President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for Attorney General, Eric Holder, is in for a tough confirmation process. Republicans are balking at his role in the pardoning of Marc Rich, which was in Holder’s capacity as Deputy Attorney General to President Clinton. But he’s getting flack from the left, too, for brokering the deal on behalf of Chiquita to settle charges of material support of a Colombian terrorist paramilitary group.

It used to be that if a business engaged in criminal activity, the top decision makers would be put on trial and convicted or not, accordingly. But under the the Bush administration, companies can now just apply a greenback poultice directly to the federal treasury. Chiquita paid $25M after admitting to giving $1.7M over the course of six years to FARC and AUC. Holder represented Chiquita in the matter, and criticized the feds for requiring the company to pay any fine.

Our Fall 2007 issue included “The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt,” in which author Phillip Robertson explained the history of the business practices of Chiquita (née United Fruit) in Colombia. While Chiquita has defended its payments to FARC and AUC as protection for its employees, Robertson interviewed a former paramilitary fighter who says that Chiquita was knowingly running cocaine on their freighters and providing arms to terrorists. The families of 173 banana workers killed by the paramilitary groups are suing Chiquita, arguing that their admission to supporting terrorism means that they’re civilly liable for those deaths.

Senate Republicans say that they have no intention of filibustering Holder’s nomination, but with his already-weak support softening on both sides of the aisle, they may not need to. The hearings are scheduled to begin on January 8.

1. Austenbook:

• Caroline Bingley tagged Jane Bennet in her note Visit us at Netherfield.
• Jane Bennet finds herself very unwell. :(
• Elizabeth Bennet is going to stay at Netherfield with Jane.
• Louisa Hurst saw Elizabeth Bennet’s petticoat and is absolutely certain it was six inches deep in mud.
• Elizabeth Bennet is improving her mind by extensive reading.
• Charles Bingley created an event: Ball at Netherfield.

2. December is National Buy a Book by a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black Month:

Here is where you’ll be safely, carefully introduced to books written by black people. Now, don’t be alarmed. The books are written by black people, but like other books, they can be read by anybody. In fact, we WANT you to read our books. Don’t let the fact that publishers and booksellers put us in the back in the special section of the store scare you. They do that because they want African American readers to be able to find us easily, which is a good thing. However, it has come to our attention that it also puts some of the rest of you off.

(Via Literary Ladies Luncheon)

3. Rep. Nancy Pelosi has been variously quoted by 448 media outlets as saying, with regard to the auto industry bailout bill, “everybody has to take a haircut” and “we call this the barbershop: everybody’s getting a haircut here.” That turn of phrase left goyim around the nation scratching their heads. It turns out to have roots among American Jews, as hinted at by the “to take” construct, describing accepting a loss that is less than total. (A total loss being “to take a bath.”)

4. Amateur linguists and lexicographers will want to bookmark Grant Barrett’s Double-Tongued Dictionary, which chronicles the appearance of new words and phrases. Some of my favorite recent entries are “misery memoir,” “choreplay,” “Olympic Village Effect,” “gork,” and “take the number 11 bus.”

Robert Frost was published in VQR’s pages eleven times during his lifetime, ever since editor James Southall Wilson asked him for a poem to publish, back in 1927 (Frost sent “Acquainted with the Night”). Julia Kudravetz and Jon Schneider put together a history of VQR’s relationship with Robert Frost, with a narrative overview, high-quality scans of the original manuscripts, and the final text, as it appeared in our pages. “Acquainted with the Night,” “Iris by Night,” “The Figure in the Doorway,” “In the Time of Cloudburst,” “The Silken Tent,” “Time Out,” “To a Moth Seen in Winter,” “The Gift Outright,” “Directive,” “The Middleness of the Road,” and “Astrometaphysical” are all included.

Three weeks ago, New York magazine published an article called “Alone Together,” which used an array of statistical and scientific data to refute the myth of urban loneliness. Cities, writes author Jennifer Senior, are the “ultimate expression of our humanity, the ultimate habitat in which to be ourselves (which may explain why half the planet’s population currently lives in them).” One in every two New Yorkers live alone, she acknowledges, but living alone is not the same as being lonely—Manhattan is alive with “transient connections,” which aren’t always easily recognized. (Think of the synchronization of four hundred pairs of shoes across the floor of Grand Central, or the collective roar of the crowd at Yankee Stadium.)

