I still buy books & other secrets

I'm popping in here for the weirdly contrarian purpose of sharing a secret or two. Secret number one is that I do still buy physical books sometimes. In the early years of this blog I wrote several times about my book-gathering compulsions--store-buying and library-borrowing--which tended to build to irresistible levels at certain periods. Namely, approaching holidays or vacations. It seems I had, and indeed still have, a horror of finding myself with plenty of time to read and an insufficient supply of choices. Just heard about, been reading to mean forever, and every category in between, there's no clear pattern to how and why I zoom around grabbing up books in the lead-up to leisure time. Older, tireder, but if anything more compulsive a reader than ever, the pattern still applies. And so, as my summer month off work draws near, I've been scouring my to-read list, other people's to-read lists, reviews, and so on, and cross-checking same with: the three library systems I use, the two e-library systems I use, online booksellers, and the Strand. And then, variously, borrowing library books physical and virtual, and, yes, when I find one or seventeen on the Strand's cheap shelves, buying them. I'm about to head up there on today's lunch hour, having put together a list of half a dozen I think I can afford. Meanwhile, I've got another three already on e-book library loan, and a dozen or so more on e-library hold. As to the Strand excursion and likely purchases, cheap though they'll be, sssh--please don't tell my wife. She's been on a get-rid-of-books kick for some time, and finds my resistance exasperating. She's got reason on her side. In a few years when I retire we'll be moving, and no doubt our next place will be smaller than the outrageously big Queens floor-through where we've lived for many years. Teresa figures we might as well start downsizing now, and in fact we have given away or sold plenty of books over the last few years, but yes I admit I've negated any progress by continuing to buy--not nearly at the rate I used to but still. Well. While the great majority of my reading is library books, some books I just want to have forever on our shelves. So, yeah, don't tell her, but a few more are coming home with me shortly.

The other secret concerns my current writing project. My second novel. Or should I say my third? After slowly plowing forward on a novel for eight or nine years, about a year ago I found myself much more excited about an altogether different idea. After bouncing back and forth between the two for the last year or so, I've now fully committed to the newer project and officially set aside what I'd long thought would end up as my second novel. So idea #3 will, if all goes well, end up as novel #2, and I couldn't be happier and, in a way, more relieved, because it represents a breaking out in a new direction for me, a refresh, which I hope the writing will reflect. I don't want to say much about this project--never a good idea with creative endeavors since who knows what might happen--but I will say this without getting specific about content. If I manage to make the book I'm trying to make, this novel will be a new take, a different angle, on dystopian fiction. Actually, and I guess this will sound either foolishly ambitious or, I don't know, pompous, this novel will be a rejoinder to the hopelessly tired, unoriginal, and deeply uncreative glut of dystopian novels with which we're endlessly bombarded nowadays. (By the way, I've aired this complaint before on Read Red. Here and here and here.) What do I mean when I dis these books, yeah why not say it, this whole genre, in this way? Without a single exception as far as I know--and no of course I haven't read them all, but I've read quite a few, and I've read about most of the rest--all these dystopias posit a future in which nothing really has changed. Yes, everything has gotten worse, much worse. But nothing basic, by which I mean the organizing principles and the human relations of the the fictive society portrayed, has shifted in any way. To put it plainly: capitalism continues. Racism rules, sexism triumphs, the rich are richer and control everything even more than they do now. And so on. There is not a single one of these dystopias--if I'm wrong please point me to it--that imagines a future in which human beings have gotten together and reorganized society in an egalitarian way. Not one novel in which, even though capitalism has wrought untold horrors, people have decided to dump the horrible system that's created such devastation (wars, plagues, ecological disaster, you name it) and cobble together a new one with which, unfettered by the one percent's destructive drive for profits, they can begin to rebuild and renew life on Earth. So yeah, that's my modest proposal: to write an alternative narrative that dares to imagine what apparently is unimaginable to most writers, locked in to bourgeois consciousness as they all seem to be. A future in which, after the horrors have ensued--because the horrors have ensued--humanity joins together to fashion a new world. I won't mention the working title of my novel, but I will say that its subtitle is: "A Dys/Utopia." Because while my version won't skip the death and destruction, it will depict the new day that follows. Yes, this will be a novel of hope.

So I read with interest Jill Lepore's recent New Yorker piece about dystopian fiction. Naturally I disagree with her basic political thrust, equating left and right, and lamenting the new dystopians' giving up on the "the liberal state." As if bourgeois democracy in this age of late-stage capitalism in decline, bourgeois democracy with all its intrinsically undemocratic features, its very basis in structural racism, its reliance on imperialist war and occupation, as if the capitalist state which exists to facilitate the theft of surplus value and to repress the working class and oppressed nations--as if the very structures created by and upholding the stinking murderous racist capitalist system--as if all this somehow constitutes a shining beacon of hope and light. Which, apparently, futurist fiction ought to be building up rather than abandoning. I'd counter that all these imagination-impaired (on this we agree) dystopians in fact do accept the status quo, completely, unquestioningly. In fact, they portray it as going on and on. They're certainly right that things will get worse and worse if it does. But because their fiction is imbued with bourgeois ideology they can't imagine a different turn in the future. A whole new way of structuring society, humanity taking on the revolutionary socialist project of reconstruction and renewal, is beyond their creative capacity. They can only see things getting worse, because they can't imagine that humanity is capable of something better.

