Some Things I’ve Been Focusing My Energies on of Late

Well, as those who used to follow my MySpace blog and then my BlogSpot blog know, I have not been doing any personal blogging for a while. To put it simply, I’ve been too damned busy with non-blog efforts and with other blog efforts.

First off, I’ve been running a blog-journal, As It Ought To Be, with Matt Gonzalez. Now, as it turns out, Matt was a hero of mine before we became friends and collaborators, so this makes me super happy. It also increases my busy-ness level quite a bit, as I am now producing two new blogs a month for the site and soliciting articles from people and then editing them or rejecting them.

I’ve also been blogging for Absinthe, a translation journal, though much less regularly. I plan to do more there in the near future. Whereas my work at As It Ought To Be provides an outlet for my political thinking, Absinthe allows me an outlet for my thoughts on European literature and translation theory/practice.

I’ve also been taking five classes here at the University of Illinois, where I am in my first year as Illinois Distinguished Fellow. My plan is to pound out the PhD in 2 years of coursework and 2 years of dissertating. This ought to prove mindnumbingly difficult. And time consuming.

I have also been working diligently on Joshua City, the po-mo/sci-fi novel I am co-authoring with Raul Clement. I have been writing new stories, poems, and essays. I have been working on some new translations, my best to date, I think. Oh, and there is a new issue of Mayday I’ve been working on with the incomparable David Bowen. Oh, and I’ve taken on the task of reviewing books in translation for an Inside Higher Education online.

Anything else? Let’s see….yes, I am volunteering at The Red Herring now, where vegetarian food is made, community workshops are held, leftist politics in general are promoted, and live music occasionally occurs.

Anyway….this is the personal update to why there have been no personal updates. I am slammed 10-12 hours a day and am looking for yet more to do. Sometime soon, I might start looking for a social life, and I did spend this past weekend in Chicago hanging out with some awesome people, which I plan to do more often in the coming months. But for now I am happy with a limited social life and a burgeoning work life. That might change sometime in the near future, but until then, look for me not on my personal blog sites talking about myself, but rather look for “me” in my work elsewhere.

As It Ought To Be

Matt Gonzalez and Jim Dorenkott have launched a new political blog site, As It Ought To Be, this week. I'll be doing two pieces a month for it. Other cool people will be as well.

My first one, in which I discuss the relationship of literature and politics, is here.

Go, read, comment.

Some Thoughts on Healthcare Reform

The Institute of Medicine recently predicted that an average of 60 Americans die every day (every day!) due to lack of or insufficient healthcare. And this in the richest country in the world. Italy, which ranks in the double digits of richest countries, has an estimated zero deaths per day due to lack of or insufficient healthcare.

So, what is the solution? According to the majority of doctors, nurses, and health economists, the answer is single-payer healthcare. And, in 2003, Obama supported this as well. When he was asked then what it would take to enact single-payer, he said we would need to take back the White House, the Senate, and the House. Well . . . in case you missed it, we've done that. And now Obama is suddenly siding with the insurance companies who heavily funded his campaign (I know, I know, all we heard was that small donors, average Americans were driving his fundraising, but look at any report and you'll see he got tons more corporate support than McCain, mostly because it was obvious any Dem was going to win in 2008, so they wanted to own whoever it was, and now it's paying off big-time).

But why single-payer? Well:

1) there is no such thing as pre-existing conditions as an excuse to deny coverage, since everyone is covered from birth.

2) It will cost much less overall, since people won't wait until the last minute to get attention they need, thus allowing their diseases or ailments to progress to a much more difficult and expensive stage.

3) Did I mention that 60 people die every damn day because we don't have this?

4) The other options are what Dr Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of New England Medical Review, calls "the futility of piecemeal tinkering". And these solutions still leave millions uncovered and cost as much or in most cases more than single-payer.

So . . . write your congressmen and -women and tell them to stand up for real healthcare reform, not some meaningless tinkering.

I write to inform thee of the fortuitous birth of Mayday Issue 1. Please go read the issue, and feel free to comment here about anything you find there. We also have a Facebook group, so join up.

We're very proud of this first issue and hope it's only a fraction of the glory that is to come. In fact, we're so happy about this first issue, we're almost jealous of ourselves for having put it together.

Also, we are now open for submissions, so go to the site and read the guidelines and send us something.

Enjoy!