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  • ‘But I’m Not Creative’

    ‘But I’m Not Creative’

    Sue Guiney, founder and CEO of Writing Through, offers some words on what inspires her organisation and its vision of fostering education and self-esteem through creative writing.

    ‘I’m not creative.’ So many people have said that to me, and I’m always upset to hear it. They say it when I suggest they might want to write a poem or story themselves. They say it when I describe how I founded Writing Through, the international educational non-profit that uses creative writing to help develop thinking skills, language fluency and self-esteem. ‘Oh, I could never do what you’ve done,’ they say. ‘I’m not creative.’  But I say, ‘Don’t be silly. Of course you are creative. We all are.’ We all just need the skills to unlock our creative impulses and the courage to try. That is what Writing Through does.

    Twelve years ago I travelled to Cambodia with my family, and I fell in love – with the people, their fascinating culture, their beautiful country despite their tragic history. That trip inspired me to write a novel – I can’t help it; that’s what I do – and the publication of that novel, which is called A Clash of Innocents, and is now the first in a trilogy of novels, encouraged me to bring the creative result of that inspiration back to the country which inspired me. To do that, I offered a modified version of a writing workshop I had been teaching in the UK to a shelter for street kids in Siem Reap. Twelve years later, that one workshop has now turned into an organisation reaching thousands of marginalized and at-risk people throughout three countries in Southeast Asia.

    We teach our workshops throughout Cambodia, Vietnam and Singapore, and we are moving towards expanding beyond the region, as well. And what is it that we do? We convince the people who participate in our specialized workshops that they are, indeed, creative, plus we give them the tools to access that creativity. We then give them the freedom to express their creative thoughts in words, in English, a language they have often felt was far beyond their reach.

    How do we do this? Over the years we have created and honed our programme of workshops which take well-known, proven techniques and combines them in a way which encourages, empowers, and stimulates all within a fun and often silly environment. We do this through the magic of creative writing.

    We at Writing Through know that experiencing the arts first-hand, and especially the literary arts of writing poetry and stories, is a key to developing thinking skills. So many of us have experienced the classroom as a place of fear. In our workshops, we take that fear away and replace it with fun and encouragement. So many of us have found ourselves in educational systems which are based on the rote repetition of information without having the chance to consider our own thoughts.

    Instead of giving answers in our workshops, we ask questions, over and over, encouraging deeper, more creative responses. Too many of us live lives where the arts are a distant experience reserved for others somehow ‘better’ than us. Writing Through hands these people a ‘magic pencil’, a blank piece of paper and says, ‘Go.’ Try.’ ‘Yes, you can.’ Then we give our students a forum in which to stand up and say aloud, sometimes for the very first time, who they are and what they think. That experience is life changing, both for the writer and for the audience.

    The word No is the death knell of creativity. To untap the creativity that is within all of us, we must first find the courage to say Yes. I have been personally lucky enough to have been given the time, the tools, and the encouragement to say Yes. In Writing Through our goal is to impart that gift of Yesto all our students, regardless of their age, nationality or life circumstances – and we aim to do it, one poem, one story at a time.

  • Something in the air

    Something in the air

    The revival of poetry in Cambodia and beyond

    One Eleven – Presage

    It’s 8:30 PM on a Saturday and One Eleven Gallery is pumping. From across the traffic island a combination of applause, shouts and the occasional ‘howl’ chop through the humid night air; lines of rhyme and verse filling the monsoon twilight like word-lit fireflies, flicking and darting, invigorated by the will of an appreciative crowd and not a little amount of alcohol. The HOWL Word Jam 2019 is in full swing, the gathered ensemble spilling out onto the verges of the footpath while, in the sky overhead, flashes of lightening forewarn of a wet season deluge. 

    Inside, standing before the microphone, dressed in a long red sweat top, Nisha is regaling us with a poem that, twelve hours before, did not exist. A participant in a morning creative writing workshop, facilitated by Writing Through, her artistic energies have birthed a poem that unfolds like a beautiful wave.

    You are my Saturn, the ring around my heart,

    You are my Mars; the fear is in your eyes,

    You are my Earth; you are as lively as an angel.

    You are my Venus, the goddess of love and belief,

    You are my Sun, the light that shines on my whole world. 

    With her last words still echoing from the speaker the crowd erupts with applause. Still standing Nisha appears shocked; unable to fathom, it seems, how words she crafted can evocate such a reaction. She nervously covers her mouth and gives an appreciative nod, while behind her palm a broad smile slowly fills her young Khmer face, surprise giving way to delight. 

    This Thing Called ‘Poetry’ 

    Poetry: What to make of this sanctified and other times maligned literature form, a form that seems to navigate its way between peaks and troughs?

    During its dip moments poetry can seem elitist and obscure, something clichéd and sentimental perhaps, writing that—either way— is irrelevant to the wider populous.

    During its peak moments, however, poetry can seem like a tidal wave—a force inspiring and driving expression; a creative surge setting fire to the cafes, bookstores and performance stages where it fines a home.

    More often, however, poetry seems to just meander along, persisting with a resting heartbeat; known to those who value such things while the rest of us carry on with life.

    Currently, though, poetry appears to be enjoying one of its ‘up-swing’ moments. In part this has evolved from the ease of online sharing and distribution, the typical poem being ideal for the attention span and cell-phone screens of the average reader.

    Across Australasia, Canada and the United Kingdom this momentum has coalesced around a bevy of young female writers (more here). They include Hera Lindsay Bird (NZ) who burned up the internet with her poem Keats is Dead so Fuck Me from Behind; Rupi Kaur, a 26-year-old Canadian-Punjabi, who dominated bestseller lists in 2018; and the slightly older Carol Duffy, the UK’s first female poet laureate. These and other women poets have attracted millions of online supporters, the internet permitting them to buy-pass the traditional male-centric publishing houses and capture a new range of attentive readers. 

