Bless Me Now With Your Fierce Tears VIII

Hold everything. DFW wasn't born in the summer of '62. He was born on February 21st. That makes him a Pisces?  Now I'm screwed.  And I can't tie knots properly anyway. 

Forget it. 

As you were.

Eschew irony.  Watch Blackadder.

Oh, there is.  I checked.  And lots and lots of four-leggers, too.  And my sister and my cousin and a bunch of other folks.

And let's not forget Danny Fisher, either:

http://nsrasite.thenetguy.com/node/28

He was a great friend. I talked to him a week before the accident and he advised me to get out of the hospital because "it's more fun out here."

Howard Zinn, 87, author of A People's History of the United States, "a favourite of Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck. From a first printing of 5,000 in 1980, it came to be a textbook for high schols and colleges throughout the U.S. "At a time when few politicians dared even call them selves liberal, A People's History told an openly leftwing story. Prof. Zinn charged Christopher Columbes and other explorers with genocide, picked apart American presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and celebrated workers, feminists and war resisters," writes APs Hillel Italie, in today's Globe.  

A major loss of an independent voice.

===

A Memory of Howard Zinn

Daniel Ellsberg, January 27, 2010

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2010/01/27/a-memory-of-howard-zinn/

"Act, Zachary Martin Glass, when and where you want to, since you feel you must, but do it with all your might." --Franny and Zooey (1961)

I feel like a bit of my adolescence has been stolen from me. Damaged. RIP, J.D. I'll miss you.

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around -- nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

from Chapter 22, The Catcher in the Rye.

Karen Schmeer, age 39, killed by getaway car in NYC

She was the award-winning editor of The Fog of War and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control.

Former Tory MP Heward Grafftey:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/heward-grafftey-bad-boy-of-...

Doug Fieger, age 57

He composed and sang My Sharona, which, whatever you thought of it, was virally popular. There's a video of it at the link.

And Dale Hawkins, age 73

Author and singer of Susie Q.

I recall that "My Sharona" was a big radio hit in August, 1979, right around the time of John Diefenbaker's funeral.

He's very much alive (sorry about the source):

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theampersand/archive/2010/02/18...

Someone started the rumour as some kind of a joke, apparently, and someone emailed it to me.

I'm glad Lightfoot is alive, I've been a fan since his first album.

Although you could call people up and say "rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated" and that would be all sorts of cool.

Weird I swear I heard he was driving. Maybe I heard wrong or maybe  the story still isn't straight.  :D

Self promoting careerist and failed presidential wannabe  Alexander Haig dead at 85.  Nation asks self...uh... Haig, didn't he used to be sombody?  Ah well, he did look good in a uniform, didn't he?

Really, I didn't know that.

(self-delete.  Decided not to go there.)

Y'know, you never SAW Haig and Skeletor in the SAME photograph...hmmm....

It was.  It was also incredibly constitutionally inaccurate(as the Vice President would immediately have been "in charge" the moment Reagan went under the anesthetic.)

Moreover, Haig looked like a twitching, shivering nervous wreck when he made the statement, thus being as far from "reassuring" as he could possibly have been.

Incredibly, in the 1988 campaign, Haig actually tried to run for president.

Doris "Granny D" Haddock, U.S. democracy and campaign finance reform activist, dies at age 100

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8559169.stm

Canadian actor Corey Haim

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/actor-corey-haim-dies-at-38/art...

What's your fucking point in summing up this great man's life as "called Jews a disease" N. Beltov? Pure racist crap on your part! My thoughts and prayers go to the Ahenakew family for the loss of a great man. A man who served his nation well. His military history is but briefly mentioned, but that is what made him for what he turned out to be. He was a stern man, no messing around. What the media tends to neglect is mentioning the fact that Elder Ahenakew served in Germany for several years. Living amongst citizens still stinging from WWII did not bode well for Ahenakew's future after the military, because he probably heard a lot of negative attitudes towards Jews, while living in Germany. Most unfortunately, years later what he may have heard and repeated, came back to haunt him by what transpired in the media and the courts...his lawyers did not even argue this point....he was eventually, aquitted, now what? He is no longer amongst us, so will you let Elder Ahenakew Rest In Peace?

No Beltov,  Who the fuck cares if they're the first lines in a racist news story, you took the words and printed them as your own. And the idea that Ahenakew could be racist is outrageous. He's FN, so it's impossible for him to be racist towards a very very priviledged segment of society. That's Racism 101. Deal with it.

