Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News
Volume XVII Number 11, November-December 2009
UPCOMING EVENTS
Thursday, December 3, 7:30 PM. Monthly
Meeting. Caltech Y is located off San Pasqual
between Hill and Holliston, south side. You will
see two curving walls forming a gate to a path--
our building is just beyond. Help us plan future
actions on Sudan, the 'War on Terror', death
penalty and more.
Saturday December 12, 8AM to 2PM at Cafe
Culture, 1359 N. Altadena Drive, Pasadena
91107, 626-398-8654. Letter writing marathon
for International Human Rights Day. Drop by
and help us write letters and postcards and
enjoy Cafe Culture's great food and drink!
Sunday December 20, 6:30PM. Rights Readers
Human Rights Book Discussion Group. See
coordinator's column regarding change of
location. This month we read "Amulet" by
Roberto Bolano.
COORDINATOR'S CORNER
Hi everyone,
Hope you are enjoying the crisp fall weather!
We are having our 5th annual Global letter writing
marathon Saturday Dec 12th from 8AM to 2 PM at
Cafe Culture in Pasadena. Come join us as we
write letters and postcards and enjoy Cafe
Culture's great food, drink, and warm hospitality!
This event replaces our usual "2nd Tuesday" of the
month letter writing meeting.
Some of Group 22's members attended the
Western Regional Conference in San Francisco in
early November. Robert and I were unable to go
due to a last minute work situation I couldn't get
out of! Read Lucas and Joyce's thoughts on the
conference later in this newsletter.
Also note that we are not meeting at Vroman's
bookstore for our December book group as they
are using our meeting space for Christmas
merchandise! The meeting will be at a private
home. Contact Lucas Kamp for more information
at 626-795-1785 or go to our website at:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~aigp22/.
Enjoy the holidays!
Con carino,
Kathy
RIGHTS READERS
Human Rights Book Discussion Group
Keep up with Rights Readers at
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com
Next Rights Readers meeting:
Sunday, December 20, 6:30 PM
Amulet by Roberto Bolano
Author Biography
Roberto Bolano was born in Chile on April 28,
1953. For much of his life he lived a nomadic
existence, living in Chile, Mexico, El Salvador,
France and Spain. During the 1970s, he formed an
avant-garde group called infrarealism with other
writers and poets in Mexico where he lived after
leaving Chile when it fell under military
dictatorship. He returned to Chile in 1972 but left
again the next year when General Augusto
Pinochet came to power.
In the early eighties, he finally settled in the
small town of Blanes, near Gerona in Northern
Spain, where he died on July 15, 2003 of liver
disease while awaiting a transplant. He is
survived by his Spanish wife and his son and
daughter.
Bolano received some of the Hispanic world's
highest literary awards, including the 1999
Romulo Gallegos Prize (Venezuelan) for his novel
Los detectives salvajes, which was published in
English as The Savage Detectives in 2007.
Six weeks before he died, his fellow Latin
American novelists hailed him as the most
important figure of his generation at an
international conference he attended in Seville. In
2004 he was honored by the First Conference of
Latin American Authors as "the most important
literary discovery of our time."
He completed 12 novels during his life,
published various poetry collections and left
behind an almost completed 1,000 page novel,
2666, about the unsolved murders of 300 women
in Mexico over the past 10 years. 2666 (1100
pages at publication) was published
posthumously in 2004. It is currently being
translated into English by Natasha Wimmer, who
also translated The Savage Detectives.
Book Review
By David Flusfeder
Published: 6:00AM BST 28 Aug 2009
The Chilean poet, novelist and provocateur
Roberto Bolano died in Spain in 2003. He was 50
years old and had already gathered a wide
readership in the Spanish-speaking world. Death,
though, can be a great career move. The response
to the 2007 publication in the United States of his
1998 novel The Savage Detectives, followed by
2666, which was almost finished at the time of his
death, has brought him into the international
literary front rank. Both are large books,
celebrations of poetry and a battered kind of
urban heroism, written in Bolano's beguiling
combination of concision and wordiness. But
now, with the success of those, his smaller books
are being translated into English for the first time.
