Wednesday, December 29, 2004
If you would like to help those people in the flooded countries affected by the earthquake and tsunami, here is a list of agencies helping in that effort.
Action Against Hunger
247 West 37th Street, Suite 1201
New York, NY 10018
212-967-7800
http://www.aah-usa.org
American Jewish World Service
45 West 36th Street, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10018
800-889-7146
http://www.ajws.org
ADRA International
9-11 Fund
12501 Old Columbus Pike
Silver Spring, MD 20904
800-424-2372
http://www.adra.org
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC Crisis Fund)
1501 Cherry Street
Philadelphia, PA
215-241-7000
http://www.afsc.org
Catholic Relief Services
PO Box 17090
Baltimore, MD 21203-7090
800-736-3467
http://www.catholicrelief.org
Direct Relief International
27 South La Patera Lane
Santa Barbara, CA 93117
805-964-4767
http://www.directrelief.org
Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres
PO Box 2247
New York, NY 10116-2247
888-392-0392
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org
International Medical Corps
1919 Santa Monica Boulevard Suite 300
Santa Monica CA 90404
800-481-4462
http://www.imcworldwide.org
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
PO Box 372
CH-1211 Geneva 19
Switzerland
41-22-730-4222
http://www.ifrc.org /
International Orthodox Christian Charities
Middle East Crisis Response
PO Box 630225
Baltimore, MD 21263-0225
877-803-4622
http://www.iocc.org
Lutheran World Relief
PO Box 17061
Baltimore MD 21298-9832
800-597-5972
http://www.lwr.org
MAP International
2200 Glynco Parkway
PO Box 215000
Brunswick, GA 3121-5000
800-225-8550
http://www.map.org
Mercy Corps
PO Box 2669
Portland, OR 97208
800-852-2100
http://www.mercycorps.org
Northwest Medical Teams
PO Box 10
Portland, OR 97207-0010
503-624-1000
http://www.nwmedicalteams.org
Operation USA
8320 Melrose Avenue, Ste. 200
Los Angles, CA 90069
800-678-7255
http://www.opusa.org
Oxfam America
https://secure.ga3.org/02/asia_earthquake04
Relief International
11965 Venice Blvd.¥405
Los Angeles, CA 90066
800-572-3332
http://www.ri.org
Save the Children
Asia Earthquake/Tidal Wave Relief Fund
54 Wilton Road
Westport, CT 06880
800-728-3843
www.savethechildren.org
US Fund for UNICEF
333 East 38th Street
New York, NY 10016
800-FOR-KIDS
http://www.unicefusa.or
World Concern
19303 Fremont Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98133
800-755-5022
http://www.worldconcern.org
World Relief
7 E. Baltimore St.
Baltimore, MD 21202
443-451-1900
http://www.wr.org
World Vision
PO Box 70288
Tacoma, Washington 98481-0288
888-56-CHILD
http://www.worldvision.org
Action Against Hunger
247 West 37th Street, Suite 1201
New York, NY 10018
212-967-7800
http://www.aah-usa.org
American Jewish World Service
45 West 36th Street, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10018
800-889-7146
http://www.ajws.org
ADRA International
9-11 Fund
12501 Old Columbus Pike
Silver Spring, MD 20904
800-424-2372
http://www.adra.org
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC Crisis Fund)
