Cat Attack
We're going to be away from the blog for most of the week as we're heading upstate to do some blackberry picking and house painting. Also, August 23rd is Shandaken Day. We don't want to miss the balloon toss.
Today we provide you with some gratuitous cat photos to start the day off on the right paw.
Also, Thomas's back is starting to get better. Thanks for asking.
As for the Olympics, we have one more complaint: both the UK Guardian and NY Times are dedicating big parts of their front pages online to Olympic Coverage. But is there not a war going on? (At least one?) And why is that not front page news? People are dying peops. Get with it Crappy Media.
Now, Cats. (and yes, we know that Mina is overweight— we're working on it.)—
Last week we were over at the Queens Botanical Garden to visit our friend Soph. Here's some stuff that came from her garden there. The Thai basil and Hyssop are especially tasty:
This is the branch that was torn from Henry the First. Henry is recovering slowly. Once again, Shame on the tree vandals of Sunnyside!—
(Notice the green bark— the Japanese Pagoda Tree keeps itself pretty green all the way to the trunk. It might look like a honey locust leaf-wise, but if you see this color on the branches you can bet that it's Styphnolobium Japonica.)
Finally, we'd like to send some thanks out to our peops— thanks to Les for the excellent waterproof watch, and for care-taking the trees of Baltimore. Thanks to Margaret for the Microsoft Office disk. The Lisablog Offices are back up and running with free Microsoft programs. Sorry Microsoft, we've gone pirate.
Box O Books
Hey Peops. Our apartment is brimming with books. Can someone take these off our hands? Most are in good condition, some are new, a couple of the chaps have bent corners. If you were crafty you could probably do a turnaround sale and make some money. We simply need to get rid of them. Contact Lisa of the blog at ljarnot@gmail.com
Box of Books
One Hundred Books One Hundred Bucks
$100 postage included
Lisa Jarnot. Some Other Kind of Mission.
Gerard Malanga. Mythologies of the Heart. Black Sparrow.
Tom Clark. Empire of Skin. Black Sparrow.
Diane Wakoski. Argonaut Rose. Black Sparrow.
Ron Padgett. Creative Reading.
Robert Frost. Early Poems.
Barry Ahern. William Carlos Williams and Alterity: The Early Poems
The Ralph Nader Reader.
Michael McGee. My Angie Dickinson.
Luisa Futoransky. The Duration of the Voyage: Selected Poems.
Edward Foster. What He Ought to Know: New and Selected Poems.
David Rosenberg. See What You Think: Critical Essays for the Next Avant Garde
Tom Beckett. Wagers of Synthesis.
Charles Borkhuis. Proximity (Stolen Arrows)
Laura Mullen. After I Was Dead.
Heidi Lynn Staples. Dog Girl.
Andrew Joron. The Cry at Zero: Selected Prose.
Arnold Weinstein. Red Eye of Love.
Wayne Kline. Asbestos.
Sor Juana’s Love Poems Tr. Joan Larkin & Jaime Manrique
Sean Macinnes. A Room of Trees.
African-American Poetry: An Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions)
Edward Foster. Mahrem.
Nabokov. Lolita.
Awake: A Reader for the Sleepless (Soft Skull Press Anthology)
Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams.
The Best Loved Poems of the American People. (1936, first edition)
Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll Anthology
Andy Clausen. 40th Century Man
Lights, Camera, Poetry! American Movie Poems Anthology.
The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets. Ed. Dennis Barone & Peter Ganick
Susan Briante. Pioneers of the Study of Motion.
Albert Flynn DeSilver. Letters to Early Street.
Rusty Morrison. The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story.
Kristi Maxwell. Realm Sixty-Four.
Joe Torra. Gas Station.
William Walsh. The Conscience of My Other Being.
Chris Vitiello. Irresponsibility.
G.E. Patterson. To and From.
The Penguin Book of Bird Poetry.
John Keats. Selected Poems and Letters.
