Since I have been working on a memoir (Diving for Pearls: A Thinking Journey with Hannah Arendt) that tracks Arendt’s influence in my own life and thinking, taking up, among other subjects, the meaning this affair had in Arendt’s life, and what it has made me think about my own life, I was familiar with, and critical of, Ettinger’s interpretation of the event. I also knew that Ettinger had intended to write a fuller biography of Arendt. But, for various reasons, she had separated out the Arendt/Heidegger story, publishing it in a short book. She never completed the longer biography. So when I learned of the availability of Ettinger’s archives I wondered whether anything else she might have discovered in her research would prove valuable for the book on which I was still working.

It turns out that the trip I made this past fall to the Schlesinger Library of Harvard University, where the Ettinger archives are housed, was both a boon and a burden. What I uncovered in the archives is invaluable to my work. Interviews, letters, and other materials Ettinger gathered from those who knew Arendt will help me craft a more fully realized portrait of the person Hannah Arendt, who assumes the role of interlocutor in my memoir. But such bounty also proves a burden.

A few months earlier, thinking I was near the end of the revision process, I had determined to pursue self-publishing the manuscript in its then current form. But the wealth of materials I have just added to my ever-expanding research files has forced me to confront the difficult question of how these new documents might reshape my manuscript.

Part of the joy of writing is what you discover about what you really want to say in the process of revision. Searching for exactly the right phrase and precisely the correct shape for a paragraph you begin to uncover what you have been trying to say all along. My immersion of the Ettinger archives has brought me face to face with this process in the work of another.

Reading through several drafts of her unpublished work, and comparing these drafts with the research materials she used to create her work, I could literally see the author’s formation of her subject, watch her confront her resistance to an interpretation of her subject at odds with her own, and discover the places where she resolved to draw her own conclusions.

So, I am taking a deep breath and diving back into my manuscript again, convinced that the changes I will make will add depth to my story without fundamentally altering its shape. And since the story I am trying to tell is about the thinking relationship I have had for nearly thirty years now with Hannah Arendt, a woman long dead but one who has become even more alive to me now as a provocative, yet irksome, companion, whose life and work continue to make me think and rethink, write and revise my own, revising my manuscript one more time seems fitting. I do hope, though, it will be the last!

But I am also in the middle of preparing to spend time at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley for the rest of the summer, where I will be directing my NEH seminar on the political theory of Hannah Arendt again, but this time under the auspices of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities.

Maybe all roads do lead to Rome, as the saying goes. But in my case, Rome will always be New York City and I found myself mesmerized by the city all over again, but for different reasons, when today, I came across a wonderful essay posted on The New Yorker blog about a video of Manhattan called “Manhattan in Motion” created by Josh Owens.

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

Owens is a videographer from Rochester, New York, who once worked at the University of Rochester’s Department of Transportation, and now makes his living doing what he obviously loves—shooting time-lapse photography and animating into video.

But it’s more than just my love of the city that connects Owens’ video to my preparations both for the writing workshop and the seminar on Arendt.

As I watched the New York skyline awaken it seemed as if the caress of a rising sun sweeping across the landscape had made the buildings themselves breathe and come alive. And the way the water glistened at the foot of Manhattan made apparent the island’s existence as a natural landscape and not only an urban footprint of human endeavor. No matter how bright the lights are, night descends on the city as the earth turns in space.

The artifice of the city and the earth on which it rests and this planet’s spinning through space are simultaneous perspectives not so much “captured” as evoked in Owens’ poetic montage. Brought together in this film they create in the viewer an awareness of both the extraordinary achievements of what Arendt called homo faber—who “fabricates the sheer unending variety of things…that give the human artifice the stability and solidity without which it could not [reliably] house the unstable and mortal creature” that we humans are—and the utter vulnerability and common fate we humans share with all other living organisms.

Owens says “Anyone who shoots time lapse can most likely tell you what phase the moon is in, what time to the minute the sun rises and sets.” (New Yorker blog) Awareness of connection to the natural environment and its rhythms is possible regardless of whether one is an urban or rural dweller. But it comes harder to consciousness in cityscapes. And yet, ironically, by first slowing things down, fragmenting time and space and then reassembling them, Josh Owens’ Manhattan in Motion reminds us city lovers that we are surrounded, in fact, embedded in and dependent on the eternal motion and rhythm of things we haven’t made ourselves.

