In art, the norms matter – along with the facts, the context, the technical proficiency…. Larry Beinhart: “The Right’s Jack Bauer Fantasy”
Also see: Fictive TV Torture Leading to Real Torture in Iraq, and Vice Versa and 24 – Isn’t It Just Torture? – interview by Marc Lee
[See the revised, extended, and in progress work at The Vassals Handbook page – subject to revision.]
Lesson one – vassalism is capitalism wrought real
Out back is where we brutalize the people. Actually, out back is where we used to brutalize the people but times being what they are we brutalize them all around the corporate gardens now. Stan D. Garde is my name. Let the brutality games begin! For their own good. Brutality is what keeps people in line. Too bad we don’t set aside more often a special time and place for good old fashioned smashing. I miss it. The constant sort of torture we indulge in nowadays seems to me an inferior replacement. Well, nevermind. Let us not lament for the past but celebrate the present and future. Let us begin here, in the Vassals Handbook. The Incorporated Estates of Earth (IEE) commissioned me to write it.
Citizens are gone. They are now vassals. It happened in a funny way. All the banks around the world collapsed, broke. So the peoples’ money was used to refund all the banks. But don’t get any ideas. When the people buy the banks, do they not own them? Yes and no, but mostly and decisively no. You see, the people may properly own the banks (having bought them) but they sure as hell do not get to decide what to do with the money or how to do it. For that is not capitalism, and capitalism is what they bought. Clear? Clever? Clout. In capitalism, the people do not own the decisions. They are not the deciders. They are the consumers, the workers, and in a pinch they may be the funders. To review, the people may be the buyers and in theory the owners, but they are never ever upon any circumstances the deciders. In capitalism, the well-connected few are the deciders, the rulers who select candidates for office, who dole out funds for the campaigns, who provide the illusion of choice via sundry discrepancies for vassals to obsess over and pick between. Nothing more is meant to be.
Am I speaking over your heads, dear vassals? Let me see if I can put this in plainer words. The privileged few rule, the masses obey, even when the masses do most of the work, buy most of the stuff, and totally bailout the bankrupt rulers. That, my friends, is capitalism. Some used to call such a system Chinese Democracy before China was fully incorporated into the IEE. Vassalism is a more precise term, in my humble opinion.
Granted, technically, no land has ever practiced pure capitalism, because, unfortunately, pure capitalism is a self-exploding system – inherently wildly unstable. Totally free markets always lead to disaster – collapse of all sorts. Thus, regulation always exists to help curb catastrophe. And so it is, sadly, that contrary to common understanding, pure capitalism is almost as horrific as pure democracy. Demoscrazy, you know. We’ve had enough of that – we’ve seen where it leads – not to vassalage! which we much prefer. We prefer vassals to people. We prefer submission to rule. Capitalism is a nice thought, an ideal. But vassalism rules.
Oh I know you odd, broke, and broken spirits out there may think of vassalism as little more than slavery. We pity you penny-pinched souls who could not be more mistaken, more immoral. After all, slaves had no money and so could not readily repay their debts, let alone those of their superiors. That is the gross deficiency of the economic system of pure slavery. We had to replace it. Vassalism is much more efficient, much safer for rulers everywhere. It puts people in their proper place. All hail vassalism! See you at the wars!
Neuroscience and Moral Politics: Chomsky’s Intellectual Progeny:
Nussbaum (1997) defends American liberal education’s record at cultivating an empathic imagination. She claims that understanding the lives of strangers and achieving cosmopolitan global citizenship can be realized through the arts and literary humanities. There is little solid evidence to substantiate this optimism. My own take on empathy-enhancing practices within U.S. colleges and universities is considerably less sanguine. Nussbaum’s episodic examples of stepping into the mental shoes of other people are rarely accompanied by plausible answers as why these people may be lacking shoes—or decent jobs, minimum healthcare, and long-life expectancy.
Fiction (and “the arts and literary humanities”) that fails to posit such well known “answers” fails a great capacity.
The space within educational settings has been egregiously underutilized, in part, because we don’t know enough about propitious interstices where critical pedagogy could make a difference.
Only “in part” though. The progressive potential of liberatory art has long since been demonstrated (and moreover for all but the indoctrinated is self evident, one would think)…
Arguably the most serious barrier is the cynical, even despairing doubt about the existence of a moral instinct for empathy. The new research puts this doubt to rest and rightly shifts the emphasis to strategies for cultivating empathy and identifying with “the other.” Joining the affective and cognitive dimensions of empathy may require risky forms of radical pedagogy (Olson, 2006, 2007; Gallo, 1989).
