September 2010 | Fiction

Kamis, 30 September 2010

“Tony Roberts, Maria Tucci to Perform Selected Shorts: Funny Food Fictions , Hosted by Isiah ... - Playbill” plus 2 more

Tony Roberts, Maria Tucci to Perform Selected Shorts: Funny Food Fictions , Hosted by Isiah ... - Playbill
Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak
Director’s Fancy Leads to a Tale-Spinning Cat - New York Times

Tony Roberts, Maria Tucci to Perform Selected Shorts: Funny Food Fictions , Hosted by Isiah ... - Playbill

Posted: 30 Sep 2010 12:16 PM PDT

Tony Roberts, Maria Tucci to Perform Selected Shorts: Funny Food Fictions, Hosted by Isiah Sheffer

By Thomas Peter
30 Sep 2010

Tony Award nominees Tony Roberts and Maria Tucci will read short stories about food in Selected Shorts: Funny Food Fictions, Oct. 16 at 8 PM at Kinsborough Performing Arts Center in Brooklyn.

The evening, part of Symphony Space's Selected Shorts series, will be hosted by Symphony Space founder Isiah Sheffer. Selections read will include stories by T. Corraghessan Boyle, M.F.K. Fisher and Milt Gross.

Roberts has appeared on Broadway in The Royal Family, Xanadu, Barefoot in the Park (original and revival), Cabaret, The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, Victor/Victoria, Jerome Robbins' Broadway, They're Playing Our Song, Sugar and his Tony-nominated roles in Play It Again, Sam; and How Now, Dow Jones.

Tucci's Broadway credits include Mary Stuart, The Night of the Iguana, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Great White Hope, The Little Foxes, Yerma and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. She was Tony-nominated for a revival of The Rose Tattoo.

Kinsborough Performing Arts Center is located on the campus of Kinsborough Community College in Brooklyn. Tickets are $25 and are available by calling (718) 368-5596 or by visiting kbcc.cuny.edu.

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Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak

Posted: 24 Sep 2010 01:49 PM PDT

SO it's autumn now and I'm back. Haven't you heard of people taking summer off? I can highly recommend the Carmel Mountain Health Spa (prison close by), Israel, where luxury twin-suites can be shared by same-sexers and other-sexers without a tabloid or loser blogger (hi, Guido Fawkes!) getting wind.

I'll drop William Hague, 49, a line about it after this. (Btw, I do wish The Sun's Kelvin MacKenzie would desist in his weekly persecution of Chris Myers, 25, Mr Hague's former room-mate driver and £30k pa SpAd. In a just world he'd be sharing a room with George Michael)

Anyway, it appears I've returned in the nick of time. For today some letters Oscar Wilde wrote to a sexy young male magazine editor in the century before last have been flogged at auction for £33,900 - or nearly £24k more than expected. What spiced them up was the claim that in them Oscar, then about 33, propositioned the Court & Society Review editor – one Alsager Vian, 22 (never heard of him: his ghost must be relishing the posthumous fame).

Alas the text of the five missives scarcely lives up to the billing. All of Oscar's letters these days read like Stephen Fry on Twitter – even an illiterate chimney sweep could expect a 'dearest'. 'Will be at home tomorrow afternoon – so glad if you come down for tea,' writes Oscar in one letter – not quite up there with: 'Come over and I'll lick your scrote'. Oscar was passive, incidentally. Oh, didn't you know?

Most compromising is Oscar's, 'Come and dine at Pagani's in Portland Street on Friday – 7.30. No dress – just ourselves and a flask of Italian wine – afterwards we will smoke cigarettes and Talk over the Journalistic article – could we go to your rooms, I am so far off, and clubs are difficult to Talk in.'

The 'No dress' injunction is not an invitation to turn up nude but merely a sartorial guide; and the preference for Alsager's rooms nothing more than a desire not to be overheard by other possibly commision-hungry hacks.

'I think your number [edition] is excellent, but as usual had to go to S. James' Street to get a copy. Even Grosvenor Place does not get the C&S. Till Thursday night! This is all wrong, isn't it … ' The playful last line is not some coded reference to an illegal sexual proposition but plainly to the unavailability of the magazine.

This distinct lack of any sexual content whatsoever has not dissuaded the likes of the Independent and other serious publications from repeating the seller's PR line. I particularly like the Indy's Sept 16 headline: 'For sale: letters from a love-sick Wilde to the object of his affection.' Purest Sylvie Krin.

The media too readily interpolates cock-cockery in otherwise bromantic relationships, as the Hague/Myers hotel sleepovers demonstrate. Why, as I write, rumours abound of a roaring musky affair between a famous footballer and a famous male TV personality. And as ever, as the unlikely trustee of cock-cunting integrity, I find myself saying, 'I don't believe it!'

Madame Arcati

Posted: 24th, September 2010 | In: Key Posts, Madame Arcati Comments (11) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink

Director’s Fancy Leads to a Tale-Spinning Cat - New York Times

Posted: 30 Sep 2010 02:18 PM PDT

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Moisés Kaufman with "Puss in Boots" puppets and puppeteers.

Now this 46-year-old playwright and director is playing with puppets: fish, fowl, an ogre, rabbits, a cat. And they're singing. Is this the same theater auteur who brought the world "Gross Indecency" (the Wilde play) and the Shepard-inspired "Laramie Project"?

"This awakens the child in me," Mr. Kaufman said recently, holding aloft a foam-rubber eel puppet during a break from rehearsal for "Puss in Boots (El Gato Con Botas)," a 1947 opera by the Spanish composer Xavier Montsalvatge. If Mr. Kaufman's inner child is behind the endeavor, he's an ambitious tyke, as Montsalvatge's one-act opera does not typically include a cast of puppeteers alongside the singers. The production, which opens on Saturday at the New Victory Theater, is by Mr. Kaufman's Tectonic Theater Project, Gotham Chamber Opera and the puppetmakers of Blind Summit Theater (a London company last represented in New York by the puppet-child in the Metropolitan Opera's "Madama Butterfly").

A taste for the fanciful is actually not so new for Mr. Kaufman. Last year he lavishly reimagined the fairy-tale collisions of Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods" at Kansas City Repertory. And while the three years he spent immersed in Beethoven's music to write and direct "33 Variations" were hardly a lark, the experience whetted his appetite "to be with music in the room, and to keep exploring the narrative power of music."

So when Neal Goren, Gotham Chamber Opera's artistic director, suggested that they join forces on Montsalvatge's opera, Mr. Kaufman felt an immediate affinity.

"I knew the composer's work, and the story is something I grew up hearing in Venezuela," said Mr. Kaufman, who moved to the United States in 1987. "And the music has a very Spanish flair to it — it's whimsical, and yet it's rough and a little caustic at times. It's a lot about eating and drinking and enjoying the pleasures of the table. So that felt like a summer vacation for me."

Deep in rehearsals, "Puss in Boots" didn't look like a vacation for anyone involved. Singers and puppeteers dodged one another on a crowded, whirling stage. At one point Mr. Kaufman got up to act out a crucial pounce for the puppeteer and for Mark Down, the puppet director. "The more violent the cat can be with the mouse, the better," Mr. Kaufman said, clawing at the air.

On a break, he explained, "When I started working with puppets, some of my actor friends joked, 'Oh, now you can just get your actors to do what you want.' But actually, with the cat you have three puppeteers and a singer. So the problem is multiplied by four. You have to direct every gesture, every look, every emotion."

In short, he said, "It's a lot of hard work to do whimsy."

