Isak

Gil Scott-Heron's Last Holiday

2012-02-24T21:05:02-05:00

Sometimes I bring music into my creative writing classes with Detroit high schoolers (via the InsideOut Literary Arts Project). Unlike with the poems I put before them, their reactions to my music is immediate, visceral, and, most of all, one hundred percent certain. It bemuses me: they know what they like. John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis collaborating on "Murder" is not it. John Coltrane is not it. Ask them to freewrite to the masters of blues and jazz, and you'll get a lot of journal entries to the effect of: "Oh my god, kill me now."

But Gil Scott-Heron: that went down differently.

I wrote before about "a thesis statement for Gil Scott-Heron," or my experiments in teaching composition at a community college with the help of his music. In my poetry classes with high schoolers, his music was an opportunity to talk about metaphor, about litany, about voice, about the image that is concrete, hold-able.

But before we got to all that, we just listened. The ninth-graders laughed when their regular teacher whooped at the sound of Scott-Heron's beats and eased into a groove while sorting their papers. An eleventh-grader nodded his head along while staring at his desk. A friend of his wanted me to hook up my feeble computer to louder speakers. "What's he talking about?" asked a tenth-grader while the song slid forth. Another responded: "Man, he's talking about revolution." One kid heard the word "brother" in the music, and hooked on that. "I like that one," said one girl, after the songs were all done. It was high praise.

The Last Holiday is Gil Scott-Heron's memoir, and it's just published. Pop Matters has an excerpt from what appears to be the preface. He focuses on his life as a musician, and a writer, in the making.

I always doubt detailed recollections authors write about their childhoods. Maybe I am jealous that they retain such clarity of their long agos while my own past seems only long gone.

What helped me to retain some order was that by the age of ten I was interested in writing. I wrote short stories. The problem was that I didn’t know much about anything. And I didn’t take photos or collect mementos. There were things I valued, but I thought they would always be there. And that I would.

Long Live the Bookninja

2012-02-23T10:45:05-05:00

For a couple years before I started writing Isak back in 2006, I was a regular reader of a handful of literary blogs that, as it turned out, were my inspiration for getting in on the game. I remember discovering that lit blogs existed, these remarkable portals of smart, funny, bookish news and commentary, and how immediately I knew them to be a home. These blogs were the first beat of my day in the mornings. I made up an excuse to talk to many of the folks behind these blogs via interviews for an article I agreed to write on spec (never again) for a certain writerly publication, and as I asked them about the rhythm of their lit blogging, there contributions to the literary conversation, I think I knew all along that I was really asking for guidance to what I wanted to do myself.

Among my early initiators and mentors, whether he knew it or not, was poet George Murray of the belated and beloved Bookninja. Bringing a brilliant and distinctly Canadian voice to the public conversation on literature, Bookninja was came alongside my cup of black tea each morning.

But the site abruptly ceased a year ago this month. My constant refreshings did nothing to stimulate new content. In the National Post, Murray writes about the project of Bookninja, as well as why, finally, he moved on.

At its peak, Bookninja’s unique brand of comedic literary commentary reached more than 10,000 people a day. It seemed like everyone in the publishing industry, from writers to editors to publicists to librarians, was reading Bookninja. We were mentioned, quoted and profiled in newspapers and magazines not just in Canada but around the world. I was invited to speak at conferences. Publishers lined up around the block to get their books mentioned on the site — the number of free
review copies got so overwhelming that I held parties at my house during which I’d put out Rubbermaid tubs full of books and demand people leave with at least three or four.

[...]

Over the years, I’d been in talks with various bigshots about buying the site, but the problem with selling a brand like Bookninja is that the brand is, well, me. So, a year ago Saturday, I posted one last time. There was no goodbye message. No real explanation of why I was calling it quits. To the readers, it must have seemed like the site went out with a whimper, but it was a shocking relief to me.

[...]

In the end, it was a good run, and lots of people had fun. A successful poet in Canada can count on between 500 and 750 readers over the life of a book; a mid-list novelist doesn’t get many more. My brand of literary stand-up comedy was earning thousands and thousands of readers each day. It wasn’t translating to sales at the till (it’s poetry, people, come on), but it certainly made me feel good at parties when people came up to say hi. Do I miss it? Sometimes. But mostly not. To paraphrase The Doors when they were told they’d not be invited back on The Ed Sullivan Show: Hey, man, I was the Bookninja.

