Songs of Experience

 

Unlike a lot of the videos making the rounds on social media, this one does not celebrate Israeli unity, righteousness and resilience since the Oct. 7 terror attack by Hamas. Instead, it captures the fracture and despair many Israelis feel about the Netanyahu government. 

“In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.” (Bertolt Brecht).

Voices from Oakland, California / The Audacity of Hope in MMXX

The interview at the Oakland Public Library is well worth spending time with.  It took me the good part of this last week to hear all of it.  I recommend the whole interview, if you have time, along with Tommy Orange's book which ends with two pages of acknowledgments ending with:

"The Native community in Oakland.  My living Cheyenne relatives, and my ancestors who made it through unimaginable hardship, who prayed hard for us next ones here now, doing our best to pray and work hard for those to come."

While working on this post, I stopped to listen to this bookstore reading and discussion of There There in Washington, D.C., in 2018:



From There There:

Part I

Prologue

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.
-- Bertolt Brecht

Part III

Return

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
-- James Baldwin

"Tony remembers something his grandma said to him when she was teaching him how to dance.  You have to dance like birds sing in the morning," she said, and showed him how light she could be on her feet.  She bounced and her toes pointed in just the right way.  Dancer's feet.  Dancer's gravity." (p. 290)

***

"Welcome to a brilliant and generous artist who has already enlarged the landscape of American fiction.  There There is a comic vision haunted by profound sadness.  Tommy Orange is a new writer with an old heart." (Louise Erdrich)

"... and the sequel has everything to do with how to come back from something that we can't even all agree on having happened ..." (Tommy Orange, from the last minutes of the Oakland Public Library interview)