___________________________________

Courtesy photo

LATE-BREAKING KPFA DISPATCH
16 November 2009

It is with deep sadness that we bring you the news of the death of our own Andrea Lewis. She died this weekend of an apparent heart attack at her San Francisco home. She was just 52. Andrea’s parents are on their way from Florida. We are planning a memorial service and will let you know as soon as we have details.

Andrea came to KPFA in 1999 as a co-host of the Morning Show. She later became host of Sunday Sedition and an Evening News co-anchor. Andrea was a true Renaissance woman with an interest in politics, world affairs, sports, science, music and the arts. She was dedicated to discussing on and off the air the issues of social justice, especially in regards to racial and gender equity. Her booming laugh filled the hallways of the station. Andrea occasionally hosted Pacifica National broadcasts; she was an early host for Free Speech Radio News. Andrea wrote for the Progressive Magazine, sang with the S.F. Community Chorus, was a former Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. [Her study at Stanford focused on the role of alternative journalism in contemporary American culture and democracy.] And she was an avid golfer. We — and the listeners — will all miss her tremendously.
— Staff of KPFA

Max Pringle remembers Andrea Lewis
(Common Dreams, 17 November 2009)

Andrea Lewis – KPFA journalist – dies
by Bob Egelko
(San Francisco Chronicle, November 18, 2009)

___________________________________

Courtesy photo

Andrea Lewis in 1993, holding the San Francisco Symphony & Chorus’ first Grammy.

___________________________________

A memorial to celebrate the life of Andrea Lewis
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
First Unitarian Church of Oakland
685 – 14th Street
Oakland, CA 94612

KPFA Pacifica Radio invites you to join us for this event honoring Andrea’s life. The program will include speeches, songs, poems, and will feature some of Andrea’s favorite people and performers. Family, friends and listeners are welcome to join us in appreciating Andrea’s brilliance and her lifelong commitment to journalism and the arts.

___________________________________

Victoria Z and Andrea Lewis at the 2007 Power to the Peaceful live Pacifica Radio broadcast.

© KPFA/Pacifica Radio

___________________________________

Andrea Lewis was born and raised in Detroit and earned her bachelor’s degree from Eastern Michigan University. She moved to the Bay Area in 1983 and began her career in journalism as a calendar, arts & entertainment editor for Plexus: West Coast Women’s Press. In 1988, she began working for Mother Jones magazine, and within a few months was hired as a research editor. She became an editorial assistant in 1991 for HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. In 1993, Lewis became a senior editor for Third Force magazine (now Color Lines), after working with the publication as a freelance editor for many years. She joined the staff of Pacific News Service in San Francisco (now New America Media) in 1996 as an associate editor and an editor for YO! (Youth Outlook). Since 1999, she has been the co-host and producer of “The Morning Show” at KPFA Radio in Berkeley, the first listener-sponsored radio station in the country. In addition to her work in radio, she contributes to several other news outlets, including the Progressive Media Project, which seeks to increase the diversity of representation on the op-ed pages of daily newspapers. She was the recipient of a National Federation of Community Broadcasters Golden Reel Award in 2002 and the John Swett Award for Media Excellence 2004 from the California Teachers Association. She was a fellow in the Society of Professional Journalists Diversity Leadership Program from 2006-2007.

___________________________________

LISTEN TO ANDREA LEWIS
(including conversations with Al Young)

Radio Tribute to Andrea Lewis at KPFA’s Morning Show, November 18, 2009

Sunday Sedition | July 19, 2009

Sunday Sedition | March 1, 2009

Sunday Sedition | February 15, 2009

The Morning Show | December 18, 2007

___________________________________

ARTICLES BY ANDREA LEWIS

‘Lord of the Rings’ vs. ‘Matrix’: Patriarchy vs. the Rainbow Coalition
(for Pacific News Service, 2004)

What If Students Went on Strike? — Students Want Teachers Who “Won’t Leave You Alone”
(Nell Bernstein & Andrea Lewis co-writing for Pacific News Service, 1997)

___________________________________

(more…)

