By The Book

++It is only appropriate for my 600th post this year, which will end up being the biggest year for this blog,that I mention recent books.

++Ypu might have read the short interview with John Ashbery in the last Sunday New York Times. In it, he seemed to be going all Romantic on us in discussing his favorite poetry. It's for that reason, I find his new book of poetry,Breezeway, surprising and excellent. His tone is a very elegant Surrealism that improves on his earliest efforts in this regard. Highly recommended.

++Leonid McGill has returned. Walter Mosley in And Sometimes I Wonder about You brings the New York private eye back as well as McGill's missing father who had abandoned him for Communist causes. McGill's wife tries to commit suicide, his young son disappears into the literal underground of New York,a derelict former Hedge Fund Manager hires him to find a distant cousin, and a Boston billionairess tries to make him believe a family is missing a daughter in New York. Maybe it seems confusing but Mosley makes it tight as a drum. And love is the answer.

++William Pepper has been an activist in the civil rights movement and became close to Martin Luther King during the days when King turned his attention to the Vietnam War, the Urban poor and the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike. In 2003,Pepper published An Act of State: The execution of Martin Luther King. After decades of investigative research and thousands of interviews, he pieced together how Martin was executed. Anyone familiar with the Kennedy assassination would get the narrative:Military Snipers sent into Memphis to case the city; the mafia from the South pay an assassin;the government has the Lorraine Motel move  King to a more exposed location,the black Memphis police are replaced by whites and you get the picture.

++I heard former CIA analyst Ray McGovern mention an story he heard Obama donors tell him about the President's response to their plea that he do more aggressively progressive things. "I just remember what they did to Martin." I've heard a similar story having to do with people in the national security establishment make similar threats to the President. But Ray McGovern went on to describe the assassination of Martin Luther King,Jr. as an act by the United States government. And he mentioned this book, which is very well documented.

++Almost at the same time I heard Ray McGovern,I saw Chris Hedges' speech at a meeting in Montana. Why Hedges did his theme of how Americans must revolt like the Czechs,he reverted to an old favorite about how Woodrow Wilson started the precedent of crushing all progressive movements and how this continues with the government actions against the Occupy Movement. Not coincidentally the coordination of the military with the local police as in the case of King still is a government M.O.