Encyclopedia Out + Jean Wyllys, Brazilian Congressman + Revolt Hits Egypt

A while back I mentioned that the journal Encyclopedia's second volume, F-K, would soon be out, and it is now on bookstands and available for order ($25).  I've flipped through a copy of this newest volume and am delighted to say that like the first one, it is a beautifully designed and produced journal, but it's also an inventive, intellectually provocative anthology and a substantial (and hefty, in terms of size and weight) book.

I'm also very pleased that my translations of two of Brazilian writer Jean Wyllys's microstories from his collection Aflitos (Fundação Casa Jorge Amado; Editora Globo, 2001), which won his native Bahia's Prêmio Copene de Cultura e Arte in 2001, appear in this volume. I began translating them in the middle of last decade, and about a year and a half ago completed a translation of the entire volume. I haven't yet found a publisher, but the experience of translating his very condensed, lyrical prose pieces, some of them closer to poetry than fiction, others nearer to horror in the brutal realities they depict, and all of which offer a fresh perspective on Brazilian and Bahian life, was instructive and creatively energizing.

I'm also glad to have undertaken this project translating Jean's work. As I've noted before, he was the first person to come out as gay on a Brazilian reality TV show--Big Brother 5, which he won in 2005--and after moving to Rio de Janeiro and returning to his roots as a journalist and professor for a few years, he recently ran on the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) ticket, representing a district in Rio, was elected in October and is now the first openly gay federal deputy (equivalent to a US Representative) to be seated in Brazil's lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies.

I imagine he'll be a bit too busy to write more fiction anytime soon, but I hope he continues to do so, and I also hope his legislative and proposed political goals and career succeed, for him, his constituents and the Brazilian people.

---

Not long ago I blogged about the revolt in Tunisia, which continues as I type this entry, and it was clear to me that if it could even partially succeed--and it has--its spirit would spread throughout other parts of the Middle East. And it has. The largest popular revolution appears to be unfolding in Egypt, where protesters comprising a sizable cross-section of that country's urban populace have staged sustained public protests against the unresponsive, dictatorial government of nonagenarian president-for-life Hosni Mubarak.  Economic stagnation, an authoritarian political systm and violent repression of dissidents have long created a volatile situation that has finally exploded, sparked in part by Tunisia's example, and it's unclear that Mubarak and the security forces will be able to turn back the clock.

In response to the revolt Egypt's government last night shut down Internet, wireless cellular phone, SMS/texting, and satellite phone services, and its secret police and over the last few days its security forces have fired live and non-live ammunition on protesters, killing and badly wounding numerous people in Cairo, Suez, and other cities. The government's communications blackout continued today, in order to shut down Friday afternoon post-prayer demonstrations, though several news reports I've read say that protesters nevertheless gathered at 6 different sites around Cairo, and began marching on government buildings. Anti-nuclear weapon activist and Nobel Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, an acknowledged leader of the opposition, returned to Egypt yesterday to rally the opposition and today the security forces purportedly turned water cannons on him and numerous supporters, besieging them in a Cairo mosque.  The New York Times is now reporting that Mubarak has now called the military to quell protests that the police forces cannot and has declared a curfew, but demonstrators remain on the streets, a ruling party building is in flames, and Al Jazeera has footage of a torched police car being pushed off a bridge. One thing that remains unclear to me is how widespread the uprisings are. I have heard about demonstrations and attacks on protesters in Suez, but what about other sizable Egyptian cities like Alexandria, Giza and Port Said? What about in the mid-sized cities and in rural areas? What about in southern Egypt? Also, if the protests do succeed in toppling Mubarak, as happened in Tunisia with Ben Ali, who are the likely leading candidates to replace him, and what sort of democratic, republican government might emerge?

