A Practical Policy

In the Declaration of Emancipation I’ve recently rewritten the (US/13 Colonies) Declaration of Independence, by simply re-using much of its language, and making it applicable to the Americas as a whole, and changing the title to reflect the emancipation manifestos and legislation freeing the Russian serfs and US slaves.  

Because I incorporate so much of the original text, it’s in a sense co-authored with the Declaration of Independence signers, though modified, updated, expanded somewhat. 

A big factual text I’ve started on is the “U.S. Military Counterinsurgency Manual, December 2006” which I’ve begun to reconstrue ultimately in novelistic or epic imaginative form as a Field Guide to Revolution for defeating not a counterinsurgency (or COIN, in the military’s acronym) but for defeating counterrevolutionary (CORE) forces like corporations and states and so on, and for carrying out a liberatory revolution (LIBREV) by revolutionaries. 

Again, I simply incorporate very much of the actual counterinsurgency manual – minus the violence – including sentences, paragraph structure, ideas and information while modifying wherever necessary to produce a liberatory revolutionary approach, ironically co-written, in a sense, with the military and the outside scholars they involved.

In some ways it starts out sounding like the opening of an epic novel, so I note it as such. This nearly 300 page military manual could be rewritten to incorporate more novelistic features to render it more in depth a novel of ideas or an imaginative epic of some sort.

The broader implications of this are that there is an ever growing number of such state-corporate type documents being produced at local, national and international levels, everything from economic treatises, to sweeping health care legislation and documents, to environmental manifestos, corporate rights law documents and so on. Some NGO documents may be somewhat liberatory, plenty of documents are reactionary, all could be, maybe should be re-imagined, closely to or wholly out of their nonfiction form. Continue reading Rewriting, Revolutionizing the World

John Cusack’s War: The Actor Battles to Un-Embed Hollywood With His New Film, ‘War, Inc.’ – by Jeremy Scahill:

Back in 1989, in his smash hit “Say Anything,” John Cusack famously stood with a boom box above his head outside the home of the woman he loved blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” With his latest films on the Iraq war, Cusack is standing outside Hollywood with a TV above his head broadcasting his political movies calling on the public to wake up and “Do Something.”

John Cusack began working on his new film “War, Inc.,” which premieres in LA and New York May 23, about a year into the US occupation of Iraq. From the moment US tanks rolled into Baghdad, Cusack was a voracious consumer of news about the war. He took it deadly seriously, regularly calling independent journalists and asking them questions as he sought as much independent information as he could. Watching the insanity of the erection of the Green Zone and the advent of the era of McWar, complete with tens of thousands of “private contractors,” Cusack set out to use the medium of film to unveil the madness. He wanted to do on the big screen what independent reporters like Naomi Klein, Nir Rosen and Dahr Jamail did in print. Over these years of war and occupation, Cusack has become one of the most insightful commentators on a far too seldom discussed aspect of the occupation: the corporate dominance of the US war machine.

Cusack is no parachute humanitarian. While he continues to do the Hollywood thing with big budget movies, he is simultaneously a fierce un-embedded actor/filmmaker who has been at the center of two of the best films to date dealing with the madness of the Iraq war.

“A candid conversation between the playwright of Over There/Over Here opening May 29th at Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro for its West Coast Premiere, and the Artistic Director of The Relevant Stage Theatre Company, Ray Buffer. Michael Reyes, Playwright.”  The Relevant Stage

An interesting lively example of mixing aesthetic criticism with ethical (or general normative) criticism is found in a review by Eileen Jones of the recent Iraq war film Stop-Loss, which she details as:

“a protest movie about the war that-follow me closely here-doesn’t actually protest the war. Because that would be a bummer, getting us into that whole thing again about Bush and Cheney and the WMDs that weren’t there and the no-exit-strategy. Not to mention the 4,000 dead Americans we’re sort of peeved about. We support our troops, you know! In this movie Peirce insists on supporting our troops so hard it’s impossible to figure out what’s ailing us, watching these fine boys with their fine parents all having fine values in this fine country of ours. Nagging questions hang over the whole project: if our Texas-style patriotism is so great, and our mission to defend America is so great, and we’ve got hordes of studly young guys leaping at the opportunity to go fight whoever they’re told, and they’re all great, too, and their families and communities are great, then uh … what’s the problem? Why isn’t everybody happy?

“Well, for one thing, it turns out that if you go fight in a war, you can get SHOT. Yeah! It’s true! Even a righteous American, with a big gun, and a Kevlar vest, and a Hummer! That’s the movie’s first-act revelation. We see our boys in Iraq, doing their jobs chasing insurgents into local people’s apartments, and those bastards start SHOOTING at ‘em!”

