Julia Stein's Blog
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May.15.2009
Dunya Mikhail’s The War Works Hard (New Directions, 2005) is the first contemporary Iraqi woman poet translated from Arabic into English. Her poetry is brilliant.
She is an Iraqi Christian whose first two languages are Aramaic and Arabic, and she learned English during her long exile in the United...
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May.11.2009
Sunday I went to Tribal Cafe for the wake for John Leech, co-founder of the Onyx Café, which was the best artists café in Los Angeles for the past forty years. John, beloved by hundreds of hundreds of artists, died March 17. The Onyx itself lasted from 1982-1998—it transformed both the Los...
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May.10.2009
My poet friend Carol Tarlen came from a Quaker background and took me once in San Francisco to a Quaker meeting house where we sat as traditional with the Quakers in a circle of silence waiting for someone to speak. The Quakers have been pacifists for two hundred years. Many were also...
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May.09.2009
Right now I'm drinking a cup of Cafe Pajaro coffee I just made. It's organic fair trade coffee I bought at my local Trader Joe's. Fair trade is coffee grown in cooperatives which are certified to have decent wages and decent working conditions for the workers. My coffeee comes from small family...
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May.08.2009
The last 2/3 of Phillip Metres book Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Home Front deal with this poetry from Vietnam through the Iraq Wars. The chapter "Bringing It all Home" wonderfully shows the range of poetry against the Vietnam War--poetry of witness,...
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May.06.2009
Phillip Metres, English professor at John Carroll University, has written Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront Since 1941, the first important book of literary criticism about anti-war poetry of the last 70 years. Metres has also edited a poetry anthology Come...
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May.04.2009
Sunday, May 3, I went to the Autrry National Center of the American West for the Cinco de Mayo festival and also to see the art exhibit "Bold caballeros and Noble Bandidas" which is closing May 10, 2009. Arriving at the Autry National Center in the center courtyard the Banuelos Charo...
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May.02.2009
Last night I went to the May Day party/rock concert/40th year reunion at Ellis Island Commune, Los Angeles's oldest and longest running hippie commune, which was started in 1969 near USC when the 1960s finally at long last hit USC. In the 1970s Ellis Island moved to a 100-year old Queen Anne home...
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May.01.2009
In honor of May Day a poem
"Today" by Carol Tarlen
Today I slept until the sun easedunder my eyelashes. The office phoneran and rang. No one answered. ..I sat in the bistro and sipped absinthewhile Cesar Vallejo strolled past,his dignity betrayed by the holein his pants, and I waved,...
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Apr.29.2009
Los Angeles Times April 26, 2009, has as it’s lead front page story “Harsh Tactics Weren’t Analyzed.” What are “harsh tactics”? That’s doublespeak for torture. George Orwell defined doublespeak as language that lies in order to hide difficult truths. So why can’t the Los Angeles Times says “...
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Apr.26.2009
The De Bugging Silicon Valley Conference, sponsored by the California Studies Association (CSA), at De Anza College April 24, 2009, in Cupertino, was jam packed with ideas. I flew up from Burbank, arriving around 10:15, and missed the opening remarks by Brian Murphy, President of De Anza College,...
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Apr.22.2009
I did research on Abu Graib and discovered Joe Darby, the whistleblower, who gave the photos to the military police to expose what was going on at Abu Graib. The army promised Joe Darby to keep his identity secret because Darby was afraid of being attacked for exposing torture. The military...
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Apr.20.2009
June 29, 2004. 6:30. North Beach, San Francisco.
Eighty or so family, friends, coworkers, comrades and fellow poets gathered in front of O’Reilly’s Pub for a wake for poet Carol Tarlen. The Green Street Mortuary Band set the spirit for the night by playing “Solidarity Forever” and then leading...
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Apr.19.2009
A long time ago while an undergraduate at UC Berkeley I signed up for a summer school class in Medieval Islamic History with Bernard Lewis, a visiting professor from England. Lewis was considered one of the leading Anglo-American experts on Islam, but I didn't know that. I was nineteen and...
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Apr.18.2009
I'm reading Gregory Orafalea's book of essays Angeleno Days: An Arab American Writer on Family, Place and Politics. Orafela, born and raised in Los Angeles , has written two histories The Arab Americans: A History and Messengers of the Lost Battalion. I'm supposed to know something about Los...
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About Julia
Julia Stein is a poet, fiction writer, and critic.
Her books of poetry are
Under the Ladder to Heaven (West End Press)
Desert Soldiers (California Classics)
Shulamith (West End Press)
Walker Woman (West End Press)
Connections
Causes Julia Stein Supports
Amnesty International
Doctors Without Borders
ACLU
Workman's Circle
Julia’s Favorite Books
War and Peace, Brothers Karamazov, Moby Dick, Golden Notebook,
God of Small Things, Bleak House, Links by Nuruddin Farah