Racism and anti-semitism are close, overlap, and are also different. Ahenakew was on record saying anti-semitic remarks.

Thanks Sineed for that insight, which could very well have been what was going on for him at that time.

It's certainly possible for members of racially marginalized groups to internalize racist and anti-semitic lies about other marginalized groups. While doing so is not racist in the definition of what racism is, it's not good and should be unlearned.

And no those words should not have been the adjectives describing his life for his obituary. Such language demeans his real accomplishments. E.Tamaran, N.Beltov was quoting the article, with quotes around it, word for word, and was not saying those words as his own. I understand that reproducing something without a critique seems to be condoning it, but it's not the same. That said, anytime anyone reproduces text that is offensive and demeaning, it is extremely painful for those of us who suffer those oppressions. I'm not sure what can be done about it.

If everyone can take a breath and dial it back a bit that would be great. This is a sad moment in time for the family of David Ahenakew.

Spirit Elder Ahenakew, thank you.

All the best to his family and close friends.

Dan Achen: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2010/03/17/achen-obit.html

Hari Sharma, long-time social justice activist in the south-asian community in Vancouver, died this past Tuesday, March 16th. His obituary has been making the rounds on the left e-mail lists in Vancouver.

HARI SHARMA

1934-2010

It is with deepest sorrow that we announce the death of our friend and comrade, Hari Prakash Sharma, on March 16 following a prolonged battle with cancer. Hari took his last breath in his home of 42 years at Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver), British Columbia, surrounded by his comrades Harinder Mahil, Raj Chouhan, and Chin Banerjee. All of them had come together in 1976 to form the Vancouver Chapter of the Indian People's Association in North America (IPANA), which had been founded by Hari and many others at a meeting in Montreal in 1975.

Hari was born on November 9, 1934 at Dadri in Uttar Pradesh though his family came from Haryana. His father was a railway employee, so he moved from one place to another wherever his father was posted. Hari received his BA from Agra University and his Master's in Social Work from Delhi University. The insight into the social life of India Hari got from his travels by train enabled by his father's employment in the railways and his extensive travels by foot through the villages of India stimulated Hari to start writing short stories in Hindi. Hari is regarded as one of the finest writers of short stories in Hindi and many people had urged him to resume his writing in Hindi. One of his stories was adapted as a play and staged in New Delhi.

Hari moved to the US in 1963 for further education and did his Master in Social Work from the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, in 1964 and Ph.D. in sociology from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 1968. He taught briefly at UCLA before accepting a position at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia in 1968, where he stayed till his retirement in 1999. He was honored by the University as Professor Emeritus.

Hari, like many enlightened academics of the 1960's plunged in the anti-Vietnam war movement in the US and Canada. This is also the period when he espoused Marxism, which ideology he held dearly and steadfastly until his death.

As a member of the Faculty of Simon Fraser University he became a champion of the academic rights of colleagues who were faced with the threat of dismissal for their support of the student-led movement for democratizing the university. He became an associate and friend of another Marxist Kathleen Gough, who was suspended for her political activities. Kathleen Gough and Hari P. Sharma co-edited the 469-page book, Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia, which was published in 1973 by the Monthly Review Press, New York. The book was sought by political activists of that time and many people know of Hari as an eminent leftist scholar because of that book.

The 1960's were a period of international revolutionary upheaval. The Naxalbari peasant uprising happened in the spring of 1967. Hari was greatly inspired by it. He went to India and visited Naxalbari area. It is then he got committed to the path opened by Naxalbari and retained his faith in its ultimate success until his last days, while many of his comrades had simply written off Naxalbari as a thing of the past. Hari developed contact with peasant revolutionaries and maintained a living contact till his last days.

While associating with the Naxalbari movement in India, Hari carried on anti-imperialist work in Vancouver through the weekly paper, Georgia Straight, published by the Georgia Straight Collective, of which he was a founding member. In 1973 Hari went to the Amnesty International in London and the Commission of Jurists in Geneva and sent a written representation to the UN Human Rights Commission to publicize the condition of more than thirty-thousand political prisoners in Indian jails.

In 1974 he and his comrade Gautam Appa of the London School of Economics organized a petition of international scholars to protest the treatment of political prisoners in India, which he handed to the Indian Consulate in Vancouver, BC on August 15 of the same year.

