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 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.”
 

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?

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.

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?

In art, the norms matter – along with the facts, the context, the technical proficiency…. Larry Beinhart: “The Right’s Jack Bauer Fantasy”

Also see: Fictive TV Torture Leading to Real Torture in Iraq, and Vice Versa and 24 – Isn’t It Just Torture? – interview by Marc Lee

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

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

“Novelist John Updike dead at 76: Was he a ‘great novelist’?“:

“The need to bend the truth, avoid certain realities, above all, not look too probingly at America’s social foundations affected his art, deflecting it and blunting it. In the more than 20 novels, there is far too much waste, secondary material, running in place, even showing off. As well, frankly, there is a good deal of mean-spiritedness directed toward those who fall outside of or reject Updike’s limited middle-class American universe.”

Amy Goodman reports:

Tim DeChristopher is an economics student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He had just finished his last final exam before winter break. One of the exam questions was: If the oil and gas companies are the only ones who bid on public lands, are the true costs of oil and gas exploitation reflected in the prices paid?

DeChristopher was inspired. He finished the exam, threw on his red parka and went off to the controversial Bureau of Land Management land auction that the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance called “the Bush administration’s last great gift to the oil and gas industry.” Instead of joining the protest outside, he registered as a bidder, then bought 22,000 acres of public land. That is, he successfully bid on the public properties, located near the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and Dinosaur National Monument, and other pristine areas. The price tag: more than $1.7 million.

He told me: “Once I started buying up every parcel, they understood pretty clearly what was going on … they stopped the auction, and some federal agents came in and took me out. I guess there was a lot of chaos, and they didn’t really know how to proceed at that point.”

Patrick Shea, a former BLM director, is representing DeChristopher. Shea told the Deseret News: “What Tim did was in the best tradition of civil disobedience, he did this without causing any physical or material harm. His purpose was to draw attention to the illegitimacy and immorality of the process.”

There is a long tradition of disrupting land development in Utah. In his memoir, “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey, the writer and activist, wrote: “Wilderness. The word itself is music. … We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination.”

Abbey’s novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang” inspired a generation of environmental activists to take “direct action,” disrupting “development.” As The Salt Lake Tribune reported on DeChristopher: “He didn’t pour sugar into a bulldozer’s gas tank. He didn’t spike a tree or set a billboard on fire. But wielding only a bidder’s paddle, a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won’t be opened to drilling anytime soon.”

Likewise, the late Utah Phillips, folk musician, activist and longtime Utah resident, often invoked the Industrial Workers of the World adage: “Direct action gets the goods.” …

Mark Vallen notes: Arts Stimulus Plan Petition – A petition calling on the new Obama administration to create a stimulus package for the arts was launched on January 20, 2009, by the Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) Washington D.C. think tank in alliance with the Split this Rock Poetry Festival.

Shelley Ettinger: “The Crab-Canning Ship is the story of a struggle by shipboard workers horribly exploited by the crabbing and processing industry. Its 1929 publication caused a sensation in Japan, and drew the imperial government’s attention and enmity, driving Kobayashi underground. In 1933 undercover police agents trapped him, captured him, beat and tortured him and, when he refused to squeal on his communist organizer comrades, murdered him. Fast forward to 2008-2009: the book is in the midst of a huge revival in Japan, where its message of class struggle resonates with masses of young workers facing cuts, takebacks, layoffs, rising prices, all the ills of the deepening capitalist economic crisis.”

Ettinger on the Acclaimed Young Writer and lit establishment ideology: “Virtually every time I’ve ever seen the case made that a politically conscious approach to art is illegitimate, and this certainly applies to the case made by Mr. AYW, it relies on three logical (actually political!) bases. None is explicitly stated. Each is assumed to be understood. Each is mind-bogglingly wrong.”

