Breaking Radio Silence

Winter has arrived with steady wet snow. I’ve filled the bird feeders and put away (most of) the summer equipment in the shed, binging out the snow shovels. The fall semester is winding down & with the exception of a heap o’ grading over the next two weeks, I’m pretty much in sabbatical mode. I [...]

Vietnamese

Powering up the Vietnamese software to refresh my (very modest) language skills. It now looks as if I’ll be going to VN in the spring to research & collect material for an anthology of contemporary Vietnamese poetry. I will have the able assistence, thankfully, of my friends Ly Lan & Hoang Hung. What I envision [...]

Clients Can Be Sooo Inconvenient

Anyone who lived through the Vietnam war era in the US will feel a startling sense that history is cycling back over familiar ground when reading this NY Times piece about timetables for the withdrawal of American forces. The laughably transparent but straight-faced explanations of al-Malaki’s clear meaning reprise the greatest hits of [...]

Adrienne Rich & Graphs of Experience

In her later work, Adrienne Rich has developed a poetic technique that presents the reader with a graph of experience. By experience, I mean the moment by moment tracings of conscious perception. There must of course be a a process of editing during composition, but the poem presents itself as a graph — the poet [...]

Philip Jones Griffiths Dies

I found Griffiths’s work only after I’d been to Vietnam in the mid-1990s. Once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it. A weirdly loving portrayal of the effects of savagery. I think the greatest art, regardless of the horror it portrays, is motivated by love.

My Lai: Forty Years Later

My friend Ly Lan, whose own village was destroyed by the US military when she was a child, sends this audio from the BBC as a remembrance.

(Poetic) Cultural Capital

So Paul Hoover sails off to Vietnam for two weeks, meets with a few writers, makes connections, comes home & publishes an anthology, Black Dog, Black Night, of 20th century Vietnamese poetry. I shopped around a similar book in 2001 when I returned from a year in Vietnam — my fifth trip to the country [...]

Burma

I’ve been thinking about Thich Quang Duc in Saigon in 1963 when Diem’s thugs attacked the monasteries & about the ongoing situation in Burma. James Wimberly catches the moral & political issues clearly in this post at the RBC. I’d go further than Wimberly in my defense of the Vietnamese revolution, but that’s not really [...]

New Species Found In Vietnam

When I was living in Vietnam in 2000-2001 I remember reading reports about several new species, including a kind of antelope, I think. Now eleven more species have been found in central VN. There is something rich & eden-like about Vietnam: rivers & mountains & everything in between.

Military Justice . . .

. . . is to justice as military music is to music. Though many people have claimed their non-existence, I have seen the shadows of Vietnam flicker through the Iraq war from the start. Now we see the moral darkness of My Lai replayed at Haditha & in its aftermath.

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