The “myth” Senior is fighting to shatter, of course, is not scientific in origin. It is artistic; more specifically, it is literary. American novelists from Twain to Brett Easton Ellis have long employed New York City as metaphor, sometimes for romanticism, but more often for emptiness. (Senior quotes Twain, who called New York “a splendid desert—a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.”) In one strain of American literature, Manhattan is the place where particularly vivid idealism comes to die; its skyscrapers, high and jagged, pierce the strongest of dreams.

I’m thinking here of authors as diverse as Don DeLillo, whose early work, “Americana,” vivisected a New York City alive with ambition, regularly denied. Or Edith Wharton, and her subtle condemnation of society life in “The Age of Innocence.” Or Pete Hamill, who called New York “a city of right angles and tough, damaged people.” Or Joseph O’Neill, who so sadly surveyed the post 9/11 metropolis. “At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us,” O’Neill writes in “Netherland.” “Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight.” The city defeats us, these novelists argue; it leaves us physically alone, and then—more dangerous still—emotionally adrift.

On Dec. 26, Paramount will release “Revolutionary Road,” a Sam Mendes film adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 book of the same name. Although he is scarcely recognized as such now—when he is recognized at all, it seems to be under the tired encomium “the writer’s writer”—Yates is a distinctly New York novelist. He was born in Yonkers, and drifted in and out of the city at various points in his life. (He died in 1992, having weathered a string of mental breakdowns, two messy divorces, and assorted physical ailments, some a product of his four-pack-a-day habit.) Yates saw the city as infectious; in many of his stories, New York incubates or inflates some long-festering moral deficit. He was great with the landscape of the city, which manifested, in its bleakness, the internal torpor of its residents. To Yates, the fact that New York was so full of promise only compounded the injury: newcomers aimed high, only to find themselves mired in a grind no more glorious than the one they left behind.

Such is the fate of Frank Wheeler, the young office worker at the center of “Revolutionary Road,” and the motif is repeated in Yates’ later short stories, which he wrote after his status had been established. (In the movie, Wheeler will be played by Leonardo DiCaprio; Kate Winslet is April Wheeler, Frank’s wife.) Here, for instance, is an excerpt from the devastating piece, “Builders.” The narrator is talking to a friend named Bernard Silver; the subject is a cramped and dark New York apartment:

And where are the windows? Where does the light come in? Bernie, old friend, forgive me, but I haven’t got the answer to that one. I’m not even sure if there are any windows in this particular house. Maybe the light is just going to have to come in as best it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder’s faulty craftsmanship, and if that’s the case, you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows, Bernie; God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

Cliff Garstang has done his annual yeoman’s work of compiling his annual ranking of literary magazines based on the number of Pushcart Prizes awarded to each since 2000, using scores calculated by compiling awards and special mentions. Cliff considers only fiction here, leaving poetry and nonfiction rankings for others to calculate. The top ten, with their scores:

1. Ploughshares (118)
2. Zoetrope: All Story (75)
3. Conjunctions (71)
4. Paris Review (67)
5. Southern Review (67)
6. Threepenny Review (58)
7. Tin House (56)
8. Georgia Review (52)
9. Ontario Review (49)
10. New England Review (46)

Of course, Ploughshares and Zoetrope: All-Story both publish enormous amounts of fiction, which gives them the advantage in sheer bulk. (VQR, incidentally, ranks at #22, with a score of 24, putting us just below StoryQuarterly and just above Mississippi Review.) Cliff notes the highlights from this year’s compilation:

Paris Review dropped a spot, Ontario … dropped a few. New England climbed a couple of spots, reaching the top-ten, which pushed Epoch and TriQuarterly out. There was more movement toward the bottom of the list, where we have ten or so magazines appearing for the first time, thanks to their Special Mentions.

In true, Joe McCarthy style Karl Rove has announced his intention to “name names” of those who opposed and thwarted the Bush administration. (Really? This administration had opposition?) CNN quotes him as saying:

You’ll notice there was outrage when it was thought that I was the person behind outing Valerie Plame. And then when it came out that it was the sainted [Deputy Secretary of State] Richard Armitage, there was no interest. I don’t remember seeing anybody camped out on his doorstep like they were camped out on mine. [It's] because he was part of the acceptable culture of Washington, and I was not. I was one of those Texans who came up. He was one of those perpetual I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you’ll-scratch-mine Washington leakers.

Wow, where to begin?

