Memorial for kari edwards

You are invited to
a celebration

of the life and work of

kari edwards (1954-2006)


This event will celebrate kari's indomitable spirit and compassionate revelation of body and language. The tribute will focus on kari's considerable legacy and include, poetry, music, performance and presentations of visual art.


Friday, April 27, 2007 at 7:30 PM

San Francisco Campus of the California College of the Arts

1111 Eighth Street

San Francisco, CA 94107



This event will be co-sponsored by Small Press Traffic and the CCA MFA Writing Program

My loving partner and publisher of this blog, kari edwards, died on 12/2/06 her birthday. She touched so many people with her work and her blogs. Her presence in the world and on the internet will live on. Thanks

The Century of Drought By Michael McCarthy

One third of the planet will be desert by the year 2100, say climate experts in the most dire warning yet of the effects of global warming.

    Drought threatening the lives of millions will spread across half the land surface of the Earth in the coming century because of global warming, according to new predictions from Britain's leading climate scientists.

    Extreme drought, in which agriculture is in effect impossible, will affect about a third of the planet, according to the study from the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research.

    It is one of the most dire forecasts so far of the potential effects of rising temperatures around the world - yet it may be an underestimation, the scientists involved said yesterday.

    The findings, released at the Climate Clinic at the Conservative Party conference in Bournemouth, drew astonished and dismayed reactions from aid agencies and development specialists, who fear that the poor of developing countries will be worst hit. more..

from Passiflora by Juliana Spahr

The politics of the island in the middle of the Pacific were something else altogether. They were a part of the island that bit into them and those around them with bladelike, piercing mouthparts that stabbed through the skin and then injected a saliva that teemed with digestive enzymes, viruses, and anticoagulants. This bite often left behind an annoying itch, a reminder that things were not both the one and the other, could not be both the one and the other because both made no sense because there could not be both colonialism and sovereignty. The uncomfortable itch did not last long, but the bite left in their bloodstream a troubling, a questioning, some new sort of information, some prickly new cells that attached themselves to their blood cells and reshaped them, something that their immune system had to deal with that it hadn’t dealt with before. more..

Raoul Vaneigem: Religion is the Enemy

By inaugurating close to two thousand years ago a system of exploitation of terrestrial and human nature, the agrarian revolution gave birth to a market economy of which the evolution and the forms are, despite their great diversity, marked by the persistance of several traits that are dominant everywhere: social inequality, exclusive appropriation, the cult of power and profit, work and separation that was introduced into the body between the impulses of life and the spirit, which tames them and represses them, just as it tames and represses the natural elements. The relation that, in the economy of gathering, anterior to the appearance of intensive agriculture, was established by osmosis between the human species and the mineral, vegetal and animal kingdoms has ceded place to its alienated form, to religion, which claims to subjugate the earth to a celestial empire, swarming with fantastic creatures called Gods, Goddesses, Spirits. The bonds interlaced by affection and comprehension, which emanate, have become the chains of a tutelary tyranny, cracking down from the foggy heights where the beyond of existence begins its vacuity. more...

The Story of My Accident Is Ours by Rachel Levitsky

The Story of My Accident Is Ours

If I no longer exist, if in fact I may never have existed in the first place, then do I have a name? What is in a name? Certainly we can ask these questions about such a name as Jane.

It was in my thinking about our names that I began to tell this story. Perhaps that is the origin, or rather, the originary root, of my accident. But  my accident, which may have begun when it occurred to me that I did not know my name nor the name of any of us, came after the events of this story, which began to be written at the time that I began to think this way about our names. (more at) Web Conjunctions (11.16.06)

Who the Hell Wants to be Reasonable? byKathryn Rosenfeld

I once joked to a friend and comrade that we should produce and distribute “WWED?” (What Would Emma Do?) bracelets. “She’s not the only famous anarchist, you know,” my friend replied. True enough. And yet, she is still the foremost foremother of modern-day anarchism, and the only person whose portrait I have ever considered having tattooed on my body. Undeniably, Emma Goldman more than any other single figure embodies the concept “anarchy” and the history that adheres to it. She is still “the anarchist” even to non-anarchists. Despite her insistence on the importance of individuality, she is by now less a person who lived than a symbol, and as such the repository of countless, multifarious, often contradictory dreams. Some of these are directly continuous with the dreams Goldman dreamed in her lifetime; others are based on creative interpretations or partial readings of her thought (into which category my own Emma Dreams fall is not for me to say). Yet all are equally precious to the dreamers themselves, as are the various Avatars of Emma with which they are bound up. Like all mythic personae, these avatars say less about Goldman herself than about the people who have created them. There is no question but that she is an icon, which is why I have found it nearly impossible to write about her. more....

