What I Did During the Great Depression

Since I got laid off, I have done the following.

• Published eight poems in four magazines
• Translated all of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Poema del Cante Jondo”
• Rewrote that translation
• Rewrote my novel, “Ainadamar.” Twice
• Wrote a handful of new poems

What I haven’t done.

• Made any damned money

Ainadamar: A Best Seller

People keep requesting a copy of my satirical science fiction novel, Ainadamar. It makes sense. It’s sensible. That is, it’s not unreasonable someone should want to read about a vampire, lady barbarian and giant kitty going back in time to save Federico Garcia Lorca in order to arrest entropy and save the world. Is it? No. It is not. So contact me at curthopkins|@|gmail|dot|com if you’d like a copy.

Poetry & Essays

Perceptions (Oregon), translation, “Autumn Day” (“Herbsttag”) by Rainer Maria Rilke. May, 2010 (upcoming). One translation.

Full of Crow (New York), poem, “Our ship shivers and splits on black rocks.” October, 2009. One poem.

Gloom Cupboard (UK-Texas), poems, “The Sod House” and “Two Visions of the Infinite in Seattle.” August 21, 2009. Two poems

3AM Magazine (London-Paris), poems, “October,” “In Liguria” and “What Is Existence.” June 5, 2009. Three poems.

BlazeVox (New York), poems, “Night and the Body,” “A Desert Place” and “San Bruno.” May 16, 2009. Three poems.

Cavafy Forum (journal of University of Michigan’s Modern Greek Studies department), essay, “Denying Julian.” December 23, 2008. Essay on the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy.

Poetry As An Act of History (by Maria Rosa Menocal), translation, “La Guitarra.” September 18, 2008. Translation from the Spanish of a poem, “La Guitarra,” by Federico Garcia Lorca.

Asian American Times (Phoenix), translation, “La Guitarra.” January 3, 2008. Translation from the Spanish of a poem, “La Guitarra,” by Federico Garcia Lorca. [page 17]

Cavafy Archive (Athens), poem, “Reading Cavafy.” November 19, 2007. Poem about reading the Greek poet.

Dada (Italy), poems, “Daybook | The Oranges of Eurotas.” January 26, 2004. Two poems.

SPSM&H (Bakersfield), poem, “Hawaii.” 2003. Sonnet.

Bluelawn (Los Angeles), essay, “Cars and How to Listen for Them.” Personal essay.

Exquisite Corpse (New Orleans), play, “Mertz in Love.” December, 2000. A play.

Exquisite Corpse (New Orleans), fiction, “A Series of Perfectly Reasonable Morpheme Tales.” May, 2000. A series of tales.

Emergency Horse (Oregon), poem, “Vita.” January, 1992. Long poem.

Emergency Horse (Oregon), cartoon, “Winnie the Beet.” December, 1991-April, 1993.

Timberline (University of Oregon), sonnet.

Catalyst (Seattle), poem.

Big Talk (Oregon), poem.

For journalism, see Publications List.

Deleting Lorca

I deleted my translations from Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Poema del Cante Jondo.” The editors of online magazines get their panties in a bunch when something you’ve submitted is on your two-bit blog. *shrug*

I’ve left up the non-Cante Jondo Lorca translations along with “La guitarra,” which was used in Menocal’s monograph (and the Asian American Times!)

My Translation in “Poetry As An Act of History”

Yale Professor Maria Rosa Menocal delivered a lecture at St. Mary’s College. This lecture, which focused on Cervantes, was subsequently turned into a monograph, which was recently published. Menocal, the author of “The Ornament of the World,” is an expert on the interplay of cultures and religions in medieval Spain. I’m a huge fan of “Ornament.”

I loved the essay, which used Cervantes to talk about the interdependencies of culture in the Iberian peninsula and, by association, the world. I loved it even more, I confess, because she used my translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem “La guitarra” (from the “Poema de la Siguiriya Gitana” in his “Poema del Cante Jondo“).

The essay is, unfortunately, not available online. I hope they post it eventually.

Poetry vs. Blogging

Fussing around and constantly botching then trying to fix the formatting and standardize the tagging of my translations of Lorca’s Poema del Cante Jondo is sucking every trace of joy out of it. Blogging has become tedious anyway. All of you pie-eyed Englishmen looking for “naked bums*” (98 out of every 100 visitors to this blog) will probably be able to hold on until the whole book is done anyway.

*No, I’m not going to link to the post. You’ll find it anyway. And boy, will you be disappointed.

Wienermorphism

Lately, I’ve noticed an increasing number of bloggers I used to read for coverage of, or comment on, social media tools and strategy have gotten odder, more bilious and petulant (and sometimes outright nasty), full of gnomic utterances and pronuncamientos; moving from a giddy sense of discovery and moment to self-aggrandizement, ad hominem attacks and embarrassing revelations.

Perhaps social media has both an aggregating and an amplifying effect, so that simple mood swings seem like personality changes, and collective mood swings seem like trends. Perhaps the insulated world of social media produces the same hothouse effect that results in the cruel crones of a Lorca play or the bitter, back-stabbing faculty in any University you’d care to name. Perhaps it attracts the kind of cranks you used to see only in a newspaper’s letters to the editor. I don’t know.

Perhaps it will pass and they’ll remember that social media is a tool; that, in itself, it’s nothing, and the gatekeeper to nothing is nothing; and that social media is, by definition, inferior to the uses to which it is put and the content which it enables.

I imagine I’ll continue to find people who are still more excited by the possibilities of innovation than they are entranced by their own authority; people who think of the service they provide in surveying and analyzing new tools as a contribution to our larger public conversation, instead of as an end in itself or as an avenue to puffery. I imagine I’ll continue to find enough bloggers who don’t confuse traffic with merit (or who get too little of it to make that mistake) and that I’ll always have the information I need to continue to participate in the conversations I think are necessary and valuable in a difficult time.

And perhaps I’ll even learn how to fall quiet myself and restrict my opinions to the written page, where such things are perhaps best kept after all.

About Curt

Personal

I am, thankfully, married to S. and live in The Greatest State in the Union™.

Artistic & Scholarly

I’ve published poems, essays and plays in such publications as Full of Crow, Gloom Cupboard, 3AM, BlazeVOX (my page [.pdf]), the University of Michigan’s Cavafy Forum (“Denying Cavafy” [.pdf], my essay on the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy’s Julian the Apostate poems), NYC’s Good Foot and Andre Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse.

My plays have been produced at the New City New Playwrights Festival (Seattle), the Marsh (SF), Doc’s Clock (SF), Lord Lebrick Theatre (OR) and elsewhere. I have directed Sam Shepard’s “True West” in Seattle and “The Bald Soprano” in Portland. Prof. Maria Rosa Menocal used my translation of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s “La Guitarra” in her lecture and monograph, “Poetry As An Act of History.”

I have recently finished translating the whole of Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Poema del Cante Jondo.” I have written two novel-length narrative poems in verse, “Jacksonville” and “I-5,” as well as “Ainadamar,” a satirical science fiction novel.

Professional

I am a communications director with over a decade of experience finding stuff out, writing it up and getting it to people in the form that’s best for the content and its audience. I have a deep affection for both carving lines in stone with a chisel and blipping and honking my way into the social media maelstrom. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Gnome sane?

My strengths include a deep knowledge of communications technologies, messaging, understanding and communicating with a target audience, marketing copy creation, content process and web architecture.

