While writing No End in Sight other friends were/are working on their own books and projects. All covering, with some overlap, different decades of time. While expressing real urgency in completing their work, each is also pretty much a perfectionist (or maybe just love being inside the world they are exploring and/or creating) as they linger over their work. Work that often moves slowly as layers of depth and insight and literary beauty keep being added.

My own book ends almost in mid-sentence. But anyone reading it will at least in broad strokes know what has happened since I finished writing it. And that knowledge becomes part of how they might take in whatever it is that I have written.

*

Stephanie Hart is writing a novel about a Jewish family living during the McCarthy era in the early 1950s. Occasionally the novel goes back in time. But never projects itself overtly into the future. But the future is always there informing our understanding about what is happening in the world she has created.

There are traces of discontent in gender dynamics for example. Subtle fissures that we know will begin to crack wide open in the next decade. Concern with labor exploitation, union organizing, tenants rights, racial oppression, class conflict, antisemitism, the execution of the Rosenbergs and far right forces that will come back with unhinged fury decades later. We know when reading the novel that Roy Cohn chief council to Joseph McCarthy though appearing only briefly in the novel, will reemerge as a long dead toxic ghost egging on, shoring up Donald Trump so much so that when Trump was feeling the walls closing in him blurted out “Where’s my Roy Cohn?!”

Roy Cohn, gay and Jewish and filled with self-loathing was closeted at the time. Today, cutthroat gay billionaire venture capitalists like Peter Theil married with two children proclaiming that they are proud to be gay. There are trans women like Caitlyn Jenner posing in fashion magazines making sure that whatever new freedom they represent won’t extend to transgender women in the streets. White male Republican senators fist bumping each other on the senate floor when a vote endangering the environment is passed. There are even dark skinned leaders emerging as heads of thinly veiled white nationalist groups. Women governors, senators, attorney generals forcefully claiming their space, as they push some of the most oppressive hateful policies imaginable. Many of which specifically target other women. Black right-wing judges, politicians writers, media celebrities bristle at those who are shocked at the extent of their reactionary politics. Calling that reaction racist in that it assumes that all blacks should think alike. In Ohio, Josh Mandel a Jewish descendant of victims of the Holocaust does everything in his power to ingratiate himself to antisemitic Christian fundamentalists to try and win a primary election. Another candidate, J.D. Vance is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about a deeply suffering stigmatized white community that is facing economic hardship desolation despair. People in the grips of a profound sense of alienation. But first and foremost, both as a writer and even more so now as a candidate, Vance wants nothing done to alleviate their suffering. Like all the others, he wants to keep people immiserated as a way to catapult himself into power. In his case trying to stoke up class resentment as a way to obliterate class consciousness.

As the forms keep changing, the greed, the power need, the sexual panic, the self-loathing, the need to dominate, control and oppress remain constant. It is as if somehow all the colors of a vast oil spill are being presented as reflecting back the colors of a rainbow.

HOWEVER. If anyone is too uppity or displays even a sliver of decency or even no decency at all but is perceived in any way as a threat to real power they will be severely attacked.

In the 1980s a group of neoconservative Jewish intellectuals were beginning to feel a very false sense of their own importance. They confused influence with power. They kept strutting around believing that they were no longer Court Jews but were actually the centers of power. White Christian America came down on them hard.

In the words of Stephen Tonsor, “It is splendid when the town whore gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a good choir director, but when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far.” [Tragically my dear, dear friend Stephanie Hart died shortly after this appeared in the introduction to No End in Sight]

*

Another friend is working on a project taking place in the 1960s. The project is still pretty much under wraps so I can’t get too specific. But what is explored is the mind spinning speed with which the world that Stephanie writes about is changing.

My friend in very real serious ways sometimes by accident, more often by design, winds up smack in the middle of some of the most important historical events of the period.

Social political movements are presented in their myriad forms. We see how one new type of awareness can trigger another. Powerful new movements are emerging. Consciousness is shifting, opening up, expanding, being raised. Struggles against racism, sexism, economic exploitation, imperialism, capitalism are growing almost by the moment.

These movements are looked at, analyzed, discussed, described. We see how they intersect, where they divide. Where they implode. How the government and corporate power mobilizes against them. Sometimes through co-optation, sometimes infiltration, Often through brutal, calculated murderous violence. Both here and across the globe. Like in Stephanie’s novel my friend’s project goes back in time but never into the future. But it very much helps us understand what has been happening through the decades since.

A personal memory from that period.

I was on a bus going from San Francisco to Washington for the 1967 March on the Pentagon. The bus was divided into two parts. Those who called themselves politicos. Those who called themselves hippies. The distinction made no sense to me since I thought of myself as some combination of both. What slogans to write on the side of the bus? A compromise was reached. One side of the bus said “Make Love Not War.” The other side said “Up the Ass of the Ruling Class.” In my mind that confirmed my point. Because under the right circumstances both slogans would be saying the same thing.

Our bus stopped for a few hours in Wheeling, West Virginia. The local radio station asked if someone from our group could appear on the radio. As the only one thought of embodying both sides of the great divide I was recruited by the others to represent the bus. I don’t remember what I said. But I do remember the hosts of the show were open and friendly about what we were doing. And how happy and hopeful that made me feel.

