So, Charlie Sheen is flipping out these days. If you haven't heard about it, all I can say is that I'm grateful that you came out from under your rock long enough to read this blog. You have priorities. I like that about you. And although he's still technically flipping out, he's calming down a bit from his peak of insanity. That was probably last week when he declared he was some sort of Vatican warlock who had something called tiger blood. He also said that dying was for losers and he wasn't going to be a part of it. OK, then.

But even before this past week, Sheen's life has been full of exciting antics. Let's see...I think it was about a year ago at Christmas time that he held a knife to his wife's throat on Christmas. Just this last October, he trashed a hotel room and scared his hooker du jour so much that she ended up naked in a closet. (In his defense, he did think that she had stolen his watch. So, that, of course, justifies everything.) Then in January he ended up in the hospital after a weekend of partying with hookers. He claims to have had a 'hernia'. If that's what they're calling partying too much when you're 45 years old, so be it. Oh, and he just admitted during some interview the other day that he used to smoke seven gram rocks of cocaine by himself when he was partying. I don't know if that's a lot, but since he seems really proud of himself, I'm going to assume that it's a lot.

He's quite the character, that Carlos Irwin Estevez. But in the past couple of weeks since the production of his ridiculously popular TV show, Two And A Half Men, has been shut down, his life is considerably tamer. Granted, he is living with two porn stars who he refers to as his 'goddesses'. But there doesn't seem to be any sort of drug use going on. That's because he asserts to have gone through his own 'home rehab' at his home (which, to my extreme delight, he has renamed "Sober Valley Lodge"). He's even passed a couple of whiz quizzes and he's clean as a whistle. So then why is it that just now, according to Pop Eater, "...major news organizations...have begun preparing obituaries for the unraveling-before-our-eyes star". What now?

Really? They're just getting around to that? The drug-fueled, hooker-in-the-closet incident wasn't enough to have them start penning his life story? According to the article, a CBS insider is quoted as saying, "No one is wishing the worst but as a news organization for us not to be prepared for one of the biggest stories in a long time would be unprofessional." Well, of course no one is wishing the worst! (Then again, it is sort of like a train wreck that is inevitable and you kind of wish that it would just crash and get it over with. Sometimes, suspense is a real bitch. And that includes when you're waiting for someone else's death.) But if you're going to talk about needing to be prepared, shouldn't you have started on this thing quite some time ago! He's clean right now, for cryin' out loud!

And look, while the news organizations may feel the need to be on a Charlie Sheen death watch, I don't see it happening anytime real soon. The guy parties like an animal. And for no real explainable reason, some people's bodies are just built to take that sort of abuse more than others. Look at Keith Richards. Why is that man still alive? How is that man still alive?! If there is ever a nuclear war, there will be two things that survive: Cockroaches and Keith Richards. (And quite frankly, the two are a little bit indiscernible right about now.) And that's just how it goes. But again, I feel the need to point out that he's not doing drugs right now! Where were your obituaries when he was smoking those seven gram rocks! Sure, it's great to be prepared, but you need to have something to be prepared for! And right now, that ship has sailed (and it probably has lots of porn stars aboard).

In Memory of Mr. Omer L. Baumgartner

I'm going to tell you this right now: I have never met Mr. Omer L. Baumgartner. I had never even heard of Mr. Baumgartner until today. Unfortunately, it took his death in order for me to read about what can only be described as an awesome and diverse individual. His obituary stood out to me for many reasons. Some of the key phrases being:

Mr. Baumgartner had lived a long and passionate life dedicated to rambunctious performances and dairy products. (I like that his life was "dedicated" to said rambunctious performances. I've always said, find your niche in life and go with it. Clearly, Mr. Baumgartner heeded my philosophy.)

He was wildly popular with the troops for his mess hours bongo drum performances accompanied by dancing girls. (You don't see many bongo drum performances these days. It really is becoming a lost art.)

Baumgartner disliked vegetables his whole life. (That's my kinda man right there!)

His last meal was ice cream. (Yep. My kinda man.)

His entire obituary is below. I lifted it with neither permission, nor malice, from something called the Register-Mail. I really wish I had known this guy in real life. His family sure was lucky to have him around for 90 years. He seems to be what life is supposed to be all about. I need to start meeting folks like this before they've kicked it. I think it would really help liven things up around here.

