Gospel of George Bush by Denise Giardina

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.

…

The Uncomfortable Dead by Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos

Macho Libre

Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos’ joint crime novel, The Uncomfortable Dead

by Marc Cooper

LA Weekly — books

Two years ago, the masked, pipe-smoking leader of the Zapatista army — Subcomandante Marcos — sent a hand-carried proposal from his jungle headquarters to one of his favorite writers. “El Sup,” as Marcos is called by his admirers, invited Paco Ignacio Taibo II, an internationally celebrated crime-fiction writer, to co-author a mystery novel. But not just a run-of-the-mill whodunit. This one would be written pingpong style, each writer pursuing his own storyline without consultation and the two bound together only by the promise that their respective protagonists would meet up about two-thirds of the way through the book.

Taibo, a devilishly provocative literary anarchist who relishes spurning the cultural establishment, immediately agreed. Within weeks, the chapters came cascading out and started appearing in serial form, as a work in progress, inside the pages of Mexico City’s leftist daily La Jornada (which experienced a 20 percent growth in its Sunday readership as a result). Now translated into English, The Uncomfortable Dead reads as an uproarious, dizzying, purposefully incoherent plunge into the multiple ironies, absurdities and injustices of present-day Mexico.

No one who knows Taibo’s previous work — now spanning several dozen mysteries translated into almost as many languages — really expects to be able to follow his storylines. As with a Handel opera, you dive into a Taibo novel not for the baroque plot but for the all-consuming music. And with El Sup as his sideman, Taibo blasts us with a dissonant take on the wall-to-wall corruption that defines Mexican politics.

Taibo resurrects his trademark Mexico City detective, the lame, one-eyed Hector Belascoaran Shayne, a chain-smoking, weary but relentless gumshoe prone to sailor-level swearing, who — like his creator — is addicted to guzzling industrial-size doses of Coca-Cola. This is more like hallucinatory than magical realism as Shayne pursues the case of a dead ’60s revolutionary, who suddenly appears in the form of rambling, philosophical messages on some bewildered bureaucrat’s answering machine.

Taibo’s grumpy sleuth eventually teams up with El Sup’s lead character, a Zapatista peasant investigator, Elias Contreras, who is sent to the Mexican capital to hunt down a notorious killer named Morales. Oh, yeah, Contreras tells us early on that though he’s narrating the story, he’s already dead. But who’s keeping score? Also appearing in the novel are an entire cast of real-life Mexican pols, several of Taibo’s real-life friends (full disclosure: I appeared as a character in one of his earlier novels), and Subcomandante Marcos writes himself into the storyline as well as a couple of other characters who seem to know that they are, indeed, characters in the book.

The central mystery of the intertwined stories is ostensibly about the brutal treatment of dissidents by the Mexican government during the so-called “dirty war” of the ’60s and ’70s. But in between the plot points, ample license is taken to passionately (and mirthfully) denounce just about everything, from the oppression of Chiapas Indians, massive robbery and extortion by the Mexican state, homophobia, gringos, neoliberal economic policies, encroaching globalization, and homicidal taxicab drivers…

Nigerian Novelists, Politics

On Nigerian novelists: 

Conflict and corruption, exile and loss. The new novelists chronicling modern Nigeria and its place in the world shy from none of it….

“I set out to write books about Nigeria, and Nigeria happens to be a country in which politics plays a major role,” Adichie — now splitting her time between public readings for her new book and graduate classes at Yale — said in a telephone interview from her New Haven, Connecticut home.

Politics and literature are often linked. For Nigerians, the model is Soyinka, a larger than life figure with an actor’s flair for drama — he has appeared in his own plays — and shock of white hair to complete the image of passionate intellectual. Soyinka once single-handedly stormed a Nigerian radio station to try to prevent a corrupt politician from claiming an election victory. These days, Soyinka speaks out against what he sees as the dictatorial ambitions of Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler turned civilian politician. Habila, who counts Soyinka among his influences, notes the Nobel literature laureate is “in his 70s and he’s still carrying placards in the streets of Lagos. “Most writers would have given up by their 70s — certainly given up on Nigeria. But not Soyinka. That’s a great lesson for people like me,” Habila said in an interview at the University of East Anglia in England….

Policing the Writers of Fiction

In “State Pulse: Maharashtra: Books as crime“

‘Writers’ Police’ gives details of the way in which greatest writers of late 18th century who were living in Paris at that time were kept under surveillance….

