A Practical Policy

Keith Oatley at OnFiction:

In a scathing article, Jerome Stolnitz (1991) argued that art has only short term effects. Greek drama is regarded as powerful but, says Stolnitz: “There is no evidence that Aristophanes shortened the Peloponnesian War by so much as a day” (p. 200). Stolnitz asserts that effects of art simply do not appear in history.

Except that—as Frank Hakemulder has pointed out to me—they do. They appear in the history of human rights. As historian Lynn Hunt (2007) has shown, the establishment of human rights has been strongly affected by literary art. …

“What’s Lib Lit? – Library, map, lens, scalpel, compost, chisel, textbook, excavation: voices, images, wrestling, contradicting, confirming, the matter of resistant art and practise.” – Adrienne Rich

AMZ
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“Where ‘Literature’ Comes From” by Edmond Caldwell:

In the larger literary venues (and on the more sycophantic lit-blogs) this phenomenon of corporate pre-determination of the “literary field” goes almost entirely unremarked. It amounts to “the repressed” of mainstream book-reviewing, as that which must remain unspoken in order for a certain type of utterance to exist at all. Reviews are written as if the titles swim into the reviewer’s ken on their own little spiritual wings or somehow magically materialize in the critic’s inbox; as if literature were somehow self-generating and “immediate” rather than constructed and subject to considerable mediation. There is in James Wood’s work not the least institutional self-consciousness or self-questioning, not a moment of institutional critique. “Literature” and “fiction,” when he speaks of them, are mystified categories.

For one antidote to corporate publishing, see Liberation Lit.

excerpts via Vice:

Between seasons of a lot of hit shows, adjustments will be made that are clearly based on network notes about what’s perceived to be most popular with viewers.
We never had that dynamic in our heads. What we were asking was, “What should we spend 12 hours of television saying?” And that’s a journalistic impulse. That was coming from the  Wire writers who were journalists and, to an extent, the novelists who wrote for the show who write in a realistic framework, like researched fiction. People like Pelecanos, Price, and Lehane.

Those three guys seemed to have the perfect backgrounds to bring a lot of valuable stuff to The Wire.
It wasn’t like we were putting Isaac Bashevis Singer on staff. I love his stuff, but we were looking for novelists who were doing researched fiction, and particularly in an urban environment. I’m also not mistaking The Wire for journalism. I have too much respect for journalism to make such a statement. But the impulse, the initial impulse behind doing the show? It was the same reason somebody sits down to write an editorial or an op-ed. Read the rest of this entry »

via Counterpunch:

Dick Wolf, who created “Law & Order” and its two successful spin-offs, “Law & Order: SVU” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” should probably consider establishing a branch office in Pennsylvania.

It seems that whenever any of the New York City cops take a road trip to find a fugitive or track down a witness, they go to Pennsylvania. Apparently, New Jersey is only a buffer zone.

Part of the reason why Pennsylvania routinely figures into the hour-long dramas may be because Wolf, a New Yorker, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Another possibility, although much more remote, may be because his first of three wives was named Susan Scranton.

Nevertheless, Pennsylvania has been the site of sufficient plots the past couple of years as the three TV series have increased their levels of social consciousness.

from “A Very Nigerian Literary Festival” by Sefi Atta:

Unlike the students I’d encountered at Northwestern University, the students who attended my fiction workshop at the festival did not write about personal relationships.  Their stories were topical.

Eugene Almazov, “The ‘Tendentious’ in Literature” Mainstream magazine (1947):

The question, then, is not whether a writer is, or is not, tendentious; but rather what are the tendencies he follows. The antagonists of tendentious art in modern literature are people who remain aloof from the questions occupying the mind of our disturbed world. They are indifferent to the fate of the millions who want bread, work and conditions which will enable them to find delight in the beautiful.

S. Finkelstein, “National Art and Universal Art” Mainstream magazine (1947):

In its lesser, as well as its greater achievements, the national art of the nineteenth and twentieth century had qualities which made it a powerful force opposed to the art-for-art’s sake neo-classicism and the individualistic, anti-social, pessimistic and introspective individualism which dominated so much of the art of the times. One of these qualities was a vitality which came from the entrance into this art of the masses of people, through a language which they themselves have helped fashion. This quality may be seen in the sheer abundance of human beings who fill the pages of Dickens, Mark Twain and Gorky….