AMES, Iowa - Noted Midwestern raconteur Omer L. Baumgartner passed away at this home in Ames, Iowa on Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2011. He was 90 years old. Mr. Baumgartner had lived a long and passionate life dedicated to rambunctious performances and dairy products. Born on a dairy farm in Walnut, Ill., Baumgartner was prodigious with the movement of manure from an early age, and exercising these and other talents, earned recognition for his National 4-H Grand Champion Dairy Heifer, Clementine's Ramona, in 1930 at the age of 10. After this debut, and as the Depression raged, Baumgartner cut his teeth in the livestock industry while attending hundreds of county and state fairs, showing and selling cattle, frying oysters, skinning rabbits, and drinking whiskey. While still a freshman at the University of Illinois, he successfully quelled the great dairy upraising of 1938, averting a desperate ice cream shortage in Chicago, and was immediately recruited, without finishing college, by the state's Guernsey Breeders Association as a field agent.Despite never learning to cook anything other than fried oysters, Baumgartner attained the rank of captain during World War II for running mess halls feeding over 5,000 in Tennessee and Alabama for the Army Air Corps. He was wildly popular with the troops for his mess hours bongo drum performances accompanied by dancing girls. Baumgartner notably worked for L.S. Heath and Company, running the dairy division and inventing Heath Bar ice cream in 1951. He also co-ran Wilkinson's Office Supplies with his wife Jattie Wilkinson Baumgartner, serving one-third of the state of Illinois and parts of Iowa. Baumgartner disliked vegetables his whole life. Despite consuming more than 2,000 pounds of butter, he never suffered from any kind of heart disease. His last meal was ice cream.Baumgartner is survived by his daughters, Donna Prizgintas in Ames, Iowa, and Mary Baumgartner Levner in Portsmith, Va.; and grandchildren Diana Prizgintas in New Zealand, Jack Levner in New York, Arion Thiboumery in Minnesota, and Stephanie Levner in New York; and great-grandchildren Max Prizgintas and Ada Levner.Memorials may be directed to: Red Oak United Methodist Church, Walnut, Ill. Online condolences may be sent to http://www.grandonfuneralandcremationcare.com/

RIP Édouard Glissant

Édouard Glissant (1928-2011),

among the greatest intellectuals,
artists, critics, creators, thinkers
to emerge from the 20th century
Caribbean, passed away today
in Paris at age of 82.
A poet, fiction writer, essayiste,
philosopher, he brought these
different genres together
in conversation, around and to
a meal at which they spoke
at length and freely with each other.

When I was in graduate school I debated trying to finesse my schedule in order to take a class with him at the CUNY Graduate Center, but couldn't swing it. I nevertheless did hurry to any and all talks he gave, and was very glad to have seen him in the fall of 2009, when NYU's Institute of African American Affairs sponsored four conversations under the title One World In Relation, that explored aspects of Glissant's work. The four panels were "Opacity, Stupidity and the History of Unintelligibility: The Right to Opacity as a Prerequisite for Politics and Philosophy" (Oct. 27); Diversity in the Black Night: Chaos, Créolization and Metissage" (Nov. 4); "Roots and Imaginary Offshoots: Ecstatic Difference" (Nov. 18); and "De-capitalization and the Way of the World: Religion, Secularism and Multiplicity" (Nov. 30). 

I caught the third event, which featured François Noudelmann, Mary Ann Caws, Fred Moten (who brilliantly opened his presentation with a clip from John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," which opened a parallel vein of conversation, that rarely happens at such events), Manthia Diawara, Emily Apter, and Avital Ronell. The highlight of the evening, in addition to Moten's presentation, Diawara's film clip, and Glissant himself, was the tribute to him by poet Kofi Anyidoho, who entered the room and, breaking the usual hierarchical exchange that occurs between those on stage and the audience, strolled down the main aisle, singing and poetizing, gathering in his lyric embrace Kamau Brathwaite, another of the great figures of the 20th century Caribbean-African-Diasporic-America who was present; Diawara; and ultimately the entire audience. It appeared to shake some of the panelists up, but Glissant appeared delighted. He could see, I knew, in Anyidoho's performance some of his own theories being enacted, embodied, in play. I was glad I caught that event and sorry that I had to miss several others, including one at which the poet and translator extraordinaire Nathanaël, who beautifully translated Glissant's Poetic Intention (Nightbook Books, 2010), participated. At the bottom of this post are some photos of the event.

