Young Souls

Image from the San Antonio Current.
Human mother beasts:
Tales from the young souls
In San Antonio's Southton

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / March 2, 2010

“Rid the streets of the poet / to whom the doors are locked.”

There is a wise dicho in Spanish: Cada cabeza es un mundo. Every individual is unique in this world.

When Gemini Ink’s Writers in Communities asked me to facilitate and teach a poetry writing class last fall, I was humbled to be part of this innovative program that sends professional writers into diverse settings to work with teens to develop their own unique voices through oral traditions, reading, and creative writing.

The workshop was open to incarcerated youth at the Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center, a residential program for adjudicated Bexar County offenders known to generations of San Antonio youth as Southton. In the 1950s its residents included a teenage Fred Gomez Carrasco; today, most of its young offenders, ages 12-17, face charges ranging from possession and assault to robbery and truancy. The average length of stay is nine months to a year.

"Yo Soy -- I Am" was a four-month poetry workshop. The dozen residents selected to participate in the workshop, mostly young men, came from Mexican-American and African-American backgrounds, from San Antonio and a few from post-Katrina New Orleans.

They tested me as I did them, asking about my previous work and listening to my own poetry. And while the presence of a state-mandated security officer might have stifled an open flow of ideas and the building of trust, by the third session, it was a non-issue.

My goal was to use identity as a springboard to find individual voice: What’s your name? What does an ID say about your background? Is your given name the one you prefer? Would you change any of these?

The first evening I used Shirley Ellis’s classic pop ditty, “The Name Game,” with its interactive entreaty to rhyme one’s name to the lyrics of the song: “I betcha I can make a rhyme out of anybody’s name.” The old-school hit proved daunting until they realized its rhyme and reason shares roots with the more familiar world of rap and hip-hop.

They later wrote prose about their definition of success. To get them to read it aloud, I used the instrumental track from hip-hop artist Drake’s “Successful.” By validating their music with poetry, their definition of poetry began to change and offer new possibilities. Their prose converted itself into vibrant poetry, and the floodgates opened.

The group’s dedication to succeed was more than evident. Our class was held in the early evening after a full day of regular classes, counseling, and other requirements. We held double sessions on school holidays -- even during the Thanksgiving weekend

Doing time is harder for teens, yet some of our greatest literature has come out of prisons. Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, the first modern novel, in jail. In recent times, other dissidents and outsiders have written poetry, memoirs, and essays while imprisoned, from George Jackson and Angela Davis in the 1960s to raulrsalinas and Jimmy Santiago Baca in the ’70s.

Each generation picks its literary heroes, and certainly the late Tupac Shakur would be high on that list today; however, it wasn’t until my students read his book of poetry, The Rose That Grew From Concrete, that they encountered the sensitive and tender side of the gangster rapper. They considered the romantic poet John Keats “a playah,” and judged the rhyming quips of the young Cassius Clay as “clowning.”

They also found two unlikely poetic heroes: Maya Angelou and Bob Dylan. Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings brought a shock of recognition, and her description of how she changed her name from Marguerite Johnson to Maya elicited smiles. Watching the young Bob Dylan singing “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in D.A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back [sic] took on special significance once we discussed its rebellious intent.

They were mesmerized as “the old hippie” beat poet Alan Ginsberg passes the torch to a new generation in the film’s opening. Later, they aped Dylan as they recited their own poems while flipping flashcards that often contained words within words: one card labeled “REVOLUTION” contained the italicized word LOVE.

They chose to learn sonnets instead of “kid stuff” haiku. They wrote 14-line poems in the style of Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Each measured the iambic and labeled the rhyme scheme. One evening was spent in deep discussion about why a line like “and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death” was so dark, beautiful, and inspirational.

Each class began with a reading from a poet’s work. After hearing poems by Cynthia Harper and José Montalvo and learning both poets were from San Antonio and deceased, they felt an immediate bond, asking how old they were and how they died. And then I realized that this experience was the first time they had heard a brown or black voice express itself in poetry and verse. Whether it was Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” or Jimmy Santiago Baca lamenting the loss of 10 years of poems in a fire, these young people were deeply moved. They understood what it means to be young, gifted, and a poet.