I have led and implemented projects, developed and supervised teams and content departments for TDS|Trimble, IAC’s GarageGames|InstantAction.com, PBworks, Ask.com, Autoweb, Elance, Sproutit, Visa and others. I have assessed communication needs and produced written strategy plans, assembled personnel and resources, set dates and work budgets, led meetings and brainstorming sessions, written style guides and taglines, acted as liaison to senior management, solicited and elicited messaging ideas from stakeholders and supervised the work of staffers and freelancers.

I am an experienced journalist with credits in Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Salon, Los Angeles Times, National Post, New Times, Seattle Times, Reuters and others.

Finally, I have extensive experience in social media. I am a blogger at Morpheme Tales. I was the founding director of the non-profit Committee to Protect Bloggers, the first organization devoted to global free speech rights for bloggers, and co-founder of the free speech campaign, the March 18th Movement. I have been involved in many social media and free speech projects, such as Spirit of America’s Anonymous Blogging Campaign BlogSafer, Blogswana and the Zimbabwean democracy blog Enough is Enough. I was a featured speaker at the U.S. State Department’s Conference on Blogs and Democracy.

I was the Social Media Marketing Manager for IAC’s InstantAction online gaming portal and, as Marketing Communications Manager for Trimble Navigation Ltd’s TDS division I oversaw and extended their social media accounts, including their social network.

I have been interviewed, sourced, quoted and invited to write on blogging, employment and human rights issues by the Public Radio International’s The World, Pacifica Radio, Wikinomics, PR Week, Associated Press, ReadWriteWeb, Guardian, Smart Money, Columbia Journalism Review, Time, Foreign Policy, Popular Science, WebPro News, De Standaard, PBS MediaShift, American Journalism Review, Tammy Bruce Show, CBS Radio, Canadian provincial radio, CMP’s TechWeb, La Voz de Galicia, Malaysia Today, Slate, Duke University Law Review, Journalism.co.uk, Naked Conversations, Voice of America, Philadelphia Inquirer | Knight Ridder, La Vanguardia, Liberation, BBC Radio 5, Newsday, Christian Science Monitor, National Post, CNET’s’ News.com, Oakland Tribune, BBC News, Network World, Jerusalem Report, Sacromento Bee, National Law Journal, American Bar Association Journal, Overseas Press Club of America, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times | Tribune Media, Internazionale, Observatório da Impresa, Village, Voice, AlterNet, Register, USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review and others.

***

For more information on me:

Professional

Client List businesses and organizations I’ve worked for

Committee to Protect Bloggers all CPB-related accounts linked from the main page

LinkedIn professional information

Press on My Activities articles on my activities, stories that quoted or sourced me

Publications List journalism

Personal

Amazon when I get a little money I buy books and if any is left I buy food & clothes – and then my dad got a real job

Blip ain’t no party like a West Coast party ’cause a West Coast party don’t stop

Creative Publications poems, essays, plays, etc.

del.icio.us I looked at this stuff online

Facebook the only social media tool everyone my age actually uses

FriendFeed a lot of my other online accounts braided into one delicious feed

Google Profile there is no reason for this sort of behavior

Photobucket photos I took

Shelfari books are good food

Twitter where the persistent, intrusive idea goes to die

Other

Other locations online, which I do not often use, include the following.

CitySpeek microblogging that can carry video and audio

Shizzow geo-microblogging

Yelp you will know the master by his dog

Global Voices Online 2005 London Summit—Another Voice

I was unable to attend the London Summit for Global Voices on December 10, unfortunately. I was finishing up the SoA Anonymous Blogging Guides and shepherding the Committee to Protect Bloggers through the last hairpin turn of its tax-exempt nonprofit corporation status application.

Nevertheless, since I’ve been a longtime supporter and tangentially involved, I wanted to register my opinion on some of the issues addressed at the summit. For those who don’t know, Global Voices, a project out of Harvard University’s Berkman Center, is an interesting undertaking. It’s rather like an international blog aggregator with annotations; it’s something like an old-fashioned international news magazine. It has been around for a little better than a year now and in that time has had a profound influence on the notion of what a blog’s good for and who writes them. One of the founders described it as a “citizen media” site, making a distinction between it and “citizen journalism.” I think of it as an online magazine whose primary topic is the global conversation.

Best just to look at it, though.

I read the entirety of the sixty-page live blog from the summit. My comments are in order. (My quotations take the liberty of correcting what look to be typos and misspellings, and writing out abbreviations, but refer to the original if you have any doubt. I’ll quote them and then attribute where possible.)

One of the things we want to cover going forward is how we might expand the regional editors, if we want to do that; how bloggers might be different in editorial structure; how it might be different and how pro journalists work. (Rebecca MacKinnon, one of the founders and American blogger at Rconversation)

The editors are, I think, just that, editors. They are journalists, of a sort, whose beat is the conversation or conversations going on in their coverage area. To think of it like that it may provide a sense of orientation to the role.

Africa has been presented in such a negative way in the past 10 years; the blogosphere has presented a different side of Africa. There are Africans talking about positive things; about — even when you talk about crises; that it’s done in a positive way… us speaking for ourselves. Another positive thing: when I joined in October, I wasn’t aware of all the blogs out there; and there was one, an American’s blog, saying where are all the women bloggers? and I responded saying ‘where are all the African women? I went out looking for them… I was amazed at how many there were that I didn’t know about. That’s been an important opportunity. (Sokari Ekine, Kenyan blogger at Black Looks)

One thing that both journalism and history writings often lack is a sense of things on the ground: What’s it look like there? What’s it sound like? How do people think about what’s going on? To listen to the bureaucrats and rocks stars, Africa is one gigantic symptom in need of medicine that can only be provided by… well, bureaucrats and rock stars. Once of the benefits of reading blogs is to get a more accurate view of things apparently far removed from your immediate reality. The notion that the only resource available to Africans is rubber trees and diamonds is given the lie by African bloggers.

Global Voices Online (GVO) should encourage more conversations between groups that are not commonly seen as conversing. The Chileans and the Chinese, say. There is an implicit notion that a Chinese blogger involved with GVO and a Chilean who is involved may speak to one another via GVO. But what about encouraging direct, back-channel conversations, events, conferences, online actions? GVO is primarily a facilitator. It should attempt to facilitate these conversations overtly, then step out of the way. Or, on the other hand, to find them and point them out. That is another the regional editors could do.

Much is made of the “blogging vs. journalism” argument. We believe there can and must be room for both in this world, and that the world will be better for having both. (Intro)

I think the distinction of “citizen media” (which includes opinion, conversation and personal experience) from “citizen journalism” is important. However, I often find myself wishing a GVO blogger had gone out and interviewed a politician or public figure or people on the streets or had pulled documents. I don’t think GVO should try to force bloggers into a journalistic mold. However, some access to journalistic experience and tools would provide the means to make additional distinctions. According to Jeff Ooi, the Malaysian bloggers have had good success with simple fact checking. Perhaps regional editors in different areas who have come up with various solutions to some of these issues might write on them at length for the benefit of the other editors, and for bloggers all around.

I started with Reuters bringing global material to a consumer audience. This is an area where many networks in the US have dropped the ball on recently. There is a good fit with Global Voices, which has a similar interest to Reuters in bringing international news to a US audience. (Dean Wright, Reuters)

In an earlier post here, I mentioned that excessive pursuit of 80s junk bonds / 90s internet IPO style profits, occasioned by the corporate buy-up of individual media properties, has left us with a media incapable of good global news gathering, with very few exceptions, which may include Reuters. The urge to get something for nothing fires the boilers of much of the traditional media in terms of bloggers. As useful as bloggers are for both people staying informed and for the media keeping its head above water, I think GVO should be cool-headed about cooperation with the media. How many musicians in SROs wish they had been a little less grateful for the attentions of record companies?