Slowing things down, focusing first on the fragments  also reminds me of the writing process. “You don’t really know what you shot until you’re able to get home and animate all the stills together,” Owen comments about his art. That’s true of writing too. You don’t really know what you have in the sentences or paragraphs or even on pages you compose until you begin to rework them in the editing process, animating all the pieces together into prose or poetry, making fragments whole, capable of conveying meaning that the parts alone couldn’t yield.

Perhaps I’ll show this video on my workshop—and maybe the seminar—and see where the conversation about it might carry us.

Most of us know Erin Brockovich from the movie of the same name, starring Julia Roberts. And most of us know her as the feisty advocate for environmental justice, who helped settle cases against, among others, P, G & E for polluting the town of Hinkley, California’s water supply by leaking toxic Chromium 6 into the ground water. Brockovich broke into the world of media with Lifetime series, “Final Justice With Erin Brockovich”, which she hosted for three seasons. Then, in 2001, there followed a non-fiction book, Take It From Me. Life’s A Struggle, But You Can Win. Now, she’s entering the world of fiction with Rock Bottom, written with CJ Lyons.

Touted as the first of a series of suspense novels about an environmental crusader, the story follows AJ Palladino as she journeys back to her West Virginia hometown after a traumatic incident. It’s only the latest difficulty she’s faced holding onto a job. So, whether out of desperation or a desire to start over again, AJ, a single mother, packs herself and David, her 10-year old wheelchair-bound son, into her car and heads for “Scotia, Population 867,” deep in the heart of West Virginia coal country. (p. 4)

Unresolved tensions, the roots of which surface only much later in the story, make her unwelcome at her parents’ house, so she hightails it to Gram Flora’s, where she finds an open door. Soon after she gets acclimated, AJ discovers that Zachary Hardy, the lawyer whom she’s agreed to work for, has just died.

At Hardy’s funeral, AJ meets his daughter, Elizabeth. Present at the memorial service, too, is Cole Masterson, son of the town’s coal company scion, who also happens to be the father of AJ’s son, a child he is still unaware was even born. (Ten years earlier, AJ had had a near-death experience when her car careened off the highway and into the water, nearly drowning herself. Rumors circulated it was an attempted suicide.)

Completing the cast of characters at the center of this gnarled, somewhat contrived, occasionally overwritten and overwrought story are Cole’s wife, Waverly, a group of radical environmental activists known as “The Ladies,” and their media-hungry ring leader, Yancey, along with a several more minor characters.

But what finally sets the action earnestly in motion is the allegation a reporter makes based on an anonymous tip she’s received: Zachary Hardy didn’t die of a heart attack; he was murdered. When Elisabeth herself receives a threatening message AJ decides to convince Elizabeth to take on whatever case her father was tracking and, with AJ’s help, get to the bottom of the emerging mystery.

But what exactly had Hardy uncovered? Turns out the Masterson Mining Company had been buying up land for several years and rolling out a rapid-fire way to extract coal—mountaintop removal—a labor–saving way to get mineral resources out faster, but at extraordinary environmental cost. And to complicate the story, it seems Cole Masterson’s been put in charge of the job. Except that nothing is really as it seems.

Ever the intrepid crusader, AJ is determined to get to the bottom of what is surely a disaster waiting to happen. As AJ tries to uncover the truth, the investigation becomes even more complicated and the story gets mired in dramas both personal and environmental. In fact, the plot has so many twists the accumulation of narrative turns eventually gave this reader whiplash.

Can AJ tell Cole about David, his son? How will Cole react? How will David take to having a father being part of a business apparently destroying the environment? What’s causing the ground water pollution? And who? What’s the truth about Yancey’s ladies? Why are AJ’s parents so cold to her and her son? Was Zachary murdered? And, by the way, what really happened to AJ ten years ago?

It takes a lot of patience to follow the trail of toxaphene poisoning AJ discovers back to its source. She finally solves the mystery of who lies behind the effort to put coal-mining profits before everything else. It’s a plausible solution, but not an entirely satisfying one. And maybe that’s because the motivation of almost every character in this story hasn’t been plumbed deeply enough to make the climax of the story, and some of the byways we are expected to travel to get to it, anything more than a little plausible. But perhaps now that Brockovich has gotten this hodge-podge of a back story out of the way she can concentrate in the coming sequel on developing her craft.

