Check out some of her poetry in Drunken Boat and Perihelion. And feel free to discuss below.

Saturday in Oakland turned into a clusterfuck (although doesn’t it always?) as OPD arrested over 400 protestors–and, by accounts which are beginning to trickle in/out, members of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department proceeded to humiliate and possibly torture the detainees. Keep your eye on this one, folks.

And keep your other eye on Miami, where police have raided the #OM encampment. I don’t have anything to link to yet (as usual, a big Thank You to the mainstream media), but here’s a piece from the Miami Herald which details the situation just after sundown, the time at which the protestors were ordered to be gone.

Boy, for a movement that’s supposed to be on its last gasp …

I can in no way come up with anything new to say about last week’s release of Mitt Romney’s tax returns, but here’s a calculator to tell you how long it took Mitt to make what you made in all of 2010. FYI (TMI?), Mitt took in my entire 2010’s-worth of income in less than half a goddamn day.

Does that not piss you off enough? Okay. Then here’s a little tidbit the Texas Observer unearthed last week: in 1983, ol’ Mitt tied the family dog to the roof of the car on a road trip. I’d like us all to repeat that together, aloud: “In 1983, ol’ Mitt tied the family dog to the roof of the car on a road trip.” From the 2007 story in the Boston Globe: “Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family’s hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon’s roof rack.”

From the Atlantic: “The Weirdest Things Occupy Protestors Get Arrested For,” a list which includes lynching (for trying to prevent cops from arresting a musician), and Grand Theft … HAT!

The OWS Library, working in conjunction with Occupy Tucson, will collect and send “As many copies as [they] can find and buy” of the books banned during that oh-so-Arizonian dismantling of Tucson Unified’s Mexican-American Studies program.

In 2010, the U.S. ranked 20th-freest in the world in the annual Press Freedom Index. This year it has plummeted to 47th. Behind El Salvador. How does this relate to the Occupy movement? Come on.

Occupy D.C.’s response to the State of the Union closes with “We are the 99%. Our finances are weak, but our spirit is strong. We are the 99%. Our spring is coming.”

If you can manage to get past the ridonkulous title, you’ll enjoy this pictorial from the Christian Science Monitor: “Occupy Dog Street: pets in protest.” (Nota bene: None of these dogs are tied to the roof of a car.)

Lots of folks are looking ahead to the G-8 and NATO summits in Chicago in May. Occupy is planning a whole lotta somethin’, and Adbusters, the folks who got us all into this mess, are calling for 50,000 protestors to descend onto the city. (Kind of a modest request, it seems to me.) You think Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is looking ahead, too? Here are a bunch of new security/surveillance measures he just forced through city council: “The new rules [...] include an increased number of surveillance cameras across the city; the ability for Chicago’s police chief to deputize trained out-of-state law enforcement personnel; increases in parade permit fees and heavier fines for violating parade rules; keeping public parks closed longer than usual each day; the requirement that ‘large parades’ (almost every sizable street protest) take out $1 million liability insurance to get permits and for organizers to ‘agree to reimburse the city for any damage to the public way or to city property arising out of or caused by the parade.’”

Before we bid farewell for the week, here’s another edition of Your Occupation Calendar:

• February 3rd – National day of action against the NDAA (Facebook)
• April 7th – Chicago Spring (Facebook)
• March 30th – National Occupation of Washington D.C. (Web Site)
• May 1st – Occupy General Strike (Web site)
• May 18th – G8 Summit in Chicago (Occupy Chicago)
• Last week of August – Republican National Convention
• September – Democratic National Convention

You might wanna start looking into flights now, folks. Because, damn.

The reader is presented with a speaker who resides on the home front waiting to be reunited with her beloved. Fenton’s portrayal of love, loss, and war are dynamically conveyed through lyrical and prose poems. A belief in the resiliency of words as more than symbols, Fenton’s love of language and life, resounds in “Love in Wartime (I).” Here, words represent sensations and emotions directly:

When I say you and I have to mean

not some signified presence, not

the striking of the same spent tinder

but your mouth & its live wetness, your tongue

& its intimate knowledge of flesh.

Words embody living moments of the mind; they must. It is a longing for the intimacy and for the physical presence of another half a world away that allow these words to be comforting. The poems in this collection reach out for those who escape our grasp, for those beyond the “rifle’s reach.” Deftly, the fabric of these poems hinge on moments of “Death so close you can reach out and touch a board / from the casket” (“The Riots in Bangalore”) or unfurl beneath “the wreckage / or papery flames, the falling arsenal of stars—” (“Refusing Beatrice”). It is these moments of passionate detail that map the journey of the speaker’s absent beloved.

The collection’s third and final section presents contemplative observations of a post solitary world, an imagined life of questionable hope, where “war is everywhere / at once….except there is no inviolable anything / and you’ve been home for a year.” Retreating to her passion for language in “Your Plane Arrives from Iraq for the Last Time,” Fenton describes the beloved’s arrival as,

…the end

of the longest sentence I’ve ever known

your face in the window’s fogged aperture:

stranded noun, Rorschach of stars. Beautiful thing.

This is a marvelous debut. Not surprisingly, this collection was the winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, selected by D.A. Powell. Elyse Fenton’s attention to decorum and her sententious awareness to the human condition illuminate a difficult subject which is never extinguished.

