Month: August 2009

via Democracy Now!:

Academy Award-winning actor, director and writer Tim Robbins is involved in a new production of Father Daniel Berrigan’s acclaimed play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. The play centers on the events of May 17th, 1968, when nine Catholic peace activists, including Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother, the late Father Philip Berrigan, entered a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and removed draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam. They were arrested and then sentenced in a highly publicized trial that galvanized the antiwar movement. We speak to Robbins about the play, which is being staged by his Los Angeles troupe, the Actors’ Gang.

“Kelman blasts mediocrity of boy wizards and crime bestsellers” by Phil Miller in The Herald:

James Kelman, the Scottish Booker Prize-winning author, has launched a furious attack on the way literary fiction is regarded in his homeland – criticising the praise lavished on “mediocre” detective writers and apparently even JK Rowling.

Kelman, appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, said that if the Nobel prize for literature was awarded from Scotland, instead of Sweden, it would be given to “a writer of f****** detective fiction” or work about “some upper middle-class young magician” instead of literary fiction.

…

He added: “Our tradition is actually an intellectual tradition, and an intellectual tradition that is not scared to be radical, and if that radical nature takes us into particular political positions then we should take them.

“And these positions have meant that we have not allowed ourselves to look at our own tradition, so that our own radical tradition is a mystery to us, that we don’t know about our historical links with people who we should be proud of – we should be proud that James Connolly the Irish socialist leader is an Edinburgh man, why are we not proud of that? One of the greatest twentieth century socialists was murdered by the British Army in 1916 – why do we not admit what happened with John Maclean, somebody who was murdered, who was poisoned by the State. Why is he not a hero?

“How can you give all this to somebody like Burns and not give a thought to all the other great Scottish writers.”

Science Fiction of the Now:

District 9 is not a pretty movie. It doesn’t look pretty. Its message isn’t pretty. It hurts the eyes to watch. In fact, District 9 is an outright ugly movie, but it is an ugly that is perfectly crafted and takes ugly to the heights of a new aesthetic. The screen is full of unflinchingly realistic ugly slums, banal ugly interiors of institutionalized spaces, and ugly people whose entire lives and bodies have been corrupted by the ugly greedy powers that dominate everything in the landscape.

Set in Johannesburg, South Africa, the movie centers on a camp of stranded space aliens who have been contained within a hideous filthy militarized slum and are in the process of being relocated to a concentration camp in the desert. Through its narrative, District 9 overtly exposes South Africa’s egregious practice of apartheid, a system of segregation that was the government-sanctioned practice of legal racism. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out this connection and to understand the film in relation to its historic and geographic specificity. Certainly, apartheid and all systems of racism need to be addressed. But what makes this movie most interesting is how it uses the real life practice of apartheid as a jumping point to expose a whole global system of exploitation, discrimination, and economic cannibalism.District 9 doesn’t take on these big issues with bombastic Hollywood gloss and spectacle, but rather through a beautifully ugly hybrid of film genres – sci-fi, body horror, toxic accident, war and action films – to show how in a world where the toxins of global capital are so fluid, everything is corrupt, nothing is in its natural state, and toxic hybrids have become the new norm.

Though District 9 is indeed a mix-up of a number of film genres, it is first and foremost science fiction. But this is not the über-slick sci-fi of Michael Bay or Steven Spielberg that has dominated the global marketplace for the past couple of decades. District 9 isn’t the kind of high gloss spectacle that subordinates any meaningful socio-political content in a tale to the quest for maximum proft.. District 9’s ugly exterior and its realistic settings work to reclaim the ideological backbone of the best sci-fi by de-glossing the sci-fi production and bringing it down to the land of the real. Long ago and far away, sci-fi was a genre that was used to expose and critique savage socio-political systems. Sci-fi in the tradition of Philip K. Dick served a political function. Often infused with a good dose of Marxism, sci-fi dissected and exposed collusions between industry and government to achieve global economic domination at the expense of the working people, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized. In fact, the sci-fi of the past often exposed a system not unlike the Global Capital Machine of the present, the one that dominates the globe and cannibalizes the vast majority of the world’s population. As the Hollywood Machine became more sanitized and safe (beginning with the Reagan era and moving forward), sci-fi became an industry staple to generate enormous profits instead of civil unrest. Any subversive political content became glossed over by mega FX and superstar heroes that raked in enormous profits at the box office. Sure, sci-fi movies have tangentially addressed political and economic corruption, but rarely with a hell of a lot of conviction or bearing on the real world.