Will Global Warming Unleash More Seismic Activity? by: Margaret Lillian

At first glance, there doesn’t seem like there could be any connection between global warming and seismic activity. After all, why would the earth become less stable just because it’s a little warmer?

Well, connected they are. The earth’s crust is a lot more sensitive than you might think. There are well documented cases of even the load of water in a new dam triggering earthquakes in the local area.

A number of geologists say glacial melting, in particular, will unleash pent-up pressures in the Earth's crust, causing extreme geological events such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. more....

Anarchism and the Question of Human Nature by Thomas Martin

In these first years of the new century anarchism, as a philosophy and as an ongoing praxis, is faced with a number of disconcerting adjustments. Chief among these is the growing evidence that we, along with most other ideologies on the Left, have based our theory on a mistaken concept of human nature. We have learned over the years to distrust words like sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and above all that dreaded buzzword, “hard-wired” — yet we can no longer ignore the fact that these sciences are probably right about human nature. It does exist; it has biological roots; and while it does enjoy a large measure of free will, its most basic drives and emotions are indeed hard-wired. The Left has long resisted and denied these facts, on the grounds that they might justify discrimination based on heredity, or that they militate against the possibility of radical social reform, or both. I hope to demonstrate that these fears are groundless.

The “hard-wired” concept is thoroughly anchored in evolutionary theory, and this is the first obstacle the Left runs up against when objecting to it. Evolution is a fact: we are animals, closely related to other primates and only a little more distantly to the rest of the mammals. We share many physical and emotional traits with them, and it is absurd to suppose that they are governed by instinct but that we are not. We don’t know exactly how evolution works (in fact there are some serious alternatives even to Darwinism’s most basic assumptions, like the central role of the gene); but it does work. Very few if any radicals or anarchists would disagree with that. But certain conclusions follow inevitably from that ‘given,’ and if we deny them, we put ourselves into very unsavory company. Biblical fundamentalists insist that we are a separate creation from the animals, our consciousness governed by a ‘soul’ which is in turn answerable to a ‘God’ — do any of us want that idea for a bedfellow? On the other hand, if we accept uncritically (as many on the Right do) the view of human nature suggested by today’s neo-Darwinism, we wander into even more unsavory neighborhoods. The notorious Bell Curve is founded on those arguments, and so is neo-Nazism and other overtly racist movements. more..

A peril that dwelt among the Navajos

During the Cold War, uranium mines left contaminated waste scattered around the Indians. Homes built with the material silently pulsed with radiation. People developed cancer. And the U.S. did little to help.

Mary and Billy Boy Holiday bought their one-room house from a medicine man in 1967. They gave him $50, a sheep and a canvas tent. . . .

The single drawback was the bare dirt underfoot. . . .

. . . . sand and crushed rock that had washed down from an old uranium mine in the mesa, one of hundreds throughout the Navajo reservation that once supplied the nation's nuclear weapons program. The waste material wouldn't cost a cent. "He said it made good concrete," Mary Holiday recalled. more...

From Aesthetics to Politics: Rancière, Kant and Deleuze by Katharine Wolfe

Jacques Rancière's Dis-agreement, as Rancière writes in his subsequent work, The Politics of Aesthetics, explores "the distribution of the sensible at stake in any politics".[1] How is this phrase 'the distribution of the sensible' to be understood and why does the distribution of the sensible bear such a relation to politics? Dis-agreement tells us that politics first becomes a possibility with the institution of a community, where a community itself begins with something in common. This commonality is no shared stock of goods or shared claim to a territory. Rather, it is a shared partition of the sensible: community pivots around common modalities of sense. In other words, the commonality upon which a community is founded is sense, and politics first becomes a possibility with the institution of common sense. Hand in hand with the disclosure of shared modalities of sensing, moreover, comes the delimitation of each modality. The partition of the sensible thus renders some sounds intelligible (logos) and others unintelligible (pathos), some capacities visible and other invisible, and more. Moreover, social positions are portioned out according to these delimitations, and the partitioning of the sensible upon which the community is founded ultimately determines which people are recognizable as part of a shared world and which are sanctioned in partaking of it. Yet the moment politics becomes possible is distinct from the moment politics erupts -- politics is a much rarer thing than common sense or the institution of a community. For Rancière, politics is that rare event that occurs when the confluence between sanctioned dispositions to partake of the shared world and positions within the partition of the sensible is ruptured. Politics not only interrupts common sense but also erupts into the shared sensible world. more..

