Category: Uncategorized

Dismissing the West

by Victor Sonkin

          and

Russia’s New War and Peace

by Christina Lamb 

A RUSSIAN artist is being heralded as the new Tolstoy after his debut novel sold out within four weeks in Moscow despite being a daunting 1,500 pages long.

Maxim Kantor, 48, achieved fame on the Russian underground art scene of the 1980s and 1990s and has 140 etchings in the British Museum. He decided to write his modern-day War and Peace because he was so disillusioned by his country’s experience of democracy.

“I always thought I’d write a big novel about what happened to my country and to the world,” he said. “It was obvious that in the last 20 years we were passing through a very dramatic and important period and big questions needed to be asked about freedom and civilisation.

“I had been thinking about it for years. Then one day I was suddenly 44 and I thought if I don’t start now, I never will.”

He spent four years on the epic work, The Drawing Textbook, which opens with the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader in 1985 and follows the subsequent 20 years of change in Russia.

Although it traces the fortunes and thwarted loves of one family of intelligentsia, it is also a political satire with a huge cast of artists, critics, secret policemen, oligarchs and politicians, including Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin and even Tony Blair.

“The book is about the crisis of Christian ethics, about the twilight of Europe and European humanism,” Kantor explained. “It’s about love. It’s about Russia’s fate. It’s about what freedom really is and whether the last 20 years have all been for nothing.”

When the book was released six weeks ago, word of mouth about its explosive contents resulted in the sale of 1,000 copies on the first day, even though it costs a hefty £27. The first print run of 5,000 was sold within a month and a further 3,000 within the past two weeks, making it Russia’s fastest selling first novel.

Kantor has been overwhelmed by the response. He has received hundreds of letters from readers, acclaim from critics describing it as “a political earthquake”, and interest from publishers from London to Milan. Valery Melnikov, of the daily newspaper Kommersant, called it “the first great Russian novel since Dr Zhivago” and said he felt on reading it as “if a bomb had gone off”.

Despite the book’s ambitious sweep, Kantor insists he never intended it to be so long. “First I thought it would be 300 pages. Then when it was already 400 I thought I still haven’t answered the important questions, so I just kept going.”

The book has an unusual structure. Each chapter begins with a couple of pages on drawing, which together form a textbook. After every two fiction chapters, there is a political chronicle commenting on the economy, the arts, and world events such as the war in Iraq.

Events hang round the Richter dynasty of German Jews, loosely based on Kantor’s own family. “My mother is a Russian from a northern Russian village and very severe, while my father is a Jew from Argentina, very intellectual, a philosopher who was imprisoned by Stalin.”

Pavel Richter, the main character, is an artist who falls in love with a journalist but, in true Tolstoy tradition, is betrayed. “The love story is a mirror of what happens to the country, the betrayal of values.”

The book pulls no punches with its exposé of corruption and biting portraits of those in power, as well as oligarchs, their characterisations based on Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky. It describes Yeltsin as a drunk and “an uncouth loudmouth with a big, meaty head”, then moves on to the teetotal Putin.

“Some citizens took fright at the arrival of the new president,” he wrote. “What scared them was that the tidy man with his eyes closed together was a colonel in the state security service; an employee of that awful KGB that had been used to frighten them all their lives. ‘What’s going on?’ they asked. ‘We spent all that time fighting for democracy, we unmasked the tyrant, and now look what’s happened! They’ve appointed a KGB colonel to run the country!’” Many publishers were relucant to take it on, well aware of apparent contract killings in a climate of hostility towards those who dare to question authority. When Kantor finally found a brave publisher, he insisted the book be brought out immediately.

It has caused consternation among the community of which Kantor was long part. Fellow artists feel betrayed at his exposé, particularly as he blames the intelligentsia for Putin. “You have to realise,” says one of his characters, “he was appointed by people with the most democratic of convictions.”

Kantor has no regrets: “One of the reasons I wrote this book was shame. People in Russia feel cheated. All these words — ‘democracy’, ‘progress’ and ‘bright future’ — we aspired to have become nonsense and one of the reasons is the betrayal by us in the intelligentsia.”

