by Saul Landau
The obituaries on Norman Mailer offer little or no space to his literary contribution that offers unique insight into the Cold War. Harlot’s Ghost explored the U.S.-Soviet clash as no historian or sociologist dared — or had the capacity to probe.
Amis’s views are symptomatic of a much wider and deeper hostility to Islam and intolerance of otherness.
Truthdig by way of USA Today notes:
If the combined power of thousands of Buddhist monks staging a nonviolent protest isn’t enough to oust Burma’s oppressive junta, one American hero (cue movie trailer voice-over) is coming to fight for democracy in a faraway land—or at least stick his nose in another nation’s business. Yes, Rambo is ready to exact vigilante justice in Burma in the fourth installment of the Stallone series called, well, “Rambo.”
My crossposted comment:
Yes, it’s quite comic what the movies can do – “cultural softening” and purging and all.
Norman Mailer and the “Good War”
by Martin Smith
Each Obituary did at least mention The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s first and most important novel. It is one of the great antiwar classics in literature and a book that speaks to all activists committed to ending the brutality of wars for empire.
Yet The Naked and the Dead is barely known today outside of academic circles–because it challenges the standard assumptions about the Second World War as “the good war,” and unmasks the hidden motives of U.S. involvement.
The Naked and the Dead is the story of a suicide mission by a reconnaissance patrol that is ordered to assess a Japanese rear position on the island of Anopopei. If the soldiers survive and return, General Cummings plans to send out a company for a surprise attack, a daring tactical move that would likely lead to his promotion.
Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer (part one)
Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer (part two)
On Maxwell Geismar and Norman Mailer:
In the two previous posts of Maxwell Geismar on Norman Mailer, it seems to me that Geismar is primarily critiquing the political or ideological component of Mailer’s work — which is easy to understand coming from a literary critic whose work and livelihood were threatened, then destroyed, for political, ideological reasons during the Cold War. In my view, Geismar correctly and astutely calls Mailer on these shortcomings.
I think Armies of the Night and Executioner’s Song are highly accomplished non-fiction works, essentially, aesthetically and otherwise. However, Armies does have the political shortcomings that Geismar points out. Continue reading Links to some earlier posts and other comments on Norman Mailer
Reviewer Kasia Anderson writes at Truthdig:
“After all, given filmmaking conventions and production timelines, the odds are stacked against any dramatization of current events achieving some semblance of intelligibility within 88 minutes of footage cobbled together to form a finished product long before reality could easily make a mockery of its driving premise.”
The claim is false. Continue reading Lions for Lambs Iraq War Movie Critiques
Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle writes, Lions for Lambs “is responsive, engaged filmmaking, the kind of movie they say Americans don’t make.”
On the contrary, Hollywood makes “responsive, engaged filmmaking” continuously. The problem is that it basically reinforces the unjust status quo about fundamental economic and military matters, especially.
Quite good article from a teacher here on academia, society, and the state of things. We live in something akin to Germany 1940 and an open society. It’s bipolar. Bipolar times.
Reed:
Given the choices that African Americans have and the environmental issues at the root of their problems, should blacks go green?
Yes, of course, blacks and everyone else. It would at least give the corporate state system of rule a bit of the shock treatment the rulers are so used to administering to the people.
We’ll see if the film industry does it any different this time in its slate of Iraq war films. The April 2002 views of British filmmaker and journalist John Pilger below seem accurate to me in “Hollywood Hurrah” –
Coal the Hard Truth
Written almost 90 years apart, a pair of muckraking books neatly frames the messy debate over the consequences of the `dirty rock’ – and its stubbornly prominent role in our future
Christine Sismondo
The Ontario government recently announced it would not be installing “scrubbers” in the province’s coal-fired power plants, technology that could reduce toxic smog-causing emissions by 60 per cent.
And why not? Because coal plants are supposedly not long for Ontario, their demise in this province promised for 2014 just last week by Premier Dalton McGuinty.
Still, some wonder if reports of their impending death are exaggerated, since the funeral was once set for this year (a promise the current government campaigned on), then initially extended to 2009.
