Novel Ideas

by Laura Ricks

In a telephone interview, Banks explained how the idea for his lecture came to him when he and many of America’s literary elite were invited by The New York Times to choose the best works of American fiction of the last 25 years. After the votes were tallied, the top 15 were compiled into a definitive list. He says the idea “implies a belief I want to examine: that there is such a thing as the Great American Novel. We’re unusual, Americans, in that there isn’t this belief in a great English novel, or a great French novel. There are many great novels, but there isn’t this idea that there is just one out there waiting to be written.”

Film on a Revolution Was a Revolution Itself

by A.O. SCOTT

“What kind of lunatic would make a movie like this and ask someone to invest in it?” asked Warren Beatty, reached by telephone recently at his home in Los Angeles. It was a rhetorical question, since the movie he was talking about was “Reds,” the three-and-a-half-hour historical epic he wrote (with Trevor Griffiths), directed and starred in 25 years ago….

“Reds” remains a superior history lesson, thanks to Mr. Beatty’s thorough command of the material and to his inclusion of real-life “witnesses” to the life and times of Reed. Their faces and voices give this romance some documentary ballast, and make it, now that they are gone, a moving archive of faded memories.

Curiously, though, the movie may be less nostalgic now than it was in 1981. You might think the opposite, given the inglorious expiration of the Soviet Union, the founding of which feeds the idealism of the film’s main characters (who do, it should be noted, express some misgivings at the authoritarian and antidemocratic tendencies evident within the revolution, even in its early days). The strains of “The Internationale” do not set many pulses racing nowadays. But the dwindling of the socialist cause may also make it possible to look at “Reds” with fresh eyes, and to feel the nearness of the long-ago story it tells.

“I’d say it’s infinitely more accessible now,” Mr. Beatty said. He recently attended a screening held by the Directors Guild in Los Angeles, and was startled by the intensity of the response. “The resonance to the film now was 180 degrees different from then,” he said. “The receptivity to the jokes of the old people, to John Reed, to the speeches he makes, is much greater now.”

And the reason for this, he believes, is that “Reds” is, in large part, a movie about American politics during wartime, and about the opposition to American hegemony at an earlier stage of its development. The fact that Reed, Bryant and their allies initially come together in opposition to American involvement in World War I — a war whose motive Reed succinctly identifies as “profit” — is something current audiences are likely to notice, and perhaps be provoked by. But in 1981, Mr. Beatty noted, “this movie was so harmless that Ron and Nancy Reagan, who I always considered friends, arranged a screening in the White House.”

A return engagement seems unlikely, for any number of reasons. But Mr. Beatty, who declined to speak to the American press when “Reds” came out, and who agreed to be interviewed for the making-of documentary that is one of the DVD’s extra features, regards his movie with renewed zeal….

——————

plot summary

Few filmmakers other than Warren Beatty would have had the courage and vision to fashion an epic film from the life of famed American Communist John Reed (who is the only US citizen buried in the Kremlin). The film is an effort to humanize a political movement that has previously been depicted on screen in a series of unsubtle and prejudicial broad strokes. The film begins in 1915, when Reed (Beatty) makes the acquaintance of married Portland journalist Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton). So persuasive is Reed’s point of view–and so charismatic is Reed himself– that Bryant kicks over the traces and joins Reed and his fellow radicals. Among the famous personages depicted herein are Emma Goldman (Maureen Stapleton), Eugene O’Neill (Jack Nicholson) and Max Eastman (Richard Herrmann)….

——————

Vincent Canby’s Review of Reds

Only the very narrow-minded will see the film as Communist propaganda. Though Reed remained at his death a card-carrying Communist and was buried in the Kremlin, the movie is essentially as ideological as the puppy that whimpers when Louise stalks out. ”Reds” is not about Communism, but about a particular era, and a particularly moving kind of American optimism that had its roots in the 19th century….

Reading can incite a panic

by Mike Ivey

Think the analysts on CNBC can move financial markets by recommending a particular stock? Imagine America at the beginning of the 20th century, when novelists had the power to incite a major stock market panic.

“Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction,” by David Zimmerman, an associate professor of English at UW-Madison, takes a look at the genre of financial fiction that gripped the public during those early days of corporate capitalism….

Zimmerman’s 294-page effort from the University of North Carolina Press recounts some well-know authors, like socialist Upton Sinclair, whose book “The Moneychangers” offered a behind-the-scenes look at the panic of 1907. While “The Moneychangers” follows the conventional financial conspiracy script of banking titans doing evil, it also points fingers at those who participate.