After a several hours’ long conversation about her life and work as a feminist artist for nearly five decades, I knew I had more than enough footage for several videos. But, in the video that follows, I decided to concentrate on the meaning Helen attached to the Pregnancy Series, a body of work Helen completed in the 1960s, a time when few, if any, women artists were working on this subject. And certainly none in the expressive way Helen was doing figurative work.

In the interview, Helen also explained why she is particularly excited about the work being in the Sackler collection. And how important it is to her that these particular works will be seen.

A lot more that could be said about the pioneering significance of Helen’s art work. (I have written other essays on this blog about it.) But what is NOT in this portion of the interview is what Helen told me about the earliest reception her work received. She created this work while she was living in Paris and took the drawings to a Paris art dealer. His response? “I remember he just said, scornfully, Ugh; They remind me of Van Gogh.” Needless to say, he didn’t get the drawings!

Over a month ago, a group of writers, San Diego Writing Women, hosted a public reading of our works at a local salon. The event reminded me of the European salons of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, particularly in Paris, where artists and other intellectuals gathered to discuss the events of the day, as well as literary and philosophical matters. Ours, like many of those, was hosted by women. But in our salon,  women’s writing  was also the focus of attention.

We met at a venue in Normal Heights, San Diego called Hairdrezzers on Fire, the space generously donated for the night by its owner, Sonny Zizzo (who coincidentally is also my “stylist”). We provided wine, cheese and other snacks. But the centerpiece of the night’s event was two series of readings by nine women writers who live and work in San Diego.

Caitlin Rother, well-known author of “true crime” stories, kicked off the readings, with an excerpt from her latest work, Dead Reckoning. Then, each of the remaining members of the group followed with five minute readings from their oeuvre. Kathi Diamant, Georgeanne Irvine, Jennifer Coburn, Divina Infusino, Sharon Vanderlip, Judith Liu, and Laurel Corona. Laurel introduced my book with some very kind words, and then it was my turn to read to the group.

The rest of the evening was taken up discussing writing with various folks who came by to chat at the tables where we had set up our books. I had some wonderful conversations with women interested in the art and craft of writing.

But what, for me, was perhaps most exciting was a conversation with a friend who told me that Eveoke, a local dance theatre company whose mission is to “cultivate compassionate social action through arts education and evocative performance,” was creating a new dance piece, Refuge, and wanted to involve me and my writing in the creative process.

Refuge is a work-in-progress by two local choreographers, Becky Hurt and Myriam Lucas, that aims to “tackle issues of gender, sexuality, cycles of violence, and personal power through hip hop dance and spoken word.” I am thrilled to be working with this exciting company to make a difference in the lives of those in San Diego and beyond who have been affected by the “cycle of violence.”  Working with Eveoke is an outgrowth of my lifelong commitment to social action that aims to improve our lives and achieve real equality for all. And it reflects my experience and belief in the role of the arts to provoke the public’s conscience to take action on the burning issues with which we all grapple.

The arts are essential to the fabric and quality of our public life. Please continue to support public funding of the arts. Now, off to watch a rehearsal and discuss our emerging collaboration….

One particular piece that I found extraordinary, not only because of its exploration of the role of social media in creating the foundation for change, but also because of the people whose brave stories are profiled is this video from “Witness”, a regular feature on the Al Jazeera English web site.

Listening to the youth in this profile recount how they used the internet and other electronic means of  communication to spread the word about what has been happening in Egypt, I was reminded of some lines of Hannah Arendt’s. “The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be alive to tell the story…[T]he lesson of such stories is simple and within everyone’s grasp….[U]nder conditions of terror most people will comply, but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that ‘it could happen’ in most places, but it did not happen everywhere.” (Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 233, emphasis in the original).

Of course Arendt was referring to the importance of stories of resistance during the Holocaust. But, as the stories in the video demonstrate, circulating the reality of what is happening under conditions of oppression in authoritarian regimes by whatever means available is critical. The circulation of these stories to those outside such a regime–those ‘many people in the world’ who can make oblivion impossible–is the very essence of political resistance and keeps alive the idea that not everyone complies with oppression. And that is why the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak moved to close off that communication. Except the stories keep getting out. Even in the face of tremendous risk.

Article first published as Book Review: Three Seconds by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström on Blogcritics.