Bolano's work is a roman-fleuve: characters
and situations recur throughout his writings, and
time is a watery element that the characters drift
through. Amulet has its origin in a 10-page
episode in The Savage Detectives. That novel was
centred on two provocative young poets living in
Mexico City in 1976: Ulises Lima and the author's
alter-ego, Arturo Bolano. In one of the most
striking episodes, a woman, Auxilio Lacoutre,
"the mother of Mexican poetry" (and a "mother"
is, in this context, a woman who sweeps and
shops and listens and adores), is in a fourth-floor
lavatory cubicle when the army occupies the
campus of the Mexico City Universidad. She is
stuck there for 12 days. In the original episode,
the emphasis was on Auxilio's physical
predicament. She drank water from the tap, ate
loo paper and lived in a state of fear and
heightened memory.
In Amulet, the emphasis is on the
remembering rather than the predicament.
Auxilio suffers from the blessing of being able to
"remember" the future as well as the past. There
are feverish prophecies about literary destinies:
"For Marcel Proust, a desperate and prolonged
period of oblivion shall begin in the year 2033...
Jorge Luis Borges shall be read underground in
the year 2045... Louis-Ferdinand Celine shall
enter Purgatory in the year 2094... Witold
Gombrowicz shall enjoy great prestige in the
environs of the Rio de la Plata around the year
2098... Max Jacob shall cease to be read, that is to
say his last reader shall die, in the year 2059."
There is an endearing bookishness to all of
Bolano's work. My favourite of his novels is Nazi
Literature in the Americas (already published in
the Americas and to be released here next year),
an entirely fabricated, very funny, but straight-
faced biographical dictionary of invented 20th-
century poets and novelists.
One message throughout Bolano's work is
that literature matters. The reason for his public
contempt for writers he saw as mediocre (he
attacked, for example, the work of Isabel Allende
every chance he got) is that they are betrayers of
the highest purpose. Time is likely to tell,
anyway. "The truth is, young poets usually end
up as old, failed journalists," Auxilio tells us. But,
in young poets, heartfelt passion is equivalent to a
kind of heroism, and adolescent verbal facility
equates to a physical potency.
Arturo Bolano rescues a friend from "The
King of the Rent Boys" with a borrowed knife and
a fearless attitude. Sitting in her lavatory cubicle,
remembering the brief heroic boys, the artist who
goes mad, the poets who sacrificed their gifts for
establishment positions, Auxilio is "choked by the
brilliance and sadness of youth". We hear of
characters who had the bad luck to attract the
Muse when they were young, which they will
inevitably betray. The outlaw poet becomes a
corrupt hack: "The chubby little guy who, with
the passage of time, had become a greasy, fat,
obsequious man."
It seems likely that Bolano's posthumous fame
will last. He wrote his long, beautifully balanced,
digressive sentences with a precise sense of
possibility and truth. It also seems likely that he
knew he was going to die young. Such fervency is
only possible when the author can feel exempt
from the decrepitude of moral value that comes
with age.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/
bookreviews/6106109/Amulet-by-Roberto-
Bolano-tr-by-Chris-Andrews.html
REPORT ON WESTERN
REGIONAL CONFERENCE
From Lucas Kamp and Joyce Wolf
On Mon, 9 Nov 2009, Joyce Wolf wrote:
Hi all,
Here are some notes from the 2009 Western
Regional in San Francisco.
At the start of the Plenary on Sat morning, I
was disappointed to hear that Banafsheh
Akhlaghi, our Western Regional Director, would
not attend because of illness. I remembered what
an inspiring speaker she was at last year's
conference and had been looking forward to
hearing her talk again. [Note: On Nov 20, AI
Western Regional Office announced that
Banafsheh is no longer our Regional Director but
has moved on to new opportunities in human
rights work.]
Larry Cox established the conference theme
("Free and Equal in Dignity and Rights") by
reminding us of the risks AI took in the past by
venturing into new areas. AI's work against
torture and the death penalty and violence
against women is the result of decisions made
after much debate. So the new Demand Dignity
campaign with its emphasis on ending poverty is
really right in the AI tradition of taking on
whatever new human rights issues that need to be
tackled. He was very persuasive - pretty much
had me convinced!
The panel on Iran included Esha Momeni, the
CSU Northridge student who was detained in
Iran last year. She gave a very dramatic narrative
of her time in Evin Prison in Tehran, describing
what it was like to be blindfolded and led through
a maze of corridors to be interrogated over and
over again. Once she heard gunshots and was
reminded of the mass executions of 1988 in which
her uncle was killed, even though she knew that
in Iran executions are carried out by hanging.
"They kill us the way they want us to live, in
silence, breathless, suspended." The audience
gave her a standing ovation.
Also notable was a panel about national
security that featured a former CIA man and a
former US military interrogator. Torture isn't
useful, they said, speaking from experience. They
repeated, "Intelligence is not evidence."