…the Parisian police had a very specific agenda.

It was clear to these protectors of internal security of a tottering regime that the renowned literati then viz Victor Hugo, Balzac or Charles Dickens, might be writing fiction, but their sharp focus on the hypocrisy of the aristocrats or the livelihood issues of ordinary people is adding to the growing turmoil in the country. They knew very well that they might be writing fiction for the masses but it is turning out to be a sharp political edge that hit the right target and is becoming a catalyst for change.

While the Parisian police was engaged in tracking down the daily movements of the writers, its present day counterparts in Maharashtra especially from the Chandrapur-Nagpur region have rather devised some ‘easier’ and ‘shortcut routes’ to curb the flow of ideas. And for them it is also immaterial whether the writer in question was alive or dead.

The recent happenings at a book stall put in by a well known publisher ‘Daanish Books’ at the Deeksha Bhoomi of Dr Ambedkar in Nagpur are a case in point. A random list of books which the police perceived to be ‘dangerous’ and which it duly confiscated from their book stall makes interesting reading….

Coming back to the ‘Writers Police’, it is clear to everyone how all those meticulous efforts put in by the police to curtail the free flow of ideas proved futile. And how French revolution of those times emerged as a beacon of hope for thinking people across the world. Rather it could be said that all those efforts at surveillance became a precursor to the storming of the Bastille.

Can it then be said that India is on the verge of similar transformatory changes and the Maharashtra polices’ efforts at ‘criminalising writing’ are an indication that ruling elite of our times is fast losing ground.

Literature in Prison

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.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin — New Edition

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.

Xican@ Demiurge: Chicano Art Today — Mark Vallen

From “Xican@ Demiurge: Chicano Art Today?”

http://www.art-for-a-change.com/blog/2006/10/xican-demiurge-chicano-art-today.html

by Mark Vallen

Art for a Change 

Historically, the Mexican American population in the western states of the U.S. endured the pains of a suffocating discrimination. In the mid-1960s, they rose to claim equality with the larger society, a struggle that entailed the right of self-identification – leading to the use of the term, “Chicano.” As a cultural identity and signifier of ethnic pride, “Chicano” is today more or less accepted by the mainstream, though the term is still evolving. Currently a number of Chicanos spell the word with an “X”, connecting their identity to ancient indigenous roots – in the Nahuatl language, the Aztecs called themselves Mexica (pronounced: meh-Shee-ka). Also, the gendered structure of the Spanish language has been rejected by some, who favor the written plural forms “Chicano/a” or “Chican@”.

Now that those basic facts have been made somewhat clear, allow me to open another can of worms – exactly what is Chicano art and how shall it be defined? Xican@ Demiurge attempts to form a definition, but as a survey it is stilted and woefully incomplete, in part because it’s extremely difficult to present the totality of Chicano aesthetics with a single exhibit. Chicano art necessarily arose from the tumultuous 60’s as a combative aesthetic in opposition to a system of racial, cultural, and political oppression – a cultural renaissance that took place concurrently with the Mexican American community’s political awakening. The California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives of the University of Santa Barbara, California (CEMA), describes the aesthetic in the following manner: “Chicano art is a public and political art, proclaiming and expressing public and social concerns in its themes and subjects.” That is not a description I’m inclined to argue against, though in all fairness it is one in need of further elaboration.

In their curatorial statement, the organizers of Xican@ Demiurge wrote: “Art that is innovative and aggressive in its approach is critical to developing a contemporary aesthetic that is representative of the 21st Century Xican@ artist. The cultural climate influencing this particular group today is not the same as the one that triggered ‘El Movimiento Chicano’ of the 1960’s.”

I’m left wondering how the art presented in this exhibit could be considered “aggressive in its approach”, unless the direction is one of insistent self-absorption, political retreat and apathy. The curators of Xican@ Demiurge take pains to point out that conditions currently facing Chicanos are not those of the 60s, which is true enough – but this seems an excuse not to address current realities more than anything else. Of the twenty-one artists in the exhibit, only one displayed a work addressing an overt political issue – and that attempt was not very engaging. The show nearly exists in a vacuum, as if one million Latinos did not march in the streets of Los Angeles to protest repressive immigration laws on May 1st, 2006, or that Latinos in the U.S. armed forces are not being wounded and killed in huge numbers in the pointless occupation of Iraq. The powerful tradition of Chicano art as an irrepressible force for social justice is almost nowhere to be found in this exhibit.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

Cabin Fever

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

“Uncle Tom” had become such a potent brand of political impotence that nobody really cared how far its public usages had traveled from the reality of its literary prototype.

When I returned to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” not long ago, it struck me as far more culturally capacious — and sexually charged — than either Baldwin or the 60’s militants had acknowledged. Half a century after Baldwin denounced it as “a very bad novel” in its “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality” and promotion of feminine tears and anguish as a form of political protest, both the novel and Baldwin’s now canonical critique are ripe for reassessment.

Gillo Pontecorvo and Mark Thomas — Political Art and Comedy

Filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, by Alexander Billet

Pontecorvo’s works like The Battle of Algiers have withstood the test of time for a reason: they continue to inspire and teach.  The flawless way in which his movies mix politics and art serves as a brilliant example for today’s directors.  Will a new generation of filmmakers take up the torch he has so gracefully passed to them?  If they do, that will be Pontecorvo’s biggest legacy.

Bruce Elder on As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela by Mark Thomas 

There is an argument that the only way to deal with the arms trade, and the mendacity of the politicians who are prepared to make pacts with the devil to sustain it, is comedy.

So Mark Thomas, a British comedian-activist, who hovers somewhere between Michael Moore and John Pilger, decides to take on the international arms industry with humour, logic and justifiably cruel games (he sets up a faux PR company designed to help serial offenders counter accusations by Amnesty International, then heads off to an arms trade fair – the Indonesians are convinced in a very big way).

Fiction and Social Change….

The Fuss Over Super-Fine Fiction

James Bradley

Once, when the novel possessed the clout television and film possess, this transgression could change the world. Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby played no small part in driving the reform of the Yorkshire schools in Britain, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook changed lives around the world, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was a touchstone for the US civil rights movement.

It would be tempting to suggest the nostalgia many commentators, particularly those on the Left, feel for this conception of the novel as a force for social action is really a nostalgia for a different time, a time when novels were widely read and closely entwined in the lives of those caught up in the process of social change. And, indeed, in many ways it is. Certainly, David Marr’s plea several years ago “that (Australian) writers start focusing on what is happening in this country”, that they “address in worldly, adult ways the country and the time in which we live”, was representative of a long-standing view that writers can and should be social activists as well as artists.

But simultaneously it is hard to ignore the sense of excitement that books such as Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe or even A.L. McCann’s splendidly ill-tempered Subtopia spark in contemporary readers, the sense there is something transcendent in the passion of their rage against the machine, in their self-annihilating assault upon the foundations of the societies they depict.

Novels — Historical and Political

Return of the Roman

by Allan Massie  

“Anyone who has read biographies of Dickens—or indeed his letters—will know how agitated he became when in need of a plot. Well, the historical novel presents the author with at least the outlines of a plot, ready-made. You still have to invent much: incidents, dialogue, encounters and so on. But your journey is mapped out. You know that somehow you have to get Caesar to the theatre of Pompey on the Ides of March, 44BC.”

“American Culture” — Broad and Broad?

Some thoughts on “American culture” at the Valve: 

I’m inclined to think that there is some such thing as American culture. But I’m not happy about the way that, for example, professional scholars talk about American culture—or, for that matter, about culture in general. I don’t think that we have a very deep idea of what we’re talking about.

By Bill Benzon

 

 

It seems to me that one uses a term like American culture _not_ to have a deep understanding of a collective phenomenon but to have a broad understanding, necessarily of limited depth. (The understanding may still be useful, powerful, incisive.)

So it’s appropriate to object to any pretensions to any extraordinarily complex understanding in this regard, it seems to me. But pushing a concept to go “deep” that is best suited to remain “broad” would seem to me to be a more fit subject for comedy than traditional scholarship, comedy such as may be implied in the title, at least, of Gary Shteyngart’s recent novel _Absurdistan_.

By Tony Christini

The Big Story

Put this in the Non Sequitur and I Wonder Why categories. Couldn’t possibly be because of the publishing industry:

“With the public still edgy from war and an uncertain economy, fiction continues to serve more as entertainment than enrichment. The big books have been escapist thrillers such as “The Da Vinci Code” and “The Historian,” and the fantasy blockbuster “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” Not only have established literary authors disappointed critics, no major new literary voices have emerged.”

 –from “Book World Still Looking for This Year’s Big Story”

by Hillel Italie

What is Texas Literature?

The question is sometimes asked, What is Texas literature? Is there one? And the answer is sometimes that Texas literature is more of a national literature than anything else – perhaps given that Texas has three of the 9 or 10 largest US cities and its vast countryside and great ethnic and class diversity and other factors. Among other Texas surprises, I suppose, there’s a book coming out on an “Asian underground railroad” that once ran through El Paso, Texas.

Continue reading What is Texas Literature?

Nobel Winner Orhan Pamuk and Guardian Links

Pamuk’s Nobel divides Turkey

Nicholas Birch

Twenty-four hours after Orhan Pamuk became the first ever Turkish writer to win the Nobel prize, reactions in Turkey are strangely mixed.His fellow artists have been overwhelmingly positive. Yasar Kemal, doyen of Turkish novelists and often tipped for the Nobel himself, emailed Pamuk to congratulate him for an award that he “thoroughly deserved”, while the winner of the 2003 Grand Jury prize at Cannes, Nuri Bilge Ceylan declared he was as happy as if he’d won it himself.

Others picked up on Pamuk’s suggestion that his award was above all a victory for all Turkish writers. “It’s a great opportunity for Turkey and Turkish literature to be better known by the world,” said the bestselling crime writer Ahmet Umit.Generosity has been in much shorter supply in Turkey’s mainstream media. “Should we be pleased or sad?” asked Fatih Altayli, editor of the mass circulation daily Sabah, in his Friday column.

… 

Some see the criticisms as simple jealousy on the part of a parochial-minded intelligentsia. Others present them as just the latest evidence of how much damage the authoritarian coup of 1980 did to Turkish society.

But the debate is also typical of the country’s elite: determined to be taken seriously on the international stage, but only on its own terms.

“It’s tragic really”, said Elif Shafak, another novelist brought to book under Article 301 last month. “This is a huge honour both for Pamuk and the country, and yet so many people are so politicised they forget about literature entirely.”
 

13.10.2006: Margaret Atwood: Pamuk is a Nobel winner for our times
13.10.2006: Maureen Freely: Pamuk receives the Nobel for being a writer, not his politics
13.10.2006: http://books.guardian.co.uk/nobelprize/story/0,,1921391,00.html
13.10.2006: Leader: Pamuk’s noble prize
03.04.2006: Interview with writer Orhan Pamuk
23.01.2006: Turkey draws back from prosecuting outspoken novelist
16.12.2005: Trial of Turkish author adjourned
16.12.2005: Leader: In praise of… Orhan Pamuk
24.04.2004: Orhan Pamuk on the road to rebellion
08.05.2004: Profile: Orhan Pamuk
Pamuk: The right choice?
06.08.2006: The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
17.04.2005: Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk
29.05.2004: Snow by Orhan Pamuk
15.09.2001: My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
12.03.2005: Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk
Orhan Pamuk author page
More about Orhan Pamuk on the Nobel prize site

When Evil Doing Comes Like Falling Rain — Brecht, Kelly

When Evil Doing Comes Like Falling Rain

by Kathy Kelly

The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer. –Bertolt Brecht

Last summer, crimes piled up in Iraq. 3,590 people were killed in July ’06; 3009 in August.

In Baghdad alone, the Coroner’s Office reported 1,600 bodies arrived at the morgue in June and more than 1,800 bodies in July. 90% of the killings were executions.

It seems impossible to count how many people were tortured in Iraq over the past several months. The chief expert on torture for the United Nations, Manfred Nowak, says bluntly that the current situation is “out of control.” The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) released a report in September which said that bodies sent to the capital’s morgue “habitually bore signs of severe torture, including acid-induced injuries, burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken bones, backs, hands and legs, missing eyes and teeth and wounds caused by power drills or nails.” The Iraqi authorities confirmed that most of the bodies that were found in the past six months bore serious signs of torture.

Not surprisingly, in the past seven months, a quarter of a million Iraqis are now displaced people after having fled the violence.

UN reports estimate that one out of every four Iraqi children suffers from acute malnourishment. The colloquial word for this condition is “wasting.”

Why are so many Iraqi children hungry and ill? One major cause of illness is impure water. Although an estimated $30 billion to $45 billion of Iraqi and American financing has gone toward reconstruction efforts in Iraq, only about 55% of the planned water projects have been completed.

…

Victor Hugo, where are you now?

“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.”  — Graham Robb