I appreciate Murray's honesty in plain-saying that he doesn't particularly miss Bookninja, even as the rest of us do. There is something -- well, poetic about calmly understanding that sometimes it is time to stop.

I don't think I ever publicly thanked Bookninja or the other sites that lured me into what has been nearly six years of adventure and joy here at Isak, so let me do so now. Thank you, Bookninja. And thank you too, Moorish Girl (Laila Lalami now occasionally blogs here), The Elegant Variation, Literary Saloon, Bookslut, Maud Newton, the site now called Reluctant Habits), and Beatrice. You meant more to me than you know.

I am so grateful.

Book Review: Sula by Toni Morrison

2012-02-20T15:54:21-05:00

Sinking into Toni Morrison's fiction is like sinking into loamy earth. She writes novels that are ground heels-down into a planet of soil and water and stone. She writes novels of blood, bone, sunlight. Sula is in kind.

For a slim book -- Morrison's second, from 1973 -- the narrative reads as an epic. (Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping has the same sort of dissonance between length and scope.) Sula unfolds almost entirely in Ohio, in a tiny community called the Bottom that actually sits in the hills, above the valley-dwelling white people of the city of Medallion. We peek also into France, where Shadrack fights in World War I, loses much of his mind, and returns with the idea of bringing a National Suicide Day to the Bottom, so that people might find a bit certainty for death. There is also a long train ride to New Orleans, into a Creole-speaking home of a grandmother who dies just before arrival.

We barely see the title character until about halfway through the novel, and even then, the vantage of Sula Peace is so searingly archetypal, it must be divided with the vantage of Nel Wright, Sula's kind of friend. They grow up in very different homes in the Bottom, one of fire (such fires) and the other of watchfulness. Nel marries after high school, gives birth to children, and becomes a leader in the small community that she never leaves (excepting that single New Orleans trip, when she was a child). Sula disappears just after Nell's wedding, and doesn't return for ten years. It was a time she spent wandering, learning, confronting, explaining nothing, and establishing a strange relationshipw ith rememberance. When Sula returns, this woman with the strange mark upon her eye, she is understood by those living in the Bottom as the incarnation of evil. She carries a bluntness about her -- not only a disregard for social conventions, but a willingness to invade them, even when they impact her old, and only, ally.

The epic reach of the novel is in part revealed in how the text moves well beyond Sula's death in 1940, after the Bottom's singular location for evil is eliminated, and therefore unleashed.

An epigraph from a Tennessee Williams play called The Rose Tattoo opens the novel: "Nobody knew my rose of the world but me. . . . I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart." The line's subtle bleakness and sky-high outlook suits this novel. And I am intrigued by the gap between the epigraph's first-person and the novel's aggressive omniscience.

Sula was nominated for the National Book Award after it was published. It was also a latter-day Oprah's Book Club pick, by the author that is America's most recent Nobel laureate in literature. And, finally, the New York Times Book Review piece on Sula was written by Sara Blackburn in December, 1973, and included a few odd turns. The italics are mine:

Toni Morrison is someone who really knows how to clank a sentence, as the novelist Irving Rosenthal has put it, and her dialogue is so compressed and life-like that it sizzles. And Morrison's skill at characterization is such that, by the end, it's as if an enormous but too severely framed landscape has been unrolled and inhabited by people who seem almost mythologically strong and familiar; like the gorgeous characters of Garcia Marquez, they have a heroic quality, and it's hard to believe we haven't known them forever.

Yet the comparison can't be extended: Morrison hasn't endowed her people with life beyond their place and function in the novel, and we can't imagine their surviving outside the tiny community where they carry on their separate lives. It's this particular quality that makes "Sula" a novel whose long-range impact doesn't sustain the intensity of its first reading. Reading it, in spite of its richness and its thorough originality, one continually feels its narrowness, its refusal to brim over into the world outside its provincial setting.

