Dove's Eye View

Easy For You To Say

Some things in life are pretty simple.

If you want to lose weight, eat less and exercise more. And drink lots of water.

If you want to write good fiction, read a lot and write often.

If you want to improve your relationship (marital, familial, or just friends), spend time paying attention to each other, and give up criticising, judging or trying to control.

If you want to succeed in the world, then know what you really want, work really hard to get it, and be diplomatic. (From my old shrink. This advice passed on to you gratis)

How to meditate: close your eyes. Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat.

I have just saved you about $75 in self-help books, and possibly thousands of dollars in workshop fees.

Have fun!

Anarchist Co-op in Greensboro

I went to high school in this town, and my parents lived here for a quarter century: Inviting Anarchy Into My Home- from the New York Times.

Having separated from my husband of 28 years the day before, I opened our three-bedroom 1927 Colonial Revival house to a group of men and women less than half my age. Overnight, the home I had lived in for 12 years became a seven-person anarchist collective, run by consensus and fueled by punk music, curse-studded conversation and food scavenged from Dumpsters.

Thoreau famously said that he had "traveled much in Concord." I would venture to say that I've traveled just as much, and maybe more, without ever leaving my house.

You know, the life doesn't sound half bad. When I was a teenager in Greensboro, we knew a group of families that had bought farmland together and were building co-housing...but the commune broke up when its leader left his wife for a younger woman. Before the breakup, my family used to spend weekends with the gang, sort of a giant slumber party ranging across three farmhouses and a trailer, with a pond full of tadpoles and plenty of woods. Because it was the seventies and we were young and not rich, we had terrible haircuts and schleppy clothes. But we were happy...

Greensboro has always had its pockets of radicals and free-thinkers. God bless her and her tribe.

Did Bush Just Lose the South?

From the Huffington Post: Eric Boehlert: If You Lose Music Row, You Lose the South.

a Elon University poll revealed a clear majority of voters in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida disapprove or strongly disapprove of Bush's performance in office. Two days later came the stunning poll results published in the Indianapolis Star that showed Hoosiers statewide giving Bush just a 37 job approval rating, down 18 points in one year. In 2004, Bush won Indiana, a longtime Republican bastion akin to the Deep South, by 21 points over John Kerry.

Is this what it looks like when the base begins to crumble?

Nine Parts of Desire: Iraqi Women on the American stage

I just saw the Berkeley Rep production of Heather Raffo's one woman show Nine Parts of Desire, reviewed here in the New Yorker magazine:

“9 Parts of Desire,” directed by Joanna Settle, is an example of how art can remake the world and eloquently name pain. Based on research and dozens of interviews conducted on four continents over eleven years (Raffo portrays nine women in the course of the evening), the play brings news of the psychic life of the brutalized and allows us to think about the unthinkable. Raffo, an American whose father is an expatriate Iraqi, exists in that liminal zone between two cultures—a culture that sees itself in charge of the narrative of history and one that has seen its history wiped out. In a thrilling moment, Raffo, speaking as the play’s only American character, chants the words “I love you” and then lists the names of the forty-five members of her own extended Iraqi family, beginning with Behnam, Rehbab, Ammar, Bashar, and continuing until all are pronounced into our world.

As a performer, Raffo is deft and vivacious; her writing, like her playing, is marked by wit and by a scrupulous attention to the details of character. Among the many felicities of the narrative is her ability to change not just character but tempo, which gives the play its particular thought-provoking wallop. The shifts—mystical to secular, old age to youth, Iraqi to American—keep an audience at attention and at arm’s length. For instance, in the middle of a rant against the war Raffo, as the American woman, stops to observe, “I should get out, get something to—eat—I’m fat. I should go to the gym and run. . . . Anyway, I can watch it at the gym. People work out to the war. On three channels.”

Leila here. I wept starting from the doctor trying to operate in a backwash of sewage. The sets, the characterizations, the things the actress did with her voice (it wasn't Heather Raffo in the Northern California production, but rather a fine Iranian American actress whose name I'll have to look up).

If you get a chance to see it in Seattle, Philadelphia or Washington, please do. A very important play for anyone who cares about the human cost of this war.

Max Rodenbeck on Bin Laden

The longtime Cairo resident and Middle East correspondent for the Economist surveys two books about Osama Bin Laden: The New York Review of Books: Their Master's Voice.

The essay is worth reading for Rodenbeck's perspective on Islam, America and Bin Laden. Rodenbeck possesses deep knowledge of and respect for Islam and the Arab world, while retaining a fundamentally pro-Western stance. He doesn't care for US policy in the Middle East much, but he's not a Bush-basher or a knee-jerk anti-American. I've got the issue in hard copy and it's a good one.