We weren’t the [original sources] but we were trusted and could point them…if you want to call it activism, sort of like a movement – it could happen in next to no time at all. (Dina Mehta, Indian blogger at Conversations with Dina)

Here’s an interesting question: Does GVO consist of citizen media, activists, journalists, or all three? Do we need to make a distinction? Certainly activists and the traditional media have radically different agendas. Can you be part of the citizen media and be both? Is it simply a matter of making sure you “show your work”? There’s a lot of talk regarding citizen journalism about revealing one’s biases, something bloggers in the U.S. at least encourage traditional journalists to do. But how can we map every line of force that makes us who we are? Should we have to? I have no pat answers to these questions, but I think they need to be considered. In the meantime, would some sort of guideline be in order?

I’ve noticed since I started rounding up the Caribbean for Global Voices, that people start to change things; since they know that I’ll ink to them if they cover certain things that alone has shifted things. (Georgia Popplewell, blogger and podcaster from the Antilles, at Caribbean Free Radio)

In this respect, bloggers are journalists. Journalists are constantly on the sell, whether freelancers or staffers. They’re selling the story to their editor, their editors are selling it to their editors, those folks are selling it to the public. What winds up happening is that sometimes stories of marginal worth are filtered out. But what happens just as often is that stories get spiked in favor of the “top ten” or the more lurid. I think GVO editors have an obligation to make certain that the full range of stories from their areas are being told. This is no easy feat, but it’s integral.

If you have an agenda and strong opinion, you’ll just find something to confirm your opinion. I’m trying to get around that; it’s very hard. (Lisa Goldman, Israeli blogger at On The Face)

It’s great if you feel your opinions are being given no credence in the world at large to find people who think as you do. However as a GVO regional editor, I think Lisa has it spot on. You simply must include divergent opinions. That’s not to say you need to engage in the increasingly useless he said-she said that is one of the logical fallacies of the traditional press. I think you can include without endorsing or without implying that each opinion has the same weight of fact or common sense or adoption by people in the area. And I think there is a place for opinion in a GVO round-up. By opinion I mean a mediating voice saying, “All this notwithstanding, I (Lisa or Haitham or Sokari, etc.) believe X is most likely.” After all, there is a comment section, right?

“How do we make sure people trust what we’re doing? As we try to call attention… perhaps making sure we’re not calling attention to false voices/disinformation. Also, what is the responsibility of bloggers?” (RM)

Trust your readers. I cannot emphasize this enough. When people read John Burns, as an example, sure, they probably give him some credence because of his association with the New York Times (for those whom the NYT is considered credible, at any rate; probably a smaller number now than in previous years). But I think most do so because of the inherent believability of his reports. Reading him over time people build up a sense of trust. To me there is no real difference between “John Burns” (who, for all I know, is actually Ambrosia FitzSimmons-Smythe) and “Zimpundit” (who, for all I know, is actually John Burns).

My point is: Trust your readers. And to do that, of course, you have to listen to them. GVO is fast becoming a brand in much the same way (though hopefully with fewer instances of post-holing) that NYT is a brand. The GVO regional editors need to use the full arsenal of their brains, not least when listening to the reaction of their readers.

The blogosphere will arrive at the same time as traditional media. So we now have an opportunity to build completely fused media. (John West—sorry, don’t know who he is.)

This is intriguing. For some reason it worries me a bit. One of the reasons that traditional media has responded with some scrambling to blogging and other citizen media is that it provides a healthy threat to the same-old-same-old. I have a hard time believing that a for-profit organization, especially a media one, is going to do anything in this profit-driven era that is not directly traceable to an increase in profit (as illustrated on a spreadsheet somewhere, perhaps in Hell). Will it give the illusion of feedback without any of the messy top-of-the-lungs vitality of blogging? I don’t have the answer to that. (I know. I’m as shocked as you.)

We’re at a point where we can shape the future. One of the reasons I’m here instead of at my old job is I believe we [can do this]. (RM)

Can I get a amen?

You have to recognize that I’m learning, you’re learning. (David Sasaki, Americas editor for GVO, has the decency, self-respect and common sense to be from the Pacific Northwest, a blogger (residing in Mexico) at oso, moreno, abogado)

GVO can’t be afraid to take chances. Chances sometimes result in mistakes. People learn from mistakes. They’re embarrassing and sometimes damaging. They should be avoided when unnecessary and embraced when necessary. GVO is based at a large American educational establishment, a place where a drive for consensus can sometimes result in timiditiy. Most people out there blogging whom GVO rounds up are not in that place. They’re out in some pretty wild and wooly areas on the verges, margins and borders of communication. (That’s right. I got a thesaurus.) It’s important not to neglect to synch up with these people.

One thing we need as journalists, other than more hugs, is training. One of the question’s I always have, using a blog in the newsroom: how do I know I can trust that? Interesting b/c it’s something journalists learn in journalism school; you have to face this every day when standing in front of a person, to look at a thousand non-verbal cues; and those cues exist on blogs too. You live in the blogosphere, so you know these things…you know what [the cues] are… What would be a tremendous resource for journalists who are getting started…– it’s all in the journalists judgment on what they should rely and on what they shouldn’t — would be if you could put together an guide on all these things that you just know that we couldn’t be expected to. (Brendan Greeley, journalist, editor of the U.S. Public Radio Exchange blog)

Putting up an “approved by GVO” badge creates a whole slough of problems. I don’t think that’s a great idea, to do it officially. Guides are fine. I’ve written (or edited rather) my share. But I think primarily it’s going to be experience reading them that will do the trick for journalists; they’re readers too, after all. I wonder if a training session on how to read and use blogs as a journalist might be more useful than a guide. I mean, a guide’s fine, but I bet there are a lot of people who attended the London summit who learned as much about a person in an hour over dinner than 10 hours reading their blog.

What I ask my colleagues to do is, “take out ‘blogger’ and put in ‘first-person eyewitness’…”and they’re a lot more comfortable with that. (DW)

This is a very good point, and meshes well with the notion of citizen media.

Part of the problem we’re confronted with jointly, is how to build more really vibrant, dynamic blogospheres. If our whole job is to point to conversations, we need them to take place. (Ethan Zuckerman, cofounder of GVO and American blogger at My Heart’s in Accra)

Regarding this point, and several made later about blogging penetration, why not ask the regional editors to secure volunteers and arrange trips to the countryside, or wherever blogging has yet to catch on? These traveling bloggers could act as an ambassadorial deputation from the blogosphere? Each area they visit will have different concerns. Perhaps some funding could be found to provide traveling money and set up some of these areas with needed tech a la Geekcorps. (Blogcorps?)

There was this dinner I was at with Roba and Haitham in Amman; everyone was saying, this is great; we all know each other, we’re excited, but we’re all from West Amman. So how do we make this broader? (EZ)

I presume West Amman is the tony part of town. And that points out an interesting, and to some extent neglected question: How can GVO promote and involve not just “other cultures” (than North American and Western European) in blogging, but other cultures within those cultures, such as ethnic and religious minorities and the poor (sometimes one and the same). This is exceedingly important, I think. If you don’t see to these people, find some way to bring them aboard, it’s all well-heeled Americans talking to well-padded Jordanians talking to well-funded Malaysians. It’s better than nothing but it’s a far cry from good enough. GVO editors need to get out and get people other than their peers blogging. Perhaps in certain cases they can invite these computerless bloggers over to use their tech? Perhaps they can go out in the community and interview 10 people each, every week, for a year—people who are different from them in economic level, religion, ethnicity, gender, politics—and post each week to a blog designed for that purpose.