– I am a writer and a photographer, and sometimes I like to combine the two art forms, which in fact are my favorite vices. Such is the case with “Ask Not,” which is what I hope is the first in a series of visual texts is support of the Occupy Movement. For “Ask Not,” I wanted to re-invent the statement made by John Kennedy in his inaugural address. I understood that the young president wanted us to look beyond our personal lives to see the greater good. Ironically, as a little kid I saw John Kennedy in Houston on November 21, 1963, the night before he was assassinated.

Don’t call it a comeback. Occupy San Fran has been feeding people and shutting down banks, licking its wounds after having its encampments forcibly taken down. But the movement is being reborn for Spring 2012 as Occupy Wall Street West. Friday’s march through the financial district included more than 50 groups that have aligned with Occupy. It rained, but Occupy says it was the biggest turn out they’ve had yet and the banks suffered more than the Occupiers. Of course, if Mark Wahlberg had been there, it wouldn’t have gone down like it did.

Your Occupation Calendar:

• February 3rd – National day of action against the NDAA (Facebook)
• March 30th – National Occupation of Washington D.C. (Website)
• May 1st – Occupy General Strike (Website)
• May 18th – G8 Summit in Chicago (Occupy Chicago)
• Last week of August – Republican National Convention
• September – Democratic National Convention

Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s Mayor, doesn’t intend to let those mean old Occupiers mess up his opportunity to play Big City Mayor at this year’s G8 and Nato Summits. Almost without notice, he pushed a new set of security and police measures through the Chicago City Council on January 18, multiplying police and surveillance powers and making permanent some shocking new limitations on political dissent you can bet other big city mayors are green with jealousy over. Occupy Chicago is displeased. Thank you once again to the UK Guardian for reporting on a story about American authoritarianism gone very wrong, when our media is too lazy or disinterested. Someone should tell Rahm, you never bring riot gear to an idea fight.

Last week we talked a little about Resurrection City, the 1968 D.C. encampment that grew out of Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign, and a few of the events where African American groups, some of which worked with Dr. King, have aligned with Occupy. The number of African American religious leaders and community activists voicing support for Occupy groups and actions is growing.

The 2nd Anniversary of the malodorous Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court case has arrived. Occupy has pushed many money-in-politics issues to the surface, and Citizens United, among the most boneheaded and obviously destructive political issues on the landscape right now, is suddenly very unpopular. I say it’s because Occupy has persistently kept it in their sights. It’s been a major thorn in the side of Occupy activists, and they were there again this week, launching the anniversary news cycle by piling on with protests in over a hundred cities. While it’s too late to get the Citizens United Super PAC money out of the 2012 elections, I promise you there will be intervention in the coming years to limit the untrammeled flow of corporate money into politics. If there is one discussion in which historians will not be able to bury the influence of Occupy, it will be in the reforms that will put the Super PACs back on a leash.

They say “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”  Well, Texas has executed one. But I’m worried about this “death by pitchfork” business. Let’s not give Governor Perry any new ideas.

Politicians do their best to ignore Occupy, but they may find it harder once The Boss steps into the ring. Bruce Springsteen’s new album drops on March 6. Said to be his best work in years, it is also said to be focused on social justice issues and specifically sympathetic to the Occupy cause. I also hear Tom Morello (of Rage Against The Machine), a vocal supporter of Occupy, is a collaborator on the record.  I have no joke for this. I don’t make jokes about Bruce Springsteen.

The new deadline for Visual Art is February 15, 2012. The new deadline for all literary genres is March 15, 2012.

“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
-Martin Luther King Jr. “Beyond Vietnam“

Let’s occupy 1968 for a moment.

Martin Luther King Jr. had a vision of a movement that would transcend civil rights for African Americans and would focus on economic justice for all, a “Poor People’s Campaign” that would cut across race and use the same peaceful protest actions he had brought to civil rights in the South to the issue of poverty in America. Dr. King’s expanding view and increasing focus on economic injustice is barely on the radar today, eclipsed by antiseptic CNN tributes and major appliance sales that have come to dominate the holiday that bears his name.

One almost forgotten part of the Poor People’s Campaign was Resurrection City, an encampment in Washington D.C. The complaints against PPC campers in Resurrection City were the same, over 40 years ago, as those we hear about Occupy Wall Street: dirt, disorganization, and vague complaints about crime that have little substance. Mostly peaceful, and more substantial than its legacy would suggest or the bad weather in Spring of 1968 would seem to encourage, this squatter protest encampment stood for a little over a month before it was dismantled by police and the activists run out.

Although he was there for the conception of the Poor People’s Campaign, the events were organized by Dr. King’s followers. The first campers arrived in Washington in May. One wonders what we would talk about when we talk about Dr. King today had he lived long enough to lead these actions for economic equality. He didn’t. Dr. King was murdered in April, just weeks before Resurrection City.

Few talk about that encampment today. The national media seems to have drawn an almost complete blank. Many of today’s Occupiers do know about it, and those who don’t can read and are learning about it this week. Some see Resurrection City as the first Occupy, a four-decade-old warmup for what’s happening today. Many of us see Dr. King’s brief but powerful work on wealth as being an early seed, the beginning of a critique that took almost half a century to fully ripen.

That’s why–part of why–we occupy Washington, D.C. this week, after and in conjunction with a series of M.L.K.-themed local events all over the country over the weekend and throughout the week.

There were many actions and gatherings this week, like this one at the Federal Reserve, calling for an end to foreclosures, money for students and a fund to come from Wall Street for creating new jobs. Occupy events associated with Dr. King’s memory happened all over the map this last weekend, many of them organized by African American churches and civil rights activists working with Occupy groups in their cities.

