Month: February 2009

Netherland and The Notion of the Post-9/11 Novel

 

Guardian Books: “’No better mind has gone to work on where we are post-9/11,’ author and judge Lee Abbott told the Washington Post,” about Joseph O’Neill and his PEN/Faulkner award winning novel Netherland. It “made the longlist for the Booker prize and was the bookies’ favourite to win before it was snubbed for the shortlist….” “It was described by the New York Times as ‘the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Centre fell’, while James Wood in the New Yorker called it ‘one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read’.”

Meanwhile, Shelly Ettinger at Read Red comments, O’Neill  

“means well, no doubt, and he is it seems trying to get at several complexities about identity and immigration and friendship and history with the novel’s title, but it strikes me that what he’s cooked up is more like Neverland, one more postcolonial fantasy of what life is like for those driven across the world by the crimes of colonialism – as told by the inheritor of the riches stolen from their forebears. There’s a liberal smugness to it, or at least that’s how it sits with me.”

Discussion of the notion of the post-9/11 novel and literature in general leaves out the question of whether or not 9/11 is much of an appropriate touchstone, given the great catastrophe that was kicked off in the March 2003 ground invasion of Iraq, an extension of the murderous US-UN sanctions era kicked off by invasion more than a decade prior…. Our suffering defines a literary era but the far more massive suffering we inflict on others does not.

That’s retrograde, it seems to me, even though much of the “post-9/11″ lit conceit may be of liberal or progressive intention. The unthinkable has been filtered out prior to the discussion. Along these lines, other significant moments or era shifts – the various US invasions, the shift to a finance based economy in recent decades, the rise of the PR industry beginning about a century ago, the fall and rise of widespread activist movements – seem like far more meaningful markers of changing sociopolitical and cultural eras that would most insightfully and most dramatically inform literature.

Of course, 9/11/01 is in its own right a “novel event” – as Noam Chomsky notes: Continue reading Netherland and The Notion of the Post-9/11 Novel

Gender, Race, and Class…Culture, Power, and Control in Lit

Cross posted from the comments at Blographia Literaria:

Too often the literature establishment produces (I’ve noted elsewhere) “almost meaningless skirmishes between the so-called ‘hysterical realists’ and Flaubertian intimatists, between the free-wheeling fabulists and the empathetic realists, and other establishment fronts and alignments.” This is a narrow formalism dominant. Continue reading Gender, Race, and Class…Culture, Power, and Control in Lit

The Trial of the Catonsville Nine revival

“Anti-war ‘Trial’ worth revisiting” – by Jeff Favre:

Famed novelist Gore Vidal and peace activist Ron Kovic spoke opening night at the Actors’ Gang revival of “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” an indication that this seminal 1971 play still holds significance with those who protested the Vietnam War…. Though big news in 1968, the action of nine Catholics burning draft files in a Maryland town would be forgotten by nearly everyone if participant Daniel Berrigan hadn’t written a play based on the protestors’ trial….

Much of the text is taken from the actual trial. The defendants admitted to burning nearly 400 draft files with homemade napalm. The argument for their action is that stopping an immoral and possibly illegal activity – such as the Vietnam War – through nonviolent means is justified. Each draft file burned, they believe, may have saved a life. Berrigan, his brother Philip (Scott Harris), who also is a priest, and the seven others provide passionate pleas for peace, but much of their time on the stand is spent explaining how America’s involvement in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and parts of Africa establish a pattern of behavior that “forced” the Catonsville Nine to act in such a bold manner.

Hollywood’s New Censors by John Pilger

 Via ZNet: “These are extraordinary times. Vicious colonial wars and political, economic and environmental corruption cry out for a place on the big screen. Yet, try to name one recent film that has dealt with these, honestly and powerfully, let alone satirically. Censorship by omission is virulent. We need another Wall Street, another Last Hurrah, another Dr. Strangelove. The partisans who tunnel out of their prison in Gaza, bringing in food, clothes, medicines and weapons with which to defend themselves, are no less heroic than the celluloid-honoured POWs and partisans of the 1940s. They and the rest of us deserve the respect of the greatest popular medium.”
 

Lesson six: vassals at arms – Lesson seven: the demise of the vassals

 

[“Lessons” are temporary posts. These early drafts come down after a few days. Any surviving or revised remnants and expanded passages may be found at The Vassals Handbook page – also subject to revision.]

