Mendocino County Today: Sunday, September 14, 2014

• Testa Testiness
• Hyphenate Withdraws
• Poacher Popped
• Ortner Pufferoo
• Goodell's Resume
• Fair Friday
• Bud Trimmers
• Catch of the Day
• Reunion Ruminations
• 100 Novels
• Women's Voices

SOME SERIOUS RANK AND FILE GRUMBLING among Sheriff's deputies at Sheriff Allman's recent appearance at a Testa Winery party in Calpella. Also attending was Allman's second-in-command, Captain Randy Johnson. So, what's the beef? The beef is that about a year ago patrol cops had to quell a drunken yuppie riot where the drunk yuppies got away with what ordinarily would be considered felonies, including attacks on the responding officers. Those officers are deeply unhappy that their bosses were yukking it up with the Testa people. The particulars of Testa's testosterone-tossed party that night were described in the press release the cops issued last September:

ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2013 at about 12:27am (just after midnight) Mendocino County Sheriff’s Deputies responded to an agency assistance call from the California Highway Patrol regarding the report of subjects riding golf carts on the roadway between Testa Vineyards (6400 North State Street) and the downtown Calpella area. The first responding deputy arrived where he was told by a citizen, the golf carts were coming from the Testa Vineyards parking lot. The deputy responded to that location where he contacted numerous individuals who appeared to have been drinking, one of whom indicated he had been giving people rides from the Testa Vineyard parking lot to an off-site parking lot in downtown Calpella.

The deputy was then confronted by Clyde ‘Rusty’ Martinson, 48, of Redwood Valley, co-owner of Testa Vineyards, who was belligerent, intoxicated, and demanded the deputy leave the location. As the deputy was dealing with the crowd, another golf cart being driven by an unidentified person approached the scene and crashed into an object in the parking lot. As the deputy approached that cart to determine if anyone was injured, Martinson threw a beer can at the deputy and then shoved the deputy, again demanding he leave the location. The deputy then called for additional units to respond due to the hostile crowd surrounding him. Martinson was eventually wrestled to the ground by some members of the crowd and restrained. Additional deputies, members of the Ukiah Police Department, California Highway Patrol, and Coyote Valley Tribal Police all responded to assist with the hostile crowd. It was then learned that some unknown person had stolen an ignition key from one of the deputy's patrol vehicle. The key was later returned to the deputy. At one point James Thompson, 49, also of Redwood Valley, approached officers in an agitated and belligerent manner. Thompson was obviously intoxicated and was subsequently arrested for public intoxication and placed into the rear of a patrol unit. Martinson was then contacted, where he was still being restrained, and taken into custody for battery on a peace officer and public intoxication. Martinson physically resisted during the arrest and was also charged with resisting arrest. While Martinson was being arrested an unknown person succeeded in releasing Thomson from the patrol vehicle and he escaped while handcuffed. Deputies searched for Thompson but were unable to find him. Martinson was transported and booked into the County Jail.

"AT AROUND 10:45am later that Sunday morning Thompson responded to the Sheriff's Office in Ukiah and surrendered himself to deputies. He had several injuries to his wrists where it appeared the handcuffs had been cut off after his escape. He was then booked into the County Jail. Deputies subsequently received an anonymous tip, identifying Charlene Testa, 59, [Ed note: Charlene Testa is the sister in law of Martinson. Rusty is married to Maria Testa, sister of Charlene Testa.] of Ukiah, as the person responsible for releasing Thompson from the patrol vehicle, aiding his escape. Testa was contacted and interviewed where she admitted she was responsible for Thompson's release. A case was submitted to the District Attorney's office for review of a charge of lynching against Testa. [Ed note: Charlene Testa is listed as Mendocino County Transportation Department employee and a member of the County’s Employee Wellness Advisory Committee.] The case was submitted to the District Attorney's Office for review of charges and to the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control for review of possible sanctions against the holder of the liquor license of Testa Vineyards. The investigation is continuing. Anyone with information identifying anyone aiding the escape or release of Thompson is encouraged the contact the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office at (707) 234-2100. (Sheriff’s Department Press Release).” [Ed note: Testa Vineyards’ website shows their third annual “Barn, Blending, BBQ” event was scheduled to end Saturday night at 10pm.]