Lisa Fishman. The Happiness Experiment.
Brian Henry. The Stripping Point.
Magazines:
Plantarchy, New American Writing, Washington Square, Brooklyn Review, Parataxis, The Hat, Cue, Hanging Loose, Antennae, Conundrum, Sniper Logic, One Less, Radical Society, lyric&, Kiosk, The Anona Wynn, Skanky Possum, Prima Materia, Painted Spoken, Jubilat, effing, el pobre Mouse, Cabinet, Chronicles of Disorder, Call, Verse, Object.
Chapbooks by
Charles Jensen, Michael Mann, Billy Mills, Mike County & Del Ray Cross, Carol Szamatowicz, Ann Stephenson, Shannon Welch, Valerie Kuehne, Tetra Balestri, Aaron Simon, Alan Jones, Wade Savitt, CJ Martin, Fran Carlen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Miscellaneous other chaps and mags and some Doonesbury.
News from the House of Death
One Story from the NY Times and one from the UK Guardian on those evil kissing cousins the USA and Israel—
Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands
Published: August 12, 2008
He was 17 when he came to New York from Hong Kong in 1992 with his parents and younger sister, eyeing the skyline like any newcomer. Fifteen years later, Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a United States citizen and two American-born sons.
But when Mr. Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.
In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.
On Tuesday, with an autopsy by the Rhode Island medical examiner under way, his lawyers demanded a criminal investigation in a letter to federal and state prosecutors in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, and the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the detention system.
Mr. Ng’s death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.
In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng’s lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.
Instead, the affidavits say, guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., dragged him from his bed on July 30, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.
“For this desperately sick, vulnerable person, this was torture,” said Theodore N. Cox, one of Mr. Ng’s lawyers, adding that they want to see a videotape of the transport made by guards.
Immigration and detention officials would not discuss the case, saying the matter was under internal investigation. But in response to a relative of Mr. Ng’s who had begged that he be checked for a spinal injury or fractures, the Wyatt detention center’s director of nursing, Ben Candelaria, replied in a July 16 e-mail message that Mr. Ng was receiving appropriate care for “chronic back pain.” He added, “We treat each and every detainee in our custody with the same high level of quality, professional care possible.”
Officials have given no explanation why they took Mr. Ng to Hartford and back on the same day. But the lawyers say the grueling July 30 trip appeared to be an effort to prove that Mr. Ng was faking illness, and possibly to thwart the habeas corpus petition they had filed in Rhode Island the day before, seeking his release for medical treatment.
The federal judge who heard that petition on July 31 did not make a ruling, but in an unusual move insisted that Mr. Ng get the care he needed. On Aug. 1, Mr. Ng was taken to a hospital, where doctors found he had terminal cancer and a fractured spine. He died five days later.
The accounts of Mr. Ng’s treatment echo other cases that have prompted legislation, now before the House Judiciary Committee, to set mandatory standards for care in immigration detention.
In March, the federal government admitted medical negligence in the death of Francisco Castaneda, 36, a Salvadoran whose cancer went undiagnosed in a California detention center as he was repeatedly denied a biopsy on a painful penile lesion. In May, The New York Times chronicled the death of Boubacar Bah, 52, a Guinean tailor who suffered a skull fracture and brain hemorrhages in the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey; records show he was left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours.
When Mr. Ng died last week, he had spent half his life in the United States, his sister, Wendy Zhao, said in a tearful interview.
Born in China, he entered the United States legally on a tourist visa. Mr. Ng stayed on after it expired and applied for political asylum. He was granted a work permit while his application was pending, and though asylum was eventually denied, immigration authorities did not seek his deportation for many years.
Meanwhile, his sister said, Mr. Ng (pronounced Eng), who was known as Jason, graduated from high school in Long Island City, Queens, worked his way through community technical college, passed Microsoft training courses and won a contract to provide computer services to a company with offices in the Empire State Building.