With Tectonic, Mr. Kaufman creates primarily by staging and developing work as it's being written. The playwright Stephen Belber, who collaborated with him on Tectonic's "Laramie Project," said his "sense of silliness" was a crucial buoy in navigating the dark, choppy waters of that documentary piece: "Moisés has this giggle — it's little boy meets little girl meets Whoopi Goldberg."

But even when directing another writer's work, Mr. Kaufman likes to throw a wrench into the rehearsal. While directing Rajiv Joseph's "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" last year in Los Angeles, Mr. Kaufman concocted a game in which one actor spoke Mr. Joseph's lines as written, while he stood just behind another actor and quietly fed him ad-libs.

"It was an exercise to help me crack open the scene, and it did open up the possibilities — it was almost like watching a puppet show," Mr. Joseph recalled. "Moisés always looks at storytelling and theatricality as things to be played with. He wants to bewitch an audience."

He will have his chance with "Puss in Boots," in which a poor man's cat wins his master a castle and a princess by spinning elaborate fictions he then cleverly renders true.

"The fable is a fascinating form because it's a story that wears its metaphor on its sleeve," Mr. Kaufman said. "Joseph Campbell says that fables talk to us about our core desires, and 'Puss in Boots' speaks to our desires to imagine a better world. This mangy cat revolutionizes his whole world with his imagination."

Rabu, 29 September 2010

“A 9-Year-Old Fan of ‘A Fan’s Notes,’ Finding Truth in His Own Fiction - New York Times” plus 1 more

A 9-Year-Old Fan of ‘A Fan’s Notes,’ Finding Truth in His Own Fiction - New York Times

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 01:36 PM PDT

In the hall of mirrors that is Brock Clarke's novel "Exley," a fictitious 9-year-old prodigy named Miller Le Ray lives in Watertown, N.Y. Because Miller is a highly precocious reader, he knows that a hapless, alcoholic, half-mad, football-loving, wildly charismatic English teacher named Frederick Exley immortalized Watertown in "A Fan's Notes," the 1968 novelistic memoir that immortalized Exley as a one-book wonder. Neither of his other books, "Pages from a Cold Island" (1975) or "Last Notes From Home" (1988), has the cult following that "A Fan's Notes" accrued over the last 42 years.

Jon Hughes/Photopresse

Brock Clarke

EXLEY

By Brock Clarke

303 pages. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $24.95.

Mr. Clarke is clearly part of the "Fan's Notes" fan club. He's also an impressive eccentric in his own right, since his last novel was "An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England," with a main character who accidentally reduced Emily Dickinson's house to ashes. So he has turned Exley into a figment of Miller Le Ray's imagination and given Miller a good reason to hold Exley so dear. Miller's father, Tom Le Ray, was such a hard-core "Fan's Notes" acolyte that he taught his son to speak in Exley dialogue and to revere the places that Exley visited. The places have a seediness that suited Exley's adult dissipation. But Miller is such a monomaniacal kid that he barely seems to notice.

One day, before the story in "Exley" begins, Miller's parents had a fight. It ended when Tom drove away from home, telling his wife and son, "Maybe I should go to Iraq, too." And with that mystifying exit line, Tom vanished from their lives, or so it seemed. Miller has decided that his father did go to Iraq, did get wounded there and is now back in Watertown at the V.A. hospital. The comatose veteran's current state, according to a nurse who mistakes Miller for a normal boy and soft-pedals reality to protect him: "quite the sleepyhead."

Now we come to Exley's role in this story. Miller is, according to his mother, a habitual liar, but the boy in fact disciplines himself with extremely strict logic. He has decided that the wounded man is Tom, that Tom loved Exley to the exclusion of all else and that Exley is therefore the only person who can rescue Tom from permanent sleepyhead status. That turns Miller's quest to find Exley into a matter of life or death.

For anyone who knows the true story of Exley's life (and this book uses Jonathan Yardley, the book critic who was Exley's biographer, as a character who appears in Watertown to supply Miller with factual information), the unlikelihood of finding him is awfully high. But "Exley" isn't about discovering truth; it's about Miller's creating the fictions he needs to believe in and then clinging to them despite all evidence to the contrary. He believes in Exley so fervently that he keeps finding Exley stand-ins all over Watertown.

"An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England" was so stubbornly loony, and so funny, that the pretzel logic of "Exley" promises to have similar appeal. It's certainly twisted enough. Miller's mother wants her son to stop lying, so she sends him to a psychiatrist who would prefer to be called a "mental health professional," though his professionalism is something short of impressive. "Exley" includes the doctor's thick-headed notes on Miller, who wants to be referred to by his first initial because "A Fan's Notes" sometimes uses only initials for characters' names.

" 'What are you thinking?' I ask M.," the doctor reports, "as I ask most of my patients when I want to know their thoughts." On the evidence of that idiocy, this is not a man likely to penetrate Miller's tricky reasoning. And the boy's boredom shows. "M. opens his eyes and gives me the look that all my patients give me when they tire of saying 'Whatever' with their mouths and instead say it with their eyes," the doctor also notes.

Anyone who loves Exley's "Notes" will appreciate the doctor's reverence for his own "Notes" ("I will not sully you, Notes"). But for even the most die-hard fans, there comes a time when "Exley" stumbles. What has Mr. Clarke really done here? He has created an elaborate mixture of truth, deception and self-deception, perhaps as a meditation on the nature of identity — and perhaps just as a feat of myopic gamesmanship that eventually falls flat.

For the readers who come to "Exley" thinking of Mr. Clarke, not Frederick Exley, as the primary lure, the experience of reading the book is even more confounding. It begins with great promise. It carefully differentiates between the language that is Frederick Exley's and the language that is Mr. Clarke's own. And Mr. Clarke has a distinctively winning style. He imagines characters so careful in their reasoning that they are deeply, maddeningly unreasonable but also tenderly hapless at the same time. Mr. Clarke is able to make their isolation both heart-rending and comically absurd.

But Miller is a problematic protagonist in a way that Sam Pulsifer, the accidental arsonist, was not. For one thing, Miller is not remotely plausible as a child, no matter how clever he's said to be. A 9-year-old reading "A Fan's Notes" would not leap past the book's sex, sports and dissipation to savor its literary conceits, no matter how well his Exley-loving father had trained him. But it's the fundamental nature of Miller's quest that creates this book's more serious problem. He's not looking for the elegant shambles that appeared in Frederick Exley's self-portrait. He's looking for something both sentimental and trite: a guardian angel. Even at his most beatifically distorted, Exley's the wrong man for that job.

Drug Warriors - It's Time For You To Go To Rehab - Huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 29 Sep 2010 05:36 AM PDT

In the Western world today, there is a group of people who live in a haze of unreality, and are prone at any moment to break into paranoia, hallucinations, and screaming. If you try to get between them and their addiction, they will become angry and aggressive and lash out. They need our help. I am talking, of course, about the Drug Prohibitionists: the gaggle of politicians, bishops and journalists who still insist that the only way to deal with the very widespread drug use in our societies is for it to be criminalized, where it is untaxed, unregulated, controlled by armed criminal gangs, and horribly adulterated.

An addict can only really begin to grapple with his problem when he hits rock bottom. This year, the prohibitionists hit theirs, as they unleashed the destruction of Mexico. But in Britain, there was a smaller story that serves as a perfect parable for how fact-free their cause now is.