It may be difficult to separate out where the aesthetic criticism ends and the ethical/normative criticism begins here because in this case they are extremely intertwined, often co-dependent. The normative breakdown generates broken aesthetics; not much chance of satisfying rising climax and poignant moments (in terms of aesthetics) when the ethics or other normative features are impoverished/degraded… And when otherwise the aesthetics are well done but the underlying norms are bunk, well it’s lipstick on the poor pig, at best.

Historical Criticism and Social Change

In the excerpts below, Edmund Wilson presents his thoughts on what it means to understand literature in its “historical” aspects, that is “its social, economic and political aspects.”

He notes that this tradition of criticism began during the Enlightenment and developed during the subsequent centuries. He begins by describing other prominent traditions of criticism then focuses on the historical one, which is a key critical tradition, especially its more progressive and revolutionary elements, overviewed and explored by this site. Continue reading The Historical Interpretation of Literature – by Edmund Wilson

Some of the most thoughtful work I’ve seen regarding aesthetics and ethics, and the related, is by Kenneth Burke in The Philosophy of Literary Form (the 1941 date below is for the collection, not for the essays, most of which were written in the 1930s, I think):

(1941) Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” The Philosophy of Literary Form:

“Here I shall put down, as briefly as possible, a statement in behalf of what might be catalogued, with a fair degree of accuracy, as a sociological criticism of literature. Sociological criticism is certainly not new. I shall try to suggest what partially new elements or emphasis I think should be added to this old approach. And to make the ‘way in’ as easy as possible, I shall begin with a discussion of proverbs. Examine random specimens in The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. You will note, I think, that there is no ‘pure’ literature here. Everything is ‘medicine.’ Proverbs are designed for consolation or vengeance, for admonition or exhortation, for foretelling” (253).

(1941) Kenneth Burke, “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism,” The Philosophy of Literary Form:

“The present article proposes to say something further on the subject of art and propaganda. It will attempt to set forth a line of reasoning as to why the contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon ‘pure’ art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable. And if it leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition. For this reason it seems that under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art. Art cannot safely confine itself to merely using the values which arise out of a given social texture and integrating their conflicts, as the soundest, ‘purest’ art will do. It must have a definite hortatory function, an educational element of suasion or inducement; it must be partially forensic. Such a quality we consider to be the essential work of propaganda. Hence we feel that the moral breach arising from vitiation of the work-patterns calls for a propaganda art. And incidentally, our distinction as so stated should make it apparent that much of the so-called ‘pure’ art of the nineteenth century was of a pronouncedly propagandist or corrective coloring. In proportion as the conditions of economic warfare grew in intensity throughout the ‘century of progress,’ and the church proper gradually adapted its doctrines to serve merely the protection of private gain and the upholding of manipulated law, the ‘priestly’ function was carried on by the ‘secular’ poets, often avowedly agnostic.  Continue reading Kenneth Burke on Aesthetics and Ethics

Preston C. Enright:

“Having recently seen author David Hajdu on C-SPAN, I was motivated to create this list of artists who are dealing with complex issues in a way that super-hero comics never did. Hajdu, the author of ‘The Ten-Cent Plague’ outlined the history of the repression of comics in America, including a decade (1945-1955) when comics were being publicly burned. Today, there is a renaissance of thoughtful illustrators who are thinking outside the box. There is also an increased interest in the ‘underground’ comics of the 60s and 70s. I’m looking forward to watching this field develop in the coming years.”

David Bacon:

I was disappointed that Daniel Day- Lewis won an Oscar for There Will Be Blood, not because he’s not a great actor (he is), but because the movie was such a betrayal of the book on which it was based. Movies don‘t have to follow books. Many don‘t. But in this case, what we missed were the things that made Upton Sinclair’s Oil! a politically courageous book for its time. For our time, it unearths a crucial part of the hidden history of our own working class movement. 

PEN asks: “…what novels were ever pointedly relevant to public and political life?”

No little bit of research and analysis on it. One could do worse than to recall Victor Hugo’s great novel of the people, Les Miserables. Biographer Graham Robb notes:

“One can see here the impact of Les Miserables on the Second Empire…. The State was trying to clear its name. The Emperor and Empress performed some public acts of charity and brought philanthropy back into fashion. There was a sudden surge of official interest in penal legislation, the industrial exploitation of women, the care of orphans, and the education of the poor. From his rock in the English Channel, Victor Hugo, who can more fairly be called ‘the French Dickens’ than Balzac, had set the parliamentary agenda for 1862.” 

Since it’s publication in 1957, Atlas Shrugged, the philosophical and artistic climax of Ayn Rand’s novels, has never been out of print. It continues to receive critical attention and is considered one of the most influential books ever published, impacting a variety of disciplines including philosophy, literature, economics, business and political science. Continue reading PEN and Public or Political Fiction

 – open letter –

Send us the money. We know what to do with it.

