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The Proclamation of Baghdad, issued by Major-General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude, March 17 1916, a week after the city’s occupation by the British. (via Harpers, seven years ago)

To the People of Baghdad Vilayet:

In the name of my King, and in the name of the peoples over whom he rules, I address you as follows:-

Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy, and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task, I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but

our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. Since the days of Halaka your city and your lands have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunk in desolation, and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in distant places.

Since the days of Midhat, the Turks have talked of reforms, yet do not the ruins and wastes of today testify the vanity of those promises?

H-hello. Hello? Is this thing on?

Then the malestrom spit Odysseus out, clinging to what was little more than a splinter, what was left of his boat. Persephone, it was revealed, had eaten several seeds of Hades’ pomegranate. Psyche opened the box but did not find the beauty she expected. Orpheus looked back.

Thanks for reading.

RIP

PJ from a couple of years back

 ”Ah, well, what you cannot correct you can at least insult,” is a Barry Hannah quote. Also a strategy that I seem to have, if not accidentally than at least unconsciously, taken to heart.

Not so interesting morning-after moment: Having already woken up, drank gatorade, taken several advil and a shower, I summoned my will (by which I mean ate a banana) and dismissed my omnipresent anxiety —yellow squiggles and zig-zags mostly—as hangover-induced and baseless. Then I threw up. Soon but not soon enough I was back in bed, dividing my attention between the ceiling (the plaster is really uneven where I patched the hole from the failed pull-up bar) and turning, one more time, through my memories of Last Night. It was then that I realized: one, I was presently in the middle of Sunday morning, not Saturday; and two, the night before I actually did say something atrocious—insensitive, uncalled for, and spot-on.

And now a word from A Man Named Me’s sponsors

Our hero in the hour of the erotic arrow, Amor.

RIP

Popular lore about these guys is that Moriaki, the original bassist, hijacked a plane with the Red Army and got stranded in North Korea—but whatever, this thing has been blowing my mind for more than two years. They could all just be serious gardeners and it wouldn’t make a difference. I think everything being so dark on stage and in the video is especially cool because it makes you wonder, What’s he doing to that guitar? Or maybe that’s not his guitar but a flamethrower. You think you would see the light from that but I don’t know, maybe it’s somewhere far off stage. It sounds dumb to say out loud but I’ve always kind of thought it’s a flamethrower that’s screaming like that

Head’s up—it only really gets going around the 40 second mark

[redacted]

[redacted]

Today Zhao Shiying, writer, and secretary general of the Independent Chinese Pen Center in China (IPCC), was released after being detained for two weeks. Zhao Shying has been an outspoken advocate for the release of Liu Xiaobo, another Chinese author, and the IPCC’s president who, in case you missed it, this past Christmas Day was incarcerated for “inciting subversion of state power.” Among the works Liu Xiaobo was being censured for was Charter 08, a public call for increased democratization and protection of human rights in the People’s Republic of China. Per the Pen American Center, “Liu was sentenced to 11 years in prison for seven sentences from five articles he posted on the Internet and two sentences from Charter 08—a total of 224 Chinese characters.” Offending sentences at bottom.*

See Perry Anderson’s bigger-picture piece, Sinomania, in the latest LRB for context on the changing face of China (hate to say it but the pest parts come toward the end, around ¶ 13)

Meanwhile, at home modest home, the Menifee Union School District in California’s Riverside County recently banned Webster’s 10th Dictionary for defining “oral sex”. (via Jacket Copy)

Last but maybe best, in the previous NYRB, Wyatt Mason on reading Celine’s anti-semitic so-called pamphlets—so-called so-called because two of the three works in question are as long as novels (longer than The Great Gatsby, Mason notes). Here Mason examines not just Celine’s work and legacy but also the politics of what gets kept in-print and the purpose of free speech. (The “pamphlets” are currently out-of-print due to the wishes of Celine’s widow but French anti-defamation laws may keep them that way). [redacted]

*The Censured Sentences of Liu Xiaobo

“Since the Communist Party of China (CPC) took power, generations of CPC dictators have cared most about their own power and least about human life,” from Further Questions about Child Slavery in China’s Kilns (2007).

“The official patriotism advocated by the CPC dictatorship is a fallacious system of ‘substituting the party for the country.’ The essence of this patriotism is to demand that the people love the dictatorship, the one-party rule, and the dictators. It usurps patriotism in order to inflict disasters on the nation and calamities on the people,” from The CPC’s Dictatorial Patriotism (2005).

“Thus, all of the tricks used by the CPC are stop-gap measures for the dictators to preserve the last phase of their power and will not be able to support for long this dictatorial edifice that is already showing countless cracks,” from The Many Aspects of CPC Dictatorship.

“Changing the Regime by Changing Society,” from Changing the Regime by Changing Society (2006).

“For the emergence of a free China, placing hope in the ruler of a ‘New Deal’ is an idea far worse than placing hope in the continuous expansion of the ‘new force’ among the people,” from Can it be that the Chinese People Deserve Only Party-Led Democracy? (2006).

[Nothing was actually quoted from the article] from The Negative Effects of the Rise of Dictatorship on World Democratization (2006).

“One-party monopolization of ruling privileges should be abolished…”; and “…to establish China’s federal republic under the structure of democracy and constitutionalism.” from Charter 08 (2008).

Round Up (Part 1?)

• NYT Mag Editor Paul Tough recently took a buyout to do more writing. A quick google search will turn up Tough’s more prominent feature-length work (e.g. “The Black White Supremacist”), but A Man Named Me has always liked this easily overlooked piece On Sorting Jokes, from Tough’s short-lived but well-loved liminal venture Open Letters. It’s a fitting essay for an editor.
• Writer-editor Gordon Lish on sorting sadnesses, from a few years prior.
• A Man Named Me recently visited Open Letters’ site to track down a passing encomium of Paul Maiszewski’s, on behalf of Willaim Gaddis’ J.R. (in this letter), a recommendation which turned out to be less emphatic than A Man Named Me remembered. On route however Maliszewski’s review of Alexander Theroux’s 2007 novel Laura Warholic turned up, in which he says: “Not since William Gaddis’s The Recognitions has a novel addressed the fallen present with such anger, love, and eloquence.”
• Maliszewksi has an interview with William Gass in the new Vice Fiction Issue, which also contains three amazing Robert Walser stories translated by Damion Searls. (The Italian Novella: It will break your heart and destroy your love and leave you wanting more!)
• Searls, as it happens, is the recipient of A Man Named Me’s Footnote of the Year Award – 2009. From his Believer essay about how he wrote a certain one of his books (; or The Whale): “There is a tradition of [writing with chance methods or deterministic procedures] in American Writing, which grew out of the midcentury confluence of second-generation modernism with the popularization of Zen. A good place to start exploring it is in the works of Jackson Mac Low, Joan Retallack, and Kenneth Goldsmith.”
• Open letter to Searls: Don’t leave us hanging man! You should write that article. If you don’t know where to publish it, A Man Named Me has a couple of suggestions that may or may not be helpful.