Based on a true tale, My Sister Sara begins in December 1948. The Leroux family stands on Cape Town's docks to welcome their newest member, a blonde, blue-eyed war orphan that patriotic Pa has "ordered" from Germany. The God-fearing clan falls in love with the bright four-year-old. Even stern Pa, an architect of Apartheid, is softened by the orphan's presence until a document arrives revealing a terrible secret. Everything changes. The truth must never come out. Pa swears the family to secrecy. Sara is fed and clothed but never shown affection again. And never told the reason why. Told through the eyes of her adoptive brother Jo, Sara's past underscores her present against the heinous backdrop of Apartheid in the 1950's and 60's. She must call on Anne Frank-like courage to resist her enemies, even those with the Leroux name, if she is to have any hope of finding her place in the world.
Take a journey into the heart and passion of one of the most brilliant voices of the American Counter-Culture Movement. While men took the spotlight, it was women like ruth weiss who would breathe feminine spirit into the fight for equality between the sexes, the races, and the classes. Celebrated in Europe and under-acknowledged* in the US, during the course of her life ruth weiss innovated poetry with jazz in the San Francisco North Beach scene of the 1950s with contemporaries Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, and others. For the first time in print, one of the last of the original Beat poets ruth weiss presents two masterpiece long form poems: COMPASS (about a road trip through Mexico) and I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU BLACK (a tribute to her African-American artist friends). Also included are two short form poems TEN TEN and POST-CARD 1995, and a biography of ruth weiss' life by Horst Spandler: ruth weiss and the American Beat Movement of the '50s and '60s.
ruth weiss, born in Berlin in 1928 to Austrian-Jewish parents, arrived in San Francisco in 1952 after hitchhiking through the United States. Crowned years later as the "Goddess of the Beat Generation" by San Francisco Chronicle critic Herb Caen, weiss has worked for almost seven decades with a plurality of artistic forms. Despite her extensive poetry career and very active participation in the West Coast buzzing artistic community since the early 1950s, weiss has remained an essentially overlooked figure in poetry history. This neglect might be representative of the overshadowing of female artists within the Beat Generation as "a marginalized group within an always already marginalized bohemia" (Johnson). The volume taps directly into this lacuna by proving the first close study on one of the most prolific members of the so-called Beat Generation. Offering diverse and comprehensive points of entrance into weiss's oeuvre, the essays in this volume adopt a multidisciplinary approach that attests to the cross-pollination between art forms in postwar counterculture. In addition, the volume also includes shorter, non-academic contributions and previously unpublished archival material. Bringing together scholars, academics and artists from around the world, this volume represents a timely and much-needed response to the increasing interest in weiss's work in the last decades.
ruth weiss, born in Berlin in 1928 to Austrian-Jewish parents, arrived in San Francisco in 1952 after hitchhiking through the United States. Crowned years later as the “Goddess of the Beat Generation” by San Francisco Chronicle critic Herb Caen, weiss has worked for almost seven decades with a plurality of artistic forms. Despite her extensive poetry career and very active participation in the West Coast buzzing artistic community since the early 1950s, weiss has remained an essentially overlooked figure in poetry history. This neglect might be representative of the overshadowing of female artists within the Beat Generation as “a marginalized group within an always already marginalized bohemia” (Johnson). The volume taps directly into this lacuna by proving the first close study on one of the most prolific members of the so-called Beat Generation. Offering diverse and comprehensive points of entrance into weiss’s oeuvre, the essays in this volume adopt a multidisciplinary approach that attests to the cross-pollination between art forms in postwar counterculture. In addition, the volume also includes shorter, non-academic contributions and previously unpublished archival material. Bringing together scholars, academics and artists from around the world, this volume represents a timely and much-needed response to the increasing interest in weiss’s work in the last decades.
Part of the Jewish Encounter series Taking in everything from the Kingdom of David to the Oslo Accords, Ruth Wisse offers a radical new way to think about the Jewish relationship to power. Traditional Jews believed that upholding the covenant with God constituted a treaty with the most powerful force in the universe; this later transformed itself into a belief that, unburdened by a military, Jews could pursue their religious mission on a purely moral plain. Wisse, an eminent professor of comparative literature at Harvard, demonstrates how Jewish political weakness both increased Jewish vulnerability to scapegoating and violence, and unwittingly goaded power-seeking nations to cast Jews as perpetual targets. Although she sees hope in the State of Israel, Wisse questions the way the strategies of the Diaspora continue to drive the Jewish state, echoing Abba Eban's observation that Israel was the only nation to win a war and then sue for peace. And then she draws a persuasive parallel to the United States today, as it struggles to figure out how a liberal democracy can face off against enemies who view Western morality as weakness. This deeply provocative book is sure to stir debate both inside and outside the Jewish world. Wisse's narrative offers a compelling argument that is rich with history and bristling with contemporary urgency.
