ESSAY BY WILLIAM BRIGHT

There has been a strong tendency to take writing, or literacy, as the most important feature which distinguishes “advanced” or “civilized” societies from those which are often labeled as “primitive” or “savage.”

In his The Domestication of the Savage Mind, author Jack Goody showed differences among human societies are related to changes in communications, first with the introduction of hieroglyphic or logographic writing, then the invention of syllabaries and alphabets, and still later the printing press.

Finally, in our own day, it’s the development of communication by instantaneous, electronic, and computerized means.

Each of these steps meant larger numbers of people were involved in networks of communication; each step meant greater amounts of information would be stored for later retrieval; and each step increased the gap between the non-literate and the literate worlds. —Not in a simplistic and dichotomous manner, but in ways involving entire structures of intellectual activity, and of mentality as a whole.1

Goody thought the results of literacy haven’t always been desirable: “. . . Through a series of forced and binary choices, literacy established the victory of the overgeneralized schema.”

How paradoxical that so many anthropologists, linguists, and folklorists have seen the development of writing as associated with “advancement,” and yet they themselves have preferred to devote themselves to field work among non-literate peoples.2

My personal view is, I’ve liked people in non-literate societies better than people in my own society. I may be accused of romanticism, of nostalgia for the “noble savage”— yet when I have become acquainted with American Indian societies, or of tribal societies in South Asia— who were non-literate, or at least only one generation removed from illiteracy— I have envied their intellectual prowess, flexibility and openness, their benefit.

Other Western anthropologists had similar reactions. It is understandable a process of Darwinian selection might operate to produce individuals with mental capacities which favor survival. Such capacities would include a highly-developed memory as well as a capacity for effective adaptation to the vicissitudes of daily life.

I would like to argue for the positive values of illiteracy.

I want to suggest non-literate peoples have retained powers of memory of a magnitude hard for us who are “civilized” to comprehend— and the holding of knowledge in such memorized form implies a deeper form of knowledge than such held by us who only have “book-learning.”

The written word may be an obstacle which separates human beings from effective knowledge. In the confrontation between literate and non-literate societies, writing is often been used by literate groups as a tool of oppression and discrimination, and as a weapon to destroy the values of non-literate peoples.

The Hindu tradition

The first scene which I wish to evoke is ancient India, on the power of memory and the importance of memorization.

On this question, Goody drew upon the epoch-making studies of oral epic in Ancient Greece and in Modern Yugoslavia3 which showed many oral literatures show constancy in over-all structure and in re-combinations of formulaic expressions, but not in word-for-word repetition.

It seems likely in the time when the Homeric epics were first sung, there was no single, fixed, or “correct” text; only the later introduction of writing led to the preparation of an “authorized version.”

However true this picture may be for some parts of the world, Ancient India gives us a different picture.

Thus, once the Vedic hymns had been orally composed (in strict meter), it was considered their religious effectiveness depended on their being transmitted without the slightest change, and elaborate methods of teaching and memorization— all without any knowledge or use of writing— were established to ensure this.

The process led to the entire development of linguistic analysis as a field of specialization among the ancient Hindu scholars, culminating in the celebrated grammar of Pāṇini and to the tradition which in turn derived from that work.

Here we have the very first invention of linguistics as a science— which, when Sanskrit was discovered by European scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries, was to contribute so much to the development of linguistics in the occidental world.

It appears Pānini was illiterate! The early Sanskrit linguistic compositions date from the 5th to the late 4th centuries B.C.; but our earliest evidence of written Sanskrit, using an alphabet introduced from the Near East, dates from the mid-3rd century B.C.4

We have reason to believe Pānini’s grammar, which not only described but standardized a language, was composed and initially transmitted without the use of writing, i.e., in the oral medium alone.

This belief is supported by the form of sūtras or rules used by Panini and other early Hindu scholars— for a wide range of arts and sciences— in which memorization was facilitated by extraordinary brevity. Thus the famous last sūtra of Panini is a a, the interpretation of which is:

‘The long low vowel [a:] has, as its short counterpart, the raised vowel [ə]’5

Not only sacred and scientific texts, but long literary works were composed and transmitted orally in Ancient India.

The most famous are the two major epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, each many times longer than either the Iliad or the Odyssey, and each requiring days and nights for its recitation.

Even after writing was introduced to India, memorization of traditional texts has continued down to modern times. As the Ceylonese scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy noted:6

From the Indian point of view, a man can only be said to know what he knows by heart; what he must go to a book to be reminded of, he merely knows of.

There are hundreds of thousands of Indians today who still repeat, by heart, the whole or some large part of the Bhagavad Gita. Others more learned, can recite hundreds of thousands of longer texts. It was from a traveling village singer in Kashmir whom I first heard sing the Odes of the Persian poet, Rumi.

From the earliest times, Indians have thought of the learned man, not as one who has read much, but as one who has been profoundly taught.

For occidentals, who’ve relied for so long on writing, it is hard to recognize the capacities of the human memory.

What is said here of language, is as plainly said of music. Long musical compositions are composed and transmitted by memory, with little or no use of written notation.

Goody noted that much oral literature, e.g., in modern West Africa, is transmitted in variable form; yet there are reports such as those of Ruth Finnegan’s7 — also from modern West Africa — of extensive verbatim memorization.

In a very different context, Joel Sherzer8 reports “perfect repetition” is still practiced by the Guna Indians of Panama.

Yet for literate peoples, writing has come to be considered a necessity. To quote Coomaraswamy once more:9

“Necessities are not always goods in themselves, out of their context; some, like wooden legs, are advantageous only to men already maimed.”

The warning of Socrates

Classicists are familiar with a passage in Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates warns his young friend Phaedrus against the dangers of the written word— in those days, relatively new to Greece.10

Socrates:

“At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth . . . he was the inventor of many arts . . . but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt . . . To him came Theuth and showed his inventions . . . and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them . . . But when they came to letters, ‘This,” said Theuth, ‘will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.’”

Thamus replied:

“O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

“The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality . . .

“He would be a very simple person, who should leave in writing or receive in writing any art under the idea the written word would be intelligible or certain . . . I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence . . .

“Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than this, and having far greater power— a son of the same family, but lawfully begotten? . . . I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner, which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.”

Phaedrus:

“You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of which the written word is properly no more than an image?”

Socrates:

“Yes, of course that is what I mean . . . even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know . . .”

Even many centuries after Plato’s time, writing was for the Greeks and Romans something secondary to spoken language.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay, “On the cult of the book” (1960), in which he reminds us, even in the early centuries of the Christian era, reading was done aloud.

Around the year 384 A.D., as St. Augustine tells us in his autobiography, he was astonished to learn his teacher, St. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, was able to read “without uttering a word, or even moving his tongue.” This is our first historical attestation of silent reading in Western European civilization.

Borges points out, “this strange art, begun by [St. Ambrose], was to lead, after many years, to the concept of the book as an end in itself, not merely a means to an end.”

This concept of writing and of the book as autonomous entities has dominated European thought down to the present time.

Pizarro and Atahualpa

In the period when the Portuguese and Spanish, followed by other European nationalities, began the exploration and conquest of the entire world, there began a period of intensified confrontation and frequent conflict in which the literate societies of Europe— armed not only with guns and cannons, but with their printed books of religious and legal commandments— sought to subdue non-literate societies of Africa and the Americas.

In the Western Hemisphere, the Mayan peoples of Yucatán and Guatemala already had a hieroglyphic writing system, used for books made of fig-bark paper as well as in stone inscriptions.

The Spanish religious authorities burned all the Mayan books they could find, considering them “works of the devil”, and proceeded to deal with all the native societies of the Americas as “savages”. (The surviving body of Ancient Mayan writing is still being deciphered.)

In South America, the Spaniards encountered an exceptional large and highly organized empire— the Incas, which extended from Colombia to Argentina; the Quechua language, spoken throughout this area, was not written, but official records were kept in the form of knotted strings, called quipus.