Zimmerman also introduces us to people like Thomas Lawson, the most feared stock promoter, muckraker and novelist in the U.S. at the turn of the century. In 1904, Lawson published an announcement that triggered a panic that wiped out almost a half-billion in market value in three days, convincing him he could produce a more disastrous panic that would topple the nation’s financial structure….

Liberalizers

by Stanley Kauffmann

About Tony Kushner as a playwright, debate continues. About Kushner as a human being, the matter is settled. A new documentary, called Wrestling With Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner, presents the Jacob who wrestled with angels in America, now doing most of his wrestling with devils. The essence of the film is that this man, with not a touch of evangelistic pomp, cannot conceive of life as anything other than a campaign to improve life. 

Freida Lee Mock, an admirably skilled documentarian, followed Kushner from just after 9/11 until the 2004 presidential election. Much of this time was of course spent in or around the theater, but it becomes clear that Kushner believes in his theater work as a source of strength and possibility for other aspects of his life.  

Like Bernard Shaw in just this one respect, Kushner takes his playwriting as an enabler. Because of his fame, he is invited to universities and conferences and other public occasions where he speaks. He talks about current politics and its stench, but mostly about ways to live and choose….

Random links to Upton Sinclair and The Jungle on the 100 year anniversary of the book publication of the novel. Links not screened for political quality:

The Ripple Effect
Huffington Post – New York,NY,USA
… Upton Sinclair, who moved to LA and ran for governor (what kind of crazy writer does that?), for showing the power of the pen to change governments. …

Popeye had it right
Boston Globe – United States
… To be sure, the vegetables and fruits and meat we consume today are, overall, vastly safer than the putrid mess that the author Upton Sinclair exposed a …

‘An Inconvenient Truth’
Rockbridge Weekly – Lexington,VA,USA
… There is a great quote by Upton Sinclair on the film’s official web site: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it … “

E. coli hunt exposes gaps in safety system
Miami Herald – FL,USA
… oversight of the rest of the food supply, has changed little since its creation a century ago following publication of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s expose of …
Best to let bin Laden fade away
Akron Beacon Journal – Akron,OH,USA
… My favorite book so far this year is a novel by Chris Bachelder called US The initials stand for Upton Sinclair, the American socialist writer best known for …
Three influential Americans put heart above brain
Town Hall – Washington,DC,USA
… Henry Ward Beecher, Upton Sinclair, Herbert Matthews: One a late 19th century pastor and orator, the second an early 20th century best-selling novelist, the … Eating Safely in the Jungle
Truth about Trade & Technology – Des Moine,IA,USA
… This year happens to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Jungle, the book by Upton Sinclair that is one of the best-known and most influential …
Don’t Panic Over Spinach
Reason Online – Los Angeles,CA,USA
… In 1900, six years before Upton Sinclair wrote his great muckraking book, The Jungle, about the filthy conditions in the meatpacking industry, the death rate …

Cruel slaughter, JAMES ANDERSON, Concord – Letter
Concord Monitor – Concord,NH,USA
ne hundred years ago, social critic Upton Sinclair’s masterpiece The Jungle exposed the filthy conditions and cruel treatment of animals and workers in Chicago …

Making news on Martha’s Vineyard
Washington Times – Washington,DC,USA
… apologias for the American Institute of Meat Packers, which had been trying for over a decade to recover from the revelations in Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”

Review: The Jungle A searing indictment of capitalism
Socialist Party – UK
IT IS 100 years ago since the publication of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. His devastating exposé of the meat packing industry …

Hog Hell
Yahoo! News – USA
The Nation — This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. Its depiction of unchecked greed and …

Los Angeles Times
The Register-Guard – Eugene,Oregon,USA
… injustice. Consider the fiction of writers such as John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, what might be called social realism. Today …

Amy Goodman Dinner-Lecture In Los Angeles
PCH Press – Malibu,CA,USA
… carrying the great muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, and IF Stone into the electronic age. Goodman …

New war and new judgments
Ottawa Sun – Ontario, Canada
… Noam Chomsky, George Bernard Shaw, Graham Greene, Susan Sontag, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser, Jean-Paul Sartre: The story of how many intellectuals got it …

Cross River Traffic by Chris Roberts (GRANTA £7.99)
Independent – London,England,UK
… shoes wear out. Upton Sinclair was a prolific American author whose work usually advanced a socialist point of view. His most powerful …

Wanted: One hero for the Left
Toronto Star – Ontario, Canada
by Chris Bachelder. What if Upton Sinclair was brought back to life? No, not the author of Babbitt and Main Street that was Sinclair Lewis. …
See all stories on this topic