Wikileaks – “Harry Nicolaides’ Verismilitude“:  On 19 Jan 2008, the Australian author and academic Harry Nicolaides was sentenced by a Thai court to three years prison for Lese Majeste — criticizing the King. The sentence follows Mr. Nocolaides arrest in August 2007, allegedly for this passage in his 2005 novel:

From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives “major and minor” with a coterie of concubines for entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a son they conceived together, for an undisclosed indiscretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumored that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives and she betrayed him, she and her family would disappear with their name, familial lineage and all vestiges of their existence expunged forever.

For the full novel and further information, see: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Imprisoned_Australian_author_Harry_Nicolaides_censored_novel:_Verismilitude%2C_2005

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/01/19/thai.jail/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

Pointed incoherence is hallmark of Jonathan Franzen’s thoughts about the social novel (fiction that is especially sociopolitically engaged). This telling garble is demonstrated in the 1996 essay Franzen wrote on the social novel – both the original and revised version, “Perchance to Dream” in Harpers and “Why Bother?” in How to Be Alone – and recurs most recently in an interview this January 2009 at 5th Estate where Franzen states with trademark non sequitur:

[When] young I actually thought I was the only one with [more-or-less progressive sociopolitical] perceptions. … I think the difference now is that I recognize that there’s a small but non-zero segment of the population that feels and thinks in all of those literary ways….

Franzen falsely conflates “literary” with enlightened sociopolitical views. Franzen has shifted from trying to reveal public reality for a broad audience to writing for a much smaller audience that shares his sense of the “literary,” whatever the sociopolitical. Continue reading The Terminal Glide Path of the Established

Stateville hobble-hopped his mangled body into the lobby searching for coffee or maybe a pitcher of ice water with slices of lime. Coffee today. Stateville slung a golden mug from his ribs and poured a brew. He noticed a line. He loved lines. He hobble hopped over. He liked to join bank lines especially when he had no money to give or take. “They pay well in this joint? Slave you much? Boss you all day long?” Stateville passed through life as perpetual job seeker, traveler, lost soul, wise man, kid eccentric, elderly beggar, philosopher, clown, worker. Today he joined a line for workers behind a woman with purple and orange plaits cascading from large skull, one of several dozen people in line from the neighborhoods. “They want those who can talk is what I hear. Mhhmh. Not just anyone can talk, you ask me. There’s the war, elections, the weather, family, land, God. God is good to talk.”

“‘No gods no masters’ – no ma’am.” Stateville peered over his golden cup. “No god ever offered me a job. No god ever built me a home, offered me bread, gave me a lift, took my hand, led me anywhere but here where I am already. What do I need what don’t exist for? Fairy tales are fine but – is what is – all gods are make believe. Is what is. Far as anyone knows. Now, you got a great story? Fine, do tell. Story is not god. Story is signs and story is what is. But God no.”

“Mhhmh. You won’t get far without God in your life. You got to believe.”

“I believe in democracy not theocracy. ‘No gods’ – I tell it straight – ‘no master’.” Continue reading Stateville Speaks

ZNet Commentary:

His song titles are blunt and straightforward: “We’re All Immigrants,” “The Injustice System,” “Military Recruiters Lie,” etc., etc. Metaphors, poetic devices are completely absent here; his lyrics include sections like this one: Continue reading “Can You Handle Tha Truth” by Alexander Billet

“Writer of 1970s ‘Ecotopia’ Makes a Comeback in the Green Era” by Anita Weier:

