Sara Paretsky and the Political

Ammu Joseph:

In her essay for The New York Times series, Writers on Writing, Sara Paretsky mentions a letter from a furious reader demanding to know why her books were “infested” with political issues when all she wanted was to be entertained. Her response: “When you’re writing about law, justice and society, you are either challenging or supporting the status quo. Continue reading Sara Paretsky and the Political

Just Art

 Emma Powers:

The connections between artistic expression and activism may not be self-evident but are worth examining. This relationship between art and social change will be discussed by Art Historian and Professor of Visual Arts and Environmental Studies at Harvard University Carrie Lambert-Beatty on Wednesday, February 6 at 7:30 p.m. in the Beam Classroom in the Visual Arts Center.

Lambert-Beatty will deliver the lecture, “Just Art,” which examines how activism is expressed through art. She will explore the importance of visual and performance art in sending powerful social messages.

Propagandizing delusional and criminal mentality via Charlie Wilson’s War

Review by Jeremy Kuzmarov:

By sanitizing and distorting history, and presenting Western militarism as a force for good, films like Charlie Wilson’s War ultimately help to perpetuate the ideological mindset shaping continued foreign policy blunders and crimes of historic dimensions, which the U.S. public has yet to fully come to terms with. 

Mark Vallen on Bertolt Brecht and Mahagonny

Excerpt from Art for a Change: 

Brecht understood theatre not just as a form of entertainment, but as a vehicle that could help workers understand and analyze their political situation, he felt theatrical performances should appeal to reason and not simply give way to sentimentality. In the 1957 book, Brecht on Theater, the playwright described his theory of “alienation effect” theatre as being that “which prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor – and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer.” The original Brecht production of Mahagonny, as with his other plays, utilized various contrivances to prevent viewers from being lulled into a theatrical fantasy. Stage settings were deliberately sparse and flooded with harsh lights, with no attempt to hide stage lighting equipment. Slogans and explanatory text were projected upon stage walls, and actors carried placards onstage bearing political messages. With outbursts of songs whose lyrics drove home his political points, Brecht would use music itself to interrupt stage action.

Continue reading Mark Vallen on Bertolt Brecht and Mahagonny

Sci-Fi and topical fiction

Clive Thompson: 

Technically, After the Siege is a work of science fiction. But as with so many sci-fi stories, it works on two levels, exploring real-world issues like the plight of African countries that can’t afford AIDS drugs. The upshot is that Doctorow’s fiction got me thinking — on a Lockean level — about the nature of international law, justice, and property.

Which brings me to my point. If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.

Continue reading Sci-Fi and topical fiction

Crusaders review

 Alastair Sooke writes: 

The central character of [Richard Kelly’s novel Crusaders] is County Durham-born vicar John Gore who, following an unfulfilled spell as a pastor in Dorset, accepts a challenge from the Bishop of Newcastle to ‘plant’ a church in benighted Hoxheath, a fictional and forlorn sprawl of painfully deprived housing estates, blighted with tykes in tracksuits, burnt-out cars and bloody syringes discarded on the street, on the fringes of the industrial metropolis on the banks of the River Tyne.

After moving into a run-down council flat in one of Hoxheath’s poxier corners – where the bus shelter looks like it has been ‘assailed with a sledgehammer’ – Gore toils at drumming up support among suspicious locals for his first service in the assembly hall of a nearby red-brick school.

US soldiers reading in Iraq

John Sutherland reports: 

The top 10 novels supplied to American fighting men by Abe [Books]…: The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling; Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry; Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams; The Collector, John Fowles; Devil’s Guard, George Robert Elford; The Unwanted, John Saul; The Alchemist, Ken Goddard; Apollyon: The Destroyer Unleashed, Tim LaHaye; Master of Dragons, Margaret Weis; The Illuminati, Larry Burkett.

There is a strong whiff of the high school curriculum (Salinger, notably) and a lot of fantasy. The presence of LaHaye’s vision of Armageddon (and the Second Coming) happening in the Middle East in the first years of the 21st century is slightly troubling.

Or greatly. Another book on the list, Devil’s Guard has been “generally regarded as sickening neo-Nazi pornography,” as Sutherland goes on to explain, glorifying warriors who slaughter “abominable sub-humans [Russians, Vietnamese], deserving only of extermination” and eventually go on to continue fighting under the American flag.