Each session ended with a recitation of the students’ work. I was amazed by the energy and pride with which they tested new material, hoping for approval and constructive feedback. One young woman sang a cappella -- lyric poetry if you will. Homer would have been proud.

When the time came to cull and edit their best work, most of the students were responsive to making their poetry leaner and stronger; others vigorously defended a certain word, a phrase, or a title: “I’d rather it be untitled, that way the reader can give it their own title,” or “That’s the word, the expression and the spelling we use” in our barrio, in the Ninth Ward.

Were we successful? The answer lies in the creative harvest from the workshop: a chapbook and a public reading. You may recognize the voice of your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters, your homies, your brave young poets.

When they return to their home schools, they may find that arts education programs have fallen to budget cuts and an emphasis on achieving higher test scores. Is it any wonder that dropout rates in San Antonio are at an all-time high? For some of these writers, their poetry and prose will grow and mature, for others this may be the first and only time they commit their minds and souls to verse. I pray not. But most important is the realization that they have the option to use their passions and experiences in nonviolent and creative ways and to give rise to a new voice filled with power and beauty.

[San Antonio poet, playwright, and journalist Gregg Barrios is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. Gregg wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin. This article was also published in the San Antonio Current.]

Yo soy — I am

A few of the poems that will be published by Gemini Ink in March in the chapbook Push and Pull: Poetry by Residents of the Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center. Copies can be purchased at Gemini Ink, or online at geminiink.org, for $10. Proceeds support Gemini’s Writers in Communities program.

Mother Courage by Taylor S.

It takes sacrifice, fear for your life
And love to do what you did
Something I would not
Have been able to do.
You were fading in front of me
Why didn’t you let go?
Dying each night and day
Brought me to tears.
Damned nurses and doctors heedless
They knew you were very ill
You were quivering deathlike
To the point of no return.
Sacrificing your life for my sister Asia
Just to see her grow up and smile
You are phenomenally courageous
It could have taken you the deathbed.
It takes sacrifice, fear for your life
And love to do what you did
Something I would not
Have been able to do.
Mom, I love you.

Brown Threat 2 Society by Alejandro V.

A menace to society and a vago from the hood
And porque my skin is brown
People assume I’m up to no good
They don’t feel safe when I’m around
They look down on me cuando hablo Espanglish
A bloodthirsty descendant of the Aztecs
Porque I don’t speak the “proper” language
I speak what’s known as Tex-Mex
Because I come from the Deep South
And have aggressive attitude towards people
But in my life, there’s been nothing to smile about
It’s full of sin, struggles, and evil
All they show is resentment and fear
But if you look closely into my eyes
You’ll see the pain from all those troubled years
I disguise it with black shades in daylight
And at night wash it away with a case of beers
But still at times in the still of the night
Alone in the dark I fight away tears
Pero no me entiendes, you can’t understand
When the odds are against you, how can you prosper?
When during childhood you become a man
And after that deranged into a monster
This is for all my misunderstood brothers
Who won’t settle for minimum wages
Who are a danger to themselves and others
For all the carnales confined up in cages.

Untitled by Erick M.

Dreams deserted burnt the surface
Yet find that silence is
Picture perfect sinner’s torment
A mind divine as this.
I try with rhyme defining life
A criminal unraveling
The twine of mind confined in time
Living with insanity
Damnation by humanity
Cold conviction of my spirit
Society denying my plea
Bold nonfiction though, why hear it?
Is how they think and so they chose
I guess to simply not then
Rid the streets of the poet
To whom the doors are locked
Many times I’ve been incarcerated
Awoke in straight jacket hospitals
But kept determination and inspiration
Despite of all these obstacles
Do you know what it’s like
To pray until you fall asleep?
Handcuffs tearing your flesh
And shackles on your feet?
I’m a son; I’m a brother;
I’m a lover; and future father too
But to the law and the judges
I’m nothing — but a fucking monster!

Pursuit by Trevon M.