It is useful to understand “liberatory” in two basic ways for literature. In the past the term in lit has been used mainly in regard to “women’s lib” of the ’60s, ’70s as far as I’m aware – I don’t recall that the lit critics of the ’30s and so on use it, though it nearly gets into the title of one of VF Calverton’s books, and maybe it is used in passing somewhere or another. More or less progressive critics of that time used words more like “revolutionary” and “proletarian” and “Marxist” or “materialist”. One broad basic sense of liberatory is in reference to about any sort of freeing or advancing or progressing phenomena of literature, especially in regard to normative issues (morals and ethics…politics and culture) and less so (secondarily or as derivative) aesthetically. So, for example, the multicultural expansion of recent decades is liberatory in this sense even when it occurs in basically a liberal and conservative or other status quo framework. In this sense, “liberatory” is a synonym for “progressive” (or “enlightened” – as in of the Enlightenment – or moving toward “ideal”) however limited or bound that progress may be. Elements of liberalism and conservatism contain some liberatory aspects also (especially in having some roots in the Enlightenment or other relation to it). All this understands liberatory in a very broad sense of the term.

The primary and most crucial sense in which we might understand liberatory is to distinguish progressive or revolutionary literature from status quo work that blocks or slows progress (let alone revolution) actively or passively, inadvertently or knowingly. Again, the term refers in this use mainly to normative respects of literature as revealed in a story’s substance, effects, functions, and consequences. Revolutionary lit, or to be more clear, liberatory revolutionary lit is the strongest sense in which the term might be used – again referring essentially to normative revolution, whether or not the aesthetics are also much revolutionized or advanced. Continue reading Liberatory Literature

The Complicit Culture

In literature, as in politics, and plenty of life, there can be a big difference between liberal and left. Literature is not somehow mystically ideology free. Don Quixote, as with many other classics, was written as propaganda. A lot of progressive views are to the left of the basic liberal views of periodicals like The Nation, n+1, The Guardian, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, etc. Substantial left views should be heard in national publications, especially since left views, as I understand them, and as polls reveal, are largely popular views. Instead, many left views are severely drowned out “even” in liberal media, as great media watch organizations like FAIR and Media Lens demonstrate. (Of course in my view conservative and reactionary views are typically as bad as or worse than liberal views.)

Obviously there are some ideological differences between basically liberal publications. There are significant differences between, say, The Nation and the New York Times, and so on. Alexander Cockburn, for example, is a left columnist for the predominantly liberal Nation magazine (though his column space was halved a few years back). The New York Times has no corresponding left columnist, though Paul Krugman occasionally comes close. The Nation is basically a liberal publication with some left tendencies, and its commentary on literature reflects its predominantly liberal emphasis, with many left views blocked out and discredited. The New Yorker, though predominantly liberal, lies to the right of the Nation. Though liberalism and its variants evince some genuine qualities, they also possess predominant and atrocious deficiencies, crucial to reveal. Continue reading Establishment Ideology – Suffocating and Oppressive

Frequent New York Times contributor and novelist Benjamin Kunkel has an article “Dystopia and the End of Politics” in the establishment journal Dissent that is the most recent in a lengthening line of State of Fiction (SoF) commentaries by various authors, picking up with James Wood’s book How Fiction Works (and related articles), tracing through a series of challenges to HFW, hopping to Zadie Smith’s “Two Paths for the Novel,” and then shifting to Kunkel’s piece with no basic new turns in the thinking of the status quo writers amid all declarations and pronouncements lavish, banal, seeking. Some parts of these essays hit the mark in noting the severe limits of various novels and their types, yet the status quo State of Fiction analysts can’t or won’t turn their heads far enough to note or to compensate for, let alone adequately address, ideological binds administered by the caging hands that feed, in academia and commerce.[1] 

In Dissent, the longtime cold war journal of Swiftian title, Kunkel writes like a character out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, rendering himself chaotically familiar and essentially inept. Chaotic because reasonable insight mixes with misprision leading to hapless assertions and vacuous conclusions.[2] As for content, Kunkel, focusing on all too prevalent sterile lit surrounds, looks to fly to fertile land, plunging instead into sand. Kunkel’s article stands as one of the many pinched walls and series of iron bars of the literature establishment, likewise the writings of Bolaño, at least as they function in the US, though Bolaño’s work is less familiar and less inept and contains a number of enduring qualities. (Kunkel’s writing can come across as less sophisticated or refined than that of the larger lit establishment, possibly willfully so, thus it may appear more evidently flawed to some, more bemusing to others, and so on. That the sentences in his Dissent article hang like debris clouds freeze-framed after a building collapse merely provides extra asthmatic effect. Kunkel may seem an easy or unnecessary object of criticism, but he remains an establishment outcropping, visible enough for critique.) Continue reading Kunkel, Bolaño, Ngugi, and the State of Fiction

