James Baldwin told her, "You must continue to write. It is imperative." And She Did.

In the Country of Women by Susan Straight
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Susan Straight’s daughter Delphine projected photographs for her Mother’s reading and talk at BAMPFA for A Country of Women, describing multi-generational and multi-racial family journeys to the Southern California community Straight has lived in for more than 40 years. They are real people written in real language, so blunt her 1980’s (bimbo) classmate from Smith College asks her “Why do you keep writing about all these working class people?”

Straight says, “…I thought: What the hell is working class? Work or welfare—those two were the only conditions of life back home …a paycheck job… or ‘You under the table, man?”…cash-only economy.” Her grim, wordless, hard-scrabble Colorado mountain father; the mother who wanted “a brick house… (but) Even more…to make enough money to escape poverty.”

Straight says flat-out, “It took constant vigilance not to be raped,” and she and her girlfriends “went to Planned Parenthood the week I was sixteen…afraid of the same thing…We didn’t want to have to marry our rapists.” She was lucky. “I ran so many times,” and she had her writing and her books.
The mostly African-American Carter-Sims family she marries into is a marvel and cornerstone of struggle, work, dignity and love. The neighborhood is classic multi-cultural California WAY East of Malibu, Monterey or Marin. She resurrects a feeling of “kin” and connection built of memory, effort, sharing and survival by the end of the book any i-pad toting yuppie-techie-millennial or wastrel hippie should envy. I certainly do. It sounds like the stories my grandparents told and hid from me.

The lives and photos are epic as well as bruising. Tulsa, Tennessee, Ontario, Mississippi, all to Riverside, CA; the Cherokee, Nigerian, Swiss and Haitian – the house, the driveway, the hair-braiding, the boom-box belting Al Green; the Granada, Country Squire, El Camino, the Bronco. Three of “Daisy’s girls” sitting at a club table circa early 1960 smiling gently into the camera, but with wise eyes; miniskirts, eyebrow pencil, lipstick, bouffant hair.

We are really, really DIVERSE, people; already, NOW. AND “It is the companionable line of our knees in the folding chairs that comforts us. We have one another.”

And for the young men – “what you have to know. Two of you can ride in the car. Three is a gang. One of y’all has to get in another car. Don’t fool around. No standing out in the yard at a party. Don’t be getting gas late at night. Don’t be speeding drinking laughing singing rapping walking. Don’t.” The funerals of fourteen-year-olds.

“Friends of Adeline” statement in the February 20 edition of BTx requests readers to “Support the Adeline community” in the Berkeley sweep of both homelessness and gentrification. Reunifying the nation and advocating for disadvantaged residents screams injustice both here and globally, but their local message is clear: “Development of the Adeline neighborhood must reverse the displacement of African Americans and the severe housing crisis facing low-income, working-class, and unhoused people.”

Let’s just get REALLY “real” and tell each other stories of our lives so we UNDERSTAND why we think and act and live the way we do, OK?
 
There is no question in my mind about STOP RAPE NOW nor is there about BLACK LIVES MATTER. Or about RICH WHITE OLD FOUL-TEMPERED MISOGYNIST DICKHEADS blaming Asians for the pandemic, either, even though they sound a whole lot like my Grampa sometimes, and look like the pictures of his grandfathers.

Joyce Carol Oates says about Country, “an ancestral chronicle, a personal odyssey, and a love letter to the author’s three adult daughters,” and so much more. Joyous love and survival, bathed in bitter truths. WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. If this sounds like a Nurse Rant or a Mom Rant, it’s because IT IS. “We are true California. True America,” Straight says. THIS IS TRUE!

Quit fighting, people. Quit denying ourselves and who we really are. In way too many ways, the 99% are all one. And they are us, grown rich and fat and scared and old. If we don’t help each other now, we all go down. When Harriet Tubman has her vision, she hears, “Fear is your enemy. Trust in God.” She led hundreds to freedom.

Let’s just get REALLY “real” and tell each other stories of our lives so we UNDERSTAND why we think and act and live the way we do, OK?

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The The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth by Samuel C. Woolley

The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth by Samuel Woolley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Or NOT "break" it as in "damage," but "break" it as in "breaking news?" Truth, Freedom, Tech and Global PTS? Former visiting Tech Research Fellow at Cal’s CITRIS Samuel Woolley’s The Reality Game: How the Next Wave of Technology Will Break the Truth makes us THINK. Think about truth, distortions, and the global and personal ways the “free” (monetized) internet, commercial, political and social media and increasingly “privatized” institutions and angry individuals affect our minds, bodies and actions.