1501 Cherry Street
Philadelphia, PA
215-241-7000
http://www.afsc.org
Catholic Relief Services
PO Box 17090
Baltimore, MD 21203-7090
800-736-3467
http://www.catholicrelief.org
Direct Relief International
27 South La Patera Lane
Santa Barbara, CA 93117
805-964-4767
http://www.directrelief.org
Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres
PO Box 2247
New York, NY 10116-2247
888-392-0392
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org
International Medical Corps
1919 Santa Monica Boulevard Suite 300
Santa Monica CA 90404
800-481-4462
http://www.imcworldwide.org
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
PO Box 372
CH-1211 Geneva 19
Switzerland
41-22-730-4222
http://www.ifrc.org /
International Orthodox Christian Charities
Middle East Crisis Response
PO Box 630225
Baltimore, MD 21263-0225
877-803-4622
http://www.iocc.org
Lutheran World Relief
PO Box 17061
Baltimore MD 21298-9832
800-597-5972
http://www.lwr.org
MAP International
2200 Glynco Parkway
PO Box 215000
Brunswick, GA 3121-5000
800-225-8550
http://www.map.org
Mercy Corps
PO Box 2669
Portland, OR 97208
800-852-2100
http://www.mercycorps.org
Northwest Medical Teams
PO Box 10
Portland, OR 97207-0010
503-624-1000
http://www.nwmedicalteams.org
Operation USA
8320 Melrose Avenue, Ste. 200
Los Angles, CA 90069
800-678-7255
http://www.opusa.org
Oxfam America
https://secure.ga3.org/02/asia_earthquake04
Relief International
11965 Venice Blvd.¥405
Los Angeles, CA 90066
800-572-3332
http://www.ri.org
Save the Children
Asia Earthquake/Tidal Wave Relief Fund
54 Wilton Road
Westport, CT 06880
800-728-3843
www.savethechildren.org
US Fund for UNICEF
333 East 38th Street
New York, NY 10016
800-FOR-KIDS
http://www.unicefusa.or
World Concern
19303 Fremont Ave. N
Seattle, WA 98133
800-755-5022
http://www.worldconcern.org
World Relief
7 E. Baltimore St.
Baltimore, MD 21202
443-451-1900
http://www.wr.org
World Vision
PO Box 70288
Tacoma, Washington 98481-0288
888-56-CHILD
http://www.worldvision.org
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Jena Osman
An Essay In Asterisks
Roof
2004
112 pages
Softcover, $12
When I read Jena Osman’s An Essay In Asterisks, I was made aware again of the types of things I value in a book of poetry: an experimental imagination, a good ear, a penchant for the unfamiliar, the strange, and, I guess, a kind of pedagogical intelligence. That is, I tend to like books that have been conceived as a whole, whose ideas have been orchestrated but not glaringly, and which interweave and reawaken earlier ideas, providing nuances, complexity, as the book moves along.
An Essay In Asterisks does all these things, and really does them well. Much like the traditional essay, the book begins with a poem titled "An Essay In Asterisks", which acts as one prefatory movement toward the book’s various interests. Osman is investigating the splintered arenas of memory in this piece, and how memories are captured, stored, and faultily recalled. The narrator adds:
These must have been part of your life. Yet later you learn that they were just images from a film. Perhaps at a certain age it is difficult for a child to discern the boundaries between what is real and what is not.
The piece tends to act as a destabilizing site, a place where future poems in the book will resound off of. Osman is interested in the blurring spaces, the testamental authority that comes with some versions of reality, and yet how reality can never actually be entirely proven or approached, for that matter...or the sense that there are hidden explanations, hidden histories, hidden messages, right in front of us, which we cannot see at particular moments.
Osman will move from the picture-making brain toward language and its doubling effects, pointing out in a footnote in the poem, "Press Scrutiny—The Doubles":
*The trick of words to be themselves and another simultaneously is often labeled "homophonic." Some writers consider sound to be the lift toward translation, when in fact something much more subversive is going on. The words prove themselves to be double-agents. Each word maintains its disquieting doppelganger, sometimes visible (and therefore noted by our dictionaries), sometimes successfully undercover. For example: "The word was feted in France" and "The word was fetid in France." Typographical mistakes sometimes reveal the double that lays low. Certain governments spend their time trying to uncover them. As if there was code there.
There are little movements in the above that will register later on with a reader. That "certain governments spend their time trying to uncover them" reverberates again in the piece about dropping leaflets in Afghanistan. The cross-traffic of languages and cultures, between an invading country and an invaded one, is effectively treated in the piece titled "Dropping Leaflets," with a kind of collapsing collage effect.
Osman is able to talk in many different ways in her pieces. She can be both passionately astute and loosely humorous at the serious and deadly effects when humans believe their idea of reality is correct and their language follows arrows direct from subject to verb to object, with no hidden land in-between. Such is the place of absolutist rhetoric, unveiled to hide the truth and to reduce possibilities, other opinions, on how, for instance, a war should or shouldn’t be fought.
The second-longest piece in the book is one called "The Astounding Complex," which is a tour of law cases, mostly from the late 1990s. The "astounding complex" is taken to be the opposite of law, something that cannot be removed of its mystery, whereas law seeks to strike out mystery and equivocation. The cases chosen by Osman, however, show a different story—of how much mystery and nonsense actually gets construed as sensible, rational, logical by the courts. She notes a particularly strange "verb test" in one, and then humorously adds a reassembled consideration of her own making.
What sets this book apart, in general, from other books hoping to show similar gaps of rationality, the mystery of what we go on, are the many examples Osman brings forth in her poems. Where other poets might just obliquely refer to these issues, Osman usually begins by articulating some larger concern in an opening argument and then adds imaginative and helpful detail to color in her assertions. It is a lively and convincing instruction, and not one filled with the assumptive tones on what one ought to know.
The longest piece, "Memory Error Theater," runs to 33 pages, taking up one-third of the book. This is a tour-de-force of images and text and inset footnotes, with a chart combining editing symbols, most of the planets, and numbers one through seven. This same chart will later act as the frame for cut-up film stills from a short by Eadweard Muybridge. But even this doubling isn’t evocative enough for Osman, as she then asks the reader to test for a collective memory by recording what each visual cue (each still’s image) triggers in him or her.