PRESS RELEASE: PAUL JOENS-POULTON, COUNTY SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS CAMPAIGN

September 13, 2014 — After much reflection and thoughtful deliberation I have decided to not engage in an active campaign for the office of Mendocino County Superintendent of Schools.

My experience since last March, when I decided to run for County Superintendent of Schools, has been remarkable. It has provided me an opportunity to see our county and the communities within it from a new vantage point. I have had the opportunity to meet many incredible people who care deeply for their communities and the future of public education, which has truly been a gift. My breadth and depth of knowledge surrounding educational issues has grown through this experience preparing me to better serve our students.

With this heightened perspective, I have to be realistic about the immediate challenges that face education and the responsibilities of the County Office of Education. As many of you know, county offices are going through tremendous change as a result of new legal requirements, new funding formulas and varying roles for our local school districts.

With all of this in mind, I cannot in good conscience take time away from my work to pursue a political campaign. I also feel very strongly that the position of County Superintendent should not be politicized and it should not be partisan.

I have spoken with Mr. Galletti and have informed him of my decision. My name will remain on the ballot and I will wholeheartedly take the office of County Superintendent should I be elected. However, my overall commitment is to the ongoing success of the Office, and with that in mind, I also look forward to working together with Mr. Galletti should he be elected. My dedication and commitment to MCOE, specifically the Educational Services Division, remains unchanged. I look forward to contributing to the efforts by MCOE to support school districts, and students in Mendocino County.

* * *

TRANSLATION: Galletti won soooo big in the primary that I know I'll lose even bigger to him in the general election. But if I want to keep the cush job I've had under Tichinin, I'd better smack up to ol' War now, otherwise he'll off me as his first order of business. As we all know, the only really smart, capable person in the race for Superintendent of Schools was Kathy Wylie of Mendocino, but as we also all know smart and capable are not synonymous with public instruction. Anyhoo, I hope all of you who really, really care about the kids will talk to Warren and tell him I promise, just like I promised Paul Tichinin when I came aboard this fine organization, that I will stand up and salute anything he wants me to do. Lips forever puckered, I am, The Hyphenate.

DUNG VAN NGUYEN, 41, of Sacramento, could get as much as 32 months in state prison, a $15,000 fine and a permanent revocation of his fishing license for poaching commercial numbers of abalone near Mendocino.

NICE FRONT PAGE PUFFEROO today in the Ukiah Daily Journal on Tom Ortner of Ortner Management Group, the new owner of Mendocino County Mental Health. The story, by Karen Rifkin, contains not a whiff of the obvious fact that Ortner got a guarantee of nearly $8 million in annual public dollars (the figure varies) for privately providing mental health services to far-flung Mendo. People close to the in-County provision of mental health interventions say Ortner is not living up to his contract.

THE CONTRACT ITSELF was obtained in a way prevalent in Chicago, circa 1930. Rifkin's story of course doesn't mention that Ortner's local holdings also include these facilities: ICMS, Sequoia, Willow Glen, and Redwood Creek. Best of all, though, Ortner's former employee, the man who engineered the privatization, Tom Pinizzotto, now employed as a hundred-grand-a-year supervisor at what's left of the County's mental health department, is responsible for reporting to County CEO Carmel Angelo and her captive supervisors on how well Ortner is living up to the contract.

SPENCER HALL’S DESCRIPTION of NFL boss Roger Goodell’s background on SBNation.com: “A senator’s son from a safety school who quite literally never worked anywhere else but in the sports job he got directly out of college. His resume is a hollow blandishment of institutional servitude. He fought in the arbitration wars; he coordinated the events. Calendars were heroically arranged.”

