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May 28, 2009
by Beata Palya (with Kim Nagy)
Song translated by Adri Bruckner
In a recent email exchange with internationally acclaimed and rising star, Hungarian folk-jazz singer, Beata Palya (she recently signed a contract with Sony and her new album is called: Just One Voice) we talked about the importance of respecting and articulating the feminine perspective. She wrote to me via email with her normal honesty and warmth with the following message:
“Much of my new album is about the feminine perspective. For instance, here in Hungary, the two side are enemies – the birth at home and the birth at hospital sides, so i just tried to emphasize the fact that women actually know how to give birth to their baby, we just need to read the signs of our body. And we need to speak out when something feels wrong or is against us! My videos are about the strength of women’s communities.”
Palya granted me permission to publish lyrics from a song called How to give Birth.
You might also want to check out my recent interview with Beata Palya.
How to give Birth
Beata Palya
I’ve decided, yes, to decide
To grow my tummy round and wide
Inside a puppet, little child
Hey on the street they’ll smile and smile
Inside a puppet, little child
Hey on the street they’ll smile and smile
My friend Vicky once frankly said
Kids are conceived in a woman’s head
Think about it, and there it is
Doesn’t matter what your man does
Think about it, and there it is
Doesn’t matter what your man does
I asked the doctor, yes I did
If I decide to have a kid
What do I do, how do I give birth?
How do I sit in the birthing chair?
What do I do, how do I give birth?
How do I sit in the birthing chair?
“Not in a chair, in a bed you’ll lie
We’ll make sure it’ll be a short time
We’ll make sure you’ll feel no pain
We’ll cut and sew, so don’t complain.
We’ll make sure you’ll feel no pain
We’ll cut and sew, so don’t complain.”
I see, Doctor, but it’s strange to me
I’ve been in this body for thirty years
It always knows how it should act
It conceived this baby, that’s a fact
So what if I want to sit or stand or grunt
Can’t I have this baby just how I want?
I don’t know yet how to have a baby
But who’s giving birth here, you or me?
This is the way
To have a baby
How would the doctor know
How to have a baby
How would the doctor know
How to have a baby
Click here to read Beata Palya’s interview
Kim Nagy is Executive Editor of Wild River Review
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May 26, 2009
by Karen Guthrie
Living and laundering in Athens has turned my long-standing fascination with clotheslines into a love affair.
In Athens, clotheslining is like farming, an eye and an ear cocked toward the weather. This city miraculously produces an abundant crop of clean clothes sown in dirty air. Tending the laundry is a woman’s twice daily ritual, the family’s clothes as demanding as cows clambering to be milked at dawn and dusk.
I arise to make coffee and glance across the sky at laundry already dancing on the rooftops. Planted in mid-air, warmed by the sun, promising a clean harvest by nightfall.
I have decided that electric clothes dryers steal joy. One of the true highlights of my day is hanging damp, sweet-smelling laundry on the line draped from my back balcony. Six stories in the air, I pin shirts and socks on the breeze as it floats by. The sun plants kisses on my face and I feel a soft and deep sense of morning satisfaction.
I observe the YaYa (grandmother) across the way hanging the family’s washing with the eye of an artist, planting wiggling knickers in thin air. I smile as she ponders how to pin a lacy lavender thong!
I settle at my desk and look through my window on the world. Front and center, my apartment neighbor’s tangled clothes wrangle with the wind. Somehow, her display always seems messy and stays sadly hanging through sun-drenched days and neglected nights. The look reminds one of weeds. I have a suspicion she does not have adequate closet space!
Clotheslines impart an atmosphere of intimacy in this otherwise veiled city. You know how often your neighbors change their sheets and what color their bedroom decor sports. Saturdays appear to be “wash the bedclothes day” when pillows and duvets rest on the balconies, sleeping in the sun. A wash line can announce a birth with a jubilation of pink and blue, or proclaim a death, as motionless black drapes red-hot August air.
Just seeing a line of sheets billowing on the breeze can lift my spirits. Like the family flags declaring possession of that particular plot of sky, the fluttering of fabric softens the rumble-jumble topography of concrete that is Athens. There is a silent language afloat as towels and drapes leave their greetings on the winds.