With the masses of people there entered into this art their philosophy of life, a realistic acceptance of the world reaffirmed in the face of its multitude of hardships. And so if we find irony and protest in the work of these folk-inspired and national artists, we also find the most full-throated laughter…great comic artists in complete contrast to the romantics’ emphasis on the “man alone,” his pseudo-tragic feeling caused by a self-imposed withdrawal from the real world.

Still another quality of this art was its imaginative use of whatever materials came to hand. While these artists fought for their integrity as honest artists, against censorship, they did not regard a practical use for their art as an intrusion upon their freedom. It was an intrusion only when its conventions were dictated by a ruling-class forcing its own fears of reality upon the artist. When a new medium for art brought these artists closer to  a mass audience, and allowed them to speak honestly with it, the medium itself set their ideas flowing. Thus Goya created his epic history and portrayal of the Spanish people in the etching and lithograph; Daumier did the same for the French people, between the 1830 revolution and the Commune, in the form of the lithograph and newspaper cartoon. Dickens grew on the penny serial, Mark Twain on frontier journalism, the Irish poets and prose artists on the Abbey Theatre.

This national art was and is highly experimental. Its experimental qualities were obscured in the later nineteenth century, when critics were enraptured by the one line of romanticist, impressionist, symbolist and expressionist experiments, the deliberate invention of ambiguities, the probing into dream and the subconscious. It remained for the twentieth century to discover the fresh and truly ground-breaking character of the national movement in the arts, and to carry this movement in the idioms of art the constantly changing aspect of the world and people, the search for new materials and media for art, which led to the scientific analysis of the languages of art, the vast enlightening study of ancient, folk, Asiatic, Indian and African cultures, which has made our own age, in the sheer knowledge of its tools, the most educated in history.

A new obscurantism has appeared in critical theory, clinically discussing the styles of such art with an ignorance of the search for greater realism and power in communication behind it. Whitman’s free verse is studied without Whitman’s democracy; Picasso’s cubism without his humanity; Bartok’s polytonality without his folk core. Such tendencies have been fostered by some of the artists themselves, such as Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein, who moved increasingly in their art away from human images and broad emotions, and by the small-minded imitators who far outnumber the genuine creative minds.

The most striking quality of national art is that almost alone among modern art movements it seeks to recreate the epic line. The bourgeoisie, who had raised the epic to such heights when they were battling against feudalism, almost destroyed the epic when faced by the struggles of the working class, fostering every theory that would remove art from a devotion to contemporary history and the fullness of society. The epic, except in false neo-classic imitations, is the study of human beings in terms of history, with human knowledge of nature and of social forces replacing the myths that had served such a function in ancient times….

A national art is one that operates simultaneously  on different levels: the small forms of immediate popular impact and daily use, the grand line of the social epic, the scholarly research into the past, the laboratory experiment. It is broad in its base, allowing the richest differentiation among the peoples and localities who make up the nation, and profiting from the wealth of idiom developed by the people through their active participation in cultural life.

The movement for a national art is now faced with the practical problem of having the political space in which to grow. In America, cultural as well as political democracy is under increasing attack by reaction. The artist who hires out his talents is forced to give up his integrity and to work hobbled by the most stifling restrictions of form and content. The great public realms of radio, newspaper, motion picture, magazine and book trade, as important to the public domain as education and food, are increasingly forbidden to artists who want to remain artists and to serve the public as honest masters of the means of human communication. The great areas of the American land, the working class and the national minorities who together make up the majority of Americans, are denied the cultural life through which their artists can grow and develop in home soil, speaking to audiences of their own people, rising in stature (as artists can only rise) through constant living contact with an audience. The great masses of people are robbed of the healthy folk and popular culture which can only come through the restoration of creative participation in art to the people. The growing monopoly of every public form of communication, of the means of production and distribution of art, has produced a grotesque mockery of a national cultural life. Yet the potentialities exist in America for a renaissance unequalled in history.

