#steve wasserman

[vinyl-artwork]

Jimmy McGriff, Electric Funk, 1970.

Photo de Steve Wasserman.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

A message from Daniel Ellsberg: Dear friends and supporters, I have difficult news to impart. On February 17, without much warning, I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer on the basis of a CT scan and an MRI. (As is usual with pancreatic cancer--which has no early symptoms--it was found while looking for something else, relatively minor). I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone's case is individual; it might be more, or less. I have chosen not to do chemotherapy (which offers no promise) and I have assurance of great hospice care when needed. Please know: right now, I am not in any physical pain, and in fact, after my hip replacement surgery in late 2021, I feel better physically than I have in years! Moreover, my cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my quality of life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my former favorite foods! And my energy level is high. Since my diagnosis, I've done several interviews and webinars on Ukraine, nuclear weapons, and first amendment issues, and I have two more scheduled this week. As I just told my son Robert: he's long known (as my editor) that I work better under a deadline. It turns out that I live better under a deadline! I feel lucky and grateful that I've had a wonderful life far beyond the proverbial three-score years and ten. (I’ll be ninety-two on April 7th.) I feel the very same way about having a few months more to enjoy life with my wife and family, and in which to continue to pursue the urgent goal of working with others to avert nuclear war in Ukraine or Taiwan (or anywhere else). When I copied the Pentagon Papers in 1969, I had every reason to think I would be spending the rest of my life behind bars. It was a fate I would gladly have accepted if it meant hastening the end of the Vietnam War, unlikely as that seemed (and was). Yet in the end, that action—in ways I could not have foreseen, due to Nixon’s illegal responses—did have an impact on shortening the war. In addition, thanks to Nixon's crimes, I was spared the imprisonment I expected, and I was able to spend the last fifty years with Patricia and my family, and with you, my friends. What's more, I was able to devote those years to doing everything I could think of to alert the world to the perils of nuclear war and wrongful interventions: lobbying, lecturing, writing and joining with others in acts of protest and non-violent resistance. I wish I could report greater success for our efforts. As I write, "modernization" of nuclear weapons is ongoing in all nine states that possess them (the US most of all). Russia is making monstrous threats to initiate nuclear war to maintain its control over Crimea and the Donbas--like the dozens of equally illegitimate first-use threats that the US government has made in the past to maintain its military presence in South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, and (with the complicity of every member state then in NATO ) West Berlin. The current risk of nuclear war, over Ukraine, is as great as the world has ever seen. China and India are alone in declaring no-first-use policies. Leadership in the US, Russia, other nuclear weapons states, NATO and other US allies have yet to recognize that such threats of initiating nuclear war--let alone the plans, deployments and exercises meant to make them credible and more ready to be carried out--are and always have been immoral and insane: under any circumstances, for any reasons, by anyone or anywhere. It is long past time--but not too late!--for the world's publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders. I will continue, as long as I'm able, to help these efforts. There's tons more to say about Ukraine and nuclear policy, of course, and you'll be hearing from me as long as I'm here. As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts. For the last forty years we have known that nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean nuclear winter: more than a hundred million tons of smoke and soot from firestorms in cities set ablaze by either side, striking either first or second, would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and would envelope the globe within days. That pall would block up to 70% of sunlight for years, destroying all harvests worldwide and causing death by starvation for most of the humans and other vertebrates on earth. So far as I can find out, this scientific near-consensus has had virtually no effect on the Pentagon's nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or Russian) nuclear threats. (In a like case of disastrous willful denial by many officials, corporations and other Americans, scientists have known for over three decades that the catastrophic climate change now underway--mainly but not only from burning fossil fuels--is fully comparable to US-Russian nuclear war as another existential risk.) I'm happy to know that millions of people--including all those friends and comrades to whom I address this message!--have the wisdom, the dedication and the moral courage to carry on with these causes, and to work unceasingly for the survival of our planet and its creatures. I'm enormously grateful to have had the privilege of knowing and working with such people, past and present. That's among the most treasured aspects of my very privileged and very lucky life. I want to thank you all for the love and support you have given me in so many ways. Your dedication, courage, and determination to act have inspired and sustained my own efforts. My wish for you is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now. Love, Dan

[h/t and thank you Steve Wasserman]

[vinyl-artwork]

Jimmy McGriff ‎– Electric Funk (1970) Cover Photography by Steve Wasserman

[chenchenwrites]

people could look at the scale of our hyperbole for the first time & understand the way we love. we literally made a skeleton of hyperbole, to teach you to dream again. 

