It’s probably a happy coincidence, but the same week that CNN is launching its miniseries Latino in America, Seattle Arts and Lectures is welcoming the poet Martín Espada to town. Born in Brooklyn in 1957, Espada is either famed or notorious for his political views, derived from his Puerto Rican heritage. “The melting pot” is not his preferred metaphor.

In an earlier interview about his book, Republic of Poetry, Espada said: “The American history taught and published in this country all too often resembles a consensus on what to forget. This is especially true when it comes to Latinos, Latin America, and their history.” Talking with Bill Moyers, he put it more bluntly: “I mean, we have to deal with this paradox that there are 40 million Latinos in this country and yet we’re invisible.”

The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer, and came on the heels of his collection Alabanza, which gathered selections written between 1982 and 2003. Both titles are taken from poems.

In Espada’s “The Republic of Poetry,” dedicated to Chile, poets and poetry overrun the trains, parades, restaurants, zoos, and airports. It’s a portrait of a country that celebrates remembrance, where people see each other. It’s also a gift from a poet, even one called “the Pablo Neruda of North America,” surprised by popular recognition of his gifts.

“Alabanza” is about remembrance, too, but in a tragic key–it’s a work in praise of “the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center.” Espada memorializes each minute before the planes:

Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked

even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish

rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.

Seattle Arts and Lectures Poetry Series: Martín Espada, Friday, October 23, 7:30 p.m.; Benaroya Hall; tickets: $20-$50/$10 students.

David Byrne says “much of Seattle” is “vibrant and full of life.” He wrote it down in black-and-white in his new book, Bicycle Diaries. But there is another paragraph that summons up Seattle, too.

There is often a highway along the waterfront in many towns. Before these highways were built, the waterfronts, already dead zones, were seen as the most logical places from which to usurp land for conversion into a concrete artery. Inevitably, little by little, the citizens of these towns become walled off from their own waterfronts, and the waterfronts become dead zones of yet a different kin–concrete dead zones of clean, swooping flyovers and access ramps that soon were filled with whizzing cars. Under these were abandoned shopping carts, homeless people, and piles of toxic waste. […]

Much of  the time it turns out the cars are merely using these highways not to have access to businesses and residences in the nearby city, as might have been originally proposed, but to bypass that city entirely.

The book itself was drawn from Byrne’s blogging (don’t miss his take on the Kindle) and I suppose it’s only fair to warn you that it’s at least as much a diary as it is about traveling around the world’s cities by folding bicycling. Luckily, David Byrne’s diary is much more interesting, so far as public consumption goes, than yours or mine. Well, mine, anyway.

Byrne begins with a survey of “American Cities”–“Most U.S. cities are not very bike-friendly”–before tackling Berlin, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Manila, Sydney, London, San Francisco, and New York. It’s an idiosyncratic travel writing. Gypsy-like, Byrne peers deep into the soul of each place, and while familiar landmarks appear, they are often seen through an interpretive crystal ball.

The heavily illustrated book never quite breaks away from its blogged birth–the structure relies heavily on when the initial inspiration to write struck, and Byrne’s head was clearly in vastly different stylistic spaces: Compare “Sydney. Hooley freaking dooley what a weird and gorgeous city!” with “Flying into Tegel Airport in Berlin I look down at the neatly ordered fields and roads–even in the surrounding forests the trees are in neat rows–and I think to myself how this entire country, the landscape, everything as far as one can see, has been ordered.”

Biking around Berlin generates further discourses on German urban manicuring, Rudolf Hess, cultural identity, the demise of the CD, Thomas Hirschhorn’s mannequin-hand art, and beauty and anti-beauty trends in art (with a short history of Vienna’s actionist movement and Otto Muehl’s sex commune–complete with photos).

Byrne also visits the Stasi Museum, ruminating on surveillance and the lifespan of retributive justice, and very casually mentions that the “two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a ‘meaning’ and that each of us is unique.”

By contrast, the chapter on Manila is largely a history of the Imelda and the glory and glamor of the Marcos years–America’s Camelot writ small. Then Byrne wanders into a brothel by accident. (“To be fair, not all western/Filipino relationships are necessarily about power or sexual fantasy.”)

There is of course a lot about music, and meetings with musicians, planned and unplanned. In Greenwich Village, Byrne happens to hear the mother of Savion Glover sing at a jazz bar while waiting for a friend to go on. A few pages later, you’re reading about the design of bike helmets. At some point you realize that this book never ends. Sure, there are 297 numbered pages, but there is no exit. You are, for better or worse, living in David Byrne’s brain.

Recently, I saw Gloria Steinem speak at Town Hall.

70 years old and that hottie totally rocked the house. It turns out she was there in support of Hedgebrook Women Writers Retreat. Waxing poetic about the importance of the place as a support for women writers, Steinem said, “Hedgebrook isn’t a retreat…it’s an advance.” I happen to be a woman and a writer so I started snooping around.

Among lots of cool offerings, there was one thing that really piqued my interest; they’ve launched this thing called the Women Writers Master Class Retreat Series.

 

Theresa Rebeck

The slot that caught my eye is in November with renowned writer Theresa Rebeck. The week-long experience is at their 48-acre Whidbey Island getaway. Each resident writer (me hopefully!) is housed in a handcrafted cottage in the woods with a sleeping loft, work area and wood-burning stove…I mean, how charming is that?! All meals are prepared by Hedgebrook’s in-house chef using fresh produce from their organic garden and seriously, that alone made this drooling girl send in my application.

 

But seriously, it’s about the writing. The week-long session includes ten hours of workshops over five days with playwright Theresa Rebeck from November 9-16, instructor-led constructive group feedback sessions, one-on-one sessions with her, and two additional days of retreat time. Space is limited to six writers per session and there is a $2,000 fee (that includes food and lodging). See you there?

For your application, email amywheeler (at) hedgebrook.org, or call 360-321-4786.

Tonight, author and Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank, of What’s the Matter With Kansas? fame, is giving a talk at Town Hall at 7:30, about the legacy of the Republicans’ mismanagement of government. Tickets are $5 advance or at the door starting at 6:30.

Frank’s last book, The Wrecking Crew, about Republican mismanagement of government, isn’t as good as What’s the Matter With Kansas?, but it’s better than most critics gave it credit for. A historian by training, Frank drafts a history of the Republican Revolution from the 1980s to the present that’s all tactics and no ideology. He follows dozens of little-known political organizations with important direct mail lists, which fueled public resentment of government while ensuring a steady revenue stream for dedicated Republican loyalists. He details the internal power struggles of the College Republicans, which, in the Eighties, produced some of the Right’s most notable power brokers (Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff among them). And he traces how the right embraced the radical style of the Sixties left, concocting their own heroes of Third World Liberation and generating urgency on college campuses.

Critics tended to turn their noses up at the book when it came out last year. All the talk of direct mail seemed outdated in Internet era, and anyway, in 2008, tactics were done with—this was a battle of ideas, and the right was losing. The Bush administration was departing in disgrace and American was embracing a black liberal for president.

But today, Frank looks downright prescient. The means may have changed, direct mail having given way to email lists and Facebook, but the tactics are the same. Anyone who’s read The Wrecking Crew is unlikely to be surprised by the manufactured populist outrage at health care reform, on display at Town Hall meetings last month. Critics who took issue with the fact that Frank’s book seemed indifferent to ideas should be reconsidering. On health care, liberals enjoy something approaching overwhelming public support. The fact that reform is floundering has nothing to do with ideas and everything to do with the right’s effective political tactics.