Month: July 2009

On TV, learning how to “survive,” by Alan Farago.

In lit, learning how to live, by Victor Hugo.

At The Valve, Andrew Seal writes:

“I’m not asking for a canon or a best of [science fiction]—in fact, that’s rather the opposite of what I’m interested in—but rather what Adam is talking about—which [SF] books aren’t just classics but have (or have retained) that waking and shaking power?”

Clearly this is going to vary widely, infinitely, depending upon who the reader is.

That said, a problem with work that self or primarily identifies as SF is the primary focus on the fantastic, which is often largely a media creation, a marketing tag or categorical brand, emphasizing fantastical cleverness above all, whatever else gets explored.

Would one call the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the Odyssey, or the Inferno, or Utopia, or The Praise of Folly, or Gulliver’s Travels, or Wizard of the Crow SF? Then where are such great, even landmark works (of all literature) in these discussions? These are all fantastical fictions but they are so much more besides that it may sound odd to call them SF, or Science Fiction, or Fantasy, or Speculative Fiction, even though they are. It may seem odd (at first) to include them integrally into such discussions but they should be included, even centrally because they are examples of great landmark works of literature regardless or genre or type that happen to be fantastical. Even while inseparable from their fantastic elements, core elements in some cases, these are stories primarily known and emphasized for something greater than their fantastical cleverness and achievements just as Middlemarch and other such great Victorian novels, for example, are primarily known for something other than their mimetic fidelity or dramatic or comic acuity.

Many of these conversations assessing contemporary SF works are self-confining when they don’t jump out of the SF media/marketing box.

Such discussions often exclude crucial novels that may be in many ways either conventional or unconvential SF works but that aim for and achieve much more than the clever fantastic: works like those that I’ve mentioned and others such as Herland and The Yellow Wallpaper and Ecotopia and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, The Dispossessed, and The Parable of the Sower, and others. And at Lib Lit, the journal I co-edit, stories like Joe Emersberger’s “The Publisher,” “Dave the Prophet,” “Segundo’s Revenge,” and “Wovokia,” among others (http://liblit.org/fiction/). Fantastical works like these long have been and currently are at the very least as challenging to current achievements in SF as those mediated and marketed as SF, as not much more than some clever fantastical trip, maybe marginally topical or otherwise thematic. Their fantastic elements and natures qualify them to be in the SF discussion, and for some of them their genuine landmark reality or normative power and import are a great challenge to what qualifies as vital and accomplished fiction throughout the years, both fantastical and otherwise.

I don’t know that this is news to many but seems worth serious emphasis. Fantastical cleverness is great but normative import and vitality is at least as much a factor in making or breaking a great novel or story, no matter the genre or type of work. Emphasis on the normative achievement and urgency of such works can also help break open the demeaned media/marketing box that SF is too often pushed into or left confined within.

Casablanca: When Melodrama Trumped History” by David Macaray via Counterpunch:

Not only is “Casablanca” regarded as one of the greatest American movies ever made—throbbing romance, exotic setting, superb cast, memorable song (“As Time Goes By”), signature dialogue (“Play it again, Sam”)—it managed to beat out an astonishing nine other nominees to win the 1943 Oscar for Best Picture. …

But for all the adoration and praise this movie has received, has anyone actually examined its plot?  Has anyone asked themselves what this movie isreally about? Because, if they had, they’d realize the movie’s central premise is patently absurd. …

And for those who think this appraisal is too petty or negative, let us go to the source.  Let us quote Julius J. Epstein, the co-writer (along with his brother, Philip) of the screenplay for “Casablanca.”

These are Epstein’s words:  “It was just a routine assignment.  Frankly, I can’t understand its staying power.  If it were made today, line for line, each performance as good, it’d be laughed off the screen.  It’s such a phony picture.  Not a word of truth in it.  It’s camp, it’s kitsch.  It’s shit!”

Ouch.

In her recent essential collection of essays, A Human Eye (2009), Adrienne Rich writes in “Poetry and the Forgotten Future”:

Antonio Gramsci wrote of the culture of the future that “new” individual artists can’t be manufactured: art is a part of society – but that to imagine a new socialist society is to imagine a new kind of art that we can’t foresee from where we now stand. “One must speak,” Gramsci wrote, “of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately ingrained in ‘possible artists’ and ‘possible works of art.'”

In any present society, a distinction needs to be made between the “avante-garde that always remains the same” – what a friend of mine has called “the poetry of false problems” – and a poetics  searching for transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can now be thought or said. Adonis, writing of Arab poetry, reminds Arab poets that “modernity should be a creative vision, or it will be no more than a fashion. Fashion grows old from the moment it is born, while creativity is eternally modern.”

Case in point for fiction, the relatively unknown novel Banjo (1929), by the great poet and novelist Claude McKay, which remains these past 80 years easily more fresh, incisive, and urgent than the vast majority of the celebrated works of its time and our time.

Banjo, and the work and thought of McKay in general, is vastly underappreciated, not least in light of the work and thought of Gramsci and Rich, as well as that of Raymond Williams and other progressive or revolutionary – liberatory – critics. Below, an ever-timely excerpt from Williams’ “The New Metropolis” in The Country and the City (1973): Continue reading Adrienne Rich, Raymond Williams, et al – Lit and Liberation

from Counterpunch – “Mothers and Military Lies”:

I only started singing two years ago.  I came to realize the power of a song.  People will listen to a song with words they wouldn’t want to read or hear in a speech.  I realized if I am going to invest my time in learning a song, it should be one that might make a difference.  One that might wake up a soul or two.  That might touch people in a way to at least plant a seed in their soul that maybe there is more to this war thing than pressing “reset” and starting over. 

When I first heard the song, John Brown, it smacked me awake, and woke me up to a new reality.  He wrote it in 1963, years before the Vietnam War peaked, although talk of it was in the air.  It is a timeless message.  And a painful one.  I think it carries a message that many of us would like the world to know.  It’s a message we’d like other mothers, fathers, sons and daughters to understand BEFORE it’s too late.

It’s one thing to go to Vegas and drop a chunk of money on slots or blackjack.  The gambler at least knows the worst case possibility of how much he or she may lose.  It’s important for enlistees and their parents to truly understand that enlistment in the military is a gamble, with the highest stakes imaginable.  The enlistee is agreeing to gamble on the loss of his or her mind, body, and soul.

“John Brown” by Bob Dylan.  Sung by Diane Rejman and Trond Toft Continue reading Diane Rejman and music for change