A Review of Three Seconds, by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, translated from the Swedish by Kari Dickson, Silver Oak, 2010.

Winner of the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers 2009 award for Best Swedish Crime Novel of the year, Three Seconds is a not at all fast-paced, sometimes annoyingly over-written, yet engaging thriller mixing mafia drug trafficking with police corruption into an explosive concoction. The back cover claims that this new book by the unusual duo, Roslund (journalist) and Hellström (Ex-con), is from the “masters of Swedish crime literature who paved the way for Stieg Larsson.” Whether this proclaimed lineage or the American readership’s apparently insatiable appetite for Swedish crime stories can explain it, the near 500-page book nonetheless clocked in this week at number 8 on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best Seller list.

Piet Hoffman, a former criminal working undercover for the Swedish police under the code name “Paula,” is about to undertake his most dangerous assignment: return to prison to corner the prison amphetamine trade for the Polish mafia, while secretly operating a police-approved ploy to crush the mafia’s operation. His Swedish police handler, Erik Wilson, knows how risky the operation will be, but has every confidence his informant will succeed. “He’d never had anyone like Paula before, someone who was so sharp, alert, cool…Paula was better than all the others put together, too good to be a criminal.” (p. 23) Besides, Wilson has some responsibility for what happened, doesn’t he?

What happened was murder and Hoffman had been at the scene of the crime, unable (and unwilling) to stop it.

The day before, Hoffman called Wilson, asking for cover. An unexpected delivery of drugs is about to arrive. The chance they’d been waiting for. On a field trip to the U.S. to study new methods of covert operations, Wilson is unable to provide backup. “Get out,” he tells Hoffman. Too late, Hoffman says. Not to go along with the deal would risk blowing his cover; he’ll “go it alone.” (p. 10) But the deal goes bust when the buyer turns out to be an undercover informant himself and Hoffman can’t stop his Polish colleagues from killing the man without getting killed himself. At least he calls the police, anonymously. “A dead man. Vastmannagatan 79. Fourth floor.”

Enter Ewert Grens, an old-fashioned detective with his own troubled past, in mourning for his deceased wife, who had spent many years in an assisted living home incapacitated (we later learn) by an accident Grens himself caused. With the tenacity of a pit bull hanging onto its prey, Grens follows the few clues he uncovers at the crime scene until they begin to lead him close to Hoffman. But Wilson has Hoffman’s back. Working at the highest levels of the Swedish police force, and with the complicity of both a government ministry and the prison authorities, he arranges ways to keep Grens off Hoffman’s track. Simultaneously he fabricates an even darker criminal profile that will land Hoffman in Aspsås maximum-security prison to carry out his double-crossing-the-mafia plan.

Maybe Piet/Paula is too good to be a criminal. At least, he wants to think so. He’s a family man with a wife and two sons, who know nothing about what he really does for a living. His company, Hoffman Security AB, is a cover for Polish mafia-led drug-running. But it’s also a cover for his real employers—the Swedish police at the highest level—to infiltrate the mafia with the intent to undermine its power. So what if everyone has to commit a few crimes along the way, including throwing off the investigation of the murder. The ends justify the means. Or so just about everyone in this novel seems to believe.

But the lying seems to be getting to Hoffman. And so does the murder. (Well, not the murder exactly, but the risk of life imprisonment it carries if he’s caught.) It’s as if he’s become like all the other criminals he met in prison ten years earlier: people with “made up morals….There was nothing left of him that he could like.” (p. 96). The “family man” isn’t stopped by his devotion from dropping his feverish young children off at the childcare center, drugged with enough medication so the fever subsides enough for them not to appear sick. Daddy even takes them along with him, leaving them in the back of his car unattended, while he completes preparations and drug deals in the few hours left before he allows himself to be arrested again.

If it isn’t his conscience that motivates Hoffman to take this one last gig, no matter how risky, or illegal, is it his hope that, if he succeeds, maybe he’ll be able to get out of the game and get on with his more “normal,” middle class life? Maybe. Except, as the twisting and turning plot suggests, the Paula side of Piet seems to like the thrill of the game a little too much.

And so do the authors. The story takes a little too detail-laden description-filled journey to arrive at the plot point where things really start happening. Along the way, a few frustrating shifts of narrative point-of-view are more distracting than illuminating about character. And, although no surprise, given the usual tone of this genre, the women in the story are a little too thinly drawn to be memorable. But then, it would take a certain kind of woman to be able to stand up to the likes of Lisbeth Salander.