The biggest event of the week is Occupy Congress. It’s connected both to the Martin Luther King Holiday, Tuesday’s four-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and like all Occupy events, is an independent campaign. Regrettably, the action is all happening right now as I have to put this piece to bed, so I can only speculate how it’s turning out. Some early pictures are beginning to show up.

No thanks to the national media. As far as I can tell, at midday and thousands gathering in Washington D.C., after weeks of open preparation and regional Occupy groups traveling cross country leaving blog posts and YouTube vids everywhere they went, the media doesn’t seem to know anything is going on. I’m not sure how many people need to show up in order to get CNN to point a camera out their window, but at this early hour I’ve seen many reports of crowds gathering, many photos and video feeds, including pictures of police armed to the teeth (they sure knew someone was coming).

I can’t include the outcome in this week’s piece, but if the news media gets bored this afternoon there are hundreds of Twitter feeds, YouTube videos and Facebook pages watching. I hope I can better sum up the day’s events next week in this space.

Hard to imagine why this particular part of the Occupy Congress story didn’t get picked up by more big news outlets. A Greyhound bus driver, seemingly disgusted at the thought of carrying Occupiers to Washington, stranded 13 of them at the Amarillo terminal. That’s not nice. Have you ever been to Amarillo?

What you’re supposed to do with people who have views that differ from your own is tolerate their voice and let them have their space to say it. Therefore, I present, the alternative view, a preview of the Occupy Congress event by someone who has already made up their mind about Occupy and today’s Congress events.

But I’m not being as gentlemanly as I let on. I include this smug and dismissive piece pronouncing Occupy Congress over before it starts in order to make a point. Small and petty as it is, it’s a pure distillation of what seems to count as “criticism” of OWS today. There’s not a word of legitimate disagreement over position in this piece, but lots of snickering at inside jokes and attempts at dismissing what happens behind “the haze of marijuana smoke and body odor.”

So much of the analysis directed against OWS seems to focus on a supposed failure to think things through, a predictable red herring that comes up in this piece, and pretty much all pieces negative about these actions. They like to pretend they are not against protest, but offended by this one because it has no purpose. Just because you don’t understand what Occupy is about doesn’t mean the Occupiers don’t.

If she had complained about bongo drums, that TownHall piece would have had it all.

The biggest obstacle to change often seems to be cynicism.

Here’s more of what people were talking about in your Occupied world this week.

Ghandi. Sure, I’ll engage in some speculative discussion about whether Ghandi would have approved. Ruchira Gupta says Ghandi would have been a leader in OWS. Along the way, the piece makes a couple of points I wish the Town Hall writer above would consider. It points out, rightly, that the U.S. is a country that lives in a dream that all are equal. Occupy has put the idea of inequality on the map, and made it a major issue in a very short time, and in a country that barely knows such a thing exists. America is waking up from a dream. I’m certain Ghandi would have approved of that.

Also, in organization, Occupy is an ongoing and real-time flexing of the democracy muscle, a radical, participatory process where all decisions are made by real people. Occupy is not demanding democracy while ignoring it themselves. These things need to be noted by all observers, and the critics need to realize these things are intentional, urgent goals and processes determined by people who had a stake through mindful democratic work with others.

These massive demonstrations are not the accidental outcomes of marijuana-fueled bongo gatherings. We just have those for fun.

Where did the ideas come from? Many places, but here’s one you won’t hear much sane discussion of: Anarchists. There was a time I used to run with self-styled Anarchists. That was when I was younger and could run.

In the context of grassroots political participation in the U.S., Anarchism needs to be understood not necessarily as a rejection, and certainly not as a purely destructive impulse–although the scene does attract more than its share of pyromaniacs and window breakers. It doesn’t mean a complete absence of rule or structure. Indeed, I often felt those who liked to disdain politics and work at the grassroots level without leaders spent too much time talking about votes and procedures. That’s because an Anarchist believes democracy is a good thing, and that America should try it. They so believe in its essential rightness that they are often the only ones insisting on democracy in its most extreme and pure manifestation. Sometimes that’s time consuming, and can appear unfocused from the outside.

The Anarchists play a huge role in establishing the rules of engagement for Occupy, and that’s a good thing. This piece says thank you, Anarchists. Thank you for the General Assembly, the open to all debate/vote process that’s the guiding decision-making and problem-solving principle for every Occupy group in America.

And as Occupy enters its fourth month, at the beginning of a presidential race, resisting the pull of electoral politics, send your local Anarchist a fruit basket thanking them for that too.

Save these dates:

• January 20th – Occupy The Courts
• February 3rd – National day of action against the NDAA.
• March 30th – National Occupation of Washington D.C.
• May 1st – Occupy General Strike

(This is just a start. I’m going to compile more upcoming event dates and have them for you each week in this space. I’ll verify the substance of these, link to reference pages, and keep an updated list of the events that really seem to be developing. So check back here often to keep an eye on what’s on the agenda.)

Citizens United, the same group that brought the Supreme Court case, is making a new documentary about Occupy Wall Street. The court decision that opened the floodgates on political contributions from corporations is a major part of what OWS is protesting, and walking the law back is one of the major goals. So you can guess what the tone of the the group’s film on Occupy is going to be like.

Matt Taibbi believes this story tells you everything you need to know about the insanity of Wall Street. I don’t know about that, but it’s pretty crazy, and Taibbi’s writing is always a kick in the teeth.

Designer jeans, body spray and reality television shows. Does the marketing of Occupy related products mean the movement is registering with the mainstream?

Here’s one example of what the movement to occupy vacant houses looks like, as an abandoned house in The Bronx enters its second month of occupation. For those of you who think I brought too many words this week, relax, this one has video.