Sometimes I think there’s too much concern over how ‘transformative’ blogging can be for Kenya or for politics; I look at it on an individual basis – what does it mean for someone who didn’t have this space before to have this space suddenly? (Ory Okolloh, GVO regional editor and Kenyan blogger at Kenyan Pundit)

Should we try to be focusing on making people have political and social blogs, and less personal blogs? (EZ)

Hell no.

GVO needs to honor the different ways in which people use blogging and other elements of citizen media. There’s nothing dishonorable about kitty-blogging. (Personally, I think kitties are adorable and anyone who doesn’t is welcome to a taste of my Ham-Sized Whirling Fists of Kitten-Lovin’ Fury.™*) I would rather read an honest, creative, passionate blog about kitties than a clanking robot of a blog about a country’s politics written as though for penance.

Also, force-feeding “what’s good for you” to bloggers who love their kitties is like the kind of fantastically unsuccessful top-down “aid” that has been given in places like Africa. GVO has to balance a top-down approach (all the bloggers who’re very familiar with how to blog and what blogging can do sharing) with a bottoms-up approach (I love kitties, damn it and that’s what I want to blog about!).

(*I’m kidding. I love you all very much and I wouldn’t hurt a fly.)

“A surplus of bloggers and shortage of blogees.” How can we direct the national attention to blogs that are consistent, accurate, thoughtful, and useful? (GP)

Man this is a good question. You know what? I don’t have an answer. (Get used to it people!) But I’ll give it some thought.

There are very true life experiencs out there, waiting to be translated. (Shahram Kholdi, Iranian blogger, resident in U.K. who blogs at S’Can-Iranic)

A-freaking-men, brother. Let’s not ever forget our humanity in this discussion. (“Comfort the afflicted and keep them from harm / let the aged be protected and the infants be strong—Go for it!)

The blogosphere has more than just regional blogospheres. (D. ?)

I don’t necessarily think rotating regional bloggers around makes a lot of sense. However, the addition of subject editors might be very useful. The mere fact that there are only regional bloggers implies that GVO is built like the foreign bureau of a news organization. But like any good medium, the blogosphere has info on—say it with me—kitties, and wine and beer and the punky rocky music the kids go all gaga for, and gardening, international trade, transportation, cryptography, charismatic megafauna, meteorology, logistics and Andalucian agronomy. Why not assign editors to find that information and point to it?

There’s a really interesting idea that’s part of this – that a Chinese Global Voices might not just be translations of what’s on the English Global Voices, but also news and tools and discussions specific to the Chinese blogosphere. (EZ)

There is no substitute for figuring it out yourself, for being given the tools and translating something yourself. But people can’t do this for everything. I think a combination of some straight translations and some tools would be optimal. The idea that Pat Hall suggests for a “translate this” tab is great. Machine-translations are sucky, but sometimes you want to know at least the gist of something right now, something you might not take the trouble to come back to. So I’m not sure machine translations should be pitched out, as faulty as they are.

It seems it would make sense for a community to use the model and initiate it themselves and officiate it rather than being all under the Global Voices hosted site. (RM)

Whether it’s the dream of a translation service that works within it or a Global Voices Español; the weight is on your shoulders. We can find ways to collaborate, to cooperate, to give feedback. It’s also an invitation from everybody here to use this as a platform. (EZ)

I wonder how much would happen without the GVO imprimatur? And of those undertakings, how many would find fuel to continue on for an appreciable length? Something to consider. Part of the pay-off for some GVO-allied bloggers may be the international attention and the unspoken stamp of approval. On the other hand, I think you also need to be careful how much you agree to “collaborate, to cooperate.” It may imply a closer relationship than you can actually provide.

Also, b/c the Global Voices blog isn’t interesting to me, recently… it’s full of
reporting, regional reporting they’re important, but not interesting to read.
I’d suggest moving this kind of regular reporting to another part; not the main
part of the page; and only have interesting writing, posts on the page that
would be great. (Hossein Derakhshan, Iranian-Canadian blogger at Editor: Myself)

It seems to me that GVO has done a great job among bloggers. It seems that they are likely to continue to do that job, to add elements and experiments and personnel. But without readers who aren’t involved it will turn into poetry. I mean that it will only be read by the producers. It has to be relevant or useful to people outside the pale in order to truly be that something new we all want it to. An effort should be made to make GVO a part of every child’s healthy breakfast.

Take money from right-wingers provided that you pursue the transparency you’re talking about… I don’t see the problem there; if it’s visible, if it’s disclosed… let people make their own decisions. I don’t agree with them on much, but let’s hear what they want to say. (Dan Gillmor, American blogger at Bayosphere)

There’s a tipping point in an undertaking like this after which the “liberal” label is stuck on for good. I would probably be more likely called a liberal than anything else. But I’m not. I’m independent. If Global Voices condemns one political stripe as unworthy of being listened to, why wouldn’t it find another to dismiss? If the leadership changes will it be all Little Green Footballs all the time? The reductionism that’s plagued American political life for the last years should be denied entry. If that upsets some people, so be it. There are many citizen media organizations expressly designed for people who pop a gasket anytime they’re contradicted. Let people who refuse to dirty themselves with argument or who can’t do so while retaining an elemental human dignity and respect look elsewhere.

***

One thing I forgot to mention, until I was reminded by Rebecca’s post, is that there was relatively little mention made of the threats to bloggers working under repressive regimes. The dangers these bloggers struggle with are real and mounting. Just ask Mojtaba or Omid. As politically sensitive as these matters are, they should be part of the mix. If every blogger associated with GVO were to take an active interest in this aspect of international blogging, it could only help.

Here are a few really interesting ideas that I was turned on to by Rebecca’s and Ethan’s posts:

Lucy Hooberman’s pledge on Pledgebank to “mentor a minimum of two people in the developing world in the area of my skills base and expertise (media, communications, broadcasting, democratic media building, participatory media, community video). ” This is an excellent idea. Please consider signing on.

The Global Voices post-summit brainstorm wiki. For those who think I just made up that phrase, it’s a website we can all edit, about what international blogging should be about, specifically as it relates to the Global Voices experiment.

Farid Pouya’s Blogologue project. Blogologue is “a place where bloggers from different countries communicate and exchange ideas about one or several topics. Probably a first Bloglogue section will be launched on Globalvoices where American bloggers & Iranian bloggers share their ideas about hot topics: Iran nuclear crisis, Democracy in US and so on. If you know American bloggers who are interested about Iran please let me know: faridpouya(at)gmail(dot)com” My fellow Americans, do not quail before Farid, denizen of the axis of evil though he may be. For, lo!, thou shalt open up thy pie hole and let fly!

To quote from one of my favorite movies, “I, for one, am very interested… to see… what’s going to happen next.”

Technorati Tags: gv2005, globalvoices

Curt Hopkins

Treasury of Chinese Love Poems

Update: Here’s a curious fact. This post is by far the most popular on a blog I’ve been keeping for over four years. It has been viewed over three times more than the next most popular post. I wonder why. Is it because there are quite a lot of Chinese web users? But if so, why read a post in English about a translation into that language of classical Chinese poetry? Is it English-speaking members of the Chinese diaspora researching poems to add to their wedding ceremonies? Or is it the publication of my own incredibly wonderful poem? (That’s the most likely, wouldn’t you agree?) I would be curious to find out. So, if you wouldn’t mind leaving a comment when you visit telling me why you were interested in this post, I would be grateful.