    Poetry and the Kingdom 

    In Cambodia poetry seems to be experiencing its own moment of upward popularity. In truth there has been little where-else for the form to go, the period of genocide and civil war having gutted the country of the educators who had previously nurtured poetry in the kingdom’s schools and universities. In the following years the necessity of family has encouraged parents to push their offspring into the commercial, hospitality and administrative sectors, depriving their progeny of the opportunity to explore poetry, even recreationally.

    This is not to say that Cambodia has never had a healthy poetry community. Poetry was openly encouraged during the golden years of the 1960s, the creative arts flourishing under the patronage of the late King Father Norodom Sihanouk. During this period writers, such as Kong Bunchhoeun—one of the revered poets of the era—moved between song and filmmaking, novels and poetry to earn their reil and fuel their muse.

    Cambodia has also been the destination for numerous international poets, arguably the most famous being the beat writer Allen Ginsberg; the man who launched ‘a thousand berets’ with his signature work Howl (a poem that has inspired a certain Siem Reap-based word pop-up). Ginsberg travelled to Siem Reap in 1962, visiting the revered temples as part of a wider spiritual odyssey that had already taken him to India and elsewhere in the Far East. Ginsberg, as poets do, chose to capture his temple experience in the long-form poem Ankor Wat (sic)—published by Fulcrum Press, complete with photographs by Alexandra Lawrence—in 1969. It is a long meandering work that suggests Ginsberg partook in some of the local herb before his temple excursions. The beat master seemed to be particularly taken by Ta Prohm, the temple’s famous vista of intertwined roots and stone offering perfect fodder for Ginsberg predilection for druggy symbols and metaphors. 

    The huge snake roots, the vaster

                      Serpent arms fallen 

                      octopus over the roof

                      in a square courtyard-curved

                      roofcombs looked Dragon-back-stone-scaled

    As frail as stone is, this harder wooden 

                      Life crushing them. 

    Moving to the contemporary and the local, the current revival of poetry is being driven by developments at the grass roots, with organisations and learning centres, alongside the energy of motivated individuals, leading the way. Foremost at the former level is the inspirational work of Writing Through, an NGO devoted to nurturing thinking skills, self-esteem and language fluency through creative writing, with a specific focus on youngsters from populations ‘at risk’ (besides Cambodia the organisation also works in Singapore and Vietnam).

    In September a selection of poems by former Writing Through students was published in an anthology, the first such publication by the organisation, each of its collected works offering a unique window into the lives of its young authors – their hopes, fears and their dreams for the future. The book is a noteworthy achievement and a testament, not only to the Writing Through mission of “saving minds, one poem, one story at a time”, but also the dignity of the students striving for a notion of the past and a future in the heartlands of the kingdom:  

    I get a lot of problems in my life

    But I never leave my dream

    I’m not afraid of my mistakes

    Life is short, make it beautiful.

    (Love the way I Am, Srey, 10, Cambodia)

    A different contribution to the revival has come via the way of LiterTree, an enterprise featuring five 13 – 14 year-old female students from the Liger Leadership Academy, who have developed the computer app Naeng-Norng (‘Rhyme and Rhythm’). The application works as a tool that budding Khmer poets can use to help them craft their work, its features including platforms for sharing and discussing poems, advice on poetry structure and even a search function that allows users to find Khmer rhyming words. In September the innovative worth of the application was recognised at no less a venue than Silicon Valley, California, where the app was awarded second place at the annual World Pitch event.

    Elsewhere in the kingdom other individuals have made it their mission to ensure that the poets of old have not faded from sight. Significant here has been the effort by Puy Kea to collect and publish the works of Krom Ngoy (1864 – 1936), a man considered by many to be the father of Khmer poetry. Krom’s importance to Cambodia poetry is underpinned by the experiences of those born and raised in the kingdom prior to the Khmer Rouge, where a common memory was the reciting of his poems by parents and teachers. Despite such significance Kea was disheartened to learn that much of Krom’s poems were in danger of disappearing forever, with only a few tattered copies of his printed works remaining. Searching out what he could find Kea, in 2016, published a single volume of Krom’s poetry, the publication being widely distributed following its release. 

    A number of other Cambodians are making poetry waves that have gone beyond the kingdom. Kosal Khiev, ‘Cambodia’s Son’, is probably the best known of the artists who have nurtured an international and local following, helped in part by the success of a film documenting his life as well as the man’s infectious creativity and performance – few can tire of a Kosal Khiev open-mic. 

    Lesser known in Cambodia, despite achieving broad international recognition, is Lang Leav, a child of the Thai border camps who later emigrated to the more restive environs of Australia and then, later, New Zealand. In the Antipodes she found her voice and has published several collections, including Sea and Strangers and Love Looks Pretty on You. Leav’s mediations on love, relationships and writing have found a keen international audience, especially amongst young adult readers—making her one of New Zealand’s top selling international poets—much to the consternation of some of this country’s literati who consider her musings ‘naïve’ and ‘tweed’. Having stumbling on two of her volumes in a popular Hong Kong bookshop—I had never heard of Leav until that point—I find her writing compelling and thoughtful; certainly more worthy of public acclaim than critical derision.

    I thought of you with

    My heart already broken;

    I thought of you

    as it was breaking again.

    I think of you now,

    as I am healing.

    With somebody new—

    I’ll think of you then.

    (‘Forever on my Mind’, Lang Leav, from Sea of Strangers)

    There is much more going on than I can cover here with workshops, festivals and collectives sprouting up around the kingdom—some living, others dying—as the muse takes hold. Poetry appears to be moving upward and it remains to see where this may lead, but for sure it promises to be an interesting ride. 

    One Eleven – Reprise

    Jess gives a stirring recital that burns the state image of Singapore; Mick speaks of creativity in an accelerated age; Wayne remembers fallen heroes and Christie reminisces, but it is Sabhor who enjoys the most popular cheer of the night. Another graduate of the morning’s Writing Through workshop his assured delivery on the fate of a squirrel belies the nervousness he showed prior to his moment in the spotlight. At the night’s end he is the resounding winner of the audience choice award, his beaming face joining his alumni colleague, Nisha, who is awarded the second runners up spot for her ode to the universe and love. 