At Coronado HS for the Arts, the play in question was The Laramie Project. While drama teacher, and the play’s director, Kim Strassburger, had gone to great lengths to involve the school and community in creating a moving production, some families thought the material too controversial for their students to attend. Worse though was the proposed–and ultimately squelched–protest by the notorious Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church. (Phelps’ actions in the past, for those of you who don’t remember, have included protests at the funerals of members of the military, and gay pride celebrations.)

Responding to the WBC’s intended protest, the school district acted to obtain an injunction against the WBC. The result: the protest was cancelled and tonight’s scheduled performance should happen without incident.

Besides the support that Coronado demonstrated for the importance of the production and the lessons it carried, what was most exemplary was the documented learning that students at the school had experienced during the rehearsal process.  As one student actor commented in response to those who thought the play inappropriate for a teen audience: “I would say high school and college students are at the peak of their insecurity and uncertainty, so if we aren’t the kids that are supposed to see this and stop our actions, who are? Once you’re older, you’re already firm in your beliefs, but we are the generation who can change.”

Lessons learned. And some may not be learned if David Snead, the superintendent who is trying to block the Waterbury Arts Magnet’s production of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” has his way. The New York Times reported that Nina A. Smith, the Waterbury drama teacher, had worked hard “to ensure that the play and its moments of offensive language are understood in context and viewed as a learning experience. She prepared a study guide for classes to talk about the play, and was organizing post-performance talkbacks so the cast and audience members could discuss the work. She also opened rehearsals to the parents of the cast and crew.”

We need more such educational arts programming in our schools. I hope to explore these and other issues in my upcoming summer seminar for school teachers on the political theory of Hannah Arendt. I encourage interested educators to apply!

And, just as a final bit of news about why art matters to politics and vice versa…I note that there will be a benefit performance of the Belarus Free Theatre’s Being Harold Pinter, on Jan 17, 2011 at New York’s Public Theatre, featuring a stellar cast. And a parallel event at Washington D.C.’s Theatre J (where I first saw Kate Fodor’s Hannah and Martin, a play I went on to produce in San Diego).

Mona has been working tirelessly on this project, which is an outgrowth of the other equally tireless work she has been doing for some years, since establishing the R.A.W. network. R.A.W. stands for Reflexive Academic Writing, and the network surrounding it consists of a group of interdisciplinary scholars who are trying to break new ground by developing innovative approaches to writing academic work. Among the approaches explored are narrative, biography, memoir, autobiography and other modes of life writing that blend these genres.

Most academic writing conforms to more traditional ways of presenting an argument in an organized essay supported by various modes of documentation, often structured in an extended version of what J. Douglas Macready has called “the tired model of the Five Paragraph Essay.” In an excellent blog post, Macready offers another model, based on Scott Crider’s The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay. No doubt Crider’s work, and Macready’s wonderful summary of it, will be valuable for those wishing to polish their academic writing, while still working in its more traditional modes. But, in my assessment–and those of the authors appearing in Livholts’s forthcoming collection–questions of ‘style’ and the nature of ‘professionalism’ in academic writing are the subjects of much contemporary debate.

My own essay in the collection,

“Writing Rahel Varnhagen: Biographical and Autobiographical Explorations of Self-Invention,” explores how,

in life-writing, such as memoir and biography, a writer aims for textual vitality by building a space for reflection into the story.

Creating a dynamic tension in her subject through an investigation of the self that enables empathy, the life writer engages readers’ attention, encouraging them to see the ‘other’ as she might see herself. In the essay, I use both word and photographic images to map the journey of self-discovery reflected in Hannah Arendt’s writing Rahel Varnhagen, an unusual biography of the nineteenth century woman Arendt once called her “best friend.”

“By occupying Rahel’s story, Hannah found a way into and out of her own life’s haunted ‘shadows’ to confront her own longing to escape who she was. And as I slipped into Hannah’s I saw myself inside that kaleidoscope, fragmented, rearranged.” If, as Crider points out, rhetoric is “persuasion aimed at the truth,” (p. 4) then the rhetorical structure of my writing aims at the truth and is a form of academic writing that, like much of Arendt’s own writing, breaks the mold of what is ordinarily defined as academic writing. As do the other essays in Livholts’s anthology.