First, I suppose, it’s worth noting that Karl Rove was behind outing Valerie Plame. Armitage, too? Yes, he revealed Plame to Robert Novak. No question. But that doesn’t change the fact that Rove outed Plame to Matthew Cooper at Time and confirmed for Novak. An internal Time memo from Cooper to his bureau chief Michael Duffy reads, “it was, KR said, Wilson’s wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD issues who authorized the trip.” And Novak (under oath) recalled speaking to Rove about Plame before writing his column outing her. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald never said he believed Rove’s innocence, only that Scooter Libby’s lies had thrown so much “sand in the umpire’s face” that it was impossible to prove guilt.

Second, one has to wonder at Karl Rove’s idea of “the acceptable culture of Washington.” By my count, the man had worked on ten presidential, senatorial, and congressional campaigns by the time he arrived in Washington in 2000–including key roles for Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Phil Gramm, Richard Thornburgh, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, and John Ashcroft. Not exactly a list of Washington outsiders. (Oh, and for the record, Rove spent his formative years in Nevada and Salt Lake City, Utah. As a native-born Texan, I would like to say: Karl Rove is no Texan. And neither is a certain Connecticut-born soon-to-be-ex-president.)

Third, in insisting that he was not “one of those perpetual I’ll-scratch-your-back-if-you’ll-scratch-mine Washington leakers,” Karl Rove apparently forgets that he was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign for… wait for it, waaaait… leaking a personal smear to Robert Novak. Rove vehemently denied that he was the source of the leak but was fired anyway. During the Plame probe it came out in testimony that Rove was, indeed, Novak’s source in 1992, and that Novak, after Rove confirmed the Plame story in 2003, had promised, “I’m not going to let that happen to you again.” Which sounds a lot like promising to scratch Rove’s back.

Countless reputable reporters and columnists have been laid off in 2008 as the American economy enters a tighter and tighter tailspin. How long before Newsweek finally decides its streamlined budget can do without Rove’s contract? Or maybe this latest round of lies is just further confirmation of what Newsweek editor Jon Meacham says about his columnist: “Karl has to be judged in the context of who Karl is.”

Time magazine is announcing their Top 10 lists of 2008 and we here at VQR get to crow a bit and point you to the Top 10 Magazine Covers of the year, which includes the cover from our Fall 2008 issue, among work from the New Yorker, New York magazine, and Rolling Stone.

Kudos to Ashley Gilbertson, whose photo graces the cover, and Percolator Graphic Design, our great and unsung designers.

The top 10 covers were chosen by Arthur Hochstein, the art director at Time. His comments on VQR’s cover:

Often cited by professional organizations for its content, The Virginia Quarterly Review also has consistently inventive covers. One of its secrets is the simple, strong format, which never varies from issue to issue. This particular cover isolates, for maximum effect, the stark black-and-white photo of a woman sleeping, dreamily out of focus. In focus is a tattoo on her shoulder of her deceased brother, who committed suicide after his second tour of duty in Iraq. And this focal shift turns reality inside-out: The dead victim is vivid and alive in the dream of his sister, whose life may have lost focus because of her profound loss. Regardless of one’s position on the Iraq War, this is a searingly sad cover that provokes equal parts sympathy and outrage.

The Nieman Narrative Digest has an interview with Neil Shea about writing “Ramadi Nights,” which appeared in our Winter 2008 issue earlier this year. Shea says, of writing the article:

It was one of the first times in my career where I had the sort of moment I’ve heard other journalists speak of—where I just had to write it, put it out there, whether or not it was published. I wrote in my spare time and tried not to think about of where I would send it or what would happen to it. When I decided it was finished, I sent it cold to VQR. Ted Genoways, the amazing editor there, decided to take a chance on it. Later I asked Andrea Bruce if she’d contribute photos to go with the text. It was off the cuff; I’d only met her once, briefly.

“Ramadi Nights” is a remarkable account of how Ramadi improved so much so fast, enhanced tremendously by Bruce’s veiled, dream-like photographs. We were all asking who this Neil Shea guy was when his submission showed up in our office. It’s not every day that war-zone reportage drops into our lap.

A few days ago I picked up a copy of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s “This Earth of Mankind,” the first novel of his acclaimed Buru Quartet. Pramoedya, who died in 2006, was widely considered one of Indonesia’s finest 20th century writers, and the many years he spent imprisoned in that country (by both its colonial Dutch masters and later Indonesian governments) made him, in some circles, an iconic dissident and exemplar of the writer-as-conscience-of-the-nation model. He won the PEN Freedom to Write Award and the Ramon Magsaysay Award, which cited “his illuminating with brilliant stories the historical awakening and modern experience of the Indonesian people.”

