Where is Yams Up My Grannie’s Ass? When Maggie Nelson mentioned Karen Finley’s 1986 performance piece in Art of Cruelty, I plunged into internet research. Yams is nowhere on Google. As a millennial, it has taken a while for me to realize that not everything is compatible and available in digital format, particularly performance art. When I saw Finley on ISSUE Project Room’s calendar, I pushed the keyboard aside, eager to witness the salaciousness off-screen.
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In July 1975, the United States Customs Service seized thousands of copies of “How to Read Donald Duck,” first published in Chile in 1971. The book fared no better in its home country. During the political turmoil after the coup that removed Salvador Allende from office, the Chilean Navy threw thousands of copies of the text into the Bay of Valparaiso; still others were burned in protest.
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The title of this book refers to a line in Mike Marqusee’s poem ‘Egypt’. In it, Egyptian people are filling a public square, presumably Cairo’s Tahrir Square, their images captured on TV. Much like a dream, Marqusee writes, what is happening is ‘turbulent and calm, much wished for, full of surprise.’ But unlike a dream, this is a revolution that will leave ‘definable traces in the atmosphere, like incense.’ He concludes: ‘I know this is not a dream because like a dream / everything is changed in its wake.’
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A very different though complementary approach is taken by Jamie Stern-Weiner in his edited collection Moment of Truth…
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My favourite writer of the political-culture mix of the current era is Mike Marqusee, who so tragically passed away in 2015, the year his friend and longstanding comrade Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party.
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At a public event in Washington, DC, CodePink’s Medea Benjamin confronted Brian Hook, the head of Trump’s Iran Action Group, over the US withdrawal from the JCPOA and re-imposing crippling sanctions on the Iranian people. Benjamin joins us to discuss her action, which went viral online
Watch the video here.
In Grabbing Pussy (OR Books), performance artist and professor Karen Finley achieves the unthinkable: out of America’s unstoppable news cycle and its disturbing undercurrents of psychosexually charged politics, she forges poetry with a punk sensibility (plus, a dash of unfiltered raunchiness, in keeping with the times), skewering Donald Trump, the Clintons, Harvey Weinstein, and Anthony Weiner in the process.
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Modern Tibetan literature has been rather hard to find, with the exception of religious and spiritual writings, and some poetry, notably Woeser’s Tibet’s True Heart: Selected Poetry, the only book of modern Tibetan poetry I have come across. Woeser has a short story in this new collection, and was the only Tibetan writer represented that I actually knew by name..
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Strongmen come in many flavors, writes editor Prashad (Red Star over the Third World, 2017, etc.), but they share a commonality: They “are nothing other than cowardly when it comes to social reality.”
The fascist dictators in modern clothing, writes Prashad in his introduction to this edited volume, “do not advertise themselves as fascists,” but they speak the same language: Protect the homeland from outsiders, obey, and worship your leader. “Older, decadent language can be heard,” writes Prashad, “the language of death and disorder.”.
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Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s stunning victory in the Mexican presidential election signals the end of decades of conservative government and the promise of fairer, more honest politics south of the Rio Grande.
Andres’ landslide electoral success was built on a campaign that pledged to tackle corruption, halt privatization of the energy industry, invest in education and infrastructure, open a dialogue with the country’s drug cartels, and oppose Trump’s border wall..
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The controversial performance artist and social commentator indulges in a Trump-bashing frenzy.
Finley (The Reality Shows, 2011, etc.) finds her ultimate target in the current president. This amalgam of creative prose and freestyle poetry floods vitriol on the words and actions of Trump. Like in some of her previous works—e.g. George and Martha, her burlesque of a love affair between George Bush and Martha Stewart—the author attempts to transmogrify a bottomless liberal rage into moving, provocative, and occasionally hilarious art..
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COVERING some of the most knotty questions about Israel-Palestine, Moment of Truth is an important resource for those who wish to drill down into the details of the debates to gain an in-depth understanding of the conflict.
Edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner, a graduate in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, the book is structured in an interesting way, with the expert contributors make their conflicting cases in a series of exchanges, with other respondents also weighing in.
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André Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) victory in Mexico’s presidential election on the 2nd July was greeted with a dose of scepticism by Counterfire. ‘AMLO’s accession to the Presidency is definitely an event to be welcomed by the left; not least, because senior members of the Trump administration have previously expressed their disapproval of the possibility, argued Sean Ledwith. However, ‘the likelihood is that AMLO as President will disappoint many of the millions who voted for him.’
Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century we have seen various reformist governments, especially in Latin America, and we know how the story ends. The unshakeable faith that the state can be reformed from within eventually leads to a confrontation where the working class loses. Paraphrasing Lenin, it seems like one step forward, but two steps back.
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With investigations continuing regarding Russian interference in American elections, Hancock provides context dating back to Machiavelli.
A veteran analyst of covert actions, the author doesn’t judge according to right or wrong, let alone good or evil. He works under the assumption that this is the way that power sustains, defends, and extends itself, and he generally sees the Russian intelligence initiatives in the wake of the Cold War and the Soviet breakup as the mirror image of America’s perspective after World War II.
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Until recently, progressives believed the retreat of liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War would be like water running uphill. “There is no coherent alternative to liberal democracy,” wrote Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History (1992). A better quote to describe large parts of the world as it is now came from George Orwell half a century ago in his long essay, Inside the Whale. “Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorship – an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction.
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“Confronted with Trump’s orders to persecute migrants, we must join together to denounce his human rights violations”: Mexico’s president-elect delivers a few choice words for his counterpart north of the border.
In this collection of campaign-trail speeches and articles, leftist politician López Obrador offers a program for—well, making Mexico great again, inasmuch as a long reign of neoliberalism has left it “one of the poorest countries on the continent.”
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The editors of Women of Resistance should be very proud. They brought hope and community to their contributors, and the book that resulted will surely do the same for its readers. They’ve ignited women to fight for their bodies, their agency, and their lives—and they inspired me to write, too.
Read the full review in the latest print edition of the Women’s Review of Books here.
When I picked up Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, a collection of poems by 49 female-identified poets published by OR Books, I hoped to report that feminist poetry — and the new feminism that it represents — would not be a tragic, polemic trudge through the trash-pile that patriarchy has made of the world and women’s lives. .
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Founded early (1519) in the Age of Imperial Conquest (commonly known as the Age of Exploration), Havana was one of the three largest cities in the Hemisphere until the late 18th century
(with Mexico City and Lima) and a magnet for all manner of peoples.
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One of the most exciting and important voices to emerge from the 1980s-90s American performance art movement, Karen Finley might be regarded as one of the country’s most noted censored artists.
As one of the four 1990 NEA grant recipients whose funding was revoked at the insistence of a faction led by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms – whose description of her performance piece “We Keep Our Victims Ready” reduced it to the action of a naked Finley smearing chocolate sauce over her body, ignoring the literary content of her monologue about smothering patriarchy the symbolic gesture was a part of – Finley’s name will forever be associated with a United States Supreme Court case that not only prompted discussions of the definition of art, but of the definition of decency.
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We’ve been swamped by dire warnings about fake news and its threat to democracy over the past couple of years, the phenomenon being variously attributed to alternative web sites, Twitter feeds, and Facebook postings made by dastardly agents employed by Vladimir Putin…
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Mike Marqusee was an anti-Zionist Jewish American socialist activist, poet, journalist, pamphleteer, novelist and author who wrote about cricket with more grace and insight than just about anyone in his adopted country of England. When he died of bone cancer in 2015 memorial meetings were held in Islington and India, where Marquesee’s columns in The Hindu had gained him a devoted readership.
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Information, as powerful as it is, belongs to everyone and can help in individual self-determination.
At the center of any WikiLeaks discussion lies Julian Assange, the platform’s founder who has been embroiled in scandals and accusations of misogyny, amongst all else. Lesser known is the story of the women involved in the WikiLeaks phenomenon, as whistleblowing is an area of activity that, as Renata Avila, Sarah Harrison and Angela Richter write in Women, Whistleblowing, WikiLeaks: A Conversation, is “widely perceived as heavily male dominated.”
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Why is it that the mainstream media in the US and other Western countries consistently frame the Palestinian liberation struggle as a “conflict” in which “both sides” share the blame, particularly because “extremists” undermine “moderates”? Why does this media unfailingly assert Israel’s “right to self-defense” even in the face of unarmed protests such as the recent Great March of Return in Gaza that in some instances pitted rocks and burning kites against modern weaponry?
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This may sound weird but you kind of need to read this book out loud.
Karen Finley, its author, is of course most famous as a mesmerizingly boundary-smashing performance artist; throughout her written body of work, the purring and percussive performative voice remains very much in evidence even on the page. All the more so in this case because the contents of Grabbing Pussy are essentially the libretto from Finley’s 2017 stage work, the multi-act one-woman political mad scene Unicorn Gratitude Mystery.
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