FRIDAY NIGHT BOONVILLE FAIR, impressions of. It was still a hundred degrees in the deep fry shade at 5pm, but the large and merry crowd swarming the Fairgrounds was undeterred by the heat, so undeterred the overall visual was five acres of well-nourished flesh. Used to be an unbuttoned shirt here, a modest blouse there was the public dress standard, and us prudes, who remember when ladies never went downtown without hats and gloves, are still having a hard time adjusting to mass amour-propre, if that's the phrase for Let It All Hang Out-ism.

AS ALWAYS marveling at how much bad art my fellow County residents manage to turn out every year, this year's underwhelming exhibit was overwhelmed by a magnificent, handcrafted, wooden row boat, a true thing of beauty. Being a journalist, I forgot to bring my notepad and pen so I might laud the boatmaker by name, but he's a marvel whoever he is.

I ALWAYS LINGER in the flower hall exhibits which, as always, was worth the linger. I used to be annually tempted to exhibit my prize Japanese maple but someone ripped it off the year I was finally going to do it. That's how attractive it was — theft-worthy. I got it years ago on Spy Rock Road, of all places, where a lady specialized in maples and peonies. I still have the peony, and have always wondered why peonies aren't more popular in Mendoland.

CAUGHT the second half of the soccer mismatch between Steve Sparks' powerhouse Panthers and a wholly overmatched Potter Valley team. Then it was on to Americano football with coach Dan Kuny's speedy and hardhitting squad running around and through Mendocino for a 42-7 win, breaking a two-year, 2-game win streak by Mendocino. And there was a Boonville football first: An official's timeout for an emergency fill of a gopher hole on the 30 before play could resume.

TRIMMING MACHINES like the TrimPro are leaving many itinerant marijuana workers out in the cold these days. The market glut, the need to get the product on the market before your competitors, and the difficulty of finding good help (those who will work for the new average wage of $10 per hr. or $100 per lbs., as opposed to the former industry standard of $20 per hr. or $200 per lbs.) all contributes to the development and sale of these machines. Trouble is, they clog up easily in hot weather, and massive amounts of rubbing alcohol are needed to free up the parts, necessitating the highly flammable process of boiling off the alcohol to recover the by-product, the hash oil (Phoenix Tears). The wine growers are using jail inmates in Sonoma County to cut the wages of traditional Hispanic workers (who are demanding better pay), and Mendocino County might consider bailing out the ailing pot Pharms with the same expediency. Crews conscripted from the overcrowded jail would definitely have experience in this line of work. (— Bruce McEwen)

CATCH OF THE DAY, September 13, 2014

JOSEPHA BASURTO, Covelo. Burglary. (Photo not available.)

CAMERON HAMMOND, Ukiah. Possession of meth, driving on suspended license, failure to appear, probation revocation.

GARY HIPES, Willits. DUI, child endanagerment.

JORDAN JACOBSON, Fort Bragg. Possession of controlled substance.

OSCAR MALDONADO, Ukiah. Probation revocation.

AUSTIN MERITT, Laytonville. Unlawful sexual intercourse with minor more than three years younger.

ALBERTO MORFIN-GARCIA, Ukiah. DUI, child endangerment.

ANTHONY NELSON, Ukiah. DUI-Alcohol/drugs.

ALFREDO ORTEGA, Probation revocation, illegal entry.

RUBEN SPAGGIARI, Willits. Probation revocation.

TODD TAYLOR, Ukiah. Under influence of controlled substance, resisting arrest.

SAUL TORRES, Willits. Domestic battery.

LOUIE VIGIL, Ukiah. Possession of drug paraphernalia/syringe.

DIANE ZACCARIA, Ukiah. Possession of drug paraphernalia, probation revocation.

REUNITED & FEELING GOOD

by Steve Heilig

"It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice, there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia" — Frank Zappa

“…and I'm never going back, to my old school” — Steely Dan

* * *

Recently, there was a reunion of my high school class, a recurrent traditional all-American event I'd always ignored, but for whatever reasons the peer pressure to attend this time came on strong and at the last minute, against my intuition and convictions, I succumbed, bought a plane ticket south, and went. I half-expected frightening reminders of collective aging, puerile nostalgia, embarrassing alcohol-enabled displays of long-repressed urges, ego-fueled career one-upsmanship, excruciating "sharing" of family pictures, and a general outburst of collective regret and confusion.