*

For the last couple of years Myrna Nieves’s collection of articles and essays Between the Sun and the Snow: Writing at the End of the Century and Beyond has been on the verge of being published. “One last thing left to do” after another has kept it just waiting to make its appearance into the world. Originally written in Spanish, the book includes English translations by writer/political activist Chris Brandt. In addition it features the work of twelve different photographers scattered throughout.

Part 1 contains 19 monthly columns written between 1995-1998, for Nosotros los Latinos, a newspaper published in New York.

 These works cover many subjects, reflecting the range and depth of Myrna’s concerns. She writes about the condition of women and girls, the economy, climate change, technology, cultural pride, racial oppression, colonialism and the impact of hurricanes on Puerto Rico.

 She also discusses cultural ferment among Latino artists, writers, musicians in the face of harsh social/cultural/economic circumstances. She herself has made a significant contribution to that ferment. In addition to being one of the great poets of the age, she organized a poetry series at Boricua College that lasted twenty years.

Part 2 consists of seven more recent essays, written between 2017 and early 2019. The new essays look back on those earlier columns. Examining how the world has changed since then. How it has remained the same. She also discusses the changes she has gone through herself.

One of the subjects explored in the original columns was about dreams and their role in our life. Myrna has often spoken to me about how each morning as a girl, she, her mother and sister discussed their dreams from the night before.

During this last year Myrna and I have been working on a long fiction piece called The Dreamer and The Agent. It is about the relationship between Aurora, the dreamer, who writes up her extraordinary dreams with great artistic force and her agent Max who admires her greatly but who also has a strong economic interest in keeping her dreaming. Over the decades Aurora, certainly with Max’s help, has developed a global following. Max in fact is alert to every opportunity to push Aurora’s work. And when there aren’t opportunities he comes up with schemes to create them. [Our story now completed can be found at https://robertperr]

The story is in the form of written exchanges between them. Myrna is writing the Aurora part. I am writing Max’s part. Inside the story itself there are these rich totally captivating dreams of Aurora and at times reflections on what those dreams might mean. Aurora has immense poetic gifts and the depictions of these dreams are great works of literature unto themselves.

As co-author I get equal credit for Aurora’s dreams. I feel a bit guilty about it. But I keep telling myself that Max does have his moments. And when it is called for, finds all sorts of ways to [implore, cajole, inspire, even try to manipulate] Aurora to keep on dreaming.

*

Carletta Joy Walker recently completed part one of her two-part memoir. It ends around 1977 as she arrives in New York City where she has lived since. As hard it is for me to fully grasp that such a time actually existed, Part One is about her life before we ever met. It is more than interesting to experience her life before we knew each other.

Written with such insight and language beauty, you get a sense of history, how it formed her, the dynamics inside her family, the societal, social forces impacting on the creation of the young Carletta. The racism, sexism in the nuclear family. The damage done as well as the love within it. There is much historical information both on the global level and on the more immediate personal level.

It is also filled with real information. Africa, the food, the climate, the people—the history. The humanity all through the memoir as you engage with people who are often imprisoned by their own pain and the forces that created that pain and attend to their humanity without allowing herself to be victimized by it. If victimized, not internalized. And if internalized, working to free herself from that, without dehumanizing others.

*

Lana Povitz, a new friend, is writing a biography of Shulamith Firestone. Shulamith died in 2012 two months after my mother’s death. A very painful horrible period for me. Lana, like Shulamith, has a powerful grasp of social political historical realities. She is always very respectful of the people she is interviewing and has an unusual gift of being able to ask the question beneath a question. We all have our own Shulamith. And often enough we are protective of our competing versions of her. Lana is committed to give people, particularly those she disagrees with, a lot of room to say what they think.

In the course of doing her research Lana came across an unpublished novel that Shulamith wrote. Desire. Disappointment. Massive tragedy. Massive horror. It covers decades of life, struggle, awareness, pain. It is the story of two women deeply, often bitterly locked into each other’s lives. Lana, Shulamith’s sister Laya Seghi (so similar to her sister in poignant, profound ways) and I spent some time discussing the book. I felt such immense warmth towards each of them. And gratitude. My love for Shulamith kept [surfacing, flooding me] as we discussed her book.

One interesting aspect of our conversation was moving back and forth to the sources of some of the events written about and keeping in mind that these were characters in a novel and not the literal story of Shulamith’s life.

There are mind boggling overlaps between Carletta’s memoir and Shulamith’s novel. The novel ends New Year’s 2000. Carletta’s around 1977. I suspect a lot of part two will take place in NYC as do many things in Shulamith’s novel.

People in both works keep popping up everywhere. Some in the same locations in fact. Africa, Boston, California, a Catholic Worker’s office.

Both works are filled with information as people continually discover things about the society and about themselves. We see movements as they form, and the life and struggles within them. We see the class, racial, gender interactions of people who in serious and significant ways are in powerful social, political, cultural movements trying to create new forms of contact and profound political/economic/social transformation. Very subtle and tender and clear eyed descriptions of people trying to work/live their way through the massive contradictions that exist—sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. Carletta’s memoir is more hopeful. Shulmith’s novel much more grim though filled with powerful descriptions of explosive intense transcendent moments of contact.

In writing the biography, Lana plans on chronicling her own engagement with the world as she looks and discusses the forces that shaped Shulamith, the works Shulamith did and the powerful political movement Shulamith played a massive role in creating. And much of what has happened since then.