UPPIE REDUX?
New Yorker – United States
A hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair, the muckraker and socialist, brought out “The Jungle,” a sensationally grim expose of the noisome squalors and …

Faith in spades
Guardian Unlimited – UK
by Chris Bachelder. I’ve never been able to eat a sausage since, at the age of 15, I read Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle. …

Freetrade consequences
Diamondback Online – College Park,MD,USA
… if any, breaks. These foreign Third World workers could literally be characters out of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Many of these …

Eco-Prisoner Chris McIntosh Interviews Derrick Jensen
Infoshop News – USA
… There’s a great line by Upton Sinclair when he says, “It’s hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it”…

N. Spencer, After Utopia. The Rise of Critical Space in Twentieth …
Fabula – France
… Nicholas Spencer argues that the radical American fiction of Jack London, Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, and Josephine Herbst reimagines the spatial concerns …

Lee Ballinger  What Backlash Against the Dixie Chicks?
Arthur Asiimwe  Rwandan president scoffs at “Hotel Rwanda”
Kennedy Johnson  How Radio Continues to ‘Dumb Down’ Blacks in Los Angeles [And, one might add, everyone virtually everyplace else.]
Orhan Pamuk  Freedom to Write
Tim Harper  Hollywood Star Tim Robbins Blasts US Media Ignorance of ‘High Crimes’ in Iraq
Terry Eagleton  What Are We? A review of Nation and Novel by Patrick Parrinder
Stephanie Merritt  Still a street-fighting man
Kari Lyderson  Support Builds for Immigration Protests, Boycott
CONTRATIEMPO  Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: 100 Years Later
Ron Jacobs  A Review of Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun
The Nation Songs of Protest
David Krieger The Courage of Sophie Scholl — Resisting Hitler
Amadou Deme Setting the Record Straight — Hotel Rwanda
Charles Isherwood Is Lefty Finally Showing Up?
Defying Poverty’s Everyday Despair in Odets’s ‘Awake and Sing!’
Dresses Are Fine, but Pajamas Are Divine
Richard Ouzounian Play Pushed Underground: Cancelled in New York, the first Toronto reading of My Name Is Corrie is being held at a secret location
Manohla Dargis ‘Sir! No Sir!’ Salutes Vietnam’s Dissenters in Uniform
Jeff Leeds On His New Album, Neil Young Calls for Bush’s Impeachment
Billy Bragg The lonesome death of Rachel Corrie
download (MP3): The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie
Arthur Asiimwe Rwanda Survivors Say Hollywood Has Got It Wrong
South Park’ aims at censors, hits Bush, Jesus
Claudia Parsons “Stuff Happens” play sears Rumsfeld in New York
Mark Scaramella The Timeless Sarcasm of Mark Twain: When Even God Can’t Keep His Own Commandments [Anderson Valley Advertiser]
Maggie Morgan All Strings Attached
Dave Chappell Talks About His TV Exodus
Billie Cohen Beat Nix
Bob Hoover What Happened Here / Bush Chronicles by Eliot Weinberger — War Critic Uses Administrations Own Words Against It
Tony Christini Orwell’s Problem, and Partisan Fiction [with links]
Thom Hartmann Democracy Be Damned – Republicans Need Another War
Noam Chomsky On Hegemony And Disarmament
Terrence Rafferty Every Nonvote Counts: Seeing, by José Saramago [If link fails, see here]
Gary Levin ‘24′ prez pivots from weasel to evil
Tony Christini The Bush Plan to Abolish America
Alan Maass Week of the Walkouts: Immigration Rights Battle Comes to US Schools [HBO movie called Walkout]
Alexander Cockburn Did Oprah Pick Another Fibber?
Jill Lawless ‘Corrie’ Opens in London Instead of N.Y.
Danny Schechter The Fear is in the Room: Inside Our Unbrave Media World
Dave Zirin “Death Row” Talks Back to Etan Thomas
Robert Jensen and Robert Wosnitzer Crash
Dave Saldana A Political Parable With Swordfights [V for Vendetta — film]
Tom Engelhardt An Interview with Chalmers Johnson: Cold Warrior in a Strange Land
Molly Ivins The ‘Long War’? Oh, Goodie
Noam Chomsky Latin America And Asia Are At Last Breaking Free Of Washington’s Grip
Chris Bachelder A Soldier Upon a Hard Campaign
Ed Rampell Fear Brings McCarthy, Orwell Back Into Spotlight
Danny Schechter Tony Soprano and Iraq: The Mafia, the Military and the Media
Lila Rajiva Getting to the Point of No Return: A Conversation with Andre Vltchek
Vanessa Redgrave The Second Death of Rachel Corrie: Censorship of the Worst Kind [Also see:  Walter A. Davis Theater, Ideology and the Censorship of “My Name is Rachel Corrie”: The Play’s the Thing]
John Scagliotti Why Are There No Real Gays in “Brokeback Mountain”? [Also see: Brokeback Mountain: Pain is Not Enough]
Israelis ask Oscars to drop suicide bomb film
Only politics in Oscar race is films’ topics
Middle East tragedies vie for Oscars
Katherine Viner A Message Crushed Again
Ramzy Baroud Cartoon Awakening: Towards a Positive Media Strategy
UnDantéd Homerica The Criminaliad — Foreword: “An Enlightened Endeavor” by Jo Swift
Julian Borger Rickman slams ‘censorship’ of play about US Gaza activist
Michael Janofsky Bush’s Chat with Novelist Alarms Environmentalists
Corey Kilgannon Street Lit with Publishing Cred
Eleanor Bader Female Muralists Dip Brushes in Women’s History
Garrison Keillor On the Road Avec M. Lévy [If link fails, see here]
John Nichols Cheney’s Crimes
Dave Zirin The Xs and O’s of Social Change
Chris Bachelder The Jungle at 100
National Archives  A New Deal for the Arts
The New Deal arts projects