____________________________________

© Al Young

The falling chill of light on flower and fruit;

the sound and feel of it October’s,

November’s. Their slowing hushes

warm shadows of whisper and touch

— ch, ch, ch — shhhhhhhh

– Al Young

© 2009 Al Young

____________________________________

___________________________________________

Go to the WSWS original

By Joanne Laurier
5 November 2009

John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish)
Bright Star trailer in HD

“A Man in love I do think cuts the sorryest figure in the world,” wrote the English poet John Keats in 1819 at the time of his love affair with Fanny Brawne. Born in 1795, he was 24; Brawne was 19 at the time. Based on the biography of Keats by Andrew Motion, New Zealand-born director Jane Campion’s new movie Bright Star tells the story of their brief but intense relationship.

As Campion’s film opens, it is the year 1818 in Hampstead, then north of London. Keats (Ben Whishaw) has recently returned from a walking tour of Scotland with his friend and fellow poet Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), who is a neighbor to the Brawne family.

The widowed Mrs. Brawne (Kerry Fox) has three children—18-year-old Fanny (Abbie Cornish), son Sam, 14 (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), and daughter Toots, 9 (Edie Martin).

For Keats, it is a time of considerable financial difficulty. Brown is keeping him afloat, affirming that “Your writing is the finest thing in my life.” While Keats is drawn to Fanny (“beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly fashionable and strange”), Brown has the opposite reaction. He disparages “the well-stitched Miss Brawne,” accusing her of making “a religion out of flirting.”

Brown resents Fanny’s incursion, partly out of jealousy, but primarily because he thinks his friend’s artistic soul is at risk, that the girl impedes Keats from making his mind “available for inspiration.” In fact, Keats is gaining new artistic strength. He pens such exquisite works as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode to Melancholy.” The loss of his brother to tuberculosis and the premonition of his own death mature his powers—“How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties.”

At the time Keats meets Fanny, his Endymion has just been published (with its famous opening lines, “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:/Its loveliness increases; it will never/Pass into nothingness; but still will keep/A bower quiet for us, and a sleep/Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing”). The poem is met with several scathing reviews. But Fanny feels otherwise. In order to impress the writer, she launches herself into Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare—Keats’s literary idols—or at least pretends to.

Keats labors incessantly in his quarters at Hampstead in the winter of 1819, completing poems such as The Eve of St. Agnes and the ambitious Hyperion. In addition to these lengthier, more involved works, Keats writes his lovely sonnet to Fanny, “Bright Star”:

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—/Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night/And watching, with eternal lids apart,/Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,/The moving waters at their priestlike task/Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,/Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask/Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—/No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,/Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,/To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,/Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,/Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,/And so live ever—or else swoon to death.”

(more…)

_________________________________________

While the event announced below has indeed elapsed, excitement lingers. You may continue to support the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal

Contact: Alice Rogoff
Email: poetship@comcast.net
Tel: 415.584.8264
Haight Asbury Literary Journal
558 Joost Avenue
San Francisco CA 94127

You can subscribe:
$6.00 for two issues
$12.00 for four issues
$35.00 for a lifetime subscription

Also available: This Far Together, an anthology of
the best of the first eighteen issues of HALJ
Available for $12.00 + $2.00 mailing

Submit up to six poems or two stories
HALJ accepts manuscripts from anywhere in the World

HALJ is looking for a sympathetic and creative web designer –
Email Alice Rogoff:
poetship@comcast.net

_________________________________________

© Susan Slapin

Haight Ashbury Literary Journal Benefit Poetry Reading

Saturday, November 7th
7-10 pm
at All Saints Episcopal Church
1350 Waller Street
San Francisco, CA 94117

San Francisco’s oldest and coolest literary magazine,
the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal,
is hosting a benefit poetry reading

$10 donation at the door
(No one turned away for lack of funds)

Hosted by devorah major
(San Francisco’s former poet laureate)

This event features
California poet laureate emeritus
AL YOUNG
and special guests

Lorna Dee Cervantes

Q.R. Hand, Jr.