    Outside the rain has stopped while inside the microphone has been switched off but One Eleven is still humming. This year’s word jam has made us laugh, ponder, perhaps spring a hidden tear, but most of all it has made us HOWL – to cry out and celebrate words composed, given life and set free into the monsoon night.

    Poetry is alive in the kingdom
    See you next year. 

  • HOWL Word Jam 2019

    HOWL Word Jam 2019

    The skies poured and our wordsters thundered . . . thank you to all those who made #HOWL Word Jam 2019 a momentous occasion. And special thanks to our collaborators #OneElevenGallery, #LittleRedFoxExpresso and #MonumentBooks. Only 12 months to Howl Word Jam 2020 so get writing and reciting Siem Reap.

  • Slave Days

    Slave Days

    A harrowing tale of slavery from the Cambodian graphic artist and author Vannak Anan Prum – the man who experienced it all

    Long the go to place for ‘ex-pats who lunch’ mid-September found me in Phnom Penh’s Java Café, its fan adorned balcony providing a panoramic view of Hun Sen Park, its statute of King Norodom Sihanouk looking northward, seemingly unimpressed at the view of the inglorious monstrosity that is the Naga World casino. Inside, away from the street noise and the miasma of Phnom Penh, I navigated to the air-conditioned room that lies to the left of the upstairs entrance. Here, as my eyes adjusted to the low light, I was able to make out what I had travelled from Siem Reap to see. 

    Along the room’s walls hung a series of prints, some of them bright and colourful, others rendered in the more sobering lines of black and white. On these walls, a million miles away from the smells of coffee and polite conversation going on outside, the images documented a world of hardship and exploitation— a place of slavery—men hauling nets, sorting fish, trying to survive in a place where the shackles are the waters of the ‘deep blue sea’. 

    The origin artist of these images is Vannak Anan Prum, a Cambodian national who, unwittingly, found himself enslaved on a small vessel plying the fishing grounds of Southeast Asia.

    As a child Vannak had enjoyed drawing pictures in the dirt outside his rural home (Bruce Lee was a favourite subject). This interest evolved into a skill that followed this remarkable individual into adulthood—a journey that saw him spend time as a monk, a soldier and then a farm hand. 

    But it is what happened after he left rural Cambodia for an alleged job in Thailand, five harrowing years at sea and on land as a slave, which is laid out starkly in The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea, the book documenting these dark chapters in Vannak’s life.

    The volume, described as a ‘graphic memoir of modern slavery’, is an astonishing body of work which, in 230+ pages of images and words, offers as much insight into modern slavery as any number of reports and conference proceedings can ever hope to do.

    Some of these insights come by way of episodes that are truly harrowing. Take this experience from Vannak’s three and a half years at sea:
    “One night I woke up needing a piss. I walked on deck toward the rope toilet at the stern and heard a strange noise nearby. It sounded like someone trying to kill a big fish. I crept to the end of the cabin and peeked around the corner just in time to see Kay cutting Dam’s head off with a cleaver.”

    There are numerous similar stories scattered across the pages of The Deep Eye and the Deep Blue Sea , each one of them reinforcing the inhumanity that arises when people are treated as mere cogs in an exploitative economic machine.

    Balancing out these episodes are depictions of the personal turmoil that Vannak endured over his half decade of enslavement – the hours spent longing for loved ones and home, the despair of not knowing if he would see either again, and the physical exhaustion experienced from long hours, with little sleep or food, of retrieving fishing nets and harvesting palm nuts. 

    That Vannak escaped his holders and was able to eventually return to his wife and child in Cambodia—at first his wife did not recognise him and doubted the story that this ‘strange man’ told of his recent life—means that he is one of the ‘fortunate’. At the same time he acknowledges psychological scars that match the physical ones from his ‘slave days’. And one suspects that translating his story into pictures and words has been an important part in his path back to normalcy.  

    A tale that is illuminating and tragic, Vannak’s survival and return home means that his story is also a triumphant one (in 2012 Vannak was presented with Human Rights Defenders Award for his work in documenting the fishing boat slave industry).

    However one should not leave the final page of The Deep Eye and the Deep Blue Sea with the feeling that all is right with the world. The truth is much more sobering, for as Vannak and others have repeated and the recent Australian live-action film Buoyancy shows, millions remain locked in slave conditions across the globe (40 million by some counts) – not just on fishing boats, but also in factories, brothels and on plantations. In fact official records indicate that more people are enslaved today than in any other period in human history.

    With this in mind the frozen fish section of your local supermarket may never look the same again. 

    Available at all stores of Monument Books

  • Burmese Daze

    Burmese Daze

    A Savaged Dreamland. Journeys in Burma.

    Author: David Eimer

    Bloomsbury (2019)

    Howl dines on David Eimer’s superb new account of modern day Burma, a land where the past is never that far away.

    Appertiser

    Five years ago, in a leafy café in the heart of Phnom Penh, I sat down with David Eimer whose new book, A Savaged Dreamland: Journeys in Burma, was published in August. Back then, however, our conversation centred on another book, also by Eimer, The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China, which I was reviewing for a city paper. 

    Eimer was newly arrived in Phnom Penh, having escaped from Bangkok for a planned new beginning in the kingdom’s fair capital (it did not work out, Eimer moved on a few months after our interview). 

    The Emperor Far Away was an excellent piece of travelling reportage and I enjoyed the opportunity to sit down and to talk to the man who had ‘fathered’ the tome. Time quickly passed and with the second latte kicking in David announced the need to leave for another appointment. There was, though, time for one last question as he made his way towards his bicycle.

    “So what are you working on next?” 
    “Something on Burma . . .’ David replied, “it’s more in my head than on paper, but it’s coming together.” 

    And then he was gone, pedalling off into the monsoon sun of a lazy Phnom Penh afternoon. 