Lepore does make some good points about dystopian novels, especially toward the end of her piece:

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of fake news and infowars, the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. [my bold] It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more.

In my view, the alternative to despair is indeed imagining a better future. We'll make one by tearing down this system that's driven the planet, and 99% of its people, to the brink of destruction. My book will be fiction. I can only do my best to imagine how it all will happen, and no doubt most of what I imagine won't turn out to even resemble how it actually goes down. But go down it will. I aspire to contribute my modest bit to a literature of hope as we head forward.

Lionel Shriver is the Donald Trump of literature

It's three weeks later, and I haven't had time to write a full-throated denunciation of author Lionel Shriver and her deeply reactionary September 8 speech at a Brisbane, Australia, writers' festival, but tardy as this is and brief though it's got to be, I've decided to post a note now, just for the record.

For the record, then: Lionel Shriver is the Donald Trump of literature. Ignorant, shallow, insecure, defensive, and offensive. Deeply, viciously offensive. A know-nothing candidate of racist reaction--a candidate for the crown of world champion of know-nothing, backward white writers like herself who are threatened by the rising tide of writers of color, queer writers, writers whose experience, perspective, literary concerns are different than hers, writers who are opening up the world of fiction to new narratives, fresh and exciting and oh so badly needed narratives telling truths that will soon overtake the tired, timeworn fiction constructed of the lies of the imperialist overlords.

Shriver's target in her Brisbane speech was that ever-reliable nemesis of defenders of the old guard: political correctness. In this case, politically correct fiction or a consciously politically correct approach to literature. Just in case her words didn't do the trick, she wore a sombrero to provide a visual cue, an ever so simple, direct and expressive Fuck You to Latinos in particular and progressive, conscious anti-racist writers and readers in general.

Ah yes. Political correctness. The bane of the politically incorrect--the racist, the anti-LGBTQ, the sexist, the pro-imperialist anti-liberation crowd--who for nigh on 40 years now have been whining about how their worldwide reign is dwindling to its inevitable end. I wrote about this phenomenon five years ago on Read Red, that post occasioned by events at an AWP conference and the thrillingly brilliant response by the thrillingly brilliant Claudia Rankine. Short version: politically correct writing, or for that matter a p.c. approach to anything, means sensitivity to and awareness of oppression and commitment to actions and language that do not perpetuate oppression. By definition, then, to be opposed to political correctness is to be affirmatively, aggressively, proudly racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQ. It is to align with the forces of oppression, reaction, the colonizers, the killers, the invaders, occupiers, destroyers, the thieves and exploiters.

This, then, is Lionel Shriver. Partisan of the ruling class and its system. Enemy of the working class and oppressed. You've made your point. We see you. You're on the wrong side. Good on yuh, as the Australians would say. Stay there behind Trump's great wall desperately defending your doomed allies. You and your cohort will soon be a bad memory. Shriver's cohort, by the way, includes the celebrated writers' organization PEN, which I've written about several times, including here and here and here. A pro-U.S.-imperialist literary-world equivalent of Human Rights Watch led by a veteran of the State Department whose specialty has long been fronting for invasion and occupation, PEN rarely misses an opportunity to side with the free expression of racist reaction, as in fact it did once again this week. Ah, ye stalwart defenders of the status quo. We'll not miss you after the revolution.

In the meantime, here is the most excellent retort to Shriver from Yassmin Abdel-Magied, the courageous writer who stood up and walked out as the sombrero-topped reactionary delivered her screed.

The despicable Gay Talese will make lots of money from his forthcoming book

The book, officially out in July, is titled The Voyeur's Motel. I recently read the lengthy excerpt from The Voyeur's Motel that was published in the April 11 issue of the New Yorker. After taking the requisite while to recover from my rage and disgust, I decided to comment here.

The overall takeaway from this article: the celebrated writer Gay Talese is despicable.

Yes of course his subject, the retired Colorado motel owner who spent decades hidden above his motel guests' rooms spying on them, most especially watching their sexual activities, is a disgusting creep of the highest order, a deeply committed misogynist guilty of criminal violation of, apparently, hundreds if not thousands of people. His crimes even extend beyond his decades of peeping tom-ism, for he also witnessed a murderous assault and left the assaulted woman, who was alive and might have been saved had he done anything, to die.

Remarkably, that's almost all anyone is writing about in the many articles and commentaries that have run since Talese's New Yorker piece was published. They're talking about the Colorado violator (he prefers what he apparently believes to be the more elegant term voyeur so I won't use it), about his pathology, his delusions, and, to some extent but not nearly as much or as outragedly as they ought, about his crimes.