Man was I mistaken. This was one of the most joyful and fun events in my admittedly failing memory. My formal schooling through high school took place in a small southern California beach town in the 1970s. Our town, Corona del Mar ("Crown of the Sea") was the funkier southern end of the infamous Newport Beach, a stronghold of wealth, yachts, sailors, surfers, fisherman, weekending Hollywood stars of various renown (John Wayne! Ozzie and Harriet! Joey Bishop!) and political values to the right of Nixon (who retired just down the coast). The nutty right-wing John Birch Society had an active presence, pre-dating their Tea Partying heirs, but even our mainstream Republican officials earned nicknames like "B-1 Bob." Our zone was close to 100% white; people of darker skin hue tended to get pulled over when driving through, like blacks in the deep south. Maids walking to work in the beachfront homes, likewise. Nobody other than "the help" rode public transport, such as it was.

And all that aside, it was paradise. At that point, before it all became a southernly beachy outpost of Beverly Hills and the open space was paved over for McMansions, social class was largely invisible in our cultural fishbowl and we had free run of long beaches, open fields, lush canyons, and a town with no high-rise, safe streets, plenty of local character and characters, with Laguna Beach just to the south, an "art colony" of mostly crappy tourist art but lots of bohemians, gays, and for a brief time, a post-Haight hippie explosion featuring Tim Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love - the biggest acid ring of the time, if not all time. Live music played in the parks, on the beach, in the the movie theaters at midnight. Beach parties were normal. So was drunk driving. The high rates of alcoholism, sunburn, premature pregnancy, and other such maladies were just part of the lifestyle. It was great.

So, after the reunion - which aptly took place at one of the less-pompous boat clubs - I found myself both very glad I attended and reflecting constantly about all the impressions I had. One evening soon after, fueled by a bit of Bulleit rye, I pounded out this little screed and posted it on the reunion's facebook page. The response was very positive. Apparently nostaliga, or whatever mental disease I caught there, was contagious.

