john guzlowski's Open Salon Blog

Will Amazon.com Continue to Support Holocaust Denial?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:11:26 -0500

The following comes from Randall Bytwerk, Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College, regarding the promotion of books denying the Holocaust at the Amazon.com site:

If one goes to amazon.com and searches for books promoting Holocaust denial, most of them have 5-star reviews at the top. How has that happened? Amazon ranks reviews by how "helpful" or "unhelpful" customers rate them. Take Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. There are a total of 49 customer reviews. 17 are 5-star. 25 are 1-star. However, the top review (5-star) has been rated as helpful by 83 of 110 customers. One of the better 1-star reviews has 61 helpful ratings out of 105 total ratings, with the result that it is way down on the list. The consequence is that unsuspecting customers, seeing all those 5-star reviews at the top, may be inclined to think the book must be good.

What to do? First, one must be an amazon customer. If you are, there are two things to consider.

First, it would be good to have some strong reviews of the various Holocaust denial books. Quite a few of the 1-star reviews are filled with invective, which is not persuasive to many readers. Amazon allows one to post reviews under one's real name if one wishes, but since that opens one up to various unpleasant consequences, one can also use a different name.

Second, and easier, one can rate existing reviews as "helpful" or "unhelpful." That option is available at the end of each customer review. Most readers of this list will know the names to look for, but here is my list of leading "Revisionist" authors: Arthur Butz, Thomas Dalton, Germar Rudolf, Veronica Clark (a relative newcomer), and Carlo Mottogno. Others will probably suggest additions to this list.

I'd also appreciate help with a related book: Michael Ford's self-published translation of Mein Kampf. I don't think Ford himself is a neo-Nazi (although the promotional material for his book on amazon states: "decide for yourself if he was a mad-man or a genius," and it's clear that he doesn't think Hitler was a mad-man). Ford's translation is pretty bad (his previous books include how to avoid being scammed on eBay and how to find a job if you are a felon). However, some neo-Nazis have jumped to his defense, and have been going after me with some energy (look at the comments on reviews if you are curious). "Helpful" ratings of my review would be appreciated.

A hundred or so "unhelpful" ratings will drive most of these books into the amazon cellar.

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Professor Bytwerk is currently working on a website exploring Nazi Propoganda.

Cecilia Woloch's Carpathia

Sat, 7 Nov 2009 16:11:26 -0500

Cecilia Woloch is a poet I like a lot, and it's not just because she's a Polish-American and she writes about Poland, and it's not because she's probably done as much in recent years as Janusz Zalewski to bring Polish and American poets together.

I like Cecilia Woloch because her poems touch me. Years ago, I wrote a short blog piece about the poems I like to read, good poems, and here's part of what I wrote:

"Someone asked me recently how I know what is good poetry and what isn't. There is the long story of what is good and the short story of what is good. The long story involves criteria and personal biography, the short story involves a simple statement. I'll give you the short story. What I feel is 'good' is what touches me."

Cecilia's new book Carpathia touches me.

I grew up hearing stories about the lives of people who started with nothing and ended up with nothing and spent most of their lives working for something, anything, that would feed the hunger that nothing brings. Sometimes they would find something and it would bring them joy. And sometimes it would bring them sorrow.

But the stories they told were never about the sorrow. They were about the search for joy or wisdom or friendship or love or honor that left the sorrow behind.

Cecilia's poems are like those stories. They takes you by the hand and ask you to rest and breathe and listen to the songs in the wind, the voices from the past and the voices from faraway telling you their stories.

Her book is full of such stories, and here are two I really really like, "Anniversary" and the title poem "Carpathia."

ANNIVERSARY

Didn’t I stand there once,
white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper,
swearing I’d never go back?
And hadn’t you kissed the rain from my mouth?
And weren’t we gentle and awed and afraid,
knowing we’d stepped from the room of desire
into the further room of love?
And wasn’t it sacred, the sweetness
we licked from each other’s hands?
And were we not lovely, then, were we not
as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?

CARPATHIA

Having rinsed off the soot and stink
of the Polish train,
having sung with the child.

Having eaten and laughed and wept,
had my vodka with apple juice,
my bread.

Having walked through the fields
at dusk, and into the forest
and back again--

meadows of buttercups,
thistles with bristling heads,
the first blue cornflowers of June.

Having opened my arms to the sky
falling back on itself
in my dizziness.

Having taken the small purple berries
that dropped from the wild bush
into my palm

--Siberian berries, like tiny plums--
put their sweet bitter inkiness
onto my tongue.

Having failed and failed at love.
Having gone anyway,
breath after breath.

Having trusted the world to be kind
and stood in the doorway
and listened for wolves

and heard my own dead in the high
grass whispering,
beloved, beloved, beloved.

____________________________

Her new book is available at BOA editions, or Amazon.com.

You can also find out more about Cecilia at her website or by taking a look at the other Writing the Polish Diaspora posts about her: Woloch and Luczaj Read in Krakow and Cecilia Woloch's New Book Narcissus.

Luciana!

Fri, 6 Nov 2009 17:11:01 -0500

People keep asking me what's up with baby Luciana, and I keep wanting to post about her but getting bogged down in various other activities, like feeding her or trying to explain gravity to her.

But right now, while she's in the other room practicing how to eat peas, I think I will post a link to a site Lillian has set up full of pictures of this beautiful and smart baby.

Here's the Luciana Link. Just click here.

All Souls Day

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:10:35 -0400

When I was a child growing up in Chicago, All Souls Day wasn't a big deal. My parents would tell me stories about what it was like in Poland when they were kids. People would travel to the cemeteries where their mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, were buried and leave flowers and lighted candles there. Some times at night, there would be so many candles burning on and near the graves that you could see the light shining above the cemeteries as you walked back home, even if your home was far away.

But we didn't do that in America. We were Displaced Persons, immigrants, and all our dead were buried far away in Poland. My mother didn't even know where her mother and her sister and her sister's baby were buried. The men who killed them put my mother on a boxcar and sent her to the slave labor camps in Germany before she could bury her family. It was a bad time.

A little while ago, the Polish-American poet Oriana Ivy sent me a poem about All Souls Day, and she said it would be okay to share it with people.

Here's the poem:

All Souls

Sometimes I think Warsaw fog
is the dead, come back

to seek their old homes –
wanting to touch even the walls.

But they cannot find those walls,
so they embrace the trees instead,

lindens and enduring chestnuts.
They embrace the whole city, lay

their arms around the bridges
and the droplet-beaded street lamps;

they pray in the Square of Three Crosses,
kneel among the candles and flowers

under bronze plaques that say
On this spot, 100 people were shot –

they bow, they kiss
even the railroad tracks –

they do not complain, only hold
what they can, in unraveling white.

-- Oriana Ivy

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If you want to read more of Oriana's poems, they are available online at the journal qarttsiluni.

If you want to know more about Polish and Polish-American All Souls Day, Deacon Konicki's blog has a post about the way it is celebrated in Poland and Robert Strybel has a piece on the way the day is commemorated by Polish-Americans in the US.

By the way, the Polish-American community in Buffalo, NY, has organized an All Souls Day commemoration. There's an article about it in the Polish News.

_______

The photo is of an All Souls Day commemoration in Poland.

Walt Whitman Sells Pants

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:10:48 -0400

Yes, he does. And he does a great job at it.

Levi's -- the jeans company -- is doing a series of ads using Whitman's poems.

Here's an ad using lines from "O Pioneers":

Here's an ad using some of "America":

Slate.com has an article about this amazing development in literary history.