Not get frozen in fear or sliced and diced in confusion; but broken open into a more humane and democratic way of experiencing people, places and minds that can make us more intelligent, empathetic and humane.

Samuel C. Woolley, UT Austin Journalism

 According to Wooley, there are “always people behind tech(nology)” with their own biases and algorithms often created for “scale” and profit, not human rights and democracy. In the face of “fake news,” ad sales stoking the internet, altered YouTube videos, bots impersonating humans and “Wild West” lack of government regulation and corporate responsibility; “computational propaganda” has been his research and writing focus; along with re-popularizing the critical thinking, media and digital literacy the present and future require.

These folks have all been asked to turn & talk to their neighbor - how many are checking their cellphones or staring into space instead?

A marvelous and readable in-depth survey of the quest for truth and democracy online, Reality Game balances privacy and security with PR firms out to make a buck spreading disinformation among lone rangers, agents provocateurs, savage and/or unsuspecting hordes of international groups and our own (FB and Google) utopian “dictatorships” who think they can dodge responsibility for the very real harms that result from their malaise. AI (Artificial Intelligence), robotic voices, traumatized Silicon Valley hate- and porn-weeders and troll-responders working on contract are all here.

“… even the most advanced machines and software systems are still tools. They are only as useful as the people, and motives, behind their creation and implementation,” Woolley says. We’re on the brink of cyber-disaster (again) politically in 2020 and have been in general for at least 14 years, but we have the tools and personal will available to us if we will USE them to keep on turning the industry, government and our fellow surfers around, holding them and ourselves accountable and making sure the changes we vote for and speak out about happen. 
 

Knowing many good, bad and ugly histories of the Arab Spring, Occupy Movement, (the "Battle for Seattle") and other semi-successes as well as journalist-stalking, trolling, doxxing, election tampering from Bolsonaro's Brazil back to Florida's "dimpled chads," and forward into "ethical design" by something more than "all white and all male" artificial intelligence engineers; Woolley is a young voice of wisdom and fact-finding as well as hope.

As upbeat an analysis as The Reality Game is, he still knows the tech industry, corporate and authoritarian governments and random individuals will be hard challenges to take on. But we will not go backwards. We will go forwards together.

 My Internet hero, Doug Engelbart, one of the inventors and designers of the mouse, internet networking and other "computational" tools for utopian and humanistic ends; is often overshadowed by millionaire digital and military industrialists’ mass marketing and use of "personal" isolated, product-centered models; but he went for goals like Woolley's as early as 1968.

He
"reasoned that because the complexity of the world's problems was increasing, and because any effort to improve the world would require the coordination of groups of people, the most effective way to solve problems was to augment human intelligence and develop ways of building collective intelligence. 

"Mother of all Demos," 1968

He believed that the computer, which was at the time thought of only as a tool for automation, ["number crunching," soon to replace human Hidden Figures like Katherine Johnson at NASA,] would be an essential tool for future knowledge workers to solve such [large-scale global] problems. He was a committed, vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and computer networks to help cope with the world's increasingly urgent and complex problems." (Wikipedia, "Douglas Engelbart," 1 March, 2020)

Katherine Johnson, NASA, 1983

Has Engelbart's exciting and beloved new tool, the Internet, been "weaponized?" It has, but Woolley explains how, so that we can choose to avoid some of the "computational propaganda" pitfalls.

Are we "augmenting" human intelligence or are we radically narrowing, herding, blunting and dumbing-down information for speed and greed? Are we just overwhelmed with data, information and images that we can't sift down into "knowledge," let alone share together and discuss civilly to create "wisdom.?" Are we using tech to "cope" with or create more global "urgent and complex problems?"

Dr. Samuel C. Woolley's a "qualitative" researcher in a quantitative world of bookselling, grant seeking, digital, academic and political "trolls;" but I believe his heart's in the right place, refusing to let the Truth get "broke" as long and he and fellow utopians and journalists stay with the upgrades, underlying motivations and "stay woke" to humans' and tech's more nefarious manipulations and distortions by "man" and machine, as well as possibilities for communication and solutions...

Soskin by Jim Heaphy

At the beginning of his book, he quotes Betty Reid Soskin, US National Park Service Ranger at the Rosie the Riveter Park site in Richmond, California: “Every generation I know now has to re-create democracy in its time because democracy will never be fixed. It was not intended to. It’s a participatory form of governance [and] we all have the responsibility to form that more perfect union.”

And I add our personal responsibility, too:

“…you better free your mind instead.” John Lennon,  
You Say You Want a Revolution.
 
Hannah Arendt said that Adolf Eichmann's main crime against (himself and his own) humanity was that "he didn't THINK." 