Pursuit is just the act of pursuing
Pursuing is just the verb of pursue
Pursue is just the noun of capture
And capture is what I do
My pursuit is becoming a rapper
Pursuit on gaining knowledge
Pursuit on also gaining intellect
Pursuit on getting my prey
My prey is knowledge and paper
I put those two together to express
Through writing utensils and paper
Pursue the thing I do best
Pursue my dream through all the pain
All the confusion and the sorrow
I strive to succeed I strive to be better
I persist on pursuing while I pursue

Human Mother Beasts by Bryan S.

Elegant beasts impregnated against their will
For purebred babies made to kill Monstrous
Moms distorted souls locked in battle
Overused like a horse and saddle
Owners watch and get their kicks
As these fierce moms get nicked and bit
If their necks are reached they may lose their litter
May lose their lives as they struggle to survive
Their souls begin to lock like push and pull
Give and take their legs start to shake
Some of these beasts’ mate is their brother
So to the litter its aunt and its mother
A mother’s love is like no other
Can you feel it as you get smothered?
Never doubt the pain of your mother
To give more than they have
And show you their love
So take these absurd words
As we live with the women we love
We as people are nothing more
Than the beasts we domesticate

FALLING by Savannah F.

It’s just so hard to make any sense and less easy to conceive
What I have to do with these questions still living in mystery
Every word you said wasn’t worth it there will be no fighting
When shall it be exciting again?
I’m stuck not knowing what is the matter
It is indifference through circumstances
This rage is starting once again
And fate still isn’t finished with me
Or does it want to escape the truth again?
I am reaching in all my conflictions
My thoughts are polluted now
Why can’t I stop and fade away
And remove this weight of sorrow
Love, I’m not falling face down again.

To my Dark Side by Michael P.

Why do you hold me back?
Is it cuz I’m Mexican and a little black?
But I don’t care what the reason
Mexican blood is what I’m bleeding
You can call what you believe
I know I can achieve anything
As long as you stay away
I believe I’m going to pay
For my sins that I’ve done
There’s no place to run or hide
Because deep down inside
I know I can become something
I’m a human being
That’s the opposite of what I feel
Because I feel like a caged animal
Waiting to be killed is no thrill
It gives me a creepy chill
I’m not who you think I am
I’m not Mexican but I’m a Mexi-can
And I’m a super powerful android
That refuses and cannot be destroyed
The darkness is just a decoy
For me to deploy
My good side
Not the hood side
But the real person
The one that’s really hurting
I’m working for the right side
You know that light side
Not the dark night side
To my dark side,
I’m on the wrong side
You know I’m going to ride
When my good and evil collide
So watch as I ignite
The words that I recite

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Book Ends : Writers Salinger and Zinn Made a Difference

"The Man in the Books," by Andre Martins de Barros / Found Shit.
Two writers who changed us:
J. D. Salinger and Howard Zinn

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / January 29, 2010

It is impossible to predict whose writing will become successful. For J. D. Salinger, it was the fact that his stories, especially Catcher in the Rye, were so perfectly poised between Huckleberry Finn and On the Road. Jack Kerouac safe for English class, without the profanity, drugs, homophilia. Samuel Clemens writing in a kid’s vernacular from the modern alienated age. In fact who but J.D Salinger created the niche for alienation to begin with?

(Disclaimer) I was Holden Caulfield. I was expelled from Prep School in 1966, and with no one willing to come get me, bussed back and dallied in Boston with my skis and everything. A few months later I ran off to San Franscisco, getting as far as Concord, Mass. To say that I lived and breathed The Catcher in the Rye would be another one of those big understatements. I even spend most of my remaining imaginary life trying to save mythical children from growing up. Peter Pan, Huck Finn, Dean Moriarty, Ken Kesey.... Holden Caulfield.

But J.D. Salinger gave up on fame, preferring to live in seclusion in New Hampshire. So I’m still following the leader somehow, though I confess some of Salinger’s writing, especially Franny and Zooey, was just a little too New York precious for my taste. Closer to the Woody Allen problem. J. D. Salinger lived to be 91 years old because he walked away from fame and fortune. Another lesson perhaps?

