Blog Visitors from Around the World

Sitemeter reports this blog has been visited last week by people from:
New Zealand; Jakarta, Indonesia; Capetown, South Africa; Yeman; Flensburg, Germany; Nmes, France; Panama; Lombardy, Italy; Dronten, Netherlands; Halifax, Nova Scotia; London; and many places in the US: Winter Park, FL; Chicago; LA; NY; Little Rock, AR; Denton Texas, etc.

Remembering Grace Paley in Boston

With the holiday season fast approaching the Joiner Center will once again celebrate the life and work of writer and activist Grace Paley. The Grace Paley Birthday Reading, which will be held at Friends Meeting at Cambridge on Thursday, December 10th, 7-9 pm, will feature local activists reading from Grace’s work. This year we are pleased to welcome students from UMass Boston who received special recognition through the 2009 Grace Paley Award for their community involvement. They are Son-ca Lam, Stephanie Fail and Heather Turner. Joining them will be Bob Nicols, Bob Glassman, Bob Zevon, Tom Goodkind, Michael Ansara, Wayne Smith, Michael Romanyshyn, and many other activists, teachers and community organizers.
This is a video of the Center's Grace Paley celebration in December, 2008:

At the Joiner Center this year there will be a potluck reception following the reading – please let us know if you’d like to contribute! You can email us at joinercenter@umb.edu. Copies of Grace’s books will be available at the reception.

This year the Joiner Center welcomes MFA graduate students Crystal Koe and Molly McGuire to our program staff. They will be working with Cat Parnell on the Grace Paley Tribute and the Grace Paley Award. Both Molly and Crystal bring extensive experience and good spirits to the center. We at the Joiner look forward to working with Crystal and Molly, and we hope you will welcome them when you meet them at the Grace Paley Tribute Reading in December.

The Joiner Center is also pleased to announce Tru Grace: Holiday Memoirs, a special production of Grace Paley’s short story “The Loudest Voice” by the Underground Railway Theater. Adapted by Wes Savick of Suffolk University’s Theatre Department, the play premieres on Thursday, November 19th and runs through Sunday, December 27th along with Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” These whimsical tales will be playing at Central Square Theater.

The Underground Railway Theater is offering the Joiner Center community discounted tickets ($17.50, regularly $35) to the production. To take advantage of this offer quote the discount code TRUGRACE either online at
www.centralsquaretheater.org, or by calling the box office at 866-811-4111.

The Underground Railway Theater would also like to extend an invitation the Joiner Center community to participate in the sharing of anecdotes and/or the reading of a piece by Grace on December 6th, directly after the 2 pm matinee, when they will be hosting a celebration of Grace's life.

Veto of domestic partners funeral bill sparks protest at R.I. State House

PROVIDENCE — About 150 protesters lit candles in the dark Thursday night and followed a black casket up the walk to the State House steps.

Six pallbearers placed the coffin on the white marble steps, a seventh placed a wreath of white roses upon it, and Joe Roch, 29, of Providence turned to address the somber crowd.

“We’re gathered here tonight out of a mutual sense of anger and frustration at Governor Carcieri’s recent veto of the domestic partners funeral bill” Roch said. He drew applause when he referred to comedian Stephen Colbert’s “shaming” Carcieri on national television. Although Carcieri killed the bill, Roch said, “Tonight we present you not with the mangled, defeated corpse of a dream deferred, but with a greater hunger for progress and equality for every man and woman in Rhode Island.”

Lt. Gov. Elizabeth H. Roberts told those attending the protests that “almost every single member of the House and Senate supported the legislation,” called the governor’s veto “a cruel act” and promised the next session of the General Assembly would overturn the veto. The bill would have added domestic partners to the list of people who can legally make arrangements for a deceased person’s funeral. In his veto message Nov. 10, Carcieri said the decision should be put on the ballot for the voters to decide.