In 1532, at Cajamarca, in Peru, there came the fateful encounter between Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador, and Atahualpa, the Inca emperor. Several chroniclers reported the event in varying ways, and we cannot be sure of the details of what happened11; but the following account, translated from Léon de Bercy in 1818, points up the drama of the meeting, and the uncomprehending rage which Atahualpa must have felt when he was asked to submit his imperial powers to the authority of a book:

“Since this monarch happened to be near the Spanish camp, the chaplain of the expedition, Vicente de Valverde, approached him with a crucifix in one hand and a breviary in the other, and asked to speak to him in the name of the King. And after having explained, through an interpreter, the principal dogmas of the Christian religion, and the right held by the Pope to distribute crowns, Valverde told Atahualpa the successors of the Apostle Peter, through Alexander the Sixth, Supreme Pontiff of Rome, had divided all the lands of the world among the Christian kings; with the obligation for each to conquer a part of them.

“He urged Atahualpa to recognize his authority and embrace the religion of Christ, assuring him, if he yielded, then Don Carlos, the King of Spain, would allow him to continue ruling.

“Atahualpa replied to this insolence with these words: that he did not understand how this Peter or his descendants could give away what had never belonged to them; that such a division was more a division between bandits than it was an order of the just and powerful God who ruled the universe; that Peru belonged to the Peruvians; and that he had received his crown from his fathers and would never renounce their religion.

“Further, in response to the insistence of the Christian priest, the Inca said: ‘Are these the benefits of the religion you boast of, of sweetness and love between the Christian and his neighbor?’

“The monk told him to obey and be silent, at which Atahualpa lost his temper and said to him: ‘Despicable scoundrel, preach to me no more of a God who is born and dies. The One whom I worship is immortal, and the poor power of humans cannot reach Him: even you can see my God is much superior to yours, who you say was killed by men.

“‘Besides, how do I know you are not deceiving me with talk of such ineffable mysteries, of which neither I nor anyone in my country has ever had the slightest notion? Where did you learn all the extraordinary things you have told me?’

—“‘In this book,”’ Valverde answered, showing him a breviary, ‘the truth is contained; the word of God is imprinted in it, and all I have told you is written in it. You must believe, and have no doubts.’

“The Inca took the book, examined it with care, held it to his ear, and then said to the monk: ‘I have looked at your quipus and seen nothing; I have held it to my ear and heard nothing; if the truth is written in it, why does God not give me the grace to read, as he does to you, who are nothing but an upstart, come from afar to murder my people and pillage my realms? Begone, disgusting impostor! I know your real nature,’ added the monarch, throwing down the book with contempt.

“The outraged monk exclaimed: ‘Christians, to arms! The word of God has been profaned; exterminate these heretics!’

“Pizarro immediately gave the order for the slaughter. The explosion of the artillery petrified the Peruvians, who stood for a moment dismayed and motionless. More than four hundred were killed by the soldiers of Pizarro, who marched up to the Inca, seized him by the arm, and led him in captivity to the camp.”

The epilogue to this was Pizarro held Atahualpa ransom for an immense amount of gold; but in the end the Inca emperor was baptized under coercion, then strangled to death with the garrote.12

The Spanish conquest of South America proceeded. To the present day, the majority of the population of Peru— and much of its neighboring countries— consists of Indians who speak Quechua, who know little if any Spanish, and who are illiterate in both their own language and that of their conquerors.

A religion based on illiteracy

In the late nineteenth century, in the northwest United States, a number of different Indian tribes, speaking a variety of languages, (including some English) —but generally literate in none— had been settled on reservations under the authority of the American government.

In this context, a new religion arose, the “Indian Shakers”— which involved a combination of native and Christian practices, and was named after the custom of “shaking” or trembling (as in many other religious groups) under the power of divine inspiration.

This religion has been the subject of an anthropological study13, and continued to be practiced into the twentieth century, as I observed during the 1960s on the Smith River Indian Reservation, in the northwestern-most corner of California.

The Indian Shaker religion was founded by an Indian named John Slocum, living just south of Puget Sound in the state of Washington. In 1881, at about the age of 40, he fell sick and apparently died; but at his wake, he revived, sat up in his coffin, and told of a visit to heaven, in which he had been instructed to return to earth and to found a new religion— which would be specifically for Indians, and as such would be based on no written scriptures at all, but on direct communication between the individual and God.

This revelation naturally aroused excitement, but Slocum himself proved ineffective as a religious leader, and eventually died in obscurity.

However, a messianic fervor began to spread, assisted by the organizational talents of an Indian named Mud Bay Louie— after the village of Mud Bay, just west of the state capital of Olympia; the head of the organization which he founded still bears the title “Bishop of Mud Bay.”

The reaction of the white authorities to the new religion— which invoked the name of Jesus, but rejected the Bible— was hostile.

Even though “shaking” was also practiced by many pentecostal or “holy roller” sects, the white members of such groups were at least nominally Bible-reading; by contrast, Indian “shaking” as a manifestation of unmediated communication with God was barely tolerated by the government, and with stern restrictions.

Two notices posted by the U.S. Indian Service at the Quileute Reservation were posted:14

The first read:

Notice to Shakers:

You are hereby permitted to hold meetings . . . under the following conditions:

On Sundays not longer than three (3) hours at one time and on Wednesdays not longer than two (2) hours at one time.

The following REGULATIONS to be observed:

1st, Keep windows or a door open during all meetings.

2nd, Use only one bell to give signals. No continuous ringing.

[The usual practice, as I have observed it at Smith River, is for members of the congregation to ring individual hand-bells during most of the meeting. The effect is deafening, conductive to an altered state of consciousness such as might be associated with religious experience.]

3rd, Do not admit school children at night meetings.

The second notice, dated six months later, shows a more exasperated level of the written bureaucratic style. It is in the form of a letter from a superintendent to the local Indian policeman:

“It has been reported . . . there are some women who are violating the Rules and they shake at all hours of the day and night. You will therefore tell the women quietly to stop shaking at any other times than the times specified in the rules.

“If they do not stop, you will lock them up until they agree to stop. Shaking for the sick must not be allowed. We do not want any trouble in this matter if it is possible to avoid it; but “continual and private shaking” must be stopped.”

In the long run, of course, the tradition of the Indian Shakers could not continue unchanged. By the 1960s, there was a schism among Shakers: on the one side were the “conservatives,” who— though by now mostly literate in English— still rejected written materials, considering them a barrier to direct religious experience; on the other side were the “progressives,” who believed in carrying Bibles to church— not actually to read, but (as one member told me) so they would look respectable before their Methodist, Baptist, or Catholic neighbors.

To the inheritors of European civilization, written language has become second nature— or even, we might say, first nature; it has come to mold our ways of thinking, even when we are not actually reading or writing; and it has come to possess, in our minds, a symbolic value of its own, entirely separate from its usefulness in communication.

But this powerful status with which writing has been endowed can diminish our memories, our perceptions, our flexibility of understanding.

The American musician and writer John Cage15 records this anecdote:

“I went to hear Krishnamurti speak. He was lecturing on how to hear a lecture. He said, ‘You must pay full attention to what is being said and you can’t do that if you take notes.’

“The lady on my right was taking notes. The man on her right nudged her and said, ‘Don’t you hear what he’s saying? You’re not supposed to take notes.’

“She then read what she had written and said, “That’s right. I have it written down right here in my notes.’”

Krishnamurti was, of course, the famous teacher from India, who was forcibly transferred to the Western world as a child, and who for years taught in an ashram in Ojai, California, near my native town of Oxnard.

Krishnamurti taught for years without publishing a word, or permitting anything he said to be published. Eventually, he permitted others to publish transcripts of tape recordings made at his lectures, and now there are many volumes by Krishnamurti in print.

After I read this anecdote in Cage’s book Silence, around 1967, my cat urinated on the book, and I had to throw it away.

