How I came to this site needs an explanation. I was teaching Marshalee children today, and we had a lesson on Hawaiian voyaging from South Pacific to Hawaii over thousand years ago. It was mainly about how we became navigators and outrigger builders. I explained to my students that I spent 9 mos. building a double haul, one can view this outrigger at Polynesian Culture Center. I am a native Hawaiian woman and I did this in memory of the women in my family.

My introduction to these children begins with my long ago family Mendiola and how they came to Hawaii and never left Hawaii. Whereas most that came to the islands went back home. My family have married over time into the Hawaiian race therefore we are mostly Hawaiian today. With both events in my life, I begin to explain how my grandfather was at Kwajaleing and he made a phone call home. In speaking to my grandmother he requested that two children be named Kwajalein and Marshal for reasons that he wanted us to remember the nuclear testing that was happening while he was down under.

I later had long conversation for about an hour with their ELL teacher, he is Marshalee. We discussed many things and a lot of our conversational particulars exist in your commentary. I hope to meet you some day and have a lengthy conversation about the military and their violent contamination of our people. Cancer should not be the end–just because we are caring people and always willing to be at peace with ourselves and our god like environment. One that will escape the minds of the anglo and his need to end mankine on earth. Mahalo

its called The Free and is set in an anarchist revolution coinciding with the collapse of capitalism and climate chaos.

Its awaiting publicatiin by PM Press
You can read it online HERE.

http://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/

Its brilliant (though not coz I wrote it)

Socialist Cuba saved itself from capitalist tyranny and exploitation. It’s not flawless by far; nowhere is.

Moreover, the socialist, that is democratic developments in South America recently, especially Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador have helped the people of those countries (and beyond) immensely.

Meanwhile the US and France and others have combined to crush democracy and “socialism” especially in Haiti, and in many other “third world” countries across the globe.

The socialistic aspects, that is, what there is of democracy in the US, are among the redeeming aspects of the country.

You and I have very different understandings of socialism. Tyrannies sometimes use the good names of socialism and democracy in attempt to cover their own despotism.

its called The Free and is set in an anarchist revolution coinciding with the collapse of capitalism and climate chaos.

Its awaiting publication by PM Press
You can read it online HERE.

http://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/

Its brilliant (though not coz I wrote it)

Some of Mailer’s writing would fit in the journal I co-edit, for example, Liberation Lit. Much would not. So much so that I can’t say I can look especially to Mailer for progressive leadership in writing either in fiction or nonfiction, a type of more full, more humane, more vital writing that has been badly needed these many years, a mode of writing that Geismar came to be greatly concerned with as well…and not because it was some hobbyhorse but because of concern of the state of writing and the state of society, the world in general.

So in part here, our concerns are differently focused, and in part we simply disagree. I see Geismar and Mailer both as important writers, though the one has been buried and the other celebrated, and (in part ironically) I find Geismar’s diverse and sometimes severe criticism of Mailer’s work to be of lasting value…

Did Geismar review much of anyone in his latter years? And did he devote much space to Mailer at all? He didn’t live to see The Executioner’s Song by several years. I think he would have greatly appreciated that book in which Mailer ditched the faults of the blowhard and the petty, etc. Executioner’s Song is arguably Mailer’s best book and it is also arguably not typical of Mailer’s more grandiose, however accomplished, books that Geismar disdained.

And if Geismar in his latter years did not pay much attention to Mailer, who is to say he was wrong to do so? Not least since Geismar had turned to critiquing what he saw as more progressive, more vital authors, and quite reasonably had little patience for grandstanders like Mailer.

Look, in my view, Mailer’s Armies of the Night is a brilliant book, a valuable one, but I’m also very sympathetic to Geismar’s disdain of it, because I think the book could have been greater if some of the comic ego had set itself aside for far greater stretches of time to analyze, inform, and explore more about the larger and more telling context of the March on Washington and related topics and situations. Other, greater books interrupt some of their flow to do exactly that, in my view, such as Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia or Hugo’s Les Miserables. These are books in which the authors don’t ride too much too few of their various strengths. These works attempt more and achieve more and don’t need to resort to the kind of cheap theatrics and the too superficial jumping, skimming, skipping shallows that partially undermine some of Mailer’s valuable contributions. Geismar had antennae for serious limits in Mailer’s work that in my view are worth paying attention to.