As the author of frequent criticism and social commentary, Morrison has shown herself someone of considerable strength and skill in confronting current realities, and it's frustrating that the qualities which distinguish her novels are not combined with the stinging immediacy, the urgency, of her nonfiction. This last is a classically unfair carp on the part of a reviewer, but Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life. If she is to maintain the large and serious audience she deserves, she is going to have to address a riskier contemporary reality than this beautiful but nevertheless distanced novel. And if she does this, it seems to me that she might easily transcend the early and unintentionally limiting classification "black woman writer" and take her place among the most serious, important and talented American novelists now working.

UPDATE: So says Toni Morrison. Hat tip to the always-amazing Randa Jarrar for clueing me in to this video.

Literary & Media Indulgences - 2/18/2012

2012-02-18T12:05:58-05:00

-- Along with many, many people, I am shaken by the death of Anthony Shadid at age 43 in Syria, where he had been covertly investigating the resistance to the brutal rule President Bashar al-Assad. The longtime New York Times foreign correspondent was one of the most essential reporters throughout the Arab Spring; he was one of the four Times journalists kidnapped in Libya last year. (See Shadid's NPR interview about being one of the narrators of the Arab Spring here.) Shadid won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work as "a gatherer, an observer, a listener." One of his last stories, on the rise of Islamism in Tunisia, was published after his death. Just a couple weeks ago, Mother Jones ran an interview with Shadid, where he discussed growing up Lebanese in Oklahoma City and his understanding that "I don't think there's any story worth dying for, but I do think there are stories worth taking risks for." Longform collects his greatest dispatches. Shadid's book, House of Stone, was to be published in March. It has since been scheduled for an earlier release.

-- Ahdaf Soueif on "Cairo, Hers Again" in Guernica: "A month before, a week before, three days before, we could not have told you it was going to happen."

-- The poetic legacy of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper founded in 1905.

-- Gish Jen (whose title story in Who's Irish? is a favorite of mine) talks up Linsanity in the New York Times.

-- Author Sara Levine, interviewed: "No one asks this of male narrators, to be likable.”

-- Bookforum interviews Sergio González Rodríguez, the journalist whose work on female homicides in Mexico's Ciudad Juarez inspired Roberto Bolaño and Javier Marias.

-- Jonathan Franzen appears to think that readers have trouble loving Edith Wharton's novels because she was both privileged and, according to him, unattractive. I beg to differ, but Steve Donoghue has the best response (albeit one that is far harsher in the overall assesment of Franzen's character than seems fair -- the new incarnation of Norman Mailer he is not). (Thanks to Chris M. for the initial link.)

-- Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the influence of fonts in urban development.

-- The Houston Chronicle looks at the role of "snitches" in journalism, or the "a legacy of secret government informants." See also, in The New York Times, "a high-tech war on leaks."

-- While I'm partial to The Michigan Daily, Roger Ebert is right to champion The Daily Illini as one of the greats in campus reporting for 140 years. And it needs our help.

-- Roxane Gay's extended comment in response to "On Getting Paid: Literary Magazines and Remuneration" in The Millions is the best part of the article.

-- Andre Dubus III on "love in a class-riven America." A lot of this rung true for me.

-- Second-grade field trip to the parking garage: a fascinating New York Times article on the value of field trips in education, particularly in, as Dubus would put it, a "class-riven America."

-- A new book examines the survival of beauty, pattern, mimicry, and camouflage in nature.

-- "The trials of Greg Mortenson." That's the Three Cups of Tea guy, and that's Outside magazine doing the rigorous follow-up to the case of literary fraud.

-- MacArthur awards for "creative & effective institutions" have gone to The Moth for its dedication to the art of storytelling. Detroiters, hit up Cliff Bell's the first Thursday of the month to experience it live (Theme: "Gangs, Cliques, and Crowds"). There's also an upcoming Moth in Ann Arbor this month. (Theme: "Bosses.") Other notable MacArthur winners include the Center for Investigative Reporting and the National Juvenile Defender Center.

-- What is the impact of Hollywood success on Michael Chabon's fiction? Tablet investigates.

-- The decline of the arts has been greatly exaggerated, says Jed Perl.