Why now? What next? Where do we go from here? What does it all mean? A conversation with Naomi Klein and Yotam Marom about Occupy.

Bill Moyers interviews a pair of Occupiers who tell him a little about where they see the movement going.

I quite enjoyed this Moyers interview, and the two OWS reps came across as thoughtful and intelligent critics and organizers who can explain themselves well. I have no doubt Moyers has his heart in the right place as well. He’s a reliable journalist you can count on to at least have a clue about money and power, and a man who knows the problems that need to be solved. I am glad he’s on the air and I hope he will continue doing thoughtful and fair work on Occupy.

But Moyers also has a government pedigree, and he seems confused as to why Occupy doesn’t take political sides, why they insist on standing outside the process (so far) and why this week’s Occupy Congress event doesn’t take the opportunity to do more traditional lobbying and trying to draw politicians to their side. He questioned them several times.

We came into this piece on the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. and we’ll go out on them, with a passage that explains better than I can why we seem to say no to politics and yes to direct action.

“You may well ask: ‘Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

-Martin Luther King Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail“

When you’re buying a new washer and dryer with 25% off and no payments til June this week, don’t forget the words of that Martin Luther King Jr.
]]> http://www.fringemagazine.org/blog/occupy-fringe-roundup-19/feed/ 1 http://www.fringemagazine.org/blog/maryann-corbett-on-art-songs-spells-and-paradelles/ http://www.fringemagazine.org/blog/maryann-corbett-on-art-songs-spells-and-paradelles/#comments Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:03:54 +0000 Anna Lena http://www.fringemagazine.org/?p=8551 This week we’re featuring three poems by Maryann Corbett. Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips asked for her thoughts on the poems and on the writing life; she shares them here.  Please share your own thoughts about the poems in the comments…

It is an over-dramatization to compare the protestors who were pepper sprayed on the University of California-Davis campus with the students who were shot dead by National Guardsmen in May of 1970. But the image of a campus police officer calmly stepping over a peaceful group of protestors, displaying a can of pepper spray like an actor displaying the Oscar he’d just won, and methodically spraying the chemicals directly into the faces of defenseless students, was disturbing. Fellow-officers forming a defensive circle with weapons fixed on the nonviolent students who watched added to the absurdity.

Over the past couple of months, pundits have vilified the protestors as dirty, naïve and aimless—actually those were some of their more redeeming descriptions. But for every one of these soiled souls, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of silent Occupiers cheering them on, just as the nation grew to support those who protested the Vietnam War. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the war, confessed later in life that Vietnam was a “terrible, terrible mistake.” Will our leaders one day admit they should have served the people who elected them, rather than those who funded their campaigns?

The wide array of the Occupiers’ grievances convolutes the movement’s objectives, but one thing is clear: their overriding message resonates with the general population.

One grievance relative to the generation of most the protestors is the out-of-control tuition fees. But parents who are still paying off tuition loans for children who graduated ten years ago are just as outraged when the bill comes each month. They trusted the marketing brochures promising that the banks were there to help parents afford their children’s educational goals. Instead, they were sold a loan with terms no different than a home mortgage.

Every bank customer hit with a hidden $30 overdraft fee when their debit card was three cents short of covering their morning coffee is rooting for the Occupiers. It never added up that banks were able to make millions of transactions per second, yet couldn’t transfer three cents from a savings to a checking account. Bankers were eager to follow the advice of consultants to a $40 billion boon at the expense of their so-called valued customers. Do you think they would have stopped if they hadn’t been exposed by consumer advocates?

Homeowners in foreclosure; small business owners who can’t get financing from the banks taxpayers bailed out; people whose health insurance costs have soared to the point they postpone medical treatments because they can’t afford their skyrocketing healthcare bills; every worker who hasn’t seen their pay keep pace with the cost of living, all clench their fist in support when they watch reports of the Occupiers on the evening news. Americans love the underdog. It’s our heritage.

The catchphrase of our politicians this election season has become, “The American people want…” But they’ve been exposed. Politicians are owned by the favored team—those with the wealth to bankroll lobbyists who own Washington—and are no longer able to do what is right and fair for all the people. That is why they saw no need to reform the financial industry in the wake of the Great Recession, and now four years later the economy is poised to reenter the downward spiral. It’s why the Speaker of the House tells the American people we have the best health care system in the world—a health care system with over 17,000 codes describing medical services on insurance bills. (For those not paying attention, he rephrased his mantra to “Best health care delivery system in the world.”) And elected officials think it’s reasonable for college graduates to begin their career $60,000 in debt, many of whom are forced to join the military because there are no jobs. Those American people our politicians keep referring to must be cloistered in a remote valley in the Midwest with no access to television, newspapers or the Internet, because every American I talk to is insanely furious about out-of-control service industries that systematically wrecked our economy while politicians did nothing but tell us what we wanted.

Pundits predict the Occupy movement is running out of steam and will fizzle now that the cold weather has come, sending its agitators back to their crummy dormitories or shelters. I disagree. The Occupation has just begun and the silent Occupiers are cheering it on.

Just think what would happen if thousands of these silent Occupiers joined the movement.

We’re still taking submissions for Occupy Fringe, FYI. Send your poetry, essays, short fiction, or artwork to FringetheMagazine@gmail.com.

Lots of fun stuff to talk about from last week, and plenty of upcoming Occupy events all around the word. So spread the word, huh? And join in if you can. Your local Occupy group likely has Facebook and Twitter accounts.