 

Lesson six – vassals at arms

 

Cannibalism as a saving economic stratagem? I exaggerate, I suppose. I’m the master PR guy, Stan D. Garde. They throw so much stuff at me. I’m responsible for everything all the time – the colonial wars in western Asia and the intricacies of each; the IEE’s waning influence in South America; the leaderless European Union; the many horns of Africa; constant upheaval and unrest in India; natural and unnatural disasters in Southeast Asia; the churning rise of China. Cannibalism? Let’s set that notion aside for awhile, its economic advantages notwithstanding, whatever its popular difficulty or promise.

The economy and the military, this is my concern, how to resurrect the one and how to strengthen the other. Through military strength comes economic might – the IEE and I see no way around that proposition – base reality. The only question – which way the IEE? Should it power up its colonial forces, all the better to occupy and instill profitable fear. Or should the military continue to power up for the big picture, for super global warfare, by expanding its huge fleets of planes, tanks, ships, missiles, and by further militarizing space?

The difficulty of my job is that the rulers are split – between the leaders of the occupying forces on the ground, on the one hand over fist and on the other hand over fist, the generals, lobbyists, lobbyist generals, and strategists beyond. I repeat: the occupying forces throughout Greater Oila wish for more pacifying resources, the better to conquer the Oilan vassals. Meanwhile, higher up brass and financiers press for bigger fleets and space based might.

But what if we figured out a way to wed the economic stimulus needed to revive the bankrupt banks with military power and spending? Why not give all the money to the military to run the world like one giant boot camp, or if that appears too extreme, make the world an endless string of military bases and installations – each vassal den an armed outpost, each inhabitant of earth a foot soldier, an IEE enlistee. Might this not be a solution more practical, more popular, more elegant than cannibalism? Militarize the IEE more fully, militarize earth. Totally. Continue reading Lesson six: vassals at arms – Lesson seven: the demise of the vassals

Zadie Antoinette?

 

Once More to the Orthodox 

 

The literature establishment is constantly grasping for some standout voice or another to cover up its too often eviscerated and eviscerating core. In his recent New Yorker commentary “Zadie Smith Reports from Dream City,” Hendrick Hertzberg urges: “Please, I beg you: drop whatever you’re doing and read Zadie Smith’s brilliant meditation on Barack Obama…” ‘Speaking In Tongues,’ in the New York Review of Books “….a wonderful essay” of “sparkling words” that is “so absorbring…an exhilarating slalom” that shows “how well [President] Obama is positioned…to summon us so thrillingly to a vision of ‘the United States of America’ and a belief, as he said in his Inaugural, ‘that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve’….” Apparently, the master state(s) will remain.

 

Smith’s lecture gives grand voice to the establishment, for it is a voice rich and eloquent, however antique, not least in its ideological orthodoxy. Per usual, the speech borders on parody at its most ideological moments in familiar guise of aestheticism denouncing ideology, a would be post-ideological stance.

 

Ms. Smith acknowledges that she has been well trained. She states her “regret” at losing her Willesden voice the voice of her youth that “was a big, colorful, working-class sea” for her college voice, her Cambridge voice, acquired in:

 

“a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose—now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth. They were both a part of me. But how the culture warns against it!”

 

Despite Smith’s being trained into a “puddle,” and her stated regret, she finds that all is not lost, and of course it is not. Unfortunately, the intellectual or literary recompense she hails is her adoption or assumption of the standard line of the status quo that not only declaims it prizes no ideology at all but (equally false) that ideology in literature functions as a lesser thing, a devaluation of literature, a betrayer of literary ideals and life. She believes literature can be ideology free – a belief that only the privileged puddle can afford to float (and even then only in the short term). Dream City indeed. It is the dream of a both servile and ruling status quo ideology: Continue reading Zadie Antoinette?

Let Them Eat Ice

Rebecca Solnit at TomDispatch:

Argentina is big in land, resources, and population with a very different culture and history than Iceland. Where Iceland goes from [bankruptcy] is hard to foresee. But as Icelandic writer Haukar Már Helgason put it in the London Review of Books last November:

“There is an enormous sense of relief. After a claustrophobic decade, anger and resentment are possible again. It’s official: capitalism is monstrous. Try talking about the benefits of free markets and you will be treated like someone promoting the benefits of rape. Honest resentment opens a space for the hope that one day language might regain some of its critical capacity, that it could even begin to describe social realities again.”

