Tomgram: Graduation Day with Howard Zinn

 

It's a beautiful day in May. The sun is streaming down; the birds are on their migration paths north; the first day lilies are just breaking into bloom -- and students are gathering for their graduation ceremonies on an afternoon when everything seems just right in a world where so much seems so wrong. These are the students who began their college lives within weeks, possibly days, even hours of that moment when, on September 11, 2001, the first hijacked plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. Certainly they -- above all classes of recent times -- have the right to peer into a murky future and wonder, with a certain trepidation, what's in store for them. Through no fault of their own, they have earned the right to discouragement, even perhaps despair.

Judge Upholds Kentucky Anti-Gay Amendment 
by 365Gay.com Newscenter Staff


(Frankfort, Kentucky) Kentucky's constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage has been ruled valid.

Include me in
The hows and whys of experimental fiction
By Masha Gutkin


'WHAT IS THE present? The present has never been described – how should we describe it?" Robert Glück asks in his introduction to Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. A sort of investigative manual for cracking open narrative, edited by locals Glück, Mary Burger, and Camille Roy and by Canadian Gail Scott, the collection clamors with the voices of more than 40 North American writers as they grapple with the project of storytelling in our times.

Most of the contributions that make up Biting the Error originally appeared on San Francisco State University's Narrativity Web journal (edited by the same team). The reader may recognize many of the contributors (Leslie Scalapino, Renee Gladman, Chris Kraus, and Aaron Shurin) as intermittently local. "We've gathered a cadre for radical narrative.... Our intent with this anthology is not to normalize a body of work, but to broaden and deepen the questions we can ask the field of fiction," Roy asserts. And though Roy may be referring only to written fiction, the investigations of this anthology have resonance for any artist communicating an experience of being in time.