In 2001, a notice ordering him to appear in immigration court was mistakenly sent to a nonexistent address, records show. When Mr. Ng did not show up at the hearing, the judge ordered him deported. By then, however, he was getting married, and on a separate track, his wife petitioned Citizenship and Immigration Services for a green card for him — a process that took more than five years. Heeding bad legal advice, the couple showed up for his green card interview on July 19, 2007, only to find enforcement agents waiting to arrest Mr. Ng on the old deportation order.
Over the next year, while his family struggled to pay for new lawyers to wage a complicated and expensive legal battle, Mr. Ng was held in jails under contract to the federal immigration authorities: Wyatt; the House of Correction in Greenfield, Mass.; and the Franklin County Jail in St. Albans, Vt.
Mr. Ng seemed healthy until April, his sister said, when he began to complain of severe back pain and skin so itchy he could not sleep. He was then in the Vermont jail, a 20-bed detention center with no medical staff run by the county sheriff’s office. Seeking care, he asked to be transferred back to Wyatt, a 700-bed center with its own medical staff, owned and operated by a municipal corporation.
In a letter to his sister, Mr. Ng recounted arriving there on July 3, spending the first three days in pain in a dark isolation cell. Later he was assigned an upper bunk and required to climb up and down at least three times a day for head counts, causing terrible pain. His brother-in-law B. Zhao appealed for help in e-mail messages to the warden, Wayne Salisbury, on July 11 and 16.
“I was really heartbroken when I first saw him,” Mr. Zhao wrote Mr. Salisbury after a visit. “After almost two weeks of suffering with unbearable back pain and unable to get any sleep, he was so weak and looked horrible.”
The nursing director replied that Mr. Ng had been granted a bottom bunk and was receiving painkillers and muscle relaxants prescribed by a detention center doctor.
But his condition continued to deteriorate. Once a robust man who stood nearly six feet and weighed 200 pounds, his relatives said, Mr. Ng looked like a shrunken and jaundiced 80-year-old.
“He said, ‘I told the nursing department, I’m in pain, but they don’t believe me,’ ” his sister recalled. “ ‘They tell me, stop faking.’ ”
Soon, according to court papers, he had to rely on other detainees to help him reach the toilet, bring him food and call his family; he no longer received painkillers, because he could not stand in line to collect them. On July 26, Andy Wong, a lawyer associated with Mr. Cox, came to see the detainee, but had to leave without talking to him, he said, because Mr. Ng was too weak to walk to the visiting area, and a wheelchair was denied.
On July 30, according to an affidavit by Mr. Wong, he was contacted by Larry Smith, a deportation officer in Hartford, who told him on a speakerphone, with Mr. Ng present, that he wanted to resolve the case, either by deporting Mr. Ng, or “releasing him to the streets.” Officer Smith said that no exam by an outside doctor would be allowed, and that Mr. Ng would not be given a wheelchair.
Mr. Ng told his lawyer he was ready to give up, the affidavit said, “because he could no longer withstand the suffering inside the facility,” but Officer Smith insisted that Mr. Ng would first have to withdraw all his appeals.
The account of his treatment clearly disturbed the federal judge, William E. Smith of United States District Court in Providence, who instructed the government’s lawyer the next day to have the warden get Mr. Ng to the hospital for an M.R.I.
The results were grim: cancer in his liver, lungs and bones, and a fractured spine. “ ‘I don’t have much time to live,’ ” his sister said he told her in a call from Rhode Island Hospital in Providence.
She said the doctor warned that if the family came to visit, immigration authorities might transfer her brother. Three days passed before the warden approved a family visit, she said, after demanding their Social Security numbers. Late in the afternoon of Aug. 5, as Mr. Ng lay on a gurney, hours away from death and still under guard, she and his wife held up his sons, 3 and 1.
“Brother, don’t worry, don’t be afraid,” Ms. Zhao said, repeating her last words to him. “They are not going to send you back to the facility again. Brother, you are free now.”
