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Viet Nam letters start coming on Wednesday, February 9, a week from yesterday, news from me about reading a bit of one of these books. I start with the cover if it’s got one.
Next letter takes up the next book, then the next and so on through the pile again and again, three letters each week. When I have chewed through a book I will add another.
Very likely you have not heard of any of these books at all. Some are about Viet Nam, some are by Vietnamese, but I read all of them because they speak from Viet Nam,
occasioned by the assertion of people there that they are human and have something to say. These are not trinkets of combat experience, ethnicity, or scholarly authority.
The books are intellect and talent, prophecy, god talking to us, or witness, us talking to god about his, whatever, creation. Their reader is a French republican, a southern
liberal, a Vietnamese nationalist, once an editor in American studies, then publisher in Vietnamese studies, then an ethnographer of Paris, France, and North Carolina.
Not a mouthpiece for the vast right-wing conspiracy, who I could have worked for and didn’t, and neither in the big tent of the three-ring circus of the old New Deal and the
popular front against fascism who raised me and their Central Intelligence Agency whose mighty Wurlitzer I did not join. You haven’t heard before from a graduate of 3
of our national boot camps and officer candidate schools and staff colleges for the establishment who has worked through an adult career as a hired man on the farms,
fisheries and woods, using French and Vietnamese as well as English at home in his study every day. These days I earn as janitor of the Viet Nam Literature Project.
Oh, and I am a Jew. Pro-Zionist though I consider that the half of us who have laid our bet for survival with the United States have so far proven more wise. Likely the
most familiar quality of my point of view. I can tell you things you have never thought before about books and authors you never have heard of because after all this all is
rather a special taste. Should you take an interest, please consider subscribing in advance for free to constitute an audience for my books and authors. You will not
agree with all or any of what I have to say about any of them and few will interest you to read yourself but one might, passionately, singing your soul or talking back to your
self as you didn’t know you yearned to hear. Please consider as well digging $50 or $250 deep to patronize everyone else reading without charge. When I am done with
each book I will collate its letters to an essay for publication by the Viet Nam Literature Project. You will have subsidized repeated and sustained criticism, as few books of any kind ever receive.
Dan