They're talking very little about Talese and his crimes. For me, this is the news about the New Yorker piece. There's lots to be said, but it boils down to four things:

1. Talese joined the motel owner up in his secret aerie above the motel and watched two people have sex. Talese did it. He committed the crime, even if not thousands of times (at least he only reports this one time.) Repeat: Talese climbed up there and watched through the screened peephole at least once.
2. Talese knew for many years that the motel owner was doing it. He never tried to stop him, and he never reported the crime this pig was committing.
3. Talese also knew, based on the motel owner's own written report, about his having witnessed the assault and left the woman to die. He did nothing about this either, neither trying to urge the guy to report what had happened, nor reporting it himself.
4. Throughout this long piece, and assuming it's representative throughout the whole book, Talese's tone is basically sympathetic toward the criminal motel owner who violated the right to privacy of so  many people. He wonders about why the guy is the way he is, he points out the guy's inconsistencies in reporting, his grandiosity and narcissism, but he evinces no horror, no revulsion. He becomes for all intents and purposes the guy's friend. By my read, Talese is troubled so little by the guy's actions as to amount to not at all. Nor, and of course this is the point,is he troubled in the least by his own, Talese's, complicity. And he is complicit, through and through, for years and years. Every few pages he throws in a phrase or a sentence to the effect of, hmm, I stayed awake worrying about whether I was doing the right thing, but it's so obviously pro forma as to be laughable. Talese has no compunction about any of it. The grand old man of "the new journalism" will no doubt have a grand old time on the book tour.

What we have here is a fine example of bourgeois morals. Most of the commentary about Talese's article consists of musing about journalistic ethics, and while some mildly question whether he didn't go too far in pursuit of a damned good story, most are barely bothered. Talese is after all famous. He's published lots of books and made lots of money. The New Yorker is a fine magazine and would never publish something tainted or questionable. The story is shocking--shocking, I tell you!--but the storyteller is more or less above rebuke. He, the publisher Grove Press, and the criminal motelier who sold his many pages of records of his crimes for I'm guessing a tidy sum, will all make big bucks on what is probably going to be a bestseller. The movie rights have already been sold, to Dreamworks, for six figures.

And that--its profitability--is what makes this book unimpeachable. In the publishing marketplace it's gold. Profit is the highest standard of morality in this stinking capitalist sinkhole of a country.

It's the annual pro-imperialist anticommunist literary love fest

That's right: it's the PEN World Voices Festival, now and for the next several days on stages throughout NYC congratulating itself for always aligning with imperialism.

I'm not saying the PEN festival doesn't feature some good writers, some worthy writers from around the world. And I'm not criticizing those writers for taking part. Nor am I denouncing those who attend. There are so few such opportunities for writers from other countries to get their work read in this country, and so few opportunities in this country to be exposed to the work of those writing in other languages.

So what's my beef? Well, to start with, here's what I wrote here a few years ago:

It's just that, on balance, it [the PEN World Voices Festival] does not in fact offer anything close to what its title advertises: the voices of the world. Which would be the voices of workers and the oppressed. PEN is a construct of the bourgeois literary establishment devoted to promoting bourgeois literary values. It will never provide a platform for a revolutionary literary voice; in fact it often propagandizes against such voices, for instance those in Cuba. So while the glit-lit crowd wines, dines and opines, let's the rest of us march -- and write -- and organize -- in solidarity with the real world's voices ... on May Day.

In fact, if there were the slightest smidgen of an orientation toward the workers and oppressed, the organizers would not schedule this event to conflict with May Day, which is the workers' holiday in every country of the world. Which would you rather do, shmooze with the gliterati or march with the workers?

Let's be clear. PEN is no more a left organization, no more a force for fairness and freedom, than is Amnesty International. Both are adjuncts of the U.S. imperialist ruling class. Both loyally stand with U.S. imperialism against any and every country that defends its own sovereignty as against the force of U.S. imperialism (Iran, Syria, Libya before the U.S. destroyed it, Venezuela) and especially against any and every country that makes a revolution and tries to build socialism.

In fact, this is not mere commentary, not merely my crazy communist take on things. It is fact, fact in the person of PEN Executive Director Suzanne Nossel. She took the helms in January. Before that, she was executive director of none other than Amnesty International. And before that? Why, she worked at the State Department! She was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations. She's been a major advocate of the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan, of the Israeli war against Palestine, of the U.S. bombing and invasion of Libya. On and on. It's a continuum. See how this works?

So. Let's take this a step further, as a heckler apparently did last night at one of the PEN festival's opening events with Salman Rushdie at the podium. Leave aside PEN's anticommunist and pro-imperialist work regarding other countries. What about the U.S.? I'm hearing reports that last night this heckler repeatedly characterized PEN as a tool of the U.S. government and challenged PEN and Rushdie to acknowledge the heroism of Bradley Manning. The heckler certainly raised a good point. Where is the award to a true hero right here? It's within PEN's purview--Manning didn't write anything, but he provided documents, he shared information, he exposed the most horrific murderous wrongs done by a monstrous anti-human government--isn't that the sort of thing PEN is supposedly set up to celebrate and defend? 

 
And what about Mumia Abu-Jamal? I understand that PEN allowed him membership--but where is its spirited organized active embrace of the struggle to free him? Why isn't Mumia the keynote speaker, the main honoree? Why isn't the case of this brilliant journalist and author imprisoned for his activism--um, isn't that there description almost exactly what PEN claims to be all about--why isn't Mumia's case, a case of monstrous injustice right here in this country, a centerpiece of PEN's work?