Ten Random Reunion Thoughts

1. Walking into that big room was kind of overwhelming. Who are all these people? Who let all the old people in? Is it OK to look at those little name tags, or do we have to be sneaky about that? (Especially when they are on women's chests?). What's proper etiquette when not sure you really remember somebody? How am I going to find everybody I want to reconnect with (which turned out to be impossible)?
2. Do people really change much over decades? Or in such a crowd, do we all revert at least in part to who were were way back then? I'm kind of a hotshot professional guy now, or at least some seem to think so, so why did I sort of feel like I was just a punk kid again in that group? I likely have very conflicting 'politics' and such from many of these folks. In fact, maybe I'd think some of them are now fascists - and they'd call me an idiot commie. Who cares? Not me. And not one person asked me "what do you do?" - it was all just "Great to see you!" followed by a hug, or at least a handshake, and laughter.
3. But why does it also feel so good to greet and even hug all these people from so long ago? Spending all those 'formative' years in a large group, some of us through all of K-12 grades, made for a kind of huge extended family group, even though I am not quite sure who all the "family" might be, even if I recall their names. In any event, so many years after school ended, why do I recall so many events, names, feelings from back then more clearly than what I had for breakfast today?
4. There were about 40 deceased classmates' photos on display. I've dealt with scores of dying people in my career and life, some of them close to me; But why did that list of people from long ago hit me as hard as it did?
5. Our generation hit adolescence at a striking time in history; with the highest rates of drug use, the best (?) music, the sexual revolution, explosion of environmental, women's, civil rights movements, etc etc etc. There were many casualties - I knew of even more who had succumbed but were not on the deceased list, and even more who had suffered but survived - but there were even more good memories. Was our high school era that special, that much different from others - I've had many people since then say things like "you were so lucky to be young when you were!" - or is that just selective, rose-colored nostalgia?
6. At a benefit dinner years back in Marin County, an elegant older woman told me she'd grown up in Corona del Mar too. I said "It was paradise in the 1970s and has been overdeveloped since, don't you think?" She gently replied "Actually, it was best in the 1950s." Do we always think, as surfers say, "Ya shoulda been here yesterday?"
7. But CdM truly WAS a kind of paradise; the beaches, open space, small-town vibe, great people, etc etc. The only thing I think we lacked was cultural/ethnic diversity. Still, I always feel a bit of melancholy and nostalgia when I visit. It's changed so much, and not for the better. So I always say, "I wouldn't trade where and when I grew up for anything." How many people say that?
8. A pal from later years was once Editor of *Surfer* Magazine, and traveled the world but especially the California coast. When we first met and he learned where I grew up, he said "You guys had the hottest girls on the whole coast." In retrospect, he was right. I wonder if growing up among such pulchritude ruined some of us guys for anywhere else by making our expectations too high?
9. Back in my youth, I "streaked" Richard Nixon to protest his closure of a famed surfing beach below his retirement "Western White House." The poster for the reunion featured a blurry shot of two streakers at the actual graduation ceremony (the poster was titled "From the Anals of History"). At the reunion, when people kept asking me if and when I was going to "streak' the reunion and I finally said OK, I just might, the wise visually-impaired classmate sitting nearby said "Now I'm glad I won't be able to see that!"
10. I really wasn't planning to attend. I figured that through the years I'd kept in touch with most of those I really wanted to. Plus I'm still basically shy (other than streaking). But as it turned out, the gathering was overwhelmingly warm and fun and I walked around with such a stupid grin the whole time that my cheeks felt "slack" afterwards for the first time in decades. It was truly a kind of "family' reunion, even if, again, it was hard to place many in the family. A bunch of us sat around until early morning afterwards, buzzing with energy. I felt both exhausted and elated the next day. So I have had to just put aside my hard-won cynicism about such things and extend huge thanks to those who put it all together - and to everybody else who showed up as well. I hope anybody's school reunion could be anywhere near that fun and reaffirming. A mass group hug never felt so good.

100 BEST NOVELS, IN TRANSLATION, SINCE 1900

A CounterPunch Reading List

by Jeffrey St. Clair & Alexander Cockburn

Cockburn calls one morning back in 2005.

“Jeffrey, don’t you think Frankie could play Behemoth in the movie?”

Frankie was Alex’s gregarious black cat, rather hefty with feline dreadlocks and an imperious manner.

“Which movie would that be?”

“The Master and Margarita, of course. Don’t tell me you haven’t read your Bulgakov? I’m astonished. Simply astonished.”

Three days later, I had indeed read Bulgakov, laughing most of the way through his satiric underground masterpiece of life in Stalin’s Soviet Union. I finished the novel and immediately plunged back in for a second helping. So it’s no surprise then that Bulgakov heads our list of the best novels in translation written since 1900 or that an equally surreal, though less comic, novel of oppressive bureaucracy, Kafka’s The Trial, follows it. As for Proust, Alex and I both made pilgrimages to the wonderful Musée Carnavalet in Paris to see the recreation of the divine Marcel’s cork-walled room.

Alex and I both studied English Literature, Cockburn at Oxford, me at American University in DC 15 years later. During our 20 year friendship, we talked about novels, films and poems nearly as much as we did politics and certainly found greater enjoyment in long-ranging debates about the relative merits of Waugh, Stendahl and Proust. Before Alex died, we’d been working on putting together two lists of our favorite novels written since 1900, similar to the very popular lists we’d done years before for nonfiction books in English and in translation. Last month we published our list of the 100 best novels in English written since 1900. Here now is our list of the 100 best novels in translation written since 1900.