An Essay In Asterisks somehow manages to be exacting and humorous, playful and serious, pedagogical without being condescending or annoying, ambitious without seeming overworked. It feels like the type of book that could go wrong at so many places, in so many different ways. It’s due to this risk that I really admire how she pulls it off and pulls the book together, by returning to the sites of memories and reality-construction which was the crux of the very first piece in the book. The effect of the book is almost as if the structures of things were being twisted and little odd bits of life and experience came tumbling out, bits of things that didn’t seem to be there before but really always were.
An Essay In Asterisks
Roof
2004
112 pages
Softcover, $12
When I read Jena Osman’s An Essay In Asterisks, I was made aware again of the types of things I value in a book of poetry: an experimental imagination, a good ear, a penchant for the unfamiliar, the strange, and, I guess, a kind of pedagogical intelligence. That is, I tend to like books that have been conceived as a whole, whose ideas have been orchestrated but not glaringly, and which interweave and reawaken earlier ideas, providing nuances, complexity, as the book moves along.
An Essay In Asterisks does all these things, and really does them well. Much like the traditional essay, the book begins with a poem titled "An Essay In Asterisks", which acts as one prefatory movement toward the book’s various interests. Osman is investigating the splintered arenas of memory in this piece, and how memories are captured, stored, and faultily recalled. The narrator adds:
These must have been part of your life. Yet later you learn that they were just images from a film. Perhaps at a certain age it is difficult for a child to discern the boundaries between what is real and what is not.
The piece tends to act as a destabilizing site, a place where future poems in the book will resound off of. Osman is interested in the blurring spaces, the testamental authority that comes with some versions of reality, and yet how reality can never actually be entirely proven or approached, for that matter...or the sense that there are hidden explanations, hidden histories, hidden messages, right in front of us, which we cannot see at particular moments.
Osman will move from the picture-making brain toward language and its doubling effects, pointing out in a footnote in the poem, "Press Scrutiny—The Doubles":
*The trick of words to be themselves and another simultaneously is often labeled "homophonic." Some writers consider sound to be the lift toward translation, when in fact something much more subversive is going on. The words prove themselves to be double-agents. Each word maintains its disquieting doppelganger, sometimes visible (and therefore noted by our dictionaries), sometimes successfully undercover. For example: "The word was feted in France" and "The word was fetid in France." Typographical mistakes sometimes reveal the double that lays low. Certain governments spend their time trying to uncover them. As if there was code there.
There are little movements in the above that will register later on with a reader. That "certain governments spend their time trying to uncover them" reverberates again in the piece about dropping leaflets in Afghanistan. The cross-traffic of languages and cultures, between an invading country and an invaded one, is effectively treated in the piece titled "Dropping Leaflets," with a kind of collapsing collage effect.
Osman is able to talk in many different ways in her pieces. She can be both passionately astute and loosely humorous at the serious and deadly effects when humans believe their idea of reality is correct and their language follows arrows direct from subject to verb to object, with no hidden land in-between. Such is the place of absolutist rhetoric, unveiled to hide the truth and to reduce possibilities, other opinions, on how, for instance, a war should or shouldn’t be fought.
The second-longest piece in the book is one called "The Astounding Complex," which is a tour of law cases, mostly from the late 1990s. The "astounding complex" is taken to be the opposite of law, something that cannot be removed of its mystery, whereas law seeks to strike out mystery and equivocation. The cases chosen by Osman, however, show a different story—of how much mystery and nonsense actually gets construed as sensible, rational, logical by the courts. She notes a particularly strange "verb test" in one, and then humorously adds a reassembled consideration of her own making.
What sets this book apart, in general, from other books hoping to show similar gaps of rationality, the mystery of what we go on, are the many examples Osman brings forth in her poems. Where other poets might just obliquely refer to these issues, Osman usually begins by articulating some larger concern in an opening argument and then adds imaginative and helpful detail to color in her assertions. It is a lively and convincing instruction, and not one filled with the assumptive tones on what one ought to know.
The longest piece, "Memory Error Theater," runs to 33 pages, taking up one-third of the book. This is a tour-de-force of images and text and inset footnotes, with a chart combining editing symbols, most of the planets, and numbers one through seven. This same chart will later act as the frame for cut-up film stills from a short by Eadweard Muybridge. But even this doubling isn’t evocative enough for Osman, as she then asks the reader to test for a collective memory by recording what each visual cue (each still’s image) triggers in him or her.
An Essay In Asterisks somehow manages to be exacting and humorous, playful and serious, pedagogical without being condescending or annoying, ambitious without seeming overworked. It feels like the type of book that could go wrong at so many places, in so many different ways. It’s due to this risk that I really admire how she pulls it off and pulls the book together, by returning to the sites of memories and reality-construction which was the crux of the very first piece in the book. The effect of the book is almost as if the structures of things were being twisted and little odd bits of life and experience came tumbling out, bits of things that didn’t seem to be there before but really always were.