Mark Vallen Abstract Art & The Cultural Cold War [December 29, 2005 entry]  For more on this topic see Maxwell Geismar’s comments here at the 1958 and 1977 entries.
One Night at the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat Bestselling Indian author paints grim view of outsourcing jobs
Scott McLemee Impure Literature
John Doe Dimslow The Power and The Authority [12.20.05]
David Cromwell and David Edwards Harold Pinter, John Le Carré And The Media
Joe Keohane Public Enemy: Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ envisioned an America in thrall to a homespun facist dictator.
Mark Steel Has An Anti-war Campaign Ever Been So Mainstream?
Larry Beinhart  Abdication of the Artists
Lee Siegel  Dead Heat: A Horror Movie That Is Also Explicit Political Satire
Davey D The Richard Pryor Tribute Mix
Charlotte Higgins Anti-war Cry of a Peace Mom [Nobel Laureate Dario Fo has written a new play titled Peace Mom.]
Amnesty International Make Some Noise
Sean Wilentz The Rise of Illiterate Democracy
Peter Graff  Gallery Traces Anti-Semitism in Political Cartoons
Alexander Cockburn Pinter, Robeson, CIA  [below the Miller piece]
Matthew Rothschild Pinter Lays It All Out: Indict Bush, Blair
John Patterson Awakenings [This article obviously greatly overstates any shift in the media, etc.]
John Patterson What’s the Plot
John Patterson Phoney War Movie
Sarah Lyall Playwright Takes a Prize and a Jab at U.S.
Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn  “You Can’t Take Power Without a Struggle” The Lost John Lennon Interview (1971)
Harold Pinter Art, Truth & Politics – Nobel Lecture
The American Prospect Some Political Art Articles:
Richard Byrne The Good Book: The America portrayed by Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry…
Scott McLemee The Honorable Menace: The Literary Life – James T. Farrell…
Alex P. Kellogg Tupac Against the World [Tupak Shakur]
Julie Ardery Art and Fellowship
Tony Christini Partisan Fiction
Grady Hendrix Zombies Attack George Bush – Joe Dante’s Brilliant Anti-war Horror Show
Michael Bérubé “Die Hard” Diehard Catching Flak for Epic Iraq Flick [note the date]
The Masses – cover – June 1916 Covers from The Masses – 1913 -1917
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman All Things Bright and Beautiful
Chomsky/Herman/DiMaggio Q/A on the Iraq War
Bob Hoover NEA Urges Bee Season For Poetry
John Freeman ‘Beasts With No Nation’ by Uzodinma Iweala
Nathan Lee Two Young Radicals and Their Dovetailing Destinies — Exist: Not a Protest Film
Gary Hart “Terrorism Expert….” – The Scorpion’s Gate
Michiku Kakutani The Scorpion’s Gate
Paul Street Antonio Gramsci on Sesame Street
Lee Siegel “Better Than Fiction” – The Boondocks
Alan Riding In France, Artists Have Sounded the Warning Bells for Years
Lakshmi Choudry When Boys Will Be Jarheads
Reporters Without Borders Editor of Literary Review Gets Three Years in Prison
Henry Chu Home Is Also a Public Library: Illiterate Man Seeks Books So Poor Can Read
David Twiddy Doonesbury Still Feisty After 35 Years [Garry Trudeau]
Cate McQuaid Art Gets Angry
Alessandra Stanley  Engrossed in a World of Political Idealism [so-called]
Agence France Press Ten Years On, Nigeria’s Ogoni Minority Community Mark Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Death
Bibliofile at Outlook India Fiction Too Subversive [Also see Barthes quote on the power of fiction, here]
Alessandra Stanley Two Fictional Families, Neither Colorblind, but Only One Really Sees Black America
Noah Cicero Interviewed by Tao Lin
Jonah Raskin  Howl at FiftyJulia Stein Death of a Poet: Carol Tarlen (1943-2004)
Alessandra Stanley Bringing Out the Absurdity of the News
Alessandra Stanley Selling Sex, That Renewable Resource [TV review – Human Traficking]
Anthony Breznican Movies Sound A Call To Action
Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe Poetry as Resistance
Rajiv Rawat The Rising: Ballad of Mangal Paday
David Barsamian interviewed by Kasim Tirmizey Media and Propaganda
John Pilger The Silence of Writers: On Nobel Prize Winner Harold Pinter
Katrina vanden Heuvel Innocent Voices
Salman Rushdie  Europe, Turkey, the EU, Orhan Pamuk
Tony Christini Write a Political Novel?
Harold Pinter Torture and Misery in the Name of Freedom
Stephen Brown Playwright Harold Pinter Wins Nobel Literature Prize
Timothy Williams British Playwright – Harold Pinter – Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
Margaret Atwood On Flogging Poets and Catching Fish – Freedom of Expression
[see also an excerpt of George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press” – or Orwell’s full essay here]
Lee Siegel Rock in a Hard Place
Stuart Jeffries “I do give a damn” (David Cornwell, aka John Le Carré)
Laila Lalami (Moorish Girl) Fiction in the Age of Poverty
Mark Vallen What’s Left? Who’s Left? [9-23-2005 entry]
Caryn James Turning African Danger Into Safe Entertainment
Sharon Olds No Place for a Poet at a Banquet of Shame
Les Payne Our Modern-Day Grapes of Wrath
Bob Hoover Upton Sinclair – The Jungle
Bury the Dead – Artists and Theater Against the War in Iraq
Adam Graham-Silverman “Drug Abuse: The Constant Gardner and Drug Companies”
A. O. Scott Digging Up the Truth in a Heart of Darkness
Brendan Coyne Political Art Removed from California Display
Dan Halpern Lone Star: Kinky Friedman on the Campaign Trail
Dudley Cocke Art in a Democracy
Vijay Prashad Every Generation Does Not Get Its 1968