We set some ground rules. First, one of us had to have actually read the book and convincingly described its merits to the other. Second, we limited each writer to one entry; otherwise, novels by Georges Simenon and Roberto Bolaño might have dominated the list. Third, each of us had unlimited preemptory challenges to be invoked against writers we hated. Thus no: Gunter Grass or Michel Houellebecq. Fourth: the novels had to have been published after 1899, which meant that Lou Andreas-Salome’s strange novels just missed the cut. We didn’t distinguish between so-called genre fiction and serious literature, thus you’ll find a thriller like Henning Mankell’s Sidetracked ranked adjacent to Nathalie Sarraute’s challenging Portrait of a Man Unknown.

Unlike our previous lists, this time we chose to rank the books. Why? Because people tend to feel more passionately about novels than treatises on the surplus-value theory and we hoped that our list would give CounterPunchers something new to fight over. Here though the rankings are tilted more toward my own biases, since Alex and I had only gotten round to slotting the first 25 or so books before he died.

We hope that our novels list confirms some of your own tastes and at other times confounds you, irritates you and turns you on to some fresh reading pleasures. As Alex was fond of saying: “By the quality of life, art and freedom that radicals commend, so will radicals prevail.”

There’s much reading to be done. Hurry, before all the beaches disappear…

–Jeffrey St. Clair

1. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov [Russian] 1966
2. The Trial by Franz Kafka [German] 1925
3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust [French] 1913-1927
4. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez [Spanish] 1967
5. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil [German] 1942
6. The Stranger by Albert Camus [French] 1942
7. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann [German] 1924
8. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar [French] 1951
9. The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Expurey [French] 1943
10. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami [Japanese] 1995
11. Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine [French] 1932
12. A Book of Memories by Peter Nadas [Hungarian] 1986
13. History: a Novel by Elsa Morante [Italian] 1974
14. How It Is by Samuel Beckett [French] 1961
15. The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch [German] 1945
16. The Conformist by Alberto Moravia [Italian] 1951
17. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk [Turkish] 1998
18. The Lover by Marguerite Duras [French] 1984
19. Zeno’s Conscience by Italo Svevo [Italian] 1923
20. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño [Spanish] 1998
21. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [Russian] 1962
22. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre [French] 1938
23. The President by Miguel Angel Asturias [Spanish] 1946
24. All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg [Italian] 1952
25. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco [Italian] 1980
26. The Erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet [French] 1953
27. Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima [Japanese] 1969
28. The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa [Spanish] 2000
29. Despair by Vladimir Nabokov [Russian] 1934
30. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago [Spanish] 1991
31. Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz [Hungarian] 1975
32. Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz [Arabic] 1959
33. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata [Japanese] 1947
34. Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig [German] 1939
35. The Joke by Milan Kundera [Czech] 1969
36. The Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun [Norwegian] 1920
37. The Land of Green Plums by Herte Muller [German] 1994
38. The Thief’s Journal by Jean Genet [French] 1949
39. Summer in Baden Baden by Leonid Tsypkin [Russian] 1981
40. The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek [German] 1983
41. The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir [French] 1954
42. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide [French] 1925
43. Sidetracked by Henning Mankell [Swedish] 1995
44. Portrait of a Man Unknown by Nathalie Sarraute [French] 1948
45. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa [Portuguese] 1956
46. Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux [French] 1933
47. Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb [Hungarian] 1937
48. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin [German] 1929
49. Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan [French] 1954
50. The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector [Portuguese] 1964
51. Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec [French] 1978
52. The Story of O by Pauline Réage [French] 1954
53. Nadja by Andre Breton [French] 1928
54. This Life by Karel Schoeman [Afrikaans] 2005
55. Yo-Yo Boing! by Giannina Braschi [Spanglish] 1998
56. The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesar Pavese [Italian] 1950
57. The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzatti [Italian] 1940
58. The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier [Spanish] 1949
59. Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes [Spanish] 1975
60. Red Lights by Georges Simenon [French] 1953
61. The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist [Swedish] 1944
62. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis [Greek] 1946
63. Furdeydurke by Witold Gombrowicz [Polish] 1937
64. Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse [German] 1927
65. The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun [Chinese] 1921
66. A Heart So White by Javier Marias [Spanish] 1992
67. Three Trapped Tigers by Guillermo Cabrera Infante [Spanish] 1967
68. Happy Moscow by Andrey Platonov [Russian] 1991
69. Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo [Spanish] 1955
70. Century of Locusts by Malika Mokedden [French] 1991
71. The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat [Persian] 1937
72. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem [Polish] 1961
73. No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai [Japanese] 1948
74. The Great House by Mohammed Dib [French] 1952
75. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson [Swedish] 2005
76. Hotel Splendid by Marie Redonnet [French] 1988
77. A Dark Night’s Passing by Naoya Shiga [Japanese] 1937
78. The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers [German] 1942
79. The Conspiracy by Paul Nizan [French] 1938
80. Memed, My Hawk by Yashar Kemal [Turkish] 1955
81. The Ragazzi by Pier Paolo Pasolini [Italian] 1955
82. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon [Spanish] 2001
83. Stolen Spring by Hans Scherfig [Danish] 1940
84. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke [German] 1910
85. Jacob the Liar by Jurek Becker [German] 1969
86. The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald [German] 1995
87. Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse [Japanese] 1985
88. The Open Door by Latifa Zayyat [Arabic] 1960
89. Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov [Russian] 1996
90. Tamas by Bhisham Sahni [Hindi] 1974.
91. The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch [Dutch] 1992
92. The Time of the Doves by Merce Rodoreda [Spanish] 1962
93. Dita Saxova by Arnost Lustig [Czech] 1962
94. Embers by Sandor Marai [Hungarian] 1942
95. The Good Hope by William Heinesen [Danish] 1964
96. The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg [Swedish] 1949
97. The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra [Arabic] 2006
98. God’s Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane [French] 1960
99. The Leopard by Guiseppi Lampedusa [Italian] 1958
100. Homo Faber by Max Frisch [German] 1957