Symbolic and public protests have also begun in Algeria, Yemen and Syria, which also suspended its Internet service. In the current New York Review of Books in an article entitled "Uprisings: From Cairo to Tunis," William Pfaff discusses the ferment bubbling across the Arab world, and notes how many of the strongmen under threat have been close allies, sometimes protegés and agents, of US power. This was the case with Tunisia's Ben Ali, who even studied in the US; Mubarak has for years collected billions of dollars annually to prop up his regime. Across the region, US-allied leaders have been stalwarts in the nebulous "War on Terror" at the same time as they have grown increasingly ineffectual in addressing the social, political and economic problems in their own countries. Among the many fine points Pfaff makes, one is key: reform in and of itself hasn't always worked out either. Ben Ali's educational and social reforms in part enabled his downfall, by helping to create a more educated population, a working and middle class with a mind of its own unwilling to continue to take the degraded and diminishing opportunities his regime offered. Enlightenment in this case unleashed forces to ensure its fuller realization. Egypt is several orders larger than Tunisia, with an enraged and engaged young populace, politicized secular and religious opposition parties, and perhaps a majority with no desire to go backwards. As I noted with Tunisia, it's unclear what the final outcome of this current Egyptian revolt will be, but what is likely is that whatever results, Mubarak's hold on power will be fatally damaged, even if he manages to retain it.

(E-)Revolution in Tunisia

Holly Pickett/NY Times

So the Tunisian people have driven out their corrupt, authoritarian president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, in office since 1987. Mohamed Ghannouchi, the prime minister, has stepped into the breach on his ouster, to form a coalition government and work with the former Speaker of the Parliament, Fouad Mebazaa (below, at left), who has now temporarily assumed the presidency according to the Tunisian Constitution. Mebazaa has promised elections within 60 days, but it remains unclear what sort of government will be formed, and by whom, especially given how harshly Ben Ali and his allies, many of whom presumably are still in the country, had restricted the opposition parties, especially those on the left and of a religious cast. In fact, Al Nahda, the Islamist Party, had been completely outlawed. Ben Ali's Constitutional Democratic Rally Party (Rassemblement Constitutionnel Democratique) or RCD, so long in control and so dominant, is now, it appears, thoroughly discredited.

What provoked this "Jasmine" revolution, which is reverberating throughout the Middle East, has been the frustration, building over a series of years but erupting a month ago, of millions of people, especially the young, the middle and working-classes and the poor, who faced a lack of jobs, rising costs for staples, constant repression in a police state, and no representation in and by a government that was robbing the country blind. Ben Ali's stage-managed elections were a sign of the problems; his family's steady enrichment a symptom of all that had been going wrong in Tunisia.  The specific spark seems to have been the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, an unemployed university graduate, who made his mortal protest after police stopped him from earning a subsistence living selling fruits and vegetables, because he lacked a permit.  News of his death spread via Facebook, engendering protests by unemployed university graduates like Bouazizi, and then, according to The New York Times, by workers and young professionals, which the Ben Ali government met with brutal, repressive responses.

Thus far, gun battles between the military and militias loyal to Ben Ali are continuing in and around key sites in the capital, Tunis and its suburb, the historical city of Carthage, with the military apparently backing the nascent government. Though he also may have aided Ben Ali's flight from Tunisia, the country's military's chief, General Rachid Ammar, had earlier made the dramatic and crucial decision to cease firing live ammunition against the protesters (initially labeled by the Western media as "rioters" and "looters"--sound famliar), which enabled Ben Ali's overthrow.  Military authorities have arrested Ben Ali's former Security Chief, Ali Seriati, who is alleged to have been promoting chaos, "murder and pillage," along with other leading figures in Ben Ali's government, including the former Interior Minister, Rafik Belhaj Kacem. (Is he any relation to the French philosopher, critic and novelist Mehdi Belhaj Kacem? Do any J's Theater readers know?)

One point much discussed in recent days is the role that Twitter and Facebook may be playing in spreading news about and helping to organize the protests, and in serving as means of communication and information dissemination; according to several reports I've read, these platforms were integral to the sustained anti-government action that culminated in Ben Ali's ouster.  This counters some arguments out there that these platforms are basically impotent in this regard, and confirms, to some degree, predictions by figures like NYU's Clay Shirky. Also noteworthy is a US cable, released by WikiLeaks, detailing Ben Ali's corruption and the US's lack of confidence in his rule, leading some to call this a "WikiLeaks Revolution." To quote The Huffington Post:

Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks had discussed the high levels of nepotism and corruption displayed by [former Tunisian First Lady Leila] Trabelsi's clan. But U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley rejected any notion that WikiLeaks disclosures led to the revolution in Tunisia, saying Sunday that Tunisians were already well aware of the graft, nepotism and lavish lifestyles of the former president and his relatives.