As reported in the Harvard Crimson, you noted that “many writers have been in a post-Sept. 11 malaise, and that it grew so severe that at one point [you] considered offering up [your] own money in order to urge writers to break through their writer’s block.”

You state, “I actually had an idea a couple of years ago – when six or seven people I knew were all in a similar place of frustration with the novel – of sponsoring a prize, of offering $10,000 of my own money who first delivered a novel.”

Within two or three years of 9-11 both Andre Vltchek and I had written geo-political novels that no publisher would touch – too progressive for the status quo literary world. We lacked the malaise but could have won your $10,000, which would have helped us greatly in starting up Mainstay Press and its journal Liberation Lit as a way of publishing our work and the accomplished literature and art of others that the status quo lit world shies from. $10,000 would still greatly help us publish the first print issue of our liberatory literature journal Liberation Lit, featuring several dozen authors. As it is we will be hard pressed just to get contributor’s copies to some of the contributors. So substantial financial help would be much appreciated. Our post 9-11, post Iraq war, post Hurricane Katrina novels and numerous other works both long and short show that we have surely and consistently produced, and know what to do with the money.

We do most everything. We write novels, plays, stories, and works of criticism, and we edit them and those by others, and we proof them, and format them, and design and create the covers, and publish them, and attempt to publicize them. And since we do it with next to no resources, you can trust that we know how to stretch a dollar. Continue reading Dear Jonathan Franzen

Robert Fisk:

I was in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron once, in 2001, and the Palestinians had lynched three supposed collaborators. And they were hanging so terribly, almost naked, on the electricity pylons out of town, that I could not write in my notebook. Instead, I drew pictures of their bodies hanging from the pylons. Young boys – Palestinian boys – were stubbing out cigarettes on their near-naked bodies and they reminded me of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, all arrows and pain and forgiveness, and so all I could do was draw. I still have the pictures. They are ridiculous, stupid, the work of a reporter who suddenly couldn’t bring himself to write the details on the page.

But I understand Hoyland’s picture, even if it is not my picture. After I saw the oil fires burning in Kuwait in 1991, an Irish artist painted Fisk’s Fires – a title I could have done without – in which she very accurately portrayed the bleached desert with the rich, thick, chocolate-tasting oil we tasted in the aftermath of the war. Sometimes, I wish these painters were with us when we saw the war with our own eyes – and which they could then see with theirs. …

Via ZNet

Nadine Gordimer on her decision to participate in “Israel at 60 Celebrations”

Dr. Haidar Eid:

Dear Ms. Gordimer,

I am a Palestinian lecturer in Cultural Studies living in Gaza. I happen to also have South African citizenship as a result of my marriage to a citizen of that beloved country. I spent more than five years in Johannesburg, the city in which I earned my Ph.D and lectured at both traditionally black and white universities. At Vista in Soweto, I taught your anti-apartheid novels My Son’s Story, July’s People and The Late Bourgeois World. I have been teaching the same novels, in addition to The Pick Up and Selected Stories, to my Palestinian students in Gaza at Al-Aqsa University. This course is called “Resistance, Anti-Racism and Xenophobia”. I deliberately chose to teach your novels because, as an anti-apartheid writer, you defied racial stereotypes by calling for resistance against all forms of oppression, be they racial or religious. Your support of sanctions against apartheid South Africa has, to say the least, impressed my Gazan students.

The news of your conscious decision to take part in the “Israel at 60” celebrations has reached us, students and citizens of Gaza, as both a painful surprise, and a glaring example of a hypocritical intellectual double standard. My students, psychologically and emotionally traumatized and already showing early signs of malnutrition as a result of the genocidal policy of the country whose birth you intend celebrating, demand an explanation.
 

Continue reading Nadine Gordimer, Palestine, Israel

Mark Vallen:

The April 2008 edition of Modern Painters: The International Contemporary Art Magazine, is devoted to “the politically driven art made in response to war and its critical reception.” An introductory statement from the magazine’s Assistant Editor, Quinn Latimer, sums up the profusely illustrated April edition thusly: “Each month, with some discomfiture, we publish art criticism that rarely touches on the Iraq war. But the fifth anniversary of the American invasion compelled us to unambiguously address the conflict. …

PD Smith:

The great scientific romancer HG Wells could hardly be described as hostile to science or scientists. It was his anger at the misuse of science to create weapons of mass destruction that led him to condemn such scientists. I share that anger and it prompted me to explore the cultural reasons why people from all walks of life came to think that superweapons were a solution to human problems. …