Today the working class is the leading force in the fight for democracy and for a thriving American nation that will serve the welfare of its people. The struggle of a national culture is part of this struggle for a democratic America, and just as the working class must realize the powerful ally it can have in the artist, so the artist striving to grow as an artist must understand that his ally is the working class. Art is the expression among people of their joy in life, their growth, their understanding and mastery of the world. It is the exchange of their experiences and ideas. The very variety of language and forms a national art can take makes for unity among peoples, for the very depth and insight with which art portrays the unique character of a people gives it the power to transcend national boundaries, becoming a force through which people can better understand one another, work together and build a world without exploitation of human beings and wars among states.

Pretending Not to See: Murder by Corporate State Design

The Fort Hood shootings. As of this writing, 13 dead, 31 injured on the Texas military base.

By coincidence, this week’s edition of the New Yorker magazine has an article by Jill Lepore titled “Rap Sheet,” slugged, “Why is American history so murderous?” The graphic of a gun – pointed at the reader – held in a hand is slugged, “Homicide may have a political dimension.”

May? Read the rest of this entry »

“The State of the Crime Novel” by Jason Pinter at Huffington Post. A thoughtful round-table as far as it goes, but how far does their notion of crime, and its revelations, go?

Great review of Iraq conquest film The Hurt Locker by Jasmin Ramsey at AlterNet: “Iraq Movie, ‘The Hurt Locker’ Is Generating Oscar Buzz: But Does It Deserve It?” The film greatly hyped by the establishment is shown to be the appalling creature it is by Ramsey. See the most vital Iraq conquest film to date: G. I. Jesus.

Via Foreign Policy In Focus:

… Over the last 10 years, there has been a noticeable shift in content and consciousness of Bollywood films. On the surface, it is still unthinkable to produce a Hindi film without any song, dance, or romance. On a deeper level, the industry is addressing sensitive social issues that have been largely ignored for decades.

Today’s Bollywood operates along increasingly inter-communal and international axes. Whether by recognizing differences and encouraging viewers to overcome them or by highlighting underlying similarities between religious and cultural groups in India and neighboring Pakistan, Bollywood films have finally begun to address the social tensions that have been ever-present in India’s history and remain salient today.

However, this trend is nascent at best. Nationalistic, slash-and-burn films are still popular, as are crowd-pleasing action movies and cheesy romantic comedies. The Bollywood I’ve grown up with, sung and danced with, isn’t going anywhere. But a handful of filmmakers are using the industry’s popular appeal to spread a powerful message of tolerance that politics has yet been unable to champion. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Denning, “The Novelists’ International” Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004):

In the middle of the age of three worlds (1945-1989), the novel looked dead, exhausted. In the capitalist First World, it was reduced to increasingly arid formalisms alongside an industry of formulaic genre fictions. In the Communist Second World, the official conventions of socialist realism were ritualized into a form of didactic popular literature. Into the freeze of this literary cold war erupted Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967), the first international bestseller from Latin America and perhaps the most influential novel of the last third of the twentieth century. In its wake, a new sense of a world novel emerged, with Cien años de soledad as its avatar, the Third World as its home, and a vaguely defined magical realism as its aesthetic rubric.

Like world music, the world novel is a category to be distrusted; if it genuinely points to the transformed geography of the novel, it is also a marketing device that flattens distinct regional and linguistic traditions into a single cosmopolitan world beat, with magical realism serving as the aesthetic of globalization, often as empty and contrived a signifier as the modernism and socialist realism it supplanted. There is, however, a historical truth to the sense that there are links between writers who now constitute the emerging canon of the world novel – writers as unalike as García Márquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadime Gordimer, José Saramago, Paule Marshall, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer – for the work of each has roots in the remarkable international literary movement that emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century under the slogans of “proletarian literature,” “neorealism,” and “progressive,” “engaged,” or “committed” writing…. And though the novelists of this movement were deeply influenced by  the experimental modernisms of the early decades of the century, they rarely fit into the canonical genealogies of Western modernism and postmodernism. Though the royalties were small, the writers not all proletarians, and the audience often more a promise than a reality, the movement transformed the history of the novel. Read the rest of this entry »