As a shortcut to making cheap electricity, we got seriously hooked on the dirty rock more than a hundred years ago and we’re still trying to wean ourselves off. Although we tend to think of coal as a thing of the past, with a few outmoded plants still lingering around as anachronisms, in fact we burn more coal than ever before.
All signs point to still more coal consumption, with coal now being billed, particularly in the United States, as a homegrown alternative to expensive foreign oil.
Coal has always had its hidden, ugly side. From the very beginning, while we were delighting in the novelty of electric appliances at world’s fairs and the convenience of nighttime lighting, coal was responsible for human misery.
About 100,000 people died in American coal mines in the 20th century, and “black lung” is thought to be responsible for an estimated 200,000 more American deaths over that span. That has been merely one of the hidden costs of keeping the lights on.
Novelist Upton Sinclair investigated the rock’s dark underbelly in his muckraking book King Coal in 1917. The book (currently in print but pictured below in an early edition) is fiction but based on a 1913-14 coal miners’ strike. Despite harsh realities of fighting powerful King Coal, Sinclair remained hopeful. He felt the injustices of men being cheated out of their full pay, and worked to the bone in life-threatening conditions, could be overcome through solidarity. In most of Sinclair’s books, there is only one real hero, socialism as he understood it, and in the end it always prevailed….
Fast forward to the present, where lately the dirty little rock has been examined by New York Times Magazine writer Jeff Goodell, in Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future.
In Goodell’s story, the modern “King Coal” is the real-life Don Blankenship, president, CEO and chair of Massey Energy, a U.S. company with 19 mining facilities in West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky. Blankenship’s a small-town-poor-kid-made-good who pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and is, incidentally, a descendent of those McCoys who kept feuding with the Hatfields.
At times, Blankenship tries to do good work; for instance, he gives out toys to children in Madison, W. Va., location of one of the company’s operations. In the real-life tale Maria Gunnoe plays the “David” role. She’s a vocal resident who has been campaigning against the environmental fallout from Massey’s operations.
By Goodell’s account,Gunnoe’s activism made her unpopular in some quarters – in suspicious incidents her car’s brake lines were slashed and the family dog found dead.
The devastation Gunnoe describes to Goodell is a result of the ways mining has changed (improved to some, much worse to others) over the years. For instance, in an effort to minimize the expense and danger involved in going into underground pits, it’s become common to simply cut the top off the mountain and lift the coal out (“mountain top removal,” in mine-speak).
…
A New Iliad: The Fixation of Dubya or The Wrath of the American People?
by Caroline Arnold
“I sing the Wrath of Achilles” … proclaims the opening verse of the Iliad.Scholars generally agree that the Iliad originated in orally generated and transmitted stories, scenes and characters during the 500 years after the Trojan War (c. 1250 BC) until the “blind poet” Homer, (who some believe was a woman) wrote them down around 650 BC.
Though many think the Iliad is about the Greeks’ war on Troy – battles, maneuvers, wife-stealing, the Trojan Horse – it isn’t. It’s about the Wrath of Achilles: “… that fatal wrath which, in fulfillment of the will of Zeus, brought the Achaeans [Greeks] so much suffering and sent the souls of many noble men to Hades ….”
Achilles spent most of the Trojan War sitting in his tent sulking over a slave-girl Agamemnon stole. Eventually, after his friend Patroclus was killed by Hector, Achilles got really mad, went after Hector, and with the intervention of the gods, killed him.
Yet what strikes most modern readers is the formulaic language: “the fair Helen,” “the swift-footed Achilles,” “Hector of the shining helm,” “the horse-taming Trojans”, “the well-greaved Achaeans.” Such repetitive epithets and stock phrases are apparently what made it possible for epic tales to be remembered and reconstructed improvisationally by generations of singers/performers in pre-literate oral societies.