In March, two young men named Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith died in a nightclub in the English seaside town of Scunthorpe. We now know what happened: they drank massive amounts of alcohol along with sedatives. But the prohibitionists embarked on a sudden, violent hallucination. They immediately announced -- with no evidence, long before the autopsy -- that these young men were the first victims of the party drug Mephedrone. The Drug Warriors had been nervously eying this a snort-or-swallow amphetamine since it started growing in popularity in 2008, and had swelled to be as popular as ecstasy. Surely it was evil! Surely it would kill! Now, they said, it had -- and it must be banned.

From the moment the story broke, it became filled with fictions and fantasies. Even the name of the drug was a fake. Somebody had randomly entered into Wikipedia two days before the deaths that the drug was called 'Meow-Meow'. Nobody I have ever met called it that. The term doesn't appear in online discussions of it anywhere. But the Sun slapped it on the front page, and the rest of the media followed. Me-ow. The drug had been used by millions of people across the world with no recorded fatalities at that point, but here's a selection of headlines from the conservative newspaper Daily Mail alone: "They're playing Russian Roulette with their lives!" "The Death Drug." "Legal But Lethal." "It triggers fits, psychosis, and death." Illustrated with pictures of Wainwright and Smith, even though the autopsies have proven they never touched the drug.

On the back of this drug-induced hysteria, the government announced it would ditch the rest of its pre-election parliamentary program and immediately criminalize Mephedrone. They were enthusiastically backed by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Only a few brave politicians, like the Lib Dem Dr Evan Harris and the UK Independence Party's Nigel Farage, politely asked for evidence, and were rudely shouted down. Don't you know! Children are DYING! When it was proven that Mephedrone was framed, and had become the Birmingham Six of drugs, no politician apologized. Nobody suggested repealing the ban. Everybody has carried on straight-faced. It is the surest sign of a harmful addiction when you can't even acknowledge what you did the night before.

To be fair, though, one group of people has hugely benefited from the ban, and have every reason to be grateful. They are Britain's armed criminal gangs. Until this spasm, Mephedrone was sold by bespectacled chemists, who manufactured a clinically pure product, and had recourse to the law if their property rights were infringed. Not now. The trade has been transferred to the Mafia. Their product is regulated by nobody and so filled with deadly filth. The right to sell it on a particular patch will be established by shoot-outs, in which innocent people are often caught up by accident.

The ban on mepehedrone is a perfect parable about the prohibitionists' habits of mind. They waved fictitious victims under a fictitious name and said they were fighting for sobriety. In truth, they have been trying to suppress any sober discussion of risk for years. In 2009, Professor David Nutt, the chairman of the British government's scientific advisory panel on drugs, pointed out a simple fact: taking ecstasy is about as dangerous as horse-riding, which kills 10 people a year there, and causes 100 traffic accidents. Everybody who checked agreed the facts were true. He was immediately fired. Since then, seven other members of the panel have resigned, because the government can't handle the truth. The best evidence we have suggests taking Mephedrone is less dangerous than eating peanuts, an activity that also kills ten people a year. Should we send the police in to bust anybody spotted with a handful of dry roasted?

But prohibition is not about really reducing danger. If it was, we would start with by far the two deadliest drugs in the world: alcohol, which kills 40,000 a year, and tobacco, who kills 80,000. If the law is about "sending a signal" that it is a "bad idea" to kids to risk your health with a drug, surely we need to immediately prohibit them? Yet virtually everyone is grown up enough to know that a ban on them wouldn't stop people using. In the US in the 1920s, banning alcohol simply created a vicious criminal class selling a vastly more deadly product, and deprived the government of any tax revenue on it. The ban became more harmful than the drug itself. Why do we think it is any different with cannabis, or ecstasy, or cocaine?

The prohibitionists sometimes say that if alcohol was invented now, they would want to ban it, before its use became widespread. But the use of prohibited drugs is already buttered thickly across British society: some 34 percent of us have used an illegal drug, including our Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, and the last three visiting Presidents of the United States. We can't even stop drugs from being freely available in prison, and we have the inmates there under armed guard.

There is a way out of this, and a new reason to do it urgently. In the early 1930s, the US ended alcohol prohibition partly because it had mid-wifed the criminal career of Al Capone and a thousand other goons, but primarily because they needed the taxes as the Depression struck. This November, California is having a referendum on whether to legalize cannabis and slap an alcohol-sized tax on it. At the moment, the legalizers are ahead in the polls. People are being persuaded the evidence from a 2005 study by Harvard University economist Professor Jeffrey Miron, showing that legalization would raise $7bn a year in taxes, and saved $13bn on wasted police, court, and prison time. The stoners, it turns out, will save us from ruin.

Perhaps the most startling international comparison, though, comes from Portugal. They decriminalized person possession of all drugs in 2001, and the prohibitionists screamed that children would soon be rolling in the gutters with needles jutting out of every available vein. What really happened? A detailed study by the Cato Institute has found that drug use has stayed the same, and slightly fallen among young people. Now, they treat addicts as ill people who need help, not criminals who should be banged up.

I know it will be hard for the prohibitionists to kick their habit. We will all need to support them as they finally leave behind their hallucinogens. I am happy to set up Prohibitionists' Anonymous, where they can confess the fears that have led them to this dark place. But the Mepehedrone madness was the equivalent of stealing your mother's jewelry and selling it for your next fix. Drug Warriors, it's time to sober up.

This article appeared as Johann's monthly column for GQ magazine in Britain. If you'd like to read these columns a month early, subscribe to GQ here.

To support the fight for Yes to Prop 19 in California - donate, or volunteer - go to http://yeson19.com/
For updates on drug legalization and other causes, follow Johann on www.twitter.com/johannhari101

Follow Johann Hari on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johannhari101

Selasa, 28 September 2010

“FDIC: The Government's Job-Killer - Huffingtonpost.com”

FDIC: The Government's Job-Killer - Huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 28 Sep 2010 12:33 PM PDT

What agency is systematically destroying American jobs? The mantra this election season is jobs, jobs, jobs, as both parties claim that putting people back to work is their top priority. But what if I told you that in the midst of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, one federal agency is throwing people out of work -- and that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are lifting a finger to prevent it?

Forget "shovel-ready projects," the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation under Chairwoman Sheila Bair is literally taking the working shovels out of the hands of hard-working Americans as it hijacks -- and then mothballs -- construction projects across the country. This is what "recovery" looks like in too many American towns: half-built projects rotting behind chain-link fences as desperate workers sit idle and politicians search for new shovels to fill with pork.

One of those projects is mine. For more than a year, a boutique hotel in my hometown of Charlottesville, VA has sat rusting within sight of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Other projects in places such as Los Angeles, Albuquerque and Milwaukee have met similar fates as Bair's FDIC refuses even to answer the phone calls of entrepreneurs who had the grave misfortune of being financed by banks that failed and were subsequently taken over by the FDIC.

Turns out, those bank failures were just the beginning of the cataclysm, as I and others learned. Many lost their life savings because of the FDIC's ineptitude and proclivity for cutting sweetheart deals with vultures like Barry Sternlicht's Starwood Capital -- a guy who notoriously told The York Times that his company is positioned to be "like the Saudis" in some real estate markets. Others, like me, have spent millions of dollars just to force the FDIC to the table in an effort to get our projects finished.

Meantime, Chandrakant Patel, 67, has been ruined. In the 1970s, he fled the anti-business repressive regime of Idi Amin in Uganda and built a thriving business in the United States. He has spent the past several months working as a security guard on the site of the Albuquerque hotel project he started and invested his life savings to build. The project was so close to completion that shipping containers had already arrived with the fixtures and furnishings. But then his bank failed. The federal government then failed Mr. Patel.