If I read New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick's January 13 article correctly, the cables released by WikiLeaks may have played a role, however, in specific uprisings that occurred in the resort town of Hammamet, on the Mediterranean coast. Here, in the "St.-Tropez" of Tunisia, was where many members of Ben Ali's and Trabelsi's extended clans had built mansions and chosen to luxuriate, and here was where protesters had their say, in violent response, flooding the streets as they chanted and denounced the soon-to-depart president, and eventually ransacking, stripping and then burning the house of one of Ben Ali's relatives.

Holly Pickett for The New York Times
Looters took furniture from a home belonging to a relative of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Hammamet, Tunisia, on Thursday.

One final point is that neighboring authoritarian governments must be a bit nervous, Egypt especially, which is tighly ruled by its octogenarian president, Hosni Mubarak. Tunisia's revolution also presents challenges for the US, which has traditionally backed governments like Ben Ali's with money and political support, most recently as part of the "Global War on Terror," while unironically and simultaneously calling for increased democratization. So what is it going to be, and if it turns out that the Islamic Party is a big winner in Tunisia, what then for the US and its chess-playing in this country and across the region? Most importantly, though, what now for Tunisia and its people?

Scenes from the streets

Al Jazeera's report on the Tunisia protests, from last Friday

GOP Trifecta Today + Super R-Type Event @ Green Lantern Gallery

The 2008 candidates' tax cut plans

Because of the high risk of incivility ("be civil" a friend sometimes reminds), I have refrained for some time from posting political commentary on here, saving that for short bursts on Twitter or other channels, but I must say, the GOP hit the foulest trifecta today: they killed a Senate vote to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, they defeated a Senate bill to provide funding for 9/11 first responders, and they forced the Senate Majority Leader to table the DREAM Act.

On top of this, I listened to "reasonable" Republican Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee tell his NPR interlocutor that not only did the country need not worry about the huge deficit-increasing effects of the Bush-GOP tax cut gimmicry overall ($4 trillion to the Treasury over the next decade), which was going to magically create jobs after having not done so for ten years, nor worry about the effects just of the cuts for billionaires ($700 million), but in fact, any future attempt to reset the tax rates to Clinton levels (which were quite low) or any other higher level would amount to "the largest tax increase in history."

You heard that--"the largest tax increase in history"--it's going to be trotted out like a sick show pony over and over and over as soon as the time is right.

On top of this, the payroll tax cut will reset in a year, meaning it either will be kept low, starving Social Security's trust fund or raised and labeled a "tax increase." Mind you, they are going to use these both to bash the Democrats' heads in throughout 2012. I need not say who is going to suffer the worst as a result of this, but he currently occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But what can you do, he's beyond listening or reasoning, it appears. I asked the question a while ago: when did this president become a self-identified "Blue Dog," and did anyone else realize we were putting a Republican in the White House?

***

Tonight I ventured out briefly into the cold and snow (it's on again) to catch the second (and last?) in the Super R-Type word-based art series, curated by a d jameson at the Green Lantern Gallery's The Corpse Performance Space, in Ukrainian Village. (Some Chicago neighborhoods have such vivid names.) The lineup included painter and graphic artist Keiler Roberts, School of the Art Institute student Hyojin An, and poets Amira Hanafi and (publisher) Rachel Araujo. Roberts narrated a tour through her witty and engaging autobiographically based graphic work, which she said she turned to after years as a more conventional painter, though she did say that she still painted and drew. Her husband (and daughter, then still on the way) made an appearance in the works, which I plan to check out. One aspect of her work that I particularly liked was her use of blogs as creative devices to enable kinds of word-text pairings that are not that possible otherwise, and it intrigued me to think about these projects (she has started 2-3 blogs, from what I can tell) in relation to her graphic work/comics.