In 1975 Hari enthusiastically accepted an invitation from his friends in Montreal. He along with many others founded the Indian People's Association in North America (IPANA) on June 25, 1975, exactly on the same day on which Indira Gandhi declared the State of Emergency in India. Hari's tireless work against dictatorship in India and in defense of political prisoners and oppressed peoples, and his energetic organization of progressive people across North America in the struggle against Imperialism and for social justice, led to the revocation of his passport by the Indira Gandhi government in 1976.

Having engaged in various anti-racist struggles in the 1970s, IPANA in Vancouver, under Hari's leadership became a primary force in the formation of the British Columbia Organization to Fight Racism (BCOFR: 1980), which proved to be an extremely effective instrument against the tide of racism in the province at the time. Hari and IPANA also played a leading role in the formation of the Canadian Farmworkers' Union (CFU: 1980), which for the first time took up the cause of farm workers who had been historically excluded from protection under the labour laws and any protective regulation.

From the 1980s Hari's work also began to focus on the condition of minorities in India, which came to a crisis with the attack on the Golden Temple and the massacre of Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Hari stood firm in his defense of the human rights of Sikhs and, increasingly of Muslims who became the primary targets of the rising Hindutva forces gathered under the banner of the Bhartiya Janata Party. He organized a parallel conference on the centralization of state power and the threat to minorities in India to coincide with the Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver in 1987.

In 1989 Hari brought large sections of the South Asian community together to form the Komagata Maru Historical Society to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Komagata Maru incident, in which Indian immigrants traveling to Canada on a chartered ship were turned away from the shores of Vancouver by the racist policies of the Canadian Government. As a result of the society's work a commemorative plaque was installed in Vancouver. In 2004, during a screening of the documentary film on this incident by Ali Kazimi, Continuous Journey, the Mayor of Vancouver presented a scroll to Hari dedicating the week to the memory of Komagata Maru.

Following the attack on Babri Masjid in December 1992 Hari became the prime mover in the formation of a North American organization dedicated to the defense of minority rights in India called, Non-resident Indians for Secularism and Democracy (NRISAD). This organization brought together Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians of origin in South Asia through educational and cultural activities. It had its most significant moment in Vancouver in 1997, when it celebrated the 50th anniversary of the independence of India from colonial rule by bringing together people from the entire spectrum of the South Asian community to focus on how much remained to be done on the subcontinent and the urgent need for peace between Pakistan and India.
Recognizing the need to build a North American front against the growing menace of Hindutva fascism in India, Hari travelled to Montreal in September 1999 to join the founding of International South Asia Forum (INSAF). He became is first President and organized the Second Conference in Vancouver from Augst10-12, 2001.

Hari's leadership again led to the development of NRISAD into South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD) in Vancouver to embrace the necessity of going beyond a focus on India to the entire South Asian region in the quest of peace and democracy based on secularism, human rights and social justice. SANSAD has pursued these goals vigorously, condemning the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 (for which he was denied a visa to go to India), championing the human rights of Kashmiris, promoting peace between Pakistan and India, supporting the rights of women in Pakistan, condemning violence against journalists and academics in Bangladesh, supporting the movement for democracy and social justice in Nepal, and defending the human rights of Tamils under the attack of the Sri Lankan state.

Besides being an able political organizer and a gifted writer of short stories, Hari was also a talented photographer. He photographed the common people of India, their lives and struggles. His photographs hang in many homes and have been displayed in many exhibitions. He proved himself to be an excellent director of political drama.

Political ideals remain steadfast. However, there has, naturally been, divergence of opinion on the strategy and tactics of achieving these ideals. During the course of long political activity of more than 50 years, Hari made many friends and comrades. It is natural that among these comrades there also arose disagreements on many issues. Nevertheless, Hari remained a comrade or a friend of all of them and they all are deeply saddened by his passing away.

Hari leaves behind him a legacy of activism in the service of the oppressed. He is an inspiration to engagement in the struggle for a better world, to a never-flagging effort to create a world without exploitation, without imperialist domination, without religious, caste, ethnic or gender oppression, a world that Marx envisioned as human destiny.

A Memorial Service for Hari will be held at Riverside Funeral Home and Crematorium, 7410- Hopcott Road, Delta, B.C. (Ph. 604-940-1313), at 3:00 pm on Sunday, March 21, 2010.

Chin Banerjee
Harinder Mahil
Raj Chouhan
Daya Varma
Vinod Mubayi
Charan Gill

Gene Kiniski, famous footballer and wrestler.

