Spain: excavation of Garcia Lorca grave hailed

Federico García Lorca

EL MISTERIO DE LORCA. Un grupo de trabajadores exhuma una fosa común, donde se cree están los restos del aclamado poeta y dramaturgo español Federico García Lorca, que fue ejecutado durante la Guerra Civil Español













La familia del poeta ha mostrado su oposición a exhumar sus restos y a que se den a conocer los resultados de las investigaciones (Foto: Archivo EL UNIVERSAL )









España exhuma supuesta tumba de García Lorca
El trabajo se realizará en una remota colina cerca de la ciudad andaluza de Granada, al sur del país, donde los hombres fueron ejecutados por miembros de una milicia leal al general Francisco Franco


AP
El Universal
Alfacar, España Miércoles 28 de octubre de 2009
10:03 Un grupo de trabajadores se preparaba el miércoles para exhumar la fosa común donde se cree están los restos del aclamado poeta y dramaturgo Federico García Lorca, en un hito en la campaña de España por abordar el legado de la guerra civil de 1936.

No está claro si los restos del escritor llegarán a identificarse porque su familia se opone a la exhumación. La meta es encontrar e identificar los restos de varios hombres que, como García Lorca, fueron ejecutados los primeros días de la guerra y enterrados con él.

El trabajo se realizará en una remota colina cerca de la ciudad andaluza de Granada, al sur del país, donde los hombres fueron ejecutados por miembros de una milicia leal al general Francisco Franco.

La guerra, que aún divide a los españoles, enfrentó a las fuerzas de derecha encabezadas por Franco que se alzaron contra un gobierno republicano de izquierda surgido de las urnas y eventualmente prevalecieron, instalando una dictadura que duró hasta la muerte de Franco en 1975. El conflicto y subsiguientes penurias dejaron un balance estimado de medio millón de muertos.

Ambas partes cometieron atrocidades contra civiles, pero el gobierno de Franco es conocido por haber ordenado una minuciosa cuenta de civiles ejecutados por milicianos republicanos y les dio verdaderos entierros. El juez español Baltasar Garzón dice las fuerzas de Franco nunca rindieron cuentas por 114 mil civiles asesinados.

El caso de García Lorca es uno de los más conocidos por ser éste el más aclamado poeta español del siglo XX.

Un grupo llamado Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica ha trabajado desde finales de la década de 1990 para ayudar a los españoles a ubicar las tumbas de sus seres queridos que desaparecieron durante la guerra. Hasta ahora, el grupo dice haber identificado a unas mil 700 personas.

La fosa se exhumará a petición de familiares de los hombres que se cree fueron enterrados junto al poeta: Francisco Galadí, Joaquín Arcollas y el torero Dióscoro Galindo. El trabajo podría tomar meses.

Expertos forenses y otros especialistas esperaban comenzar a excavar el miércoles por la tarde, dijo Javier Giraldez, un vocero del departamento de justicia de Andalusía, región que incluye Granada.

La familia de García Lorca se ha opuesto a la exhumación, argumentando que el escritor no debe ser distinguido cuando tanta gente murió en las manos de las fuerzas de Franco. Dicen que prefieren que sus restos permanezcan intactos. Pero la familia dijo este mes que eventualmente proporcionaría muestras de ADN para ayudar a identificarlo.

Amos Elon (1926–2009)

Amos Elon's commitment to Israel, the country where he lived and worked for most of his life, was never in question. But for just this reason his awkward stance, relentlessly engaging with the country's failings, set him apart. His courageous refusal to endorse the clichés with which Israel's defenders parry every criticism contrasts not only with the defensiveness of contemporary left-wing Israeli commentators but also and especially with the pusillanimous apologetics of Israel's American claque.

"The settlements...have tied Israel's hands in any negotiation to achieve lasting peace.... [They] have only made it less secure."

As he foresaw in 2003, Israeli insistence upon ruling over an Arab population that will eventually become a majority within the country's borders can only lead to a single authoritarian state encompassing two mutually hostile nations: one dominant, the other subservient. With what outcome? "If Israel persists in its current settlement policy,...the end result is more likely to resemble Zimbabwe than post-apartheid South Africa."

Amos was perfectly well aware that the present Middle Eastern imbroglio was the achievement of all sides. His sympathy for the "stateless, dispossessed, and dispersed Palestinians" did not blind him to the ineptness of their leaders.

Zionism, as Amos came to realize, had outlived its usefulness. "As a measure of...'affirmative action,' Zionism was useful during the formative years. Today it has become redundant." What had once been the nationalist ideology of a stateless people has undergone a tragic transition. It has, for a growing number of Israelis, been corrupted into an uncompromising ethno-religious real estate pact with a partisan God, a pact that justifies any and all actions against real or imagined threats, critics, and enemies.

Zionism has been hijacked by ultras. Herzl's dream of a "normal" Jewish country has become an exclusivist sectarian nightmare, a development that Amos illustrated by slightly misquoting Keats: "Fanatics have a dream by which they weave a paradise for a sect."

Kerouac at Bat

New York Public Library, Berg Collection, Jack Kerouac Archive. Jack Kerouac’s fantasy baseball team cards, circa 1953-56.


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Almost all his life Jack Kerouac had a hobby that even close friends and fellow Beats like Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs never knew about. He obsessively played a fantasy baseball game of his own invention, charting the exploits of made-up players like Wino Love, Warby Pepper, Heinie Twiett, Phegus Cody and Zagg Parker, who toiled on imaginary teams named either for cars (the Pittsburgh Plymouths and New York Chevvies, for example) or for colors (the Boston Grays and Cincinnati Blacks).

He collected their stats, analyzed their performances and, as a teenager, when he played most ardently, wrote about them in homemade newsletters and broadsides. He even covered financial news and imaginary contract disputes. During those same teenage years, he also ran a fantasy horse-racing circuit, complete with illustrated tout sheets and racing reports. He created imaginary owners, imaginary jockeys, imaginary track conditions.

All these “publications,” some typed, some handwritten and often pasted into old-fashioned composition notebooks, are now part of the Jack Kerouac Archive at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. The curator, Isaac Gewirtz, has just written a 75-page book about them, “Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats,” to be published next week by the library and available, at least for now, only in its gift shop.


Slide Show ‘Kerouac at Bat’

Among other things, Mr. Gewirtz has learned that Kerouac played an early version of the baseball game in his backyard in Lowell, Mass., hitting a marble with a nail, or possibly a toothpick, and noting where it landed. By 1946, when Kerouac was 24, he had devised a set of cards with precise verbal descriptions of various outcomes (“slow roller to ss,” for example), depending on the skill levels of the pitcher and batter. The game could be played using cards alone, but Mr. Gewirtz thinks that more often Kerouac determined the result of a pitch by tossing some sort of projectile at a diagramed chart on the wall. In 1956 he switched to a new set of cards, which used hieroglyphic symbols instead of descriptions. Carefully preserved inside plastic folders at the library, they now look as mysterious as runes.

A Late Bloom From a Master

W. B. Yeats reflects on his life in 'Among School Children'


The poem -- modest in length, if not in scope -- comprises eight stanzas of eight lines each and employs a rhyme scheme, abababcc, known as ottava rima. Although the lines -- which include a congeries of symbols, allusions, insights and memories -- represent a kind of extended reverie, not a word among them seems awkward or imprecise, let alone superfluous.

John Hope Franklin

From a blog (Crooked Timber) I follow, this story:

The historian John Hope Franklin has died at the age of 94. The Post’s Obituary notes, inter alia,

In 1985, Franklin was in New York to receive the Clarence Holte Literary Award for his biography of historian George Washington Williams, a 40-year project for which he was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. The next morning, he and his wife were unable to hail a taxi in front of their hotel. Ten years later, when he was to receive the [Presidential Medal of Freedom], Franklin hosted a party for some friends at Washington’s Cosmos Club, of which he had long been a member. A white woman walked up to him, handed him a slip of paper and demanded that he get her coat. He politely told the woman that any of the uniformed attendants, “and they were all in uniform,” would be happy to assist her.

