Alexie on Colbert

Sherman Alexie will keynote the Real Change Annual Breakfast this November 12th, and there's still time for you to come. RSVP to development@realchangenews.org.

Nurture The Grassroots

As the stakes get higher, Real Change is more and more about taking risks and speaking truth to power. It doesn’t really matter if the thin-skinned Nickels administration hates us. Our funding comes from people like you. We are uncompromised. We have the freedom and the capacity to mobilize, and we’re getting better at it all the time.

Back last November, we “went activist” with the launch of the Real Change Organizing Project (RCOP). Since then, we’ve led the grassroots response to the Mayor’s homeless sweeps policy and, more recently, taken on the related issue of incarceration and poverty in Seattle. This week, Real Change was honored by Washington State Jobs with Justice for “leading the movement for social change.” Not bad for RCOP’s first year.

When you’re out front, it’s wise to look back over your shoulder every once in a while to see who‘s with you. My experience is that for every supporter who says you’ve gone too far, there are two more who say you got it just right, and someone else who thinks you haven’t gone far enough.

Soon, we’ll get to see how we’re doing. Real Change's Annual Breakfast (click image above to enlarge) is a time to gather, celebrate, and support our critical work. This November 12th at 7:30 a.m., noted Seattle poet, author, filmmaker, and 2008 Stranger Genius Award recipient Sherman Alexie will join us at the University of Washington for an inspirational wake-up call to the grassroots.

Last year, we had close to 500 people. This year, we want to double that. This is about more than just raising money. This is a grassroots show of power and support. Are you with us? Tickets are $50. A table of ten is $500. Help us be strong. Call (206) 441-3247, x201, or email development@realchangenews.org

Still Pissed That Earle Thompson Is Dead

I've mentioned before that I'm a total sucker for street intellectuals. Give me a fucked up genius with an alcohol problem, and I'll bend every rule I can find.

I knew Earle Thompson for more than a decade. Earle has a section in the celebrated Native American poet anthology Dancing On the Rim of the World. When he died a few years ago, Sherman Alexie wrote a remembrance that ran in Real Change. Earle would come in to see me regularly, usually drunk, with a handful of new poems. He was what I'd call a genial pain in the ass drunk: equal parts amusing and annoying.

One day, after he'd once again blown his sobriety despite the threat of a foot amputation, I invited him to write us his obit so we'd have it on file when he died. "The New York Times writes these things up way ahead of time. You're obviously going to die soon, so why don't you just save us some trouble and get it the way you really want it to read?"

He never wrote the obit. He did die. This poem of his has been on the staff bathroom bulletin board for a few months. I thought I'd share.

Nightmare

in the shelter last night amid
swearing, snoring
and sleeping
i dreamt of hunting with my brother
who died last september of a drug overdose
in a toilet and after we left mountains
in a music-filled tavern
he admitted smoking a cigarette
he didn’t want to kill bambi
the imaginary cute little fawn
and he shot a fallen tree instead
like rambo in the movies
he said he had always wanted to do that
somehow i became lost in the dark goya canyons
and blue forests
i fell and stumbled
sweating
closing my salted eyes in the black
i came upon bones of fallen deer
they had remnants of torn fur
bleached bone protruded
darkened flesh
brown marbled eyes glistened
in the night
i sought and climbed the walls they elongated
and curved to a faint glow
i crawled upward my breathing burned
i wiped my nose on the sweatshirt
shouted help me
i’m alive
a helicopter entered and spotlighted me
i prayed my eyes turned red
so they could find me
i felt warmth and the outline of the logging road
a arm reached out my brother had helped me
he was alright and the fluorescent lights
came on time to wake up
the staff said it was time to leave.

-Earle Thompson

Flight

Fuck neutrality. I love everything Sherman Alexie writes. I’ve got eight and a half inches of Sherman, not including the poetry, sitting right on my top shelf. Nelson Algren lives next to him. He was a prose poet too, before his writing went all to hell in a puddle of scotch. Algren's career spans just seven and three-quarters inches.