– — This happened a few weeks ago, but I’m just seeing it now: Newt Gingrich being “mic-checked” during a speech in Iowa. I can’t decide how I feel about this one. On the one hand, anyone who wants to disrupt anything Newt Gingrich is doing has my support. I’d very much like it if the American people gave Newt plenty of free time with which to write more of those shitty alternate history novels. And this clip did make me grin from ear to ear. And giggle some more at that awkward oaf who knew he wanted to do something but couldn’t quite figure himself out.

But. Is this the right kind of action? Or does it bring negative attention and serve to reinforce what Fox Newsies say about protestors?

Not for me to judge, I guess. What do you guys think?

– — Here’s something I support unconditionally: a group of elderly women shutting down a Bank of America in Frisco. The self-named “Wild Old Women” looked so ferocious on approach that BoA staff barricaded themselves inside, so the grannies sat right down in front and protested. Against foreclosures, hidden/ridiculous fees, etc. You know, the usual complaints about Bank Scum of America.

I guess not all Occupiers are privileged white kids after all. Who knew?

– — “Occupy” has been named 2011’s Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, beating out “FOMO”–which apparently is an acronym for “Fear Of Missing Out,” described on Urban Dictionary (my go-to) as “The fear you feel that you will miss out on something huge if you don’t do something/participate in an event.”

I doubt a word is allowed to win more than once, but that doesn’t mean Occupy can’t be the biggest word of 2012, too. Don’t miss out on this stuff, FOMOs and MOFOs.

– — Occupy Wall Street has been nominated for a Shorty. I don’t really know what a Shorty is, but it sounds cool. So, to all my shorties: get out the Shorty vote.

– — BREAKING NEWS from the Washington Post: D.C. is cold in the winter. (I can’t believe I buried my lead.)

But Occupiers are finding ways to stay warm. Many of them by … (drum roll) … (second drum roll) … going inside. Because this isn’t 1777-1778 Valley Forge.

Of course, not all Occupiers are allowed to go inside, and still others choose not to. Here, Adbusters, progenitor of this whole movement, gives a quick shout-out to these die-hards.

Don’t be shy about doing your part to contribute. Your local camp will take donations of blankets, stocking caps, hot cocoa. Cigarettes. And while you’re there, take a few minutes and talk to some of the Occupiers. See what they’re all about, get to know them, give ‘em a thank you.

– — Here’s some stuff Occupiers were planning for the primary in New Hampshire. (As of press time, only 1% of precincts had reported. Insert your own punchline.)

And a bit of OccupIowa’s doings during the Caucus.

– — The New York City Council last week passed a resolution decrying Citizens United (Corporations = People).

Speaking of which, here’s an ultra-fun flow chart from Mother Jones entitled “So You Want to Buy an Election.

Some background on Citizens United, if you can stomach it.

– — Nigerian Spring? Has a nice ring to it.

– — The Huffington Post has released an ebook titled OCCUPY: Why It Started. Who’s Behind It. What’s Next. Despite the intro from Huff Barf Herself, I’m intrigued. Here’s an excerpt.

The ebook is available for $5. I’d much, much rather you not even read it than buy it on Amazon, so please keep that in mind for me.

– — Here are some “reflections” on Occupy from folks like Nancy Pelosi, Gloria Steinem, and Alice Walker.

– –Plenty of upcoming Occupy events to mark on your calendars. Alternet has a list of 7 hotspots for 2012, including Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, and Chicago. Will the Midwest be a tinderbox this year?

Regarding Wisco and the Scott Walker recall petition: time’s a-wastin’, folks. For real. Friday’s the last day to get ‘em in. So get ‘em in.

– — And this is just a big fat list of future events to keep an eye on. Check your local group for details on how your hometown will participate.

• Occupy 4 Jobs, January 14-16 (in Philly, Baltimore, Boston, New York, hopefully others)
• Occupy the Dream, January 15 (in Chicago, for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. More on Occupy the Dream.)
• Candlelight Vigil For Unity, January 15 (”Wherever You Are”)
• Occupy the Dream Federal Reserve Action, January 16 (13 U.S. Cities so far)
• Occupy Congress, January 17 (Transportation info)
• Occupy the Courts, January 20 (Federal courthouses across the country)
• International Day of Creative Action, February 12 (spawned in Australia, likely to spread)
• Occupy May Day, May 1 (General strike around the country/world. This one could be a biggie, ladies and gents)

If you’re a reporter and planning to cover any of these events, here’s an informative piece about your rights, from The Nation.

That’s it for this week, readers. Have we missed anything? Let us know below. And feel free to email news/events/links to me at FringetheMagazine@gmail.com.

Hey Occupiers: stay safe, stay warm. And stay.

This story, “Fresh Bread,” is the fifth I’ve published featuring Frankie Rossi, and it’s the third I’ve published in which his cousin, Jade Rossi, makes an appearance, though this is the first where they are together. In the stories apart from each other, they each smoke a lot of pot and cigarettes, get drunk, deal with the incessant bullshit of daily life, masturbate, fuck, lie, swear, sneak around, and attempt to float invisibly through rooms filled with smoke and anger and the bitterly disappointed. So of course I had to have them fuck each other in this story, blood relations and Jade’s pregnancy be damned. They’re just a couple of lonely kids, and I owed it to them to at least give them chance at pretending to be wanted, and fucking is the best pretense at love there is. What’s more real, words that may or may not mean a damn thing, or the idea that another human being is willing to share their genitals with you for a spell?