 

Well, because the sort of thing PEN is actually all about takes center stage tonight at its one-thousand-dollar-a-head gala. The guest of honor who will be presented with the PEN Literary Service Award is none other than racist misogynist extraordinaire Philip Roth, who will "reflect on his lifetime of literary endeavor and his personal involvement in promoting freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe, a story that he has never told publicly." Oh goody! It sounds like Philip Roth worked on behalf of U.S. imperialism to undermine the workers' states and bring about the counterrevolutions that have transformed the former socialist countries into such fabulous bastions of the good life that standards of living have plummeted; life expectancy has dropped and infant mortality skyrocketed; unemployment, homelessness and poverty are now the rule of the day; and women are trafficked. How did he do it? Via the National Endowment for the Humanities? Voice of America? Directly on the CIA payroll? All of the above, or via some other more subterranean route? Those thousand-dollar-a-plate attendees will no doubt lap it up, whatever the story is. What courage, they'll applaud, what dedication, what a paragon, a champion of literary freedom!

What an anti-communist anti-worker anti-woman racist champion of the status quo. Thus spake PEN.

How dare they

Samer Issawi, the Palestinian political prisoner who has been on hunger strike since August 1, 2012, and whose life is now in grave jeopardy, has called on supporters to do everything possible to demand his release and safe his life.

In his most recent statement, a public letter specifically addressed to Israelis, this brave brother called on " intellectuals, writers, lawyers and journalists, associations, and civil society activists" to visit him in prison and witness his suffering. He noted bitterly that "I have not heard one of you interfere to stop the loud wail of death, it's as if every one of you has turned into gravediggers, and everyone wears his military suit: the judge, the writer, the intellectual, the journalist, the merchant, the academic, and the poet." He concluded: "Israelis: Listen to my voice, the voice of our time and yours! Liberate yourselves of the excess of greed power! Do not remain prisoners of military camps and the iron doors that have shut your minds!"

I find this not only poignant and moving, but incredibly generous, that this freedom fighter who is at death's door should find it in his heart to reach out with nearly his last breath and call on Israelis to open themselves to his words, to "liberate themselves" from the chokehold of the racist monster that is the Zionist state.

So what is the response from the Israeli intellectuals and writers to whom brother Issawi issued this appeal? Did they heed his words? Visit him and pledge solidarity? Take a stand? Did they announce they were joining him in his hunger strike, call on others to do the same, build a mass public campaign to demand that Samer Issawi be freed and pledge that they would suffer along with him until he is? Did they do anything at all, in fact, anything to support this political prisoner their government is murdering?

Quite the contrary. They didn't address the Israeli state at all. Instead, they issued a statement addressed to him, to Samer Issawi, demanding that he call off his hunger strike.

Wow. The arrogance. The arrogance of the oppressor, condescending to instruct the oppressed in how they, the oppressed, ought to proceed.

The statement's writers, including such supposed literary luminaries as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, expressed their "agony," pronounced themselves "horrified," about Issawi's hunger strike. They accused him, in so many words, of making things worse. And so on.

Damn. Do you wonder why I refuse to read any Israeli fiction, even, no especially, written by ostensible liberals? If this is the best of them, I mean, Jesus H. Christ, come on! How dare these privileged comfortable thieves of the Palestinian homeland presume to instruct one of the dispossessed about what he ought to be doing! How dare they lecture a hero like Samer Issawi!

Such is the state of arts and letters inside the Zionist state. Which should come as no surprise, for what other art could the project of theft, expulsion and occupation, the Zionist project, possibly give rise to but the most distorted expressions based in occupier consciousness?

The ultra-reactionary chokehold

Playwright Tony Kushner has done some good work. His most famous plays, the Angels in America cycle, were some of the first mainstream drama to draw attention to how the AIDS crisis was devastating the gay community in this country. His musical Caroline, or Change, which I saw in 2004 during its all too brief Broadway run starring the soaring, searing Tonya Pinkins and the incandescent Anika Noni Rose, is an honest, tough-minded yet tender treatment of race, racism, and Black-Jewish relations in the 1960s South. Kushner is not a radical. He is thoroughly at home in the mainstream. Basically he is a left social democrat, a devotee of what he sees as the potential of bourgeois democracy while acknowledging its shortcomings, and also aware of other possibilities and even of the ubiquitousness of anti-communism in this country and how it has damaged and distorted culture. This brief take on his political sensibilities, based on having read a number of his pieces and interviews with him over the years, is offered to lead in to commenting on the current dust-up drawing much notice here in New York.

At its meeting this past Monday, the board of trustees of the City University of New York voted to cancel the honorary degree that John Jay College had planned to bestow on Tony Kushner at this month's graduation ceremony. The reason: the playwright is not sufficiently rabidly racistly violently Zionist.

He is a Zionist. A left-liberal Zionist, the sort who says "I love Israel" and expresses his "strong support for Israel's right to exist," but does oppose the occupation and criticize what he sees as its worst extremes in the treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population. Kushner has acknowledged at least some of the crimes committed during the creation of the state of Israel. Yet "the occupation" that he opposes is the post-1967 occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not the larger occupation—that is, the theft of the entire land of Palestine, on which is imposed the Zionist state, a state that is by definition racist, exclusionist and illegitimate.