“[R]adical pedagogy” and “radical” fiction and other art, etc.
Evidence produced from a game situation with medical students strongly hints that empathic responses can be significantly enhanced by increased knowledge about the specific needs of others—in this case, the elderly (Varkey, 2006). Presumably, limited prior experiences would affect one’s emotional response. Again, this is a political culture/information acquisition issue that demands further study.
A key element in liberatory literature: emphasizing “the specific needs of others,” and revealing crucial specific facts and information of many types. Continue reading Empathy, Specifics, Liberation
Sign-up for ZNet’s 10 week Spring ZSchool is currently ongoing, including for Liberatory Lit: Imaginative Writing for Social Change:
Literature and other art may be created to liberate or enslave, to enlighten or deceive. This course will explore progressive and revolutionary tendencies in liberatory literature. While broad based enough to facilitate explorations of a wide variety of arts, this course will focus especially on liberatory fiction and liberatory criticism of imaginative writing. I will present my own lib lit criticism and fiction, along with works of a variety of other scholars and imaginative writers. Course members are expected to participate in exploring the existing reality and potential of lib lit and to contribute to its further creation. We will use the new art and issues journal Liberation Lit (liblit.org) as a touchstone.
See initial readings below – however, the course is rather free form and probably should be thought of as an independent study, with forums, shaped by participants’ interests and time beyond the background readings and knowledge provided. Participants should feel free to explore their particular liberatory interests and avenues beyond the provided background.
I’ve provided links to all the readings online to ensure that everyone has ready access. Unfortunately, it takes some digging or is impossible to turn up paper versions of many of these readings. Books of other liberatory criticism and fiction can be substituted if extensive online readings are objectionable, or too remote from participants liberatory interests and needs. The course may be either reading intensive or writing intensive as participants choose.
“Novelist John Updike dead at 76: Was he a ‘great novelist’?“:
“The need to bend the truth, avoid certain realities, above all, not look too probingly at America’s social foundations affected his art, deflecting it and blunting it. In the more than 20 novels, there is far too much waste, secondary material, running in place, even showing off. As well, frankly, there is a good deal of mean-spiritedness directed toward those who fall outside of or reject Updike’s limited middle-class American universe.”
Tim DeChristopher is an economics student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He had just finished his last final exam before winter break. One of the exam questions was: If the oil and gas companies are the only ones who bid on public lands, are the true costs of oil and gas exploitation reflected in the prices paid?
DeChristopher was inspired. He finished the exam, threw on his red parka and went off to the controversial Bureau of Land Management land auction that the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance called “the Bush administration’s last great gift to the oil and gas industry.” Instead of joining the protest outside, he registered as a bidder, then bought 22,000 acres of public land. That is, he successfully bid on the public properties, located near the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and Dinosaur National Monument, and other pristine areas. The price tag: more than $1.7 million.
He told me: “Once I started buying up every parcel, they understood pretty clearly what was going on … they stopped the auction, and some federal agents came in and took me out. I guess there was a lot of chaos, and they didn’t really know how to proceed at that point.”
Patrick Shea, a former BLM director, is representing DeChristopher. Shea told the Deseret News: “What Tim did was in the best tradition of civil disobedience, he did this without causing any physical or material harm. His purpose was to draw attention to the illegitimacy and immorality of the process.”
There is a long tradition of disrupting land development in Utah. In his memoir, “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey, the writer and activist, wrote: “Wilderness. The word itself is music. … We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination.”
Abbey’s novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang” inspired a generation of environmental activists to take “direct action,” disrupting “development.” As The Salt Lake Tribune reported on DeChristopher: “He didn’t pour sugar into a bulldozer’s gas tank. He didn’t spike a tree or set a billboard on fire. But wielding only a bidder’s paddle, a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won’t be opened to drilling anytime soon.”
Likewise, the late Utah Phillips, folk musician, activist and longtime Utah resident, often invoked the Industrial Workers of the World adage: “Direct action gets the goods.” …
Mark Vallen notes: Arts Stimulus Plan Petition – A petition calling on the new Obama administration to create a stimulus package for the arts was launched on January 20, 2009, by the Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) Washington D.C. think tank in alliance with the Split this Rock Poetry Festival.