Reuters attacks Israel's failure to take action over cameraman's death
- Oliver Luft
- guardian.co.uk,
- Wednesday August 13 2008 13:43 BST
The car of Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana burning in Gaza after it was shot by a tank in April. Photograph: Getty
Reuters has said it is "deeply disturbed" that the Israeli military has decided the tank crew that killed one of the news agency's cameramen and eight young bystanders in the Gaza Strip four months ago will not face legal action.
Israel's senior military advocate-general told the London-based news agency in a letter sent on Tuesday that the official report into the incident concluded that troops could not see whether Reuters' Fadal Shana, 24, was operating a camera or a weapon.
However, the official said reports found that the Israeli Defence Force tank crew were nonetheless justified in firing an airburst shell packed with flechettes - metal darts - that killed the Reuters cameraman and eight other Palestinians during fighting in the Gaza Strip on April 16.
Fadel Shana: the Reuters cameraman killed in Gaza
The international news agency, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters, issued a statement today saying it was "disappointed with and dissatisfied" by the Israeli military's decision that the tank crew would not face legal action.
"Reuters is deeply disturbed by a conclusion that would severely curtail the freedom of the media to cover the conflict by effectively giving soldiers a free hand to kill without being sure that they were not firing on journalists," the news agency said.
In a letter issued today to the IDF, Reuters responded to the report's conclusions with a number of questions.
The agency asked the IDF why the soldiers ruled out the possibility that Shana was a cameraman, why his standing in full view of the tanks for several minutes did not suggest he had no hostile intent and why the crew, if concerned but unsure, did not simply reverse a few metres out of sight.
Excellent Art, Lawrence, Kansas
Hey Peops, we'll be away from the blog for two days, but we wanted to tell you about this excellent show in the middle of the country. You missed the opening wine and cheese which happened last night, but don't miss a chance to see the art. My sister rocks!
6 Gallery presents:
"Jerry Kunkel, Jennifer Jarnot"
August 8th - September 21st, 2008
Opening Reception, August 8th, 7 – 9 wine and cheese to be served
Gallery Talk, 4:00 Sept.6
Jerry Kunkel is an emeritus professor of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder, retiring at the end of 2006. His work is on permanent display at the Denver Museum, and also has been shown at the National Collection of Arts in Washington D.C., San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, as well as other public and private collections.
Kunkel's realistic oil paintings draw from a wide range of subjects and quite often
present a seemingly insignificant moment or series of moments, frozen in time; a
depiction of the ordinary, of the everyday object or collections of objects, perhaps
those things we take for granted or seldom consider. Something as ordinary as a
cherry pie isn't often viewed with an eye toward revelatory self-reflection, but as
we begin to elevate it and re-examine it in the context of our daily lives, memories
are triggered, and our knowledge of it is expanded. It is at that moment we begin
to truly comprehend that the difference between recognition and cognition is more
than just the spelling.
Jennifer Jarnot has a BA in Drawing from the State University of New York at Fredonia and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her work is shown nationally and internationally, including Mexico, the Philippines, Los Angeles, Denver, and New York. In recent years, she taught Drawing and Painting classes at the University of Colorado.
Jarnot paints in response to her surroundings, telling a story that includes travels, conversations, material objects, sights and sounds. The process involves the collection of imagery from various sources, including photographs, comic books, magazines, and clip art websites. Her purpose is to utilize a language using found images in order to create a universal vocabulary. This results in a graphic reproductive quality akin to a visual shorthand, all irrelevant information and details are omitted to trim the appearance down to a basic cut and paste design. The intention is to ask the viewer to be self-reflective, to reconsider feelings or conversations they may have forgotten, places they may have been or would like to go, and material collections that are now lost or allegedly devoid of symbolism.
Sally F. Piller, Director
6 Gallery
716 1/2 B. Mass. St.
Lawrence, Ks. 66044
785-856-6480
www.6gallery.net