-- Poet Mary Oliver is seriously ill. The new blog Dear Mary is collecting letters from her readers.

-- "The new world of William Carlos Williams."

-- "The unsung maestro of East African literature."

-- Vladmir Putin is proposing a new Russian "great books" program.

-- From one of the most recent Three Percent podcasts: "on books and being alone."

-- It's an honor to give writer Cheryl Strayed credit for her wonderful work as the Dear Sugar columnist, which she wrote passionately and anonymously up through Valentine's Day. The New Yorker profiles Strayed after her coming-out. See my posts provoked by Dear Sugar, including: "There isn't a thing to eat down there in the rabbit-hole of your own bitterness except your own desperate heart" and "Whatever it was that wouldn't let us go: On Writing and Necessity."

Image Credit: The New York Times

Poetry for the Science Fiction Fan

2012-02-16T16:40:21-05:00

Over at io9, Rebecca Ariel Porte takes on two "suspect" genres of literature that she loves, and invites readers of one to crossover into another.

Of course there are scifi readers who already really like poetry—and poetry readers who really like scifi—but we tend to exist (however passionate we are about our sestinas and our ray-guns) in the fringes of both communities.

Porte questions the assumption that science fiction and poetry have never intersected, while acknowledging that to retroactively apply modern genre labels to literature that pre-existed them is limiting.

My guess is that when I write "science fiction," the first things that come to mind aren't Lucretius' De rerum natura (1st century B.C.) or Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth century sonnets about atoms.

When I write "fantastical literature," I suspect that most readers will think of The Lord of the Rings before S.T. Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market."

... What I want to establish is that there's a long history of English language poetry on both scientific and fantastical themes and that these themes are still active concerns for contemporary poets.

Porte goes on to profile poetry books "for every kind of science fiction fan." It's actually a list of only five books. But there are some interesting choices, among them A. Van Jordan's Quantum Lyrics, which links to the Isak interview with Jordan on "where poetry, physics, and politics collide." (Thanks, io9!). Missing from Porte's list: Nikki Giovanni, who writes a lot about space and has fascinating ideas about humans traveling to Mars.

Where Porte oversimplifies: she seems to be equating "science" with "science fiction," and "science fiction" with "futuristic outer space." There is overlap, of course, but these are not literary synonyms. The reasons I, for example, am head-over-heels for the Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars review here) was partly about the patient and exciting science of the novels, but it was also about the deep storytelling about what it takes to create large-scale community; or, the moral and technical and emotional stakes of acting on the belief that an alternative world is possible. Porte tossed off "ray-guns" as an aside in her post, but, it implies one single kind of fan-dom of one single kind of science fiction, and a rather dated one at that. A more expansive approach to what draws readers to science fiction would have made for a more nuanced rundown of the poetry that could set their (our) imaginations alight.

About the image: Red Mars, via GOOD Magazine. Looks like the perfect place to bring a bottle of wine, a blanket, and a dog-eared copy of Marianne Moore, no?

Poems of Love

2012-02-14T16:18:18-05:00

They have something of a bad reputation, don't they? Carrying a whiff of the sentimental, the overwrought, the one-dimensional hyperbole? The scent of the idealized, the self-serving, the hyper-adjectival? Love is not only a difficult emotion to articulate, but a difficult one to imagine.

Nonetheless, a host of authors over at The Guardian -- from Ahdaf Soueif to Jeannette Winterson to Seamus Heaney to Hilary Mantel -- choose their favorite poems of love. So does The Boston Globe: fourteen poems for February 14. The Chicago Tribune looks at the "poetry" of missed connections. And the Poetry Foundation has put together a "sampler" of classic and contemporary poems that it invites you to (it says with a sly wink) share.

And here is one of my favorites, translated by Mark Eisner, that appears in none of those special-for-Valentine's-Day features.

One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
By Pablo Neruda

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,

or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as one loves certain obscure things,

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries

the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,

and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose

from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,

I love you directly without problems or pride:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,

except in this form in which I am not nor are you,

so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,

so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

The Public Health Emergency in Eastern Burma

2012-02-13T12:43:07-05:00

There's a lot going on in Burma these days, from a possible ceasefire between the government and the Karen National Union (KNU), to the release of political prisoners, to Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi running for parliament in Rangoon. It's a time of exciting but cautious promise, as we wait to see what change takes.