Paul Street “I’ve Got a Life to Live”: The Obliviousness of Boy-King George
Sudhanva Deshpande Harry Potter And The Dilemma Of The Left [If link fails, see here]
Mickey Z An Interview with Jordy Cummings
Olga R. Rodriguez Films Look at Mexican Border Town Slayings [If link fails, see here]
Jason Cowley A New Life for the Novel
Rachel Donadio Truth is Stronger than Fiction [If link fails, see here]
Lee Siegel “Action Sequence: Over There“ [If link fails, see here]
Eric Racher “A Response to Lyle Daggett’s Political Poetry”
Katy Ryan The Effects of Political Art
Caryn James The Intertwining Legacy of Terror Attacks and Fiction
Rob Kendt Stuff Happens…in LA: David Hare’s play about Blair, Bush and the Iraq invasion received its US premiere this week. How did it go down? Special report: Political theatre Related articles: My Name is Rachel / Bloody Sunday / Beyond Belief / Stuff Happens / Guantanamo / The Permanent Way / Justifying War / How the Iraq war has energised dramatists / Who needs farce? We’ve got politics / The arts world and the Iraq war
Louis Menand Missionary: Edmund Wilson and American Culture
Richard Dorment The Shock of the News
Terry Teachout When Drama Becomes Propaganda
Danny Schecter  “It’s Time for a Sequel to Over There”
Jody Minalgo Playwright Bears Green Party Flag
Michael Moore Says Documentary Already Has HMOs Spooked
Bruce Kirkland Tim Robbins at War: Actor enters stage left and takes aim at the lying politicians and their lapdog media
Stephanie McMillan Minimum Security
John Pilger From Iraq to the G8: The Polite Crushing of Dissent and Truth
Stacey D’Erasmo  ‘The Hummingbird’s Daughter’: A Saint with Grit [If link fails, see here]
Stephanie McMillan Minimum Security
Luis J. Rodriguez It’s Not a Frill: The Redemptive Power of Art
Huck Gutman Through the Prism of Human Collectivity
Robert Fisk Kingdom of Heaven: Why Ridley Scott’s Story Of The Crusades Struck Such A Chord In A Lebanese Cinema
Scott Baldauf India’s popular soap operas become a national soapbox: Some story lines include health information and appeals for tsunami victims
Victor Sonkin Salon: Will the imprisonment of billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky have any effect on literature?
Eric Allen Hatch Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins)
Charles Demers A Conversation with Tariq Ali: Part II
Lisa Sorg Scratching a niche: Indie, progressive presses target audiences looking for the stories behind the headlines
Stephanie McMillan Minimum Security
Howard Zinn The Scourge of Nationalism
Artwork Angers California Immigration Foes
Tom Engelhardt Laura Who? Politics in an Age of Fiction
Mark Vallen Art Show in LA Closed by Police see Sunday, May 08, 2005 entry
Juan Forero ‘Great Crime’ at Abu Ghraib Enrages and Inspires an Artist
Davey D Who is Assata Shakur and What Does She Mean to Hip Hop?
Mike Whitney Fighting Torture with Art: The Paintings of Fernando Botero
Brendan Coyne Artists Experience Déjà vu in “Bioterror” Case That Won’t Go Away
Dennis Loy Johnson Foetry Revived (Friday 22 April 2005 entry)
Andrea Hoag Novel on neo-Nazis opens new territory for Prose
Heidi Benson In a world of violence, inequality and moral chaos, Adrienne Rich’s voice will be neither silent nor content
Christopher Michaud Authors Make Case for Power of the Pen at Panel
Salman Rushdie The PEN and the Sword
Stephanie McMillan Fear and Art: Secret Service Raids Another Exhibit
Dan Molinski Colombian Artist Depicts Abu Ghraib Abuse
Ron Jacobs A Review of Greil Marcus’ “Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads”
Christopher Orr Hotel Reservations [If link fails, see here]
Michael Atkinson Cheadle survives a timid account of the Rwandan genocide: Hotel Rwanda
Carolyn Marshall In Steinbeck’s Birthplace, a Fight to Keep the Libraries Open
Art Hazelwood The Artist’s Role in Social Change [Sunday, March 27, 2005 entry]