He “only obeyed orders” and acted like a machine, automaton or object. Going all the way back to Plato, Arendt said, one THINKS, particularly about political actions that will affect others, before taking action, if we are to be HUMAN, to be humane.

Engelbart, 2008, with first "mouse."

 Before we "like," "delete," “friend,” hit SEND, post a photo, ("just follow orders," "do my job...") forward a diatribe, design software or hardware, distort videos, fill in our ballots, stay home on election day or bend algorithms, do we THINK? Especially if we are in the 1%, privileged, powerful, wealthy, racially, sexually or religiously dominant class? Or the lowest echelon of the economy and networked universe, "off the grid," easily coerced or digitally illiterate?

Or just bored, lonely, angry, frustrated, alarmed, tired, cranky (et cetera) and can't imagine how our post might intimidate, isolate, humiliate or actually harm another human being or group of people with the words, images or actions that we send or repeat, thoughtlessly or intentionally?

See my post from Karam's 9/11 Backlash, if you can't imagine how words can chill or kill...

The Automation Revolution has overtaken the Industrial Revolution -- where do we go now?

“You say you'll change the constitution
Well you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well you know
You better free your mind instead…” © John Lennon, (1988), Imagine.

see also, Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, (2016,) Crown, NY, NY. and
Robert Scheer, They Know Everything about You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies are Destroying Democracy, (2015, 2017), Nation and Bold Type Books. 


 

3 - 3- 2016 Photo of murdered land rights activist Berta Caceres, UK Guardian. 

(So why ARE all these people wanting to emigrate from Mexico, South and Central America into the United States? Maybe because they want to keep their own land, reject slave labor in palm oil plantations or cheap clothing or goods-factory maquiladores and DON'T want to get beat up, raped or murdered by dictators, banana republic police thugs in "their own" countries... ) 

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The Truth about Freedom: A Book of Rediscovery by Angie Schubert

The Truth About Freedom by Angie Schubert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Think about truth, distortions, and the global and personal ways the “free” (monetized) internet, commercial, political and social media and increasingly “privatized” institutions and angry individuals reflect on our minds, bodies and actions. Schubert’s Truth about Freedom: A Book of Rediscovery is a first-person novella about a teen who’s lured and abducted through an online chat group by an abusive criminal troll, her escape from her horrific entrapment and her journey through some of her post-traumatic-stress symptoms into a kind family and some redemption.

Edited skillfully by one Nasús Aransu, this tells a “coming of age story” that’s just palatable and realistic enough to serve as a solid cautionary tale for young adults, and a reminder for everyone else that both evil and kindness still live; even in a wired, persistently dominator-modeled world.

If “the personal is the political,” The Truth echoes an emblematic legacy in our present reality as well. Although mostly available online right now, I recommend it, especially in light of cyber- and sexual bullying in our local high school (see last issue of The Berkeley Times' cover story re women, teachers, parents and feminist friends resisting harassment, demanding policy change and action) and beyond.

L'Ecole Polytechnique Massacre

It caused me some flashbacks, which almost all women who have gone past denial, self-blame, silence and guilt into truth have had and worked with in order to get to a relative Freedom.  

With a modestly “happy” ending in this volume, we still know many folks and fields on this planet are war-torn, enslaved financially, politically or physically; suffering, missing, raped or murdered.  

We will not go backwards. We will go forwards together. We have to keep telling these truths, making sure we all have knowledge, support and ways out.

Ft. McMurtry, Alberta, Canada

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Watanabe-McFerrin's Navigating the Divide - Exorbitant, Rebellious

Feb 6, 2020 - The Berkeley Times, Wyndy Knox Carr, Knox Book Beat -- 

Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s Navigating the Divide: Selected Poetry and Prose is mostly emotive and sensual “creative non-fiction,” with short stories and pieces of her sexy zombie thriller, (yes, really), Dead Love, brought in for good measure. 

Linda joined the Berkeley Poets Cooperative in 1984, headed by Gail and Charles Entrekin, whose “love permeated their poems and filled the space around them,” she said in her introduction, “One Door Closes.” “I can see why the Co-op thrived for all those years… the sessions were thrilling – full of risk and dread and elation. Charles and Gail were the perfect hosts…Everyone was opinionated. Not a lesson was wasted.”

Even though she turned to writing more prose than poetry eventually, Linda used those workshops to become a truly gifted writer, editor, coach and mentor; also hosting the fabulous and useful Left Coast Writers’ meetings at Book Passage bookstore in Corte Madera first Monday evenings of every month.

