A Timely Exhibit of Burmese Artists

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April 16 2018 Update: It’s been more than six years since I attended this exhibit of Burmese artists in exile, held on the cusp of pivotal changes in the Asian country. It is distressing to know that despite much positive change, recent months have seen human rights abuses directed against the Rohingya people. There was no sign of this on the horizon when I wrote up the exhibit in 2012. It’s a pity that when positive change takes place—like the Arab Spring of last decade, and the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s—it is often followed by a decline in freedoms, as rivalries are loosed and opportunistic politicians angle for ways to help themselves gain or maintain power.
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I was excited then when I entered Gallery 35 last Saturday night, and detected a buzz of activity in the large, lighted space. I was first aware of the crowd–New Yorkers you might see at any art openings plus the Burmese artists, their friends and family. The work was striking, with much of it overtly on message about the years of military repression they’ve endured, but also full of brilliant color, vibrant shapes and strong composition. There was painting, fiber, sculpture and photography on display. I had a conversation with female painter and performance artist Chaw Ei Thein. She and others I spoke with are pleased, but wary about the regime’s new policy of relaxation. They hope it continues, but none of them is ready to believe in it wholeheartedly. Chaw Ei Thein placed this statement on her website in September 2011, prior to the current relaxation of repression:

Many of my friends are in prison, far away and inaccessible. There are over 2000 political prisoners in Burma. Some have been sentenced to 56 years of imprisonment, some 65, some 102. All are committed to their fight for freedom and justice in Burma, and for our people. I am lucky because I am not in prison like them. But I always think of them: how they spend their time in the prison, and how they have sacrificed. I cannot help them to be free. So I am doing this performance as a tribute to them and what they have done for us. In this performance, I explore the “poun-zan”: a form of torture common in Burmese prisons, in which prisoners must hold a physically excruciating and psychologically humiliating position for a long period of time.  My performance is their real performance in those prisons.

I photographed her two-fingered peace sign painting in the Gallery 35 exhibit. If you’re in New York I urge you to check the gallery’s hours and go see the powerful and beautiful work in this timely exhibit. It is up until February 25, and there will even be a closing reception on that Saturday next month. Meantime, here are pictures I took at the opening last week. // more . . .

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Russell Hoban, Just a Great Writer

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Update: Turtle Diary has now been reissued. See my new post about it, published July 12, 2013.
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When longtime novelist and children’s book author Russell Hoban died last month, it was reported widely, deserving for an author who’d written the perennially popular children’s book series featuring the badger Frances (Bedtime for Frances, etc.) and the daring novel Riddley Walker (1980), set in a post-nuclear world. With an ingeniously minted alternative language, the protagonist is an appealing dystopian hero, unlike the menacing Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange. I read the obituaries memorializing the 86-year old Hoban, and today was delighted to find another really good piece on him was just published by Irish novelist Kevin Holohan.

The book of Hoban’s that I loved most was Turtle Diary, a 1978 novel about two lonesome adults, strangers to one another at the start of the book, who happen to meet and befriend one another in front of the sea turtle tanks at the London Aquarium. Hesitant to converse at first, they quickly realize they’re each pondering and worrying over the fate of these large reptiles in their too-small tanks that mirror the limits surrounding their own lives. Soon, they hatch a conspiracy to spring two of the great, heavy aged beasts from their confinement, and with the help of an agreeable aquarium guard, set them free in the sea. In my bookstore, Undercover Books, we sold stacks of the Avon mass market paperback edition. In 1985 the novel was made into a memorable film with Harold Pinter adapting Hoban’s novel, Ben Kingsley and Glenda Jackson playing the unlikely couple, and Michael Gambon the guard who facilitates their plan, and their relationship. We sold many copies of Hoban’s books at Undercover Books; I recall that Riddley Walker was prominently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Benjamin Demott and again in the daily Times by John Leonard, who wrote, “His patter is an extraordinary compound of Middle English and Black American, an unpunctuated slanguage that achieves -despite some internal contradictions -the poetic. After 30 pages, we stop reading and start listening. The ear becomes our organ.”

When I was with Carroll & Graf Publishers, a literary agent offered us rights to the next Hoban novel, Amaryillis Night and Day, then being published in Britain. I made a modest bid for U.S. rights, but the author evidently thought it too modest and it ended up being published here by another house. It would have been a personal high point to publish a book with Mr. Hoban, but it was still a treat to read him in manuscript.

If you’ve never read one of Russell Hoban’s fine books, I urge you to remember him and the next time you’re browsing, especially in a second-hand bookstore, keep an eye out for his name on the spine of a copy of Riddley Walker, or even better, Turtle Diary. Don’t hesitate to take a copy home. He was just a great writer. And if you see a copy of the old video of the film “Turtle Diary,” grab that too, because Netflix doesn’t have it.

March 5, 2012, Happy News Update: The book imprint from the New York Review of Books, NYRB Classics, is reissuing Turtle Diary, so soon there will be no need to to find it secondhand.

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#Fridayreads/Jan. 20

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#fridayreads Finished THEM: Adventures w/Extremists by @jonronson–wow, weird characters, affable narrator. Started EX LIBRIS, Ross King’s novel told by 1600s London bookseller. Vivid portrait of the city and the book trade, w/mystery hovering.