I have a short article over at RH Reality Check about how families in the particularly ravaged area of eastern Burma are experiencing both the political transformation and the very long legacy of human rights abuses. I'm drawing from the significant new report, "Separated by Borders," which details why this region has the worst pregnancy outcomes in all of Asia. Access to contraception is virtually nonexistent, and maternal mortality is extremely high -- in part the consequence of the military policy of denying certain ethnic groups healthcare, though there is more than that to the story. I'll be digging deeper into this via an extended interview with one of the doctors on the ground in eastern Burma that will appear eventually in Guernica.

Image Credit: Alisa Tang

Speaking: Joyce Carol Oates

2012-02-12T14:57:04-05:00

"Having completed a novel that is saturated with what Jung calls the God-experience, I find that I know less than ever about myself and my own beliefs. I have beliefs, of course, like everyone—but I don't always believe in them. Faith comes and goes. God diffracts into a bewildering plenitude of elements—the environment, love, friends and family, career, profession, “fate,” biochemical harmony or disharmony, whether the sky is slate-gray or a bright mesmerizing blue. These elements then coalesce again into something seemingly unified. But it's a human predilection, isn't it?—our tendency to see, and to wish to see, what we've projected outward upon the universe from our own souls? I hope to continue to write about religious experience, but at the moment I feel quite drained, quite depleted. And as baffled as ever."

-- Joyce Carol Oates interviewed in The Paris Review, 1978

Even back in 1978, Joyce Carol Oates was charged with "producing too much," as the very first question in her Paris Review interview reveals. The conversation was conducted while Oates lived in Windsor, Canada. Oates also used to live and teach across the river in Detroit, where she wrote the novel them, a National Book Award winner. The Paris Review interview also covers what Oates learned from Kafka, why she found the Syracuse University sorority life thoroughly despairing, and the advantages of being a woman writer: "Advantages! Too many to enumerate, probably. Since, being a woman, I can't be taken altogether seriously by the sort of male critics who rank writers 1, 2, 3 in the public press, I am free, I suppose, to do as I like."

Born in 1938, Oates is the author of more than fifty novels, as well as poetry, stories, and nonfiction. Her books include Blonde, Wonderland, A Garden of Earthly Delights, We Were the Mulvaneys, and The Gravedigger's Daughter. The same year that this interview was published, Oates began teaching at Princeton University, where she still is at it.

Image Credit: Book Patrol

The (Literary) Story of the Gay Revolution

2012-02-10T08:38:41-05:00

Don't get me wrong: Christopher Baum's Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (reviewed by the Columbia Journalism Review) looks like a fascinating read. Especially as we stand here in a moment of transformation -- accelerating this week with the Prop. 8 overturn in California, and Washington's embrace of same-sex marriage -- this appears to be an important account of how the gay literary writers contributed to revolution. Baum focuses on Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Tony Kushner, James Baldwin, Edward Albee, and Edmund White, and other writers that are less-titanic, but were pivotal in their time. Storytelling, he argues, is a triggering mechanism for cultural turn.

But I'm irritated that there's no mention of gay women contributing to it. This, even though the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s made publishing and writing a key tenant, which in turn made space for lesbian and bisexual women writers to flourish. See, for example, The Feminist Press, Calyx, Virago Press, Kore Press, the Women's Review of Books, and the feminist bookstore movement, like this one in Madison and this one in Chicago.

In Eminent Outlaws, where is Gertrude Stein? Susan Sontag? The brilliant Kate Millett of Sexual Politics? Rita Mae Brown? Audre Lorde? Adrienne Rich? Dorothy Allison? Elizabeth Bishop? Amy Lowell? Mary Oliver? Alison Bechdel? Ali Smith? Sapphire? Emma Donoghue? Diane DiMassa? Djuna Barnes? Carson McCullers?

And where is Sarah Orne Jewitt? June Jordan? Edna St. Vincent Millay? Kay Ryan? Alice Walker? Angela Davis? Joanna Russ? Octavia Butler? Willa Cather (probably)? Elizabeth Bowen? Jeannette Winterson? Tove Jansson? Gabriela Mistral? Hélène Cixous? Colette? Virginia Woolf, for god's sake?