But Sherman's sober. Before he’s done, I’m hoping for a good ‘nother foot.

Flight is Alexie’s second novel, the first in more than a decade. Indian Killer came out in ‘96, and I loved that one too.

Lots of people didn’t. I gave it to my mother-in-law and it freaked her out. Novels about guys who scalp people aren't for everyone. Sherman’s issues were less resolved in those days. Since then, his work has grown.

Shockingly, I loved Flight too. When Sherman read the first chapter at Town Hall, I heard why. He writes for the ear. He inhabits the lines. He’s what happens when a natural poet who possesses a deep understanding of the spoken word decides to do prose. It lands as poetry. Words remind us that life is beautiful.

Many of Flight’s reviewers sound like my mother-in-law before she’s had her coffee. The Village Voice calls it a simplistic teen novel. The Seattle Times deems it “self-important.” The LA Times whines that Flight is “thin and disappointing.” Our good friends at the Seattle Weekly say it “barely deserves to be called a novel.”

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Review of Books liked it just fine. They’re smart. Let’s hear it for east coast elitism!

Who can explain? Maybe it’s just garden-variety literary bitchiness. Or maybe they just don’t get it.

By happy accident, I’d reread Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five just months before. Flight inspired me to re-reread Slaughterhouse, and then return once more to Flight. And then Vonnegut died. So it goes.

Flight pays homage to Vonnegut’s masterpiece by giving us the awkward outsider’s view of a world that is both awful and sublime. While Alexie’s touch is grounded in his trademark humor and appreciation for the absurd, the material, like Vonnegut’s treatment of the bombing of Dresden, is deadly serious, and never lapses into cynical farce. Flight’s protagonist careens through time and space to participate in the various highs and lows of which humans are capable, and in the end finds a version of acceptance and peace.

Alexie is, first and foremost, a storyteller, and the time traveling format allows him to piece together a variety of vignettes, any one of which could have developed into a short story of its own. In some ways, this novel isn’t so far off from Ten Little Indians, his last collection of stories. We have a range of characters who hop across class and race and, now, time itself, to offer multiple points of view on the human condition.

We are reminded that, yes, people suck, but at the same time, love transcends. There are a thousand instances of horrible cruelty in any given moment, but there are also epic acts of love and kindness between strangers. There is abandonment and heartbreak, but we also see everyday rituals of affection and the eternal possibilities of redemption.

The climactic scene, which involves a drunken Indian, a harried professional, and a parboiled parakeet, is top shelf Alexie, pulling the best of which we are capable from the wreckage of everyday failure and disappointment. Flight may not, like Slaughterhouse-Five, be an enduring work of genius. But it’s a damn good book, worth reading at least twice.

Another Day At Which I Marvel

Astonishing Occurrence #1: I step in for sick staff and do vendor orientation yesterday morning for the first time in a few years. It's like riding a bike. There are three people in attendance: a really nice hippy-chick who has temporarily dropped out of the middle class for reasons I'll never know; a charismatic hobo guy who, having learned that I started the paper, keeps repeating "Dude, you've done an amazing thing." His wife, a hard drinking good hearted woman of "a certain age," is moved to tears during the Real Change video. She smiles and cries throughout the orientation.



Astonishing Occurrence #2: One of our volunteers shows me a paper that was published by a group of 50 academics in Los Angeles that bills itself as a "reality-based approach to ending homelessness." They lead with supporting fair wages and creating employment and protecting and expanding housing stock, and call for an end to the deplorable treatment of homeless people in LA. Southern California increasingly looks like the front lines of the war on the homeless, and people are fighting back in very interesting ways. This is encouraging.

Astonishing Occurrence #3: Sherman Alexie reads from his new book at Town Hall to benefit Real Change. He has a sense of timing and an ability to work a crowd that blows my mind, modulating through various moods (levity, wonderment, solemnity, anger, hope) with a facility I have never really seen in another speaker. He does stand-up comedy that looks and feels completely conversational and natural. His technique is so well honed it never looks remotely like technique. He is masterful. He advises white liberals to consider voting with people of color instead of pursuing "romantic bullshit." We could destroy the Republican party for decades to come this next election, he says, if stupid liberals can just once refrain from fucking things up. "Vote to destroy," he says. He trashes The Weekly up one side and down the other for their dumbshit Real Change article. "I'd just like to say Fuck the Seattle Weekly," he says. The crowd goes wild.

Sherman the Unexpected

This week's Real Change will feature an interview I did with Sherman Alexie last Thursday. We talked about his new book Flight, the legacy of Kurt Vonnegut, class and the declining significance of race in America, how privilege makes people stupid, and the advantages of leaving our tribalisms behind. This section, on why he no longer supports the movement to free Leonard Peltier, is excerpted from the unedited transcript that will be posted on the Real Change website.

Sherman's Town Hall reading on Monday, April 23rd, at 7 pm will be a benefit for Real Change, and will also feature readings from our own Anitra Freeman and Stan Burriss.

ALEXIE: It always bothered me, for instance, with the American Indian Movement and the Leonard Peltier case. I reflexively supported Leonard Peltier until very recently. Just because, you know, I am fully aware of what the FBI is capable of in this country, and has always been capable of in this country. But then I actually looked at what happened that day on the Pine Ridge Res. Two FBI agents holed up, at the compound. I have no problem believing they shot first. Whatever happened, there was a gunfight. The FBI agents were mortally wounded, defenseless, and one, two or three — depending on the stories — people, walked down the hill 100 yards, went around the cars, stood over the FBI agents, and shot them in the face. By any definition of the term, that is a crime.

RC: It’s an execution.

ALEXIE: If you believe what was happening at Pine Ridge was a war, and therefore both sides were protecting something. If you even believe AIM was practicing self-defense that day, in the context of war, still, it couldn’t be self-defense. Because the FBI agents were no longer capable of harming anybody. It was war, the FBI agents were no longer able to fight. So there was no self-defense anymore, and they were defenseless enemy combatants. So it was a war crime. So one of those moments when you realize, oh shit, I have been supporting a war criminal.

RC: Well, it’s a great example of a morally ambiguous situation, where the whole issue of being of a tribe or not affects your ability to see what’s really going on. I mean, you’re right. On the one side was GOON, which was horrible, but on the other side, AIM certainly had its totally thuggish aspects as well, which I thought certainly came across in the way that you set it up in the book.

ALEXIE: Which was the fictionalized version of seventies activism where the so called good guys, what do I call it in the book? IRON, Indigenous Rights Now. Two activists work with the FBI to kill another Indian. So two IRON guys are acting as double agents, which happened. There is evidence, anecdotal and otherwise of AIM members cooperating with the FBI. It happened with the Black Panthers. It happened with Chicano movements.

Because certain members of AIM, not all of them, a lot of them did a lot of great stuff, but because certain more violent members of AIM and I share the same ethnicity, I automatically reflexively assume that we shared the same moral system. And we don’t. I have an entirely different moral system than Leonard Peltier. Russell Means. Dennis Banks. I have a different moral system. And if you push and look, I would say that most of the people, and it’s white liberals, almost all of the white liberals who support the Free Leonard Peltier thing, if they really examined it, would realize how different their moral system, about violence and guns, is from the people they are trying to support.

RC: So, I assume then that you don’t regard the Matthiasson book then as the definitive account?

ALEXIE: No.

RC: Is there a source then, that …

ALEXIE: No. It’s a combination of reading this side’s version and that side’s version. One of the facts you can’t get around is that the FBI agents were shot in the face when they were defenseless. That’s a pretty hard fact.

RC: That’s a tough one to get around isn’t it?

ALEXIE: Yeah, so where do you go from there? After that, it’s all politics, and its all moral relativism. But I’m going to take the firm moral stance here that it was wrong. Regardless of why the FBI was there, what happened was that two defenseless human beings were shot in the face. And I get in trouble for it.

Q; I’ll bet you do.

ALEXIE: I’ve had people yell out, “Fuck you, Sherman!” at readings and performances, which is fun.