Anyidoho's entrance and tribute

Repeating Island has some of the best links to obituaries, tributes, thoughts on Glissant. I quote the following obituary (credited to Kevin Meehan), which appears on Repeating Island's page, and whose original link can also be found there.

Eloquent defender of diversity and métissage, the great Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant died on February 3 in Paris, at the age of 82. Poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, thinker, [and exponent of the concept of] creolization, he was born in Sainte-Marie (Martinique) on September 21, 1928 and conducted studies in Philosophy and Ethnology in Paris.

His success upon winning the Prix Renaudot in 1958 for his novel La Lézarde made the general public aware of this intellectual, who never separated his literary creation from a militant reflection. Influenced by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he construed the history and geography of the Caribbean politically, demonstrating his revolt against racisms of any type and evoking the indelible mark of slavery on the relationship between France and Africa and all overseas territories.

Opposing any imposed systems and any rejection of the other, Edouard Glissant has been champion of métissage and exchange, formulating in his essays gathered in the “Poétique” series his theses on Philosophie de la relation [philosophy of relation] and Poétique du divers the [poetics of the diverse]. He refused to be constrained by single genre, moving constantly between the novel, essay, and poetry, even within a single work.

Novels Directed towards the Imaginary

Edouard Glissant, who shared at once a respectful and conflicting relationship with Aimé Césaire, the other great personality of the Caribbean world, also expressed his concern for literary parentage, through writers and “disciples” [I would rather translate this as supporting scholars] such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, or Ernest Pépin.

His novels, from Quatrième siècle (Seuil 1965) to Ormerod (Gallimard 2003), are geared towards a mythical and imaginary world, far from any naturalism, but also imbued with picturesque elements specific to certain Caribbean novelists.

After having created a center for research and teaching in Martinique, as well as a review named Acoma, Edouard Glissant founded in Paris the Institut du Tout-monde, aimed at putting into practice his humanistic principles and to allowing for the dissemination of “the extraordinary diversity of the imaginaries of the people.”

A clip of Glissant from Manthia Diawara's documentary on his life and work
 
The panel before the conversation
 
Avital Ronell and Manthia Diawara, introducing the event
 
Édouard Glissant, Ronell, François Noudelmann, Emily Apter, Fred Moten, Mary Ann Caws, and Diawara

Kamau Brathwaite and Kofi Anyidoho

Graduation Day + Birthday + Adeus Saramago + Adios (Old New) New York

Although I've already congratulated this year's graduates, since today is GRADUATION DAY, let me extend my deepest CONGRATULATIONS again!

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Yesterday was my birthday. C made a delicious pasta dish (penne con funghi), and baked one of his signature desserts, a coconut-lemon cake, which, as the photo below shows, we dove right into. I'm willing to turn 45 weekly if it results in that meal and one of these cakes!

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Yesterday around the time that Reggie H. sent me the link I saw online that José Saramago (1922-2010) had passed. He was, without a doubt, one of the major writers in contemporary world literature, and one of Portugal's greatest novelists.  I must confess that although I can read Portuguese (to some extent), I've only read his novels in English; years ago, when after teaching myself the rudiments of Portuguese I realized I couldn't speak the language, so I engaged an Azorean tutor-conversationalist in Cambridge who had me read selections from the works of Fernando Namora, Jorge de Sena, José Cardoso Pires, Augustina Bessa-Luís, and several other major 20th century Portuguese (but never Brazilian) writers, including some whom she wasn't so fond of, like Antonio Lobo-Antunes. But Saramago was, I recall, "too difficult" for a beginner. By this, I later gathered as I read his work in English, his formally experimental prose, often comprising long, paratactic and sometimes hypotactic sentences, broken up mainly by commas and few periods, and shifting at times abruptly between points of view and perspectives, while interspersed with direct authorial commentary and philosophizing, certainly would have proved a challenge. Yet I've found that in English at least, Saramago's works, once you engage the prose's rhythms, aren't as narratively difficult in the way that William Faulkner's, Juan Goytisolo's, Claude Simon's, or  are. Nor are they philosophically demanding in the way that superficially more formally simple novels of Clarice Lispector are, or linguistically as impenetrable as Julián Ríos or João Guimarães Rosa (i.e., untranslatable). Saramago is very interested in the traditions not just of the novel but of storytelling, and stories, sometimes remarkable ones, often allegorical and symbolic, his novels do tell. Saramago attributed this deep devotion to story to his illiterate grandparents, great storytellers thesmselves, who reared him when his parents left the small Santarém district village of Azinhaga, where he was born, to look for work in Lisbon.