    But now Mr. Eimer has returned and that ‘Burma book’, referred to several monsoons ago, has passed through its gestation and now seats prominently on the hollow shelves of the globe’s bookshops.

    Main Course

    ‘Fractured land’: it is an oft-used term but in many ways it seems the best phrase to describe contemporary Burma. This was not how things appeared four short years ago, in 2015, when the National League for Democracy (NLD) swept to power, voters inspired by the promise of its Noble prize winning leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s  (or Daw Suu as she is know to most Burmese). In the aftermath of the election the number of international tourists arriving in Burma, previously in the low thousands, swelled to 3+ million, with Yangon, Bagan and Mandalay on the ‘hot list’ of places to visit. The end to isolation also saw foreign companies navigating to Burma’s shores, drawn by an inexpensive labour force, copious natural resources and the knowledge that they would no longer be called to account for trading with a pariah state. 

    Four years on and this flush of optimism has given way to disappointment. Tourists numbers have declined markedly since the halcyon days of the mid-decade, while Daw Suu’s hero status has been tarnished by her seeming indifference to the persecution of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority and the detention of local journalists. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the nation’s generals remain clearly in charge, their control on the strings of power as tight as ever. 

    It is this Burma, the country that rose and then fell from grace, that Savage Dreamland documents. And in Eimer it has found the perfect chronicler. Former foreign correspondent with the Daily Telegraph (China desk) and for the South China Morning Post (Southeast Asia) Eimer clearly has the reporting chops to bring the story of modern Burma into the light. 

    To accomplish this task Eimer takes us on a ‘journey’, one that draws on history, culture and the post-WWII politics of Burma, mingled with interviews, conservations and ‘vignettes of observation’ draw from those who he meets and the places he visits through his travels. The resulting view of Burma is a thousand miles away from the post-card image of saffron clad monks and twilight-lit temples. Instead the nation emerges as a disjointed country; a land at war, where minorities, nominal leaders and generals battle with the notions of what the future should be, bracketed by the aspirations of powerful neighbours, with the whole menagerie periodically stirred by forces originating from imperial wrongs. 

    Eimer also has an eye for detail and when he shares some of these with the reader his dispassionate reporter persona falls away—an account of watching Yangon natives using ropes and hitches to hoist food items to their top-floor balconies is one such example. Although quickly—too quickly perhaps—Eimer returns to the role of ‘objective observer’, his emotions and feelings placed on hold. The impression left is of a man meandering through a museum, telling us what he sees but revealing little of what it means to him. 

    It is also a challenge, sometimes, to follow Eimer’s physical path across Burma. In part this is because the ‘journeys’ that feature in the book unfolded across several years of travel and reporting. But still, as a reader you long for some unity of theme or idea around which his movements can coalesce, rather than the patchwork feel that arises across the chapters of A Savage Dreamland.

    Dessert

    But none of this takes away from what is a compelling, informed and superbly written account of modern Burma. The result: A Savage Wonderland is—for now at least—the ‘go to’ book for those wishing to understand this most complex and divided of nations.

    After Dinner Mints

    Some factoids from A Savage Wonderland

    • A third of Burma’s 55 million people belong to 30 or more ethnicities, the greater number in open conflict with the Burma’s national army (the Tatmadew).
    • These conflicts represent the longest running civil wars in modern history. 
    • In the 1950s Burma was home to a flourishing movie industry that reached as far as California, with the Burmese actress Win Win Than starring alongside Gregory Peck in the Hollywood production of The Purple Plain. 

    David Eimer’s A Savage Wonderland is available at all Monument Book stores.

  • An Unexpected Redemption

    An Unexpected Redemption

    American Carnage: 
    On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War 
    and the Rise of President Trump

    Au: Tim Alberta

    Part II: 
    Bush Redux

    The pages of American Carnage offer what, for me at least, was an unexpected opportunity, namely to reappraise the former president George W. Bush Jr. This re-assessment is less about his policies and political decisions—remember his administration brought us the Second Iraq War, extraordinary rendition, Abu Ghraib and the Hurricane Katrina debacle—and more about his manner, style and capacity to predict the direction of America.

    American Carnage reveals three Bushes that, I suspect, you never knew existed:

    1. Bush the Sage

    Nearing the end of his second term Bush could see the dangers posed by the rise of populism and nativism before most Washington commentators: “the ‘isms”, he told his team in 2007, “are goanna eat us alive.”

    2. Bush the Political Commentator

    At the 2018 inauguration of the newly elected President Trump, G.W. Bush provided what some consider the most succinct summary of the new leader’s agenda, which he had just laid out before a crowd that was not half as big as he believed. Leaving his anointed spot on the stage behind the departing president, Bush offered the following overheard remark:

    “That was some weird shit.”

    3. Bush the Compassionate

    Six days before leaving the Whitehouse, his Democrat replacement having swept the Republicans aside in a blaze of hope and optimism, Bush hosted a meeting of prominent conservative talk-show radio hosts in the Oval Office (the more extreme hosts were kept off the invite list; they, it was agreed, were a lost cause). 

    Part way through the meeting Bush announced the reason for bringing the hosts together, and looking across at the faces of the ‘on-air right’ he made a request:

    “I want you to go easy on the new guy.”

    Today, this voice of compassion on behalf of a political rival, seems a million years ago. 

    Bush the sage, the commentator and the compassionate – who would have thought. 

  • How Did We Get Here?

    How Did We Get Here?

    American Carnage: 
    On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War 
    and the Rise of President Trump

    Author Tim Alberta

    Part I: 
    All Hail the PoT (Party of Trump)

    “ The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favour of his image, because the image will be so much more powerful than he could ever be.” Marshall McLuhan (interview, 1972)

    Through the long journey across the primaries and into the US presidential election in 2016 it seemed unlikely, no impossible, that come January 2017 Donald J. Trump Jr. would find himself sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. The consummate salesman, his skills honed through reality TV, it felt like a massive charade with we, the audience, waiting for the man to break into a grin, to offer a wink, before announcing: “just kidding folks”. I guess Donald was not in on the joke.