 The big question may be whether the rest of us, in our own potential Argentinas and Icelands, picking up the check for decades of recklessness by the captains of industry, will be resentful enough and hopeful enough to say that unfettered capitalism has been monstrous, not just when it failed, but when it succeeded. Let’s hope that we’re imaginative enough to concoct real alternatives.

Lesson three: empire’s graveyard glory

 

Well here we go, off to the wars! Let’s see, where do we visit today? Iraq? Afghanistan? Pakistan? Gaza? Yes! How is the war for the everlasting expansion of the Incorporated Estates of Earth going? you ask? Very well! How do we know? Graveyards! Here we are in one going full blast, the bodies flooding in as if from some channeled hurricane of blood and gore. Now this is the sort of full employment the overlords of the IEE fully appreciate. Gravediggers rejoice! These grave diggers get no rest around here. They barely have time to jot down the names of those going under. Some bodies even come in with no names at all, and some are surely pseudonyms. But who needs names when business is booming? One look and we know the story of many a body: Mr. Shot-in-the-back-of-the-head. Ms. Blown-to-bits-from-the-sky. Child mutilated-by-shrapnel. Infant Crushed-from-on-high. Busy, busy, busy are we in the graveyards of the IEE. Continue reading Lesson three: empire’s graveyard glory

Lesson two: a vassal’s duty is debt repayment

 

I, vassal. I vassal. Vassal I. It may surprise readers that your author is a fellow vassal. Some vassals are more subservient than others, some more privileged. I’ve been asked to overview here not only the duties of vassals – any mere serf could do as much – but to sketch the world entire, as best known today. I’ve been asked by the lords of capital to reveal in one single work the full human condition of our time, of the time that came before, and of the time that will come after. The better to know, the better to rule and be ruled. For the first time in all history, the great epic of Earth is to be written – the tale of the IEE. Continue reading Lesson two: a vassal’s duty is debt repayment

The Swiftian Operations of the USA

Paul Craig Roberts at Counterpunch:

The unreality in which the US government operates is beyond belief.  A  bankrupt government  that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.  According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the US taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year!  

Obama’s war in Afghanistan is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.  After seven years of conflict, there is still no defined mission or endgame scenario for US forces in Afghanistan.  When asked about the mission, a US military official told NBC News, “Frankly, we don’t have one.”  NBC reports: “they’re working on it.” 

Speaking to House Democrats on February 5, President Obama admitted that the US government does not know what its mission is in Afghanistan and that to avoid “mission creep without clear parameters,” the US “needs a clear mission.”

How would you like to be sent to a war, the point of which no one knows, including the commander-in-chief who sent you to kill or be killed?  How, fellow taxpayers, do you like paying the enormous cost of sending soldiers on an undefined mission while the economy collapses?

The Vassals Handbook

 

[See the revised, extended, and in progress work at The Vassals Handbook page – subject to revision.] 

 

Lesson one – vassalism is capitalism wrought real

 

Out back is where we brutalize the people. Actually, out back is where we used to brutalize the people but times being what they are we brutalize them all around the corporate gardens now. Stan D. Garde is my name. Let the brutality games begin! For their own good. Brutality is what keeps people in line. Too bad we don’t set aside more often a special time and place for good old fashioned smashing. I miss it. The constant sort of torture we indulge in nowadays seems to me an inferior replacement. Well, nevermind. Let us not lament for the past but celebrate the present and future. Let us begin here, in the Vassals Handbook. The Incorporated Estates of Earth (IEE) commissioned me to write it.

Citizens are gone. They are now vassals. It happened in a funny way. All the banks around the world collapsed, broke. So the peoples’ money was used to refund all the banks. But don’t get any ideas. When the people buy the banks, do they not own them? Yes and no, but mostly and decisively no. You see, the people may properly own the banks (having bought them) but they sure as hell do not get to decide what to do with the money or how to do it. For that is not capitalism, and capitalism is what they bought. Clear? Clever? Clout. In capitalism, the people do not own the decisions. They are not the deciders. They are the consumers, the workers, and in a pinch they may be the funders. To review, the people may be the buyers and in theory the owners, but they are never ever upon any circumstances the deciders. In capitalism, the well-connected few are the deciders, the rulers who select candidates for office, who dole out funds for the campaigns, who provide the illusion of choice via sundry discrepancies for vassals to obsess over and pick between. Nothing more is meant to be.