By a perversion of memory, I have been telling the story over since with Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki— another of Cage’s gurus— as the central figure, instead of Krishnamurti. No one ever corrected me until I started writing this lecture, when I found Cage’s book in the library and corrected myself.

A member of a non-literate society would not have made my mistake— or have fallen into the absurdity recorded by Cage.

We who are literate, cannot cast off the literacy which has become part of us; but we can become aware of what it has cost us, of our conscious efforts to recapture the virtues of illiteracy.

Notes on the Lecture.

I’m Susie Bright, Bill’s daughter. I edited and illustrated this 1981 essay of my dad’s, for our newsletter.

Material in this paper was presented to Bill’s UCLA class in “Spoken and written language” in Winter 1981; to one of the preliminary sessions of the Georgetown University Round Table, in Washington, DC, during the same year; to the Centro de Estudios de Lengua y Literatura of the Colegio de México, Mexico City, in Spring 1982; to the Anthropological Linguistics group at UCLA in Fall 1982; and to a meeting at Stanford University in 1983. He thanked the audiences for their feedback and was particularly grateful for suggestions and encouragement from Linda Arvanites, M. B. Emeneau, Dell Hymes, Glauco Sanga, Deborah Tannen, and Marta Elena Venier.

The Translation of the Borges Poem

Beneath the shady eaves or in the vine-covered nook,

the hands that dealt death knew how to tune the guitar.

“Milonga de Calandria”

To pluck a fragment from the whole to fashion a new whole might be the whim of a capricious argument;

the zeal of a vain talent that lays out its own carpet, that names and renames itself with the preceding rhyme, and finds easy shelter beneath the shady eaves.

A word that, upon the giant shoulder of boldness, rises in that poetry which endures like a diamond;

a stump that retrieves the glove it can barely grasp, and—amidst the revelry—turns the bass string into a lute, in a dark alleyway or in the vine-covered nook.

And yet, the material is the same—

the primal stuff that in one instance found true genius, and in another, a banal course.

With the immortal phoneme poured into the syllable, they weave the inert word—like the one that is never forgotten—the hands that gave life, the hands that dealt death.

One distinguishes the mastery of the true singer from that mediocre verse which borders on the shameful.

Those who hear such a mystery ask: “Why is the heart torn?”

And the answer is bound to the voices of the elders: “Perhaps it is because those singers knew how to tune the guitar?”

References

Barnett, H . G . 1957 Indian Shakers: A messianic cult of the Pacific Northwest. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Basham, A. L., 1954 The wonder that was India. New York: Grove.

Bercy, Drouin de, 1818 L’Europe et l’Amérique comparées. Paris.

Borges, Jorge Luis, 1960 Otras inquisiciones. Buenos Aires: Emecé.

Cage, John, 1961 Silence. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 1947 “The bugbear of literacy.” In his Am I my brother’s keeper?, New York: Day, 19-35.

Finnegan, Ruth, 1973 “Literacy vs. non-literacy: the great divide? Some comments on the.significance of ‘literature’ in non-literate cultures.” In Modes of thought: Essays on thinking in Western and non-Western societies, ed. by Robin Horton and Ruth Finnegan, London: Faber & Faber, 112-44.

Finnegan, Ruth, 1977 Oral poetry: Its nature, significance, and social context. Cambridge: University Press.

Goody, Jack, 1977 Jowett, B., trans. 1982 The domestication of the savage mind. Cambridge: University Press.

Lockhart, James, 1972 The men of Cajamarca: A social and biographical study of the first conquerors of Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Lord, A. B., 1960 The singer of tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Parry, Milman, 1971 The making of Homeric verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

The dialogues of Plato in five volumes, 3rd ed. Oxford: University Press.

Powell, Jay, and Vickie Jensen, 1976 Quileute: An introduction to the Indians of La Push. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Prescott, William H. 1848 History of the conquest of Peru. New York.

Renou, Louis, 1954 La grammaire de Panini, fase. 3. Paris: Klincksieck.

Sherzer, Joel, 1980 “Tellings, retellings, and tellings within tellings: The structuring and organization of narrative in Cuna Indian discourse.” Paper presented at the conference on “Oralità: Cultura, letteratura, discorso,” Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e Linguistica, Urbino, Italy.

Tannen, Deborah, 1980 “Spoken/written language and the oral/literate continuum.” Proceedings of the 6th Annual Meeting, Berkeley Linguistic Society, 207-18.

The Same Guy Who Threw Up on Himself at the Lincoln Memorial

Is the Next President of the United States

Visit Polymarket to place your wager now

You could

be a winner

But you won’t

You’ll sleep with the fishes

the mob is on the lawn

Everyone here is a man except this misshapen clay

mud

This man,

the false Prophet Joshua

who, it is said, did not come out of a womb

but a trashcan

T-rex Tryin’

It was a beautiful day at

the trashcan

this shit-hole country

Remember what Malcom said

This is what I say:

It’s a miracle if you live to 50 in America standing on your own two feet and know how to read

In the ring, when

the fury shrieked St. Michaela’s name,

millions of the dead rocked back and forth

all over Mesopotamia

and Palestine

The ones the Americans murdered have a ghost laugh.

And all the dead in the dead

prairies and the dead

provinces and dead

coasts at home.

Starved and sick in fields of gold. “I wonder what

the poor people are doing today.”

Every time the dead girls laugh, another American turns

to cinder, stone, yesterday

cigarette butt

We’re getting everything that’s coming to us.

Share

Other people go to Paris— I want to work at the library, just like Mom.

The librarians suggested I might volunteer for two projects. One, they’ll have me pull online reader requests, which then get shipped to the patron’s home branch.

It will be fascinating to see what everyone in town is reading and curious about, eh?

Second, Would I like to lead a monthly book club?

Oh, yes I would. I want a readers’ room of books you can’t put down. Hot topics. The zeitgeist.

Naomi Kanakia wrote a great piece about the peril of the dreary book club. I don’t quite subscribe to her rules (we will have fiction!) but I respect her hard stops.

Could I make rules for my branch readers? Who wants to obey or rebel?

• I’m the book club leader, therefore I get to pick all the books. See how easy that was? There will be variety, the spice of reading life.

• No reciting the plot.

• Any gossip, behind-the-scenes knowledge, conspiracy theories on titles — welcome.

• I actually don’t care if you “read the whole thing,” but you better be ready to hold your own.

• We can’t drink, imbibe, or spread crumbs at the library. Shame. We could continue later at the park down the street? Maybe “potluck picnics” after, when the weather is nice.

• “What did you learn from this book?” —Absolutely NOT. This is not an after-school special. People who come to library afternoon book clubs are grown-ups.

I will start reading aloud a passage from the book at the stroke of 1pm. Then we’ll segue to saying hello and I’ll throw out an opening question to consider. It’ll be a good one.

“Hot Topic” Book Club Ideas I’m Kicking Around

I want variety. I want lively times. The book has to be a pageturner and impossible to have only one opinion about! I’d welcome your suggestions, too.

FICTION/FANTASY

Yesteryear - Caro Claire Burke

MEMOIR

Strangers - Belle Burden

Both Yesteryear and Strangers are the tear-away bestsellers of the year thus far. And the debate is fierce. Why do New Yorkers get to have all the fun? We shall set our hair on fire in Santa Cruz.

ROMANCE/EROS

“M/M Fiction” - The Rachel Reid Explosion and Long Tail of Getting Pucked

Can I say “pucked” on a library flyer?

S/F

11-22-63 - Stephen King

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

(Did you know F-451 is back on EVERY bestseller list right now?)

HEALTH

Into the Wood Chipper - A Whistleblower’s account of how the Trump admin shredded USAID - Nicolas Enrich

This is also known at “The Ebola Book.” We can consider this as either Health/Politics, or Horror genre. Either way.

FOOD

“Le Cookbook Special” - In the fall, before the holidays, I want to chow down on all the most cherished, “I don’t want to return this” cookbooks we borrowed this year— what we’re making, harvesting, drinking. I’ll find out, and reveal, what are the most “checked-out” foodie books in the system.