—from Keegan Lester’s “to the tin band that read: keegan matthew lester” 

I had a great time talking with Steve Wasserman on his podcast Poetry Pharmacy. We read and discussed poems by Keegan Lester and jayy dodd. I also read one of my own poems, and Steve had some lovely and brilliant things to say about it. Each of these poems is, in its own way, a statement or an interrogation of poetics, a digging into why each poet makes these offerings of language, of history, of dream. Listen to the full episode. 

every poem is a death & each stanza: an economy

built on an ocean floor covered in bones,

like my mouth.  

—from jayy dodd’s “ars poetica” 

[chenchenwrites]

What a beautiful episode of the Poetry Pharmacy podcast! Wonderful to hear poet friend Mary Jean Chan (pictured here) sharing Adrienne Rich’s powerfully tender “Dedications” and explaining why this particular poem has meant so much to her over the years. Great to hear Chan’s own poem “Self-Portrait,” as well. Beautiful work. 

And big thanks to host Steve Wasserman for sharing and discussing my poem “Winter” (around the 15 min mark). Be sure to check out the whole episode. 

And in case you missed it, Chan and I recently read together for Transatlantic Poetry. It was a blast. (Hope our paths cross in person soon!) 

I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs toward a new kind of love your life has never allowed.

from “Dedications” by Adrienne Rich 

[brianjohnspencer]

We as a species, are the storytelling animals.

Steve Wasserman, literary executor for Christopher Hitchens (here: http://www.adweek.com/galleycat/steve-wasserman-on-the-qualities-of-a-good-literary-agent/12647)

[durgapolashi]

“Sontag’s greatest project was her devotion to demolishing, as she put it, “the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment. […] Thinking is a form of feeling; […] feeling is a form of thinking.

”This quest can be seen in all her essays and, especially, in her fiction. Her writing, observed the late Elizabeth Hardwick, her admiring friend and perspicacious literary critic, “has a profound authority, a rather anxious and tender authority — the reward of passion. […] The tone of her writing is speculative, studious and yet undogmatic; even in the end it is still inquiring.”

Others were less impressed, accusing Sontag of “a tendency to sprinkle complication into her writing” and of tossing off “high-sounding paradoxes without thinking through what, if anything, they mean.” Greil Marcus found her “a cold writer” whose style was “an uneasy combination of academic and hip, […] pedantic, effete, unfriendly.” Her fiction, despite her last novel, In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award, was mostly dismissed by reviewers, largely because the only character whose sensibility Sontag seemed genuinely interested in exploring was her own. Her critics weren’t entirely wrong, but neither were they entirely right.”

“Sontag’s style is her subject. For it is the way she thinks, how she goes about it, how she offers her readers the chance, as it were, to eavesdrop on a mind thinking as hard and as nimbly as it can that is most compelling about her work. Or, to put it another way, it is not so much her opinions that matter — though of course they do — but rather how she goes about arriving at them, how she renders them, the very warp and woof of her sentences. Wayne Koestenbaum, in his appreciation written soon after her death, understood this well, observing that she “is usually cited for her content rather than her form or style, and yet her paragraphs and sentences bear close and admiring scrutiny as exemplars of […] prose forms that would permit maximum drift and detour.” He marveled at what he called “her prose’s Mercurochrome aesthetic, her stern, self-conscious, tense sentences.” He saw that “her essays behave like fictions (disguised, arch, upholstered with attitudes), while her fictions behave like essays (pontificating, pedagogic, discursive).” Koestenbaum writes that “the ends of her novels are the best parts.” Often the same is true of her essays.”

Susan Sontag: Critic and Crusader by Steve Wasserman