Never forget this: Tony Kushner, or I, or any U.S. Jew, can move to Israel at any time and get automatic citizenship. Simply because we're Jews (and, by the way, regardless of religious practice, smart move since most Jews are atheists). By contrast, no Palestinian-American—not a young person whose parent or grandparent was forced out of the family home, nor an elder who was herself/himself driven out of the house by the terrorist thugs whose murderous ethnic cleansing campaigns were crucial to the creation of a Jewish state—not a single Palestinian is permitted to return home to live. Think about that. I, someone with no tie whatsoever to "Israel," someone whose ancestry goes back to Eastern Europe for hundreds of years and to Spain for hundreds of years before that, could pack up and move there tomorrow. And be welcomed as an automatic citizen. But my Palestinian sister whose parents still keep the key to their stolen home in a precious box, who still yearn for home, who still grieve over their forcible expulsion from the land their people had lived on for untold generations—she is barred from returning. (Here I'll point again, for any who have not yet read it, to Susan Abulhawa's wonderful novel Mornings in Jenin, which conveys this reality in a gripping literary tour de force.)

So. Here's a famous playwright who despite all that proclaims his love for Israel. Who says he is "moved and excited by its culture, its meaning in Jewish history" (which is to my way of thinking a reprehensible sentiment since its meaning in Jewish history is a blot, a shame, a stain, a crime against humanity, a turning away from a tradition of righteous struggle and solidarity against oppression). Who does criticize some of its crimes, as indeed do many Israelis, but does not at all part ways with Zionism itself, or with a fundamental support for the Zionist state's right to exist. Who, furthermore, explicitly does not support the BDS—Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—movement, an international effort to bring pressure on Israel to end the 1967 occupation even though that in itself is a moderate demand and the BDS tactic a time-honored one honed during the struggle against that earlier apartheid state, South Africa; but no, even so, Kushner opposes BDS. Here, in other words, is a friend to Israel. But in the landscape of U.S. culture, where the ultra-right has an ever tighter grip on consciousness and culture, even that is not good enough.

And so CUNY pulls his honor. And Kushner cries foul. In his letter to the board expressing his dismay at the action, he asserts his "strong statement of support for Israel's right to exist, and my ardent wish that it continue to do so." He decries the BDS movement, explaining: "I have never supported a boycott of the state of Israel. I don't believe it will accomplish anything positive in terms of resolving the crisis. I believe that the call for a boycott is predicated on an equation of this crisis with other situations, contemporary and historical, that is fundamentally false, the consequence of a failure of political understanding of a full and compassionate engagement with Jewish history and Jewish existence." You can read his whole letter here. I've included these several sentences, with which I could not disagree more—and the latter of which seems to me to smack shockingly of a Jewish exceptionalism that objectively aligns with the base racism of the Zionist ideology rather than conveying any meaningful point about the history of European persecution of the Jews to which he's obviously referring and to which Zionism was and remains a backward, reactionary response; his view, apparently, is that apartheid in Israel cannot be compared to apartheid in South Africa because those imposing apartheid in Israel had terrible things happen to their grandparents in Europe—I include his own words expressing his unfortunate views to show how far from anti-Israel Kushner is. As he indeed took pains to show. Which underscores how extreme is the chokehold of reaction in every realm of this culture.

Now Facebook groups spring up. PEN, that bastion of anti-communist bourgeois liberalism, enters the fray. No one asks why reactionary investment bankers and bosses sit in control over CUNY, the college of New York's working class funded by the workers' taxes; why the majority of the board is white when most students are people of color; why tuition is no longer free and is in fact about to go up drastically again, making college an unreachable dream for more young workers.

CUNY should belong to the people of New York City. Militant students are right now organizing to take it back, fighting alongside staff and teachers against the vicious funding cuts and layoffs dictated by the banks. This will be a long, hard struggle, but it can be won. When it is, when CUNY is in the hands of the working class, I'll love to see who that new improved CUNY chooses to receive its honorary degrees.

Morals, Marx & May Day

As often seems to happen after I read a good book, I've had an unsettled period, a couple weeks of neither-here-nor-thereness reading-wise. I've pulled out of it and am now engrossed in a fine novel. First, however, I spent the better part of a week trying to get through a book—and I did try! I violated my own rule about how many pages to give a book before giving up on it, gave it well over 100 pages before crying uncle!—that had sounded like it might be a fun and interesting follow-up to The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore. I responded to a publicist's promotion and received a free review copy of The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson. I'm thinking I should stop doing this—not that I have that often, two or three times now, but each time the book's been a disappointment that I've forced myself to stick with much longer than I would have had it not been a review copy, plus I feel obliged to blog about it where I'd otherwise have probably kept silent as I do about many books I read or try to read.

Well then. While I read Bruno Littlemore as primarily a commentary on human society, the novelist did also fold into the story some provocative ideas about animal (or at least chimpanzee) consciousness, mentation, and, yes, morality. So I hoped that with The Moral Lives of Animals I'd get a chance to pick up and run with some of these ideas. Didn't happen. The book's a dud. In several ways. You know how you'll sometimes read a magazine article that makes a cogent point or two about a particular issue, and then a year or two later you'll see that the writer has expanded the article into a book, and you'll read the book and think, jeez, she/he should have left it an article? Peterson's book feels like one of those—a good idea for an article-length piece, destroyed by expansion into a tedious book—only, oops, as far as I can tell it never was an article. So it's a book that should have only been an article. I could recap Peterson's main points in a paragraph or so, or, in conversation, in a minute or two, and then back up his points with some of the buttressing evidence in another few paragraphs or, in conversation, another five or 10 minutes. You know: we human beings are not unique; we are animals too; we share most or all of our physiological and psychological characteristics with other mammals; there is wide and deep evidence of moral behavior among other mammals; and of emotion; and of social cooperation; these characteristics and behaviors developed over millions of years because they have evolutionary value; and so on. There just doesn't seem to be anything new or any particular contribution here.