BIOGRAPHY

Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World - Bruce Nichols

I feel a bit guilty to not choose a West Coast version of this notion, (what would you suggest?) but the fact is I am fascinated by the Massachusetts bohemians who so profoundly created an American philosophy and way of life. Yes, a bestseller right now.

Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Brian Evenson

This title will be my exception to the “everyone’s talking about it” rule — I doubt anyone in Santa Cruz besides my family has read (or better yet, listened) to Evenson’s memoir/biography of Carver, but they OUGHT TO. Whew. I want to change a few lives. Here’s my previous review.

COMIX

Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi

Marjane’s recent and somewhat mysterious death has everyone in tears, and her title has jumped back to the bestseller lists. The fact that it’s set in Iran reveals even more today than the day it was composed.

HUMOR

The Land and Its People - David Sedaris

I’m torn about this. Sedaris is on the top 10, and he’s also beloved in my college town— sells out the Civic Auditorium every time. But I might want to pick another deeply queer satire! I haven’t read it yet, so I need to do more research. Do you think it’s one of his best?

POLITICS

Regime Change - Maggie Haberman

Hoo boy, this will be fun. A great “hate-read” if there ever was one, an author many despise, but it’s great to read it at the library and then begin the ruckus!

PSYCHOLOGY

The Third Reich of Dreams: the Nightmares of a Nation - Charlotte Beradt, editor.1

Few will have heard of this buried German classic — it is literally a record of dreams Germans were having during the rise and unfolding of the 3rd Reich. Yes, let your mind explode. I thought for this session, I’d ask everyone to bring in a dream they’ve had lately which included scenes/characters from contemporary world/American politics. And then maybe we’ll act them out, Jungian style!

Are any of you in reading groups this summer, highly formal or barely functioning? What have been the best moments? Worst ones, too, of course.

My most outrageous book group night, was when a local readers club of policewomen, sheriffs, and other first responders — all gals — said they wanted me to come talk to them about Santa Cruz Noir. They also commanded, yes, commanded, that my partner Jon appear, who had a story in the pages about a Westside Surfer who went over the edge.

Well, when we arrived, the women surrounded Jon and demanded to know who his fictional n’er do well antihero was!

“I arrested that bastard!” “I married him!” “Is he in jail for good?” “I oughta nail his dick to the wall.”

Jon tried to explain it was a composite character — SURE JAN — but they wouldn’t stop hounding him.

He took it as a real compliment that he got the meth, violence, and toxic blow-out atmosphere nailed. We all know a guy like that around here, and when we’re not laughing about it, it’s a heartbreaker.

To edit a book of murder stories, where the cops and the medics are often part of the scene, and have every detail click, that was work well put in.

Okay, now I wanna hear what you’re reading!

UPDATE:

My Hot Topics book club is launched. All are invited. Registration required.

In Case You Missed It

I’ve got a question to you, Susie, as a veteran and super-experienced audiobook editor and producer:

My book, ________, was just officially released by The Big 5 Press about three weeks ago. I’d like to get an audio book out soon. How can I make this happen?

I asked my publisher about it and she said a member of her team “has pitched your title to our audio publishers and is hoping to hear that one of them wants to license your work for their audience.” She added that the process takes time and that audio publishers often want to see published reviews before they make an offer.

Is the publisher really so passive that they need to “hope” an audio publisher makes an offer? Perhaps my publishers is too understaffed to do it itself? . But if so, what can I do to make it happen?

As for published reviews, I’d like to see more. There were positive pre-publication reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Library Jo…

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They are in the late 20s, verging on 30. As our fireside chats unfolded, glasses filled, the dreaded question arrived: “What do you think of ‘poly,’ Mrs. Bright?”

Actually, they don’t call me Mrs. Bright.

But I am trying to convey, they treat me as an éminence grise— a boomer receptacle of mid-century sexual liberation.

What do I think of poly.

At first I spit out my punch. And then . . . It’s time for the reckoning.

Please do listen to my podcast for the rest!

Susie’s Undecidedly UnCool Reading List for PolyWannas

• Friedrich Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

• Anything by Alexandra Kollantai

• Shulamith Firestone: The Dialectic of Sex

• Emma Goldman: Living My Life

• The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Ned Katz

• Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, by Hanne Blank

• Public Sex by Patrick (née Pat) Califia

In other words, skip the how-to manuals! Instead, study patriarchy and nonconformity from people who broke the chains long ago.

In Case You Missed It

He emailed me, asking for my free counsel on how to write a lesbian sex scene in his novel, “Since I am not a lesbian.”

You don’t say.

I kindly replied with my professional appointment info.

The advice-seeker decided to chastise me, shame me, but I think he could have done a little more research.

“I am 66,” he said, (younger than me) “And on a fixed income! You could just answer a few questions and read my manuscript by email!”

That’ll teach me.

Shall we go to the classroom? I have a few notes below, but I go into greater detail in the 30 minute video, below.

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I’ve loved reading your answers! You tunas have good taste.

Care to cast your answers? Here you go, it’s a five minute frolic:

• Susie’s Interview Questions, À la Colbert.

My answers are: here.

Let’s begin, my little French dips:

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I thought we could play the getting-to-know-you game that Stephen enjoyed with his guests.

Ready?

I’ll do mine, and then I’ll set up the questions for you.

I’ll report all results in a few days! The poll will be open for only a few days, so hop to it!

LATE SPOILER: Here are the survey answers.

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She is missed.

I imagined saying, if she was here today, “Rachel, are you going to do a tarot deck of Etruscan Deities? Their goddesses throw their weight around . . . Everything we thought was “Roman” and “Italian” turns out to be Etruscan to the core!”

And she would say, I’m sure: “I’m already in the middle of it!”

Rachel was a pioneer Sci-Fi author and comix habituée. A Tarot Card Renaissance legend. —Very much a 70s old-school dyke and trans underground scout member.

I recorded Rachel’s novels, Temporary Agency and Godmother Night, when I was a young producer at Audible. Later, we took on her neo-jungian Tarot interpretation bible, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. I know many of you have a copy.

To celebrate the “78” debut, we decided, let’s do an interview1 . I’m so glad we did. Cancer overtook her daily life not too long after, and in hindsight, it was a miracle we were able to finish the production.

What a conversationalist Rachel was. You could spend hours, laughing and letting the lightbulbs go off.

Among other things we talked about:

• How old were you when you discovered Tarot? What was going on in your life at the time?

• What is the difference between Tarot for divination, versus those seeking wisdom, or meditation, or a prompt for therapeutical inquiry . . .

• Decks Gone Wild . . . Does it need to stop?

• Will I meet my soulmate in six months? (Go ahead, I dare you to ask her)

• How Rachel “took over” Doom Patrol

• The notion of innocence, in the instance of the Card of the Fool and the Number Zero

• The nature of Free Will? — and “rarely using it”

I’m one of the people who loved Tarot as a kid, pretending to read my friend’s fortunes. When I grew up, it occurred to me the deck was the best set of writers’ prompts ever assembled. They make you peek around another corner. —Which we could all use more of.

In Case You Missed It

We rubbed our hands with anticipation— there’s so much to linger upon, to talk late into the night!

Becca fell ill on her travel day— this morning. “I think I got the flu from my son on his birthday.”

She feared infecting me— so we scrapped our rendezvous. We know the influenza, the mystery bug, could keep us imprisoned in bed for weeks. At our age, a so-called “cold” is a Trojan Horse.

Maybe the young feel such danger these days as well. We live in the new Dark Age of measles at the opera and hantavirus on a bird boat.

Woolf wrote an essay called “On Being Ill,” when she was 42. It was 1925, and she was recovering in bed. I’d like to share an excerpt of it with you today, with my special love for those of you, who at the moment, are in the middle of something rather nasty. I’m going to poetically refigure some of her phrasing, because it is so beautiful, you have to take a pause to drink it in.