Am I speaking over your heads, dear vassals? Let me see if I can put this in plainer words. The privileged few rule, the masses obey, even when the masses do most of the work, buy most of the stuff, and totally bailout the bankrupt rulers. That, my friends, is capitalism. Some used to call such a system Chinese Democracy before China was fully incorporated into the IEE. Vassalism is a more precise term, in my humble opinion.

Granted, technically, no land has ever practiced pure capitalism, because, unfortunately, pure capitalism is a self-exploding system – inherently wildly unstable. Totally free markets always lead to disaster – collapse of all sorts. Thus, regulation always exists to help curb catastrophe. And so it is, sadly, that contrary to common understanding, pure capitalism is almost as horrific as pure democracy. Demoscrazy, you know. We’ve had enough of that – we’ve seen where it leads – not to vassalage! which we much prefer. We prefer vassals to people. We prefer submission to rule. Capitalism is a nice thought, an ideal. But vassalism rules.

Oh I know you odd, broke, and broken spirits out there may think of vassalism as little more than slavery. We pity you penny-pinched souls who could not be more mistaken, more immoral. After all, slaves had no money and so could not readily repay their debts, let alone those of their superiors. That is the gross deficiency of the economic system of pure slavery. We had to replace it. Vassalism is much more efficient, much safer for rulers everywhere. It puts people in their proper place. All hail vassalism! See you at the wars!

Empathy, Specifics, Liberation

Neuroscience and Moral Politics: Chomsky’s Intellectual Progeny:

Nussbaum (1997) defends American liberal education’s record at cultivating an empathic imagination. She claims that understanding the lives of strangers and achieving cosmopolitan global citizenship can be realized through the arts and literary humanities. There is little solid evidence to substantiate this optimism. My own take on empathy-enhancing practices within U.S. colleges and universities is considerably less sanguine. Nussbaum’s episodic examples of stepping into the mental shoes of other people are rarely accompanied by plausible answers as why these people may be lacking shoes—or decent jobs, minimum healthcare, and long-life expectancy.

Fiction (and “the arts and literary humanities”) that fails to posit such well known “answers” fails a great capacity.

The space within educational settings has been egregiously underutilized, in part, because we don’t know enough about propitious interstices where critical pedagogy could make a difference.

Only “in part” though. The progressive potential of liberatory art has long since been demonstrated (and moreover for all but the indoctrinated is self evident, one would think)…

Arguably the most serious barrier is the cynical, even despairing doubt about the existence of a moral instinct for empathy. The new research puts this doubt to rest and rightly shifts the emphasis to strategies for cultivating empathy and identifying with “the other.” Joining the affective and cognitive dimensions of empathy may require risky forms of radical pedagogy (Olson, 2006, 2007; Gallo, 1989).

“[R]adical pedagogy” and “radical” fiction and other art, etc.

Evidence produced from a game situation with medical students strongly hints that empathic responses can be significantly enhanced by increased knowledge about the specific needs of others—in this case, the elderly (Varkey, 2006). Presumably, limited prior experiences would affect one’s emotional response. Again, this is a political culture/information acquisition issue that demands further study.

A key element in liberatory literature: emphasizing “the specific needs of others,” and revealing crucial specific facts and information of many types. Continue reading Empathy, Specifics, Liberation

Spring 2009 Liberatory Lit Course

Sign-up for ZNet’s 10 week Spring ZSchool is currently ongoing, including for Liberatory Lit: Imaginative Writing for Social Change:

Literature and other art may be created to liberate or enslave, to enlighten or deceive. This course will explore progressive and revolutionary tendencies in liberatory literature. While broad based enough to facilitate explorations of a wide variety of arts, this course will focus especially on liberatory fiction and liberatory criticism of imaginative writing. I will present my own lib lit criticism and fiction, along with works of a variety of other scholars and imaginative writers. Course members are expected to participate in exploring the existing reality and potential of lib lit and to contribute to its further creation. We will use the new art and issues journal Liberation Lit (liblit.org) as a touchstone.

See initial readings below – however, the course is rather free form and probably should be thought of as an independent study, with forums, shaped by participants’ interests and time beyond the background readings and knowledge provided. Participants should feel free to explore their particular liberatory interests and avenues beyond the provided background.

I’ve provided links to all the readings online to ensure that everyone has ready access. Unfortunately, it takes some digging or is impossible to turn up paper versions of many of these readings. Books of other liberatory criticism and fiction can be substituted if extensive online readings are objectionable, or too remote from participants liberatory interests and needs. The course may be either reading intensive or writing intensive as participants choose.

Continue reading Spring 2009 Liberatory Lit Course