My introduction to Saramago's work was the 1995 novel Blindness (Ensaio sobre a Cergeza), which appeared in English (translated by Giovanni Pontiero) in the fall of 1997.  An allegory about the effects on civilization of man's loss of our most important and essential sense--sight--and the possibility, even after societal breakdown, of humanity, Blindness struck me at the time as the work of someone writing at the very height of his powers. The next year Saramago received the Nobel Prize, in part for this extraordinary book but also for his oeuvre, up to that point, consisting of the poetry he'd written during his fallow fiction period, of some 30 years, and the nearly dozen novels up to that point, including Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, Baltasar and Blimunda (Memorial do Convento), The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Stone Raft, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, and The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. This last inventive, irreverantly anti-religious book sparked denunciation by the Roman Catholic Church, which led the Portuguese authorities to withdraw Saramago's name for a prize consideration, which thus led him to decamp for Lanzarote, in Spain, where he lived for the remainder of his life. From the time of his Nobel Prize he was sometimes derided as or viewed solely in terms of his affirmation of Communism, and he also received harsh criticism for his critique of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. His work, however, rarely dealt overtly with contemporary politics or ideology, either in the abstract or, in the case of Portugal's, where the Salazar dictatorship spanned a great portion of his life; only in one novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, I believe, does he directly treat a fairly recent political moment, 1936, when war and fascism were engulfing Europe--and Salazar seized control of the Portuguese state--but in his inimical, indirect fashion; the eponymous protagonist, Reis, is, in fact, a heteronym of Portugal's towering 20th century literary figure, Fernando Pessoa, whose death provokes Reis's return from Brazil and who makes repeated, ghostly and increasingly troubling appearances, finally leading to Reis's own "death," as it were, at the novel's end. Saramago has stated that this strange and enchanting book is his favorite.

The last book of Saramago's that I read was 2003's The Double (O Homen Duplicado), published in 2004 in English. A haunting metaphysical meditation, The Double starts with the principle of the doppelgänger, and plays it out, with devastating consequences, to its logical end. Saramago's prose style presents an initial challenge, but once you get past and into the flow of the storytelling, this bizarre tale unfolds like a charm: at the suggestion of a coworker, a man recognizes a double of himself in a videotape, conspires to meet the double, does do so while withholding the details and truth from his beloved, switches places with the man, terrible things ensue, and then...he's contacted by someone whose voice, as was the case with him and his double, sounds--in so much as he might appear--like his double. Only the protagonist decides he ought be preemptive this time around, and so.... This reductive plot summary hardly conveys the literary and philosophical richness of the novel, which, like several of Saramago's later works, unfolds on a more narratively abstract plane, giving it the quality of fable, or allegory, or myth. And there is enough in this work to ground the reader in a here-and-now, in a material world, swiftly but authoritatively drawn, full of suspense and disquiet, such that you not only become part of it, but care about these characters and feel the topsy-turvy emotions they experience.  This is the case not only for The Double, but for all the ones of Saramago's that I've read. He was, and remains, among the best.

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The blog of a mourner of lost New York City, or a fairly recent version. He has, however, tired of his mourning, and now bids his readers, like the now vanished city of a decade ago, adieu. Read it, and commiserate, and weep (if it resonates with you at all).  And to think, but for 50,000 or so more votes (only 1.15 million people voted out of 4+ million eligible voters), New York could have freed itself, at least for a term, of its neoliberal, billionaire billionaire-cheerleader.