Some 30-odd centuries after the fall of Troy we seem to be in a new age of orality I see it in letters- to-editors, blogs and on-line comments where common oral phrases are spelled in ways that change meaning: “tow the line,” “feint of heart,” “waived a handful of documents,” “take the reigns,” “in cynic with” (for: toe the line, faint of heart, waved documents, take the reins, in synch with)
Where’s the sense, the meaning, the reality? in the sound of the words or in the spelling? And where are facts or truth when we are swamped with sloppy orthography, or the oral bravado of thousands of blind bards – PR people, newscasters, pundits, preachers, patriots, protestors and politicians who repeat the sound bites and urban legends they think portray reality?
Three thousand years – a hundred human generations – have passed since the Trojan War. Human population worldwide has grown from perhaps 50 million in 1000 BC to over 6 billion today. Human communication has gone from ephemeral oral/aural exchanges to semi-permanent visual modes of writing and printing; it has spread into broadcasting, computing, Internet, and cellphones, and been largely taken over by a corporatized “mainstream media” and professional spin-doctors.
Are we better off? The Greeks and Trojans had a pantheon of gods just barely nobler than the imaginations that produced them, and a body of oral, malleable myths to explain the world. We have imagined one great God who speaks directly, but orally, to selected prophets, (and latterly, presidents) and we justify our unimaginably destructive ideologies and technologies with oral, malleable myths.
“Fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” is recited as the all-purpose justification of a cruel war. Cindy Sheehan is labeled an “Attention whore;” anti-war protestors are called “whiny, anti-US morons,” or “idiot liberals.” “All options are on the table for Iran” means “we can nuke Iran if we want to,” and “support the troops” means giving Bush our money to pay Haliburton and Blackwater. Or does it mean “Bring the troops home now”?
I have been writing these columns for almost 10 years. I like to play with words and meanings, and explore ways to understand the natural world and our human place in it. I like to think I have done this in service to a less violent, more humane world.
I confess I’m running out of steam. The sheer quantity of information needed to understand what is going on in the world has become unmanageably large; the amount of noise in the system drowns out all sense. Even with good google-skills and a fast computer I can’t keep up with issues like corporate crime, drug smuggling, health care, global economics and a myriad of other things that matter. Among other things, I suspect it is not a good idea to tell pension funds what they can’t invest in, but how do I know?
Worse: it’s getting too hard to offer hope to people. The illusions we have created out of sound bites and formulaic phrases are taking us all to hell. The Middle East is aflame with civil wars, the U.S. President is hated world-wide, global warming and proliferating nuclear weapons threaten all of us.
We the people aren’t in control of our own government any more – nor of our our lives. We’re trying to stop the use of torture and illegal detentions, to end a cruel war, or turn back the march of global warming, and it’s not working.
We’re mostly contributing to the construction of an epic we might as well call Oiliad (”I sing the Fixation of Dubya, that fatal fixation which, in fulfillment of the will of God, brought [the world] so much suffering and sent the souls of many noble ones to Hell ….”)
We need an epic about “The Wrath of the American People” against the abuses of the Bush administration. Regrettably, six years of protests, speeches, op-ed essays, online blogs, and MoveOn.org haven’t accomplished much.
And we need an epic that glorifies the worth and dignity of every human being and ends the use of deadly weapons, nuclear bombs, torture, and war.
Opening excerpt from Ishmael Reed’s great article at Counterpunch:
“Some of us relish the naughtiness.”
–Howard Kurtz
In his 1995 book Hot Air, Howard Kurtz wrote that “Imus’ sexist homophobic, and politically incorrect routines echo what many journalists joke about in private. ‘”
“Later, host Don Imus brought up McGuirk’s prior impersonations of African-American poet Maya Angelou asking, “[W]ho was that woman you used to do, the poet? . . . We used to get in all that trouble every time you’d do her. ” As McGuirk launched into the impersonation, Imus said, ‘I don’t need any more columns. Come on. ‘ But Imus did not stop McGuirk, who delivered his impression in verse:
McGUIRK: Whitey plucked you from the jungle for too many years. They took away your pride, your dignity, and your spears With freedom came new woes. Into whitey’s world you was rudely cast. So wake up now and go to work? You can kiss my big black ass”
George Curry, March 3, 2007
What began as a firestorm against Don Imus’ remarks against the members of Rutgers women’s basketball team ended, thanks to Imus’ friends, who controlled a bogus “National Dialogue About Race,” with a referendum on Gangsta Rap and the morals of Revs. Sharpton and Jackson.