Over the last several years there's been a slight but steady stream of news reports about scientific studies providing evidence that unselfishness or altruism or kindness or cooperation, some quality along this spectrum, is an essential human trait, constructed by evolution and proven by way of animal-behavior studies. These reports naturally intrigue and encourage me; they're the sort of thing I'd hoped to find in this book. Some of this is in here, but there's so much bloat, obfuscation, repetition and dross that it's obscured. Bummer. This is my second unsuccessful try at such a read. My last was one of Frans de Waal's books, which I had to give up on very early because I got pissed off at a gratuitous anti-Soviet comment right near the beginning. If you feel compelled to insert an attack against the first group of people who tried to build a socialist society at the very beginning of a book that is purportedly about the evolutionary benefits of empathy and cooperation, I don't feel compelled to keep reading your words.

Which reminds me to note that most of these books, Peterson's and de Waal's definitely among them, even as they assert what seem to be mildly progressive points, are thoroughly grounded in bourgeois consciousness and imbued with bourgeois ideology. This is important to remember especially with reference to evolutionary biology, a field upon which these writers heavily rely and that's rife with not only potential for reactionary use and abuse but much actual reactionary use and abuse. There is a whole wing of evolutionary biology, arguably its biggest, dominant wing, that's devoted to "proving" all sorts of sexist, even misogynist, theses. This is the sort of "science" that lets an asshole like Lawrence Summers assert, as he did in a 2005 speech as president of Harvard University, that the female of the species is underrepresented in science and engineering because of a "different availability of aptitude at the high end." In other words, um, women are stupid—and, hey, there are studies of chimpanzee behavior that prove it. So. Any and every bourgeois-liberal book of social science heavily based on the work of evolutionary biologists must be approached with this in mind.

When it comes to morality, there is in fact a human-specific angle that none of these writers appreciates or acknowledges. I speak of course of class. Morality is a vague and amorphous enough concept, but it becomes even less meaningful in a consideration devoid of class analysis. For a Marxist, there is no broad blanket moral code shared among everyone, worker and owner alike. How could there be, when our interests are so thoroughly opposed? Thinking about these issues, this morning as I was getting ready for work I pulled from our bookshelves my old, well-worn copy of Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky. It's got to be 30 years or more since I read this collection. Seems like a good moment to give it another going-over.

While I was at the shelves, I noted a book on Teresa's to-read pile and may ask her if I can have a go at it now. Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster. Title, topic and glowing blurbs aside, I have no idea what this one really is. I know what I wish it to be: that rare bird, an honest-to-goodness non-revisionist not-anti-communist Marxist work on questions of science and society. Whether it delivers, we shall see.

All this talk of morals and society leads me to a moral imperative. And that is to march this Sunday, May 1, May Day, for worker and immigrant rights. There are actions in cities around the country. Find yours and stand with our sisters and brothers to fight back against all the attacks on our rights, and especially in solidarity with immigrants who are being deported in record numbers by the Obama administration. Here in New York, meet up at noon at Union Square, where we'll rally before marching to Foley Square to join up with other groups for a mass demonstration of worker unity. Here's a bit of the May Day press conference this past Tuesday at New York City Hall. (That's my lover Teresa Gutierrez of the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights in the yellow jacket.)

Politically correct

Rising out of the drear 1950s, led by the civil rights movement which in turn gave rise to the anti-war movement and the women's movement and the gay movement, inspired by the anti-colonial uprisings and wars for national liberation in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and Pacific islands, on through the 1960s and into the 1970s, there was in this country a flowering of political consciousness. As we all know. It is now most often referred to with the all-encompassing term "the 60s." To the bourgeoisie and all those in the grip of that class's ideology, which most definitely includes the liberal intelligentsia, "the 60s" is now a term of opprobrium. To those of us who are partisans for the class struggle and against racism, sexism, LGBT oppression and all forms of bigotry and exploitation, "the 60s" is or should be shorthand for everything righteous—rebellion, revolution, activism—for rejecting the norms of capitalism and fighting toward a new way of organizing society. This latter, our view of the 60s, is also known by another term, especially as regards education and the arts: politically correct.

Those of us of the 60s/70s generation of activists did indeed come to understand some things as correct and some other things as incorrect by the lights of our politics. That which seeks to advance the struggle, that which conveys the reality of oppression and exploitation, that which upends the old hierarchies and gives voice to those whose voices were heretofore suppressed, this is correct. The old ways of seeing, doing, explaining, steeped as they are in bourgeois consciousness and backward, reactionary ideology, are wrong. Incorrect. Offensive. Above all, untrue. Based on all the false old assumptions, all the lies and justifications of the chattel-slavery-subjugation-of-women system that built the wealth of this country's capitalist class. By our lights, all this needed, and of course still needs, correcting. This is a noble and necessary endeavor.