In the story, Frankie relates to the reader how his grandfather ripped the bread ovens out of the wall of their grocery store in an act of self-sacrifice. I doubt many of us would pull such a stunt. Before I picked up the axe I’d be calculating how much it would cost to repair the damn things, how much business would be lost, and I’d probably just say, Hey, what the fuck, you want to make bread while you’re dying of pneumonia, go right ahead.

Or was he really trying to prove his love by tearing those ovens out? It’s possible he was just an angry prick and didn’t like his wife defying him. Maybe he wanted to scare the shit out of her and let her know that she better obey him, or else this time it’s the ovens, next time it’s her head. How the hell can anyone know? I sure as hell don’t. There’s no way to measure love. Everyone lies to everyone else and you’re lying right now if you think you don’t. Words don’t mean a damn thing. Love can’t be measured; it can’t be quantified, so we might as well just trust fucking and pretend it’s something more.

I knew a girl one time who disagreed with my theory. This was many years ago and she wore her pubic hair long and unkempt, as was the fashion of the day. It sometimes took on an odor that wasn’t fully unpleasant in the winter months, but come July gave off sourness like milk gone bad. It was no big deal; we’re all nothing more than animals when push comes to shove, but still the taste was off-putting and so I made a suggestion.

Just take a little off the top, I said.

It isn’t like I ever wear a bathing suit, she said. You should love me how I am.

How you are is what’s inside of you, I said. The outside is just trappings. And your trappings can use a trim.

If you truly loved me, she said, you wouldn’t care.

Jesus, you know I have a gag reflex, I said. It’s kind of stinky.

She lay back and opened her legs. Get to it, she said.

You’re all bloody, I said. At least rinse a little first. And I hate tasting myself.

I’ve tasted you enough, she said.

Just use a fucking wash cloth, I said. Did you even take a shower today? How about you shower first?

You’d drink a glass of my menstrual blood if you really loved me, she said. Love knows no boundaries.

Excuse me? I said.

You would. You’d drink it if I asked you to.

Sure, I said. And then maybe I can take a shit in your mouth. I mean, that is if you love me.

They aren’t the same thing, she said. Shit is waste, my blood is a sign of me being a woman, it represents life.

So in other words there are some boundaries?

It wouldn’t even have to be a big glass, she said. Like maybe a juice glass.

Are you really asking?

Maybe even a shot glass, she said.

Four years later I was in the same bed, alone. At the time, I looked back and wished I had gone for the whole glass and not just settled for licking the metal taste off of my fingers. Maybe she’d have still been there and I wouldn’t be left with nothing but dirty sheets and an empty bank account, the ping ping ping sounds of the video arcade downstairs floating up through my open windows, the smell of traffic and fried chicken and cigarette smoke. The bitter tastes of loneliness and betrayal. But now, many years later, I realize I could have drank a bucket of her blood every morning for breakfast; I could have filled the tub with it and had myself a sticky bath; I could have gone out in public wearing it like a beard, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. She had simply grown tired of me and I didn’t really want to be with her anymore either. Her being gone was actually a great relief. It’s just that I wanted to fuck her some more. Not live with, not love; just stab my cock a few more times into that vast jungle that covered her opening. A few more times at the very least.

We can begin 2012 by looking at some of the battles the 99% have won. Don’t forget the smaller cities. Even serious movement watchers and participants sometimes make the mistake of overlooking Occupy groups in smaller cities, even as their wins stack up. Check out McAllen, Texas, a little (but fast-growing) town on the southern most tip of Texas just across the Rio Grande from Reynosa, Mexico.

We can look way back, as Michael Moore tells us the story of The First Occupy.

We can embrace the new year by looking to the future. Noam Chomsky says it’s time to advance to the next stage. While we’re at it, we could start speculating about the proposed May 1 celebration/demonstration/occupation.

We could look outward, to the Arab world, where the Occupiers Of Tahir Square say they support the American Occupy movement. Democracy Now has a special episode looking at the year of global uprisings. Did you know there was an Occupy Tokyo?

We can look in the mirror, at the best Occupy photos of 2011.

Or we can stay in the moment:

January 17 is the next big occupied date on the calendar. Organizers hope Occupy Congress will be the biggest gathering yet. The date is the day Congress returns for the new session.

Why Congress? From the Occupy Your Congress organizing site:

“All branches of the federal government are in need of radical reform, but Congress is especially broken. According to RealClearPolitics, a whopping 82.5% of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. Maybe our legislators are not bad people. Maybe they’re just stuck in a system that is no longer capable of working for the people. Let’s give them a chance to prove they have the courage to change that system. We need to get money out of politics, right now, and completely.”

Is there a media blackout on Occupy? Consider the January 17 event. I linked to the organizer’s Facebook page and an organizing site because there are practically no news stories about the event, despite the face it’s been organized in open view for weeks and there’s a very real possibility it could draw hundreds of thousands on the very day Congress reconvenes. Likewise, today, Occupy groups have called for a Day Of Action Against The NDAA. As this column went to press, I couldn’t find a significant news story about it, despite the intense controversy Obama’s signing of National Defense Authorization Act has created. The President’s signing has been a major news event because progressive Democrats have spoken out against the president. It doesn’t appear Occupy actions in protest will get any press unless today’s demonstrations are heavily attended or end up in violence and arrests. Street battles appear to be the only thing the news media wants to cover when it comes to Occupy.

Case in point: On New Year’s Eve, Occupiers in New York City retook Zuccotti. Anyone with their ear to the ground knew the re-occupation of Zuccotti was coming, but they didn’t get that from CNN. It got plenty of press after the fact because there were arrests and violence. Once again, the New York police showed how special they are.

