Subjects Archives: Literature

  “There is a great deal of misinformation feeding on itself about U.S. forces allegedly using ‘outlawed’ weapons in Fallujah. The facts are that U.S. forces are not using any illegal weapons in Fallujah or anywhere else in Iraq.” — U.S. Department of State, 9 December 20041 “But I repeat the point made by my […]

  For the most part, we go along living without thinking much about the world around us. Things just seem to happen without rhyme or reason. My parents knew that people like themselves were not quite the same as people who had a lot more money, but they didn’t reflect very deeply as to why […]

  “I’ve always loved George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, those kinds of guys,” said Kevin’s smiling, catastrophically Caucasian father from his overstuffed recliner, as I waited for the boy to come down the wide, oak stairway with the sheets of music he had scribbled his ideas down onto, but which he had mistakenly left upstairs in […]

  One of the most pleasant (and, for us, unanticipated) consequences of finishing a film is the chance to travel on other people’s tab. In the coming months, we have invitations to travel and screen Zizek! in venues as far flung as Vienna and New York City, Beirut and Columbia (Missouri, that is), primarily at […]

She sat her husband down made the confession she stole food from the refrigerator You mean our refrigerator? You didn’t steal nothin’. Lou, I ate a sweet pickle and two slices of bread.The end pieces. That food’s yours, Flo! I bought that for you to eat. I didn’t ask first. You don’t have to for […]

if she could use her hands to fasten a button twist a knob scribble a letter to tell me she dreams about tailpipes thirteen parts assembled again and over like a broken dance of two palms stroking rubbery backs fingers bowing to partners swollen with gnarled collapse snapping delicate cylinder joints in place for the […]

Leaping from the edge-of-town factory fist, a machinist, buttoned blue sleeves, steps into the autumn noon light. Sits, back to the smokestack, on an old wooden bench opens wax-paper tuna seedless dark rye, a half-sour. A bookkeeper stretches fingers ’round a flat wide thermos, lentil soup, and a welder, unmasked, sips crimson borcht, red confetti […]

  La hemorragia de América anclada en tu cuerpo como una sangría en tu alma cáncer de espanto quebrada de llanto canto de dolor y muerte pasajeros cautiverios secuestradas las almas y en ti Puerto Rico se proyecta resurge y reclama el faro de luz negado por Halcones de la noche tú como un rayo […]

[The following was delivered, by Paul Buhle, to an audience of 150 Brown undergraduates preparing to watch the first night of the Dylan special directed by Martin Scorsese, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, 26 September 2005.] In my young political lifetime, from being your age to twice your age, there were three great individual singers […]

what does a rubber worker exhale if it’s the same as what she inhales if she complains to management that the label on the primer is a warning with a skull and crossbones and there’s no ventilation in the building to ingest the souls of the antioxidants the activators and bonding agents if she asks […]

People penned to die in our instant concentration camps, just add water, bodies pushed to the side. Thirst hurts worse than hunger. It swells your brain against your skull. it sandpapers your gut from within. But hunger too makes people mad. Shoot the looters who are grabbing from flooded stores survival for hours more. Baby […]

Two films, Paheli and Matrubhumi: A Nation without Women, hit theatres in India within weeks of each other. Significantly, both the films, directed by Amol Palekar and Manish Jha respectively, have or claim to have women at the centre of their discourse. In the promos of Paheli, the producer-actor Shah Rukh Khan talked of the […]

The Front Lines of Social Change: Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. By Richard Bermack, Introduction by Peter Carroll. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2005. 120pp, oversize. $19.95pbk. This is a photo book with text, and Richard Bermack is the master photographer of veteran political activists on the West Coast. He has been on the job for […]

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Most progressive-minded hip hop fans and culturally-inclined activists have not heard of Baltimore rapper Son of Nun yet. After listening to the Son’s first album, Blood and Fire, I can only say this: they will. Despite this being his first album, Nun — a high school teacher, activist, and organizer from Baltimore — is clearly […]

2005 will mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Industrial Workers World, the I.W.W., popularly known as the “Wobblies.” The most radical, mass-based labor organization to emerge within U.S. history, they embodied the slogan “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All,” as they organized unskilled as well as skilled workers, immigrants […]

  We all remember the TV images of diligent cleanup workers in Alaska wiping the black sludge from the Exxon Valdez off the shores of the Prince William Sound. Who would have guessed that the well-intentioned workers were unknowingly being poisoned by Exxon? Those of us who are acutely aware of monopoly capital’s contradictions might […]

1 She calls across the tenement valley to her friends pulling laundry off the cross-cut line A block away, hogs hang from steel question-marks Guts pour from the gashes in their bellies spill over the workers’ shoes fall between the floor slats into Miller’s River She calls Bernadette, Madge, Belinda in the chopped syllables of […]

With god on our side we don’t need a conscience. The others are ripe for burning and burn them we will, the smoke of their flesh rising to heaven, an acceptable sacrifice. With god on our side there is no grey, no shading only glaring gorgeous white blinding with purity: beyond just blackness that could […]

It’s fashionable on the Left to look down one’s nose at the world of sports. To do so, according to Dave Zirin, would be to miss a chance at both inspiration and solidarity. Zirin’s new book, What’s My Name, Fool! Sports and Resistance in the United States creates a much-needed bridge between the political and […]