Watch a video reporting on the exploitation and protest of Indian immigrant workers

Support the Indian Guest Workers on Day 8 of Hunger Strike!

After Hurricane Katrina, billions of dollars poured into the Gulf Coast region to rebuild. Signal International used these funds to enrich themselves by using the exploitive “guest worker” visas and corrupt recruiters to hire workers.

Some of the welders and pipe-fitters who were brought to the Gulf Coast to work in what amounts to modern-day slavery have taken a courageous stand for justice. On May 14, five of the workers went on
hunger strike demanding they be granted permission to stay in the U.S. while their case against their exploitative employer goes through the courts. They want to be granted continued presence in the U.S., and
they’re asking that the U.S. Congress hold hearings on the abuses of the guest worker program.

With the hunger strike entering its second week, at least 5 more workers join the hunger strike today, while allies across the U.S. and in India fast in solidarity with the strikers.

You can help! Please urge your Representatives in Congress to sign onto a letter calling for them to remain in the U.S. and to hold hearings on Signal International.

Also go here

(Hat-tip, Liz Blum)

And so, when Franzen and Wood fielded questions at the end of their hour, I asked the following: “The desire for a writer to find readers is perfectly understandable, just as it is for a writer to fear judgment. Some contemporary writers, among them David Foster Wallace, [say they don’t] read any criticism, and I wonder what role criticism has played in your life as a writer, particularly criticism of your work. And in the instance of James’s review [of The Corrections, in The New Republic, in 2001], it would seem to be a missed opportunity (given how infrequently critics and writers actually have conversations about work and given how diminished the reading culture certainly is) not to know: when you read James’s review of your book; what you thought of it; and, as an ambitious novelist who is writing a fourth novel now, one presumes, to what extent any of the things that James said in his review affect you or afflict you as somebody who’s attempting to create a better and more ambitious book still.”

Franzen’s answer was frank, generous, thoughtful, and, I think, usefully revealing about the impediments, both philosophical and practical, that may come up when any of us might wish to discuss a work of art, whether with its creator or with one of its admirers (or detractors).

Wyatt Mason’s brand-new blog Sentences delivers a detailed report on the Jonathan Franzen-James Wood conversation that had been mentioned on this blog earlier.

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