He saves much of his ire for Blair. “British society has got used to evildoing,” he writes, citing arms sales and the Iraq war. “Britain is a country I have adored since childhood and which to me embodied certain standards of morality and conscience. But over the last eight years that has been lost and I blame Blair and his hypocrisy for destroying it.”

Fast Food Nation Makes Headlines

by Mickey Z

In almost every movie ever made, at some point, a character will consume animal products: a cheeseburger, a steak, a tuna sandwich, an omelet, a slice of pizza, a milk shake…whatever. Often, the script will even have characters specifically voice their love for such fare. In the reviews of these films, of course, you will see no mention of this. No film reviewer would ever condemn a movie simply because the protagonist ate and enjoyed, say, a grilled cheese sandwich. However, if you were to release a movie that directly addressed the standard American diet and animal consumption, every wiseass writer would be poised and ready to get glib and trivialize the message. It’s all part of the subtle, daily conditioning we endure. If you don’t believe me, check out some of the headlines for “Fast Food Nation”
reviews:
 
“‘Fast Food’ serves a lot to chew on” (San Jose Mercury News) “It’s a whopper!” (Edmonton Sun) “Beefing Up ‘Fast Food Nation'” (Washington Post) “Mistake on a bun” (Toronto Star) “‘Fast Food Nation’ bites off too little as a drama” (Seattle Post
Intelligencer) “‘Fast Food Nation’ serves up revolting food for thought” (Los Angeles Daily) “Linklater spoon-feeds audience ‘Fast Food Nation'” (Reno Gazette-Journal) “Order of ‘Fast Food’ difficult to stomach” (Boston Herald)
 
Then we have A.O. Scott, film reviewer for the newspaper of record, the New York Times. Scott’s review (“Will ‘Fast Food Nation’ spoil your appetite?”) wastes no time in mocking the movie’s mission. In the first sentence, Scott broaches “the subject of spinach.” To Scott, “Fast Food Nation” “dwells on conditions in the feed lots and slaughterhouses” where cows are “future hamburgers.” Thus, he says, one cannot help but indulge the “impulse to point out that contaminated leafy greens have recently sickened more people than dirty meat.” Scott evens add: “So there.”
 
Following that, this polemic disguised as a review still doesn’t talk about the film itself. Instead, Scott gleefully points out that, at Cannes, “American journalists bragged (or at least joked) about heading for the local McDonald’s after the “Fast Food Nation” screening, as if to prove they had resisted its lessons.” Did Scott finally discuss the movie after this? Nope. He chose instead to quote Bruce Willis (who appears in the film) as saying, “Most people don’t like to be told what’s best for them.”
 
Eventually, Scott gets around to saying a few positive things about “Fast Food Nation”, but how many folks were still reading the review at that point? It isn’t until the last paragraph that he mentions the “mute, helpless suffering of the cows,” and calls the film “necessary and nourishing.”
 
If I was a pithy headline writer, I might say: “New York Times: Junk Food Journalism.”
 
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net/

Legislators of the World

Adrienne Rich

In “The Defence of Poetry” 1821, Shelley claimed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. This has been taken to suggest that simply by virtue of composing verse, poets exert some exemplary moral power – in a vague unthreatening way. In fact, in his earlier political essay, “A Philosophic View of Reform,” Shelley had written that “Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged” etc. The philosophers he was talking about were revolutionary-minded: Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft.

And Shelley was, no mistake, out to change the legislation of his time. For him there was no contradiction between poetry, political philosophy, and active confrontation with illegitimate authority. For him, art bore an integral relationship to the “struggle between Revolution and Oppression”.

The Body in Pain

by Arthur C. Danto

Botero’s images, by contrast, establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims, whose suffering we are compelled to internalize and make vicariously our own. As Botero once remarked: “A painter can do things a photographer can’t do, because a painter can make the invisible visible.” What is invisible is the felt anguish of humiliation, and of pain.

‘Books Liberate’ is theme of 2006 international book fair in Venezuela

BY RÓGER CALERO  

As part of the Venezuelan government’s efforts to make world literature more widely accessible, Chávez announced that the Ministry of Culture will begin distributing 1.5 million free copies of a three-volume edition of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Thousands began lining up as soon as the fair opened to get their copies of this classic.