Earlier this month, the FDIC foreclosed after months of foot-dragging, misinformation and running Mr. Patel out of money.

Instead of putting ordinary Americans back to work, the FDIC is presiding over one of the greatest wealth transfers in American history. Many of the same unaccountable banks and financiers who wrecked the global economy out of sheer personal greed are now scooping up projects for pennies on the dollar -- with the help and blessing of the FDIC.

One in seven American now live in poverty, but the super-rich are fast becoming the mega-rich and the mythical American path to prosperity is being blocked, compliments of an agency whose original mission of safeguarding the deposits of ordinary citizens has mutated into protecting the banks at all costs. The FDIC claims it's all for the greater good, but as Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil recently noted: "The banks were saved by the American people. Now who will save the people from the banks?"

To understand how fiercely the FDIC protects the interests of banks over ordinary citizens, consider that it took me over a year and around $500K dollars in lawyer bills to just get the names of the eight syndicate banks that held the loan on my project after my original lender, Specialty Finance Group, collapsed in the largest bank failure in Georgia history. That's right: the FDIC didn't believe I had a right to know the names of the banks that stopped funding my project.

It's all part of an accounting scam. While the banks later claimed I defaulted, they never foreclosed on the project, which should have been the natural and expected course of action.

As a result of fancy accounting, eight banks show my loan as good on their books. But as the people of Charlottesville know all too well, the hotel is just a half-finished skeleton of concrete and steel looming over downtown. If you think Enron was bad, get this: these banks also show interest payments from me as revenue and profits! I assure you, I have not paid these banks one single red cent of interest since they stopped funding. But they continue booking this imaginary interest income and phantom profits and report it to shareholders and customers alike. Mission accomplished: hundreds of jobs destroyed and accounting fictions created, all in one tight package.

If I was a customer of or investor in these banks, I'd want to know what I just told you, particularly since the "value" my loan makes up a significant portion of some of these bank's so-called "assets." According to iBanknet.com, the eight syndicate banks have an average of $33 million in equity; my original loan was supposed to be for more than $23 million. (Remember, bank customers, you are own on deposits over $250,000 when it comes to deposit insurance.) The banks, complete with the person in charge, are:

River Community Bank in Martinsville, VA; Ronald Haley, President
Pioneer Bank in Stanley, VA; Thomas Rosazza, President & CEO
Old Dominion National Bank in North Garden, VA; Charles Darnell, President & CEO
HomeTown Bank in Roanoke, VA; Susan K. Still, President & CEO
Harrison County Bank in Lost Creek, WV; David Griffith, President
Guaranty Bank & Trust Co. in Huntington, WV; Marc Sprouse, President
First United Bank & Trust in Oakland, MD; William B. Grant, Chairman of the Board, President & CEO
SuffolkFirst Bank in Suffolk, VA; T. Gaylon Layfield III, President & CEO

Most people who fall victim to the FDIC never learn the names of the banks that help do them in, in large part because the FDIC throws the full weight of the federal government behind its efforts to protect the banks. Simply by warning people I am violating a court order. That's how oppressive the FDIC is in protecting its banks. Few people have the resources or perseverance to fight that kind of obstruction from an army of government lawyers paid with taxpayer money and backed by taxpayer-funded threats.

Chandrakant Patel tried for eight months just to get through to the right person at the FDIC after it took over his lender - coincidentally also part of Silverton Bank, which was being run for the FDIC by a former Ameriquest Mortgage executive named Claire Cotter. Ameriquest, you may recall, was fined $298 million for illegal lending practices before it went belly up. (I was able to get through to Claire Cotter in less than eight months, but she repeatedly hung up on me. Then the FDIC sought an injunction to prevent me from calling Cotter and other public officials at their government offices.)

Mr. Patel and his family were told by Claire Cotter that the agency would help them renegotiate the loan and then backpedaled. The FDIC told Patel one of the syndicate banks holding his note refused to renegotiate the terms so Patel could finish the final 15% of his project. When Patel asked to see the paperwork, he was denied.

The only alternative the FDIC offered Mr. Patel was to find someone else to buy his loan out. Keep in mind that this was during the height of the credit crisis. At a time when government officials from President Obama on down were telling the country that taxpayers were injecting money into the banks to enable lending, the government agency overseeing a big piece of that process was basically telling the Patels they were on their own.

More than 75 people lost their jobs when Mr. Patel's project stopped -- not counting the ongoing jobs the hotel would have created. Now he is facing foreclosure and bankruptcy.

In Los Angeles, developer Sonny Astani was well on his way to completing the first phase of his Concerto high-rise project, planned to include 629 residential units in twin 30-story towers. Then in the fall of 2009, his lender, Corus Bank, failed and was seized by the FDIC, which subsequently sold his loan and 100 others to a consortium of hedge funds led by Starwood Capital. Buoyed by the FDIC's sweetheart deal of 0% financing, Starwood began squeezing Astani out by turning off the spigot of construction funds needed to complete Concerto, costing hundreds of jobs and millions in tax revenue. Astani is now fighting desperately to keep Starwood from seizing his property and making it part of a portfolio of 50 other high-end properties wrested from other developers.

As for me, I had to put my hotel company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy to defend against what would have been a ridiculously expensive legal fight on multiple fronts. The FDIC wants to fight me in multiple venues in multiple states over the same set of facts; I'm trying to consolidate them in one venue. It's another absurdity in a case that has collectively cost me and taxpayers like you more than $12 million. For the record, my loan balance was only $10.3 million when the bank stopped funding and threw 100 people out work. Do the math.

There are likely thousands or even tens of thousands of stories like these all across the country, but the FDIC doesn't want people to hear them or to know what's being done with taxpayer money in the name of economic recovery. But if no one speaks up, the FDIC will continue to take what entrepreneurs like Mr. Patel, Mr. Astani and myself built and hand it off to for pennies on the dollar to international bankers.

Tomorrow, I am scheduled to begin a mediation hearing with the FDIC. My sole original goal was to end Charlottesville's nightmare and finish my project. But as I have learned the plight of Mr. Patel and many others, I now know that something more must be done to help entrepreneurial small business people protect themselves from rapacious banks seizing wealth and then killing jobs. We have given hundreds of billions of dollars to banks that don't lend.

Banks don't create jobs, the small businesses and entrepreneurs of America do. Yet banks won't even loan money that they are given expressly for that purpose. They just pay bonuses to themselves for taking no risks. Hard working entrepreneurs and small business people like Mr. Patel created the engine of American commerce and power our world-renowned willingness to invest and take risks. Somehow Washington has been seduced by the banks into thinking it is they who are the key to job growth. How can politicians confuse those who got us into this mess with those who will lead us out?

Don't get me wrong: banks play a function in economic growth, but only if they lend. In that way, a bank is like gasoline. Entrepreneurs are the engines that power our economy, but they need the gasoline of credit. When banks think they can exist on their own without the engine of small business, they are -- like gasoline -- nothing more than a highly combustible substance. We saw that when the banking "industry" threw a match on the global economy it now controls.

Entrepreneurs like me, Mr. Astani, Mr. Patel and many others are still waiting for the flames to die, but the FDIC seems intent on stoking the fire as long as it can.