By Monday, April 16, appearing on CNN, an all Imus buddy panel, including John Roberts, Paul Begala, and James Carville, engaged in a tribute to Imus. All that was needed were champagne glasses. On the same day John Roberts and his colleague, Wolf Blitzer, described the murder of 31 students at Virginia Tech as “the worst massacre in American history”–ignoring mass killings of blacks and Indians that had been far worse. Moreover, the fact that the shooter Cho Seung-Hui, was a fan of Guns N’ Roses–he named a play, “Mr. Brownstone,” after one of the band’s songs–didn’t inspire the 24/7 castigation of white Heavy Metal music that was dealt to Hip Hop music in the wake of Don Imus’ firing.
The President of NBC News, Steve Capus, was disingenuous when he claimed that Don Imus, the shock jock, was fired solely because employees at NBC were outraged at Imus’ description of the members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “Nappy Headed Hos.” That might have been part of it. But it was the multibillion dollar purchasing power of African-Americans and organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists, a more difficult target for Imus’ fans than Sharpton and Jackson, that gave the African-American community its greatest victory against a racist media that have been its bane since the first slave ships arrived. Before television and radio, it was the newspapers alone that raised lynch mobs on African-Americans. In Charles Chesnutt’s novels, The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and The Colonel’s Dream (1905), the villains are newspaper men. The inflammatory coverage of one led to a lynching. The other editor caused a race riot. A book, The Betrayal of the Negro by Rayford Whittingham Logan, indicts some of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers for inciting civil strife during the 20th Century, based upon malicious and false reporting.
The “National Dialogue” that MSNBC held after the Imus outburst about the Rutgers team was a telling example of this historic trend. The so-called “dialogue” was dominated mostly by white talking heads, including white women, who seem to be prospering at MSNBC, receiving as much airtime as the men. (Even so, Gloria Steinem maintained, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that white middle-class women and blacks share the same social predicament. Really? The college enrollment of white women is higher than that of both white men and blacks.) Instead of the opinions of black academic feminists like bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Sandra O’Neale, Paula Giddings, Joyce Joyce, or Sonia Sanchez being solicited to comment about Imus’ remarks, Naomi Wolfe, a white feminist, whom bell hooks has criticized, spoke on behalf of black women.
It’s fortunate that the money people at General Motors and Bigalow Tea, Direct TV, Ameritrade, Staples, Sprint, American Express and Proctor and Gamble, stepped in, because had they not Imus’ groupies at MSNBC, like his pals, Mike Barnicle, David Gregory, Bo Dietal, the author of a vicious anti-Muslim tirade during Imus’ last weeks, and Joe Scarborough, would have rescued their buddy by following their leader’s talking points. (Keith Olbermann reported that Dietal was even reprimanded by rightwing fixer Dick Morris for using Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein, to make even more anti- Muslim comments.)
Imus griped that he was a victim of the African-American male culture, where, according to a man who has a lengthy record of making misogynist remarks, men mistreat women. Yet a recent SUNY study reveals a different reality: white men commit most of the assaults upon women in this country. According to the study conducted by Lois Weiss, professor of education at the University of Buffalo, and Michelle Fine, professor of social psychology in the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, white women are afraid to talk about the abuse. Weiss and Fine found that 92 percent of the white women interviewed said that “serious domestic violence” had been directed against them, their mothers and/or sisters, either in their birth households or in later relationships. By comparison, 62 percent of black female subjects reported similar levels of violence in their lives. The authors of the study said that they were surprised because these were white women largely from middle class homes. On the other hand, there has been a steady reduction in the murder of black women by their husbands and boyfriends, while the murder rate of women by white men has remained about the same. One of the reasons for the falling rate of domestic abuse among blacks is that black women are more likely to retaliate. This drop in black domestic violence has been reported in The New York Times, yet the face of domestic violence in the pages of the Times continues to be painted black. Do you suppose that MSNBC will ever conduct a “National Dialogue” about white domestic violence? Maybe Newsweek? One of its writers, Evan Thomas, recently told Imus’ audience that black men in the inner city enjoy beating up their women.