A selection from a conference of European writers at Leningrad, Summer 1963.

One can talk about the crisis in the novel only when literature becomes charged with radical scepticism, the conviction that it is impossible to know reality and that human existence on earth has no meaning at all. And let me say too that literary tendencies which are in disagreement with this total scepticism, which in their programme are satisfied with descriptions of certain isolated and incomplete elements of life, which want to create their own relationships and to abandon all social and moral responsibility, these tendencies themselves represent one of the manifestations of the crisis in the novel….

Both high quality and poor quality literature can have no major social or political effect? Much humor. 

Drug Industry Caught Covering Up Propaganda Book

By Tim Edwards

In a recent story in the New York Daily News drug lobbyists were found to be secretly endorsing a new novel aimed at scaring the American public into not ordering prescription medication from Canada. The novel focused on swaying the opinion of importing drugs from Canada in order to recoup some of the 1.7 billion dollars lost to the Canadian market each year.  In one of the most outrageous attempts of propaganda by the pharmaceutical companies to date, they reportedly offered $100,000 to the co-authors and publishers in an attempt to keep the details of the novel under raps when the project reportedly fell through at the end of July.  Julie Chrystyn began writing the novel in early April. The book details a Croatian terrorist group who uses Canadian Pharmaceutical websites in order to sell fatal drugs to unsuspecting American consumers. Julie titled the book “The Spivak Conspiracy” after a good friend of hers Kenin Spivak. Spivak later joined to help Julie write the book after Julie had submitted the first 50 pages to PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) for review and editorial suggestions.  Spivak told New York Daily News, “They said they wanted it somewhat dumbed down for women, with a lot more fluff in it, and more about the wife of the head Croatian terrorist, who is a former Miss Mexico.” PhRMA wanted to change these aspects in the story in order to appeal to women who are the most loyal consumers of Canadian Pharmacies.  When confronted about the propaganda novel, Ken Johnson, executive vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America acknowledged the scheme but attempted to shift the blame.  Since Spivak and Chrystyn denied PhRMA’s $100,000 offer, they have since finished the latest version of the novel which is set o release at the beginning of next year. If you are interested in ordering your prescription medication at 30 to 70 percent less than at your local pharmacy, visit this Consumer Advocacy website for more information on ordering from an online no prescription pharmacy….

Two War Novels

While I was reading All Over but the Shoutin (the book I just reviewed), I was also reading All’s Quiet on the Western Front. I did not expect two war novels–or, more accurately, two anti-war novels–but that is what I got, though the styles varied vastly….

Venezuelan Book Fair

President Hugo Chavez inaugurated Thursday the Second Venezuelan International Book Fair (FILVEN) with Cuba as its guest of honor….

President Chavez addressed the opening ceremony after having handed out copies of a massive edition of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables to workers of the “Negra Hipolita Mission,” a social program aimed at helping Venezuelans in situations of extreme poverty.

The Venezuelan leader said: “The Empire sows death with its weapons. In contrast, these are our guns: books, ideas, culture.” 

Earlier, participants had attentively listened and applauded the reading of the poem “Che,” by its author Miguel Barnet, to start off the tribute that the Book Fair will pay to the historical legacy of Ernesto Che Guevara…..

UPDATE:
Venezuela Book Fair Wraps Up with Tribute to the Cuban Five

Havana, Nov 21 (ACN) Venezuela’s Second International Book Fair
(FILVEN) came to an end in Caracas Sunday with a presentation of books
related to the case the five Cubans serving long-term prison sentences
in the United States for having uncovered terrorist activities being
planned against Cuba.

Several books written by the Cuban Five men were presented at the Cuba
pavilion with family members of the five revolutionaries and Venezuelan
Minister of Culture Francisco Sesto. The books included Gaviotas
blancas (White doves), the latest book of poems by Cuban Five member
Ramon Labanino; Inseparables an essay by fellow Cuban Five member
Antonio Guerrero; and La pequena nina y el hombre boa (The little girl
and the human boa), dedicated to Ivette, the daughter of their comrade
Rene Gonzalez.

