Alcalay, Watten, Silliman

As friend Ammiel Alcalay pointed out in an email, I was somewhat overhasty when posting addresses to interesting, meaning radical, information sites on Mid East politics, and included MEMRI, which as Ammiel points out, & I totally agree is “really a bad news outfit (zionist/neo-con) & i wouldn’t even trust their translations…”

***
An interesting analysis on the war in Lebanon by Barrett Watten just up on his site, here, called “Thinking of War at a Distance: Proxy Violence and Real Victims in Lebanon.”

***
Ron Silliman, back from cross-country holidays, has re-kickstarted his blog with a reaction piece concerning an article about Afghani poetry published recently in the Wall Street Journal and picked up by several other national papers (you can still read it for free here). Not a bad piece of journalism (the original article), even if one could ask oneself why a piece of that order appears at this time and in those places; it is indeed a bit on the snide side, to say the least.
Silliman, faced with the occasion of momentarily climbing out of the American Tree, unhappily can think of nothing better than to lasso the Afghani poets & schlepp them right back into his own limited US-centric understanding of how poetry functions in the world, i.e., “School of Quietude” vs. “US post-avant-garde.” As if that was the only possible model with wich to gauge oppositions and struggles between different poetry constituencies.
Even if there were something to the comparison, the last thing these different Afghani poets’ groupings need to have done to them is to be stripped of their own differences and reasons for differing among themselves so as to be assimilated to the local hamerikan versions of different poetic schools. The least interesting way to think about differing sets of realities is to blot out the differences by insisting on the resemblances, i.e. by making sameness the hinge on which our understanding should swing — a move that can only be limiting not to say reactionary, and in a post-colonial situation even dicier than that. What would have been more interesting to do would have been to analyse and compare the differences between the Afghani and US poetry movements. But rather than trying to look at the Afghani differences or use some insight their analysis may have provided, the perceived sameness is then used to simply reflect further on Anglo-American lit-sociology. Ron, who has spent a good part of his life seriously thinking about — and working in — left-wing politics, should know better. Though maybe it is simply the problem of the limit of what thought can accomplish in the context of the quick daily blog-post — but (no buts), this would then also be true of my response here — which would, should indeed need much more reflection, thinking & working through than I can give it here, now.