Book Club Activism

Debra Linn:

Edwidge Danticat’s family memoir Brother, I’m Dying riled us up. Outraged us, actually. We were incensed by the treatment her uncle received when he arrived in Miami from full-on upheaval in Haiti. Our book club had received the call to action, our chance to start living up to our name, Page Against the Machine, an opportunity for book club activism.

Book club activism sounds high-minded and formal, but really, just about any book can spur your club to action. It rises organically from your connection to the book. What Is the What by Dave Eggers leads to activism about Sudan. Water for Elephants to the Humane Society or PETA, perhaps. …

Fiction and the Left

On the left in North America, the novel kind of died or was killed a long time ago, if nowhere else. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was not only first published in serial form in a left periodical, his research for the novel was funded by it – by the socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason. I’m aware of no left news periodicals that are regularly running partisan liberatory fiction. Liberation Lit is one of the few left journals of any type that runs much progressive partisan fiction, and that consciously seeks it out.

Left periodicals might find it ever more to their benefit to run Lib Lit type fiction because, at least compared to nonfiction, it reads better in print than online. Moreover, a lot of nonfiction is actually more useful online than in print, by far; whereas, probably the opposite is true for fiction, with the exception of microfiction. Plus, running liberatory fiction would give left news outlets a comparative advantage over the many news outlets that don’t run any fiction at all, or very little.

Continue reading Fiction and the Left

Remedial Crucifixion

Out back is where we crucify the students. The loyal-consumers-in-training, I mean. The lcit.

Actually, out back is mainly where we crucified the lcit – those who have most seriously erred – but now, times being what they are, we crucify them all over the Terminal and Terminal grounds.

There seems to be an inevitable rhythm to the crucifixions. This stern punishment arises from incidents that arrive in clusters around the holidays, near the beginnings and endings of the Terminal year, and semesters, and months, and weeks. Also, the beginnings and endings of days, classes, and exam periods are particularly fraught with tension and volatility. Not to mention to different degrees every moment in between. We find remedial crucifixion necessary for lcit crimes deemed especially heinous, such as duct-taping over forehead ID bar codes and other subversive behavior, like excessive cooperation and socializing.

Continue reading Remedial Crucifixion

Interview with Eduardo Galeano – by Andre Vltchek

 

at Café Brazilero, in historic center city Montevideo

Q: Eduardo Galeano, after so many years are the veins of Latin America still open?

A: Yes; obviously yes. I think they are. Not long ago I met count Dracula in Buenos Aires. He was looking for an Argentinean psychoanalyst. Argentina produces many psychoanalysts. Dracula was told by someone that he can still be cured by an Argentinean psychoanalyst. I found count Dracula in a terrible state; really depressed, thin, terrible…

Continue reading Interview with Eduardo Galeano – by Andre Vltchek

Art Against War

Mark Vallen reports:

LA vs. War promises to be one of the largest antiwar cultural happenings in the recent history of Los Angeles. Organized by the activist artists of Yo!, the same people who put together the Yo! What Happened to Peace? international touring peace poster exhibit, the LA vs. War extravaganza is scheduled to run April 10 – 13, 2008, at The Firehouse art space in downtown Los Angeles. In the words of the organizers, the show will be “an unprecedented gathering of artists united to deliver a message of peace, and offering resistance and opposition to war and violence.”

Tim Robbins 1984 Play

Tim Robbins’ reimagining of Orwell’s ‘1984’ resonates in 2008 by James D. Watts Jr. –

“It’s one of those books you think you know well — until you sit down and read it,” said Tim Robbins, the Academy Award-winning actor and director who founded The Actors’ Gang. “And then you realize just how prescient George Orwell was, and how incredibly relevant this book is today.”

Continue reading Tim Robbins 1984 Play

Edwidge Danticat on Art and Injustice

Haitian repression inspires Danticat

by Reilly Kiernan, The Daily Princetonian

An immigrant author must be brave enough to “create dangerously,” said Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat, who delivered the second annual Toni Morrison Lecture last night in Richardson Auditorium and received a standing ovation from the audience.