(With many thanks for their valuable input, even when it was ignored: Ben Sonnenberg, Kimberly Willson-St. Clair, Daisy Cockburn, Joshua Frank, Ron Jacobs, Carl Estabrook, Christine Karatnytsky and JoAnn Wypijewski.)

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His new book is Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence (with JoAnn Wypijewski and Kevin Alexander Gray). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.

Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch.

(Courtesy, CounterPunch.org.)

CHRIST JESUS SAVE US ALL

Janie Rezner's guest on Women's Voices, KZYX, Sept 15, 7 pm PT are author Vicki Noble, and Genevieve Vaughan, of Gift Economy

Janie Rezner's guests on Women's Voices, Sept. 15, 7 pm PT, KZYX will be Vicki Noble, feminist shaman, scholar, wisdom teacher, and author of several books, including "Motherpeace" with its seventy-eight "Motherpeace Tarot Cards," who taught for two decades in the Women's Spirituality programs at California Institute of Integral Studies, New College, and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, in Palo Alto … and Genevieve Vaughan, independent scholar, who has given vast amounts of money away to women to further the work of social change, and has been working on the theory of a Maternal Gift Economy as an alternative to Patriarchal Capitalism for many years; both of whom are devoting their lives to bringing back the wisdom of the Mother, and are helping us to remember that once upon a time we humans lived in gratitude and harmony with the earth and each other, without war, without money, where all life was considered sacred, and we knew we were all children of one Great Mother. In 1992 Genevieve Vaughan created a beautiful white temple to the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, (whose name means The Powerful One), near the nuclear test site in the vast Nevada desert. A celebration and sacred ritual to honor the instillation of a new statue of Sekhmet, the original recently stolen, was held in August. Vicki, Genevieve and her daughter, Amelia, share their experiences of being there. The show can be heard on KZYX&Z 90.7FM Philo, 88.1FM Fort Bragg, and 91.5FM Willits, as well as stream live on the web at www.kzyx.org This show will be archived at www.radio4all.net under my name or Google Janie Rezner Spiritual Feminist Warrior www.janierezner.com