A melancholy morning is surprised by the whisper of memories in the air. My past comes tumbling by and I hurry to peg it down along with my old, soft flannel nightgown.
Half a world away in time and space, I remember the clothesline of my youth. Heavily laden, propped up in the middle with a gray and weathered pole, constant as my grandmother who tended it. A mortifying memory of discovering the boy next door, the heart-throb of the young teen circle, sneaking a look at the size of my bra as it dangled in the summer heat.
I recall the clothesline of Addie Rainwater. My neighbor, friend, and mentor as I navigated the nuances of young motherhood. Addie, the mother of three teenaged sons, seemed to display an infinite number of inside-out tee shirts on her line. I thought it was somehow a secret safeguard against sun-bleaching rays. No, the reason was more profound: clothes were washed, dried, ironed and put away in the condition they were given to her. I learned
a lot about raising children from that clothesline.
My present day Athenian clothesline is the backdrop for Lunch with the Laundry, as I have affectionately named the balcony meal my partner, Robin, and I share in the middle of our everyday. I think it is what lures him home from the office.
The familiar fabric of our lives together sways and swings, wrapping us in an undulating and private cocoon of color. Clothespins as bright as butterflies and the scent of apple blossom fabric softener create our garden in the sky.
I am not embarrassed to state that there are days I accessorize my washing, color coordinating clothespins with clothes. Gives me a sense of time to spare, beauty and order. Invites whimsy. Reminds me that dreams can be pinned on the air and allowed to dance within my reach.
Karen Guthrie discovers herself dwelling in Athens, Greece for a spell. She derives inspiration from the ordinary, and writes about her everyday observations and experiences. Transcontinentally transplanting herself several times a year, she tries to maintain her balance hanging laundry on Greek, British and American soil. This is her first post for Wild River Review.
May 21, 2009
by Kim Nagy
 Photo by Joy E. Stocke During last week’s visit to the Institute of Empowerment, (a Stockton, NJ-based organization encouraging critical media awareness in teenagers) I headed back in time into a 1995 documentary called Slim Hopes one of the many films challenging media stereotypes offered by the Media Education Foundation.
But if Slim Hopes narrated by Jean Kilbourne was dated, it’s hard to argue that the main subject of the film--the national U.S. obsession with dieting (especially among women)-- has not changed much at all.
In 2008, Business-Week reported that each year Americans spent “40 billion dollars on weight-loss programs and products.” From Jenny Craig to Dr. Atkins products, a lot of cold hard caloric abstinence and/or food substitution.
I have to admit that I actually enjoyed my low-tech (completely free) first-time diet around the age of 13 many many years ago. My weapon of choice was calorie counting and I guess you could call it a scaled back form of starvation. I lost weight quickly and in the beginning I kind of liked the self-imposed hunger I held inside (and heard inside my grumbling stomach) until I let myself devour the most amazing Chef’s Salad, ever, around dinner time. The food tasted more flavorful when I ate less—and the good news was I ate more vegetables. I felt so awake and aware for the first few days but the honeymoon didn’t last.
Soon, I got spacey, confused and started to drag. I couldn’t sleep. My mom got worried (though she was a dieter herself) when the scale dropped to 100 pounds and I communicated no plans to alter my new lifestyle. In my mind, the more weight I lost, the more I had a chance of having some pretty skinny girls’ legs rather than my own ridiculously muscular thighs and calves (that of course stayed muscular no matter what) that never seemed to fit into the right jeans. But that night, my mom and I talked and with her urging, we made dinner together—and I ate it all.
My mom used my favorite foods to sway me from my diet and perhaps not much else would have worked. Because had you warned me that severe caloric restriction in girls my age could result in osteoperosis and hormonal problems later in life, it probably wouldn’t even have even registered as a mild concern. I mean, that was later, right? My problem was right now: How was I ever going to look like a skinny girl in gym class?
Which is really what the philosophy of dieting is all about—immediate gratification with a hefty dash of all too human but nevertheless a media-inspired neurosis.