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Whispering in Shadows: a Syilx interpretation of litterature engagee?
Renate Eigenbrod
I engage, you engage, we engage
Make it Active: “Action Poetique”
Kristin Prevallet
The Situation
Matt Forsman
Operation Homecoming
Mark Sommer
The Case that Will Not Die
Jerry Tallmer
It has now been 80 years since the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti tore the United States half apart — and caused a great deal more hullabaloo elsewhere around the globe — in mass demonstrations of hurt, outrage, and fury, bucking against the flanks and flailing clubs of the mounted police, a/k/a Cossacks.
…
…if the Communists jumped on the case, so did a great many other people who were not Communists at all, or very offbeat sorts of Communists — writers and artists and actors and singers and poets from Upton Sinclair to Dorothy Parker to Diego Rivera to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Woody Guthrie to hundreds of others, and none more effectively than the Ben Shahn whose woodcut Sacco and Vanzetti poster is sort of the cornerstone of Peter Miller’s film [Sacco and Vanzetti].
Of its very nature, the footage between the archival footage is a panoply of talking (or music-making) heads, from Howard Zinn to Studs Terkel to Anton Coppola to Arlo Guthrie — and many others — to Jeanette Murphy, daughter of the slain paymaster. “Do I think they killed my father?” she says on camera. “Well, somebody did.”
The Zapatista Reader, edited by Tom Hayden
Gina Ruiz
The Zapatista Reader is one of the most amazing collection of essays, interviews, stories and insights by some of the greatest writers of our time: Jose Saramago, Paco Taibo II, Octavio Paz, Naomi Klein, Elena Ponitowska, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Monsavais, Manuel Vazquez Montalban, John Berger, Andrew Kopkind, Eduardo Galenao, Alma Guillermoprieto, Pascal Beltran Del Rio, Saul Kandau, Jorge Mancillas, John Ross, Regis Debray, Jose de la Colina, Mike Gonzalez, and many more.
Dealing head-on with Bush’s War, thriller dissects Iraqi unrest and nails the neocons
J. Hoberman
The Situation, Philip Haas’s deftly-paced, well-written, and brilliantly infuriating Iraq War thriller is not only the strongest of recent geopolitical hotspot flicks but one that has been designed for maximal agitation. Based on a script by the Anglo-American journalist Wendell Steavenson, this gutsy attempt to dramatize the way Iraqis live now is an incitement to rage and despair — the most vivid critique of Bush’s War yet put on screen.
Apoca-lit: “Novelists have been feeling downright apocalyptic“
Vivek Sharma
Victor Hugo, the French poet and writer, who wished to change how novels were written and read, wrote The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in the beginning of his career.
Pitt to Feature Editorial Cartoonists Who Take Aim at Iraq War
National editorial cartoonists will give illustrated presentations March 28 moderated by the Post-Gazette’s Rob Rogers
The University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will host an illustrated panel presentation, “There’s Nothing Funny About War: Editorial Cartoonists Take Aim,” featuring national editorial cartoonists and moderated by Post-Gazette editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers at 7:30 p.m. March 28 in The Twentieth Century Club auditorium, 4201 Bigelow Blvd., Oakland.
Featured panelists are David Axe, military editor for Defense Technology International Magazine; Ted Rall, columnist and cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate; Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist for The Birmingham News; and Signe Wilkinson, editorial cartoonist for the Philadelphia Daily News.
The moon’s glow hits the pavement as you park your car outside of your friend’s Queens apartment. The second hands shadow graces the number two upon your watch and a yawn emerges from tired lips. You walk up the stairs into your friend’s apartment where the two of you begin cooking dinner.
Unexpectedly six or seven FBI agents bust into the apartment, break down the door and scare the tiredness from every crevice of your body. After the initial, “freeze put your hands up in the air!” the agents ask you for your status.