***

I just read Qiu Xiaolong’s “Treasury of Chinese Love Poems.” It exceeded my hopes. It was really quite excellent. My previous relationship with Chinese poems was primarily through Rexroth’s “One Hundred Poems from the Chinese” (especially the excellent Wu Tsao) and an occasional Pound hilarity.

Then I started reading Qiu’s Shanghai political police procedurals*, in which he is constantly interpolating classical, as well as modern, Chinese verse. (The “hero” of the books, is a poet as well as a police inspector.) A “refugee” of sorts, he remained in the US where he was studying after the events of Tiananment. His biography is interesting reading.

When we read poems, Asian poems anyway, we expect them to be “emblems.” Any more English readers have accepted that poems in their language are going to be diary entries, language experiments or something equally non-magical. Picking up this book I expected both that incantatory experience and yet expected to be disappointed. Neither happened really. These are actually poems. You can hold them in your hand. They are things, which poems rarely are anymore. It’s considered something of a failure these days if you’re poem is not a “process.” The problem with “processes” of course is that they’re not sharable. For that you need an unashamed artifact.

I’ll just give one example from the 70 or so poems. There isn’t a clunker among them, but I found about 15 to hold particular resonance for me. By the way, the great majority of these poems are from the Tang dynasty, are in two primary forms, and all by men (except one), mostly writing with a woman’s persona, “which,” to quote Abe Simpson, “was the fashion at the time” for love poems.

An Imperial Concubine Waiting at Night
by Li Bai (701-762)
Waiting, she finds her silk stockings
soaked with the dew drops
glistening on the marble steps.
Finally, she is moving
to let the crystal-woven curtain fall
when she casts one more glance
at the glamorous autumn moon.

Chinese poetry is filled with sleeves.

Qiu Xiaolong is an excellent poet himself, something I can say without having read yet his original poetry. It’s not possible to do creditable translations if you cannot write poetry yourself. One example will due, from “Deep Courtyard,” “Tearfully, I ask the flowers,/who do not answer,/in a riot of red falling over the swing.”

These poems have great lines, or extraordinary moments, or mournful atmospheres. There’s something in each poem to recommend it.

Here’s a poem I wrote, in part a reaction to these poems.

The Tang Period
By Curt Hopkins

The poem is a magic object,
A white-silver pearl, in which
A memory or moment is caught,
Captured and preserved.

Not for the sake of time itself,
But for the way our souls light up
Touching the suspension
Of an irrevocable instant.

Above the road the sky softens,
Glowing like purple vellum,
And from the cloud the moon breaks,
Seeking its truer self, her face.

Documentary Company & Projects

I’m considering various names for my fictional production company.

Five South

Global Wig Out Productions

Clang Association

Fugue State Expeditions

Idée Fixe

Sponge on a Stick

Sacromonte Productions – Hay que tener arte

Pyroclastic Events Management

Glass Master

King Thistle

Disposable Ensign

Stop Drop & Roll

Flambango

Rude Boy

***
Here are some projects I’d like to tackle.

My Life on the Holy Mountain: Manolín in Granada (the Gypsies of Granada, Spain)

A Good Man is Hard to Find: Luis in El Salvador (the effect of the civil war on a wealthy Salvadoran family)

State of the Nations (visit each of the over 500 federally recognized Indian tribes in the U.S.)

Dope: From Seed to Stem (follow marijuana from a seed planted in the Hawaiian highlands to a joint being smoked by a buyer in L.A.)

The Scorpions: South Africa’s Modern Day Untouchables (the Directorate of Special Investigations is said to be uncorruptable and impossible to intimidate)

Among the Peoples of the Book: Three Years of Study with Christians, Muslims & Jews

Ask Jeeves: The Start Up, Fall and Rebirth of an Internet Company (pretty self-explanatory; I was the ninth full-time hire at Jeeves)

The Memory Palace: Andalucia in Muslim Memory

Lorca’s Granada

Hugo Ball: The Man in the Gray Metal Suit (the very first documentary about dadaism and a dadaist that does not reduce everything to a tidy explanation: punch yourself in the face and drop dead)

Afro Punk

Berlin: there’s a great deal of talk, especially by the German political and cultural establishment, about the “new Jewish” Berlin, though most of it consists of non-observant Russian refugees; it would be interesting to counterpoint the hand-wringing enthusiasms of Der Mann with the wry attitudes and experiences of members of this grand new renaissance and the possible realities of yet another episode of Slavophilia.

Getting a House: a series that tackles the history and meaning of home ownership.
How we define a home and who we allow to own one says a great deal about our society, about who is included and excluded. Various episodes would cover the following topics:

• Classical Greece and the seclusion of women.
• Rome: the enfranchisement of slaves, disenfranchisement of farmers and property awards to soldiers; the “public” and “private” rooms of a Roman house.
• The “closed gardens” of Arabic Spain.
• The reconstruction era of the American South: freed slaves and the Exodusters.
• Pre-independence southern Africa and the experience of later leaders with initial housing injustice.
• Contemporary predatory lending practises.
• Booms and busts in housing speculation, including the current one.

***

I’ve written up basic pitches for several television shows, including Dressing for Dinner, Hell Hole and The Siam Society.

Technorati Tags: tv, tv_pilot, documentary

Curt Hopkins

Anthology of Granadine Poetry

I would love to put together an anthology of poets who were born or lived in Granada, Spain. I could include Shmuel Ha Nagid, Pedro Soto de Rojas, Solomon ben Judah ibn Gabirol, Judah Ben Shmuel Ha Levi, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Guillén and many others. Granada has had a remarkable ability over the centuries to draw to it or produce from it poets of great power. The place is… different than other places.

Technorati Tags: Spain, al_Andalus, Sephardic, Sefarad, Andalucia, Granada, Andalusia, poetry, anthology

Curt Hopkins

New and Improved Gypsies of Granada Book Proposal (My Life on the Holy Mountain)

[Here is a piece on the same subject I wrote for Salon.]

[And here is what Prof. L.P. Harvey said about one of my models for this book, Richard Ford's Handbook for travellers in Spain: "I am glad to see that Ford still has the capacity to set people thinking. They don't make guide books like that any more."]

My Life on the Holy Mountain: A Book Proposal

I have had this idea in mind for a long time. No one seems as interested in it as me, alas (alack). So, here it is. Admittedly, the “sample chapter” is a bit slapdash. Here is a better look at the topic.

A brief description of the book:

“My Life on the Holy Mountain” is a biography of Manolin Heredia Heredia, my oldest friend in the Sacromonte, an angelic picaro from an ancient Gypsy family, famous for their musicians. Manolin, in his mid-thirties, unmarried, with no prospects, member of a culture that is alternately despised and worshipped, is one of the happiest sad men I’ve ever known. As the Gypsies themselves say, he has the joy of being sad.

The book will cover not just Manolin’s life and struggles, but that of the community as a whole, the Gypsies of The Sacromonte, or “Holy Mountain,” a barrio on the hills on the north side of Granada, Spain where this people has lived for over 500 years.

Their unique culture, full of a passion for creating, is under-represented outside of the most vulgar or romantic books and movies. Metal work, guitar making, horse trading, lying, story telling, singing, dancing and drinking are all arts in the Sacromonte.