I completely agree with the documentary Slim Hopes in questioning a societal obsession that has girls as young as eight stressing about their diet (this age has actually gone down to age 7.) And the salacious nature of an advertising industry that “sells” an unrealistic body type over and over again—as though it were the only answer to every problem—and the greatest depiction of health.
But though Slim Hopes depicts an amoral advertising industry with a huge misogynist streak—I was a little skeptical of its wholesale castigation of “them”.
Because who is the advertising “industry” and did “they” alone invent using women only as sexual objects? Did our expectations simply become more photo-edited and/or homogenous? Is there a larger problem in a centuries old belief system that instructs women that their greatest hope for material security and the most important creative use of their time is to ensnare a man through the sole use of their looks? (And what does it mean that girls as young as seven are convinced their worth stems mainly from what they wear and how they look.) Are girls taught that what they think and say will be valued at all?
On the other hand, for adults, men and women, is wanting to be attractive a locked-in part of our biology? And can we honestly say that this is one-hundred-percent bad? Should we be honest and realistic with our children so as to guide them through some tricky navigation?
As for diets, I swore them off long ago, but my favorite non-dieting advice now comes from author of In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan:
“Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”
Kim Nagy is Executive Editor of Wild River Review.
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May 19, 2009
by John Timpane
Mom used to get drunk before
The first drink poured.
Into the party house she’d come
As beautiful a being as ever
There has been, a smile as
Big as your mother’s smile
In the biggest room of your
Memory, and in a moment
You’d hear this laugh
Already drunk because
Ready to be. No alkie she,
Just a girl who liked a good
Time – so much she
Started liking it before
Time came. Anticipation, our
Real. Expectation, what
You are while you wait; life
Is in the waiting. I shudder
In 40-degree November
Cloudbursts to remember
What I did to disappoint
Her astral expectations.
I did try. I did inherit
Mother’s champagne
Trick. Pour me one; go
Ahead and watch. All I
Need is to see
Effervescence prism
Myriad the swarming
Light, lion-tawny wine with
Nose enough to tell me
Be happy, and snap, I’m
Glad, glad to be about
To be glad. Skip James, I’m
Glad. I’m glad, I’m glad. Not
That champagne never
Fails. Must have at some
Time but never for me. I
Pour it when it’s time to
Pour champagne. The glass
Is my mirror: Like my mother
I get loaded before there’s
Ammunition, stagger before
Blood is laced, laugh
Before the first joke,
Cry at the first note, at
Anything. I blunderbuss
The woods before I see
Bear. Wait and See and I
Don’t see eye to eye. I lack
The knack, to reserve — to
Recover from dissed
Appointments. I want
Bear. Laughs. I want
Glad. Look: wine falls
Into glassy curve; glad
Is walking down the road
Right at me; for such a
Guest who wouldn’t get out
The flags and wave them out
Of their minds?
I’d be
Glad to pour for you
and
Watch you start being
Glad ahead of time.
John Timpane is a frequent contributor to Wild River Review. His translation Song of the Blessed One, Canto 11 of the Indian epic poem, Bhagavad Gita, appeared in an earlier edition.
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May 14, 2009
by Kim Nagy
Eat your heart out, H1N1. Move over, New York Stock Exchange! For God’s sake, sit down, American Idol.
 Andrei Codrescu at Labyrinth Bookstore (Photo by Fred Young) Because in the dada world, poets (and other mischief makers) will always make the best headlines… and the dada world might very well be the REAL world according to Andrei Codrescu’s latest book, The Posthuman Dada Guide (Princeton University Press).
You see, headlines are dada, especially when you take out a pair of scissors and whip down a shot of whiskey while reconstructing prose. (I warn you, this is not easy—but neither is dada).
Dada is the art of making very little sense (in practical terms)—and loving it. But it’s more than that (and not exactly that too). In the words of The Guardian (UK) reviewer of The Post Human Dada Guide, “This book may damage your career, but it could just save your life.”
On May 6, at Labyrinth Books, award-winning writer and NPR commentator, Andrei Codrescu, talked with Princeton University Professor, Brigid Doherty (author of Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, New York, Paris) about his new book and suggested that dada is still alive and well. As Codrescu put it, dada seems “impossible to kill.” In fact, dada might just be the best survival tool today, an antidote to the modern “loss of liberty” furnished by the luxury of cell phones, I-pods and the 24-7 “plugged-in” buzz of busy-ness.