“The Education of Bob Baer – Unlearning the CIA” by Christopher Ketcham, via Counterpunch:

When [Bob Baer] left the Agency in 1998, he hunkered down and wrote about his time as a spy.  His first two books – a memoir, See No Evil, and an expose, Sleeping with the Devil, about the demented US relationship with the Saudis – netted him a deal with Hollywood.  But what Syriana as film could not capture – because, after all, it’s a Hollywood operation and dedicated, like the CIA, to a good cover story, one that sells, keeps us watching without really understanding – is that the CIA isn’t very good at doing what it’s supposed to do, which is not to assassinate or to blow things up or to mount ill-conceived coups, but to know. …

When Hollywood came calling after the success of “See No Evil” and Syrianawent into production in 2004, Baer snagged a cameo role, playing an FBI agent.  He had one line, demanding George Clooney give up his “passports” – in the plural – and he kept flubbing it.  There are a lot of ex-CIA officers who tell me they’ve laughed at the Syriana version of the CIA, among them Bob Baer.

What Syriana offers, beyond its obvious portrait of the symbiosis of big oil and aggressive foreign policy, is a clean conspiracist choreography of agency men.  The CIA dances without fail to the tune of oil corporation executives and DC lobbyists and lawyers who, in undisclosed channels as ethereal as ESP, order the agency to assassinate a Middle Eastern emir the oil corporations don’t like.  This preposterous clockwork CIA world is run, like most CIA conspiracies on film, with no snags, no accidents, no bureaucratic in-fighting, no paperwork, no stupidity or incompetence or laziness, and certainly nothing of the tiresome and tragically boring real world interregnums where officers like Baer sweat in those hotel rooms in Beirut debriefing sources, slowly making connections, piecing the puzzle or not piecing it at all.  Real intelligence work doesn’t make for good movies.

In this regard, Syriana is a remarkably dated vision that aligns nicely with the agency of the 1950s and 1960s that swooped around the planet toppling governments during the golden age of covert action, back when the CIA was deadly effective and not the clipped-wing thing it is today.  One could argue that Syriana is in fact a kind of backhanded propaganda, as deafeningly simplistic as a James Bond film.  “The objection I have with Baer’s work is that the entertainment angle unintentionally shows the CIA as an efficient organization,” says Ishmael Jones, who spent 15 years in deep cover with the agency.  “Syriana may seem a negative portrayal of the CIA – as an organization of assassins seeking to advance American oil company interests – but it also presents the CIA as all-knowing, determined, tough and hard-working.  The CIA, as a living creature, would prefer this portrayal to that of being devoted only to its own feeding and growth, avoiding rigorous work and foreign duty.”  When I asked Baer about his fellow officer’s assessment, he shot back in an e-mail: “He’s right.” Read the rest of this entry »

As written by Shelley Ettinger – on Zeitoun by Dave Eggers.

Via Counterpunch:

Imagine a historical novel about an indigenous confederation of nations faced with the loss of its lands to European colonists.  Now imagine those colonists in rebellion against their government overseas because of its demands to curtail and tax the colonists’ trade.  Where does that leave the indigenous peoples?  Should they side with the overseas government that has treated them with a certain respect expected of honorable men or should they side with those colonists who they know are stealing their lands?  After all, both the overseas government and the colonists are part of the original project to establish their presence on land that is not their own.

Now imagine this novel being written by a collective of Italian fiction writers.  Sound far-fetched?  Impossible to pull off?  Just plain impossible?

Let me introduce Manituana.  It is a story set in the Mohawk nation in the 1770s.  Joseph Brant, Mohawk war chief and his family, friends and enemies are the primary characters.

Via ZNet:

Having spent much of his adult life campaigning on issues including the arms trade, the illegality of the Iraq war and the misdeeds of Coca-Cola, comedian and activist Mark Thomas has now turned his attention to the ongoing financial crisis.

With banker bonuses and government bail-outs there has been a huge amount of public anger about the credit crunch. But at the same time, esoteric terms such as derivatives, quantitative easing and fractional reserve banking mean many people are also very confused and ignorant about the issue too.