Duke’s Tribute to John Hope Franklin

Born and raised in an all-black community in Oklahoma where he was often subjected to humiliating incidents of racism, he was later instrumental in bringing down the legal and historical validations of such a world.

As an author, his book ''From Slavery to Freedom'' was a landmark integration of black history into American history. As a scholar, his research helped Thurgood Marshall win Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that outlawed the doctrine of ''separate but equal'' in the nation's public schools.

HWPL's record on the original book:

From slavery to freedom: a history of Negro Americans. New York, Knopf [1974]

Newer records:

From slavery to freedom: a history of African Americans. John Hope Franklin, Alfred A. Moss, Jr. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994

and










From slavery to freedom: a history of African Americans. John Hope Franklin, Alfred A. Moss, Jr. Boston: McGraw-Hill, c2000.












Above all, he documented how blacks had lived and served alongside whites from the nation's birth. Black patriots fought at Lexington and Concord, Franklin pointed out in ''From Slavery to Freedom,'' published in 1947. They crossed the Delaware with Washington and explored with Lewis and Clark. The text sold million of copies and remains required reading in college classrooms.

Roads to Quoz

William Least-Heat Moon's new book is Roads to Quoz. I'll get to it, soon. I still remember how much I enjoyed Blue Highways (1982).

Studs Terkel, Listener to Americans, Dies at 96

A Chicagoan.

The author Studs Terkel at the Algonquin Hotel on May 20, 1997, around the release of his book "My American Century."


The actress Beverly Younger and Mr. Terkel on the Chicago set of his television variety show, “Studs’ Place,” around 1950.

Two Speeches on Race

Gary Wills on Lincoln and Obama.

The Confidence Artist

One of my favourite writers (ugh, that expression).

The Rescue of John Steinbeck

This fascinating article appears in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. I find it so interesting is that, as with Freud, long after his death, amidst declarations of how pedestrian and bad his work, critics can not leave Steinbeck out of their focus of attention.

Steinbeck is my favorite writer. Well, I thought so once, and as it really doesn't matter any longer, I leave it at that. I got a little bothered at the criticisms hurled by this writer at Steinbeck, and then realized it didn't matter personally. So I read the article with interest.

As was the case when he was alive, and as Gottlieb writes (Nor is dismissal of his work by the literary establishment anything new. When to everyone's surprise, including his own, he won the 1962 Nobel Prize, the reaction was startlingly hostile), critics love to hate Steinbeck. Perhaps one of the things they hate about him is that his books continue to sell. Who knows?

Gottlieb dissects the writer and his works, and throws in some criticisms of the man as well. A few criticisms are so pedantic it boggles the mind. First there is a sort of dismissal of Steinbeck's style as simplistic.

Tortilla Flat (1935), that rompy account of salt-of-the-earth down-and-outers in Monterey. They drink, they brawl, they fornicate, they steal—oh, those happy simple paisanos! And what about their dialogue?"

Of course, this is a book written more than 70 years ago. But that does not spare it or its writer from criticism. Witness this gem.

Danny's house, we're told in a preface, "was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny's friends were not unlike the knights of it." They're innocents, and they're all for one and one for all. Most important, they're "clean of commercialism, free of the complicated systems of American business." Far better to be a bum with a heart of gold than a solid citizen.

The contrast drawn between bum and solid citizen seems absurd. Solid citizen? Seems too absolute, but, that's me. Yet, to be fair, Gottlieb does give Steinbeck some praise.