Reopening the canons of the Beat Generation, Blows Like a Horn traces the creative counterculture movement as it cooked in the heat of Bay Area streets and exploded into spectacles, such as the scandal of the Howl trial and the pop culture joke of beatnik caricatures. Preston Whaley shows Beat artists riding the glossy exteriors of late modernism like a wave. Participants such as Lawrence Lipton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and at great personal cost, even Jack Kerouac, defied the traditional pride of avant-garde anonymity. They were ambitious to change the culture and used mass-mediated scandal, fame, and distortion to attract knowing consumers to their poetry and prose. Blows Like a Horn follows the Beats as they tweaked the volume of excluded American voices. It watches vernacular energies marching through Beat texts on their migration from shadowy urban corners and rural backwoods to a fertile, new hyper-reality, where they warped into stereotypes. Some audiences were fooled. Others discovered truths and were changed. Mirroring the music of the era, the book breaks new ground in showing how jazz, much more than an ambient soundtrack, shaped the very structures of Beat art and social life. Jazz, an American hybrid--shot through with an earned-in-the-woodshed, African American style of spontaneous intelligence--also gave Beat poetry its velocity and charisma. Blows Like a Horn plumbs the actions and the art of celebrated and arcane Beat writers, from Allen Ginsberg to ruth weiss. The poetry, the music, the style--all of these helped transform U.S. culture in ways that are still with us. Table of Contents: Introduction: Opening Measures 1. Horn of Fame 2. On the Brink 3. Celluloid Beatniks 4. Ready for Breakfast 5. Howl of Love Conclusion: The Horn Keeps Blowing Notes Credits Index Mr. Whaley, in this book, takes an academic approach to a subject that is just now beginning to attract scholarly interest. He thoroughly fleshes out a range of sources that span the artistic spectrum in order to give balance and objectivity to his treatment of American culture during the bebop and beat eras. The 1960s, with the Civil Rights Movement, the advent of hippie culture, and the protests against the Vietnam War, has long garnered attention from scholars, writers, musical historians, and filmmakers alike. In the popular conception of pop culture, the 1950s are often labeled boring or drab by comparison. Preston Whaley's analysis, however, will go a long way toward identifying the cultural movements of the 1940s and 1950s as part of a linear whole, a direct predecessor of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. --Douglas Brinkley, author of World War II: the Axis Assault, 1939-1942 This book has a nice exuberance and conviction, a consistent vision and a persuasively engaging tone. It has a winsome, masculinist, optimistic, expansive style that is reminiscent of beat literature itself. --Maria Damon, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry Whaley's Blows Like a Horn made me want to read ruth weiss, see The Subterraneans, reread Visions of Cody and well, I already listen to Coltrane and read Howl all the time .. but these are signs to me of a very effective book. Whaley wants to find a new way of talking about the Beats and post-Beat culture, one that doesn't fall into the rhetoric of liberation and resistance that is so common in the analyses of this genre, or to the cultural studies critiques of the beats that have pointed out the movement's appropriation by the hegemonic structures of Western, white, patriarchal, hetero capitalism and left it there. Whaley looks for a hitherto ignored space in Beat culture in which the aspirations, experiments and prejudices of the Beats can be directly related to precisely the kind of struggles that cultural studies itself is engaged in as a field. The Beats may not solve all problems, but they are aware of many of them, to varying degrees. There's a subtle, improvisatory quality to Whaley's writing that mirrors the kind of in situ politics and aesthetics that he's trying to evoke in Beat culture. He moves between high and low, personal and theoretical as the situation needs. He talks to the reader directly. There's a refreshing directness here, a willingness to address fundamental human situations. --Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs
They told her that her body belonged to men and her mind didn’t matter. They were wrong. “What if I don’t want to marry?” Lillian held her breath. She had never said the words out loud. “Not want to marry?” Her aunt frowned. “What else would you do?” Set in a Ugandan village, Lilian has learned to shrink herself to fit other people’s ideas of what a girl is. In her village a girl is not meant to be smarter than her brother. A girl is not meant to go to school or enjoy her body or decide who to marry. Especially if she is poor. Inspired by and written in consultation with young Ugandan women, I Am Change is the tragic but empowering story of how a young girl finds her voice and the strength to fight for change.