Andrew S. Hughes
The film “300,” which is set at the battle of Thermopylae, opens today, but it’s not the only artistic work inspired by the Greeks at war that might titillate area audiences.
Goshen’s New World Arts theater also opens its production of Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” today.
Written in about 411 B.C. and set during the Peloponnesian War, which pitted Athens against Sparta between 431 and 404 B.C. and was won by Sparta, “Lysistrata” offers a novel if extreme idea of how to end war: Led by the title character, the women of Athens and Sparta pledge to withhold sex from their husbands and lovers until the men agree to peace.
“It’s always produced during times of war, especially wars that seem to drag on for long periods of time,” director Laura Gouin says of the play’s relevance to today and the war in Iraq. “I think the audience will really connect with the monologue Lysistrata has with a magistrate where she talks about how easy it can be to end a war.”
Lysistrata attacks politicians who profit politically and financially from war, points out how the war has squandered Athens’ treasury, argues that the war deprives young women of potential spouses, and questions why war seems like a reflexive action for men.
The play, however, isn’t a simple anti-war treatise.
“Aristophanes, a lot of people think he’s an anti-war writer, but he was against Greeks against Greeks,” Gouin says. In the text, for example, both Sparta and Athens received praise for previously coming to the defense of the other.
Productions of “Lysistrata” flourished during the Vietnam War, and the play has been revived numerous times in various forms since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States. In April, for example, Indiana University South Bend also will produce “Lysistrata.”
The play also presents other problems to theater companies. For one thing, Aristophanes wasn’t the champion of women’s rights that an outline of the play’s plot might suggest.
“The play does read as a feminist play until the end,” Gouin says. “If you stopped two-thirds of the way through, you’d think he was forward-thinking, until you realize it was all meant as satire.”
In particular, the play ends with negotiations between two men about Peace, a female character.
“The reconciliation scene was difficult to do,” Gouin says. “The two ambassadors essentially divvy up parts of a woman’s body as the land they want. We’re doing it in a way that’s more dignified for her.”
Although Aristophanes doesn’t challenge the male dominance of his society, he does make Lysistrata appealing as an orator, but up to only a certain point.
“The character of Lysistrata appears well read and educated, and her character is written very differently from the other characters,” Gouin says. “She’s the voice of reason; they’re the buffoons. She seems the most like what we’d like to be.”
Until, that is, Aristophanes no longer needs her.
“He uses Lysistrata as his tool, but once (the men) agree (to peace), she disappears,” Gouin says.
Even translations of the play sometimes present problems for theater companies. Gouin, who directed Chicago-based playwright Jeremy Menekseoglu’s feminist rewritings of “Ismene” and “Antigone” in recent years at New World, chose Jeffrey Henderson’s translation from 1997 for New World’s production.
“A lot of the translations make the Spartans sound Southern (and unintelligent),” she says. “I didn’t want to do that. We went with one that makes them sound Russian. We wanted to go with something outside the U.S.”
New World’s production, Gouin says, will try to cover some of the original text’s other problems with its staging.
“Part of what we’ve done is taken the play out of ancient Greece,” she says. “Everything is caricatured, both the men and the women. Aristophanes wasn’t kind to either. He was really upset with what was going on.”
The set, Gouin says, plays into that, too, with a look that might remind audience members of Dr. Seuss’ books.
“We’ve set it in a cartoon world,” she says. “The lights are fun and circuslike. The props, we’ll just say, are larger-than-life.”
So is the play’s use of sex for humor. The women’s sex strike, for example, produces painful results for both the men and the women. Aristophanes’ text is explicit in its use of sex for humor, and Gouin doesn’t recommend the play for children, although parents may bring their own if they want.
“The play is not about sex,” she says. “It’s about the lack of sex, and the consequences of the lack of sex are very visible onstage. … I’m used to working on dramatic pieces. I’ve never worked on a play where I had to give directions much like, ‘Touch his phallus on this line.'”
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See also:
by Tony Christini
A Practical Policy 