Actress Ellen Barkin was swept up in the madness. She wasn’t there as a protestor, although she is a supporter of the Occupy movement. Police manhandled her as she tried to help another bystander who was trying to walk home. Barkin is hoppin’ mad.

The news may be of the opinion nothing of importance is happening. We know otherwise. Even during the holidays, there is plenty to report on.

The New Year’s Day Rose Parade: Occupied.

I love the Occupy Octopus, a 70-foot monster made out of recycled bags. It’s a witty and appropriate symbol for the movement. And speaking of media blackouts, what’s going on when a 70-foot Octopus and 5000 protestors crash the nation’s biggest parade and TV cameras manage to avoid them?

Occupiers from all over the country are flocking to Iowa for the first caucuses of the 2012 presidential campaign. In fact, they were there early. They’re everywhere. This will make the news.

Josh Stearns of the Free Press has been tracking journalist arrests at Occupy events. Storify, a a site that uses posts to social media to build stories, voted his the story of the year.

The expert who developed weapons-grade pepper-spray tells Democracy Now he was horrified to see police use the weapon on non-violent Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Occupiers are “building a Facebook for the 99%.”

The city didn’t want the campers, but Los Angeles does want the mural the campers created.

Finally, since we’re all walking around with video cameras and Americans are finally claiming their right to disruptive peaceful protest, I have a dream: A cable news spin-off channel that covers nothing but direct citizen actions.

When it happens, I could watch this spectacular act of civil disobedience at a foreclosure auction over and over.

That’s ambitious, and it wouldn’t be out of line to question if it can be done. Just how big is the movement today? Nobody has more of a finger on the pulse than Firedoglake, and they put the number of active encampments at 61 this week. This number is in constant flux and may not reflect some smaller groups.

But the strength of the movement is measured in the many fronts on which news is happening and things are getting done. That’s why you read Occupy Fringe. Let’s see where things are, and have a little fun. Day 100 of The Occupation was celebrated on Christmas day. Here’s what was happening this week in Occupied America:

“We Are The 99%” has been chosen as the year’s top quote by a guy who chooses the year’s top quote.

The 99% celebrated Christmas in public spaces all over the country. In Zuccotti Park, now fenced off and tightly guarded, at huge cost to the city, demonstrators came together for a holiday celebration of companionship, singing, food, dancing, and police harassment. For some reason the NYPD can’t even explain, the cops decided to outlaw holiday snacks and cookies. New Yorkers, your tax dollars, are protecting you against cookies being served in the streets.

Down the street, protestors had a very special Christmas message for the New York Stock Exchange. Oh my!

That’s not in the spirit, you say? Salon says Christmas was traditionally about rebellingagainst authority.

You know you wanted one of these Lego Occupy Wall Street sets for Christmas.

The Occupy effort to save foreclosed homes is at a crossroads, but isn’t everything Occupy does always at the edge of what’s legal and possible? That’s the nature of a movement that tries to go where no one else is going. Here’s a snapshot of where the Occupy Homes Movement is.

Going into the second 100 days, Occupy is also an Education Justice campaign.

Here’s another front we’re fighting – Food Justice.

Of course feeding people has been a preoccupation of Occupiers since the beginning, and they’ve given out countless free meals to protestors, those without homes or food, and anyone else who wanted something. So Vancouver had a brilliant idea.  All over America, cities are trying to turn people against the movement by publicizing the costs of policing. Vancouver has given out thousands of meals, along with medical care and sleeping accommodations for those the city would have had to serve, and in response to the city listing their (questionable) expenses, Occupy Vancouver is itemizing itemizing their services to the community and presenting the report to the public. I’d love to see Occupy groups all over the country fight back against this police cost propaganda by publicly establishing the dollar value of services they are providing the cities.

That, and 1st Amendment lawsuits. In many of those cities where arrests were made, cities are now having to defend themselves in court over free speech disputes. The cities will probably try to say these court cases are part of the cost too.  Anyone who was paying attention saw this coming.

Financial reform, elections, homes, education, and food are all good ideas and important spaces. How does the movement stay a movement as it begins to diversify?

Here’s an example of how you’re going to see Occupy’s big footprint in the coming year(s), especially this year, election year. The SEC has a ridiculous system of mediating abuses by banks. They negotiate settlements with transgressive banks, allowing them to pay a fine that is a fraction of the money they pocketed. The banks go back to their business, admitting no guilt. Imagine you were to steal $1000, then a court secretly allowed you to pay a $50 fine with nothing on your record. Imagine you knew that was all that would happen to you when you committed the crime a 2nd time. Our legal system would fall apart.

Now, questions are being raised, and Spencer Bachus is pushing to have the Financial Services Committee look into this practice. Bachus is the third biggest recipient of Wall Street money in Congress, a Wall Street lap poodle of the highest order, and he is leading the charge. Don’t be fooled. The minute Wall Street feels there is no pressure, their trained dog will back off.  Would this have even happened last year?

Expect more of these kinds of stories throughout the election year, but only if we keep the heat up. That’s why we Occupy.

Speaking of, this is a good example of how Republicans, the party most obviously in bed with Wall Street, can capture the high road and Congressional seats in November, 2012. The GOP is comfortable with anger. Democrats like to sit back and see which way the winds blow. The hurricane is already on us, and Democrats are in danger of letting Republicans claim this populist rage, leaving Obama and the Dems looking like they were the ones holding water for Wall Street. I’ve tried to let the President know my concerns, but I keep getting his answering service.