dnaylor@projo.com

Palestinians Breach Separation Fence

From Haaretz, November 9, 2009:
Activists breached a hole in the West Bank wall for the second time in less than a week on Monday in a demonstration to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their faces masked, the activists tethered a 2-meter wide section of the cement barrier to a truck which then pulled it over. The crowd of around 50, which had gathered at a section of the barrier near an Israeli checkpoint at Qalandiya, cheered as the 6-meter high section fell. Israeli soldiers fired tear gas at the crowd, some of whom threw stones over the wall. Several demonstrators passed through the gap they had created, hoisting a Palestinian flag and setting ablaze tires on the other side.
On Friday, during a demonstration in the West Bank city of Na’alin, where activists and Palestinians gather every Friday to protest the route of the fence, masked Palestinian youths breached a section of the wall that runs through the village, while Israeli border guards fired tear gas and a foul-smelling spray from behind the high concrete barrier. Protesters levered open a space under one the pre-cast panels and used a hydraulic car-jack to topple it out of position. “No matter how tall, all walls fall,” read one banner pasted onto the structure by Palestinian youths assisted by Israeli activists, who say the wall on Palestinian land and through Palestinian communities is simply a land grab by Israel.
The panels of the walls in Israel’s separation barrier are cast in the same inverted T-shape as the wall constructed through Berlin by communist East Germany. Israel began building its barrier of fences and walls at the height of the Palestinian uprising that began in 2000 and it now runs along most of the West Bank border, at many points encroaching into West Bank territory.
It says it was built to prevent suicide bombers entering Israel and has largely succeeded in doing so. Palestinians see it as an attempt to seize land on which they aim to establish an independent state. “Today we commemorate 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” said Abdullah Abu Rahma, leader of the People’s Campaign to Fight the Wall. “This is the first step in a series of activities we will be holding in the coming days to express our firm attachment to our land and our rejection of this wall.”
In a non-binding decision in 2004, the International Court of Justice said the barrier was illegal and should be taken own because it crossed occupied territory.
Israeli leaders have said the barrier is a temporary obstacle that could be removed once a peace agreement with the Palestinians is signed.
Masked activists used a lorry to tear down a cement block of the wall [AFP]
From Al Jazeera:
Abdullah Abu Rahma, leader of the People's Campaign to Fight the Wall, said: "Today we commemorate 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. "This is the beginning of the activities, which we do, to express our hold on our land, and our refusal to this wall - the wall of torture, the wall of humiliation."

Activists have vowed to hold a week of protests in the Palestinian territories and around the world, including a campaign calling for the release of all anti-wall activists currently imprisoned. Last Friday, Palestinian youths almost toppled a segment of wall using a hydraulic car-jack in the West Bank village of Nilin. Protests against the wall have become a regular event in Nilin and in the nearby village of Bilin, where Palestinian, international and Israeli activists are commonly confronted by tear gas and rubber bullets fired by Israeli troops.

Israel began building its barrier, consisting of fences and walls, in 2002, citing security reasons. The wall is up to 8m high in places, twice the height of the former Berlin wall. Palestinian sources anticipate that it may be more than 750km-long when construction is finished, more than four times the length of the Berlin wall.

Palestinians say the route of the wall has been set in such a way that it grabs land that could have been included in a future Palestinian state. The International Court of Justice, in a non-binding decision in 2004, said the Israeli-built barrier was illegal and should be taken down because it crossed into occupied territory. A report by Stop the Wall, a Palestinian coalition of NGOs opposed to the wall, said that in 2007 alone, Israel demolished more than 160 houses and appropriated more than 3sq km of land in the Palestinian West Bank in its construction of the wall.

Grace Paley Peace Ornament Found on Web

The Grace Paley Permanent Peace Crane Origami Ornament
Grace Paley, an American Poet, Writer and Civic Activist, born December 11, 1922 died August 22, 2007.
Her most important and multiple times published work is "The Little Disturbances of Man"

Having spent several years as a typist and housewife, Paley turned her attention back to writing in the mid 1950s. After a number of rejections, Paley published her first collection, "The Little Disturbances of Man" (1959) with Doubleday. The collection features eleven stories of New York life, several of which have since been widely anthologized, particularly "Goodbye and Good Luck" and "The Used-Boy Raisers." RIP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Paley
*****************************************************

Permanent origami peace crane ornaments by Nancy McNally;
http://www.nancymcnally.net

Celebrate Grace on December 11 at Barnard!

Grace Paley:
Speaking Truth to Power
Ujju Agarawal, Yvette Christiansë, Ynestra King, Nancy Kricorian, and Amy Swerdlow
A Panel Discussion:
Friday, 12/11, 6:30 PM
James Room, 4th Floor Barnard Hall
Barnard College,
3009 Broadway
NYC
On Grace Paley's birthday, we present a conversation exploring how imagination, truthtelling, and courageous action flow out of Paley's life and work. A prolific writer, Paley's fiction highlights the everyday struggles of women, what she calls "a history of everyday life." In addition to her writing, Paley was also a committed activist, passionate about numerous issues, including women's rights, the Vietnam War, nuclear non-proliferation, and most recently, the war in Iraq. Her death in 2007 was a great loss, but her work continues to inspire. Speakers, coming from a range of generations, will include politically engaged writers, artists, and activists in such causes as immigration rights, housing, human rights, gay and lesbian issues, foreclosure actions, anti-militarism and other important struggles. The speakers have all drawn inspiration from Paley's work and life and demonstrate various affinities to the amazing woman, artist and thinker who described herself as a "combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist."

Speakers will include: Ujju Agarawal, member of the Center for Immigrant Families Collective; Yvette Christiansë, poet and novelist; Ynestra King, ecofeminist activist and educator, and editor of Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment, and Development; Nancy Kricorian, New York-based writer and activist, author of Zabelle and Dreams of Bread and Fire, and coordinator of the New York City chapter of CODEPINK Women for Peace; and Amy Swerdlow, founding member of Women Strike for Peace and author of Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s.