“Sixty percent of your body is electronic now. I don’t know how you can exist without dada. I can’t,” Codrescu said in the signature wry tone that continues to delight NPR listeners.
I should mention that the dada movement stemmed from no lack of grave circumstances. Born in early twentieth century Europe amidst deep concern over colonialism and protest against the First World War–dada was a creative means of tearing down societal boundaries to combat the status quo through avenues like theater and art. It might be argued that dada’s absurdity served to buffer it from the pitfall of most revolutionaries (who, suspiciously often come to resemble those who they criticize)–taking themselves and their philosophy too seriously, so seriously that any and all behavior can be justified in its service.
So what’s Codrescu’s book all about?
“The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world–all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich’s Café de la Terrasse–a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution–lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world.”
Back at Labyrinth Bookstore, perhaps like a drug, the “primal raw energy of dada” overtook me in the very midst of Codrescu and Doherty’s conversation, just as the audience asked studiously about the importance of cities in dada and dada’s potential use in “teaching” poetry. (In one dose of dadaism, Codrescu instructed his afternoon poetry seminar to write their poems on various kinds of fruit. Not long thereafter, he allowed them to eat their words.”It was a late afternoon class. They were hungry,” shrugged Codrescu matter-of-factly.)
And I felt a little guilty at the end of the talk when, instead of posing an intelligent question, I suddenly imagined Codrescu leaning against a pool table playing various anonymous opponents (including author of “The World is Flat” Thomas Friedman and overnight You-tube superstar, Susan Boyle) in Labyrinth’s well-stocked bookstore with no pool table in sight.
My imagination cared little for these limitations. I mean, who would nail the corner shot with a satisfied Cheshire grin? Who would call stripes? More importantly, who would forget about the game altogether and start up a game of “truth or dare” or hopscotch (or a hybrid of the two)? Would someone (perhaps a customer) sit in the corner laughing over a well-thumbed copy of John Kennedy Toole’s, The Confederacy of Dunces or Angela Carter’s Wise Children or maybe even The Best of the Onion?
And when I turned on my laptop (in between checking my voice messages on my I-Phone) to write this blog, what I thought was: Perhaps the most important thing to be learned from living the dada life isn’t whether you win or lose, but just how well you learn how to PLAY.
Kim Nagy is Executive Editor of Wild River Review and writes a column called The Triple Goddess Trials.
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May 12, 2009
Editor’s Note: During research for our book Anatolian Days and Nights Angie Brenner and I spent time in southeastern Turkey where one of that country’s worse massacres occurred early in May. In many ways Turkey, a secular Muslim Republic, is a beacon for stability in the region. What follows is an account from Turkey’s Daily paper, Hurriyet, and a response from a teacher and friend who lives in Mardin.
Carnage during an engagement ceremony in southeastern Anatolia has ignited debate over Turkey’s village guard system, part of a controversial militia force that patrols the rocky hillsides in the region and is paid by the state.
According to unconfirmed reports, the assailants who claimed the lives of 44 people including three pregnant women in Bilge village, near the city of Mardin, were part of this system.
Village guards have aided the government forces and fought the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, since 1984 and have long been criticized for their alleged links with illegal activities in the region. According to official data from the Interior Ministry, the number of village guards is around 58,000, all of whom are men with a lower standard of pay and benefits than the police.
To: Angie Brenner
From: Mustafa Oludeniz
Greetings from Mardin,
What a perfect feeling to hear from you Angie.
First of all, the event took place near Mardin is the most terrible and horrible event We have ever seen and heard.
We certainly don’t accept and understand this kind of massacre on our grounds. The most important thing you should understand and know about these monsters is that they are the victims of uneducated life and are very, very poor.
I want to mean that they had some arguments about their valuable land. Because of that, they no longer agreed to share the land and that is where their money comes from.
The worst side of the event is the killers and the victims are relatives. They have the same surnames.
I believe we must invest in education not guns if we are to make change in our region.
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