CECILE PINEDA’S NEWSLETTER
“Pineda’s singular books perform dazzling literary feats of
technique, history, and political responsibility. They display a range of
technical sophistication that is hard to compare. To read Pineda is to touch on
the miracle of humanity.”
—Marcus
Embry
- READINGS AND BOOK SIGNINGS
- THE LIVING EARTH
- GOINGS ON AT CITY HALL
READINGS AND BOOK SIGNINGS
I’ll be talking about Apology
to a Whale in April and May at U.C. Berkeley, at the Ethnic Studies
Library, 30 Stevens Hall, on Wednesday April 20 at 5:30, and in May at
Oakland’s Main Library, 125 14th Street at Lakeshore Drive in
Oakland on Saturday, May 7, at 3:30 PM.
I
love talking about this book, because it asks questions. For example, to create
a life-sustaining world, how radically would we have to change our thinking? As
I wrote it, section by section, its discoveries kept surprising me. Its central
theme, the encounter between the Mind of the West and the indigenous mind, runs
through it much like an underground river, silent at times, at other times
making its rumbling felt.
February 1, 2016 I shared some thoughts about Apology to a Whale with S.F. Occupy
Forum in San Francisco (view video here):
THE LIVING EARTH
The comparative linguistics work of Benjamin Whorf anchors Apology to a Whale, lending it the kind
of underpinnings that pull the themes together; it suggests some ways we might
re-envision our thinking about the world and how we live within it. Whorf based much of his study on indigenous
languages, Hopi in particular. As an
alternative example of world view, he describes how the Hopi see clouds as
alive. Lately this 2014 NASA video “The Earth – a Living Creature” a came to my
attention. Maybe the Hopi have a point.
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| The Effects of Good Government |
GOINGS ON AT CITY HALL
The City Council of Berkeley saw fit to honor my work as a
literary artist on April 5th, going so far to proclaim it “Cecile
Pineda Day.” The statement I prepared took more than my allotted “3 minutes” to
read because of frequent interruptions by the clapping and cheering of overflow
crowd of outraged Berkeley citizens, there to oppose this council’s latest
plans to demolish entire flatland sections of Berkeley in their relentless
pandering to developers:
Watch video at 12:35!
I am quite happy to
accept this honor from the City of Berkeley for my efforts as a cultural
worker, especially from a council which recently passed a resolution urging the
closure of a nuclear reactor—Diablo Canyon—which sits atop a fine network of
connecting faults, a fact PGE knew as
early as the 1960s but kept secret from the public till last year.
But if the Berkeley City Council is serious about honoring
its artists, it must remember that the role of a true artist is to afflict the
comfortable, and comfort the afflicted. It must reconsider its draconian
approach to homelessness; it must take responsibility for the library directors
it appoints, insuring that 39,000 more books—books which are the commons of the
citizens of Berkeley—have no more chances of walking out the library back door
to be pulped. It must guard and preserve the lungs by which it breathes and
moderates its climate by protecting the 600,000 East Bay Hills trees designated
for the FEMA ax, and Monsanto’s herbicides. It must quit selling out its city
block by flatland block to the vulture flock of developers who settle in for a
killing; it must regulate rents now so that people unable to afford the new
“market rate” apartment rents are not evicted from existing housing stock
because of rising rents. It must provide affordable housing for those displaced
by the stampede to build market-rate apartments; it must not permit the Zoning
Adjustment Board to rubber stamp 18-story-high-rise projects without having so
much as looked at the engineering report. It must understand that one of
Berkeley’s last remaining cultural vestiges is the Shattuck theater; it must
protect its citizens from gross incursions by the university of California; and
it must learn to value its Black community by not displacing it under the
veneer of gentrification. It must understand finally that the concepts of wise
government go back to the 14th century where its effects are vividly
laid out in the council chambers of the city of Siena by Ambrogio Lorenzetti,
an artist whose work was deliberately commissioned by its citizens to remind
the council it must govern wisely and well, in the interest of promoting a
healthy society endowed with both compassion and civic responsibility.
Thank you very much.
Cecile Pineda, Berkeley, April 5, 2016
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