    Over the last three years an extensive number of books have been published detailing the rise of Donald Trump and the first years of his presidential term. Some writers—Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Inside the Trump Whitehouse is an example—have gone for the low bar; its hotwire into the Whitehouse, Steve Bannon (or ‘Sloppy Steve’ as the Trump now calls him) ensuring that the book was not threatened by scholarly intent; other publications—such as Bob Woodward’s Fear. Trump in the Whitehouse—have brought a reasoned and articulate analysis to the subject. In other cases, Matt Taibbi’s Insane Clown President is a personal favourite, writers have used gallows humour to detail the bewildering situation. 

    Tim Alberta’s American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump is a different beast—and at 680-odd pages it has more than the hint of Godzilla about it—for at its centre lies not the president but the Republican Party; a party, Alberta argues, that Trump has captured and reshape into his own image.

    “Rarely has a president so thoroughly altered the identity of his party. Never has a president so ruthlessly exploited the insecurity of his people.” 

    This is a party known as much by its acronym—GOP (the Grand Old Party)—as by its Republican title; a political collective that begat us Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and ‘ahem’ Richard Nixon; and which, over the course of 150 years, has championed a conservative agenda of lower taxes / less government, free trade, the global world order (remember the Neocons) and strong families, all underpinned by a healthy dose of individual ‘can-do-ism’. 

    Now, in the space of eleven years—a period that predates Donald Trump—the party has become a proponent of state intervention, an isolationist foreign policy agenda, the subverter of tax laws and personal freedoms, all underpinned by an alarming strain of nativism.

    So how did this dramatic turn come about? It is a question that Alberta seeks to answer across the pages of his weighty, but seldom boring, tome. 

    The case: At the centre of Alberta’s argument is the idea, foretold in the sub-title of his book, that the GoP has been at war with itself and its founding ideals – a conflict of ideas and beliefs that have transformed the party, leaving in its wake fertile ground for the likes of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump to grow and flourish. 

    So where were the seeds of this civil war first sown? 

    Ironically, given his bête noire status in the Trump universe, Alberta points the finger at the decision by the Republican Party and its presidential candidate John McCain, in 2008, to appoint Sarah Palin as his vice-president nominee (wholly under-qualified as a candidate, Pailin was nonetheless reputed to be a deft-hand at moose skinning). It was, Alberta reasons, a fatefully decision that saw the GoP embrace the populist wing of blue collar, male America—a group increasingly marginalized on the fraying edges of the American dream—for the first time. Writes the author:

    “Practically overnight, Sarah Palin came to embody the most disruptive “ism’ of them all, one that would reshape the GoP for a decade to come: populism.”

     [To be fair to McCain he wished to select Joe Lieberman as his running mate, but Lieberman’s pro-choice stance on abortion made him untenable to the GoP base]

    This is, of course, just a starting point. What followed was a grass-roots Republican ‘revolution’ that saw the rise of the rightwing Tea Party; the emergence of the ‘birther’ movement (supported by Donald Trump); and onward, the rise of Trump and his bulldozed path through the primaries, then his presidency and the three years of disruption, chaos and mixed achievements that have followed (as Alberta points out, beside a certain wall, Trump has been surprisingly successful in accomplishing his campaign pledges).

    Personally I am not convinced by Alberta’s claim that the Republican ‘turn’ is necessarily recent in origin. Rather I think that there is a strong case to be made that it started earlier, in 1968, with the failed effort by the liberal Republican candidate, Nelson Rockefeller, to capture the GoP nomination (it was won by Richard Nixon). In this dramatic year the party’s liberal wing found itself orphaned when Rockefeller imploded on the nomination trail, his demise heralding an uninterrupted era in which the party has failed, ever since, to nominate a moderate for president or vice-president. In short, the arrival of Nixon embedded a new ideological stance in the GoP, creating a conservative party in which moderates and their ideas remain marginalized fifty-one years on. 

    In classic ‘civil war’ style American Carnage recalls the tragedies and victims of the conflict: Paul Ryan, speaker of the house, forced to compromise his beliefs in order to steer laws through Congress; Michael Cohen, Trump’s disgraced ‘fixer’, whose past financial improprieties were laid bare by the Mueller Inquiry; James Comey (Former FBI head), Jeff Sessions (Attorney General), and even ‘Sloppy Steve’ Bannon, whose love of the spotlight was intolerable to a president who craves the centre of the stage. The fate of these individuals and others who fell foul of Donald Trump indicate the degree to which the GoP has become subverted to his will – a president demanding undying loyal with the power to disrupt and upend careers, families, stock markets, allies and enemies with a single tweet. 

    But Alberta shows that not everyone has gone quietly into the night. An example is Mitt Romney, a man who openly questioned Trump’s nomination, earning him the now infamous tweeter storm, but who stood by his beliefs and returned to Congress as a junior senator in 2018. He is a man clearly out of step within the new Party of Trump (PoT), a Shakespearean Lear wailing against the excesses of his party’s president.

    American Carnage does carry some noteworthy gaps. Arguably the most important is an understanding of the cultural and socio-economic factors that provided the fuel for the rightward turn of the GoP. In fairness the scrutiny of these origins would require another book, with others have done a fair job of setting out the societal changes that have nurtured ‘Trumpism’. Personally I suggest George Packer’s The Unwinding, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Amy Goldstein’s Janesville: An American Story, and for those prepared to go back a decade, Joe Bageant’s underrated Deer Hunting with Jesus.

    But even these writers cannot answer certain questions that, before reading American Carnage, I could not answer. Foremost here is the question of the support Donald Trump enjoys from fundamental Christians – backing that seems immune from his less-than Christian indiscretions (Stormy Daniels and Access Hollywood anyone). Alberta lays the answer out clearly in three words: Supreme Court judges. 