Charles and Gail Entrekin 

Navigating is a tasty smorgasbord of Linda’s work, varying from profound and insightful coming-of-age sections of Namako: Sea Cucumber, The Hand of the Buddha short stories and poetry to her entertaining and enlightening parts of Dead Love and her excellent travel essays. She slides from ruthless gangsters in fancy taxis to six-year old Tina casting “the vague shape of her longing” up to her Grandmother in heaven to searching out Shinto shrines and kami “folk deities” to Tamara pouring “Jack Daniels in a Dixie cup” when “She was moving toward some sort of crisis and she didn’t like it” with editor Ted’s “all-powerful masculine vortex.” Just on the edge of too-funky, her ear for dialogue, brushstroke character-definition and succinct metaphors pull us on:

Compared to Selita, Terrell’s “other girlfriends” were “like a closetful of cheap nylon nightgowns, they seemed only marginally alluring and infinitely replaceable.” (p. 70) Describing her father prepping dinner, he’s “Standing at the counter with one of Ineko-san’s blue aprons wrapped around him”…”making a big mess with a huge pile of shellfish, moving back and forth between counter and stove, cutting the heads off shrimp and slipping them out of their wafer-thin jackets of exoskeleton, pulling off funny blue veins, then rinsing them in a colander. They were shiny and grey, with big heads festooned with antennae and a pair of beady, accusing black eyes. It was actually the first time I realized that shrimp had heads,” (p. 46) and then, from “Something to Rave About,” 

“In the kitchen, two tall women with red hair stood at an enormous industrial stove, stirring soup. They looked like twins. Both wore short black cocktail dresses, chef’s toques and threateningly pointed, six-inch stiletto heels that made them appear taller still. The chef’s toques were stiffly starched columns topped with a poof that made them look like they had their red heads up in their respective clouds.” (p. 297)

Linda and Joanna Wandering in Paris!

Her eye for detail, sense descriptions, contemporary male-female relationships and the pleasures and perils of travel and family life; especially as a Welsh-Japanese-American, are second-to-none. Her “genres, cultures and points of view” kaleidoscope from her Grandmother’s tiny traditional town life in rice-paddy Japan to “right-now” super-urban Tokyo, Opium Wars and Cultural Revolution Shanghai from 1884-to-present and “the 96th Avenue Baptist Church.”

Exorbitant, rebellious and admitting to anything; good, bad or downright evil, Watanabe-McFerrin is a new voice sprung from Old Berkeley coming forward to be reckoned with.

The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers

The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I get to the middle of Nona Caspers’ book, The Fifth Woman, and suddenly I want to write. D. H. Lawrence’s requisite to great writing, “An interesting mind at work” leaps out at us from the page. That’s why I do this for free, I’m thinking, so I can read free books like these and feel like this… Wow. It’s like a really long prose poem, cut into sections; a sort of mystery play of grief and recovery, loss and redemption; but through a contemporary, Bay Area writer’s life; a transplant from the Middle West, as many of us are.

The clarity of her sentences pulls me into a story I’ve “made up” about the huge, empty house at the corner of Avalon and Claremont that I’ve wanted to write about for weeks, “Its children’s bedroom windows gazing open but empty, southward to the wide, waiting world…” I leap from mere words on the page to a Creator’s viewpoint, The Large. I haven’t read anything this perfect since Laurie Anne Doyle’s World Gone Missing, so right.

It’s a different voice than Doyle’s, of course; plot, thought and emotional pattern; but clear and right in the same way, as if we’re brought into the moment of each story purely, succinctly, cracking open a flat, gray rock and discovering a bright chunk of gold.What used to be surrealism, now called “magical realism” since Allende and Ionesco brought them into fiction and stories; makes immense, mythic and multidimensional the ordinary world.

After a series of interlocked grim but gripping portraits, scenarios and incidents; guided by her beckoning Mother’s image as she steps out her back door into the yard outside; she boards a bus, is transported to a primal deer hunt out of Gen X techie San Francisco, and she stalks and kills, dismembers and transports her venison; recollects her Father, memories of her lover, Michelle; converses with a worm, a bear, her own heart, as she moves through a time where impossible things happen. Like recovering from an intimate death.

Getty Images, Free, Park & Fog

Where are her images from? Her dreams, feelings, hallucinations? Her world is ours, metropolitan, everyone’s. But so full of love, longing and precision. Everyone who’s ever loved and lost, lost hope, kept going, watched time drag and days dwindle and sag, then finally caught sight of a shoelace that’s just a shoelace, a day that’s just a day.

My heart grows wide, my mind triples with these writers. A voice of song, a breath of time, a breeze of hope…

The Berkeley Times, 9 January, 2020, © 2020 Wyndy J Knox Carr

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