Shelley Ettinger: “The Crab-Canning Ship is the story of a struggle by shipboard workers horribly exploited by the crabbing and processing industry. Its 1929 publication caused a sensation in Japan, and drew the imperial government’s attention and enmity, driving Kobayashi underground. In 1933 undercover police agents trapped him, captured him, beat and tortured him and, when he refused to squeal on his communist organizer comrades, murdered him. Fast forward to 2008-2009: the book is in the midst of a huge revival in Japan, where its message of class struggle resonates with masses of young workers facing cuts, takebacks, layoffs, rising prices, all the ills of the deepening capitalist economic crisis.”
Ettinger on the Acclaimed Young Writer and lit establishment ideology: “Virtually every time I’ve ever seen the case made that a politically conscious approach to art is illegitimate, and this certainly applies to the case made by Mr. AYW, it relies on three logical (actually political!) bases. None is explicitly stated. Each is assumed to be understood. Each is mind-bogglingly wrong.”
Wikileaks – “Harry Nicolaides’ Verismilitude“: On 19 Jan 2008, the Australian author and academic Harry Nicolaides was sentenced by a Thai court to three years prison for Lese Majeste — criticizing the King. The sentence follows Mr. Nocolaides arrest in August 2007, allegedly for this passage in his 2005 novel:
From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives “major and minor” with a coterie of concubines for entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a son they conceived together, for an undisclosed indiscretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumored that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives and she betrayed him, she and her family would disappear with their name, familial lineage and all vestiges of their existence expunged forever.
For the full novel and further information, see: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Imprisoned_Australian_author_Harry_Nicolaides_censored_novel:_Verismilitude%2C_2005
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/01/19/thai.jail/index.html#cnnSTCVideo
Pointed incoherence is hallmark of Jonathan Franzen’s thoughts about the social novel (fiction that is especially sociopolitically engaged). This telling garble is demonstrated in the 1996 essay Franzen wrote on the social novel – both the original and revised version, “Perchance to Dream” in Harpers and “Why Bother?” in How to Be Alone – and recurs most recently in an interview this January 2009 at 5th Estate where Franzen states with trademark non sequitur:
[When] young I actually thought I was the only one with [more-or-less progressive sociopolitical] perceptions. … I think the difference now is that I recognize that there’s a small but non-zero segment of the population that feels and thinks in all of those literary ways….
Franzen falsely conflates “literary” with enlightened sociopolitical views. Franzen has shifted from trying to reveal public reality for a broad audience to writing for a much smaller audience that shares his sense of the “literary,” whatever the sociopolitical. Continue reading The Terminal Glide Path of the Established
Stateville hobble-hopped his mangled body into the lobby searching for coffee or maybe a pitcher of ice water with slices of lime. Coffee today. Stateville slung a golden mug from his ribs and poured a brew. He noticed a line. He loved lines. He hobble hopped over. He liked to join bank lines especially when he had no money to give or take. “They pay well in this joint? Slave you much? Boss you all day long?” Stateville passed through life as perpetual job seeker, traveler, lost soul, wise man, kid eccentric, elderly beggar, philosopher, clown, worker. Today he joined a line for workers behind a woman with purple and orange plaits cascading from large skull, one of several dozen people in line from the neighborhoods. “They want those who can talk is what I hear. Mhhmh. Not just anyone can talk, you ask me. There’s the war, elections, the weather, family, land, God. God is good to talk.”
“‘No gods no masters’ – no ma’am.” Stateville peered over his golden cup. “No god ever offered me a job. No god ever built me a home, offered me bread, gave me a lift, took my hand, led me anywhere but here where I am already. What do I need what don’t exist for? Fairy tales are fine but – is what is – all gods are make believe. Is what is. Far as anyone knows. Now, you got a great story? Fine, do tell. Story is not god. Story is signs and story is what is. But God no.”
“Mhhmh. You won’t get far without God in your life. You got to believe.”
