I first became aware of Uruguayan writer, activist, and dog lover Eduardo Galeano about 20 years ago through Lawrence Weschler’s investigations of the amnesty movements in Brazil and Argentina during their post-military dictatorship years (Weschler’s work culminated in his book, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturers; Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America briefly put him in the news cycle when Hugo Chávez presented a copy to President Obama). Since then Galeano has gained international recognition, and in this country was awarded the (prestigious) Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. He also published his splendid Memory of Fire, the three-volume history of the Americas, and a number of other well-regarded tomes. Since Memory of Fire, Galeano has employed a kind of digressive anecdotal style which includes a variety of textual fragments, some fact-based, some invented. Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books) covers 5,000 years of human history with fragments, questions, vignettes, poems, dreamscapes, and more. Here is the book’s last entry, entitled “Lost and Found”:

The twentieth century, which was born proclaiming peace and justice, died bathed in blood. It passed on a world much more unjust than the one it inherited.
The twenty-first century, which also arrived heralding peace and justice, is following in its predecessor’s footsteps.
In my childhood, I was convinced that everything that went astray on earth ended up on the moon.
But the astronauts found no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises or hopes betrayed.
If not on the moon, where might they be?
Perhaps they were never misplaced.
Perhaps they are in hiding here on earth. Waiting.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 30, 2009

Accepting writing as one’s profession allows one to indulge all manner of aberrant and/or unorthodox behavior (sometimes to or with other writers). Along with the expected impecuniosities, the great unwashed associate peculiarity with affection for the written word. Now this is not a wild habit in the scheme of things, but I must confess to a passing interest in author acknowledgements and annotations. These days it is not uncommon for writers to give thanks to their publicists (I have a feeling it is common but I am not willing to do the research to substantiate that claim). In Quarrel With the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War (Harper), quintessential English author Adam Nicolson (Seize the Fire, God’s Secretaries) salutes longtime Harper publicity maven Jane Beirn, and I was reminded of how I came to be acquainted with Nicolson and his oeuvre.

I was walking on the Lawrence Ave. beach in Chicago a few summers ago (I was either in town to speak with Eduardo Galeano or to attend my high school reunion—these things get fuzzy after awhile), when my mobile phone interrupted my Lake Michigan idyll. It was Jane Beirn inquiring about my interest in speaking with Adam Nicolson. Not having any familiarity with Nicolson, I expressed my ambivalence. The next thing I remember is reading Nicolson’s Seamanship and chatting with him upon my return to Boston—both pleasurable experiences. When I say Adam is quintessentially English, I am referring to his choice of subjects, his lineage (son of Nigel Nicolson and the grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West), and the fact that he lives with his family in a castle. I ask you, can you get more English then that?

I was talking with Jane Beirn recently on another matter and she mentioned Quarrel With the King. The book was published last fall to indifferent attention—which I can understand, as the book seems to have little to attract the attention of the currently embattled American public, or even that fractional part considered literate. Jane sent me a copy and, given Nicholson’s fine prose and the fact that he focused on a crucial century (1520-1650 or so of England’s history, including its bloody civil war), I discovered that there was much more to this subject than I had apprehended at first glance. And more than that, I concluded that it is a book any publisher would—and should—be proud to publish. Thanks, Jane. —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 16, 2009

[Photo by Robert Birnbaum] Inclement weather may have scuttled my chat this week with multifaceted writer Lawrence Weschler, but I want to take the opportunity to bang the drum loudly about the republication and updating of his early works on Robert Irwin and David Hockney, as well as the rest of his fascinating oeuvre—which most recently includes Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.

That tome may most clearly exhibit (if not ostensibly define) Weschler’s point of view. In a recent interview with fiction writer Kyle Minor (In the Devil’s Territory), Weschler responded to a question about convergence as a new literary form:

It’s not a form original to me. When I published the first one, I was sure to give credit where credit is due, to John Berger. After Che Guevara was killed, Berger wrote an essay that began with that famous photograph of the general. He said that we all know where this photograph came from. It’s based on Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, a painting which is hotwired into everyone’s brain… The subtext—Che as Christ, as resurrection; the corpse of the thief in Rembrandt alludes to the corpse of Christ—taught me something. That was a huge, formative event for me. I think that’s how we tend to think anyway, but our thoughts are muffled by so much noise.”

But it should not go unsaid that while two books covering about three decades of conversation and intellectual exchange with two seminal, influential, and articulate artists constitutes an eloquent and original departure from traditional long-form journalism, what is especially interesting about Weschler’s dozen books is that his readers come to his work from so many different entry points. In my case it was his study of A Miracle, a Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturers, his 1990 account of torture under military dictatorships and the aftermath in Brazil and Uruguay and my discovery of the great progressive Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano that brought me to and kept me interested in Weschler. —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 27, 2009

In fits of attempting constructive self-criticism (also known as navel-gazing), I ponder the possibility that my disaffection with mainstream politics and my lifelong drift from left-leaning liberal to socialist to anarchist is mostly a result of my biography. That probably is supposed to matter, especially to people who think that “balance” and “objectivity” are viable constructs or values or whatever. I am drawn to renegades and skeptics and dissidents—Howard Zinn, Kurt Vonnegut, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, the Berrigan Brothers, Staughton Lynd, Eduardo Galeano—and even to the right lurch of Christopher Hitchens. (I have not abandoned a healthy respect for his analytic and rhetorical skills.) For some time now, I have caught glimmers and rays of Joe Bageant at his site and at Mark Woods’s web site/media bonanza.

Among other of my cogitations about Bageant was a puzzlement that his commentary did not have a wider audience. Consider this illumination from his Aug. 27 entry, “What will America look like in two years?”:

It’s going to take what most people outside the US would consider a ridiculous level of disaster before most Americans understand that something is deeply wrong with the trajectory of their nation. Personally, I think we are years away from that realization—decades away if we can steal enough oil and keep printing enough fiat currency to keep the public fooled.

Last year Bageant published a book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War, the title of which tips off why he has not been lapped up by the mainstream. Bageant mentions, and in fact insists, that there are class divisions in America. Which contradicts one of the basic myths of our republic. Here’s Studs Terkel’s take:

This recounting of lost lives—of white have-nots in one of our most have-not states—has the power of an old-time Scottish Border ballad. It is maddening and provocative that the true believers in “American exceptionalism” and ersatz machismo side with those stepping all over them. Bagaent’s writing is as lyrical as Nelson Algren’s, and if there’s a semblance of hope, it’s that he catches on with new readers thanks to the alternative media.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 2, 2008