When: May 10, 7 p.m. sharp
Where: Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St., SF
Cost: $10 (gets you a free copy of Opium6)
Pre-Order: Buy now or Subscribe, get a free ticket to the LDM, and avoid the line!

During the government crackdown in September and October, I linked to several blogs within the country that reported on the imprisonment and beating of monks and other protesters. In the wake of the cyclone, however, it’s difficult to find up-to-the-minute blogs out of Burma, likely in large part because the storm wreaked havoc with basic infrastructure. Burma Digest, however, is still posting.

A chilling post from today. (I’m copying the entirety of the post here, as the link to the post on Burma Digest is no longer active).

The Cyclone Nargis also hit Insein Prison in Rangoon. On Saturday morning at around 8 am local time, the roof of the Insein prison building was ripped off by the cyclone and a fire broke out in Hall No 1. The prisoners inside the cells called for help for hours, but prison authorities failed to show up. Finally some young jail service men opened the doors to the cells.

As prisoners ran around in the prison compound, army soldiers fired at least 30 gun shots at them from the top of the roof. At least thirty-six prisoners were killed by the shots and 70 more injured.

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This from the Telegraph today:

Kate, 40, said yesterday that she “senses” that Madeleine is alive. She still looks frail and seems permanently on the verge of tears. ”Madeleine just feels very close. It’s more of a kind of sensation that she’s there. You try to be objective and you think it is because I am her Mum and I want to believe, but it has not changed.”

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Masha Hamilton was also a finalist.

Congrats to all.

Via Apartment Therapy–those literary journals piling up? Don’t know where you’ll stash another issue of your Glimmer Train, Mid-American Review, Paris Review, Believer, etc.? Try the ring rack.

Via Interior Stories–could you write at this table?

More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates told a federal judge Monday in San Francisco…He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day - a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 e-mail - and the agency’s backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, an increase of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003…

The lawsuit is a proposed class action on behalf of 320,000 to 800,000 veterans or their survivors. The advocacy groups say the VA arbitrarily denies care and benefits to wounded veterans, forces them to wait months for treatment and years for benefits, and gives them little recourse when it rejects their medical claims.

The setting is San Francisco, 1953, and the narrator is Pearlie Cook, whose lyrical opening words, a kind of soliloquy for her damaged marriage, set the tone for this lovely, sensitive, thought-provoking novel. “Perhaps you cannot see a marriage. Like those giant heavenly bodies invisible to the human eye, it can only be charted by its gravity, its pull on everything around it.”

As with Confessions, Greer has intricately drawn San Francisco in another time. Pearlie and her husband, Holland Cook, grew up together in Kentucky in the years leading up to World War II. Now, they are adults, parents to a young boy, living far from the homes of their childhood, making a life in San Francisco’s unfashionable Sunset District, once known as the Outside Lands. (more…)

With special guests- The Progressive Reading Series All Star Minstrels, and Board Of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin. Hosted by Stephen Elliott author of Happy Baby

When: Saturday, April 19, 7pm
Where: The Makeout Room- 3225 22nd Street, San Francisco, (415) 647 2888
Price: $10 - $20 sliding scale
Advance Tickets: $20. Paypal to ‘tribe AT stephenelliott.com’
Advance tickets strongly recommended. It’s gonna be crowded.

Green Apple’s book of the month, by the way, is Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American. The Green Apple promise for their book of the month: “We guarantee this book 100% (and discount it 20% to further entice you to trust us).”

Oh, and one more thing I wouldn’t know if I didn’t subscribe to the Green Apple newsletter: Richard Bausch, author of The Last Good Time; Good Evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea; In the Night Season; and other works of fiction has a new novel out, Peace, which involves three soldiers on a snowy night during WWII. I’m a big fan of Bausch, whose stories and novels are marked by quiet intensity admirable subtlety.