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in September
From AK Press
Featuring Essays by:
Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Michael Neumann, Shahid Alam, Alexander
Cockburn, Uri Avnery, Bill and Kathy Christison and More
Today's
Stories
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
Recent
Stories
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
August
11, 2003
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland Security for Whom?
Mickey
Z.
Bush's Progress
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Meet the New Bitch, Same
as the Old
Elaine
Cassel
Indicting DNA
Dr. Mohammad
Omar Farooq
Civil Liberties and Uncivil Super-Patriotism
Uri
Avnery
Who Will Save Abu Mazen?
Website
of the Day
RIAA Subpoena Clearinghouse
August
9 / 10, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
August
8, 2003
John
Chuckman
What the US Says Goes
Roberto
Barreto
Defend the Vieques 12!
Bruce Gagnon
Iraq War Emboldens Bush Space Plans
Elaine
Cassel
The Reign of John Ashcroft
Dave
Lindorff
Snoops Night Out
Website
of the Day
Zero Boy
August
7, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
It the US a "Terrorist Magnet?"
Toni
Solo
Neo-liberal Nicaragua: a New Banana
Republic
Adam Lebowitz
Hiroshima Commemorated: the View from Japan
Hanan
Ashrawi
When the Bully Whines
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Conscience Takes a Holiday
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Lets Slip: Iraq Not Behind 9/11; No Ties to Al-Qaeda
Mike Kimaid
What's the Score?
Elaine
Cassel
The Smell of VICTORY: Ashcroft's Latest Stinkbomb
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
August 6, 2003
Steve
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause: It's Not
Easy Confronting King Coal
David
Krieger
Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Robert
Fisk
The Ghosts of Uday and Qusay
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's War on the National Forests
Elaine
Cassel
No Fly Lists
Stan
Goff
Military Equipment and Pneumonia
Hugh Sansom
An Open Letter to Nicholas Kristof on the Nuking of Japan
August
5, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Prisoner of Ramallah: Arafat at
74
Forrest
Hylton
Terrorism and Political Trials: the
View from Bolivia
Ray
McGovern
"We Cook Estimates to Go"
David
Morse
Poindexter's Gambit
Edward
Said
Orientallism: 25 Years Later
George
W. Bush
My Darn Good Resumé
Hammond
Guthrie
It's Incremental, Watson!
Website
of the Day
National Prayer Day
August 4, 2003
Bruce
K. Gagnon
Another Peace Activist Detained by
Airport Cops: My Story
David
Lindorff
Fear-Mongering About Social Security
Mark
Zepezauer
George F. Will: Descent into Self-Parody
James
Plummer
Tracking You Through the Mail
Mickey
Z.
Marriage Insecurity from Sharon to Bush
Bruce
Jackson
News that Isn't News: How the NYT's
Pimps for the White House
August
2 / 3, 2003
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
August
1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
Prison Rape
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Stan Goff
Injury and Decorum: The Missing Wounded in Iraq
Wayne
Madsen
Europe Unplugs from the Matrix
Robert
Fisk
Wolfowitz the Censor
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Loses Big in Puerto Rico
Website
of the Day
Stop Prisoner Rape
July
31, 2003
Ray
McGovern
The Prostitution of Intelligence
Brian
Cloughley
Wolfowitz's Operative Statement
Sheldon
Hull
The RIAA's Jihad:
The Devil's Music (Industry)
Elaine
Cassel
The Next Time You Crack a Lawyer Joke, Think of These Attorneys
Sheldon
Rampton
and John Stauber
True Lies: Propaganda and Bush's
Wars
Hammond
Guthrie
Speculation Blues
Website
of the Day
Army of One?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
July
30, 2003
David
Lindorff
Poindexter the Terror Bookie
Marjorie
Cohn
Why Iraq and Afghanistan? It's About
the Oil
Elaine
Cassel
How Ashcroft Coerces Guilty Pleas
in Terror Cases
Zvi
Bar'el
The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War
Lisa Walsh
Thomas
Killing Mustafa Hussein: Death of a Child, Birth of a Legend?
Sean
Carter
Pat Robertson's Prayer Jihad: God, Sodomy and the Supremes
ND Jayaprakash
India and Ariel Sharon
Steve
Perry
Bush's Top 40 Lies
Standard
Schaefer
Correction about Bloomberg and Outscourcing
Website
of the Day
Bring Them Home Now!
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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August
16, 2003
A Review of Julie
Hilden's "3"
The
Loneliest Number
By ADAM ENGEL
Occasionally, a book comes along that makes me
want to call up my old first grade teacher, Mrs. Lillian Gang,
and thank her for teaching me to read. "3"
is such a book. Not a great book, ultimately, but a very,
very good one. Hilden can't be compared to Jean Rhys or Marguerite
Duras just yet, but she certainly blows away such contemporary
"masters" as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace
who attempt to take on the complexities of the world without
understanding even the simplest of problems, such as how to write
a book without resorting to RAD (Reader Assured Destruction),
pounding us poor semi-literate slobs to insensibility with page
after page after page of bloated prose till we beg them to appear
on Oprah and explain just what the hell they are writing about.
Of course they refuse our requests. After all, such masters
owe nothing to the masses, most of whom would rather be watching
reality TV anyway.
I didn't expect to like "3."
If I'm going to read fiction I usually prefer to learn some
stuff about economics, history, or kazoos. Pynchon, Burroughs,
Gaddis, Acker etc, whose books are chock full of useful information,
and exciting prose.
But here's where Julie Hilden proved
to me that the death of narrative fiction has been greatly exaggerated.
Hilden had me hooked from the first sentence and taught me that
once you strip even my favorite post modern masters of the erudite
monkeyshines I so enjoy, they're writing about the same thing
as Hilden: humans and the madness that twists them when they
pursue what humans are most inclined to pursue, the things that
make us human by the very act of pursuing them: love, work, pleasure.
While we are supposed to have jobs, and
families, we are not really supposed to find adult love and adult
work (art?) much less adult pleasure. The pursuit of such forbidden
fruits lures us to madness, obsession, causes us to inflict pain
on the  beloved as
well as ourselves, and distorts the work, especially creative
work, with the poison of celebrity and the nastiness that ensues
when two lovers are celebrated for working in the same milieu.
Heavy stuff Julie Hilden has tackled
here, with powerful, original prose and for the most part, quick,
no-nonsense narration, which goes something like this:
Maya and Ilan meet in college, each
bearing deep psychological wounds. Ilan's mother died when was
a child. Maya's parents divorced and went on to establish families
of beautiful blonde achievers. Both Mom and Pop decided they
could get along very well indeed without the brooding, red-haired
Maya, ghost of their failed marriage.
But the nineteen-year-old loners, Ilan
and Maya find a separate peace in a love affair that early on
hints at predilections for mutual pain and obsessive desires.
They burn each other's arms with cigarettes at a party their
sophomore year. Unfortunately, the co-eds who witness their
secret rite do not understand the complexities beneath the surface
action and
Not to worry. Ilan's father owns and edits an up and coming celebrity/literary
magazine. He finds them an apartment , takes them on as interns,
then full-time staff writers. Problem is, Ilan's not much of
a word-smith, and as in college, Maya works for the two of them,
writing both her articles and his, while Ilan focuses on perverting
their relationship with sexcapades involving third party women
whom he cultivates according to their physical similarities
to Maya.
An agreement is reached, an ad placed
in the Voice classifieds for a red head of Maya's description
looking for a night of fun with a fun couple. Ilan interviews
the women in bars and cafes while Maya lays low in the background,
pretending to read or write, but carefully scrutinizing the applicants.
Both she and Ilan must approve of the candidate before the threesome
can begin.
These threesomes form the basis of their
subsequent marriage, for before they tied the knot, Maya caught
Ilan with another woman. He can't stop, and he won't stop seeing
other women, for his vision is to include Maya in his quests
for what? Pleasure? Fulfillment? and, so as not to
lose him, she agrees to the closed system of this "open
marriage."
These aren't the adolescent flirtations
of "Friends" or the fatuous trysts of "Sex in
the City" we're dealing with here, but a complex relationship
between two very complex and confused human beings. Maya finds
sex with her own carefully chosen doppelgangers is kind of exciting,
especially since the third parties are told to leave and never
return part of the agreement at the end of the night
and morning brings a kind of togetherness between her and Ilan,
alone in bed, albeit each time a step closer to the a place his
S&M fantasies will bring them, a place Maya prefers not to
go.
She really just wants a "normal"
life with Ilan, a baby, her career etc. But this fantasy of normality
is no more attainable than true bliss in their increasingly sado-masochistic
menage-a-trois.
Meanwhile: work. Maya's becoming a famous
journalist to the extent that's possible acclaimed
for he insightful celebrity interviews. She has a knack for
busting the truth out of their sealed lives and writing it up
as interesting copy, becoming a celebrity herself in the process.