Mark Vallen Withered Arts Journalism in LA? [Friday, March 25, 2005 entry]
Anthony Arnove Breaking the Boundaries
Kimberly Bird Poems to Shout (Marge Piercy)
Mickey Z. Weapons of Mass Deconstruction: The Revolutionary Potential of Art
Scott Richard Lyons Million Dollar Bigotry
Lydia Sargent Humor, Theater, and Social Change
José Guadalupe Posada José Guadalupe Posada My Mexico Calavera de D. Francisco I. Madero Calavera of Don Francisco I. Madero Broadside The American Mosquito Broadside
Mark Vallen Naji Al-Ali – Palestinian Cartoonist
Steve Almond How I managed to Galvanize the Right-Wing Hate Machine Without Really Trying
Jo-Ann Moss Writers Against War
Jesse Lemisch The Gates
Peter Weiss The Aesthetics of Resistance
Agence France Presse War Dominates the 2005 Sundance Film Festival Winners
Susan Griffin To Love the Marigold: Hope & Imagination
Tom Perry Egyptian Secular Writer Battles Religious State
Gabriella Coslovich The Politics of Art [If link fails, see here]
Dennis Loy Johnson Bad Eggers! Bad Moody! Bad Sontag! More on ULA: Tim Hall Fighting The War Against Publishing Nepotism / Claire Zulkey Interview / Andrew Stevens Swimming Against the Mainstream
Divide Art and Politics
Adisa Banjoko The Myth of the Hip Hop Protest
Judi Jennings Interacting Creatively Across Generations
Alice Lovelace The Art of Juvenile Justice: Innovative Practices for Transforming Youth
Marilyn A. Zeitlin Art Under Duress: El Salvador 1980-present
Stephen Duncombe Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture
Robert Shulman The Power of Political Art
Paul Krugman Worse Than [Bad] Fiction [If link fails, see here.]
The Political in Literature from Peace Party – Native American Contemporary Political Art
Dan Green renews the politics and art discussion at his weblog, a post to which I respond
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
Thom Yorke of Radiohead and historian/activist Howard Zinn Duty of Expression or Art and Politics
Pemmican political poetry, fiction, and criticism 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
Mark Vallen The Ballot and the Pallete at Art For A Change
Mark Vallen Why All Art Is Political
John Jordan The art of desertion (”Deserting the art to bunker”)
Trebor Sholz, Brian Holmes, and others Who is faking it: artists or activists, or both?
Rachel Konrad Steinbeck’s Hometown to Close Libraries
Tania Branigan Stars sign letter in support of playwright in hiding
Stephan Smith My Family in Iraq: Views on a Silenced Majority
Marc Cooper Gary Webb, RIP: No Thanks to the L.A. Times
Jerry Fresia A Call to Artists: Support Parecon
An interesting discussion on politics and fiction at Dan Green’s literary weblog The Reading Experience
James C. McKinley Jr. Solution to a Stalled Revolution: Write a Mystery Novel
E. Eduardo Castillo Rebel leader to pen a political fiction
FAQs Underground Literary Alliance
Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel The Plot Thickens…
Heather Lee Schroeder Political fiction inspires thought, debate on issues
Felicia R. Lee Enlisting Literature to Fight AIDS
Andre Vltchek Are We Alone, Arundhati Roy?
Sam Graham-Felsen Eminem Aims at Bush
Zachary Pincus-Roth Political Play
Ira Chernus Presidential Fiction: The Story Behind the Debates
Tom Engelhardt The Morning After
Fred Kaplan Truth Stranger than “Strangelove”
Larry Beinhart Politics & Mysteries The Librarian and American Hero story
Suzanne Charlé “The Fountain at the Center of the World” by Robert Newman Robert Newman
Lee Siegel Jumping Off the Page
Andrew Gumbel Tim Robbins: Acting on a Liberal Impulse
Ardain Isma Novel Injustices: Whither the Contemporary Novel?
John Pilger The Silence of Writers
John Pilger Our Writers’ Failure (II)
John Pilger Our Writers’ Failure (I)
Arundhati Roy Come September
John Pilger Hollywood Huurrah