Danticat discussed how dealing with injustice in her native Haiti inspired her writing and cultivated her belief in the importance of art in coping with oppression and conflict.

Continue reading Edwidge Danticat on Art and Injustice

Michael Albert on Parecon and Art

Albert: 

…in sum, parecon creates conditions conducive to society benefiting from artistic talent and conducive to capable artists expressing themselves as they choose. More, parecon does all this consistently with economic equity and justice for the artists but also equally for all other workers and consumers. Parecon is an art friendly, even an artistic economy.

Political Literary Criticism: 1903-2003

Some brief excerpts:

(1903) Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist: “[The novel] may be a great force, that works together with the pulpit and the universities for the good of the people, fearlessly proving that power is abused, that the strong grind the faces of the weak, that an evil tree is still growing in the midst of the garden, that undoing follows hard upon unrighteousness, that the course of Empire is not yet finished, and that the races of men have yet to work out their destiny in those great and terrible movements that crush and grind and rend asunder the pillars of the houses of the nations.”

Continue reading Political Literary Criticism: 1903-2003

Public Effects of Fiction

P. D. Smith:

…Ken Kolsbun’s new book, Peace: The Biography of a Symbol. There’s also a fascinating article about it on the BBC.

They interview peace historian Lawrence S. Wittner who says that “it is still the dominant peace sign,” a fact partly due to its beautiful simplicity. It’s perfect for spraying on walls and is a universally recognised symbol of peace and resistance to repression.

Continue reading Public Effects of Fiction

Iraq War Novels and Iraq Conquest Novels – Where They Are and Are Not

“Where’s the first wave of Iraq War fiction?” – asked at Paper Cuts: A Blog About Books, at the New York Times

There are number of good comments there on a variety of matters, though some that are wanting. In answer to that central question, the first waves of Iraq War fiction are in the movies, on TV, in plays and novels and short stories… While there is not nearly as much as one might hope to see, it hasn’t been too difficult to compile a list of dozens of such works, plus works on closely connected US militancy in the “Middle East,” Afghanistan in particular: https://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2007/11/05/iraq-war-fiction-3/

Continue reading Iraq War Novels and Iraq Conquest Novels – Where They Are and Are Not

Rigoberto González interviews Roger Sedarat

A discussion of Roger Sedarat’s Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic – poems. Sedarat:

The two respective governments of Iran and America certainly tend to speak and act in terms of rigid dichotomies. You know…like President George W. Bush’s infamous warning to nations of the world that “You’re either for us or against us.” On the whole, the speaker in this book is positioned like the majority of Iranians who love their country yet resent its leadership (I think a lot of Americans have felt the same way). …

As for the American side of the room, the book obviously is for them too. I want them to experience the kind of disorientation—through humor, form, and disparate subject matter (popular culture juxtaposed with ancient tradition, western paired with eastern sensibility, etc.)—that makes Iran more of a complex country than they see represented in the media. More than anything, I want to challenge the Orientalist gaze fixated on the veil (in this case the Iranian chador). I tried to do this in the book by setting up then violating expectations. Also, as grave as the situation appears in the Middle East, I want my American audience to understand that Iranians especially have a tremendous sense of humor, as well as deep sense of the poetic tradition.

Sociology, Art, Health – Susan Bell

 “Talking Bodies“:

“Works of art can anchor social movements,” says Bell, Bowdoin’s A. Myrick Freeman Professor of Social Sciences. “Think of the AIDS quilt, or the Clothesline Project that is used to bring attention to issues of sexual assault and domestic violence against women. Images can be a powerful way to signal, engage, shock. People respond viscerally. It opens up a conversation.”

In a surprising twist on her discipline, Bell has turned to analyses of works of art to guide her in her research. In recent publications in journals including Health, Sociology of Health and Illness, and Qualitative Research in Psychology, Bell has made a case for incorporating the analysis of visual narratives into sociological work as documents and barometers of human experience.