L.J. Moore, Clara Hsu
and

John Smalley

_________________________________________

Click on image to enlarge

_________________________________________

“HAIGHT ASHBURY LITERARY JOURNAL — The long-term heavyweight, HALJ has been around the block and back, 18 years running. In its tabloid format HALJ is a magazine of the streets, by the streets and for the streets. Not to mention sold on the streets, by sidewalk hawkers. Mostly poetry, some fiction. Many local writers. Sporadic–1-3X/year. $2.  558 Joost Ave., SF 94127.”
– Todd Dayton, MetroActive

_________________________________________

Haight Ashbury Literary Journal
MISSION STATEMENT

The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal publishes well-written poetry and fiction. HALJ’s voices are often of people who have been marginalized, oppressed, or abused. HALJ strives to bring literary arts to the general public, to the San Francisco community of writers, to the Haight Ashbury neighborhood, and to people of varying ages, genders, ethnicities, and sexual preferences. The Journal is produced as a tabloid to maintain an accessible price for low-income people.

_________________________________________

Read Joanne Hotchkiss’ remarkable historical essay on the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal

_________________________________________

__________________________________________

Poet Morton Marcus at home in 2006
© Shmuel Thaler/Santa Cruz Sentinel

__________________________________________

THE MINUTE

We are allowed sixty footsteps to cross each minute. It is a desert, but with each step, bushes grow into trees behind us. As we pass, beggars emerge, sitting cross-legged by the side of the road with baskets of teeth they are sewing into necklaces. Bees and buildings and blaring traffic are swept along with us as we advance, as if they wrestle one another into existence in our wake. We can’t stop: the weight of everything behind us is pushing us on. Will we make it to the other side? That’s the question, although we can’t imagine, let alone see, the finish line, in the distance. Just white desert all around the shouts and jostling behind us. Voices call out, some familiar. Hands grab our arms and pant legs. It’s always the same. We drag the heads and voices along with us. Ten more steps and we’ll be there, then more steps until it starts all over again.

© 2007 by Morton Marcus
—from Pursuing the Dream Bone

__________________________________________

Clickable

__________________________________________

“When do you run out of this vitality? When do you run out of the imagination? I hope that never happens. I hope I come to life fresh and new, because what it’s about for a writer, what it’s about for an artist is not the afterlife, it is this life. It is the world around us—socially, politically, spiritually—it is while we’re here, the human experience — and that’s all that concerns me.”
—Morton Marcus

__________________________________________

© Jana Marcus

__________________________________________

THE LIBRARY

When I die I will be a book on a shelf in the library, and this notion doesn’t bother me. I look forward to leaning against Melville and Montaigne, and I can’t wait to stand in the ranks shoulder to shoulder with Rabelais, Sterne and Twain, laughing with them and pausing now and again to listen entranced to sonorous Willie S.

Think of it: Cervantes and his knight proclaim the difficulties of chivalry a dozen rows above me, while next to them Chekhov sighs among his landowners and peasants and shakes his head. Just below them, Dostoyevsky rants about salvation and guilt, while on the shelf over mine, Li Po, intoning words of reverence, raises a wine cup to the moon, and, dozens of rows farther down, Whitman, enraptured by it all, bellows his exaltation.

What more can one wish for than to be buried in such a mausoleum, where my friends and I will live forever, better prepared for eternity than a pharaoh in his tomb, since the words in books will provide us with all the earthly goods we’ll need to live a luxurious afterlife.

Meanwhile, here, now, the words in books plant trees, launch rivers through forests and plains, and build cities crowded with skyscrapers and tenements. But what if the world, I often wonder, is only a ball of light we populate with phantoms of the mind and the flickering longings of the heart? Then this edifice of books I choose to be my crypt exists only in my head and will not outlast the moment of my death. Not even a vacant lot, littered with fluttering pages and toppled walls, will remain.

That possibility doesn’t disturb me: I’ve assumed from the start that the library continually disappears, as if, like an enchanted castle, it is under a spell from which it can be resurrected only when a boy or girl, man or woman, finds and steps inside its hidden entrance—that secret door which is always close at hand, yet, until we recognize it, we think is nothing more than the cover of a book.