Or, listen to my voiceover tape, above. Better than ASMR.

Feel Better. ;-) Your friends love you.

“Considering how common illness is,

How tremendous the spiritual change that it brings,

How astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed,

What wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view,

What precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals,

What ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness,

How we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads1

and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s armchair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth— rinse the mouth”

With the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of heaven to welcome us—

When we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it,

If becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache.

But no; with a few exceptions Thomas De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater;2 there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Marcel Proust3— literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind;

That the body is a sheet of plain glass

Through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent.

On the contrary, the very opposite is true.

All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colors or discolors, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February.

The creature within can only gaze through the pane— smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant;

It must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness

Until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul, it is said, escapes.

But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe.

They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery.

Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncoming of melancholia, are neglected.

Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.

Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.4

The public would say that a novel devoted to influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in it— wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love, and plays the same odd tricks.

It invests certain faces with divinity, sets us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the creaking of a stair,

And wreathes the faces of the absent (plain enough in health) with a new significance,

While the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor taste in health.5

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.

It has all grown one way.

The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor, and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready-made for him.

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand,

And a lump of pure sound in the other, as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning6,

So to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.

Probably it will be something laughable.

For who of English birth can take liberties with the language?

“To us it is a sacred thing and therefore doomed to die, unless the Americans, whose genius is so much happier in the making of new words than in the disposition of the old, will come to our help and set the springs aflow.

Yet it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions;

Love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104 degrees;

Jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica;

Sleeplessness play the part of villain,

And the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste— that mighty Prince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral.

“But to return to the invalid . . .

“I am in bed with influenza”— but what does that convey of the great experience?

How the world has changed its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields;

And friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others deformed to the squatness of toads,

While the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea,

And he is now exalted on a peak and needs no help from man or God, and now grovels supine on the floor glad of a kick from a housemaid—

The experience cannot be imparted

And, as is always the way with these dumb things, his own suffering serves but to wake memories in his friends’ minds of their influenzas,

Their aches and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry aloud, desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy.

Sympathy we cannot have.7 Wisest Fate says no.

If her children, weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings would cease to rise;

Roads would peter out into grassy tracks;

There would be an end of music and of painting;

One great sigh alone would rise to heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair.

As it is, there is always some little distraction

—An organ grinder at the corner of the hospital,

A shop with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse,

Some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old beggar’s hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering;

And thus the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their behalf, is uneasily shuffled off for another time.

Sympathy nowadays is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures

—Women for the most part, in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with anarchy and newness,

Who, having dropped out of the race, have time to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions.

C.L.,8 for example, who, sitting by the stale sickroom fire, builds up, with touches at once sober and imaginative, the nursery fender, the loaf, the lamp, barrel organs in the street, and all the simple old wives’ tales of pinafores and escapades;

Or, A.R.,9 the rash, the magnanimous, who, if you fancied a giant tortoise to solace you or a theorbo to cheer you, would ransack the markets of London and procure them somehow, wrapped in paper, before the end of the days;

The frivolous K.T.,10 who, dressed in silks and feathers, powdered and painted (which takes time too) as if for a banquet of Kings and Queens, spends her whole brightness in the gloom of the sick room, and makes the medicine bottles ring and the flames shoot up with her gossip and her mimicry. 11

But such follies have had their day; civilisation points to a different goal; and then what place will there be for the tortoise and the theorbo?

There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.

About sympathy for example—

We can do without it.

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan,

of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another,

where however strange your experience other people have had it too,

where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you— is all an illusion.

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.

Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way.

There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown.

Here we go alone, and like it better so.

To always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood— would be intolerable.12

But in health the genial pretense must be kept up and the effort renewed— to communicate, to civilize, to share, to cultivate the desert, educate the native, to work together by day and by night to sport.

In illness this make-believe ceases.

Directly the bed is called for, or, sunk deep among pillows in one chair,

we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another,

we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters.

They march to battle.

We float with the sticks on the stream;

helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn,

irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years,

to look round, to look up— to look, for example, at the sky.”

P.S. — Our friend, beloved Ka’ala, has not been feeling so hot. Music is the only thing that always makes sense. His voice is as beautiful as ever.

In Case You Missed It

For all the squawking about Substack’s “thousands of writers,” or celebrity overkill, it’s hard to find beautiful consistent work. Here, or anywhere!

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than are dreamt of in your philosophy"

This post has been a long time coming.

Perhaps it will begin as a book review. It ends in the territory of a moral inventory. This chapter has come with a cost, and the meter . . . is still running.

This spring, a new historical survey was published, edited by Andrew Stone Higgins.

It’s called: “From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists.”

It contains reflections from, and interviews with, 24 former members of the IS, and 6 members of The Red Tide. (RT)

Some, like me, were in both groups.

You see, The Red Tide started out as a radical high school newspaper in Los Angeles, in 19701– all kinds of writers/activists, all teenagers. Some were Yippies, some were Marxists, lesbian separatists, Black Student Union founders, everything.

Then, as the War ended, a significant part of the RT joined/merged with the IS. “The Grown-Ups.”

That really is how I thought of them. A little suspicious, a little admiring.

I was 15 when I joined the Red Tide. I was instantly attracted to a group of very young smarty-pants who were talking about revolution and history and seizing state power. They were miles ahead of what was being talked about in my high school history class.

My first presentation to our Red Tide study group, written in longhand, was on “Dual Power” between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks as described by Isaac Deutscher.

Following such study sessions, we picketed local liquor stores to support the UFW Boycott and get Gallo wine off the shelves of LA grocery stores. Company goons occasionally beat us up.

We excoriated our textbooks at our high schools and founded classes on US Black History. Women’s history. We turned a janitor’s closet into a birth control and abortion information center. We brought Jeanne Cordova from The Lesbian Tide to speak on campus, and Jane Fonda, fresh off the plane from Hanoi. We sued the school district for the first amendment rights of high school students and we won.

When the LAPD installed undercover narcs to pose as students “scoring grass” on our campus, we sparked a walk-out across five city public schools and turned over a cop car or two.

This was not easy. You must imagine a lot of pandemonium and frustration between the highlights. We were not being controlled by some parent-specter-groomer. It really was “just us.” I learned how to organize, i.e., talk to strangers, and I learned how to produce a newspaper, from scratch.

Eventually the Los Angeles Red Tide hooked up with another high school student group in the Bay Area, who shared our vibe and determination. (Described in Higgins’ book by Larry Bradshaw.) Some of us would eventually move to Detroit, Michigan, where high school students would greet me outside their campus, saying, “But why did you come here? Everyone here is trying to get to Cali!”

We started a RT chapter in Detroit, and we bonded hard, fighting for political prisoner Gary Tyler’s innocence, and doing citywide anti-apartheid teach-in’s.

The short story is, these friends/comrades I made during those years are my oldest and fiercest. We went through so much together — changing the world before our eyes. We saw what a small group of people could do. We also took our lumps from the state: in jail, targeted by police, labor bosses, the KKK, the Nazi Party, getting our asses kicked —feeling very isolated at times.

Then, there was an aftermath.

I have been an unaffiliated socialist since the I.S. expelled me in 1977. There was a lot of that, throwing people out in spasms of organizational ire. I wasn’t alone!

Still, what that word means in my heart—“socialist”— comes from the comrades I found when I was still in high school. My best friends.

I know you’re waiting for a BUT.

I am reluctant to give you my BUT. Let’s unspool this a little more.

My history is not in Andrew Higgins’ collection— I wrote a memoir about my years in the IS, long ago.1

I did consult with Andrew, and offered him my introductions, and editorial caveats. I gave notes to a couple of the contributors, like my friends Michael Letwin and Kim Anno. Their experiences are the most like mine.

Some of my favorite chapters are from my friends in Detroit— Kyle Hopkins, Tonya English, and Arnita Dobbins, who grew up in the city’s Black Power era at its zenith, when your stake in your political future, your family — everything seemed possible.