In the early 70's that's all you could watch on TV on Saturday afternoon anyway. That and whatever the Bellingham station put out.

I heard about Chartrand yesterday.  I was fortunate enough to act as one of many sponsors to a lecture he gave at U of T in the early 70s.  A fine, dedicated and inspiring human being.

The author Alan Sillitoe has died aged 82 at Charing Cross Hospital in London, his family has said.

The Nottingham-born novelist emerged in the 1950s as one of the "Angry Young Men" of British fiction.

His novels included Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, both of which were made into films.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8642720.stm

Fred Halliday (1946-2010), a scholar associated with New Left Review who knew English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, and Farsi fluently, and public intellectual, has died. He was 64.

Fred Halliday

Remembering Fred Halliday

"Never Give Up!"

Jesus. This has been one SUCKY year for Vanessa Redgrave.   Natasha Richardson(Vanessa's daughter), Corin, (her brother and fellow revolutionary) and now Lynn.  Damn.

I just saw Ms. Horne on TV this past weekend.  Racist Hollywood indeed; it's hard to imagine a black woman with whiter features, which is likely one reason she was allowed to do as much as she did in film at a time when black women couldn't do much other than play "mammy" roles.

They put her in cameo, walk on roles which could be easily cut for showing to  audiences south of the Mason-Dixon.

Ultimate schmultimate.  Check out Lena Horne in Cabin in the Sky.

Ethel Waters is in that picture, while Louis Armstong plays a minor role.

From the late 1920s - Ethel Waters sings My Handy Man.

Sorry for the thread drift.

I think I've seen all of Hopper's flicks. The only one that truly creeped me out was Blue Velvet, but there might have been another that I've forgotten.

It would probably be kinder to the poor guy if there wasn't much mention of his death(although it did get big play on the BBC and CNN websites and will undoubtably be the subject of big stories in the entertainment press next week).  The Franklin Mint will probably put out "Diff'rent Strokes" commemorative plates in the next few months.  Hopefully, the adoptive parents who squandered most of the money he earned as a child actor will not profit from them.

Gary Coleman had a fairly miserable life and was turned by that life into a pretty unpleasant guy.  Hopefully, his many-leveled-pain is finally over.

A past Babble contributor, Hephaestion, passed away on June 6, 2010. A memorial thread has been set up at En Masse.

I'll have to see that thread over there.  I'm guessing Heph died well before his time.  He was a good presence on this board and stood for many, many positive and humane values in his posts.

Jose Saramago's publisher says that the Nobel-winning Portuguese novelist has died at age 87.

Publisher Zeferino Coelho is being quoted on the website of the Portuguese paper Publico as saying that Saramago died at his home in Lanzarote, one of Spain's Canary Islands.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/books/story/2010/06/18/obit-saramago-jose.html#ixzz0rDBEitVk

My father, Paul Nenonen, died around 1am on Wednesday morning.

He never heard this song, but it makes me think of him, and the lyrics speak to the deepest, quietest layer of my grief.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DXXHT8v52I&feature=related

I am very sorry to hear about that Michael.

So am I.

The loss of a father leaves a deep, deep hole in the soul.

Condolences Michael....

Condolences, Michael.

link over here.

Oh no, Michael, I missed your original post. My condolences and may you cherish good memories always.

My condolences Michael.  

George Steinbrenner basically sucked all the remaining joy and spontaneity out of pro baseball.   He reduced the whole thing to greed, arrogance and anger.  And he never DID get it that, while money can buy potential, it can never buy a guarantee of success.

It would be nice if this meant that baseball could move into a post-Steinbrenner age, but that's not bloody likely.

That's 'Splendor' in American:

'In comics circles, cranks are king.

'Harvey Pekar was the king of cranks. He was a born contrarian, a writer whose ironically titled comic-book series American Splendor was a compendium of personal grievances, largely about human nature and its failings.

'Pekar, who died Monday at the age of 70, was a product of Cleveland, his blue-collar hometown. His disillusionment with the American Dream and its diminishing returns echoed his city’s decline as a manufacturing centre, and he found an outlet for his frustrations in comics ... '

Thanks, everyone, for your words of solace. 

Wow - that brings back memories. My oldest brother who I think had a warped sense of humour, gave me their album It Crawled Into My Hand Honest as a Christmas present the year it was released - I think in 1966 or so. Up until that point, it was the filthiest and funniest record I had ever heard.