FILVEN organizers noted that the 2007 edition of the book fair will
focus on the United States, where books by authors excluded by the
large US publishing houses will be sold.

Ramon Medero, president of the National Book Center, said: “We hope to
bring together writers with a history of resistance from the
Afro-American and Hispanic communities who have struggled within a
repressed and muzzled society. We hope to give them the space they are
denied in that empire in decline.”

While the fair came to a close in Caracas, it now spreads out to the
rest of the country as well as neighboring Cucuta, Colombia through
November 30, with poetry readings and book presentations scheduled.

Homeland
A Novel
Paul William Roberts

The year is 2050. The US is by now a global empire, sealed off from an outside world that has been reduced to a series of wars against several Chinese factions. America is little more than a wasteland. The great cities have disintegrated into memories of a bygone glory. New York has become a tourist haunt and theme park. Washington is the hub for central command operations, and only those on official business ever visit the capital. The president and Vice President, along with the Secretaries of State and Defense, are no longer identified for reasons of national security. There is no sense of the past. History, as we know it, ceases to exist….

Poorly done propaganda novel

by M. Cooper

There’s nothing wrong with a “propaganda novel” — a work of fiction intended to influence the reader in a political sense. In fact, propaganda novels have a long and honorable traditions, with some prime example being Hemingway’s _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ and Malraux’s _Man’s Fate_. But, and here’s the kicker, the propaganda novel must also work as a novel, with plot and characterization.

State of Fear is a disappointment. Cardboard characters and an unconvincing Swiss-cheese plot interspersed with footnotes, graphs, and documentation. Crichton could have done better. In fact, Crichton *has* done better. But, this time, his agenda seems to have gotten the better of him.

By the way, the graph on page 468 (of the paperback edition) is a cheat. It’s a bar chart of hurricane strikes decade by decade. Only the final bar doesn’t represent a decade, but only three years. And, it omits the very active hurricane seasons of 2005 and 2005. The result is misleading . . . deliberately? Readers of this book would be well advised to pick up a copy of Darrell Huff’s book, _How to Lie With Statistics_.

Against Silence by Shelley Walia

The Power of Film and Literature in France

by Mohammed al Mazyoodi
 

Nathaniel Herzberg of the French newspaper ‘Le Monde’ believes that the film ‘Indigenes’ is not the only example of artwork that has had an impact upon politics. Victor Hugo’s ‘Le Notre Dame de Paris’ contributed to the establishment of an investigative body for historical monuments and Mervyn LeRoy’s film ‘Escape’ played a significant role in the criminalization of penal labor in the United States. Herzberg stated that the production team and the crew of ‘Indigenes’ have “defeated policies and is a reminder that film can change the world in difficult times.”

…

The Time of the Toad by Louis Black

On anarchist fiction by Bill Whitehead

Heart Beats on the Left: Radical Strategies for the Novel by Eric Darton

More on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, from “Ben and Alice”

Film made of Jose Saramago’s political novel Blindness

Good interview with socially engaged Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o

An old note on the Radical Novel Reconsidered series

Edward Abbey and The Monkeywrench Gang 

Autobiography — Jose Saramago

Linklater, Sinclair, Fast Food — new film

Bicentenaire by Lyonel Truillot — a Haitian “committed novel”

The Silences of David Lodge by Terry Eagleton

On The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell

On Creators by Paul Johnson

Howard Fast — “Prolific radical novelist who championed the cause of America’s common people” also see this Howard Fast page.

Gayle Brandeis — “Walk in Their Shoes” and Self Storage

Richard Wright and Native Son

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The American Way of Gore 

Pierre Tristam

“On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations. On the right side of the wing are the jaw wounds, gas cases, nose, ear, and neck wounds. On the left the blind and the lung wounds, pelvis wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the testicles, wounds in the intestines. Here a man realizes for the first time in how many places a man can get hit.”

The passage is from Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Paul Bäumer, the hero, also reflects about death: “We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent, more varied and terrible.”