    To wit: by supporting the nomination of arch-conservative, pro-life judges Trump—a man who has personally expressed pro-choice values—has steered the American Supreme Court towards the holy grail of the staunch Christian right – the overturning of Roe vs. Wade (the landmark ruling protecting the constitutional right to abortion). With two conservative judges already appointed during his term and new appointment possibilities in the wind, a challenge to the ruling appears imminent.

    Again, on the matter of campaign pledges, Trump can be said to have delivered. Yet in the background the words of Alexander Dubček, the de facto leader of the Prague Spring (Czechoslovakia) come to mind:

    “To disregard moral principles in the realm of politics would be a return to the law of the jungle.”

    And selling your soul comes at a price; a point made clear by the the 2018 mid-term elections when a retreat of affluent suburbanites from the Republican Party helped the Democrats recaptured the House of Representatives. This trend, alongside an ethic shift in American society, wherein the sum of minorities will soon out number the previous white majority, forewarn of telling times for the GoP. The risk for the party, Alberta reasons, is that Trump’s ethnic baiting could turn sufficient voters away from the GoP that years in the electoral wilderness will follow. It is an important argument that raises the question of what a post-Trump Republican Party may need to become in order to survive.

    And what of the future for the other party – the Democrats – who have been energerised by the arrival of younger, social media suave blood into its ranks. Here Alberta’s makes it simple: Trump will seek to demonise the party’s left-leaning progressives by labelling them ‘socialists’, and then use this declaration to tarnish the entire Democrat party, and then watch as his ideologically unsophisticated base balk at a perceived ‘red’ threat to America (author’s note: American Carnage was published before the recent altercation between Trump and the three-women group of Democrats known colloquially as the ‘Squad’).

    It is a tactic that the older guard, Nancy Patricia Pelosi et al, is seeking to deflect. Yet the appearance of these internal differences suggest that the Democrats face a milder version of a civil war themselves – one fought between its older, pragmatic centralist members and the younger, energized followers of the ‘new new left’. And without agreement on a shared path Trump, the artful tweeter of discontent, will use these differences to fracture efforts by the Democrats to recapture the Whitehouse in 2020. 

    But for the bulk of us, by-standers to this American tragicomedy, the situation can seem bewildering and nonsensical; yet we remain aware that our fate is entangled in this unworldly mess (think climate change and trade tariffs). Eldridge Cleaver, the African American activist, presaged this situation in his 1968 treatise Soul On Ice:

    “It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jet liner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot’s seat.” 

    Returning to Alberta’s thesis, in a 2018 TIME opinion piece Charles Skyes reasoned that political entities seldom lurch dramatically from one form of ideas and identity to another: “usually” he writes “it is a gradual process of compromises that make sense in the moment, but which have a cumulative effect — like a frog being gradually boiled.” The story laid out across American Carnage suggests that this argument may only be half-true, given the changes that have occurred over the short period of the Trump era.

    But correct or not Tim Alberta has done us a favour by setting out the paths that have brought us to our current point, while providing us with a sense of what lies ahead.

    To end, if one wishes to find some comfort at the end of American Carnage it might be found in the past words of another American, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, a man whose faith in the regenerative capacity of his nation’s culture and its political system remained unblemished by historical events: 

     “ We have passed through abnormal periods before this, periods of disorder and violence that seemed horrendous and insoluble at the time. Yet we survived as a nation. The genius of our democracy is its room for compromise, our ability to balance liberty with authority. And I am convinced that we will strike a new balance this time, and achieve in the process a new awareness of human relationships among our people.”

    Me? I’m not so sure . . .

  • “Everything starts with Alexander”

    “Everything starts with Alexander”

    Take a journey through the ‘game of empires’ with Jeremiah William’s review of Angelos Chaniotis newly published, Age of Conquests – The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrien.

    In his latest book leading historian Angelos Chaniotis covers nearly 500 years of history across the ancient world, from Egypt to Britain; the volume providing readers with a brief, yet sufficiently detailed narrative of the major events occurring in the ‘oecumene’ (the known world) from the time of Alexander the Great (336 BC) until the death of Roman Emperor Hadrian (AD 138).

    Angelos Chaniotis introduces the argument that Alexander the Great’s transformation of the world during his lifetime did not stop upon his death in 323 BC. 

    Instead, everything starts with Alexander. 

    Through his extraordinary conquests, he became assimilated with the gods and carved a brand new world out of the Mediterranean landscape. Yet he died before seeing the entirety of his accomplishments. 

    The poem “Anno 200”, transcribed in the book’s first chapter, is used by the Chaniotis to provide a measure of the ‘man gods’ achievements:

    “And from this marvelous pan-Hellenic expedition
    Triumphant, brilliant in every way,
    Celebrated on all sides, glorified,
    As no other has been glorified,
    Incomparable, we emerged:
    The great new Hellenic world.
    We the Alexandrians, the Antiochians,
    The Selefkians, and the countless
    Other Greeks of Egypt and Syria,
    And those in Media, and Persia, and all the rest:
    With our far flung supremacy,
    Our flexible policy of judicious integration,
    And our common Greek Language
    Which we carried as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians.”

    The territories conquered by Alexander endured a period of violence and war after his death, with several new dynasties emerging to battle for increasingly large portions of Alexander’s former kingdom. 

    However, these hectic times also led to scientific, artistic, and intellectual achievements that are still with us today. 

    Angelos Chaniotis demonstrates why combining the Hellenistic and Imperial periods into the ‘Long Hellenistic Period’ gives us a better understanding of the important social, cultural, economic, and geopolitical developments that shaped the beginning of the modern world. 

    Covering five centuries of complicated history in sixteen chapters is no easy feat but under the steady hand of Chaniotis it is managed masterfully. The book’s layout certainly helps in this regard. Right after the table of contents, at the front of the book, are eight detailed maps in black and white. There’s also a full list of the figures used to illustrate the chapters. The narrative portion of the book is summarised down into twelve chapters, while the remaining four are dedicated to the overarching themes of socio-economic, cultural, religious, and global development. 