—Morton Marcus

__________________________________________

Santa Cruz poet Morton Marcus lived a life “devoted to excellence”

By Wallace Baine,
Santa Cruz Sentinel

Posted: 10/29/2009 01:30:04 AM PDT
Go to the original obituary

Morton Marcus, one of Santa Cruz’s most prominent literary figures, died Wednesday at his home in Santa Cruz after a long battle with renal cancer. He was 73.

Marcus leaves a legacy of influence in at least three separate spheres. He was an internationally recognized poet, having published 10 books of poetry. He was also a celebrated film critic and historian. And, for 30 years, he was a mainstay on the English Department faculty at Cabrillo College.

A former Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year 1999, Marcus just last year published his 500-plus-page memoir, Striking Through the Masks, which served as both autobiography and re-evaluation of poets and writers of his generation. His final book of poems, to be titled The Dark Figure in the Doorway, is slated for 2010 release.

“He was larger than life,” said Santa Cruz poet Joseph Stroud, who knew Marcus for more than 40 years. “Mort loved nothing more than to have a meal and to have a conversation. I think of him as a conductor almost, eating and drinking and driving the conversation this way and that. It was unforgettable experience.”

Marcus’ fingerprints are everywhere in Santa Cruz literary circles. He led a free-wheeling film discussion group twice a month at the Nickelodeon, up to his last days. He was the co- host of a popular public-access TV program on film called “Cinema Scene.” Until recently, he hosted KUSP’s “Poetry Show.” And he influenced countless students over the years at Cabrillo College.

Marcus was born and raised in New York City. As he outlined in Masks, his early life was a time of severe emotional trauma. His father left when the boy was 3 and Marcus was shuttled back and forth between boarding schools, between bouts of watching his mother endure abuse at the hands of a stepfather.

“He began his life in such an unpromising way, with so many strikes against him,” said Mark Ong, a longtime friend and student who helped design many of Marcus’ books. “It’s a real testament to what was inside him that he became the man he did. I used to call him up and say, Why are you not insane?’”

After a youthful flirtation with boxing and a stint in the Air Force, Marcus came to California in the early 1960s, and to Santa Cruz in 1968. “When Mort came to Santa Cruz, there was no poetry scene whatsoever,” Stroud said. “He developed the reading series at Cabrillo and in various restaurants and bookstores, bringing  such poets as Vasko Popa, Michael McClure and Al Young, among many others.

“He began publishing in the 1960s and achieved a  wide readership with his volume The Santa Cruz  Mountain Poems, which, said Stroud, seemed tocapture a distinct back-to-nature essence of the  period. “Mort was a master of so many different  kinds of poetry. Lyric poetry, comic, cosmic, prose  poetry. In fact, during the last part of his career, he really became one of the finest in the world at  prose poems.”

At Cabrillo, where he also served as the president of the teachers union, Marcus was known as a great lecturer, and those public  speaking skills carried over in his discussions at  the Nickelodeon, which attracted a loyal core audience for years. He traveled widely, reading  his poetry in workshops and serving as poet in residence at universities across the country.

In his later years, he wrote poetry, translated work from the Serbian poet Vasko Popa, and  composed a libretto for an opera. He also helped  edit a history of the Croatians in the Pajaro Valley written by his wife, Donna Mekis, and his sister-in-law Kathryn Mekis Miller.

“Mort was a giant, loving intellect where you could have rich, very in-depth discussions about almost any subject,” said longtime friend George Ow, Jr. “If you wanted to discuss any movie subject, Chinese poetry over the last 3,000 years, Greek and Roman mythology, hiking paths of Greece and Crete, best places to stay in Prague or Croatia, the history of Cabrillo College, New York City baseball, the San Francisco 49ers or anything else, you would have a good time and learn a lot.”

Mark Ong said Marcus, both as a teacher and a friend, demanded excellence but recognized the difficulty in achieving it. “He was a person of integrity and great dignity and lived what he espoused,” Ong said. “His was a life of inquiry, a life of rigor, a life devoted to excellence.”

“He was a man of incredible energy,” Stroud said. “He had enormous passions and he pursued them with zeal. He lived the life of the mind, and he lived the life of the heart as well.”

(more…)