Iraq Body Count

We all know about the American soldiers dying for no good reason in Iraq.  There are reasons they have been sent over there, yes, just not virtuous ones.  But what about the Iraqis being murdered each day?  Here’s the description on the Iraq Body Count website:

Iraq Body Count is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths during and since the 2003 invasion. The count encompasses non-combatants killed by military or paramilitary action and the breakdown in civil security following the invasion.

You can download the complete database with news source citations.

This is terrible and gets worse everyday.  What’s next for the Global War on Terror if people don’t get up and demand that it end now?

English 106 Fall 2008 Focus: Prison Industrial Complex

I’ve begun collecting possible texts and articles for my major unit for next semester in my Introduction to Rhetoric & Composition class. My unit on the torture debate/controversy in the U.S., using J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, was the most successful unit I have done so far, so I’m pushing it even further next year.

Thanks to C.D. Wright for convincing me to focus on the prison industrial complex as a way into race issues in America generally. Her long poem One Big Self [read an excerpt] will be one of several major texts for the unit. I’m going to try and find several other texts in various media (literature, film, music, interviews, photography, essays) to give as effective look into the situation as possible from multiple angles.

In an initial google search on the topic, I came across this grassroots organization that takes on this very issue, Critical Resistance. I would like to find more groups like this, or that write press releases on the situation in American prisons.

I really want my students to become of aware of the major problems going on inside the U.S., especially as they will not hear about from in the major media outlets. There is real disparity between the races in this country, and there is racism embedded in the structures of our communities as embodied in law enforcement and the prison system (and all stops between). If they can learn this one thing, what else might they be more open to seeing going on all around them?

Iraq War Winter Soldier Media Blackout

As expected, the Winter Soldier Hearings held last month on the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq were not covered much in the media, and this window into the reality of what is going on in Iraq, which is (as if we do not already suspect it) at least as disturbing as what went on in Vietnam. As though any war can be less violent than another. Here is FAIR’s article “New York Times Explains Winter Soldier Blackout.” It explains a lot, just not what the NY Times meant it to.

If you’d like to see what this was all about you can watch the archived video testimony of Winter Soldier 2008 at the Iraq Veteran’s Against the War website. If you don’t like being disturbed, don’t watch it; but it’s going on regardless, and personally I’d rather face the reality. If we as Americans would stop ignoring what crimes our leaders are committing all over the world in our names (this is a democracy, after all) and face the facts, then maybe we can do something about it.

“In a Strange and Foreign Country”: Composing Poetry from Existing Texts

Attached here in PDF format are the lecture notes for a Looseleaf workshop I led this week called “’In a Strange and Foreign Country’: Composing Poetry from Existing Texts.” What follows is the opening lecture:

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I have taken the title for this workshop from a passage in Helene Cixous’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing which I believe says a lot about the nature of the methods that we will be learning tonight:

The writer is a secret criminal. How? First because writing tries to undertake that journey toward strange sources of art that are foreign to us. “The thing” does not happen here, it happens somewhere else, in a strange and foreign country. (20)

Tonight, we plunder. We will be “secret criminals,” or we should at least believe in the thrill of this.

None of the methods presented here are traditional ways to write poetry. They are often used for satire and social commentary than for “serious” art, but let that be a reason for encouragement rather than derision.

Where we will begin is with the language around us, the language we find and read and are fascinated by. The language that catches us like little children get caught up in anything wonderful.

A movement developed in music recently called plunderphonics which utilized samples from existing recorded music to assemble or provide the basis for new music which, though it uses others work almost exclusively as its means, is highly original in its ends.

We will do some plunderpoetics. We will use the methods of constraint and selection to create new works out of existing texts.

Lit Journals: Preparing for Summer Submissions

I’ve been doing some research lately to find journals that seem receptive to the kind of writing I’m doing now. I’ve never published before; I’ve never even submitted. I just sent out 5 subscriptions this week to some journals to see what their content is typically like. A few them I have little hope of getting published in, but I want them all the same for the pleasure of reading new poetry that’s actually interesting and exciting, something that is difficult to find in the Midwest (and often anywhere else).

So, my list of print journal hopefuls:

• Phoebe
• No: A Journal of the Arts
• Combo Magazine
• Fence
• New American Writing

And print journals I’m subscribed to that either don’t except open submissions or seem a bit out of my league, but I subscribe to for pleasure:

• Chicago Review
• SHINY
• Abraham Lincoln

And while I’m in the listing mode, here are online journal hopefuls, though I need to do more research on the submission policies of these journals, and find more of them:

• NOÖ Journal
• ecopoetics
• Exquisite Corpse
• MiPoesias / Ocho

I’m not bothering to put links here in this post. All of these journals and others are located in the left sidebar under either Lit Journals or Literature.

A friend of mine in fiction has asked me about online fiction journals, but I honestly have not looked into them much. If any readers can comment any good journals of this kind, I’d be very grateful. I’ll put them up here with the others.