Dreamways

In February, Britain scored second from the bottom in a Unicef report that used 40 indicators, like relative poverty, health and family relationship, to measure children’s well-being in 21 industrialized countries. (Only the United States scored lower.)

[From an article titled “How the Young Poor Measure Poverty in Britain: Drink, Drugs and Their Time in Jail” in The New York Times (10 Mar 07)]

What is the collective dream that is creating such a reality in the United States, the world’s wealthiest nation?

Hector Tobar, Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States. (2005.  New York: Riverhead Books) This is a fascinating and eminently readable journalistic exploration of the movement of Latinos and Latinidad across the U.S. in the 21st century. The author, Hector Tobar, journeys to various venues where he explores aspects of Latino life in the U.S. These travels are like a great dream, where Tobar finds situations and realities beautiful and horrendous that he could not have imagined in his "right" mind.  read more »

In his essay “Of Tax Cuts and Those $10 Million Bat Mitzvahs” (The New York Times, 25 Feb 07, section 3, pg. 1) columnist Ben Stein begins his essay with an homage to the grounded-in-reality idealism of Martin Luther King.

“I read Marshall Frady’s awesome biography of Martin Luther King Jr. Wow, what that man went through. What Southern blacks have gone through. It is fortunate beyond belief that providence sent a man as great as Dr. King to redeem the soul of the nation.”

In The New York Times of 02 Feb 07 Fergus M. Bordewich writes an editorial essay called “History’s Tangled Threads,” as a response to recent controversy surrounding a plan for a New York City park honoring Frederic Douglass to create a stone replica of a purported Underground Railroad map quilt.

At the beginning of this fascinating book ( 2006. Durham: Duke University Press), the author, Ted Gioia, asks: „Can songs born of hard labor and the workaday life hold relevance for us today?“ (pg. ix) In the pages that follow, he answers the question with a resounding YES. The author’s attitude toward work songs, songs created by individuals to accompany various forms of labor, is one that sees these spontaneous creations of unnamed people as an immensely meaningful and meaning-producing activity, a healing process.  read more »

"...[President] Bush has never had to pull off a U-turn like the one he is contemplating now: to give up on his dream of turning Babylon into an oasis of freedom and democracy and instead begin a staged withdrawal from Iraq…“ (Time magazine, 11 Dec 06 pg. 44)

This would seem to be an example of how a waking dream that is not continuously fine-tuned and checked against reality (and against sleep dreams) can wind up creating a waking-world nightmare. Dreamfulness is held hostage by the war in Iraq.

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (Germany). This movie is a powerfully disturbing and inspiring telling of a miracle story that really did occur in Nazi Germany during WWII. It is an archetypal story of an individual standing up to colossal forces of Darkness.  Hitler’s troops have recently lost the catastrophic Battle of Stalingrad, making it clear that the German war machine is no longer invincible. The results of this demoralizing loss are not known to the average German, since in Germany all news is censored.  read more »

This movie is a stunningly beautiful visualization of an amazing event that occurred on a battlefield in France at the beginning of World War I. This “war to end all wars” had as one of its ghastly features massive armies facing each other for months on end in well-fortified street-like systems of trenches, miserable home for hundreds of thousands of military personnel. Each side literally dug in and hunkered down, living an emotional yoyo between massive stretches of confined boredom and the terror of being shot at or bombed. Trench warfare was about military stalemate.

Poet Stanley Kunitz write about: "The Sea That Has No Ending"
Who are we? Why are we here,
huddled on this desolate shore,
so curiously chopped and joined? -
broken totems, a scruffy tribe!
How many years have passed
since we owned keys to a door,
had friends, walked down familiar streets
and answered to a name? We try
not to remember the places
where we left pieces of ourselves
along the way, whether in ditches
at the side of foreign roads  read more »

It is utterly amazing that this movie, starring Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton, appeared 25 years ago. A quarter century! Oi!

I was curious to see what I would think of it. I vividly remember going to see it in 1981 at the University Hills theaters. I went with Z and his sister who was in town visiting. It was snowy. This I clearly recollect, but I had almost no memories of the movie itself.