Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@

By Joel Bleifuss | 1.27.03
In These Times

[Kurt Vonnegut 1922 - 2007]


In November, Kurt Vonnegut turned 80. He published his first novel, Player Piano, in 1952 at the age of 29. Since then he has written 13 others, including Slaughterhouse Five, which stands as one of the pre-eminent anti-war novels of the 20th century.

As war against Iraq looms, I asked Vonnegut, a reader and supporter of this magazine, to weigh in. Vonnegut is an American socialist in the tradition of Eugene Victor Debs, a fellow Hoosier whom he likes to quote: “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

—Joel Bleifuss

You have lived through World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Reagan wars, Desert Storm, the Balkan wars and now this coming war in Iraq. What has changed, and what has remained the same?

One thing which has not changed is that none of us, no matter what continent or island or ice cap, asked to be born in the first place, and that even somebody as old as I am, which is 80, only just got here...

"My Name is Rachel Corrie"

A Debate Over Why the Play is Not Opening in New York
Democracy Now - March 22nd, 2006

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"My Name is Rachel Corrie" - a play based on the words of the American peace activist crushed to death three years ago by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza - is causing controversy after the New York City theater that was scheduled to run it postponed production. We host a discussion with Katharine Viner, the editor of the play in London and James Nicola and Lynn Moffat, the two top directors of the New York Theatre Workshop. [includes rush transcript] We turn now to the controversy over the play "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which is based on the words of the late U.S. peace activist.

Three years ago this month Corrie died at the age of 23 after she was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer. At the time Corrie was attempting to block the demolition of the home of a Palestinian doctor in the Gaza town of Rafah.

The play opened last year in London to rave reviews and sold out audiences. It was scheduled to come to New York and open tonight at the celebrated off-Broadway New York Theatre Workshop.

But there will be no opening night.

In late February, the theater announced it was indefinitely postponing production of the play due to the current political climate.

The theater's artistic director James Nicola told the Guardian of London: "In our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities in New York, what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon's illness and the election of Hamas, we had a very edgy situation." Nicola went on to say, "We found that our plan to present a work of art would be seen as us taking a stand in a political conflict, that we didn't want to take."

But the theater has been accused of political censorship. The co-creator of the play, Alan Rickman responded by saying, "This is censorship born out of fear" and that the theater had effectively canceled the play.

Today, in a broadcast exclusive, we host a discussion between one of the creators of "My Name is Rachel Corrie" and the New York theater group that postponed the production of the play.

In London we are joined by Katharine Viner, the co-editor and co-producer of "My Name is Rachel Corrie." She is an editor at the Guardian newspaper in London. Here in our New York studio we are joined by James Nicola, the artistic director at the New York Theatre Workshop as well as the theater's managing director Lynn Moffat.

* Katharine Viner, the co-editor and co-producer of "My Name is Rachel Corrie." She is an editor at the Guardian newspaper in London.
- Read Viner's article: "A Message Crushed Again"
* James Nicola, artistic director at the New York Theatre Workshop.
* Lynn Moffat, managing director of the New York Theatre Workshop.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

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AMY GOODMAN: Today, in a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we host a discussion between one of the creators of the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie and the New York theater group that postponed the production of the play. In London, we're joined by Katharine Viner. She’s the co-editor and co-producer of My Name is Rachel Corrie. She's editor at the Guardian newspaper in London. Here in our New York studio, we’re joined by James Nicola. He is the artistic director at the New York Theatre Workshop, as well as the theater's managing director, Lynn Moffat. And we welcome you all to Democracy Now!...

Manhood and its Poetic Projects:

The construction of masculinity
in the counter-cultural poetry of the U.S. 1950s

Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Jacket number 31 : October 2006

[An early version of this paper was given in 1996 at the National Poetry Foundation conference on the 1950s held in Orono, Maine (USA). It was subsequently delivered at a conference in Athens (2002), at the University of Arizona (2003) and at the University of Florida, Gainesville (2004). A version treating Ginsberg and Olson only was published as ‘Manhood and its Poetic Projects.’ In The Periphery Viewing the World, ed. Christina Dokou, Efterpi Mitsi, Bessie Mitsikopoulou. Selected Papers from the 4th International Conference of the Hellenic Association for the Study of English. Athens: Parousia Publications 60, 2004: 159-181.This piece is 18,000 words or about 36 printed pages long.]

The works of Beat and “New American” poets of the 1950s were overtly counter-cultural and counter-canonical.[1] They were made on the periphery of American culture by people in chosen and flaunted marginality to the center at the moment of the fixing of the Cold War, the fixing of United States post-War hegemony, and the construction of influential intellectual and cultural analyses justifying these global politics. The most dramatic instance of cultural marginality was Charles Olson’s; he gave up two relatively centrist career paths (in the Democratic Party and in the university), to propose an alternative United States-ness and an energetic geo-cultural vision.[2] Olson emphatically did not accept “the Americanization of the world, now, 1950; soda pop & arms for France to fight, not in Europe, but in Indo China, the lie of it,” a prescient statement about the global penetration of U.S. products, globalization, and the forthcoming War in Vietnam (Olson Origin, 9). Allen Ginsberg, who brought the Popular Front politics of the 1930s forward into the 50s, is well-known for his visceral, principled identification with the deviant Others — people in minority cultures, internal exiles for political reasons (communists, anarchists, anti-Bomb radicals), exiles for psychological reasons (the dissident/ odd, psychotic, crazy, or driven mad), as well as the sexual exiles and outcasts (mainly male homosexuals, also the sexually promiscuous, and others who do not enter the family economy). Robert Creeley, rather uninterested in these overt realms of socio-politics, nonetheless engages many of the normative gender tokens of the 1950s — home, family, breadwinner, wife, and husband, exploring the fissures and ironies within their putative seamlessness. All three poets, variously, investigated United States culture; they resisted “mere aestheticism” of the arts, wanting to integrate social critique and energies with artistic expression “as the wedge of the WHOLE FRONT” (Olson, Origin 95; 11). Their poetry and poetics were proudly peripheral, stylistically non-conforming, and intellectually outspoken.

These poets’ ideological, cultural, and political critique of the “American century” also implicated gender.[3] Their writing is notable for its various but considerable opinions on manhood. Thus not only being male (a fact), these poets often championed strong-minded, pushy, outspoken, feisty, shrill, self-consciously posing and even hysterical masculinities (as ideology) — in contradistinction to the more buttoned-down, centrist manhoods normalized in the 1950s. They constructed a dissident and analytic subjectivity on the periphery of their culture, including critiques of masculinity, yet simultaneously they claimed the powers and privileges of normative manhood.

It has been often noted that it is difficult to talk about gender without tumbling into binaries, especially when the people you’re talking about deployed them, sometimes assiduously. Maleness is hardly one totalized thing. Ideologies of manhood and of masculinity are not single. All of the manifestations of gender are historically variable, affirmed, selected from, reaffirmed, and deployed even if these manifestations sometimes proceed under the rubrics of “nature” or “the natural.” Further, one’s sense of the meanings and practices of a gendered self may change over a lifetime and inside a poetic career...