Oh man, it was a tough day to stand by President George Bush, even for me, his main PR man, yours truly, Stan D. Garde. They threw everything they had at us today, everything but the book. They fired shoes, sure, you heard about those, size 10, truly a coward’s size, but we also ducked, dodged, and skirted random machine gun fire, rocket propelled grenades, and assorted other small arms fire attacks, half a dozen mortar rounds, and miscellaneous other missiles. Man, where’s the love, man? We liberated these ungrateful Oilans. You would think they would at least give us a pass for that gift. Not so. Instead it’s like they think we blew up their country and slaughtered their people and tried to steal their oil. Oh well, it’s probably only a minority here out to kill us. I’m sure the masses still love us. Well, it’s not like we’re too much safer on our homeland streets back in the good old US of A, you know, what with all those raging pot smokers and immigrant service workers and smart-aleck rappers we need to keep locking up in record numbers. Just what this world is coming to, I haven’t the faintest idea. Fortunately, reality this past century or so is totally optional especially now that we’ve got all the crucial propaganda safely on our side, billions and billions of dollars worth of glorious gloss in ever more righteous e-gaze and garde. Oila for the Oilans! I say. We’re all Oilans now. Continue reading Oilan Shoe to the Head

John Pilger:

One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama? … He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: “They have nowhere else to go.”

Not yet. If there is a happy ending to the Groundhog Day of repeated wars and plunder, it may well be found in the very mass movement whose enthusiasts registered voters and knocked on doors and brought Obama to power. Will they now be satisfied as spectators to the cynicism of “continuity”? In less than three months, millions of angry Americans have been politicised by the spectacle of billions of dollars of handouts to Wall Street as they struggle to save their jobs and homes. It as if seeds have begun to sprout beneath the political snow. And history, like Groundhog Day, can repeat itself. Few predicted the epoch-making events of the 1960s and the speed with which they happened. As a beneficiary of that time, Obama should know that when the blinkers are removed, anything is possible.

From Edwin Muir’s thoughtful The Estate of Poetry (1962):

“I’ve been trying to measure the gap between the public and the poet, and to find some explanation why it is so great…. The first allegiance of any poet is to imaginative truth…but it does not mean that he should turn inward into the complex problems of poetry, or be concerned with poetry as a problem. That is something which has commonly happened in the last fifty years. There was some excuse for it after the years of experiment associated with Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound. To them, about 1910, poetry seemed to have come to a dead end, and intense thought had to be given to it. The experiments of that time and the succeeding years have become a part of literary history. As they were new and strange when they were first attempted, they were found difficult by the reader; and they seem to have left for a time in the minds of poets and critics the belief that poetry should be difficult. The experimenters have done their work, and we should be thankful to them. There have been many experimenters in English poetry: Chaucer was one; and Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Wordsworth were all experimenters. The experimenters of forty years ago did something to poetry and something for poetry. One kind of poetry was written before T.S. Eliot, and another kind after him. But the point of an experiment is that it should solve the particular problem set for it. This was done in the twenties…. There remains the temptation for poets to turn inward into poetry, to lock themselves in to a hygienic prison where they speak only to one another, and to the critic, their stern warder. In the end a poet must create his audience, and to do that he must turn outward. Even if he is conscious of having no audience, he must imagine one. That may be the way to conjure it out of the public void.” Continue reading Edwin Muir on Poetry, the Public, and Audience – in The Estate of Poetry