    The narrative chapters generally follow a chronological order. However, for clarity, the author sometimes chooses to explain distinct episodes linearly, which requires him to jump back and forth through time.

    Chapters Thirteen through Sixteen, the final chapters, focus on the main themes of the book, the author seeking to tie its anterior arguments into a concise understanding of the era.

    Overall, the effect is one of an easy-to-digest account as well as a reference and guide for further research, with every section acting as a stepping stone to a specific topic. This is assisted by the detailed reference, chronology, and bibliography sections that are found at the end of the book.

    Available at Monument Books.

    Jeremiah William

  • Sex, lies and audiotape

    Sex, lies and audiotape

    Three Women – A Review

    Author: Lisa Taddeo

    We of the HOWL team welcome Ms. B to our esteem pack of eager reviewers. Describing herself as “bi-coastal”, “multi-faceted” and a woman who knows her way around a ménage àtrois,“even with the lights off” (her words, all), there could be no one better to review Lisa Taddeo’s much hyped ‘Three Women’. Over to you Ms. B.

    “It’s the nuances of desire that hold the truth of who we are at our rawest moments. I set out to register the heat and sting of female want so that men and other women might more easily comprehend before they condemn. Because it’s the quotidian minutes of our lives that will go on forever . . .”

    Oh dear. I do not know if I want to continue reading or just throw the book at the wall . . . Lisa, please! No more. I know that you have worked eight long years on this tome; I know you are talented writer and that you have probably rewritten the above paragraph umpteenth times, but please, stop now!!!!

    Okay. I’m back. It was a touch and go there; the question being, would I need to fish my review copy of Three Women from my landlord’s catfish pond? Or would I go on Tinder to see who was new in town? But there is a job to be done with a task, laid out before you, to share my critical thoughts on Ms. Taddeo’s new opus. So to the nuts and bolts, or maybe just the nuts given the topic in hand (all words and phrases are loaded in this review).

    Lets start – Two-years shy of a decade in research and writing Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women does not simply announce itself, it kicks down the door. At least that is the impression left by the endorsements that flourish on its covers:

    “This is one of the most riveting, assured and scorchingly original debuts I’ve ever read”(Dave Eggers). ‘Riveting’, ‘assured’, ‘scorchingly’, one wonders if Eggers was rewarded on the basis of how many superlatives he could include in his writer’s blurb. And is ‘scorchingly’ even a word? My spell check, in open revolt, says ‘no’.  

    Ms. Eat, Pray, Love – Elizabeth Gilbert, takes things up a notch or four . . . “ A masterpiece on the same level as In Cold Blood” 

    Hold on a minute Liz. Have you engaged in a tantric yoga pose for too long? I mean no one! No one! Can challenge my man Truman when it comes to immersive, narrative non-fiction. 

    [Ed. Disclaimer: While we at HOWL all regards Truman Capote’s seminal work with the highest esteem we accept that Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe might have something to say about its status in the pantheon of ‘new journalism’]

    So what is the topic of Ms. Taddeo’s much-praised book? Its actually quite simple, one word in fact: desire. Although as the 300 pages of Three Women reveal, ‘desire’ is never simple. It is ‘nuanced’ as Lisa eloquently puts it. Me? I would choose a more colourful adjective. 

    As a reviewer I do not favour the approach of picking over a book like a Moscow dissentient eating lunch in a Russian restaurant. Rather, I like to employ what I call the ‘alien test’. Here is how it works. Imagine you are an alien who has landed on earth and have absolutely no idea how humans function; in fact the only thing you know is how to read English (here I am thinking of a cute alien, something like ET, not one of those creatures that bursts out of John Hurt’s stomach so many Sigourney Weavers ago). Now, as an alien you pick-up and read Three Women, drawing conclusions about humankind at its end. Here are your observations:

    Men trend towards being manipulative pedophiles, unkempt jerks and selfish voyeuristic no-bodies.

    Women, in contrast, veer towards victimhood, complicity, desperation and varying levels of obsession. Revenge is, on occasion, employed.

    Moving to the matter of sexual congress—which to an alien would probably appear, well, alien—such acts are mostly illicit and awkward, while best undertaken in the back of a pick-up, in a school classroom or in the family basement. 

    Clearly we are not in Kanas here (‘right Truman?’) so where are we? 

    The answer is embedded—as much as a writer and by default a reader can ever be—in the lives of three women (yes, the title keeps it simple) and their contrasting experiences in the spotlight of ‘desire’. We have Maggie, a high school student who finds herself entwined in an emotional and physical (think hands, lips and fingers) relationship with her school’s most popular teacher. There is Lina, an unhappily married housewife, who fines salvation in the arms—and the rear seat — of an old school flame. And Sloane, the most callow of Taddeo’s informants, who has a voyeuristic complex that is complemented by her husband, who enjoys watching her have sex with other men (and women). 

    Complicated? Likely. Messy? Most definitely! For all of Taddeo’s lead characters—and remember we are talking non-fiction here—suffer for their desires and the actions they trigger, with only Lina surfacing from her story with any form of satisfaction. Still, even for Lina you feel her life could collapse at any moment, her passions backstopped by clouds of looming darkness. 

    As a writer Taddeo has the skill to transform copious reels of audiotaped interviews into chapters that flow coherently across multiple story and time-lines. She also has the emotional disconnect of an Idaho potato farmer; so while her subjects flounder under the raw emotion of the pain, guilt and ardors of their experiences, she remains calm and neutral, a recorder not a counselor. Behind this craft you feel there is another story, an account of how she came to find and choose Maggie, Lina and Sloane as subjects; the steps taken to encourage them to tell their stories; and how she, as an author, was able to retain her neutrality throughout the book’s gestation. 

    So where does Three Women stand? 

    Timing can mean everything when it comes to the reception of a piece of art, and as the ‘alien test’ suggests, the behavior of men in Three Women falls very much into the narrative of the #MeToo age. Thus inadvertently—for the author could hardly have anticipated this movement when she started writing in 2011—Three Women feeds into its zeitgeist. 