Baby, You Can Ride My Bike:10 Reasons Cars Suck By MICKEY Z

There's an interesting courtroom battle shaping up out in California. The state is attempting to institute new emissions standards for greenhouse gases. Such regulations could reduce exhaust emissions by 25% in cars and light trucks and 18% in SUVs. California already has the toughest standards in the nation-standards adopted by 10 states, including New York. This new proposal would surpass federal emissions standards and is likely to eventually raise the national bar even higher. Guess who's not happy about this?

Among others, DaimlerChrysler Corp., General Motors, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers have filed suit, claiming that California is in violation of the federal Clean Air Act because the state did not get a waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency. In other words, the automobile giants are siding with the EPA and the Clean Air Act to crush regulations designed to address issues of global warming and human health. You can add this situation to the top ten list of why cars suck. Here are the other nine reasons: more..

Singer Ruth Brown Dies at 78

She'll always be Miss Rhythm, the powerhouse belter of those 1950s blues hits that made Atlantic Records.

Ruth Brown could swagger on "Teardrops From My Eyes" and turn imperious on "(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean," its very first word rising like a squealed exclamation point. ....

Brown, who died yesterday at 78 after having been in a coma in a Las Vegas hospital for almost three weeks, was a pioneer of rhythm and blues. Even her initials bore testimony to that. Blessed with jubilance, sass and high spirits, and wonderfully expressive features that simply broadened over time, she influenced such greats as Etta James, Stevie Wonder, Bette Midler, Aretha Franklin and Bonnie Raitt. more..

Kamala Das - MY SON'S TEACHER

My son is four. His teacher swooned on a grey pavement

Five miles from here and died. From where she lay, her new skirt 

Flapped and fluttered, a green flag, half-mast, to proclaim death's 

Minor triumphs. The wind was strong, the poor men carried 

Pink elephant-gods to the sea that day. They moved in 

Long gaudy processions, they clapped cymbals, they beat drums 

And they sang aloud, she who lay in a faint was drowned 

in their song. The evening paper carried the news. He 

Bathed, drank milk, wrote two crooked lines of Ds and waited. 

But the dead rang no doorbell. He is only four. 

For many years he will not be told that tragedy 

Flew over him one afternoon, an old sad bird, and 

Gently touched his shoulder with its wing. more...

Global warming already killing species, analysis says

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Animal and plant species have begun dying off or changing sooner than predicted because of global warming, a review of hundreds of research studies contends.

These fast-moving adaptations come as a surprise even to biologists and ecologists because they are occurring so rapidly.

At least 70 species of frogs, mostly mountain-dwellers that had nowhere to go to escape the creeping heat, have gone extinct because of climate change, the analysis says. It also reports that between 100 and 200 other cold-dependent animal species, such as penguins and polar bears are in deep trouble.

"We are finally seeing species going extinct," said University of Texas biologist Camille Parmesan, author of the study. "Now we've got the evidence. It's here. It's real. This is not just biologists' intuition. It's what's happening." more...

Antonio Gramsci - Problems of today and tomorrow

There will be no possibility of working-class political action, so long as the concrete problems which present themselves to each worker have to be resolved individually and privately, as is the case today. He has to preserve his job, his pay, his house and his family. The union and the party cannot help in any way, indeed the reverse is true. A little peace can only be won if one makes oneself as small as possible, if one scatters. One can only increase one's pay a bit by working a lot or looking for supplementary jobs, competing with the other workers, etc. The very negation of the party and the union. The economic crisis has now diminished, so that if there was even a minimum of trade-union freedom and public order, union organization, industrial action, etc., could start up again (as in England, for example). The urgent question, which conditions all others, is that of "freedom" and "order": the others will come later, but for now they cannot even interest the workers. more..

Shameless self promotion

Review of "obedience" by kari edwards by Erica Kaufman, at CutBank Poetry

Midway Journal .01.FA.06

Midway Journal .01.FA.06

Fiction
Frank Miller
Greggory Moore
Richard Holinger
Barbara De La Cuesta

Poetry
kari edwards
James Sanders
Richard Kostelanetz

Drama
Mac Wellman

Mixed Genre
jUStin!katKo

Interviews
An interview with Henry Hills by Charles Bernstein

Chronic Diseases of Rich Countries Begin to Plague Developing Nations

The international community has set its sights on easing the burdens of infectious disease and malnutrition around the world. Yet some projections find that a bigger fraction of deaths in developing countries may soon come from chronic ailments such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer and respiratory illness. In one example of the underlying trend, researchers report that high blood glucose exacts a global death toll comparable to any pathogen and has fueled an epidemic of diabetes in Asia. Another new study surveys the known economic impacts of such chronic diseases. more..