The style of In Dubious Battle is radically new. Description, action, dialogue are straightforward and gritty. Still, Steinbeck can't resist injecting an idealized guru figure into this realistic world—a kind of fellow-traveling doctor who lends the strikers a hand. "Doc": "Man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates itself." Jim: "We don't hate ourselves, we hate the invested capital that keeps us down." One suspects that this is what the endless bull sessions between Steinbeck and Ricketts must have sounded like. Even so, In Dubious Battle is an impressive step forward.

Impressive; that's good. Even kinder is this assessment of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

Uninfected by moralizing, ingeniously if stagily constructed, and credibly populated, Of Mice and Men—far from Steinbeck's most ambitious book—is the closest he came to a fully satisfying work of art.

Lest one suspect Gottlieb has softened, he quickly turns back to slashing at Steinbeck, quoting Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin in the process.


As Kazin put it, "Steinbeck's people are always on the verge of becoming human, but never do." Wilson:

The characters of The Grapes of Wrath are animated and put through their paces rather than brought to life.... It is as if human sentiments and speeches had been assigned to a flock of lemmings on their way to throw themselves into the sea.

Still, The Grapes of Wrath is unquestionably a major achievement.

Well, that's kind. But it is not to last. Critiquing East of Eden, Gottlieb slashes again.

It's a perplexing book—melodramatic, self-indulgent, even trashy; yet at last you feel you're reading a real novel rather than fictionalized reportage—a novel with strong characters, large-scale story development, a central idea holding it together.

Then the man comes in for criticisms that border on the personal attack. Can any one's life, would Gottlieb's life, come through as wholesome and sane and balanced? Under the glare and microscope of being dissected by the media and critics? 40 years after dying?

When Steinbeck returned from California after Ed Ricketts died in a car accident, his second wife, Gwyn, asked for a divorce. She also told him that she hadn't loved him for years and had been abundantly unfaithful to him... [and "confessed"] that he was not the father of their second son. In his book The Other Side of Eden (2001), the younger John dismisses this notion as preposterous...

Some rudimentary Freudian analysis is dispensed before Gottlieb drops this little gem into his essay:

Young John's book is a horrifying portrait of dysfunction, his father alternately overprotective and indifferent, his mother alcoholic and violent. On his sixteenth birthday, he tells us, she became so drunkenly abusive that he threw a TV set out of the twelfth-story window of her apartment and then "punched her in the mouth as hard as I could, and hammered at her body for God knows how long." Therapist: "Why didn't you go to your father for protection after you beat your mother?" Young John: I'd already given up thinking he would protect me from her insanity. He was into his Great Writer Bubble, so it wasn't like having a dad around, but instead having the Great Writer present. By the age of thirteen, I realized my father was an asshole.

There: Steinbeck was an asshole. Bad man. But he retained some talent... his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), which, although hardly a masterpiece, was Steinbeck's best work since East of Eden. Steinbeck had found his last big subject—the moral deterioration of the times.

Finally, though, Steinbeck can not escape criticism. Gottlieb tosses this softball: Steinbeck's heart, as always, is in the right place, but there's something artificial about Charley: many of the encounters he reports sound like pure inventions. His son John put it bluntly: "Thom and I are convinced that he never talked to any of those people.... He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit."

And some final disapproval: You could say that by the end he had evolved into a kind of minor and irrelevant prophet, both disillusioned and irredeemably optimistic.

Worst of all, And he's become that unfashionable and embarrassing thing, a patriot. Somewhere along the way, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" had turned into "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."

Bad John: a patriot, corny. Bad John. I'm amazed that Gottlieb can lambast Steinbeck for being, embarrassingly, patriotic.

Turning Short Stories Into a Main Course

When I read Interpreter of Maladies some years back, I thought it was one of the best books I had ever read. It inspired me to try to write short stories. I've recommended it a number of times to library patrons. Now she has a new book.

Writer Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book of short stories. Her second collection, 'Unaccustomed Earth,' is drawing early raves from critics.

Trends in publishing

Interesting publishing trend.