We were so lucky to meet each other that young, to trust each other a little. It was a huge leap.

I said the editor, “Andrew, I doubt you’d want my writing in this, because it’s too frank, sexually, for your purposes— and you know, a side of tragic.” —A little of the cautionary tale.

I am speaking from the uncomfortable-truth department, and it doesn’t make me look great, either.

Why has it taken so long for IS and RT folks to speak out? The adventures, triumphs, and heartbreaking twists of fate are remarkable. We did change the American politic.

I think . . . It’s because there is a lot of pain left in the wake of the IS splinter and demise. You could say the seeds of destruction were baked in, long ago.

The American Left, coming into the sixties, was devastated by McCarthyism fears, exile, sins of the father. That’s what the IS was born into, like all of the New Left during the Vietnam years.

American socialists in those days, were instructed by their mentors from Day 1, not to tell anyone anything, to keep our names secret, to remove traces of one’s past, to put everyone on a “need to know” basis. “Domestic matters” were not supposed to matter.

We never admitted problems or aired dirty laundry. How could we? The FBI had their sights on us. We were monitored by the COINTELPRO programs, we were infiltrated by creeps we only found out about, years later. Everything you’ve read about what happened when J. Edgar Hoover devastated the Panthers, we were well acquainted with. Smaller scale, same ugly impact.

We didn’t “win,” after all. No democratic socialism in my lifetime. So much for triumphalism and five-year plans, seven-year plans. Anyone from that era who’s still in politics now, has become zen-like. You burn through your attachments.

The more sensitive issues are the things we did to ourselves— those are the hardest to sleep on. The internecine battles between former loving comrades— the stuff of drama.

It has taken decades to open my mouth and say, “Okay. I’m ready to say what happened.”

One has to begin with the “good part.” Not to be an apologist, but to understand the stakes.

Higgins’ oral histories show how a cadre in the labor movement and community struggles held their spine and even slayed a couple dragons during the psychotically conservative Reagan years. It was a mouse that roared. We “did good” like Robin Hood.

If you’re young and curious about the organizing campaigns of contemporary socialists like AOC, or Mamdani, or how the rank and file trade union movement changed from a bunch of old Nixon-lapping fogeys to progressives of today— there’s a lot of the IS spirit in those movements. Foundational.

The Red Tide and the IS did create some moments intimate solidarity between “black and white” at a time of profound segregation; we physically resisted the Klan and the Nazi’s, the carceral system, the corrupt-cozy hell between union and company bosses.

On the theoretical side, the IS was on the money for two precedents.

They were the first socialist tendency to “Say No to Moscow AND Washington” — a Marxist group untethered to Capital-C communist oligarchies in USSR, China, and Cuba.

At the time, in the 60s and 70s, such a position was WILD. There were so many American lefty illusions about Mao, Fidel, and the rest.

We never had to go on apology tour.

The other tradition that came out of the IS in particular, was systematic, from-the bottom-up community, street by street, shop by shop, organizing. It owes much in debt to Farrell Dobbs and the earliest American socialist days, long before Bolsheviks. When you see how Minneapolis resisted ICE, you are seeing some of that legacy.

So too, as you observe campaigns like Mamdani’s in New York, or the Black Panthers in the early days, you are looking at a particular kind of shoe leather that gets worn out organizing on the ground.

You identify grassroots charisma, form common cause, and keep pushing from below.

It’s the opposite of investing in magical leaders and political hubris. The hours involved are endless. It sounds noble, but it’s strategic. You want to be able to withstand being picked off.

Because you will get picked off.

So why did it all end? What broke up the band?

You don’t learn that answer from Higgins’ book— or rather, it’s obscure. You hear fragments.

I was startled reading some of my old friends’ accounts of “why we broke up” — like a divorce where you’re the stunned kid who never understood what the hell was going on.

There is a spoken reason for this disconnect, and an unspoken one.

The stated fatal argument was, “Whither American Labor?” How were we supposed to navigate the Reagan years when unions were being eviserated? —Or as one comrade put it, “death by a thousand cuts.”

The IS had, let’s be frank, shocking success building a rank and file movement in the Teamsters that ended up toppling the old-boy leadership, and prompted the first national general strike among over-the-road drivers. We could hardly believe it when we found we had a tiger by the tail. The timing was right.

I was in the middle of the earliest days of TDU, when it was just a handful of us in a room, running the mimeograph machine. I typed and edited the founding documents. I drove cross-country organizing in truck stops, driver by driver. Loading dock by loading dock. Having guns drawn on me by opposing sides, staying up late at night strategizing, planning a next day. Crafting the kind of union we wanted. The membership swelled to thousands. People were READY.

So— one thing happening in the freight industry at the time, was that United Parcel Service, UPS, was coming into its ascendancy. They would change the business entirely, but we didn’t know that yet. UPS hired a lot of young people, Gen-X’ers. They changed protocols. They had their own language. They hired women. (Women who would become extraordinary union leaders, to their dismay).

Yeah, and you didn’t have to be white to be hired, either. Ha! This was really different for the trucking industry, and for the Teamsters Union.

UPS was not benevolent— they exploited the generation gap and race and gender gap, which they’ve continued to this day.

In TDU, and consequently the IS, there was an argument about whether we needed to emphasize the older veterans of the union, the gray-hairs, so to speak, versus the younger generation coming in. Women rising up. It was not a polite set of differences.

As an example, 1976, I was arrested on a UPS picket line with my comrades in Detroit, roughed up and thrown in a cell. I was 17.

When I got my one phone call from jail, I called not my family, but the IS national office. Older comrade Mike Parker answered the phone, and when I told him where I was— Can you get someone to bail me out? — he lost his temper.

“Sue, you’ve been told a hundred times. UPS is not a priority.”

And then he hung up on me.

And that’s what you call a difference of opinion.

This happened all over the Left, not just the IS. Members never talked about our own class origins and differences inside our groups, but it was tense. I didn’t like being lectured by people from backgrounds different from my own about what “a real worker” was.

There were purity tests. The Right Kind of Worker. The Right Kind of Internationalist. The Right Kind of Ally.

One afternoon, years later, I talked to Elaine Brown from the Black Panthers about the same bullshit in her era, (“The Right Kind of Black” category—you can imagine) and we started crying with laughter. Catharsis.

In retrospect, it was the internal power struggles of the over-matched, and it’s been repeated a million times. Crabs in a bucket.

So yes, there were disagreements about the group’s approach to labor, or how to live through a rather reactionary period where it was clear the Left and Labor were on the defensive. You would think we could overcome the differences, small as we were.

But no.

The fatal ingredient, was our lack of self-examination. The abuse of corrupt leadership. It was rotten. The dick-swinging made self-examination impossible.

So let’s rip off the bandaid. What finally broke up the IS tendency in the 21st century, both in the U.S. and the U.K memberships, was a cascade of events prompted by “a charismatic man”— reckless, narcissistic, drunk, and indulged— who sexually assaulted a comrade, a woman. More than one. More than once.

A consistent pattern, as they say.

And, instead of nipping the perp’s bullshit in the bud, and packing his bags, leaders close to the scoundrel closed ranks, made excuses, covered it up. They disparaged the complaining women.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Google your heart out.

The final dissolution happened around 2019, forty-two years after I was expelled. The trust was broken.

Toxic characters like these men have shambled their way through social movements for as long as we can remember. What different now is that finally, finally, a group of women and men said, ENOUGH.

I can’t believe the Chavez exposé has come right in time for this moment. Because it is endemic.

The IS was one domino in the history of organizations who preached one thing, and did another at their peril. There we were, ardent feminists, openly gay members in the 70s, people devoted to unmasking and repudiating racism wherever it raised its head.

And Yet.

By sweeping the ugly under the rug, you end up with a monster under the bed.