As Washington Irving put it almost two centuries ago, “Indeed, all this part of Andalucia abounds with such game-looking characters. Great gossips, great smokers, apt at touching the guitar.”

This story is the story of Manolin, but also of his community, of the Gypsy, of the force of imagination and freedom in a restrictive world. It is also the story of history – the history of Spain, of the Moors, the Jews, the Reconquista, of Europe, of India, of Arabia – a story of survival, cultural power, minority-majority conflict and dialogue.

The book will be a narrative, the story of Manolin, but it will necessarily also be a book about ideas – art, history, cultural survival. I have outlined possible chapters below, but please keep in mind this narrative that will hold all the cultural material in a meaningful context – the life of a man.

The manuscript details:

The book will contain approximately 11 chapters with approximately 250 pages. Each chapter should take about a week and a half to write, so the book should take about four months to complete. Research will take several addition months, bringing the book in at around six or seven months.

List of possible chapter titles:

Chapter 1: Un Gitano Legitimo (A Real Gypsy) Introduction to Manolin and to myself; our relationship.

Chapter 2: Hay Que Tener Arte (You Gotta Have Art) The function of art in Gypsy culture, the immediacy and ‘practical’ nature of their relationship to expression that makes it a part of living culture; stories of the great artists of past and present in the Sacromonte. Manolin’s birth and introduction into art as a method of cultural survival.

Chapter 3: Los Paredes de Jericho (The Walls of Jericho) Granada’s Gypsies through their history, from Arabic times through Franco and up to and including the landslide and current conflict with the city of Granada. The forces of history in Manolin’s life.

Chapter 4: Tiene Historia (He Has History) The story of Gabriel – his birth, death and rebirth. Manolin vs. one Gypsy ideal.

Chapter 5: Humanos Son Humanos (People Are People) The story of Manuel the Bricklayer and his sons and daughters. Manolin vs. the other Gypsy ideal.

Chapter 6: Los Hijos de Benjemi (The Sons of Benjemi)The clans of the Sacromonte and how they fight. Where Manolin stands in the complex politics of the Sacromonte.

Chapter 7: Cante Jondo (Deep Song) The development of cante jondo and flamenco music – the siege of heaven. Soundtrack to Manolin’s life.

Chapter 8: Caras Famosas (Famous Faces) The world looks at Granada and the Sacromonte, visitors who’ve been taken — Washington Irving, Prosper Merimee, John Ford, Malcolm Cowley and Glinka. Tourists, travelers and Manolin.

Chapter 9: Sr. Heredia Va a Madrid (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) The political power of half a million Spanish Gypsies and the fight against racism in Granada, Spain, Europe and the world. Manolin’s nascent political consciousness.

Chapter 10: Verdes Voces (Green Voices) Love, courtship, marriage – and Manolin’s “Ay, no hay chicas?” Manolin’s salvation and damnation.

Chapter 11: “Tenemos Que Irnos, Pero Granada Queda” (“We Must Leave, But Granada Remains”) Leave-taking and some notes on the future – of Manolin, the Gypsies of the Sacromonte and of Granada. Hope springs eternal. History is a heartless machine.

The Market:

A book on the Gypsies of the Sacromonte will be popular for a number of interrelated reasons. First, Gypsies have been made popular by, among others, Isabel Fonesca in her book “Bury Me Standing.” This book, however, was about Eastern European Gypsies.

Secondly, flamenco music, the characteristic art of Southern Spain’s Gitanos, made increasingly popular through Carlos Saura’s movies, the records of Ketama and other young players, has created an unfilled hunger for information on the people who make it. This book is, by necessity, a book on the flamenco subculture. This is in line with a general tendency toward appreciating the cultural products of the world’s varied peoples.

The final reason is the sheer paucity in English of books on Spanish Gypsies, ironically, the very Gypsy people with the most to offer culturally.

Generally speaking, the Western reading public deeply reveres examples of life lived “authentically,” of lives lived for deeper values. Hay que tener arte, say the Gypsies. You must have art. And the American book-buying public agrees.

And that same public has been primed by books like “Memoirs of a Geisha” to read history through personal narrative.

About the author:

Curt Hopkins is a playwright and poet who has spent the last decade working in the Internet industry and as a journalist. He has had essays, plays and poems published in Exquisite Corpse, Bluelawn, Amelia, Catalyst, Timberline, Dada and Big Talk. He has had plays produced at New City New Playwrights Festival in Seattle and Northwest Playwrights Festival in Oregon. He is co-founder of Emergency Horse Magazine and of the Big Time Poetry Theatre and The Making House/AutoImaginary Clown.com theatre groups. His journalism has been published in Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Salon, Seattle Times, The Rocket, New Times and many other magazines and newspapers. He lived for a year among the Gypsies of the Sacromonte barrio in Granada, Spain. He has visited many times since then.

He has written previously about the Gypsies of Granada in Salon.

Sample chapter:

Every story purporting to be true is a story of memory. I have told so many lies about Spain, omitted so much that would be injurious to me, built up around the bad memories and superimposed, telescoped and colorized so much, that it will be a miracle indeed if I am able to tell the plain truth. And maybe the plain truth is not what a reader needs, or a writer. It’s possible that the construction in words of an atmosphere and a structure that the reader can gain from entering, and can enter at all, requires the relegation of the truth to the status of an incidental. But I don’t think so. I think there is some value to trying to tell oneself, and others, the truth. So I will try. In the end perhaps it will be a matter of which Me wins – the confessor or the writer. They are not always the same and they do not always share the same goals and values.

Spain made me. No, that’s not true, though it sounds good. Spain brought to the surface the best and the worst of me. That “worst” part bothers me. The egotism, selfishness, blindness, temper, sharp tongue, the dismissive, contemptuous, frightened and impotent part of me, that flails and lashes out against the chaos of living, that would rather put its eyes out than stare into the incomprehensibility of it all, that part escapes and catches on fire and to this day I have to stay on guard to keep it from flaring up again and burning those I love. And still, I am not always successful. But I am, however marginally, a better person, more aware, stronger than I was before I knew Spain, before, more accurately, I came to know Granada.

By now, Granada is more a religion, or at least a cathedral, than a place to me. Granada rescued me by condemning me to see myself, and the world, as it is, or rather, as I always suspected it was, and was always told it was not. Granada showed me that joy was not an indulgence, but rather the point of life. If my evocation seems a bit purple and extravagant to you, sitting in your office or on your deck or in your coffee shop, surrounded by career worries and plans and money or its absence, your life full of necessities and pragmatism, no-nonsense and proud in your adulthood, having put childish things behind you, prideful of your ability to see through the fairy tales and take things “head on,” well, I blame Granada, and I give it the credit. But the place has grown, in the intervening years since 1987, abstract. And that’s not right. Granada holds, breeds, feeds abstracts, or non-physical, metaphysical realities, but it is not itself anything but made of stone, water, flowers, wind, music, food, vino mosto, language – things you can touch, taste, hear, smell. It’s real.

My way back from the abstract to the real is to tell you about Manolin. Manolin is Spain, he is Granada, and he is, despite the warp of light around him that will surely result in passing him from the Camino del Sacromonte through my mind and memory to you, quite real indeed, I assure you. Manolin is no idea, no symbol. He is a man.

To say Manolin comes from a family of famous musicians would be like saying someone from Amish Pennsylvania comes from a famous farming family. In South Africa, they mine diamonds. In Jiangsu, they produce silk. In the Sacromonte, they make music.