___________________

See also:

by  Tony Christini

A recent “political novel” making the news, and sales — sounds somewhat reminiscent of, among other apocalyptic novels, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and James Morrow’s This is the Way the World Ends. Review excerpted below — “The Master of Entropy Shows What Could Happen If We Go On” by Joan Mellen:

The Road

by Cormac McCarthy

Nuclear holocaust has reduced the world to ash and rubble. A man and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” trek without purpose down a road to nowhere in death-defying starvation. Along the way, they pass renegades barbecuing their infants. There is no plot to Cormac McCarthy’s harrowing, brilliant new novel, a worthy successor to his masterpiece, Blood Meridian, because human history has drawn to a close.

The Road at times resembles Robinson Crusoe. The man reveals a profusion of ingenuity, siphoning drops of gasoline, digging deep into the burrows of an abandoned survival shelter for precious stores of food, even suturing his own deep, bloody wound inflicted by a sniper….

In The Road, McCarthy has produced the first major post-9/11 novel. He has revealed himself not to be writing an allegory, an abstract story about the consequences of human evil, but a political novel. Ignoring how this holocaust happened – it doesn’t matter – he reveals the likely result of the history we are living, and the politics of accepting passively the premises of a warrior government out of control.

The horrific images of suffering for which McCarthy has long been known have now been enlisted in the service of defiance….

In this Swiftian nightmare, horror proposes its reverse, protecting the soon-to-be “vanished world” as the father cares tenderly for his son….

Mainstay Press wasn’t invited either.

Elmo Will Not Absolve You

by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman:

Party tents are going up.

Getting ready for the National Book Festival on Saturday.

Hosted by the Library of Congress.

Sponsored by Target and AT&T.

And starring Laura Bush.

You will be seeing a lot of Laura Bush in the next couple of days.

Talking with authors.

Reading.

Hanging out with kids.

It’s just a nice cover for the killing.

Buzzflash reviews a John Le Carre spy novel:

“John Le Carre is the master spy novelist with a social conscience. Few popular writers have the ability to convey the complex scenarios and nuanced morality of the world that the protagonists Le Carre creates populate.”

A great editorial on the power of fiction, including great literature, to contribute to social change:

Watch out for poetic justice

Hindustan Times Editorial 

Is good literature just a story well told or verse set in perfect meter? Forget what critics may opine, the French police of the 19th century seem to have been possessed of more valuable judgment regarding the ‘real’ influence of literary writers. Nineteenth-century Paris police files, recently published in the form of a book, The Writers’ Police, reveal that many of the greatest writers living in the city at that time of turmoil and change in European history were kept under surveillance. Obviously, their vigilance did not stem out of fear of Arthur Rimbaud influencing a new Paris fashion of unkempt hair or of the unconventionality of Paul Verlaine’s love life.