I was one of the young sweepers, the excusers, the insecure, the dupes, the exploited — until I wasn’t. I remember thinking that it was kind of weird I was asked to bed the National Secretary when he came to Los Angeles, like it was an assignment. He needs a young woman in every port! I thought he was an asshole. He was cruel. Was he supposed to be some kind of genius in spite of it?

Well, that turned out not to be true. He was not a genius; he was a con artist.

By the time I was 18 in Detroit in 1976, I’d surmised that if you were in our group and didn’t have a powerful “husband/protector,” then the only other avenue was to become an Iron Nun. There was nothing in between.

But there were bigger fish to fry, right? Weren’t we aiming for revolution? Why would I want to complain over a personal hassle, a pathetic misogynist stunt? I pushed it out of my mind and went to a lesbianfeminist CR meeting. Then organize another demo. Then print the next issue of our paper. Stay up all night until everything was done. There was more to do. I couldn’t synthesize the contradictions, only the imperatives that lay in front of us.

Marx was read, Lenin studied, but honestly, Freud and Shulamith Firestone could have offered some insights.

We did not discuss members’ mental health when it was failing. We looked past outrageous drug and alcohol problems, ones that probably mirrored those of our own parents.

We tolerated and esteemed and excused men in leadership who were beating their lovers. And their wives who excused it. —Violent drunken pricks who were supposed to be in charge.

Or we didn’t. I slapped one of those bastards in the face at a meeting and you can guess which of us got in trouble.

It was disgraceful. Blood was spilled, literally. And the chickens came home to roost.

How does one answer collective PTSD? It was never addressed, not even remotely.

I am haunted by all the things that “didn’t happen.”

This is one story.

One time after the Red Tide had organized a high school teach-in about South African apartheid, an inspiring day, I invited everyone over to my flat I shared with an older (27!) comrade who was at work. I would make spaghetti for everyone.

We were so tired that instead of spinning records, dancing, and carrying on, everyone was lying on the sofas waiting to eat. There were about 20 of us, including some ninth graders from Chicago who told their parents they were at a YMCA conference.

Then came the knock, or rather a series of hard blows on the door and everyone knew it wasn’t friendly. I cracked open the door and it was five of Detroit’s finest, batons at the ready while I sputtered out, “Don’t you need a search warrant? “—The lead thug pushed his way in, twisted my arm around in a half Nelson, and drew his gun to my temple.

They had that look the ICE agents have today. —Where they are both furious and embarrassed with themselves, which was only gonna be taken out on us. One of them claimed we were harboring a kidnapped officer, which was ridiculous. I got the impression a racist neighbor had tattled on us and reported a house full of black and white young people no doubt having an orgy.

They pushed me gun-first through the house, threatening everyone with the same fate. One of the older RT’er in the room made oinking noises, goading the cops on, which only made things worse.

Yeah, he turned out to be one of my comrade wife-beaters and pimps. Good times.

I really don’t know why the thug team gave up, but a headquarters message was crackling in the ears of the cop’s walkie-talkies, and the chief pig dropped my arm, spinning me, and threw me to the floor— You’re evicted; get out.

All I could think about was those little girls from Chicago scared shitless. And the look I imagined on my roommate’s face when she came home and saw the mess they made. Losing her apartment because of me.

Everyone fled like rabbits; it seemed like in one minute the cops were gone and everyone else disappeared— I was standing alone with a bunch of congealed pasta.

The silence I remember in that moment was a ringing in my ears. I didn’t sit. I remember, staring out the window as if waiting for the next shatter.

It came, with the arrival of two men from the IS leadership, Joel and Eric. One of them had been my lover the year before. Now disavowed.

The two men stepped in the open door— it had been broken. They surveyed the dismal scene.

Joel said, “Is this it? “ And then, “Well, clean it up.”

And that was it.

So many times, this scenario. This is on you. Toughen up. Say Nothing. Familiar messages in my family of origin, too.

As the decades went by, I began to wonder if anyone remembered what I did.

And then, five years ago, I went back to Detroit for a Red Tide reunion, and I saw Billy, now 60-something like me, one of the locals who’d been in Highland Park that day. I hadn’t seen him since we were 17.

We were drinking Vernor’s sodas and hanging around the grill outside at Tonya’s. Perfect summer day. Billy came running up to me with his wife who I’d never met, and he just folded me into his arms and kept exclaiming to his missus, “It’s Sue, it Sue, they held a gun to her head. She’s the one I told you, they held a gun to her head.”

What happened to those who left or drifted away from the IS? The paths are quite various. The folks you’ll see Higgins’ edition are people like myself who remained in the political life. Some are venerated in the Labor Movement. I’m friends with some. A few to confide to. Others, a respect for that fact we’re still here.

A lot of us had families and raised children and grandchildren and adopted children. We made neighborhood communities. We worked and worked and worked at all the jobs America offers. Making things. Taking care of people.

Quite a number of us became artists, that’s interesting to me.

I have comrades and ex’es who became inventors, and leaders in the beginning of the tech revolution.

I have others who joined Eastern-inspired religious groups, or became rabbis. Sects that made the IS look like a casual drop-in club.

And other comrades, because we were adept at publishing our own house organs, we got involved in journalism, book and media publishing.

When you were in the IS, you had to know how to write copy, capture the photo, lay it out, print it, and then market the hell out of it. We called that last part, “agitprop.” I have never had a better training ground, although ironically, no one at the time ever said, “Huh, you’re good at this.”

I thought we all had to be good at it. I thought you had to be able to debate the world and win.

So back to my book review — if you’re a critic/student of American history and politics, yeah, you will be curious to read it. The quality of the writing is all over the map, but the good chapters are really good, and you’ll learn things you’d never find anywhere else. Think of it as a primary document, the beginning of a trail.

Does it have major holes? Yes. I think we’re at the beginning of the “Can-we-talk-about-what-really-happened” phase. It’s ironic that it comes at the end of the founders’ generation.

So many young people are saying today, “Enough of you, and your excuses. We’ve run out of time.”

I can’t help but agree with them. I wish I had been that ferocious at the time. I thought I was. I thought I was.

The offending driver jumped out, already crying, tears streaming down his young face, saying he was to be shipped to the Strait of Hormuz the next day; he’d enlisted because “I’ve fucked up my entire life” and he couldn’t take wrecking his parents’ car on top of everything else. “PLEASE GOD PLEASE DON’T TELL THEM.”

We started crying too because who doesn’t need a good cry at this point.

Don’t tell my mother, don’t tell my father; they’re buried here, right by my side.

Our car went to the body shop, but we shouldn’t have bothered. A body shouldn’t have been bothered.

We shouldn’t have bothered because the insurance man said we’d still have to pay $10,000.

“Well, that might as well be a million,” I said.

Well. I will not sully my poetry with Allstate’s rhetoric. As JD Vance says, the Insurance Man should be careful before he talks about matters of theology. Theirs is the language of Pilate. No matter how many times they wash their hands, the blood does not come off. “Whether it’s home, health, or auto.”

During my time without a car, I am walking around the neighborhood. My favorite fashion poet, Derek Guy, calls this experience a fast-disappearing luxury— the ability to walk around a neighborhood, where on foot you can find groceries, tacos, or cigarillos. Yes, I live walking distance from a place called CIGARS R US.

My town, Santa Cruz, is a city of 100,000– give or take a few thousand as the students ebb and flow. The summer tourists swell it to a million on the beach. It has Victorians and urban alleys and suburban blahs and wide rural fields— a mix of all things, sometimes on the same mile.

My favorite pretty blocks are closely-nested single family homes built between the two first world wars. The houses are small, and some claim the sidewalk. They are grown over with roses at the moment. Everything grows in our temperate climate. The desert plants and the artichokes, the crabgrass lawns, the fir trees and the magnolias.

On foot, I walk and walk each morning, but don’t call it fresh air and exercise. I think of my life on my feet as “street photography.” A flaneur, gently spying in the gardens and gutters. I will lie down in a muddy alley to get my shot of a towering palm sheltering owls, morning doves, and probably, rats.