The Buru Quartet has been praised around the world and translated into at least 33 languages, but it was one other biographical note about the text that caught my eye: Pramoedya first composed “This Earth of Mankind” orally, reciting it to fellow prisoners on the island of Buru. It sounds like a remarkable story, one that deserves to be told in its own right, and the legend of “Earth”‘s popularity among the prisoners provides a reminder of the potential of oral storytelling as spiritual salve.

Prisoners on Buru island were denied any reading materials. In his afterword, Max Lane, an official at the Australian Embassy in Indonesia who was recalled home after translating the book into English, writes of a prisoner who found a small, ragged scrap of newspaper and was later discovered with it by guards. The guards killed the prisoner and tossed him in a river. It was in this environment that Pramoedya’s stories were orally transmitted, first from the author himself, then between prisoners. ”This Earth of Mankind,” along with Pramoedya’s other writings, were banned for many years in Indonesia, but not before a publishing house run by ex-political prisoners made the novel a bestseller. 

In the US, we have little tradition of verboten texts wielding such power, no history of samizdat furtively shared among whispering dissidents, although slaves in the pre-Civil War era often communicated surreptitiously, sustaining each other through song. We should probably be grateful, since this lack reflects our nation’s generally liberal policies of freedom of expression, though certainly we owe debts to people like Barney Rosset, who fought American censorship laws and published controversial works like “Tropic of Cancer” and “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” But if we gain something by this freedom, obviating over-romanticized notions of the tyrant-challenging samizdat, then I think we lose something, too. For in this country we, unfortunately, have little room for the role plumbed by Pramoedya, Solzhenitsyn, and others of the writer speaking truth to power. Little attention is paid to, say, Philip Roth criticizing George W. Bush (though certainly he is one of a crowd in that regard) or the commendable Cities of Refuge program. Sure, the States once had a fine intersection of poetry and political activism, fading in the 70s along with the Beats who made it great and the general enthusiasm for protest. Instead we must look abroad to dictatorships like Burma, where poets are imprisoned for writing verses on Valentine’s Day, or to our more democratic friends across the sea in England, where the views of the likes of Martin Amis and Harold Pinter receive significant media attention, for better or worse.

On December 1, The Los Angeles Times ran a compelling piece on Iman Bakry, an Egyptian poet who is allowed relative freedom of expression. It is a line from Bakry, uttered in an interview, that provides the title to this blog entry, and it could be taken as representative of her views of Hosni Mubarak’s 27-year rule of Egypt. The Times piece describes Bakri as a nationally prominent poet in her country who deftly criticizes the regime in poetry—one poem is titled “Hello, Our Masters”—and in media appearances. But by Bakry’s own admission, while her audience has grown, “as far as the government is concerned, neither [she] nor any other poet has much of an impact.”

Egyptians “are living as if in a theatrical play,” Bakry says, where, as in one of her poems, “Democracy is our ruse.” Let us hope that she and others persevere, following in the great tradition of Pramoedya and of Middle Eastern writers like Mahmoud Darwish, Adunis, Amos Oz, Naguib Mahfouz, and David Grossman, who, in their varying ways, challenge and chronicle the consciences of their nations. With luck, her works will outlast the tyrants’, as Pramoedya’s surely have.

Every month 690 Iraq/Afghanistan veterans commit suicide. I’ll repeat that: Every month 690 Iraq/Afghanistan veterans commit suicide. PTSD or major depression are reported by 300,000 Iraq veterans. Those veterans who file disability claims to receive assistance wait an average of 183 days for help. The situation is reprehensible, and there’s no sign that it’s going to improve.

That’s the topic of photojournalist Ashley Gilbertson’s “The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce,” featured in the Fall 2008 issue of VQR. He tells the story of just one veteran, the 23-year-old Pierce, who took a handgun and shot himself in the head on the night of July 25, 2008, tortured by the memories of what he’d seen and what he’d done in his two tours of duty in Iraq.

I sat down with Ashley a few weeks ago to discuss how he became interested in this topic, why it’s so important, and what it’s been like for him to write about and photograph something so difficult.

Download as an MP3

Also, you can listen to the talk Ashley gave to UVA students and the public at the Jefferson Society here at UVa in October, on the same topic.