Manolin has been my friend for over ten years. His friendship has been one of those that changes your life, that remakes the scope of what is possible in your life. I first went to Granada with no knowledge of what a Gypsy was. I left knowing what it is to be Gypsy, ser gitano. Manolin has been my Virgil in a journey that seemed on the outside to be an attempt to understand the Gypsy people, their barrio of the Sacromonte, the city and state of mind that is Granada. But it was really a process of coming face-to-face for the first time with me, and with death. For that, above all else, is the purview of the Gypsy.

The Sacromonte, or “Holy Mountain,” clings to the hills on the south of Granada, Spain, a city its 17th century poet Pedro Soto de Rojas, called “paradise closed to many .” The Sacromonte itself was described by another native son, the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, as “the lost village in the Andalucia of cries.” It is a community of caves dug out of the hillsides and whitewashed. There we lived – my wife Susan, my friend Ian and I – first in a cave with dirt floors, then in a villa that used to host the legends of flamenco – Sabicas, Mario Escudero, Cameron, Paco de Lucia, Tomatito, Pepe Habichuela. From the terrace of this villa one could look across the lush tropical ravine of the Darro River and see, at night, the broken tower of the Silla del Moro and the sharp outlines of the Generalife and Alhambra palaces, lit up first by the fading sun, then, later, by electric lights.

Here Manolin was born, in a house at the intersection of the Cuesta del Chapiz – the road to the ancient Arabic quarter of Albaicin – and the Camino del Sacromonte. The house, which has stood in the same place and the same form for 500 years is a tiled apartment around a carmen or atrium garden. It stands as a sentinel between what is easily known and what is unknowable. Here the tourists, both foreign and Spanish, divide to the antique Arab gate and the Mirador de San Nicolas or to the Sacromonte. Either way they choose they will see the light as it plays over the glazed surface of the pottery embedded in the plaster, the copper ladles hanging from the cave roofs, the hammered gold and silver of the Darro in its weedy reaches.

There are few doors into the private carmenes of Gypsy life in this place where architecture is less in service to society than to a drunkenness of the soul. Gypsys are well aware of how to manipulate non-Gypsy images of the mysterious, dangerous, knife-wielding, palm-reading picaro. One of those few doors in it seems is to show up without any such images in your head, as we did. I had heard the world ‘Gypsy’ but had no idea what images I was supposed to be seeing so I saw none. We had no money, so we couldn’t get taken. We had no appointments to keep so we couldn’t be late.

Manolin and I sat on the wall overlooking the school yard one summer afternoon passing an Aguila and a pack of Fortunas back and forth. Behind us, over our left shoulder, on the hill where the monastery of the Sacromonte sat the olive trees rippled green to white with every breeze. He pointed across the Valparaiso, his blue-black hair shading his coffee-colored face.

“See that hill?” he asked, indicating a green and yellow ridge full of prickly pear, wild olive and agave. “That used to be full of Gypsies. You could see the smithing fires from here, and they could see ours. Look behind you.” He turned over his right shoulder and pointed his bottle of beer up past the Vereda en Medio Alta and the hand-pumped fountain. A smear like a giant hand could be seen all the way down through the re-build.

“In 1964 we had rains like we’d never seen. The whole hillside came down. A man and his grandson were buried right there where that cave is now.” So the government, he said, moved half the barrio out to a dusty shantytown in the Vega. It was supposed to be temporary but they remain there. The Sacromonte pays the price for the heartlessness of nature and man both.

Below us the kids squeaked and clapped, running after a red-and-white soccer ball as the habit-clad nuns kept them from rolling off into the ravine or sneaking off for cigarettes. Kiki called from Los Faroles, “I got a tortilla in the oven!” Later, later! We told him. His mother, clad in the black dress of the widow, sat in a cane chair beside the bar, tatting lace. The four-stroke of an old Renault unwound as a driver shifted down on the turn, honking once at Manolin. “My primo, Eduardo,” he said. Explanation enough. Silence descended as Kiki clanged shut the iron gate of his bar, the children disappeared back into the classrooms and the car made the turn by La Faraona. The sky overhead was the improbable robin’s-egg of a Titian painting.

Manolin Heredia Heredia, I thought, looking at my closest friend, angelic picaro from an ancient family. Manolin “tiene la alegria de estar triste.” He has the joy of being sorrowful. He’s a brooding, tender soul, quick to laugh, out with his feelings, open-handed, suspicious, naïve, easy-to-offend, forgiving. The Abadia bell rings lauds, vespers and compline and in the silence afterward the smoke of blond tobacco and the tower of the muezzin under the magnified stones of the stream.

Juanillo waved from the green balcony of his restaurant. Juanillo was a leader in the community and owner of the best restaurant in the barrio. He had a beautiful wife and polio-stricken leg. Sometimes we hung out after the restaurant closed, Manolin, La Susana, Ian and I, sitting on the terrace playing the guitar, singing soleás, drinking sherry in the humid summer night air, the sigh of wind through the trees on the riverbank far below us.

Around us stitching in and out of sight and weaving the material of the Sacromonte together were the people. Rarely does an invidual have the sight to see the hidden raices of his life. Here they were like the everyday miracles of the Hebrew prophets. Ratón, on-street hash connection and a singer of unusual power. Manuel, construction worker, singer and father of the dancer Belen. Gabriel, archangel who served seven years in the carcel under Franco, scars like a raised, white spider web across his chest from an attack by a grieving woman. The angry American who stole money from us and occasioned a show-down with the Guardia Civil. Pilar, the black widow. Mondeja, the painter and his arch-enemy Antonio, who nearly came to blows over whose carnations were more beautiful.

Hay que tener arte, the Gypsies say. You must have art.

We believe love is real, sometimes we believe G)d is real, we believe when we’re young in things like art and freedom. But in Granada you do not have to operate on faith. Those things are real like water is real, like the agave and figs on the hillside are real. You can touch them. You do not have to believe in them any longer. You can pull them up by the roots.

I had first come to Granada with Ian, who had discovered flamenco and cante jondo music, the Gypsy-figured music of Southern Spain that united elements of Byzantine liturgy, Andalucian folk song, Arabic music and Jewish prayer, while working alone in the middle of the snow and coyotes at the Pine Mountain Observatory in Central Oregon. There, alone under the cold echoing dome, tracking the stars, he had discovered his own rhythms and progressions he later discovered to be solea and bulerias. For years I was bothered by Spain. It hung in the corner of my mind like a dream I couldn’t shake.

*************************

I stood by the open train window, the overnight from Madrid. Over the fractured, broken land of the southern La Mancha plains Quixote’s windmills and villages of white blocks turned slowly on the red earth. It wouldn’t be long, the slow rise at the end of the plain, the drop into the verdant trough of the vega, the Moorish castles broken apart atop the weathered crowns of the hills. Then, the city itself, laid out like jewelry against the backdrop of the hide-scraper peaks of the everwhite Sierra Nevada…

Hoax Poets: A Book Proposal

Inspired in part by Scoble and Israel’s The Red Couch, I am posting my book proposal, such as it is. Earlier, I posted a sample chapter on Thomas Chatterton. So, to the hundreds of editors who regularly read this blog: please contact me if you are interested in a history of poetic frauds with an attendant anthology. And who wouldn’t be? Really, it’s just common sense.