There is no denying the real world in District 9. …

On the film Balibo – Via ZNet – Pilger:

On 30 August it will be a decade since the people of East Timor defied the genocidal occupiers of their country to take part in a United Nations referendum, voting for their freedom and independence. A “scorched earth” campaign by the Indonesian dictatorship followed, adding to a toll of carnage that had begun 24 years earlier when Indonesia invaded tiny East Timor with the secret support of Australia, Britain and the United States. According to a committee of the Australian parliament, “at least 200,000” died under the occupation, a third of the population.

Filming undercover in 1993, I found crosses almost everywhere: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the road. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. A holocaust happened in East Timor, telling us more about rapacious Western power, its propaganda and true aims, than even current colonial adventures. The historical record is unambiguous that the US, Britain and Australia conspired to accept such a scale of bloodshed as the price of securing Southeast Asia’s “greatest prize” with its “hoard of natural resources”. Philip Liechty, the senior CIA operations officer in Jakarta at the time of the invasion, told me, “I saw the intelligence. There were people being herded into school buildings by Indonesian soldiers and the buildings set on fire. The place was a free fire zone… We sent them everything that you need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn’t have any guns. None of that got out… [The Indonesian dictator] Suharto was given the green light to do what he did.”   Continue reading Cover-Up: A Film’s Travesty Of Omissions by John Pilger

Great interview on social change and writing at Africa is a Country.

Or rather, Atticus Gladwell.

It’s telling that one of the most valuable pieces of criticism of fiction to come out of the New Yorker in a while was not written by any of its literary critics but by another staff writer, Malcolm Gladwell. It’s telling additionally that on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the central US novel To Kill a Mockingbird, a review of the novel and its fit in society was either declined by the entire lit crit staff and all adjunct literary reviewers of the New Yorker or was directed away from all of them. Maybe they were all on vacation, forced or otherwise. One can see why. After all, George Packer, James Wood, and Keith Gessen were recently exposed for their severe distortions of another socially central writer, George Orwell; and Louis Menand recently admitted in a review of Pynchon’s latest novel that “I could be missing something, of course. I could be missing everything” in regard to the existence of allusions in the text of a writer famed for allusions. Perhaps New Yorker subscribers don’t mind such cavalier attitude to their subscription funds.

Regardless, Gladwell’s article, “The Courthouse Ring,” goes only a small step forward in New Yorker criticism. Who knew that an early 1960s portrayal of an early 1930s Southern lawyer in a  small town would reveal “the limits of Southern liberalism” rather than “instruct us about the world”? Well but Gladwell may mean that the (white) masses hold this belief that goes against reason. But the masses encouraged and “led” by whom? The publishing and lit industry? The corporate-state, its media and schools? Surely not.

At least Gladwell usefully spells out some points of concern: Continue reading Malcolm Finch and the Limits of Liberal Fiction

Consider Dave Eggers’ story “Max at Sea” in the recent New Yorker in light of Maxwell Geismar’s comments over half a century ago:

…a negation of the ‘mind’…in favor of the pure and primary world of childhood sensation. That lost world of childhood indeed to which somehow or other, [J.D.] Salinger, like the rest of the New Yorker school, always returns! That pre-Edenite community of yearned-for bliss, where knowledge is again the serpent of all evil: but a false and precocious show of knowledge, to be sure, which elevated without emancipating its innocent and often touching little victims… The root of the matter is surely here, and perhaps all these wise children may yet emerge from the nursery of life and art (208-209)…

More from Geismar in the same book, American Moderns – From Rebellion to Conformity (1958), including the quote above in further context:

The present volume began as a collection of articles and reviews writing in the Nineteen-Forties and Fifties for a more or less popular audience… Some of these articles are in the polemical vein which a critic uses with reluctance when his second nature, or his first, is to inquire, to balance, and to evaluate. The central focus of the volume is on the transitional decade from the Second World War to the middle of the twentieth century – from McCarthy to Sputnik. The historical setting is that of the uneasy ‘peace,’ the tensions of the Cold War, the return to ‘normalcy,’ and the epoch of conformity.