The works of writers like Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac and Charles Dickens tended to be more in the line of a social commentary. From raging at the shallowness of the aristocracy to focusing attention on poverty and discrimination, fiction for the masses turned out to be a sharp political blade that hit the right places and became catalysts of change.

The influence they could sometimes exert can be gauged by US President Abraham Lincoln’s statement to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great [American civil] war.” Campaigner-for-changing-this-big-bad-world Arundhati Roy might now consider writing her second novel.

The great John Pilger, “Truth shall set us free” —

“There is a hunger among the public for documentaries because only documentaries, at their best, are fearless and show the unpalatable and make sense of the news. The extraordinary films of Alan Francovich achieved this. Francovitch, who died in 1997 , made The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie. THIS destroyed the official truth that Libya was responsible for the sabotage of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie in 1988. Instead, an unwitting “mule”, with links to the CIA, was alleged to have carried the bomb on board the aircraft. (Paul Foot’s parallel investigation for Private Eye came to a similar conclusion). The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie has never been publicly screened in the United States. In this country, the threat of legal action from a US Government official prevented showings at the 1994 London Film Festival and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. In 1995, defying threats, Tam Dalyell showed it in the House of Commons, and Channel 4 broadcast it in May 1995.”

Great article on the impact and effect of fiction and other arts — a view of aesthetics and social change: “How We Deal with Disease” by Iman Kurdi —

 

“We learnt much more from seeing Mark Fowler on our screens every week than from reading hundreds of leaflets or seeing a public information film. Partly this is because when we are entertained, we are stimulated and this makes us more open to respond to what we are shown. Good fiction leads us to respond both emotionally and intellectually; there is a sense of intimacy. Particularly in long-running fiction like a soap opera, we feel involved, we don’t feel informed: We understand.

“Fiction is undoubtedly powerful in conveying a message to its audience.”

Standout British filmmaker joins boycott of Israel

(Daily Star staff) 

Ken Loach, the critically acclaimed British filmmaker who won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has lent his support to the cultural boycott of Israel, according to a personal statement issued late last week…. 

Loach won the Palme d’Or for “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” set in the Irish War for Independence. He is one of the UK’s most controversial directors, in no small part because he is a die-hard leftist. Previous films include “My Name is Joe,” “Bread and Roses,” “Hidden Agenda” (which examined the British government’s “shoot to kill” policy during its troubles with the IRA) and “Land and Freedom” (which explored the political rhetoric at play during the Spanish Civil War and offers probably as complex and critical an insight into notions of resistance as Jean-Luc Godards’ “Ici et Ailleurs,” about Palestinian fighters in the early 1970s) “Hidden Agenda” and “Land and Freedom” won smaller awards at Cannes.

Nouvo Noir: Mystery and detective fiction is increasingly concerned not just with solving the crime, but with digging into the injustices of society

By Anne-Marie O’Connor

Once upon a time, American popular fiction was full of stories of social inequality and great injustice. Consider the fiction of writers such as John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, what might be called social realism.

Today, such themes may be less common in mainstream best-sellers, but they are alive in well in popular genre fiction – especially in the areas of crime fiction and mystery….

Dahr Jamail interviews Ray McGovern:

I like to refer to what my four-year-old granddaughter said when she saw me on TV. When it was all over she went to my daughter and said, “Mommy, that was grandpa. That means the other people are real too.” Now, that’s sort of cute on the surface, but think about what that means. If you don’t know someone in the picture, the other people aren’t real too. And we’re deprived even of the pictures of the carnage that’s going on in Iraq, and now in Lebanon. And we have to fess up to that and realize that unless we get our hearts involved in this, as well as our minds, we’re not going to be able to stand up and do our duty as American patriots and face down this situation and say to our government, “Enough. Enough. No more carnage. Bring our troops home from Iraq. And reign in this Israeli government that is using your helicopter gun ships, your fighter-bombers, your tanks, etc.”

Brief overview of Upton Sinclair’s life and work.

Ryan Bigge reviews US!

Jay Parini reviews US! — “a lark of a novel” by Chris Bachelder:

“Sinclair was the ultimate muckraker, the scourge of capitalists and greedy politicians, and a vibrant man of the left, when there was a left. Now he’s at the centre of a larky novel by Chris Bachelder. With his first novel, the inimitable Bear v Shark, Bachelder stepped unabashedly into the limelight, full of postmodern pizzazz. He has put his cleverness, and his unusual narrative skills, to good use in US! – a romp of a book (the word “novel” almost doesn’t stretch to include such a work) in which the great muckraker comes alive, again and again, dug up by his admirers, who need him desperately. Alas, he is assassinated again, too – over and over.”