Continue reading US soldiers reading in Iraq

Politics of the Bourne Ultimatum, and other movies

“The Bourne Ultimatum: rejecting the CIA” by Hans Bennett provides an overly optimistic and perhaps false view of a number of movies and novels, to my knowledge. Is violence really “not glorified at all” in Bourne, the man and the movies?; Are the “critiques of US militarism and foreign policy” actually all that “remarkable” and “scathing” in these films, especially when taken in context of the films in their entirety? Seems rather dubious. Nevertheless, the article does point out some libratory instances.

Scialabba’s View of Edmund Wilson’s Work

Some thoughtful comments by George Scialabba on the work of the great critic Edmund Wilson.

“Art, like all other intellectual activity,” Scialabba notes is in Wilson’s words:

an attempt to give a meaning to our experience–that is, to make life more practicable…. The writer who is to be anything more than an echo of his predecessors must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena which has never yet been mastered. With each such victory of the human intellect, whether in history, in philosophy or in poetry, we experience a deep satisfaction: we have been cured of some ache of disorder, relieved of some oppressive burden of uncomprehended events…. This relief that brings the sense of power, and, with the sense of power, joy, is the positive emotion which tells us that we have encountered a first-rate piece of literature.

[Wilson quote from his essay “The Historical Interpretation of Literature“]

Tinseltown much critical of Iraq War? – No, thank you

‘Prom’ Date: Play documents a side of the Iraq War 

J. C. Lockwood

Newburyport – Playwright George Larkin laughs when he’s asked, as a joke, how long he’s hated America. He’s heard comments like this before. In these politically polarized times, any writer dealing even tangentially with international or homeland security issues who is not sufficiently patriotic, not solidly positioned in the God-Bless-America camp, leaves himself open for attack — even in Los Angeles, supposedly the land of limousine liberals and America-lasters, where Larkin has been developing “The Baghdad Prom” for the past five years. Continue reading Tinseltown much critical of Iraq War? – No, thank you

Killing History Via Charlie Wilson’s War

Brzezinski and Charlie Wilson’s War

By Stanley Heller

Imagine, they made a funny movie about how the US helped turn Afghanistan into a killing field. It’s the film “Charlie Wilson’s War, a ligthearted look of how a skirt-chasing Congressman and a no-nonsense CIA thug helped bring mountains of weapons and money to the fanatic, women-despising “freedom fighters” who gave us 9/11. It’s certainly material for a “laugh riot”.

Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen: A Heart in Action – documentary.

 Jesse Hamlin:

In the film, [Alice] Walker credits Olsen with “changing the landscape of feminist writing and reading,” alluding to Olsen’s role in getting the Feminist Press to republish forgotten works by women, among them Rebecca Harding Davis’ 1861 “Life in the Iron Mills” and Agnes Smedley’s 1929 “Daughter of Earth.”

In the film, Olsen says she started writing about the lives of the working people she grew up with because “it was nearly impossible to find them in any of the books I read.” Continue reading Tillie Olsen

Antiwar Novels

Daniel J. Neumann reviewing Civilized Savages by Susan Kaye Behm:

“I wrote two anti-war novels. At a recent book-signing, I recall a man arguing with me: “Why are you against war?” And I replied, “Why are you for it?” He did not answer, but if the conversation would have carried on, I would have recommended Susan Kaye Behm’s Civilized Savages to the man, over my own books. Behm may not have had any direct exposure to war, but she offers a future that conveys the horrors of war as much as any civilian can contemplate. In short, it is an anti-war novel for those of us who have never fought in a war—which makes it the most valuable variety of anti-war novel.”

Great Review of Charlie Wilson’s War by Chalmers Johnson

Johnson:

“My own view is that if Charlie Wilson’s War is a comedy, it’s the kind that goes over well with a roomful of louts in a college fraternity house. Simply put, it is imperialist propaganda and the tragedy is that four-and-a-half years after we invaded Iraq and destroyed it, such dangerously misleading nonsense is still being offered to a gullible public. The most accurate review so far is James Rocchi’s summing-up for Cinematical: ‘Charlie Wilson’s War isn’t just bad history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia’.”