LRB · Walter Benn Michaels: What Matters

American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity and, as a response to the demand for equality, far from being left-wing politics, it is right-wing politics...

RED ZONE – Coming Soon! « Pig Squash Press



By official estimates, three hundred people live and sleep on the streets of Nanaimo, British Columbia. On any given day, a percentage of these people are barred from a 40-block area of the city core known as the “Red Zone.” Kim Goldberg has spent the last three years verse-mapping and photographing Nanaimo’s back alleys, graffiti galleries, underpasses and homeless encampments...

Gee Gerry G . . .

Keep it personal, I tend to think—so, lovely flashes of memories, of this dear person. Like time he was doing TV children's program, the loping monster spider they could hardly freak out at it was so benign. Viz., himself. I love the shy excitement of his voice, the particularity with which he catches to consonants. Likewise his eyes, of a faded flashing blue. He's got a great beard now, reddish, a kind of Anglo-Scots Santa Claus.

He's always been good to me, god knows. Times he was restless and couldn't sleep nights in early days Vancouver, he'd drop in and we'd drink and talk, round and around. He told me once that something like two generations of his family had had the same English teacher in grammar school—grounds for life in one place, surely. He's often a bird who seems to be sitting on the roof for awhile, just looking down with bemused regard for those below.

When he moves, language, body, mind and eye, I get a sense, even a whiff, of some post-gun-powdery smell. Which is so good, quick, to the nose. He's a very fast, sweet perceiver, the sweet Jesus of local streets. No cross ever finally necessary. Or, as he would say, "save the postage & come yourself!"

Well, standing here in the wings, so to speak, could put it, "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the greatest show on earth," which is , after all the distractions, human , and right here and now. You're going to love it, because it loves you. So—ticket's in your hand, eye's in your head, ear's in your body. Let's go.

Placitas, New Mexico
August 22, 1976

---

---

from The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley

Ed's Blog City: The Bombing of PanAm Flight 103 - Case Not Closed

"We are aware that in relation to certain aspects of the case there are a number of uncertainties and qualifications," the judges wrote. "We arealso aware that there is a danger that by selecting parts of the evidence which seem to fit together and ignoring parts which might not fit, it is possible to read into a mass of conflicting evidence a pattern or conclusion which is not really justified."

Local trees &c.