“I believe in democracy not theocracy. ‘No gods’ – I tell it straight – ‘no master’.” Continue reading Stateville Speaks
His song titles are blunt and straightforward: “We’re All Immigrants,” “The Injustice System,” “Military Recruiters Lie,” etc., etc. Metaphors, poetic devices are completely absent here; his lyrics include sections like this one: Continue reading “Can You Handle Tha Truth” by Alexander Billet
“Writer of 1970s ‘Ecotopia’ Makes a Comeback in the Green Era” by Anita Weier:
It is useful to understand “liberatory” in two basic ways for literature. In the past the term in lit has been used mainly in regard to “women’s lib” of the ’60s, ’70s as far as I’m aware – I don’t recall that the lit critics of the ’30s and so on use it, though it nearly gets into the title of one of VF Calverton’s books, and maybe it is used in passing somewhere or another. More or less progressive critics of that time used words more like “revolutionary” and “proletarian” and “Marxist” or “materialist”. One broad basic sense of liberatory is in reference to about any sort of freeing or advancing or progressing phenomena of literature, especially in regard to normative issues (morals and ethics…politics and culture) and less so (secondarily or as derivative) aesthetically. So, for example, the multicultural expansion of recent decades is liberatory in this sense even when it occurs in basically a liberal and conservative or other status quo framework. In this sense, “liberatory” is a synonym for “progressive” (or “enlightened” – as in of the Enlightenment – or moving toward “ideal”) however limited or bound that progress may be. Elements of liberalism and conservatism contain some liberatory aspects also (especially in having some roots in the Enlightenment or other relation to it). All this understands liberatory in a very broad sense of the term.
The primary and most crucial sense in which we might understand liberatory is to distinguish progressive or revolutionary literature from status quo work that blocks or slows progress (let alone revolution) actively or passively, inadvertently or knowingly. Again, the term refers in this use mainly to normative respects of literature as revealed in a story’s substance, effects, functions, and consequences. Revolutionary lit, or to be more clear, liberatory revolutionary lit is the strongest sense in which the term might be used – again referring essentially to normative revolution, whether or not the aesthetics are also much revolutionized or advanced. Continue reading Liberatory Literature
The Complicit Culture
In literature, as in politics, and plenty of life, there can be a big difference between liberal and left. Literature is not somehow mystically ideology free. Don Quixote, as with many other classics, was written as propaganda. A lot of progressive views are to the left of the basic liberal views of periodicals like The Nation, n+1, The Guardian, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, etc. Substantial left views should be heard in national publications, especially since left views, as I understand them, and as polls reveal, are largely popular views. Instead, many left views are severely drowned out “even” in liberal media, as great media watch organizations like FAIR and Media Lens demonstrate. (Of course in my view conservative and reactionary views are typically as bad as or worse than liberal views.)
Obviously there are some ideological differences between basically liberal publications. There are significant differences between, say, The Nation and the New York Times, and so on. Alexander Cockburn, for example, is a left columnist for the predominantly liberal Nation magazine (though his column space was halved a few years back). The New York Times has no corresponding left columnist, though Paul Krugman occasionally comes close. The Nation is basically a liberal publication with some left tendencies, and its commentary on literature reflects its predominantly liberal emphasis, with many left views blocked out and discredited. The New Yorker, though predominantly liberal, lies to the right of the Nation. Though liberalism and its variants evince some genuine qualities, they also possess predominant and atrocious deficiencies, crucial to reveal. Continue reading Establishment Ideology – Suffocating and Oppressive
Frequent New York Times contributor and novelist Benjamin Kunkel has an article “Dystopia and the End of Politics” in the establishment journal Dissent that is the most recent in a lengthening line of State of Fiction (SoF) commentaries by various authors, picking up with James Wood’s book How Fiction Works (and related articles), tracing through a series of challenges to HFW, hopping to Zadie Smith’s “Two Paths for the Novel,” and then shifting to Kunkel’s piece with no basic new turns in the thinking of the status quo writers amid all declarations and pronouncements lavish, banal, seeking. Some parts of these essays hit the mark in noting the severe limits of various novels and their types, yet the status quo State of Fiction analysts can’t or won’t turn their heads far enough to note or to compensate for, let alone adequately address, ideological binds administered by the caging hands that feed, in academia and commerce.[1]