Hyojin An, a native of Korea, devised pictograms as a means of dealing with her struggles with the English language and American signage. These were humorous but also underlined how even knowledge of a second language, in written form, can prove baffling given the complexities of idiomaticity, conventional and everyday usage, and so on. In the second project she displayed, she had created large quasi-ID statements saying on the top half, "I, ________, am [ ] a foreigner here in _____", and on the bottom half allowing the self-identifier to write whatever she or he wanted, especially in her or his native language. She mentioned that she took photos not only in Chicago, but overseas (I think she said Singapore, but perhaps also South Korea). Though I did think immediately of similar projects based on self-identification, both formal and more contingent and popular (the sorts of quickly drawn up IDs people have used, for example, on Chatroulette or other sites), I enjoyed hearing her talk through how she had come up with this project. She invited us to come create one, but I wasn't feeling so ready to do so. You can download them from her site, though. One other fun and funny project An created was a Facebook profile for "Foreign Er": do visit it to review it for yourself.

Concluding the evening and event were Hanafi and Araujo, who read together and in complementary fashion. Hanafi's project derived from culling Oxford English Dictionary entries related to "fucking," while Araujo's selections were drawn from her interest in human anatomy and her conceptualization of what might happen if one's right brain somehow ended up in one's crotch.  They did create a dialogue that did raise the heat, especially Araujo's pieces, though both were less graphic--in the sexual sense--than I thought they might be.  But then, had they were not allowed to project the old porno film clips, taken from the waiting rooms in Parisian brothels of an earlier era, that they had wanted onto the screen, but the gallery's picture glass front posed too much of a vice-squad risk. (Daley's Chicago is pretty liberal, but not that liberal, especially outside of certain neighborhoods.) Not even the falling snow provided enough cover. It did, however, make driving back north treacherous, and yet I'm here posting this, so I got my dose of mind food and it all worked out in the end.


Photos!


Green Lantern Gallery's Devin, opening the event

Before the event

Series curator a d jameson

The cover of one of Keiler Roberts' graphic pieces/comics

A frame of Keiler Roberts' comics (it resembles Alison Bechdel's style a little here)

Some of the art in the gallery

Between presentations

Spectators/attendees

Keiler Roberts chatting with an attendee

Hyojin An showing her images

One of An's pictographic signs

One of An's foreigner identity sheets

Curator jameson displaying his foreigner identity sheet
 
Curator jameson and An displaying prints of the foreigner ID sheets

Rachel Araujo and Amira Hanafi

Man and cloth mountain (this is not the name of this artwork, to be sure....)

Idiotic Things I Read Today

You'd think that I'd be happier, what with the election finally over. Finally, I can have the TV on for more than 5 minutes without being bombarded with an ad by Meg Whitman or Jerry Brown telling me why their version of hell is better than their opponent's. But I'm irritated. I started perusing the Innerwebs this morning and just found idiocy after idiocy. Let's review.

My semi-beloved San Jose Mercury News ran a piece detailing the most awesome victory parade in San Francisco for the World Champion San Francisco Giants after they won the World Series in most excellent fashion on Monday. When describing the size of the massive crowd, the article read: "Those arriving in downtown San Francisco -- where police officers gave crowd estimates ranging from 200,000 to 1 million -- were greeted by gigantic orange and black balloons that bobbed on the traffic signals."

That's the BEST you can do?! Somewhere between 200,000 and a freaking million? OK, that's not really an estimate. That's just pulling numbers out of your arse. Anyone could come up with an estimate like that! What good does that do anyone? That's just a ridiculous way of saying "The crowd was very, very large". You morons.

Then there was an article over at Politics Daily. I'm not going to bag on the writer of the article so much, as I do kind of like what she tends to write. She was probably just having an off day. The point here is that the article focuses on the folks that Sarah Palin endorsed. The title of the article reads "Sarah Palin's Midterm Scorecard: A Winning Record, but Some Key Losses". In essence, it goes on to detail how Sarah Palin supported "...more than 100 conservative candidates during the primary and general elections." Um, OK. I guess she can do that being how she's being whatever it is that she's being these days. (I still haven't quite figured that out yet.) It then goes on to say, "A Politics Daily tally puts Palin's Tuesday successes at 62 wins, 23 losses and seven contests that are still too close to call, with Palin's candidates trailing in five of those races."

