My award-winning film “The Atomic Bowl” started streaming on PBS.org and PBS apps last week week (you can easily watch it via links here), plus it is airing over many PBS stations, and there is a companion e-book.
Just a quick head's up here: My latest piece related to my new book and PBS film (streaming everywhere and on stations), “The Atomic Bowl,” is published today at that fine books site, Literary Hub. It focuses on the “hero” of the film, a lit prof and frequent contributor of poetry to the revered New Yorker magazine, William W. Watt—who witnessed and then exposed the U.S. all-star football game played in Nagasaki just months after our atomic bomb killed over 75,000 there.
Read it here, and photo of him below and brief excerpt from the LitHub piece:
“There were only two wooden bleachers, so we followed the play up and down the sidelines. Here and there were isolated Japanese—a father and his boy, a group of giggly girls, two old men—all looking small and lost and bewildered by it all. Off in the distance on the fringes of the hills were little groups of Japanese regarding the strange Western spectacle in quiet isolation.
“There was no organized cheering. I guess it was because, in spite of everything, it didn’t feel like home—and because everyone was wondering what the Hell he was doing there watching a touch football game in this bizarre Inferno….and secretly hoping the first Atom Bowl Game would also be the last.”
Speaking of the atomic bombings, Patti Smith posted a video at her substack last night, reflecting on her recent visit to Hiroshima and the connection of so many civilians killed there and at Nagasaki to what’s happened in Gaza. Best link I can find is here or maybe here.
The New York Times this morning:
Israeli Security Cabinet Approves Full Military Takeover of Gaza
I posted my interview on Democracy Now! yesterday but here is a brief exchange:
Amy Goodman --Greg, you can't help but think, when you watch the trailer to the film. when you just show the moonscape in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the comparison to what we're seeing in Gaza right now.
Greg Mitchell -- Yeah, I've called Gaza "Nagasaki in slow motion". And the photos do look remarkably similar.