Such oversight reeks of the mid-century erasure that Baum believes he is challenging with this book.

The 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens

2012-02-07T21:26:38-05:00

It's difficult to not like Charles Dickens. He is the man who made literature out of serials, the writer with both unfettered scope and a taste for well-made syllables, an artist attuned to both social class and to coincidence. He is the humorist who risked tragedy. London's celebrating Charles Dickens all year long, and it would do well for the rest of us if we joined in. Fortunately, the birthday clamor rings loud and clear.

Micheal Dirda has a nice piece in The Barnes & Noble Review on Dickens as a journalist: "We Revel in a Crowd of Any Kind." Over the novelist's career, he wrote more than a million words of nonfiction, and he used to be a top-notch Parliamentary reporter. But it is no surprise that he seemed to have a native taste for narrative journalism.

His first book, Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People (1836), collects a series of "you-are-there" newspaper reports on "shabby genteel" London in the mid-1830s. Nothing escapes Dickens's street-smart eye and ear, as he visits the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall, the secondhand clothes shops of Monmouth Street, the city's pawnshops and theaters and gin joints.

"We have," proclaimed the young journalist, "a most extraordinary partiality for lounging about the streets. Whenever we have an hour or two to spare, there is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy -- walking up one street and down another, and staring into shop windows, and gazing about as if, instead of being on intimate terms with every shop and house in Holborn, the Strand, Fleet Street and Cheapside, the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind. We revel in a crowd of any kind -- a street 'row' is our delight -- even a woman in a fit is by no means to be despised, especially in a fourth-rate street...."

Meanwhile, the New York Times has an op-ed on "Dickens v. Lawyers."

Lawyers appear in 11 of his 15 novels. Some of them even resemble humans. Uriah Heep (“David Copperfield”) is a red-eyed cadaver whose “lank forefinger,” while he reads, makes “clammy tracks along the page ... like a snail.” Mr. Vholes (“Bleak House”), “so eager, so bloodless and gaunt,” is “always looking at the client, as if he were making a lingering meal of him with his eyes.” Most lawyers infest dimly lighted, moldy offices “like maggots in nuts.” (No, counselor, writers dead since 1870 cannot be sued for libel.)

I love the electric verbosity of Charles Dickens, and I love his run-wild imagination. I find his affection for sentimentality endearing, if not always persuasive or accomplished. His manic mind and his morbid sensibility brings texture to his pages, without ever suffocating the good humor.

But it's been a long time since I've read one of his novels. I've already decided to read a Dickens book this year in honor of his life and literature, but I haven't decided which one. Here is the shortlist:

The Adventures of Oliver Twist
Bleak House
Hard Times
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
David Copperfield
The Pickwick Papers

What say you, Isak readers? Which novel gets my attention this year?

Related:

Image Credit: The New York Times

Komen's Long Journey Back

2012-02-07T19:01:13-05:00

Karen Handel, the vice president for public policy at Susan G. Komen for the Cure, resigned today. In both her outgoing letter and her press conference, she challenges Planned Parenthood for making the foundation's decision to eliminate grants to them into "something political." The decision itself, she argued, was purely nonpartisian best practice for a leading nonprofit.

What is interesting about Handel's argument is that it belies the rather feminist roots of the Komen foundation. It was founded in 1982 as an explicit grassroots challenge against the "hush-hush" culture shrouding breast cancer that implied that women's bodies are something shameful. It loudly pointed to the enormous disparity in research funding and treatment practices for breast cancer, as if a cancer that harms primarily women is not as important as a cancer that equally harms men. Komen, back then, was saying that something was wrong when obituaries cast a breast cancer victim's death in vagaries: she died "after a long illness." The disease was not to be named. Komen, in public actions and political advocacy, said this was wrong. And Komen was right. Saying so had political implications, for better and for worse.

My new article in The American Prospect is about Handel's resignation, and how the discord within the Komen foundation reveals that is has a long way to go to not only return to its mission-oriented work, but to get back to its roots.