Senin, 27 September 2010

“Nigeria on the Brink: A Rejoinder - Huffingtonpost.com”

Nigeria on the Brink: A Rejoinder - Huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 27 Sep 2010 01:10 PM PDT

Former U.S. Ambassador John Campbell's recent article, "Nigeria on the Brink: What Happens If the 2011 Elections Fail?", published in the September/October web edition of the journal Foreign Affairs, has seized the attention of dedicated Nigeria-watchers and evoked the wrath of Nigeria's official establishment. Perhaps unintentionally, the article seems to suggest a coming Armageddon in the aftermath of Nigeria's 2011 elections. Ambassador Campbell's prognosis is both alarmist and sensational, but is it based on objective facts? This rejoinder points out problems in Ambassador Campbell's assumptions and analysis and the many factors that would preempt a coming catastrophe for Nigeria in its pursuit of credible and democratic elections.

The main flaw in Ambassador Campbell's somber portrait is that he reduces Nigeria to two monolithic, antagonistic and inexorably colliding blocs, one Northern, the other Southern. This is a false reality since Nigeria is a nation of roughly 150 million people with more than 200 ethnic groups. There is no insuperable Mason-Dixon line separating a wholly Muslim North from a wholly Christian South. These hypothetical blocs are convenient intellectual fictions that do not accord with the complexity of the country's vast national tapestry. There are portions of Southern Nigeria where Muslims are in the majority or are large minorities as there are swaths in the North where Christians are the majority or a significant minority. As in our own country, Nigeria's cultural, ethnic and religious diversity is at times a source of tension but also a tremendous national asset and a source of national pride. Despite occasional local outbursts, Nigeria's Christians and Muslims occupy the national space with considerable peace and tolerance.

Nor is conflict a predictor of national collapse. Like America before it, Nigeria has suffered a ghastly civil war, but is unlikely to suffer another one. Most of Nigeria's political leadership experienced the unspeakable depravity of that war, and are united in their determination not to go down that road again.

Ambassador Campbell's article contains an implicit, blanket indictment of the Nigerian political class. He indirectly accuses them of unbridled political greed, and gross irresponsibility, if not recklessness. Those who lose elections, he implies, will readily hurl the nation into chaos in the face of their personal political defeat. Political ambition trumps all else, including patriotism and national allegiance.

While Nigeria's movement toward elections in 2011 has its flaws, and much needs to be done to prepare for a credible poll, deep national divisions do not seem to be ominous. Of course, there will likely be disputes and regrettably sad instances of pre- and post-election violence. However, there is nothing that suggests politicians are prepared to carelessly sacrifice the nation's existence because of a negative electoral outcome.

Ambassador Campbell implies that the presidential contest should be confined to only Northern candidates. This conviction is shared by many Northern and some Southern politicians. That some Southern politicians support the principle of "zoning" would appear to undermine Campbell's theory of two monolithic geopolitical blocs.

According to Ambassador's Campbell's line of thought, President Jonathan's entry into the presidential race will prove detrimental to national unity. This conclusion, however, rests on several weak assumptions. If the nation were splintered along the lines that Ambassador Campbell suggests, then the political parties would all have exclusive regional or religious constituencies. However, while parties and candidates may draw core support from one area, no successful national candidate can be merely a regional favorite son. In order to win, a presidential candidate must, according to the Nigerian constitution, have not only a majority of the popular vote but he must also win "not less than one quarter of the votes cast in each of at least two thirds of all the states and the Nigerian Federal Capital Territory."

All Northerners are not against a Southern candidate and all Southerners are not against a Northern candidate. One declared Northern presidential candidate has a bevy of Southern and Christian supporters, but significant opposition in the North. Since all politics is local, some Southerners find their bitterest political rivals among their own group in their home base. The same can be said of many Northerners. Moreover, President Jonathan has many Northern and Muslim backers. It is an open secret that the opposition party ACN, although a Southern based party, is actively courting a Northern candidate. If the nation were as bitterly divided as Ambassador Campbell suggests, this would certainly not be the case.

The governing PDP has made its decision regarding zoning and Jonathan's candidacy. The party decided that zoning remains in effect but that Jonathan represents a continuation of the Yar'Adua presidency and thus can run. This is the kind of pragmatic accommodation that has characterized Nigeria's politics. While it challenges Ambassador Campbell's sense of logic, it is a workable accommodation that reflects political reality. That the largest party has settled this matter to its own satisfaction should be seen as evidence that the political elite is working to prevent the catastrophe Ambassador Campbell appears to predict.

We should not forget that in addition to the presidential election, important gubernatorial, National Assembly and state elections will also occur. The vice presidential candidate in the PDP and most other parties will come from a section of the country other than that of the presidential candidates. Thus, support for the ticket will cut across regional, religious, and even ethnic lines.

Numerous candidates for office as well as constituents in Northern states are stalwarts of the PDP, and it is inconceivable that they will exit the party if a Southern presidential candidate emerges. Their interests are served by remaining in the party. Likewise, the majority of PDP office holders in the South would remain with the party if a Northern presidential candidate is nominated. Strong countervailing forces make apocalyptic outcomes highly unlikely.

Contrary to the implications of the Campbell article, Nigeria's political elites are well versed in dealing with matters of ethnicity, religion, and regionalism. The 2003 election pitting President Olusegun Obasanjo against his chief adversary, former Head of State Muhammadu Buhari, a Northerner, did not make the nation convulse, and it will not convulse in 2011. The political system has always had to content with these potential centrifugal forces, and Nigerians have shown exceptional ingenuity in making those accommodations that maintain the unity of the nation.

Nigerian politicians are no different a species than politicians elsewhere, in that they will use every legitimate means to gain leverage and advantage. Those who believe they will benefit from zoning will advertise it as a bulwark against disaster. Those who oppose zoning will call it archaic, divisive, and unfair. Yet, just because some dust gets kicked around in the wake of competition does not signal an impending hurricane.

Furthermore, Ambassador Campbell's article is contradictory in parts. At one point, he claims that the political field is wide open; yet, he describes this openness as inimical to democracy and stability. He decries President Obasanjo's tactics as dictatorial, while lamenting that the absence of a strong man now to impose his will can ensure chaos. Campbell's Nigeria appears to be caught between the proverbial rock and hard place: when the strong arm is there, he labels it dictatorial; when it is absent, he predicts chaos.

Ambassador Campbell's article employs overly sensational phrases that lead to problematic conclusions. The inflation of the degree of "extremism in the North," and the description of conflict in Plateau State and a few other areas in the Middle Belt as religious and ethnic violence, rather than responses to local and economic issues, is misleading. Religion tends to be a secondary consideration in these flash conflagrations. In the Niger Delta, the worst of the violence has abated through local and national efforts and is certainly not moving toward "impending insurrection." Efforts to reach an accord with "militants" in the oil producing zone have sometimes been slow and halting, but even in the worst of times, the vast majority of these "militants" was interested in resolving very practical local grievances and deprivations and had no taste for an insurrection that might prove fatal to the national unity of Nigeria.

What our friend Ambassador Campbell has done is to connect a chain of improbable assumptions. What we have tried to demonstrate is that individually each assumption on its own is not likely. Moreover, the probability of these flawed assumptions simultaneously coming to pass, while theoretically possible, is extremely unlikely. What Ambassador Campbell does is to construct a complex improbability, then label it inexorable. Not a single match has been lit and yet he forecasts a nation aflame. When one engages in rigorous political analysis, it is clear that Nigeria is not inexorably on the brink of collapse. As such, Ambassador Campbell's article was good fiction but a less than stellar portrayal of facts.

Of course, what happens in Nigeria will have national, regional, and continental ramifications. Our job as friends of Nigeria is to separate fact from fiction, and to provide supportive encouragement for Nigeria's movement toward greater national unity and stability. Nigeria's 2011 elections come at a critical juncture for the country, and a point at which we need to demonstrate the collaborative support of its international partners, the United Nations, and many other well-wishers.