Betsy Hartmann Novel – Deadly Election

Betsy Hartmann on her new political thriller, Deadly Election:

In Deadly Election I explore what would happen if a right-wing administration in Washington definitively crossed the line between democracy and dictatorship.  What steps would they take?  Who would resist them?  The book is also about the frailties and strengths of the human character, of both villains and heroes alike.  As a novelist, I’ve always been interested in how political passions shape personal choices and how an unchecked lust for power has a corrosive influence on individuals.  The book’s a fast, scary read, but the characters are multi-dimensional and their stories intertwine in interesting and unanticipated ways.  

Ishmael Reed Interviewed by Wajahat Ali

 via Counterpunch:

ALI: It’s amazing how all the best selling Urban Ghetto writers – they’re all White.

REED: Right. “The Lords of Urban Fiction.” What I can’t understand why Blacks can’t achieve royal status when it comes to forms that they have largely created? I mean there’s a White King of Rock n’ Roll, there’s a White King of Jazz, how come we can never achieve titles of royalty in these fields we are supposed to prevail in? They held a so called Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the other night, where White judges credit people who resemble them with the invention of Rock and Roll. I didn’t even see Blacks in the audience.

There would be no Rock and Roll without Ike Turner, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, etc. Fake ghetto books and fake ghetto music. Elvis Presley, whom they idol, is merely a karaoke makeover of James Brown and Chuck Berry.

On Brian De Palma’s Redacted

Peter Bradshaw:

Perhaps without quite realising it, De Palma is applying his extensively developed idiom of slash, splatter and gore. After a while, Redacted starts to feel like a sort of politicised exploitation-horror picture. I am still not entirely sure if it is just the director’s default position for representing violence, or if the wayward genius in him senses that, in the era of Abu Ghraib, this is the truest way of representing the essentially grotesque nature of the military adventure in Iraq.

Liberatory Poetry

Pretending poetry, or any considered creation, is not political is sheer ignorant (to put it poetically) or a lie. Pretending poetry is not political is itself extremely political, as poem or otherwise, extremely ideological.

“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see —
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

-Emily Dickinson

Split This Rock [poetry festival] calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national network of activist poets. The festival will explore and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change: reaching across differences, considering personal and social responsibility, asserting the right to free speech, bearing witness to the diversity and complexity of human experience through language, imagining a better world. It will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions on poetry and social change, youth programming, open mics, films, parties, walking tours, and activism.

Some further notes on the politics of art, from a discussion at Common Dreams: 

Continue reading Liberatory Poetry

Karl Rove and Dick Cheney in Hollywood and TV – at taxpayer expense

Michael Weldon, interviewed by Ryan Lambie:

DoG: On your website you say that movies are more politicized now than at any time since WWII or the Cold War. Could you give any examples?

MW: This is a huge topic. Many movies, producers, and production companies, and some studios, stars and directors have close ties to the American DOD (Department Of Defence), arms dealers (American and Israeli), oil companies, and/or the ruling Republican Party and neocon Bush backers. The Hollywood/D.C. connection has existed for a long time to some extent but it’s stronger now than ever. After 9/11 Karl Rove met with studio heads and top producers and directors and convinced most of them to be part of the war on terror and to be more patriotic and pro FBI, CIA, Armed Forces…

If an American movie features spies, the military, and military hardware and does not explicitly criticized the government and the Iraq war – it has the full cooperation of the DOD. Some of our tax dollars actually go to providing military planes, boats, weapons, soldiers, advisors… to pro military movies that we pay too much to see – then go buy DVDs of! Many major movies have government agents and agencies right in the credits if you know where to look. Even most people who look back at WWII era movies or early Cold War era movies and realize that they were propaganda, don’t realize what’s happening now. Continue reading Karl Rove and Dick Cheney in Hollywood and TV – at taxpayer expense