Or was it euphoria? In literature the period marked the decline of the classic modern American writers at the peak of their popular reputation. In criticism there was the movement towards higher and higher levels of aesthetic, or scholastic, absolutism…

There was indeed a state of general inertia in the arts, as the familiar sequel to an age of anxiety: of problems urgent and not resolved, while the surface of the globe, and outer space too, vibrated in the throes of change. The American literary scene of the Forties and Fifties must have presented to the rest of the world an odd and ironic spectacle at times; and perhaps the polemical note was indicated; and meanwhile I trust that this spectacle may also be instructive… (ix-x). Continue reading New Yorker at Sea

More on this when I get a chance [update: Malcolm Finch and the Limits of Liberal Fiction] but just want to note that – re: Malcolm Gladwell’s article on To Kill a Mockingbird in the recent New Yorker – the novel is more sociopolitically limited by far than Gladwell conveys. Also the novel is far more than a study of “the limits of Southern liberalism”; the novel had huge New York and national imprint and involvement in its production and creation and further dissemination (the film), as well as having strong current relation (in a variety of ways). The work greatly typifies the limits of liberalism in general. Similarly, Gladwell’s article is a study in the limits of liberalism (north, south, east, or west).

The May 2009 book by James A. Miller – Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial covers some of this ground. See in particular the Epilogue and “Chapter Eight: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: The Final Stage of the Scottsboro Narrative.” Continue reading Gladwell and Finch

Liberatory, visionary SF: Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach and Solartopia by Harvey Wasserman, their conversation at Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/callenbach06052009.html. Also Joe Emersberger’s more recent, related Wovokia.

Good review, excerpted below, of an important book and author. Stella Miles Franklin’s novel My Career Goes Bung (The End of My Career) has far more going for it than most novels today, also as much as or more than the valuable and acclaimed novels written about the same time, such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. See an excerpt at Lib Lit, as well as an excerpt of another valuable neglected novel, The Marrow of Tradition, by Charles Chesnutt.

Lisa Hill:

I’m not in the habit of writing fan letters, but I am very tempted to write to Jill Roe to thank her for writing this magnificent biography. Stella Miles Franklin, A Biography is not just an authoritative exploration of the life of one of my literary heroes, it’s also an intriguing read in its own right.  It’s excellent because it is so well structured, because the author’s prose is a pleasure to read and because the scholarship shines through without being heavy-handed.

Roe has not only read Franklin’s oeuvre and her voluminous correspondence, she has also read the books that Franklin enjoyed and considered memorable; she has read the most obscure of reviews about Franklin’s work, and she has the knack of using an apt comment from her sources to amplify her own analysis of events.  It is this perceptive analysis which sets this biography apart from the Olley biography which relies on commentary instead.

Almost everyone is familiar with My Brilliant Career – from the film if not from the novel – but I was intrigued to see that whereas today this book tends to be analysed in terms of gender and psychology, in Franklin’s day it was viewed through the perspectives of autobiography and class. Sybylla was rebellious and ‘unladylike’ it is true, but it was the gulf between the impoverished selectors and the squatters that lay at the heart of her rejection of Henry Beecham.  Even though she mellowed a little in her old age, Franklin was always radical in her opinions and politics, and nationalism and feminism were equally important in shaping both her professional and personal life.

Will Grant, BBC, “Venezuela’s Revolutionary Reading”: “The [Venezuelan] government has given out tens of thousands of free copies of Don Quijote by Cervantes and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, saying that such events ‘promote reading for the construction of socialism and humanist values’.”

“Plan Revolucionario de lectura es particpativo”