The death penalty panel included a man who
was released after 17 years on Florida's Death
Row. The actual murderer had confessed on tape
before the trial, but the prosecution withheld the
tape. "You can release an innocent man from
prison, but you cannot release an innocent man
from the grave!"
The Demand Dignity panel revealed some
surprising statistics about maternal mortality in
the U.S. After declining steadily until the late
1980s, it is now back up to 1970 levels. One
possible cause is that more women are sick at the
start of their pregnancies because they have not
been able to afford treatment.
Regards, Joyce
On Tues, 10 Nov 2009, Lucas Kamp wrote:
I only have a few tidbits to add to Joyce's
account.
One is from the same National Security panel
that she attended. The former CIA operative
made what I thought was a memorable quotation:
"The FBI catches bank robbers, the CIA robs
banks."
In the same panel, the comment was made
that Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who
was falsely arrested by the FBI for the Madrid
terror bombings on the basis of fallacious
fingerprint identifications, was paid $2 million
compensation for improper imprisonment for 2
weeks. Based on this rate, what should we pay
those falsely imprisoned in Guantanamo for 8
years?!
The other is on a workshop on the Sri Lanka
DP crisis. AI is trying to focus world attention to
this problem. One of the organizers of this
workshop showed images taken from spacecraft
and airplanes, which were used by his group to
document bombardments of camps and other
abuses. I went up to him afterwards and told him
that I'm the business of image processing with
NASA and offered to try to help. He seemed
interested.
- Lucas
SUPPORT THE CLOSING OF
GUANTANAMO!
BRING GUANTANAMO DETAINEES
TO JUSTICE!
End Date: 02/01/2010
The Obama administration is closing GTMO
and wants to bring the 911 conspirators to trial in
US federal court. It wants to move other detainees
to a maximum security federal prison in Illinois.
The prison is currently almost empty and could
easily be renovated to accommodate detainees
safely. The move is supported by Illinois Senators,
the Governor and the local Mayor. Senator
Lindsey Graham - a Republican has said that the
idea that we cannot put detainees in prison in the
US "not rational". But the fear mongering has
already started; Mark Kirk has said "The move
would make Illinois ground zero in the war on
terror". Closing GTMO is a national security
imperative supported by national security and
foreign policy experts including General David
Petraeus, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and
five former Secretaries of State from both parties.
Support GTMO closure by calling your Senator to
support the move of detainees to federal prisons
in the US and charge them in US.
SAMPLE LETTER:
Dear Senator:
We urge you to support the decision to close
Guantanamo and the option of bringing detainees
to the maximum security prison in Thompson
Illinois. We need to bring those responsible for
911 to justice. We should charge detainees in
federal court and move detainees to federal
facilities in the United States. Congress should not
seek to tie the hands of the administration in
carrying out the will of the American people. The
US should close the detention facility at
Guantanamo which has become an international
symbol of human rights abuses.
Only three days ago, the Attorney General
announced the transfer of the alleged planners or
conspirators in the September 11, 2001 attacks to
regular federal courts, which are the same federal
courts where the Department of Justice regularly
tries and convicts defendants charged with
international terrorism crimes. These federal
courts have successfully convicted 195 cases since
911, compared to military commissions which
have dealt with 3. Why would we want to take
our best tools off the table when we are trying to
deal with terrorists?
Guantanamo should be closed and the
detainees should be brought to federal detention
facilities in the US. The best way to keep the
American people safe is to convict those
suspected of crimes and detain them in the
strongest maximum security prisons in the US.
There is consensus among serious national
security and foreign policy experts including
General David Petraeus, Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates, and five former Secretaries of State
from both parties-that closing the Guantanamo
Bay detention facility is essential to U.S.
counterterrorism efforts and to repairing the
standing of the United States as a country
committed to human rights and the rule of law.
Many people can and do disagree about the
how the detainee cases should be treated, but we
should agree that they should be brought to
justice. Allowing them to slip through the cracks
of partisan politics is not an appropriate way to
deal with a crucial national security issue.
Sincerely,
your name and address
[Note: you can find contact information for
California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne
Feinstein at http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/
and http://feinstein.senate.gov/]
MONTHLY LETTER COUNT
Sri Lanka Cards 6
UAs 14
Total 20
To add your letters to the total contact
lwkamp@gmail.com.
Amnesty International Group 22
The Caltech Y
Mail Code 5-62
Pasadena, CA 91125
www.its.caltech.edu/~aigp22/
http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com