It is also a frightening challenge to the status quo and for that reason has been subjected to a 40-year-long onslaught of taunts, derision and every other possible means to flip the truth into its opposite. The problem isn't racism, sexism, oppression, exploitation, we're told. The problem is all these uptight rigid purveyors of the whip of political correctness, which is portrayed as an assault on freedom of expression. How dare these people—and for these people read people of color, women, LGBT people, workers, the disabled—how dare anyone trespass on anyone else's freedom to be as incorrect as they please? Is this a free country or what? And so they've managed, the bourgeoisie and its witless mouthpieces, to turn reality on its head with the well-worn Big Lie tactic of endless repetition. And so "politically correct" joins "the 60s" (and especially its literary sub-genre "the madness of the 60s," which I've ranted about before) as A Bad Thing. None of this is surprising. Not the ruling class's efforts to shore up its image and beef up its propaganda; not the bosses' vicious, mendacious attacks against any and all who do try to tell the truth; and, saddest of all, not the efficacy of these efforts. Hardly anyone proudly, boldly claims the mantle of politically correct anymore. Most run scared of being so named, and if so named turn somersaults to defend against the accusation.

Which brings us to the latest round of doings in the literary world. First, by way of noting that "the 60s" is a broad term and can be stretched decades to make a point, I must quickly mention a book I read about in this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review. It's a "madness of the 60s" memoir—set in the 80s! Apparently it tells the poignant tale of a young woman who was so misguided as to travel to Central America and join a bunch of wacky internationalists doing solidarity work in support of the anti-imperialist struggles there. The men she worked with were of course louts. The women were, like her, naïve and confused, and motivated by their pitiful devotion to the loutish men rather than any of their own opinions or political ideas. None had the slightest inkling of what they were doing, and all were completely misled by the Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans fighting the Reagan administration's overt and covert military intervention. The reviewer loved it. I expectorated onto the review.

But the main event I want to point to is a bold, courageous initiative by poet Claudia Rankine, begun at the AWP conference in D.C. earlier this month and still under way online. AWP is the big daddy of literary conferences, put together by the organization of college writing programs and attended by many thousands of poets and writers, almost all of them associated with a writing program in one way or another. I went once, a few years ago when it was here in NYC and the staff very kindly allowed me to attend for free as a worker, rather than student or faculty, at a university. That once was enough, for the whole thing was far too drenched in academia for me. Not my scene. Still, thousands of folks attend, and in a literary culture where it's virtually impossible to be published without an MFA and the only way for writers to make a living is by teaching, I can understand why they do. Once in a while something noteworthy occurs, as it did this year.

I've read a number of accounts of it and I'd urge you to do the same. Basically, at one of the poetry panels, Claudia Rankine's presentation consisted of having Nick Flynn get up and read Tony Hoagland's poem "The Change," then her reading her response to the poem, then her reading his emailed response to her response. Google the key names and you'll find lots of blog postings including several that have the full texts. You'll find that Hoagland's poem includes blatant racist language and imagery. You'll find that Rankine's response is deep, incisive, painful, and so full of truth that … that, yes, sure enough, in his response, Hoagland accused her of "political correctness, with its agendas of rightness, perfection, enforcement, and moral superiority." He also calls this brilliant African American poet "naïve," explains the nuances of U.S. racial history to her, and avers that his poem "is not 'racist' but 'racially complex.'" Hoagland's stunningly, yes, racist and sexist condescension becomes even more breathtaking when you reread and think again about Rankine's thoughts, which are nothing if not complex. "Who let America in the room?" she asks. She says she "could taste the vomit of Reconstruction and slavery in the back of my throat"—but only after acknowledging that she knows what she's opening herself up to by daring to speak up about any of this.

I don't like using the word racist because of you use it it means you are an angry black person. Angry black people are the old black and everyone knows that's pathological. … The old black is positioned in a no-win situation where to express an opinion based on what you see, experience, feel or deduce rsisk falling right into some white folk's notion of black insanity.

This is one brave truth-telling artist. Further, in the wake of all the commentary that's been swirling since AWP, she is not shying away from pursuing the issue. She recently posted an open letter on her website, calling for people to submit their own "thoughts on writing about race." She poses a series of provocative questions as "a few possible jumping-off points." They include:

• If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?
• If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?
• Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history.

Rankine will post responses received by March 11 on her blog.

Finally, one other item under the Politically Correct rubric. I was planning to write about this but I've gone on too long as it is so I'm just going to point you to this article. Headed "Let's say goodbye to the straw-feminist," it's Cordelia Fine's response to a slew of reactionary reviews of her book Delusions of Gender. In that book, which I've now added to my to-read list, she dismantles the sexist underpinnings of the increasingly dominant strain of evolutionary biology and psychology, the Steven Pinker school of biological determinism as regards innate sex differences, i.e. trucks vs. dolls or, as per Lawrence Summers, home ec vs. science. These reviewers to whom she responds in this piece accuse Fine of political correctness, that most dreaded of offenses. Kudos to her for taking them on.

Should a socialist indulge in schadenfreude?

Of course she should, can and does, in terms of big important events on the stage of the worldwide class struggle, for example the impending doom of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Anyone whose allegiance is with the workers, the poor, the oppressed, anyone who stands in solidarity with the fight for national sovereignty and against imperialism can't help but derive great joy from the increasing misery of the U.S.-puppet regime and the class of thieves and murderers it serves.