Minggu, 26 September 2010

“Confessions of a Radical Mind - Wall Street Journal” plus 1 more

Confessions of a Radical Mind - Wall Street Journal

Posted: 26 Sep 2010 05:07 PM PDT

By NICOLAS RAPOLD

On Saturday afternoon at the Museum of Art and Design in Midtown, Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky explained how he found his calling.

"I discovered art because my father hate my mother," he said. "He was eating fried eggs, and my mother said, 'I cannot be with this disgusting person.' My father threw the fried eggs, and my mother did like that [he ducks his head] and it hit the painting [on the wall]. There I learned first surrealism."

Bryan Derballa for The Wall Street Journal

Alejandro Jodorowsky speaks to a master class at the Museum of Art and Design in midtown Manhattan.

True? False? For the rapt, overflowing audience at the museum, it could be hard to tell the difference in the story of a life as unlikely and impressive as one of Mr. Jodorowsky's hallucinogenic movies. As part of the museum's retrospective of the cult filmmaker's cinematic work, "Blood into Gold: The Cinematic Alchemy of Alejandro Jodorowsky," the director gave a 90-minute "master class," and the engaging event revealed a life story that, as one viewer put it later, was Zelig-like in its breadth.

"I was a dancer. From dance I went to pantomime. I came to Europe, and I directed the mise en scene for Maurice Chevalier," Mr. Jodorowsky, an animated raconteur with a ready grin, said. He then paused to demonstrate the "trapped-in-a-box" mime routine (aka "The Cage") he later choreographed for Marcel Marceau.

Afterward came theater in Mexico, where he directed 100 shows ranging from Ionesco to Strindberg and co-founded the "Theater of Panic" movement. He destroyed a piano with a hammer on Mexican television, and wrote several books. His cinematic head-trips include 1970's "El Topo"—perhaps the most renowned of the mind-altering era's cult films.

Born in Chile, Mr. Jodorowsky stood out early, the son of a Communist Russian-Jewish father who had little sympathy for his son's "marecon" poetry. But his decades of iconoclastic output have won him fans internationally, and at the master class, the warm, disarming artist looked and acted far younger than his 81 years. His fans matched his vigor, and included artists and performers. One of them, Deborah Harry, introduced Friday's screening of Mr. Jodorowsky's "Holy Mountain" and hosted a party in his honor.

Bryan Derballa for The Wall Street Journal

Stacy Engman, the chief curator for contemporary art at the National Arts Club, sits at Alejandro Jodorowsky's master class.

Saturday's session offered nuggets for Jodo-heads, tips for aspiring filmmakers, and bits of mysticism. A brief clip from "Santa Sangre," his surreal 1980 circus-family horror oddity, starring his son Axel, led to a very special on-set memory. "You can imitate to cry, or cry real. What do you prefer?" Mr. Jodorowsky recalled asking his son. "He say, 'I prefer to cry really.'" So the director obliged by pinching the boy's legs just out of the range of the camera, triggering the desired whimpering.

Mr. Jodorowsky also gave a sense of the filmmaking philosophy that led to the bright, spectacular compositions of "El Topo" and "Holy Mountain," with their mythological starkness of Westerns and the uncensored, indelible bizarreness of a symbol-laden dream—whether a perfectly circular pool of water tinged red with blood or a Russian-roulette ritual run by a priest.

"When I see a camera who move a lot, it's the camera who move! Why? I eliminate the extraordinary camera movement. I look for the accident," Mr. Jodorowsky said, wiggling and swooping to mimic American action cameras. Close-ups, he said, are also a no-no: "The truth of you is in your body. I want to shoot bodies. I don't want to shoot heads."

Mr. Jodorowsky's comments on purity and beauty struck a special chord with the audience, which seemed to include more than one artistic pilgrim. At the screening of "El Topo" that opened the series, two separate questioners thanked Mr. Jodorowsky for his inspiration, and each presented him with gifts. (One was booze and, from what I understood, the other a homemade comic book; "Jodo" has a long-running weekly newspaper comic and massive comic-book collection.) It's all in a day's guidance for Mr. Jodorowsky—who also gives advice in the form of "psychomagic," a therapeutic practice that involves prescribing liberating fictions to act out.

"If you want to make poems, don't try to live off from your poems. Work! Drive a bicycle. Be taxi driver," he said.

"Blood Into Gold" runs through Oct. 8 and marks the latest entry in the Museum's movie program, which is curated by its manager of public programs, Jake Yuzna. There are no current plans to tour the series, but Mr. Jodorowsky will appear again next week for another screening.

"The essence of theater is ephemeral," he said as he described the provocative acts that helped make his name. The flip side to this sentiment is to seize the moment—which the cult figure did, in spades, at the Museum's lively afternoon.

Armchair travelers will relish 'India' : New in Paperback - Cleveland Plain Dealer

Posted: 26 Sep 2010 11:31 AM PDT

Published: Thursday, September 23, 2010, 3:16 PM Updated: Sunday, September 26, 2010, 2:54 PM

By Vikas Turakhia

The 13 stories in India: A Traveler's Literary Companion attempt the impossible: to capture the essence of a subcontinent that feels like 20 countries teeming within the borders of one.

Readers will see familiar names with contributions from Salman Rushdie ("The Prophet's Hair") and Vikram Chandra (an excerpt from "Sacred Games"), but the collection's value lies in the stories from writers unknown in the United States.

Phanishwarnath Renu's humorous "Panchlight" follows a group of Bihari villagers who have purchased a lantern but don't know how to light it. A story by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, whose novels form the basis of Satyajit Ray's "Apu" film trilogy, showcases the ingenuity of a Calcutta man trying to win back a lost job.

Nazir Mansuri's "The Whale" moves the drama of "Moby-Dick" to the coast of Gujarat, with an Indian Ahab who maintains his senses while confronting an obsession. Anjum Hasan's "Eye in the Sky" perfectly tracks the shifting mood of a woman who decides to take an overnight train to Goa without her husband.

Travelers shouldn't forgo their Lonely Planet guides, but editor Chandrahas Choudhury's selections give readers visiting "India" a taste well worth sampling.

For reviews of nine more noteworthy paperbacks:

Stitches

David Small (W.W. Norton, 329 pp.)

$15.95

Small, an award-winning illustrator of children's books, aims for an older audience with his moving memoir about a childhood marked by an operation to remove his thyroid that unintentionally severs a vocal cord. The botched surgery renders Small mute during his adolescence, and he suffers from devastating loneliness. His mother's mental illness and his father's emotional distance make his situation even worse.

Praising Small's memoir, Plain Dealer reviewer Karen Sandstrom said, "Much depends on the art, and this is where 'Stitches' really earns the reader's affections."

Sandstrom went on to explain, "Small's fluid line drawings are tailor-made to convey movement and emotion. This energy speaks eloquently about Small's experiences and troubles. The most heart-stopping example takes place when Small, as an angry teenager, visits a therapist who becomes the first adult to give voice to the boy's feelings.

"What follows are not words, but nearly 10 wonderful pages of drawings depicting scenes of rain. Fantastic. And the book is chock-full of equally creative visual scenes all the way through."

Still, Sandstrom found aspects of this book problematic: "There's a natural flow to the events Small has chosen to depict and real intrigue in the details of his troubled upbringing. But for me, one factor diminishes the story's power: Small's mother is drawn here -- literally -- as an unmitigated rhymes-with-witch who does things like reminding her sick son that doctors cost money. (Ironic detail: Small's father was a radiologist.)"