Another writer who defied the odds to become popular and -- better than that -- influential was Howard Zinn. Mr. Zinn once gave a lecture that I attended while I was at Cambridge School of Weston (after my Holden Caulfield period). The subject of the informal talk was the Vietnam War. I had never before heard an adult deliver such a scathing indictment of the American “authorities.” What a subtle rabble rouser this gentle looking Jewish man really was.

Howard Zinn worked hard to get to college and once he graduated he got a job at a black woman’s college, Spelman. He joined SNCC, the radical black civil rights group, and got fired from Spelman. At Boston University he goaded conservative president John Silber constantly. He went to Hanoi in Vietnam with Reverend Daniel Berrigan during the war. He published as an academic historian but nothing ever matched the effect he had when he put out a book for popular consumption: A People’s History of the United States, in 1980.

Basically everything the official history books left out, or glossed over, A People’s History of the United States became an unofficial textbook for radical families, radical kids and home schoolers all over the USA. Scathing in its attacks on formerly iconic figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, A People’s History sold over two million copies. How valuable was this analysis of American history, unflinchingly critical of the U.S. elites, yet not obviously ideological? Ask ourselves that question nowadays while tea party clowns seem able to float any kind of fantasy accusations into the public discourse. They need to go back and read their Howard Zinn if they want to be radical and rational.

Two writers who managed to move millions. Books, minds, hearts, people. Both in their way accidental successes. Neither particularly ambitious or celebrity minded. J. D. Salinger romanticized the loneliness created by our modern society and Howard Zinn gave us the facts and concepts to reenvision American history from the point of view of it’s victims. Together they gave us the some of the wherewithal to survive the 1960s and the 1980s.

J.D. Salinger passed away in New Hampshire and Howard Zinn passed away in nearby Massachusetts just a little over a year after the passing of his wife Roslyn.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, gentlemen.

[Carl R. Hultberg's grandfather, Rudi Blesh, was a noted jazz critic and music historian, and Carl was raised in that tradition. After spending many years as a music archivist and social activist in New York's Greenwich Village, he now lives in an old abandoned foundry in Danbury, New Hampshire, where he runs the Ragtime Society.]

Also see:

• New Years Day : J. D. Salinger Turns 90 By Charles McGrath / The Rag Blog / December 31, 2008
• People's Historian : The Singular Legacy of Howard Zinn by Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / January 28, 2010
• Other material by and about Howard Zinn on The Rag Blog.

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Author of 'Writing Down the Bones' Visits Austin

Natalie Goldberg and Bookwoman's Susan Post. Photo: Alice Embree.
Natalie Goldberg Visits Austin
By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / April 5, 2009

Natalie Goldberg was in Austin on April Fools’ Day promoting her book, Old Friend from Far Away, The Practice of Writing Memoir. She read and took questions at Temple Beth Israel to a crowd of about one hundred. Austin was the last stop on a national tour before she returned to her home in Santa Fe. She extended her Austin stay to see Leonard Cohen the following night and mentioned that he often refers aspiring songwriters to her books. That’s a formidable endorsement from one word wizard to another.

For two decades, Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones has been part of my life and at the core of writing practice in several of my writing circles. The advice Goldberg imparts to writers is to practice -– to practice through writing prompts and timed exercises -- to practice the way she practices Zen Buddhism -- to get to a place where the editor steps aside and the writing can emerge. Memoir, she says, is the study of memory. It isn’t boring and linear. It is about taste and smell and sound.

She reminds us of the importance of practice among marathon runners, baseball players, and violinists. It’s about muscle memory. The image in my mind is watching my son’s Pony League baseball team practice catching. The coach had players catch the ball and swoop down to tag out imaginary base-runners. Just as muscle memory is built in baseball practice, writing can become instinctive through practice. Spontaneity can be a learned response.

Bookwoman was selling Goldberg’s books. I got three signed – one for myself and two for members of a current memoir circle. I haven’t made my way through this Old Friend from Far Away yet –- in part because Goldberg urges you to practice, not just read. In many ways her advice is as plain as the back of your hand. But Natalie would have you really look at the back of your hand, the age spots and ragged cuticles, the curve of your index finger, the scar on the ring finger. Get really specific and write for ten minutes.

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