***

Hoax Poets is a book about a different kind of writer. Each chapter discusses a different person writing under a manufactured identity in order to spoof popularly accepted poetic sensibilities and standards. Some writers were satirists giving ruthless comeuppance to the arbiters of taste, some were merely pranksters looking for a bit of fun and others were devoted to recreating a past that never existed as a “harsh corrective” to the short-comings of their own age. But no matter the motivation, all of them successfully hoodwinked readers into embracing works that were something less than genuine.

Why do we want to read hoaxical poetry? Hoax poetry not only defies our literary standards and tests the integrity of our taste, it challenges our very faith in the relevance of the artistic act itself. Such challenges demand intelligent, thoughtful response, and serious readers of literature welcome the intellectual stimulus that a hoax poem offers. In addition, we naturally have an enduring fascination with hoaxes, wherever and whenever they are revealed. Why else have the Hitler Diaries, Howard Hughes’ Will, and Piltdown Man continued to grip our imagination many years after being declared bogus by authorities? At some level we admire the hoaxer. Just as we might respect an outlaw’s audacity or an art thief’s daring, we respect the hoaxer’s ability to reveal ourselves to ourselves—render naked our gullibility and puncture our pomposity.

Currently, there are no books about hoax poetry on the market. With Hoax Poets, we wish to fill that void. The popularity of recent titles such as The Professor and the Madman, The Web of Words, and Ether Day has demonstrated that audiences are eager for books that spotlight neglected areas of our culture. We believe that the mystery, intrigue, humor, and audacity inherent in our focus will be appealing to a wide range of readers. Formally, another option we may wish to consider is that of an anthology with each entry prefaced by a short essay.

Enclosed is a detailed table of contents that indicates the scope and vision of Hoax Poets. I have also enclosed a sample chapter, on Thomas Chatterton, that will give you some idea of the tone and inherent interest of these stories.

Hoax Poets: A Literary History of Manufactured Identities.
Table of Contents

Chapter One. An introductory chapter consisting both of a survey as well as analysis will open this first-ever literary history of poetic hoaxes. This analysis will discuss who perpetrates poetic hoaxes and toward what end. It will examine the intended results of these hoaxes and the actual results. The chapter will be the first complete assessment of poetic hoaxes and will appeal to the bright, demanding general reader, due to its humor and drama and the new light it throws on literature, the map of human thought.

Note: Each subsequent chapter will explain the anatomy of the hoax: who did the hoaxing, why, who got hoaxed, how, who exposed the hoax and what the outcome of the hoax and its exposure was.

Below are the first possible eight hoaxes; others may include Mlle. Malerais de la Vigne, Bob Folder, Trabeus and Hardy-knute.

Chapter Two. “Ossian, the Son of Fingal,” perpetrated by James McPherson. (1760s)
An 18th century minor Scottish poet named James Macpherson published what he claimed were fragments of an ancient Scots Gaelic epic poem. He fooled titans of the time such as Goethe and Napoleon. Samuel Johnson, poet and critic, and philosopher David Hume decried the hoax, but were not proven right until the 19th century.

Chapter Three. “Thomas Rowley,” perpetrated by Thomas Chatterton. (1769)
Chatterton was an 18th century golden boy, praised by Wordsworth, Rosetti and Coleridge. His “discovery” of the poems in Bristol was disbelieved by Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray. A year later, he killed himself at age 18.

Chapter Four. “Bilitis,” perpetuated by Pierre Louys. (1894)
Louys was a French male author of the fin de siècle, a friend of the poet Paul Valery and the composer Claude Debussy. Taking advantage of the age’s rage for Hellenism, and for ‘decadence, Louys united the two elements in the construction of Bilitis, a Greek-Phoenician Lesbian poet. In his Bilitis manuscript, Les Chansons des Bilitis, and its introductory essay, thick with artificial scholarship, he represented the poet in her three “Classical” stages of maiden, nymph and crone: first as a lover of Sappho and other (in both senses) Lesbians, then as a courtesan, finally as an old woman.

Chapter Five. “Emanuel Morgan & Anne Knish,” perpetrated by Witter Bynner & Arthur Davison Ficke. (1916)
Perhaps the single most famous poet hoax, Bynner and Davison unleashed on the credulous world of modernist poetry a furious condemnation of poetic excess in the form of the “Spectra” movement. Taking in everyone from Edgar Lee Masters and William Carlos Williams to politicians on the campaign trail, Bynner and Davison wound up with an event that in itself was praised by Carl Sandburg as fine art. Most critics retained their feeling, even after the hoax was exposed, that Morgan and Knish were simply better poets than Bynner and Davison.

Chapter Six. “Earl Roppel,” perpetrated by Malcolm Cowley, S. Foster Damon. (1917)
Earl Roppel, “the ploughboy poet of Tioga county” was a hoax by the critic, poet and novelist Malcolm Cowley and his poet friend S. Foster Damon, as a response to the Spectra hoax. Roppel’s verse was stiff and faux-rural, extolling the virtues of America and nature. Among the achievements of this hoax was a letter of praise by Witter Bynner and the setting of one of the poems to music by a San Francisco composer and its subsequent, and non-ironic, debut where it was sung by 3,000 voices.

Chapter Seven. “Isidoro Capdepon Fernandez,” perpetrated by Federico Garcia Lorca & friends. (1920s)
Modern Spain’s most important poet, Federico García Lorca, held a tertulia at the Café Alameda in Granada for years where poets, scholars, musicians and others would meet to discuss art and life. A great booster and detractor of Spain in general and the city of Granada in particular, this Rinconcillo, or “Little Corner” created the personification of hopelessly outdated and florid academic poets in the person of Isidoro Capdepon Fernandez. Among other activities they put his name forward for a chair in the Royal Academy and succeeded in placing three articles on his work in a prestigious Madrid weekly.

Chapter Eight. “Ernest Malley,” perpetrated by James McAuley & Harold Stewart. (1944)
Two bored Australian officers stationed in-country during the Second World War, McAuley and Stewart created Malley as an expression of what they loathed most about their contemporary poets, such as Dylan Thomas and Henry Treece. Using lines culled from random documents on their desks and a dictionary of quotations, which they mangled and misattributed, and assigning him an early death, they gave the avant-garde what they believed they most wanted: a tragic hero. After their exposure, which was worldwide news, and the publication of Malley’s verse in Australia’s most important magazine, the Australian police seized the issue for obscenity! Of all the hoax poets, the reputation of “Malley’s” work has lasted the longest, supported by poets such as John Ashberry and Kenneth Koch.

Chapter Nine. “Araki Yasusada,” perpetrated by Kent Johnson. (1997)
A spectacularly successful, and very recent, hoax, Yasusada was made out to be a victim of Hiroshima. His ultra-modernist verse was embraced by the American poetic establishment whole-heartedly, including widespread publishing and praise in American Poetry Review and Grand Street and book plans by Wesleyan University Press. One of the hoax staples was used to create Yasusada, the mysterious notebooks of a dead poet. In the insulated world of hyper-specialized post-modern poetry and semiotic criticism, Yasusada was snapped up as an emblem and venerated. He was the Perfect Victim and when the hoax was exposed, the rage was humourless. The hoaxed spent hours and pages decrying the alleged hoaxer as little more than a racist and decrying the “criminal act.”

Chapter Ten. A concluding chapter will tie the individual instances, in which the tones or themes of hoaxing are visited with subtle difference, back into a single stream. What does hoaxing tell us about ourselves? About authorship, about identity?

hoax, poet, literature, book_proposal, books

Curt Hopkins