What does this mean to her, this probing of false lives? Is
Maya even a real journalist? After all, getting a celebrity
to admit to being gay/pregnant/addicted to drugs etc is hardly
a job for Robert Fisk. What is the connection between her unmasking
of actors and actresses' false lives and the celebrity-sized
drama of her own marriage?
Well, she must see something because
she tells Ilan it's over. She wants normalcy, a child, monogamy.
He asks her for just one more tryst. Just one, she agrees,
just one more woman. But Ilan commits suicide slits his
wrists one afternoon in the apartment before this final
threesome can take place.
This is where "3" loses something
along with Ilan, becomes a very good novel rather than the excellent
book it has been thus far. Had Hilden ended with Ilan's suicide,
she would have left the reader and Maya with many unanswered,
perhaps unanswerable questions. This would not have been a
bad thing, for these questions are only unanswerable on the surface.
Hilden has already provided enough information about both
Ilan and Maya in the first 150 pages of this 220-page book
to allow the reader and Maya to reflect. To make sense of it
all to the extent that "it all" can ever make sense
in literature or life. I would not have felt "cheated,"
for in the brilliant text she had thus far provided, the pieces
are there, even if the "whole" puzzle seems impossible
to "solve." In fact, Hilden's attempt, in the last
third of the book, to solve the unsolvable puzzle of the narrative
and ultimately "redeem" Maya barter's some of "3"s
originality for that fiction peddled by writing workshops throughout
the land that a narrative must be "wrapped up," it's
pieces put in place, else the reader find himself/herself "wanting
more."
Ilan gave his life, Maya her soul. What
more does any reader have the right to ask for?
Well, before Ilan took himself out of
the picture, he left Maya with his promised "final woman,"
Olivia, who looks more like Maya, and behaves more like Ilan,
than any of the others. Maya had no say in Olivia; Ilan chose
her on his own, his final "gift."
Maya and Olivia are intensely attracted
to each other. Maya breaks her and Ilan's "agreement"
by letting Olivia spend the night, then another, then another,
until Olivia, a photographer, breaks her own lease and moves
into the apartment.
Love. Domestic peace. Companionship.
Creative work. Followed by jealousy Olivia is not pleased
with Maya's lingering love for her late husband; Maya suffocates
under Olivia's obsessive love and domestic scrutiny and
so on.
I'm not going to "ruin" the
story by describing how Maya works it all out, but she does work
it out, and I wish she didn't. True, her relationship with
her look-a-like Olivia offers interesting contrasts and cinematic
images of a love affair with oneself, but we've already seen
this during the days of her and Ilan's threesomes.
Had Olivia not arrived on the scene,
many things might not have made sense to Maya, at first. But
she would have figured out what could have been figured out,
in time, as would the reader. After all, many if not most human
relationships, particularly if they involve love, sex and marriage,
are ultimately beyond comprehension. There is a point at which
we don't understand passions grown in the mulch of deep childhood
wounds. In fact, that's the key ingredient to tragedy. We begin
things with the best intentions, they spin out of control, we
crash, and there's nothing more to explain. All that's left
for us is the record of events leading up to the crash, which
we can try to understand as best as we can. No real explanations
or conclusions. No redemption. Girl meets boy, girl and boy
go to bizarre extremes of their particular obsessions, girl loses
boy. Girl tries to figure out, and write about, what the hell
happened.
As it is, Hilden's attempt to put things
in order, which might stem from the author's fear, not unfounded,
that today's readers the few of us left so dependent
upon an orderly fictional universe in which things happen for
a reason, which is revealed through a conclusion/redemption
in the narrative, just wouldn't "get it" if "things
fell apart" and we were left with nothing but the history,
the narrative up to the point of the tragic end to ponder.
Hilden wrote an excellent book up to
page 150; after that, "3" steps down from excellence
and becomes "merely" very good till the wrap up on
the final page. Whether you chose to read the excellent first
two thirds, or continue through the very good last third, "3"
is a must read. It is a work of art, and as such, an indictment
against all that's tawdry and false in human relationships and
a paen to all that's beautiful and true. Its mere presence in
the world is a weapon against all the garbage we are bombarded
with in books, movies, television about "true love"
and childish visions of Romance. Hilden writes daringly, for
the most part, about who we really are.
Definitely worth a phonecall or even
an email of thanks to Mrs. Gang.
Adam Engel
can be reached at: bartleby.samsa@verizon.net.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 9 / 10, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
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