Sandstrom acknowledged that Small offers a short coda at the end of "Stitches" in which he says that he would have offered more context if he were telling his mother's story, but for Sandstrom, "that caveat only goes so far." As she went on to say, "It's certainly fair for Small to depict only his perceptions of childhood, but the strongest memoirs are shaped by adult reflection."

Even with the book's flaws, however, Sandstrom felt " Stitches" deserves an audience: "If the words here feel sometimes incomplete, even truncated, the lavishly thoughtful artwork earns "Stitches" a place alongside other mature graphic books of the day."

A Happy Marriage

Rafael Yglesias (Scribner, 382 pp.)

$16

Yglesias based his first novel in over a decade on his 27-year marriage. His wife, Margaret, died in 2004 of cancer.

"A Happy Marriage" follows the trajectory of the 30-year relationship between Enrique Sabas and his wife, Margaret, creating characters who resemble the author and his wife in their ages and occupations.

In a note to readers, Yglesias explains, "I chose to write ['A Happy Marriage'] as a novel, and not as a memoir, because I wanted to preserve the frankness of my private thoughts and feelings while telling the story. I believe what William Dean Howells once put this way, 'No man, unless he puts on the mask of fiction, can show his real face or the will behind it.'

"I doubt any human being is capable of writing with absolute honesty about himself -- we are all too skilled at self-deception -- but the sad combination of losing my wife and needing to go on with my work led me to hope that by writing 'A Happy Marriage' I could provide readers with an unusually intimate portrait of marriage from a man's point of view."

Plain Dealer reviewer Nancy Connors observed, "I can't think of many examinations of long-term marriages in modern novels, and that alone makes Rafael Yglesias' surprising and deeply affecting new work stand out. What's more, it's clearly autobiographical, yet deals evenhandedly with deeply painful subjects, which makes it a very brave book indeed."

The San Francisco Chronicle also complimented Yglesias' novel and said that the "sprawling yet intimate account of his 27-year marriage will break readers' hearts while at the same time renewing their faith in the value of the enduring institution of matrimony."

The paper's reviewer noted that "the nonlinear story structure creates a fine balance between the excitement of a youthful romance and the heartbreaking loss of a longtime love." She went on to say, "Although the ending is no surprise, the emotional suspense of the novel keeps the reader turning pages long after giving up hope that a miracle will save Margaret's life and Enrique's marriage.

"The medical details are a fascinating but stark reminder that there is nothing glamorous about death, that a strong-willed and healthy woman can be reduced to a spectral presence dependent upon one tube that feeds a milky substance through a port in her chest while another ejects green-black bile from her stomach in order to keep her alive."

The Education of a British-Protected Child

Chinua Achebe (Anchor, 176 pp.)

$14.95

Achebe's first book since he was paralyzed from the waist down in a 1990 car accident collects 16 essays by the Nigerian author, most exploring topics and presenting arguments his readers already know.

For readers only familiar with the writer's landmark novel, "Things Fall Apart," this collection offers an entry point into Achebe's ideas about the longstanding effects of colonialism, the insidious ways of institutional racism and the importance of having a sense and value for one's own culture. Achebe also offers a glimpse of his personal history in essays about his childhood and father.

Some of these essays betray their lecture/speech-roots in their academic heavy-handedness, drowning Achebe's natural voice. But pieces such as "Africa's Tarnished Name" demonstrate an intelligence and conviction commensurate with the writer's august reputation. In that essay, Achebe illustrates that though "race is no longer a visible presence in the boardroom," it may still "lie, unseen, in our subconscious," so that "when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absent-mindedly."

The Providence Journal found the collection "provocative and perceptive" and said, "The lucid ferocity of Achebe's style underscores his humane point of view."

The New York Times offered a mixed reaction, explaining that "Achebe has lived in the United States for the past 20 years, and almost half of these essays are transcriptions of lectures he has given at universities and conferences in America, Europe and Africa from the late 1980s onward. In addition, then, to a certain dated quality, the book has something of a recycled feel. This is not helped by the fact that several of Achebe's more affecting anecdotes are repeated from one essay to another."

Still, the paper's reviewer said the collection "does, however, succeed in presenting an eclectic and thorough view of Achebe in his longtime roles as writer, father and teacher. With the same generosity and humility that have always distinguished his work, Achebe once again shares his thoughtful perspective on a world about which, despite his privileged placement in the 'luxurious' space of the middle, he remains more than a little wary."

A Village Life

Louise Gluck (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 72 pp.)

$13

Gluck, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her collection "The Wild Iris," offers her 11th collection of poetry. The 40 poems, narrated in a variety of voices, are set in a seemingly Mediterranean nameless farming village that houses danger and offers safety.

Gluck writes, "Wherever you live,/ you can see the fields, the river, realities/ on which you cannot impose yourself." While these images seem to offer tranquillity, "the mist/ dissipates to reveal/ the immense mountain" and a sky "punctuated with small pines/ like spears."

"No one really understands / the savagery of this place," Gluck explains, "the way it kills people for no reason,/ just to keep in practice."

Plain Dealer reviewer Craig Morgan Teicher noted that Gluck's poems "have always combined a choked intensity with a stony gaze that reports back in the plainest, starkest, often the severest terms."

In this collection, Teicher explained, "The fictions here are really a pretext for Gluck to stage poems that explore, for the first time, material that is neither explicitly her own biography nor that of her mythical stand-ins. Always at the mercy of the Greek gods that inspired her earlier poems, Gluck now is playing God herself."

While Gluck at times "speaks from on high, a watchful deity, sad for her creations," and elsewhere "she inhabits her villagers' minds and voices," Teicher said that "really, the voice is always the same: It is Gluck, whose verbal knife is always sharpened by what suffering promises to give and take away."

Teicher went on to observe that "for the first time in her poems, Gluck lets her lines -- which were always clipped and breathless -- go long, lets her sentences fill with air. In so doing, she proves that her unflinching intensity is like a gas expanding to fill its suddenly larger container. This book is not quite as thrilling as 'Averno' (2006), which recast the Persephone myth as a narrative on love and aging, but Gluck is claiming some new territory."

The Kids Are All Right

Liz, Diana, Amanda and Dan Welch (Three Rivers, 352 pp.)

$15

This memoir (not connected to the recent Annette Bening/Julianne Moore movie of the same title) was written by four siblings who were orphaned after their father was killed in a car accident and their mother lost a three-year battle with uterine cancer.

The siblings were farmed out to various foster homes, and while each Welch experienced varying degrees of unpleasantness, as the title makes clear, things turned out OK.

The story of the Welch family should appeal to the fans of Jeannette Walls' memoir, "The Glass Castle," although the writing here isn't as sharp, and the story feels disjointed as the siblings take turns narrating different chapters, sometimes revisiting events from two or more perspectives.

But the memoir's structure, as the authors explain, helps in understanding the way that "memory is a tricky thing." Where such a disclaimer can sometimes gloss an author's exaggeration, here it offers an explanation for messy truths, as the Welch siblings disagree. They illustrate the ways in which the truth can be subjective -- told from the perspectives of a 16- or 20-year old girl or that of 14-year-old boy.

Vanity Fair said "The Kids Are All Right" is "by turns heartbreaking and hilarious."

Kirkus Reviews said that the book's four authors have composed "a love-filled but often fraught dialogue, and the reader is a privileged silent witness to their testimony." The result is "a brutally honest book that captures the journey of four people too young to face the challenges they nevertheless had to face."