In Dissent, the longtime cold war journal of Swiftian title, Kunkel writes like a character out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, rendering himself chaotically familiar and essentially inept. Chaotic because reasonable insight mixes with misprision leading to hapless assertions and vacuous conclusions.[2] As for content, Kunkel, focusing on all too prevalent sterile lit surrounds, looks to fly to fertile land, plunging instead into sand. Kunkel’s article stands as one of the many pinched walls and series of iron bars of the literature establishment, likewise the writings of Bolaño, at least as they function in the US, though Bolaño’s work is less familiar and less inept and contains a number of enduring qualities. (Kunkel’s writing can come across as less sophisticated or refined than that of the larger lit establishment, possibly willfully so, thus it may appear more evidently flawed to some, more bemusing to others, and so on. That the sentences in his Dissent article hang like debris clouds freeze-framed after a building collapse merely provides extra asthmatic effect. Kunkel may seem an easy or unnecessary object of criticism, but he remains an establishment outcropping, visible enough for critique.) Continue reading Kunkel, Bolaño, Ngugi, and the State of Fiction
Oh man, it was a tough day to stand by President George Bush, even for me, his main PR man, yours truly, Stan D. Garde. They threw everything they had at us today, everything but the book. They fired shoes, sure, you heard about those, size 10, truly a coward’s size, but we also ducked, dodged, and skirted random machine gun fire, rocket propelled grenades, and assorted other small arms fire attacks, half a dozen mortar rounds, and miscellaneous other missiles. Man, where’s the love, man? We liberated these ungrateful Oilans. You would think they would at least give us a pass for that gift. Not so. Instead it’s like they think we blew up their country and slaughtered their people and tried to steal their oil. Oh well, it’s probably only a minority here out to kill us. I’m sure the masses still love us. Well, it’s not like we’re too much safer on our homeland streets back in the good old US of A, you know, what with all those raging pot smokers and immigrant service workers and smart-aleck rappers we need to keep locking up in record numbers. Just what this world is coming to, I haven’t the faintest idea. Fortunately, reality this past century or so is totally optional especially now that we’ve got all the crucial propaganda safely on our side, billions and billions of dollars worth of glorious gloss in ever more righteous e-gaze and garde. Oila for the Oilans! I say. We’re all Oilans now. Continue reading Oilan Shoe to the Head
One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama? … He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: “They have nowhere else to go.”
Not yet. If there is a happy ending to the Groundhog Day of repeated wars and plunder, it may well be found in the very mass movement whose enthusiasts registered voters and knocked on doors and brought Obama to power. Will they now be satisfied as spectators to the cynicism of “continuity”? In less than three months, millions of angry Americans have been politicised by the spectacle of billions of dollars of handouts to Wall Street as they struggle to save their jobs and homes. It as if seeds have begun to sprout beneath the political snow. And history, like Groundhog Day, can repeat itself. Few predicted the epoch-making events of the 1960s and the speed with which they happened. As a beneficiary of that time, Obama should know that when the blinkers are removed, anything is possible.
From Edwin Muir’s thoughtful The Estate of Poetry (1962):
“I’ve been trying to measure the gap between the public and the poet, and to find some explanation why it is so great…. The first allegiance of any poet is to imaginative truth…but it does not mean that he should turn inward into the complex problems of poetry, or be concerned with poetry as a problem. That is something which has commonly happened in the last fifty years. There was some excuse for it after the years of experiment associated with Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound. To them, about 1910, poetry seemed to have come to a dead end, and intense thought had to be given to it. The experiments of that time and the succeeding years have become a part of literary history. As they were new and strange when they were first attempted, they were found difficult by the reader; and they seem to have left for a time in the minds of poets and critics the belief that poetry should be difficult. The experimenters have done their work, and we should be thankful to them. There have been many experimenters in English poetry: Chaucer was one; and Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Wordsworth were all experimenters. The experimenters of forty years ago did something to poetry and something for poetry. One kind of poetry was written before T.S. Eliot, and another kind after him. But the point of an experiment is that it should solve the particular problem set for it. This was done in the twenties…. There remains the temptation for poets to turn inward into poetry, to lock themselves in to a hygienic prison where they speak only to one another, and to the critic, their stern warder. In the end a poet must create his audience, and to do that he must turn outward. Even if he is conscious of having no audience, he must imagine one. That may be the way to conjure it out of the public void.” Continue reading Edwin Muir on Poetry, the Public, and Audience – in The Estate of Poetry
Milton’s republic – by Terry Eagleton, in the Guardian – “Our great dissident poet, born 400 years ago today, did more than just hymn the praises of revolt”:
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust.
We are not used to such revolutionary sentiments in our poets. When he left Cambridge, Milton refused to take holy orders and, in his first great poem Lycidas, he mounted a blistering assault on the corruption of the clergy. He was a champion of Puritanism at a time when that meant rejecting a church in cahoots with a brutally authoritarian state.