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The Anvil Drops On Mitt

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According to Greg Sargent’s Plum Line, ABC  News’s Brian Ross has the goods on Mitt Romney’s offshore holdings–it has seemed for weeks to many observers including me in posts here and here–that his willingness to get pounded over the refusal to release his tax returns might be explained by the presence of parts of his personal fortune nested in foreign entities, money beyond the reach of taxation, which prevents the American treasury from getting a fair share of money earned here. Turns out, we were all right all along. From ABC, via Sargent:

“Romney has used a variety of techniques to help minimize the taxes on his estimated $250 million fortune. In addition to paying the lower tax rate on his investment income, Romney has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 funds listed on a Cayman Islands registry. Another investment, which Romney reports as being worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as having been domiciled in the Caymans. Official documents reviewed by ABC News show that Bain Capital, the private equity partnership Romney once ran, has set up some 138 secretive offshore funds in the Caymans.” // more . . .

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Kodansha Returning to U.S. Publishing Scene

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Excited to see a brief item explaining that Kodansha, the Japanese publishing house I worked for from 1992-97, is planning their return to the U.S. scene. In 1996, as part of the Kodansha Globe series we published the first paperback edition of then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama’s debut book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

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Three Years Ago Today

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On January 14, 2009, I was laid off as the editorial director of Sterling Publishing’s Union Square Press, an imprint of narrative nonfiction books I had been recruited to run two years earlier. I recall the anxiety I felt upon being summoned to the office of the HR director; the sick-making sensation that shot through my gut upon receiving the news; that my email was shut off by the time I returned to my office; and the way I was instructed to leave Sterling’s office for the final time, informed that whatever personal effects I couldn’t grab then would be shipped to my home. If you’ve never had this happen to you, I must say it is not something you can prepare yourself for. Even though I was not surprised to get laid off in the middle of the worst financial crisis in eighty years, it nonetheless registered as a deep shock. Later that dark week, I sent an email to all my contacts, headed “Moving on From Sterling,” for that’s what I had already begun to do. In the weeks that followed, I incorporated a business in the state of New York, Philip Turner Book Productions LLC, and began cultivating clients for what would be my new editorial services business. // more. . .

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Mitt’s Biggest Pander Yet

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I’ve noticed of course that Mitt Romney will do virtually anything to get a vote, but I didn’t quite understand how far he’s willing to push the envelope until I saw this picture. Evidently, he donned a green yarmulke, or skullcap, at this recent event with voters. These exercised citizens don’t look like they’re part of an orthodox Jewish congregation, so it may have been a very pious, ecumenical crowd. Of course, popes also wears yarmulkes, so he may have also been trying to ramp up his appeal to Catholic voters. Note the rakish tilt at which Mitt’s wearing his yarmulke, conveying a pious image coupled with an insouciant flair.

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A Modest Proposal to Media: Please Replace “Said” with “Claimed”

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“Should the Times be a Truth Vigilante?” is the title of an online column today by New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane. It’s raising a lot of dust, and well it should. Is there something lawless about printing the truth? Are reporters some sort of lynch mob? Brisbane chose a terrible word for his headline. What’s more, news consumers have been expressing their frustation for years about politicians and public figures uttering lie after lie and getting away with it, while news organization stand by abetting the outrage by uncritically repeating these statements. By now, readers might well appreciate a reader going rogue and unleashing a fury of anger on an obfuscating source. To cut Brisbane some slack, I think he’s asks readers if Times reporters and editors should be calling out the falsehoods uttered by public figures–calling a lie a lie line by line–or continue simply reporting the statements of those figures, surround those statements with deep and solid reporting, allow readers to judge the veracity of those remarks, and leave the up-front opining on such statements to features clearly marked “News Analysis” and to writers and columnists on the Editorial and Op-Ed pages. While I’ve also long been frustrated with news reporting’s refusal to call a lie a lie (i.e. the Swift Boating of John Kerry), I think before we make reporters into referees of truth–which could make reading a news story as boring as watching a football game when a disputed touchdown has been sent up to the replay booth for labored review–there is a very simple way to ameliorate much of the problem. I recommend that news organizations institue the following policy.

Reporters and editors at newspapers and all news orgs should routinely replace the word “said,” as in “Mitt Romney SAID President Obama apologized for America”–which is the false statement at issue in the public editor’s column–to”Mitt Romney CLAIMED President Obama apologized for America.” This would signal clearly to readers that Romney’s statement was an assertion of opinion, not a statement of objective or established fact.

I’ve been doing this for years as I read news article and I urge you to do it for yourself. Try it the next time you read or hear a news story that does little more than give a platform to a typically tendentious statement by say, a press flack blowing smoke about a defective consumer product, duly repeated in a news story. Like this,

“Spokesman Joe Flaherty said that Prostate & Grumble uses only the finest materials in assembling their baby cribs. Flaherty also said the company had received no other complaints about their cribs collapsing in a heap.” Now, try this:  “Spokesman Joe Flaherty claimed that Prostate & Grumble uses only the finest materials in assembling their baby cribs. Flaherty also claimed the company had received no other complaints about their cribs collapsing in a heap.” It takes the unearned authority away from the statement, rendering it less powerful, not so magisterial.

A final point regarding Mr. Brisbane’s column. Why did the Times close comments online so quickly? Yes, there was lots of pushback, but so what. Guess they can’t handle the truth.

Please try it and let me know what you think. If you like it as much as I do, please recommend it to your favorite news organization.

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