The Patterns of Paper Monsters

Emma Rathbone (Back Bay, 206 pp.)

$13.99

Rathbone's young-adult novel offers the story of 17-year-old Jacob Higgins, a rebel spending time in a juvenile detention center for an inept robbery attempt.

Jacob, with his cunning, could be a youthful version of Ken Kesey's anti-hero, Randall P. McMurphy, though the teen's circumstances and intentions make it easier to be sympathetic toward this particular delinquent.

The New Yorker praised Rathbone for writing Jacob "some great bits of irreverent commentary," and said, "The best thing about Jacob is that he is remarkably self-aware: Even as he's feeling sorry for himself or slyly manipulating some well-meaning adult tasked with helping him, he is frank about what he is up to."

The reviewer went on to compliment the way adolescent romance in the novel is "is believably stilted and messy; it moves in fits and starts, with Jacob's motives alternating between a deep need for companionship and the simple desire for sex. It's an appealingly understated teenage love story, and Jacob's offbeat descriptions are charming."

The magazine's critic, who confessed to having "little patience for all that sullen self-pity, pent-up anger, and nascent sexual pining" that form the core of many young-adult novels, admitted that Rathbone's novel "presents an interesting challenge to grown-up, strait-laced readers who tend to avoid books about troubled youths. "

Where other teenage narrators have made the reviewer wonder "Why work so hard to shut others out? Why not make oneself useful for a change?" she said, "Jacob is just the kind of junior criminal -- smart, devilishly perceptive, secretly sentimental -- with whom I really can identify. I started this book at lunch one day, and found that Jacob had won me over before I'd finished my sandwich."

Homer & Langley

E.L. Doctorow (Random House, 224 pp.)

$15

Doctorow's latest historical novel takes its title characters and inspiration from the Collyer brothers, hoarders who were found dead in 1947 underneath 103 tons of trash in their New York mansion. Doctorow alters the brothers' real history by adding more than three decades to their lives and changing some of the biographical facts.

Narrated by Homer, who is blind, Doctorow's novel moves through the 20th century and its varied political movements. As the two bothers age, we see Langley mentally deteriorate as the traumas tied to his experiences in World War I gradually turn into an overwhelming paranoia.

Plain Dealer Book Editor Karen R. Long acknowledged that Doctorow's latest novel "does not match the artistic level of 'Ragtime' or 'The March,' " especially in the way "secondary characters feel less like people and more like placeholders for the cavalcade of time: a Japanese couple forced to an internment camp, a mobster who supplies the brothers with hookers, hippies who come out of Central Park and crash at the crumbling Collyer pad."

Still, Long admired Doctorow's "melancholy, absorbing" novel and said "the smell and feel of bygone eras come to us so easily through" the work of this "gifted writer."

Long noted that, "unlike the gawkers of the day, he visits no sensationalism on their sorry heads. Instead, he writes with a magisterial, distilled sympathy," and in the story of the Collyers, Doctorow creates a "commentary on our national penchant for piling up junk."

The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

Translated by Cathy Porter (Harper Perennial, 656 pp.)

$16.99

Porter's abridgment of Sofia Tolstoy's diaries begins with entries from 1862 (the year she married Leo Tolstoy), and includes entries until her death in 1919.

Through their 48-year marriage, Sofia bore Leo 13 children, ran their extensive estate and helped with his writing, copying out "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" multiple times.

In her introduction to Tolstoy's diaries, Doris Lessing writes that the book "is witness not only to her thoughts, but also to public events and to Leo Tolstoy's work -- in the period covered by the collection, he wrote 'War and Peace,' 'Anna Karenina' and many other books. At the same time, we see the hard work of Sofia: She is an involved mother, though there are nursemaids and all kinds of help. She copies, and copies, and copies again, her husband's work."

"The diary entries in these pages," Lessing goes on to say, "bear witness to a remarkable life: the life of an exceptional woman, married to one of the most exceptional men of the time, with all her passions and difficulties laid bare. This is a book which is interesting for what it says about the predicament of women in the past, and how that compares to their present circumstances."

The Guardian said, "The hundreds of pages offered by Porter in this selection are testament to a great spirit, a woman who lived in terrifying proximity to one of the greatest writers of all time, and who understood exactly the high price she would have to pay for this privilege."

The paper's reviewer went on to say that these diaries clearly demonstrate that "Sofia was herself a gifted writer. Without apparent effort, she draws countless portraits of her contemporaries, and it's fascinating to get her view of Tolstoy's encounters with such figures as Turgenev or Chekhov. His large world passes before us in scene after scene. And there is often a great deal of tension, as Tolstoy seemed always at odds with someone or something, including church and state."

Lost in the Meritocracy

Walter Kirn (Anchor, 212 pp.)

$14.95

Kirn, an Akron native, subtitles his memoir "The Undereducation of an Overachiever." He writes about how he strategically worked his way through high school and eventually Princeton University, all without, as he claims, learning all that much.

Kirn writes, "Percentile is destiny in America," and his abilities to ace multiple-choice tests such as the SAT and understand the psychology of classrooms allows him to manipulate his teachers and excel. But in reflecting on his schooling, Kirn writes that he ended up at an Ivy League institution "all thanks to an education and test that measured and rewarded . . . what, exactly? Nothing important, I've discovered. Nothing sustaining. Just 'aptitude.' "

In The Plain Dealer, Tricia Springstubb said, "Very few people could get away with complaining about attending Princeton University, but Walter Kirn does."

Springstubb observed, "While Kirn mocks both his entitled classmates and abstruse professors, he's an equal-opportunity satirist. What saves the book any time he gets too whiny is the scalpel he takes to his own psyche."

The Boston Globe found that "there are times when Kirn makes a meal, even a shtick, of self-excoriation even as he excoriates Princeton's snobberies and pretensions.

The paper's reviewer felt that "there is aggrandizing in the abasing," but he also saw a "number of shining insights. The last pages have [Kirn] abandoning his careerist robotry and beginning to read real books -- 'Huckleberry Finn,' 'Great Expectations' -- for the first time. It's rather an instant conversion, but what an excellent way to express it: 'I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.' "

Vikas Turakhia is a critic and teacher at Orange High School in Ohio.

Fiction

Kamis, 30 September 2010

“Tony Roberts, Maria Tucci to Perform Selected Shorts: Funny Food Fictions , Hosted by Isiah ... - Playbill” plus 2 more

“Tony Roberts, Maria Tucci to Perform Selected Shorts: Funny Food Fictions , Hosted by Isiah ... - Playbill” plus 2 more

Rabu, 29 September 2010

“A 9-Year-Old Fan of ‘A Fan’s Notes,’ Finding Truth in His Own Fiction - New York Times” plus 1 more

“A 9-Year-Old Fan of ‘A Fan’s Notes,’ Finding Truth in His Own Fiction - New York Times” plus 1 more

Jon Hughes/Photopresse

Selasa, 28 September 2010

“FDIC: The Government's Job-Killer - Huffingtonpost.com”

“FDIC: The Government's Job-Killer - Huffingtonpost.com”

Senin, 27 September 2010

“Nigeria on the Brink: A Rejoinder - Huffingtonpost.com”

“Nigeria on the Brink: A Rejoinder - Huffingtonpost.com”

Minggu, 26 September 2010

“Confessions of a Radical Mind - Wall Street Journal” plus 1 more

“Confessions of a Radical Mind - Wall Street Journal” plus 1 more

By NICOLAS RAPOLD

Published: Thursday, September 23, 2010, 3:16 PM Updated: Sunday, September 26, 2010, 2:54 PM

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