In the United States, the dead and wounded of the Iraq war haven’t been so fortunate as to be grown accustomed to. They’ve been ignored. Chalked up to an abstraction indistinguishable from the kind of “dead” Americans see on their nightly television shows and in Shwartzenegger movies. “In any given period during prime time viewing hours,” the Boston Globe once reported, “there are at least 50 people killed, shot, maimed, or raped across the spectrum of broadcast and cable television channels.” The dead and wounded of the Iraq war are barely visible because they can’t compete with the numbers in prime time”neither in factual numbers nor in dramatic effect. Prime time’s dead are more interesting. They’re simple. They usually have no names, make no emotional demands, and they’re excellent props for plots that us! e them as means to obvious ends: within forty-eight minutes”if it’s an hour-long drama and the ads for vagina l lubricants and other orificial commodities are excluded””justice” has been done, the dead have been avenged, usually by killing those who killed them, and wisecracks have been exchanged all around. The credits, as they roll, are as meaningless as the names on a war memorial. The 11 o’clock news, local as it is, won’t even mention the real dead in those real war zones far, far away.

When an American soldier dies his story is written up in his hometown paper, powerfully enough usually, but the story’s effect is limited to that newspaper’s readership zone. There is no totality in the reporting of war casualties, no sense that one soldier’s death, no matter where from, affects the whole nation. A town in Montana will ache for a lost son by itself, as if it alone is experiencing loss. What mourning and suffering does take place is solitary because inherently isolated. Existentialism at its bitterest, though don’t expect our information society ever to touch on the subject more than gingerly. It’s an aspect of that sickness of compulsive “localism” in American journalism: if it’s not local, it’s not relevant. If twelve Americans from other states are killed in a single day, your state, should !

….

Gospel of George Bushby Denise Giardina

AND HE TAUGHT them, saying:

1. Blessed are the rich, for they have more than they need and still they take with such joy.

2. Blessed are those who mourn, for their numbers shall multiply.

3. Blessed are the meek, especially the liberals, for they will not stand up to me.

4. Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness, for they may wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills the fastest.

5. Blessed are those who are not merciful, for they shall laugh upon those without health insurance.

6. Blessed are the pure in ideology, for they shall promote religious fascism.

7. Blessed are the warmongers, for they shall control the world’s resources.

8. Blessed are those who persecute, for they shall trample upon the First Amendment.

9. Blessed are you when you are an abject failure, yet people still think you’re doing a fine job.

10. Blessed are you when you base your policies upon a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture. You violate the consciences of millions of Americans. But they’re going to Hell anyway.

11. Blessed are the undecided and those who don’t vote, for you allow me to get away with murder.

12. Blessed are the Americans, for God loves us better than anyone else.

13. Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But I tell you, do unto others before they do unto you. And be sure to use cluster bombs.

…

On the effect of literature in prison: 

Dinitia Smith writes: 

Mr. Richter, 56, who has been working in prisons for 33 years, has no statistics testifying to the program’s success or its effect on recidivism rates. But, he said: “When we first began there were lots of incidents of violence. It was nothing for somebody to walk into that unit and see three or four kids waiting in shackles to be put in disciplinary lockdown.” Nowadays, he said, “we have very few incidents of violence. We may have a fight once every three months.”

For Tyler, charged with armed robbery, the program, “brings you into a whole new life for a brief period. Whatever you’re facing here, you can put it aside.”

The boys stay at the jail for an average of four to eight months. Eighty-five percent are convicted and go to adult prisons where there are few programs like this. What’s the point of offering them this brief look at literature? “If there is a salvageable lot, it’s these kids,” Mr. Richter said. “You can see it after they’ve been here a while. Their eyes grow a little less hard. They begin to believe there is hope for them.”

A new edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the novel reassessed.

Edward Rothstein writes:

In one early chapter, for example, the fictional Senator Bird of Ohio, who had voted for the Fugitive Slave Act, is brought face to face with just such a fugitive in desperate need. His abstract political conviction is suddenly challenged by the suffering human being before him. “The magic of the real presence of distress — the imploring human eye, the frail trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony — these he had never tried. He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenseless child.”

This is just what Stowe tries to do again and again: to force the imagination to shift from abstractions to the concrete.