“I don’t think it is that complex, but the jargon is baffling,” Thomas tells me backstage before one of his shows at the Tricycle Theatre in London.

“I think people get it automatically. It is very, very simple: the bankers have got the money, we’ve got the recession. They’ve got the increase in wages, we’ve got the increase in unemployment. You don’t need a degree for that.”

In the Meanwhile, the Incorporated Estates of Dearth, and not only the North American subsidiary, sponsor every day the “123 Years of Incorporated Evisceration Book Awards” (not least since the 1886 Supreme Court ruling taken to mean that corporations are legally persons, entitled to their rights, except infinitely more powerful). Prominent winning novels of late include:

• Mr. Mundane’s Big and Special Day
• View of a Pity
• From Gloss to Dross and Back Again
• Learning to Love Mr. and Ms. Not Quite So Tepid, I Swear
• Cool Zones and … … …
• America, Wherefore Art Thou, You?
• Here We Sit Ensconced in Our City
• The Gritty and the Bloody, Bleeding, Oozing
• TUATAU: The Unaligned Aligned, The Aligned Unaligned
• Not So Much
• Between Flaming Death and a Boy on His Bike
• Dysfunction – It’s Not Just America
• She’s Incredible and So Might You
• Fast Words and White Space
• Quirky, Suave, and Monied
• Poof! Time’s Up, My Warlock Dear Read the rest of this entry »

Hundreds of thousands of copies of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby are sold each year. Meanwhile, Claude McKay’s 1929 novel Banjo, which is at least as accomplished and probably far more vital, remains virtually unknown. See excerpt: Banjo – fiction by Claude McKay.

The Great Gatsby ranks 2nd on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. Banjo does not appear.

Shelley Ettinger’s views on the recent novel by Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood:

…the big problem with all these speculative fictions whose speculation consists primarily of prophesying doom is that when they look at the current state of human society and conclude that it’s all downhill from here, they don’t take into account the most important variable of all: the class struggle. It’s as though the workers and oppressed have no role in the world’s future, whereas in fact the opposite is true–we have the decisive role. The fate of the planet, of the many species threatened with extinction, our own above all, is in the hands of working class, the oppressed and all those who end up as allies. Will we succeed? In time? No one can foresee the future so no one knows. But to simply omit the possibility of real revolutionary change seems to me to be a failure of the literary imagination. A failure to recognize workers and poor people as central to the story, as, not to put too fine a point on it, the agents of history. Which failure is to be expected, sure, from any but the most explicitly class-conscious writers, and can be chalked up to the death-grip bourgeois ideology has on most, but still registers as a disappointment each time I come upon it.

Especially with a writer as good as Atwood, and one so obviously political in her own well meaning way. This book is a warning. Here is what capitalism has brought the world to, or rather what it will bring the world to if things continue this way, she’s saying, here are the results of the rule of profit, here are the even worse horrors to come. Yet she doesn’t delve all that deeply into the implications of what she does clearly identify as the cause of the crisis. Nor does the fact that capitalism is the root of the problem seem to have set off any light bulbs for her about what direction to look for the solution.

Given this major failing, it’s not surprising that page by page there are lots of littler ones. …

Continued at Read Red: “On Atwood’s dystopia.”

While Richard Powers’ novels hold a sometimes interesting and informative young sci-tech appeal, the novels’ limits of the social and political, not to mention the intimate personal, are stark. In “Brain Drain: The Scientific Fictions of Richard Powers,” James Wood dissects the limits of character and philosophy or theme in the novels in some ways that make sense. Still, it’s a review by penlight. Why the small scope? Because of the small conception. For example, Wood binds himself with this misrepresentation: “The traditional domain of the novel—eros, marriage, the question of children, the irreducible particulars of domestic life…” These elements may comprise the traditional domain of the domestic novel but not the traditional domain of the novel, far from it, let alone imaginative fiction writ large. Don Quixote? Robinson Crusoe? Les Miserables? Has the domestic novel come to mean the “traditional” novel? If so, a pity. Such a misrepresentation squashes both life and the novel, leaving a critic able to do little more than belabor the most evident limits in Powers’ fiction, while distorting or overlooking greater underlying problems. Read the rest of this entry »