Let's do the math. She supported more than 100 candidates. She currently has 62 wins, 23 losses and 7 undecided. That's 92! That's not more than 100. What gives? On top of that, what makes these "wins" or these "losses" Sarah Palin's to absorb? Aren't there a lot of people out there who would support just about any conservative candidate, no matter how wacky they appeared (Christine O'Donnell, I'm talking about you)? I think there are. Since when did the wins and the losses of the conservative candidates fall squarely on the shoulders of Sarah Palin? She's a former half-term governor who once spent a couple of months running for Vice President! (And don't get me wrong. For the most part, I like Sarah Palin. But her endorsement of someone certainly isn't gold by any means and it shouldn't be construed as such.)

And finally, I'm really getting tired of how any time an animal attacks a human, it is made into some sort of sensationalistic news, as if something like that is so shocking and so unheard of that we should all just be in a state of disbelief that it ever occurred. Take this headline from The Huffington Post: "Peter Evershed KILLED by 5 Lions in Zimbabwe." Um, yes. I would imagine that five lions WOULD kill a man.

To begin, I get thoroughly annoyed when the media runs the name of some person afflicted by tragedy in a way that makes the reader feel as if something horrendous has happened to someone that they knew. Does anyone know who Peter Evershed was, other than people who actually knew him? No. He was a 59-year-old businessman from Zimbabwe. But the headline makes the reader initially feel as if they've just read "Brad Pitt KILLED by 5 Lions in Zimbabwe". (And, in this example, it wouldn't be much of a stretch for Brad to have actually been in Zimbabwe. He could have been over there buying another child to complete his collection. They don't have one from Zimbabwe yet, do they?)

See, animals eat meat. Humans are made of meat! Of course they're going to eat a human if they're given the chance. It's a big piece of meat! Why is that so shocking to people? Or maybe it's only shocking to the media. I'm not sure. But in another example of the inexplicable shock that this article tries to convey is when they quote some Zimbabwe guy as saying, "We appeal to everyone to exercise extreme caution. Animals have become extremely unpredictable." Wait. What now?

Have become? Animals have become unpredictable?! They're animals! Aside from that, since when is a wild animal eating human considered "unpredictable"? Seems pretty predictable to me. If you showed anyone a picture of a human standing in the wild with a bunch of lions walking around and you asked that person to guess what might be about to happen, I'd guess that nine times out of ten (with the tenth being the moron who wrote the article) the person you are asking would correctly infer that the chap in the picture is about to become lion lunch! HOW is that unpredictable?!

I've had enough. I'm going to go watch a little TV without a political ad in sight to try to make myself feel better.

Rally Signs Part Deux

There were just too darned many signs that the Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear for me to just do one post on them. Besides, I learned that the first post I did ended up being quite informative for some of those who had no idea what so ever that anything was going on at all! That made me feel pretty good; almost like I had done some sort of a public service or something. And since I never intentionally have engaged in a public service before, I thought it might be nice if I did it again. I mean, there really were a lot of signs!

There was one thing that was conspicuously missing from this rally. There was a noticeable absence of misspelled signs. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who noticed.

I appreciate how this lady apparently waited until the rally to craft her sign (as evidenced by the pack of markers over there to her left). And I don't think that I've ever seen such fancy glassware at any rally now that I think about it. What's that all about?

Here's a sentiment that I'd like to think that everyone could rally around. Well, everyone except for that one guy.

I don't know exactly what the sentiment that these two women are displaying is, nor do I know what is up with one woman's Gremlins-esque hairdo, but it's amusing none the less.

I had to include this one simply because the guy holding the sign that says "Burn In Hell" looks so darned happy about it. Maybe he knows something we don't...but I doubt it.
Finally, someone with realistic expectations and sensible fashion advice.

What are the chances of the sentiment behind this next sign really catching on? Any chance? In hell? Just a little bit? Yeah, I didn't think so either, but it's nice to dream.

Yep. This is what I've been saying for a while now. You can't go around comparing people to Hitler. That's because there was only one Hitler. And he's dead. So no matter what you may think about someone, they're not Hitler. They're probably also not a cute little kitten, either, but at least that's a comparison I can live with.

This is an odd concept, but one that I can strangely and deliciously get behind in a weird, certain, sort of way. Mmmm. Sammiches.
And finally, I know this isn't a sign, but he just might be the sanest and the cutest member of the rally.