    And here I think Taddeo encounters her biggest conundrum, for there is a sense that the power and reverberations of #MeToo suck some of the force from her work – the movement’s rise robbing the book of its potency, the revelations in Three Women no longer original. It’s a shame. If the ground that Three Women covers had been less crowded it may have raised sufficient steam to match its hype. Instead it comes to the party late – less clarion call, more an addition to an orchestra well into its second movement.

    The discerning reader might have gathered that I am not completely taken with Ms. Taddeo’s oeuvre. Let me be honest here: Yes the book is well written. Yes it does shine light into the corners of female emotion less explored and written of by woman themselves. And yes, eight years is a bloody long time to research and write a book (and one feels that Taddeo was not the sort of person to stop for a year or two to smell the roses). It’s an accomplished work, but it falls short of its embellishments. Capote can rest peacefully; his most celebrated work remains unchallenged.

    Yours, Ms. B 🙂

    For an alternative take on Ms Taddeo’s Three Women, click here

  • “Money, that’s what I want”

    “Money, that’s what I want”

    Author: Oliver Bullough

    Welcome to Peter Olszewski’s review of the 2018 Economist ‘book of the year’ 

    I don’t understand the exotic fiscal intricacies employed by the rich, which is possibly why I’m not rich.

    I don’t really understand shell companies, companies within companies, offshore trusts and some such, which is why I don’t have any.

    Hence it was with trepidation that I began reading Oliver Bullough’s startling book, Moneyland, which explains how the super-rich stay super rich.

    Happily, the book promptly put me at ease, because the author stressed that the whole point of the machinations the super-rich undertake to hide their money is an unparalleled complexity that few can understand,  apart from a tribe of high-priced lawyers paid to create and hide dosh behind said complexity.

    Bullough writes, “The physicist Richard Feynman supposedly once said: ‘if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’

    “I feel the same about the way offshore structures have warped the fabric of the world. But if this dizzying realization sends me out of the house and away from the screen, there’s no escaping it.  The building where I buy my morning coffee is owned in Gibraltar.”

    Gibraltar of course being one of those countries dubbed an offshore haven, and Bullough gives an easy-to-understand example of the concept of offshore – of being legally absent while being physically present.

    He discusses the pirate radio stations that began emerging in the UK in the 1960s when the BBC had the only radio licence and writes that these radio stations, 

     “…moored their vessels outside British territorial waters, set up radio equipment, and broadcast pop music back into the UK. Many people called these radio operators pirates, but others called their stations something else: offshore.”

    Bullough notes that the concept of offshore was useful, and the term started to be employed to describe financial transactions as well.

    Bullough also cynically notes,  “If we spent all of our time trying to puzzle out what is really happening, we’d have no time to do anything else.  It’s no wonder most sensible people ignore what the super-rich get up to.” 

    And what the super-rich get up to is amassing so much money that the amounts can make heads spin, and that there is so much money sloshing around looking to be spent that it has created a new field of economic study, plutonomy 

    According to Investopedia, plutonomy is an economy that exhibits massive income and wealth inequality, and where the spending and consumption activity of an extremely wealthy minority have an outsize impact on the economy.  

    And according to Bullough, plutonomy also leads to, or creates, a new world.

    “I call this new world Moneyland,” he writes, “Maltese passports, English libel, American privacy, Panamanian shell companies, Jersey trusts, Liechtenstein foundations, all add together to create a virtual space  that is far greater  than the sum of all their parts.”

    Moneyland is the province of the world’s new ruling class, a global super-rich society interested only in amassing super wealth.

    The inhabitants of Moneyland broadly fall into two categories: those who earned their wealth legally and wish to hide it, and those who earned their wealth illegally and need to hide it.

    The latter includes criminals as well as sundry despots who head countries and strip the country’s coffers bare via corruption and other means, while spending, for example, $1.04 million on a wrist watch when their ordinary citizens struggle to live on $10 a month.

    As Bullough writes, “It is remarkably easy to loot a country providing you are in charge of it.”

    Author Bullough presents his case in a tightly and sparely written book, dense with information that shocks.

    He avoids the tabloid trap of describing how disgusting the behaviors of rich people can be, although he does give an example of traveling first class with a super-rich woman who wore diapers because she couldn’t be “bothered” going to the toilet, and who became embroiled in an argument with the flight attendant as to who would change the diaper.  The flight attendant ended up doing the dirty work.

    But Bullough does give plenty of examples of the disgusting amounts people spend on things, such as the aforementioned $1.04 million watch, and he bemoans the fact that some of the best real estate in some of the best parts of the world’s best cities   sits mostly empty – London apartments, for example, worth figures like $55 million that are used only a couple of weeks a year by wealthy wives who drop into town for shopping sprees.

    On the obscenity of  such property, Bullough quotes another author,  New Yorker Michael Gross and his 2014 book, ‘House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the world’s most powerful address.’

    Gross writes,  “Fifteen Central Park West is more than an apartment building. It is the most outrageously successful, insanely expensive, titanically-tycoon- stuffed real estate development of the twenty-first century…it represents the resurrection and the life of our era’s aristocracy of wealth.

    “No longer dignified, unified, well-born, or even well-bred, they enjoy unheard-of-incomes and the most extraordinary standard of living in history.”

    And yes, Trump and his cohorts do get mentioned in the book.

    And yes, Bullough does ultimately sound the warning that this inequality, this profligacy must end, will end, and the end will probably be messy.

    He quotes Brooke Harrington, author of books such as Capital Without Borders, and Pop Finance.

    She lays out what can eventuate in the wake of money launderers and super-clever deviant lawyers working for the super-rich stuffing up the global system.

     “Their work radically undermines the economic basis and legal authority of the modern tax state,” she writes, “Using trusts, offshore firms, and foundations, professionals can ensure that inequality endures and grows in a way that becomes difficult to reverse short of revolution.”  

    Moneyland is a great must-read – but be prepared to be disturbed. Be prepared to be angry, very angry.

    Peter Olszewski