I talk to people who come in and out of their cars and front porches.

One woman this morning, Judy, told me her home was built by a sea captain in 1900. “The Ghost and Mrs Muir!” I said. Her front steps were built with abalone shells pressed into the cement.

“That’s right,” she said.

“I get lots of Facebook messages,” I said, “from men who say they are lonely sea captains with full heads of silver hair and rippling tattoos of mermaids on their arms and shoulders.”

“I know;” Judy said, “me too.”

We wished they were real and would make us a drink.

I lived half my childhood around Los Angeles. The red bottle brush plant is planted all over Los Angeles, their beds flourishing the endless freeways. The plant used to fill me with dread in those years, like I was trapped forever, Catholic school punishments, the sprawling red and green hedges in the 60s thick smog that said nothing to eight-year-old me except “You are lonely and that’s the way it’s always going to be.” Their fallen bloody stringy flowers were a carpet on every sidewalk.

But now I’m grown up and the same red Callistemon in Santa Cruz looks quite innocent. The chucked mattress in the street cracks me up. I feel like calling up Zorhan Mamdani and asking for his advice.

The truth is, in Santa Cruz, we don’t have “311” like New York City, yet you still call up our mayor— they are required to answer the phone, they take shifts— and ask, where do I get rid of this street mattress and the mayor says, “Oh THAT again” and you laugh together because who is this busy mattress marauder?

The best thing I ate on my walk today was lychee fruit. They are yellow and ripe on the tree. You split the gold fruit open, but don’t eat the alkaline skin— suck out the juicy pulp inside; it’s so sweet. You can say to yourself, “Close our eyes and we are in Hawaii.”

We grow many tropicals in Santa Cruz. Fragrant ginger grows easily. Tall banana trees don’t properly fruit. It’s not hot or rainy enough. But there are lots of avocados and avocados are so expensive now that when my avocado tree bears fruit this summer I am going to sell $5 dollar avocados on the sidewalk and it will be a retirement plan like no other. Maybe $10,000 each, we shall see.

I have a new method to make neighbor friends. I admire their broken-down vintage cars stuck for years in the weeds, or tagged on the street.

—Take a gorgeous dark green Mercedes Benz for example, or the GMC El Camino. What year? I don’t know. The kind of years I like.

I wrote a note in my own handwriting — “I love your car. I don’t suppose you want to give it to me? I could spend all year fixing it with my shade-tree mechanic and then we could go for rides.”

Oh boy, did they respond.

They will never give that car up; they have plans. They’ve had plans for 40 years. They love to be flattered, the gearheads, and we sit down and smoke and juice a few oranges that are rolling around in the driveway and before you know it, I know who they’re voting for, in the next election.

I tell them, I can’t afford ten thousand for a new bumper/rear/whatever it is that’s broken, and they say FUCK ‘EM; CALL LUIGI!

I can’t get over that everyone wishes they had their own personal St. Luigi of Vengeance.

There is a new version of The Count of Monte Cristo on television right now, PBS. A French and Italian production. Remember, as I said, Hollywood, c’est fini.

If you know the story well, I suggest skipping to episode 2 of this version; the pace picks up.

Our hero Edmond Dantés is locked up to die in the Château d’If, a fate worse than death except that he meets his one other brother in this forsaken hell, the Abbé Faria, played by Jeremy Irons, who anchors the script.

The two men talk late into the night, all the knowledge of the world from the master to his protegée. They begin to dig out. The Abbé tragically dies before their final day, and he leaves Dantés a map to a 300-year-old cave of treasures: gold and rubies and diamonds.

I love the treasure scene. I could linger there. Treasure used to be a thing of beauty: jewels, carved coins and stones made by artists, even engraved parchment instead of . . . cryptocurrency.

This PBS Count of Monte Cristo is a low-key TV hit. I believe, I do believe, it is because Alexandre Dumas wrote a tale of justified and sweeping revenge.

Dantés’ life was destroyed by the corrupt and the profane, and he, in time, destroys his enemies with as much cruelty as is required.

The Abbé warns Edmond before he dies, he says, “Mon fils, if you want revenge, you must dig your own grave first.”

And we, the reader, who empathize with Edmond after his fifteen years going mad in solitary confinement, we say, “Yeah, yeah, fine. Hand me a shovel, et allons-y, motherfucker.” Our mercies were destroyed long ago.

Our impatience is because of our thirst for justice, at the price of abject loneliness.

I thirst for the same.

Yet.

I also want to eat gold fruit that falls to the ground, and lie on a dirty trampoline that someone left in the street, staring at the sky, eating lychees and spitting out the seeds with some guy who isn’t going to give me his Mercedes Benz. Not today. But what a pal. What a pal.

In Case You Missed It

Today, we find out, Trump’s Pentagon thugs threatened Pope Leo— yes, the Pope— with a murderous analogy to the 14th century Avignon Papacy.

Um.

“What is The Avignon Papacy?”

Here’s the short version: in the 1300s, the Vatican’s Roman Pope was kidnapped by French King Philip, and beaten and left to die in prison while a series of “new popes” were installed by the French Monarch.

It didn’t turn out very well, but you get the drift!

Here’s the scoop that just got unearthed by The Free Press and Letters from Leo:

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You self-published an e-book and want to promote it. How?

OR

You had an existing paperback, or hardcover, or audiobook, and now you finally have your ebook ready. How do you tell all your old readers? —and the new fans who might like it?

OR

You’re standing in the street screaming, “What the fuck is the difference between Kindle vs. Amazon vs. an Ebook vs LOSING MY MIND?”

. . . And, some of you wonder if it’s too late to promote an e-book, because you should have done it so long ago, it’s a disgrace and how are you suppose to rise like a phoenix at this late date.

Yes, I can help you, too.

Watch the video, and add any questions you have, in the comments! I will reply to all.

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McCarthy’s Blacklist, who can forget? Women in fear of losing their kids. Gay writers with good reason to know they could be prosecuted. People who smuggled their work out of the country with their lives on the line.

“But that’s not me!” you may say. Your apprehension may be closer to home.

Your family members— your parents or children— might not be pleased with the “unexpurgated you.” Do you really have to wait ‘til everyone dies before you can write your opinion, your observations?

Finally— a group I hear from a lot: academics and scholars, who see their university &/or government watching them like hawks to pounce if they so much as comment negatively about the weather. “Alw…

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I thought we might as well kill some time, before we kill anyone else.

Because the killing hasn’t stopped, whatever the poison.

Sometimes speeches fail me and I’d rather sing, or listen. I put together some songs for us to share, and you’re welcome to lend me yours.

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• The White House Didn’t Listen to Machiavelli: “Wars Begin When You Will, But They Do Not End When You Please.”

I have a couple tips for how to circumvent the rather-flailing American press. Persian strategy vs. Clown Car Continuum.

• For my birthday month, I went from “Cancer Sufferer” to “Cancer Survivor” in 2 weeks, thanks to an early-detection surgery. It’s my first existential procedure!

• How do you exhibit conflict-art in places where politeness is valued and aesthetic experience is sheltered? I got my eyes opened throwing my first “War At Home” show.

• “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the AI Juggernaut.” —If it hasn’t succeeded in porn, it can’t make it anywhere. No proof of concept. Let’s talk . .

Some Photos from the Sweeter Side of my Birthday Week.

Thank you for the flowers and the affection!

If you meant to bring me an ice cream or a pearl necklace for my birthday/cancer recovery/show debut— it’s not too late!

If you’d like purchase a small subscription to my blog, it would mean the world to me.

It’s cheaper than food, gas, or helium! - Susie

In Case You Missed It

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Good evening everyone, to the March 14 edition of Sage Lee’s “Storytime.”

My name is Susie Bright, and Sage asked me to guest-host for him while he and Ed are traveling overseas. I want to do him proud!

This is a dream come true, to continue Sage’s weekly poetry reads that have been our tradition for years.

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(See occasion details at end of today’s story).

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