It may very well be we are seeing a huge shift in politics, away from right vs. left and toward people vs. corporatism. After generations as the obvious party of big business, all Republicans need is one year and one election to change history and position Democrats on the wrong side of it for decades if they position themselves as the party of the people in 2012. Democrats have so sold themselves out to Wall Street, they deserve the fall. But in the end it might not be their support of the 1% so much as their constant testing of the water that dooms them, as Republicans rush in, unafraid, and make a big show of pushing a few reforms.

Don’t believe me? In Iowa, an Occupy group is persuading Dem voters to give their vote to “Uncommitted” instead of to President Obama.

I’m sure the president reads this column and he’ll be calling me this week for advice.

I’ve been saving some of my favorite Occupy poster images as web graphics or printed a few of those considered in the public domain, so I know OWS has produced  a vast collection of beautifully designed material and important informational material.  I’d been wondering if anyone was archiving it. The New York Historical Society is working on it, and next month the Museum Of The City of New York has an exhibition planned. They’re not the only ones who know there is value in archiving this material.

If 86% of Americans think Wall Street has too much control over American life and politics, why are so many hesitating to back Occupy Wall Street. It’s a good question.

Seems like everyone has their own drone spy helicopter these days.

Occupiers came into the streets believing they can change the world. They also believed Radiohead was going to play a free concert just for them. It’s not that far of a reach. The band was on tour and they have been supportive of the movement.  Here’s how the prankster who fooled the 99% did it.

Finally, it’s always interesting to see how the other side views Occupy. But I don’t know what to make of this. The author seems to believe the band Pfish, who he compares to Chinese Communists and masturbation enthusiasts, in their series of shows in New York this week are secretly colluding with Occupy Wall Street to stage an orgy of “a dangerous mix of sexual indulgence, marijuana crime and anti-American lyrical messages pumped out to audiences at ear-splitting levels.”

I can’t really tell if this article is real or a figment of my imagination, but if it really is happening, I need tickets.

What inspired this story?

The Boston clergy sex abuse scandal. We all know that the most respected and trusted individual can be leading a double life, in the basement or on the internet. I just wondered what it might sound like inside the head of someone like that. Sade was the first to discover the literary effect of juxtaposing rationality and bestiality, and that’s what I was after.

Looking at it five years later, is there anything you’d change?

Yes, I think I’d make it a bit clearer how McGinty has made the discovery on his computer that leads to his having to be killed. You don’t want to insult the reader’s intelligence by explaining too much, but in worrying about that, you can sometimes leave too much out. I think I’d spend a little more time on the computer angle, make it clear how both men visit the same child porn site and so on. The story horrified me to the point that I wanted it to be over as fast as possible.

How does this fit into your scholarly work?

As a student of the novel, I’m interested in color and tone more than story. I like the way Kawabata deals in silence, for example, or the way Beckett and Thomas Bernhard create inner voice landscapes. They’re not interested in plot. Plots are where you bury the dead.

This debut novel reads like a collection of linked, creative nonfiction essays that are so visceral and real they make your palms sweat—at least for the first 2/3 of the book. Then a time jump in the last chapters leapfrogs the story forward in time and it loses its realistic tone and delves into serious melodrama that involves a much-hinted-at sexual awakening and a trip to the mental institution. Torres gives the reader just enough to feel as though they are sitting on the edge of something, on the verge of understanding—but then he pulls back.

Torres, a graduate of the acclaimed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has tight control over the language of his stories, and his descriptions are clear and apt, surprising and at the same time obvious. The economy of his prose is reminiscent of the minimalism found in Carver. These stories are lean on the surface, but they demand the reader work to parse out the relationships between brothers and mother and father. The mundane activities of family life take on meaning, like the chapter entitled “Big-Dick Truck,” in which the narrator’s father buys, well, a big-dick truck after the family car breaks down. The father returns from the dealership with a brand new, cobalt blue truck that is the envy of the neighborhood children. The mother on the other hand is not nearly as enthused—the truck doesn’t have seats belts for her and the three boys. She says to her husband, “How many fucking kids do you have? How many fucking kids, and a wife, and how much money do you make? How much do you earn sitting on your ass all day, to pay for this truck? This fucking truck that doesn’t even have enough seat belts to protect your family.” She then spits in the direction of the driveway. “This fucking big-dick truck.” In moments like these we really see the conflict between the parents, and also how they handle that conflict, which is to say they scream about it in the street in front of their three boys and the whole neighborhood. Of course the father says he’s going to take the truck back, but he never does.

There is an aggregate effect to moments like these in the story: the father does something, he buys this truck, he leaves presumably because he’s cheating on the mother, he loses his job as a security guard after only a few days and he almost drowns the mother and the narrator, and we’re left waiting for the consequences, for the weight of all these conflicts to rest on someone’s shoulders, but it never comes. The book leaps forward with little to no transition and drops us into a time when the narrator is breaking away from his family, and then he makes a break from himself and has to be institutionalized. The last chapter is full of murky, kaleidoscopic descriptions that just don’t jibe with the rest of the book. I finished reading it and legitimately wondered what had just happened.

I admire the stylish and graceful manner with which Torres successfully creates the mood and tempo of this book. At times his prose is powerful enough to sustain what feel like snapshots, rather than fully-fleshed-out characters. The fact that this is labeled a novel gave me different expectations than I would have had, had it been packaged as a collection of stories. Either way, something is lost in the ending of We the Animals that left me feeling a little empty, like I hadn’t been given what I was promised.