His political dissidence, however, had its limits: he defended the notion of private property, unlike the more communistic wing of the parliamentary forces. As for sexual politics, Adam in Paradise Lost is a priggish patriarch. Yet Milton was also an early advocate of divorce, claiming that a lack of love and companionship was a more important ground for separation than adultery.
At the heart of Milton’s political vision lay a belief in liberty and self-government. Pressed to an extreme, this doctrine could appear anarchic: grace freed humanity from law and authority. He thus came to reject the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in the name of personal freedom. One of his most magnificent pamphlets, Areopagitica, inveighed against the state censorship of books. He denounced the censorship of works before publication as a strangling of free inquiry. “Almost kill a man as kill a good book,” he observed. If truth were to be established, an open marketplace of opinions was indispensable. “So truth be in the field,” Milton insisted, “we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worst, in a free and open encounter?” Continue reading Terry Eagleton and John Milton
William Deresiewicz Reviews How Fiction Works by James Wood
Is there no current liberatory criticism, no viable alternative to the status quo criticism of fiction and other literature as William Deresiewicz claims in the Nation magazine?: “The very idea of heroic criticism, like that of heroic art, is…no longer credible” given “the abandonment of the political dimension of radical critique over the past several decades” and “any sense that politics and culture are connected, or that their criticism should be connected….”
Actually, some liberatory criticism is being produced in the academy let alone elsewhere, especially online, along with some other liberatory lit as well. Considerable progress has been made in criticism in recent decades, especially originating largely outside of commercial critical circles, given the work of Edward Said, for example, among others.
Dominant criticism is too much impoverished Deresiewicz notes but far more impoverished than he touches on. This long into the age of the internet in particular, to not look readily beyond the dominant journals and magazines for other current critical tendencies is to be remiss, at the least, to perpetuate the grip of the closeted approach to literature decried in the article, especially since about the only alternative presented is the limited too often biased or retrograde dominant criticism of decades past. Even as Deresiewicz claims James Wood’s example would lead criticism into a desert, his own article already leaves readers there, for not only does Deresiewicz bury contemporary liberatory criticism, he buries such criticism of the past, a tendency in American criticism more vital, more crucial than the bulk of the critical tradition he cites.
He elides accomplished critic Maxwell Geismar, the increasingly progressive Geismar who wrote at the same time as the dominant critics Deresiewicz lauds (“the New York critics”), Geismar who was for a time no stranger to the pages of the Nation but has subsequently been written out of history, along with much of the roots, current realities, and possibilities of liberatory lit. Deresiewicz finds himself with Wood and the New York critics among the dominant lit dunes of their own making. Continue reading Criticism of the Parched
Some thoughtful recent posts:
A Serb’s story
The second noteworthy book reviewed in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is The Delivery Room by Sylvia Brownrigg. Why is it noteworthy? As usual, not because of the review itself, but because of what a careful red reader can glean from it. The novel’s main character, it seems, is a Serb. Not only a Serb, but a politically and historically conscious Serb who sharply opposes the U.S./NATO breakup of Yugoslavia and the imperialists’ 1999 bombing war against her country. Dare I hope? Can it be: a fiction that rejects all the outrageous U.S. lies about Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo that have been served up to justify the Clinton administration/Pentagon/Nato criminal war of aggression? I won’t know for sure until I read it. But reading between the lines of this lukewarm and ultimately politically hostile review, hope swells. …
Joe Hill & Paul Robeson
November 19 is the anniversary of the murder of the great labor organizer and people’s singer-songwriter Joe Hill by the capitalist robber barons’ firing squad in Utah in 1915. Joe Hill’s last written words were in a letter to Big Bill Haywood: “Goodbye Bill. I die like a true rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning–organize!” …
A new James Kelman novel
I’ve read two Kelman novels: How Late It Was, How Late and You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free. I loved them both. Another, Translated Accounts, has been on my night table pile for a while. Now I’ll add this new one, Kieron Smith, Boy to the to-read list. Sunday’s NYTBR review by Marcel Theroux was lukewarm–filled with damning-with-faint-praise formulations like “Still, this isn’t a bad book”–but that doesn’t deter me at all. I’m glad for the review because it alerted me about the book and, well, that’s about the extent of its use. …
A Practical Policy 