Xark!

Being Number One at Peace

Last Tuesday night, my cousin invited me up to the beautiful Earlham College campus to attend a talk by Arn Chorn-Pond, a human rights leader and musician.  Chorn-Pond, the subject of the documentary The Flute Player, was speaking as part of a lecture series sponsored in part by a lecture series endowed by my cousin in honor of his mother.  I attended out of family obligation, then, but I left with a sense of humility and a need for reflection. 

Chorn-Pond, whom I am embarrassed to admit I did not know of prior to the lecture, is a Cambodian who, as a child, was separated from his family and put in a work camp with hundreds of other children.  After having been forced to take part in a number of killings (including those of family members), Arn was chosen, along with six other children, to learn to play revolutionary songs on the flute.  The Khmer Rouge soldiers brought in an older musician to teach the children; after one week, they determined that the children had learned enough, so they killed the old man and some of the other students.  Arn learned enough to play for the soldiers and, as a result, was one of fifty children to have survived the work camp.

Arn later escaped the soldiers and found his way to a refugee camp.  He was eventually adopted by an American family, and moved to the United States.  As an adult, he became a crusader for world peace and children's rights.   In addition, upon returning to Cambodia, he discovered that 90% of the "traditional" musicians of his generation had been killed, and he began a project to gather and record the remaining musicians.

When Silence Isn't Golden

In Speechless: The Erosion of Free Speech in the American Workplace (Berrett Koehler, 2007), Bruce Barry has written a book that should be required reading for citizens, regardless of their political orientation.  Simultaneously clever and conversational, Barry takes the reader on a journey through workplace free speech cases that leaves one angry and confused about the practical meaning of, and limits to, free speech. 

While the rules are different for “public” and “private” workplaces, the news Barry delivers is the same:  while there are historic moments for optimism, in the most general sense, workplace free speech is not only more limited than you might imagine, but the constraints are getting tighter, and more and more confusing.  As Barry notes after looking at multiple court cases concerning free speech in “public” workspaces:  “To sum it up in one sentence:  as a public employee you have rights to free expression except when you don’t” (p. 74).   The difference between the things you can and can’t say are so confusing that silence becomes the ruling norm. 

The same is true in different ways in public workplaces.  A fairly recent example cited by Barry:  Lynne Gobbell, a factory worker drove to work with a John Kerry bumper sticker on her car.  Her boss—who had put pro Bush inserts in employee pay envelopes--demanded that Gobbell remove the sticker or lose her job.  She lost her job.

Q&A: Tiffany Jonas

We met Tiffany Jonas of Charleston several years ago, back when she and her partners were woodshedding ideas for a new and unusual book publishing company. It was going to emphasize literary speculative fiction, an interesting sub-sub-niche in the fiction universe, but what really stood out in those early discussions was the group's intense interest in publishing books that would be -- for lack of a better term -- things of beauty.

Their vision became Aio Publishing, and I recently got around to reading its first title: The Summer Isles, by Ian R. McLeod (I've since bought Aio's whole list). Not only did I love this short novel, but the book -- as an object -- got me thinking about quality all over again. Here was a book that was built for people who love to read, and yet it cost no more than a regular hard-cover from a major publishing house.

I asked Jonas to answer a string of e-mail questions for Xark because I'm fascinated by people who see things they want to do and then go right out and do them. There's something more, too: At a moment when the established publishing industry is experiencing all manner of soul-killing degradations, this transplanted Midwestern thirtysomething went out and built a publishing house out of little more than the shared passion of a group of people who just happen to love a particular kind of novel.

Here's that interview: