A Practical Policy

From this link, at the Times Online, Libby Purves:

. . .Bookselling is a trade; it is sad but not criminal that it operates like one, cutting deals to maximise profit. It is sad but not surprising that big booksellers do not care that their practices are widening the gulf between hyped authors and the rest, squeezing out new writers and truncating the careers of those who fail to return the publisher’s investment fast enough. "Bookselling is a trade; it is sad but not criminal that it operates like one, cutting deals to maximise profit."

Crime? Trade? "Free" trade (as it's called)? NAFTA? WTO? World Bank? Of course much "trade" is criminal, backed up by the biggest of guns, bombs, and threats, and often railed against. The book "trade" is part of that — a reflection of the larger society and economy, much of which is criminal, however legalized, and protected by force (from the marginalized, the executed, the disappeared, including those who would speak and mobilize on their behalf). Just how common knowledge this is, is indicated by the fact that the reality is noted merely in passing for the purpose of dismissing it without argument — a gesture, an effort, probably unconscious, that's comical, at best…

"cutting deals to maximise profit" — nothing criminal about that happy state of affairs, as the thriving world can attest.

"Hey mom, when I grow up, I want to 'cut deals to maximise profit'."

"Excellent, son. Just be sure to hire enough police, and military, to protect you. Try your luck in books, why don't you? I hear the police there talk a lot and don't need to carry guns."

Stop that. Brazen intrusion of reality, that the word police, or their spokespeople, and acceptable litterateurs, are quite visible, and are as busy now as ever.

That's the claim:

Harvey Wasserman, Why the Fundamentalists are Freaking Out Over the Da Vinci Code

A couple politics and art news items:

Lee Ballinger, What Backlash Against the Dixie Chicks?

   update: John Nichols, Dixie Chicks Are Number One

Arthur Asiimwe, Rwandan president scoffs at "Hotel Rwanda"

Some thoughts on the New York Times “best American fiction” discussion: 

In my view, a lot of what the NYT discussion group said was valid and interesting, and thus part of a useful exercise, but in many ways the discussion also seemed inbred and stunted, or oblivious. First, through no fault of the members of the discussion group, the narrow makeup of that group reflected the narrow makeup of the polled group, and then who could be surprised that the discussion would revolve largely around those writers featured prominently in the poll, even if partly in dissent? The main problem with the poll, as has been widely remarked, was the set-up, which the discussion group itself reflected, even as they to some extent pointed out some of the flaws in the set-up…lending an underlying bizarre flavor to the entire discussion.

Beyond that, “American” (that is U.S.) economic and social and cultural influence is so expansive that it is in significant ways strange to think of American fiction as being confined to U.S. citizens/residents (or, that is, _set apart from_ a lot of fiction abroad), let alone the small nonrepresentative group involved in the poll and the discussion both. There were many calls, rhetorical at least, from citizens of countries all around the world for the right to vote in the most recent U.S. presidential election because the quite accurate view is that what the U.S. does has often a significant or even profound and decisive impact on conditions abroad, which cannot help but include and affect literary production as well.

So think of what might have been added to the discussion if a literary figure like Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy had been involved:

Arundhati Roy with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: “I want to ask in our last 30 seconds: the role you see of the artist in a time of war?”

ARUNDHATI ROY: “Well, I think the problem is that artists are not a homogenous lot of people, and some of them are as rightwing and establishment as they can get, you know, so the role of the artist is not different from the role of any human being. You pick your side, and then you fight, you know? But in a country like India, I’m not seeing that many radical positions taken by writers or poets or artists, you know? It’s all the seduction of the market that has shut them up like a good medieval beheading never could.”

There are also a number of U.S. literary figures who make similar observations about the state of U.S. literature. During these past decades of nonstop U.S. covert and overt military action, with U.S. military installations in something like 150 countries around the globe, and hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers also spread around the globe, and U.S. weaponry even more pervasive, what are we to make of this statement by Ron Jacobs?: “Not since Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five [1969] has there been a novel for the US market that so clearly addressed war from an oppositional viewpoint.” This may be something of an overstatement but the underlying deficient reality, it seems to me, is enormously telling. Something akin to a “medieval beheading” is evident in a variety of ways in U.S. literature, in the NYT poll, and in the discussion itself.

As I’ve commented elsewhere: “In a time of state aggression and state terrorism and non-state terrorism; in a time of nuclear proliferation; in an increasingly perilous time of environmental catastrophes, those arrived and those impending, it’s long since time for skilled novelists…to get up to speed in these areas not least” in a modern and contemporary society/culture that bears more than a little resemblance, it’s surely not too difficult to imagine, to a “Good German” culture of the Nazi era…:
https://apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com/2006/05/22/updated-barbara-kingsolver-bellwether-prize-2006-post/

Am I asking the NYT poll and discussion to do something it was not designed to do? Yes, absolutely. And, no, not at all.

 —

This post and more thoughts of my own and others: here.

Traditional anarchist colors.

Art and politics in Nepal — The Color[s] of Freedom:

"My inspiration has always been my fascination with society, figures, the romantic, birds, trees, animals," says Manandhar. "I focus on the female form, not the male. That for me is where the real beauty is."

But now Manandhar says he is in a different phase – one which will likely follow the trajectory of Nepal's democratic process. He says these are not just the empty words of a dilettante but something he is backing up with action.

Indeed, at an event held next to Gongabu Street in Katmandu, site of some the largest pro-democracy demonstrations in April, Manandhar and 55 other artists and poets are creating works of art that will be sold to raise money for those injured during violent confrontations with the police….

See also comment 4:

This is great; Manandhar is a significant artist, and quite famous in Nepal and even in India. But what I think I love the most about this atricle is the way he is distancing himself from the Royal Court. "Sees only Black and Red"; for now…but quite likely to see other colors later. Somewhat ironic, as his patronage extended right up to the previous Queen, and he enjoyed long running painting shows in the former Queen's "Palace". But what they hell; that's the way it is with "revolutions"; when the new administration comes in, best to have a few qualifications that keep YOU from being frog-marched down a dank, dark corridor to rot in a concrete cell. Not to detract from his creative talent though; he clearly has the juice. But self-promotion is also a skill of all great artists.

Arundhati Roy with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, from ZNet:

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask in our last 30 seconds: the role you see of the artist in a time of war?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Well, I think the problem is that artists are not a homogenous lot of people, and some of them are as rightwing and establishment as they can get, you know, so the role of the artist is not different from the role of any human being. You pick your side, and then you fight, you know? But in a country like India, I’m not seeing that many radical positions taken by writers or poets or artists, you know? It’s all the seduction of the market that has shut them up like a good medieval beheading never could.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think artists should do?

ARUNDHATI ROY: Exactly what anyone else should do, which is to pick your side, take your position, and then go for it, you know?

A review of Homefront – anti Iraq War novel    

    Optimism of the Will    

    by Ron Jacobs

Tony Christini wondered why there were no antiwar novels published in the US about its war in Iraq. So did his cohorts Mike Palecek and Andre Vltchek.  

After all, doesn’t this war and its implications need a fictional approach to reach readers who avoid non-fiction? Don’t other cultures and peoples utilize the fictive approach to make political points. Indeed, haven’t writers throughout history understood the power that fiction provides for a view too often unheard. I guess one could argue that there is such a thing as political fiction in the United States if they included novels about Washington corruption and chicanery, but there is little fiction that considers the politics of US extraparliamentary movements. Given this dirth of literature, Christini, Palecek and Vltchek started a publishing venture to resolve the situation. The company, known as Mainstay Press, has around a half dozen titles currently on their list, most of them fiction. It also includes a website that features discussions about literature and politics.  

Homefront is the first novel in a trilogy that takes on the Iraq War and the complicity of the common citizen. Set somewhere in the United States, the story is told through the words and thoughts of one family and some members of their circle. A year after losing their son during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the novel presents the family’s questions and doubts. Simultaneously, it carries on a conversation with the reader about the reasons for the young man’s death.   

Oftentimes, novels like Homefront are so political that they read more like a tract from some political sect than like a novel. In other words, the politics render the flow of the story and its characters to be woodenlike props. The story become secondary at best to the politics. While there is no doubt that this book is very political, just like there is no doubt as to the author’s politics, Christini manages to make this work quite readable. The story has its own compelling style that sweeps the reader into the minds and hearts of its characters.  

The son’s death proves to be a cathartic event in the life of the family and the individuals that make it up. The mother can’t get away from the doubts she has regarding her first statement to the press where she stated “Aaron (her son) died for all of us.” It seems that within minutes of her utterance, she begins to wonder whether she should have said “Aaron died because of all of us.” It is this question that the novel revolves around and it is this question that the author wants each of us to answer for ourselves.

Like Upton Sinclair’s King Coal or even John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Homefront is part moral and political outrage and part story. Taken from today’s headlines, there are themes in this book that read like the evening news. However, the format of fiction allows the writer (and the reader) to go beyond the soundbite. Thereby that ordinary US family becomes an intellectually and emotionally complex creature. Mom not only questions the complicity of her politician cousin, she also questions her own. The dead man’s brother wonders how much the world of sports and macho masculinity created he soldier his brother became. His sisters move from their very private worlds to the public sphere where nothing is certain but their own convictions. It is the author’s hope that the reader will do the same.  

Is the US public this complex? Or are they like so many docile creatures that think only how they are told? Are their concerns really only as deep as the next episode of their favorite television show or the next ball game? Christini thinks not. Otherwise, why bother writing the novel? Most folks involved in the antiwar movement agree with Christini. Otherwise why bother spending the energy it takes to go to meetings and marches? Most politicians, on the other hand, seem to hold the opposite viewpoint. Otherwise, why would they continue to support and fund a war that poll after poll tells them their constituents don’t support? If they don’t consider us to be the simple creatures described above, than the only other possibility is that they hold us in even greater contempt than previously thought. Or perhaps it’s just that the money from the plutocrats that really run this country is just so plentiful that any public or private conscience that the politicians have is rendered dumb in its presence. The presence of amoral (if not immoral) power and greed, and their effect on those whom we choose to rule us is the subject of the second book in the trilogy, Washburn.  

Homefront is an overtly political and staunchly antiwar novel. This in itself is a rarity in today’s world of publishing. Besides the novels of Washington corruption and chicanery mentioned above, Tom Clancy and a myriad of others publish works that justify and encourage the warmongers and their backers, all the while implying to the reading public that the world the imperialists made is the only real world and one that not only deserves to be, but is as permanent as the mountains of the Himalayas. Not since Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five has there been a novel for the US market that so clearly addressed war from an oppositional viewpoint. Homefront is a noble attempt to change that fictional reality.  

Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize is a laudable effort to encourage politically progressive imaginative writing, and this year’s selected novel Mudbound that “tells the story of the contempt that greeted African-American veterans who returned to the Mississippi Delta after serving their country during World War II” is surely valuable and may be a great novel. Racism is as great an issue today as it was decades ago; the racist nature of the explosive growth in incarceration in the U.S. is merely one manifestation today. But is a novel set in the wake of WWII the most timely choice, and in that way the most conducive to social change? Were the other more timely submissions so very much more deficient, at all deficient, or in fact superior aesthetically, etc, to the winner? When Mudbound comes out, it might make for an interesting exercise to compare it to Homefront, Glory, and Washburn (three books of fiction of social change that I submitted as a single novel titled Homefront for the 2004 contest), and also compare it to Andre Vltchek’s novel Point of No Return (submitted for the 2006 contest) or even the forthcoming novel Master of Fine Arts (that I also submitted for the 2006 contest), and also compare it to other such submissions, if any, and you be the judge. All three of these submissions failed to survive even the first cut in the Bellwether contest. Maybe Andre’s novel and my own books are unaccomplished, written by a couple politically disengaged people with no writing experience or evident skill, heedless of the world and the people in it today; that’s one possible answer, easily looked into. The other possible answers are quite telling too.

DePauw Alumna article:

“Writers should embrace the idea that their work is political rather than running from the label,” novelist Barbara Kingsolver said. “In fact, some of the best writing is political…. Because of this climate in the U.S. that political art is taboo, the writers will tell you it’s not political. I’ve heard John Irving say he’s not a political writer. There is nothing to be worried about. It’s absolutely the domain of art.”

Also reported:

Kingsolver created and personally funds the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, the only major North American endowment or prize for the arts that specifically seeks to support a literature of social responsibility. At yesterday’s event she announced the 2006 winner, Hillary Jordan, who receives $25,000 “and a contract with Scribner publishing house for her unpublished novel, Mudbound. It tells the story of the contempt that greeted African-American veterans who returned to the Mississippi Delta after serving their country during World War II.

A worthy novel in concept, and, in all likelihood, in achievement. Yet it’s difficult not to think that — during this time of war and this time of lightning fast global connection and information, even direct access, and during this time of the ever bloody occupation of Iraq, and during this time of the increasing threats of hostility directed from the U.S. further into the Middle East and into Latin America and elsewhere — highly accomplished American novels of contemporary war will continue to be passed over in favor of, say, the next great novel of the French and Indian War, or its wake, that might garner the 2008 prize. In a time of state aggression and state terrorism and non-state terrorism; in a time of nuclear proliferation; in an increasingly perilous time of environmental catastrophes, those arrived and those impending, it’s long since time for skilled novelists, let alone politically engaged prizes, to get up to speed in these areas, not least.

Also, is a contest nearly the best way to go about facilitating the publication of politically progressive imaginative fiction? Instead of producing a single novel every two years, wouldn’t the prize money be better spent founding such a publishing house itself? Or recognizing more novels with a much smaller prize or none at all? After all, these novelists aren’t writing for the prize money, one would think. That said, one would also think that simply going with accomplished but more timely novels would help make the Bellwether Prize something more than it currently is.

Some thoughts from Stan Modjesky on antiwar novels in "Anti-War Book Collecting": 

"Curiously, little if any anti-war fiction has dealt with post-Vietnam warfare, despite the fact that U.S. citizens have been bitterly divided on the justification for the Persian Gulf wars, the war in the Falklands, the ongoing Arab-Israeli and Irish-British conflicts, to name only the most obvious examples. I cannot but wonder whether this stems from lack of artistic inspiration, or fear of reprisals."

The title of Terrence Rafferty’s article in the New York Times about Carlos Fuentes new novel The Eagles Thrown, “The Political is Ultra Personal,” might lead one to believe that the article will explain that the novel portrays the political ramifications of personal decisions and actions that lead to general illumination and pointed understanding on private and public levels both, along with their relation — overt, implicit, and enigmatic…all. Not so fast.

Would that be asking too much of a novel? Would that be too complex for the novel form to ever dare hope to handle? Would that be beyond the capacity of the authors themselves to create, let alone readers and critics to understand?

For instead the article builds to and closes on this bit of boilerplate ideology:

“Fuentes, no mean aphorist himself, wrote not long ago: ‘Politics can be dogmatic. The novel can only be enigmatic’….”

While it may be that most every novel might do well to be deeply imbued by enigma, surely most any novel can also make as deep and clear a political mark as it would like, as well. The two are not mutually exclusive, far from it. See, for example, some of the best moments in Robert Newman’s comic geopolitical novel The Fountain at the Center of the World or Andre Vltchek’s global novel Point of No Return, and so on….

This is not to say that Fuentes did not write a fine novel, or that Rafferty did not incisively review it, or even that the title of the article is inept. It is to say, again, that Fuentes’ aphorism that Rafferty agrees with is deeply flawed, in a variety of ways, as the progressive tradition of literary criticism has revealed in vital detail over the decades.

Link of the day: Graphic Witness

"a site dedicated to social commentary through graphic imagery by artists working from the turn of the 20th Century to the present, with related bibliographic and biographic data"

Interviewer: Is it true that reviewers are too cowardly to review your Iraq War novel, Homefront?

A: You mean antiwar novel? I don’t know. I guess you would have to ask them.

Interviewer: Well, what makes me ask is, see, there’s this whole war going on, people dying by the scores every day in Iraq, and U.S. soldiers dying and occupying the place, and the Air Force bombing across the land, and, well, here you’ve written this Iraq War novel Homefront and can it possibly be that no one is interested?

A: Antiwar novel. What can I say? You would have to ask reviewers. And their editors and publishers.

Interviewer: Way back on March 12, 2004, for Kirkus Reviews Tom Miller and Gregory McNamee  asked: “Where are the great Iraq war novels? It’s been a year since American tanks rolled into Baghdad, and we have yet to see the first roman a guerre.” [The Great Iraq War Novel] That was over 2 years ago, and still nothing today?

A: Seems strange doesn’t it? It’s a massive, very serious public issue, very grave, very many people involved. Hard to fathom why there is not more exploration of the war and occupation of Iraq in novels. Think of the stories the military war resisters could tell…as some are, all across the country.

Never have so many argued for so much (of what they do) to mean so little.

This is how they think, from establishment high officials to establishment flunkies, like the dominant press. They think what they do doesn’t matter in any damaging way when they simply type up what the officials have to say and leave it at that. Hey, buyer beware! (But you won’t be warned here.) Here’s Ana Marie Cox on Stephen Colbert’s satire of the administration and of the press at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

“Comedy can have a political point but it is not political action, and what Colbert said on the stage of the Washington Hilton — funny or not — means far less than what the ardent posters at ThankYouStephenColbert.org would like it to. While it may have shocked the President to hear someone talk so openly about his misdeeds in the setting of the correspondents dinner — joking about “the most powerful photo-ops in the world” and NSA wiretaps — I somehow doubt that Bush has never heard these criticisms before. To laud Colbert for saying them seems to me, a card-carrying lefty, to be settling.”

She hit the trifecta in a short space, wrong on three accounts. First, political comedy is political action and can directly create social, cultural, and political action all. Second, Colbert’s whole performance was mainly a criticism of the press, a far more apt target under the circumstances. Third, the idea that Cox considers herself a “lefty” is entirely laughable and predictable.

Back to the first point, the dominant members of the press love to think so very much of their work has no negative effect on anything no matter how disinformative and subservient to power it continuously is. I’m sure tobacco PR spokespeople think the same way: Just doing my job (and making my big bucks) mainstreaming killer dope, into the veins of the public. And why not? PR doesn’t kill people — words do.

A note I posted on a thread at The Valve:

It seems to me too that the NYT list exercise is in many ways absurd and seriously deficient — does that need to be pointed out? Despite some accomplished works on the list, it fails to provide even a glancing overview of the vital works of contemporary American fiction, or even much insight into what might be more truly representative of or understood as “the best” — singly, let alone, variously, defined.

Considering “the best” might not be the most fruitful way to go, but if one wants to seriously consider standards of high excellence it might not be terrible if the exercise were thoughtfully constructed. So, “the best” according to some 100+ literary figures who know one particular literary figure, or viewed much more broadly, in ways both more representative and eccentric? And “the best” culturally? intellectually? emotionally? ethically? aesthetically? (defined how?), the best in effect? or in execution? or in conception? or…?

It may be that a “best” list exercise can’t be done in a way that does justice to the value of literature. Considering which novels or short fiction may be exceptionally vital, in many ways defined, seems more fruitful and appropriate. But even then one would want much fuller contextualization of the selected works and their relation to other valuable works that don’t measure greatly or at all on any such list.

Evidently, the NYT list is the result of an exercise (by connected establishment figures) with no serious thought to design and understanding. Though there are some strong works on the list, the exercise is in many ways an embarrassment, not least given its obvious limits coupled to its grandiose claim. Should people take it seriously, it seems to me that it would be destructive to literature and culture, as it fails to highlight much of the most valuable writing, let alone the diverse “best,” and a lot of the otherwise vital and lively work being produced.

From the New York Times, a list of the “best work of American fiction from the past 25 years” and an essay “In Search of the Best” by A. O. Scott, excerpted and commented on briefly below. [The NYT list exercise is in many ways absurd and seriously deficient — does that need to be pointed out? It fails to provide even a glancing overview of the vital works of contemporary American fiction, or even much insight into what might be more truly representative of or understood as “the best” — singly, let alone, variously, defined.]

“The three novels do what we seem to want novels to do, which is to blend private destinies with public events, an exercise that the postwar proliferation of media simultaneously makes more urgent and more difficult.”

Really? Or more urgent and easier? because we don’t have to wait a generation to gather so many of the facts, and stories, from, by now, around the globe.

“A big country demands big books…. The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.”

Really? That parochial? High quality global novels like Point of No Return (by the American international journalist, Andre Vltchek) would seem to have a leg up on novels that limit themselves to a national subject, rather than, by now, a global one. Novels of the global age can be found at Mainstay Press, and elsewhere of course. Maybe a few more of those will make the next list.

Other thoughts:

Some novelists and critics have commented on the necessary internationalization of American novels for over half a century. And a decade and a half ago, Maxine Hong Kingston commented in “The Novel’s Next Step,” Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing (Philomena Mariani, Ed.): “I’m going to give you a head start on the book that somebody ought to be working on. The hands of the clock are minutes away from nuclear midnight. And I am slow, each book taking me longer to write… So let me set down what has to be done, and maybe hurry creation, which is about two steps ahead of destruction…. All the writer has to do is make Wittman [hero of her novel, Tripmaster Monkey] grow up, and Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield will grow up. We need a sequel to adolescence—an idea of the humane beings that we may become. And the world will have a sequel…. The dream of the great American novel is past. We need to write the Global novel…. The danger is that the Global novel has to imitate chaos: loaded guns, bombs, leaking boats, broken-down civilizations, a hole in the sky, broken English, people who refuse connections with others…. How to stretch the novel to comprehend our times—no guarantees of inherent or eventual order—without having it fall apart? How to integrate the surreal, society, our psyches?”

Further thoughts at The Future of Imaginative Writing and Political Fiction Journal.

Art Hazlewood with some thoughtful words on political art at Mark Vallen's weblog Art For A Change.