But hereabouts we're supposed to be about the arts. It's on not the world stage but the actual stage—the Broadway boards—that the events occasioning my question are unfolding. I'm talking about the ever unraveling travesty that is writer-director Julie Taymor's latest work of musical theater, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. As anyone who follows the theater even a little, and everyone who lives in New York where the whole mess has been front-page news for months, knows, this musical has major-league tsuris. The elaborate production design and attempts at unprecedented special effects make this the most expensive show in Broadway history. Trouble is, all the high-tech gadgetry, all the spectacle, can't compensate for an essentially lousy play. Even if they somehow could, the gizmos and doohickeys don't work. The whole months-long saga of tryouts, of rejiggering the book and music and choreography, which in this case means acrobatics more than dance, has been marked with repeated serious problems, especially mishaps with the flying contraptions including several injuries to actors, at least one very serious.

About that—worker injury, worker endangerment—I feel nothing close to schadenfreude. I feel rage. At Taymor and at the deep-pockets producers who've sunk $65 million dollars into what from all accounts (more on that in a minute) can scarcely be termed a work of art yet who, for all their money, can't manage to make it safe for the people doing the on-stage work. I'm enraged, too, at OSHA and New York state and city worker-safety officials, who should have long since stepped in to force the profiteers to fix this thing or shut it down. And I've got, if not rage, a lot of disappointment in and questions for Actors Equity and the other stage workers' unions. The Broadway unions, like the rest of the labor movement, have been under siege for a long time, and it's hard not to see their apparent inaction here as evidence of the state of their decline. Granted, they may be working behind the scenes to push for better on-stage safety. They should have been doing much more, much more publicly--mounting picket lines, making demands, building a solidarity movement, reaching out to the huge New York population of workers, union members and theater lovers. Instead, as unions in other industries have done for the last 30 years since the UAW's original Chrysler give-back contract, they seem to see their duty as supporting the bosses' profit-taking in hopes of keeping the enterprise open and saving jobs.

As to those jobs, all of them, onstage and back: I have only sympathy, fellow-feeling for the actors, singers and dancers subjected to these conditions. Conditions—unsafe physically and debased artistically—that theater workers feel compelled to grin and bear, grateful to have any job at all. This is a terribly unstable industry for its workers. There is no joy like landing a job, whether it's a lead role, in the chorus, downstairs sewing and mending costumes, up in the rafters working the lights, or in the box office selling tickets. Once you've got a show, you want it to stay open, naturally. On Broadway as in a coal mine or any other site of wage labor, no matter how dreary, how dangerous, you need that job. Oh god, as they sang in A Chorus Line, I need this job. At what cost, though? It might not hurt a theater worker's future prospects to have Spider-Man on the resume, but there will be no prospects after a broken neck from a fall due to defective equipment. On Broadway as in the mines, the bosses will always stint on safety in favor of profits.

Here's where schadenfreude comes in. I do take pleasure from this week's round of uproariously bad reviews for the Spidey musical. I am glad that these profit-takers in artist ("pardon me, I mean artiste," as the Times' critic Ben Brantley purred) garb are being humiliated. They should be ashamed.

Now, I'm not utterly starry-eyed about Broadway. Lots of shlock has passed that way. Much, maybe most, of the musical theater is mediocre, unmemorable. Much is objectionable from my political viewpoint. Hardly any, including a lot of the old musicals that I'm still sentimentally attached to and whose music still stirs my corny old heart, meets the mark for the best of what I wish from any art. In recent decades, the whole industry has become such a pure profit monster, with ticket prices rising so out of reach of most workers, that I guess it'd be silly to hope for something true and good and beautiful, new and creative and with, god forbid, something to say about society. All that said, though, this derivative cartoon cardboard cutout stunt is a new low for the New York stage and I'm glad for whatever potshots are thrown at its perpetrators.

Earlier I referred to "all accounts" because I base my broad characterizations of the awfulness of this so-called musical on what I've read in various reviews and commentaries. I have not myself seen it (even if I wanted to I couldn't afford a ticket) yet I feel safe, and justified, in the conclusions I've drawn about this stinker. I've made a long study of reading reviews, of books, movies and stage productions. It's more art than science, I suppose, but I think I've got it down, how I take into account the source, class slant, artistic standards and so on, breaking it all down so that I'm generally able to get a pretty good sense of the piece in question and what I'd think of it. Often I conclude that a negative review is wrong or am intrigued enough to want to see for myself. Or the opposite, I read through a rave and know to stay far away. I'm sure I'm not always right but one thing I have to admit is that the mainstream critics are not always wrong either, even if they're right for the wrong reasons. Such is the case, I believe, with the Spiderman musical. I'm sorry for the workers whose jobs—and safety—depend on its success but I'm not sorry for the miscreants whose worship of commerce over art are responsible for its becoming, already, a legendary failure.

I want to say one more thing about what Broadway can do. You might think that it's so in the grips of big money and old thinkers that it's incapable of mounting any but the most conventional works of musical theater. That we must look elsewhere for innovation, particularly politically conscious work. And mostly I'd say that's true, that exciting new work, in the musical theater as in drama as in books or movies or any other art form, is doubtless being created in countless corners by impoverished unknowns, and that most of it has no chance of ever seeing the light of day, at least as long as art remains locked down under capitalism. Once in a while, though, somehow, a bright light shines through.

Such was the case with Caroline, or Change, which I was lucky enough to see in early 2004 before it closed after an all too brief run on Broadway. This musical by Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori was unlike any I've ever seen. Innovative—hell yes, with talking washing machines, and scenes that conflate and compress time and space. Musically successful—OMG yes, with a near-operatic score that ranges wide and strikes deep. Artistically challenging and politically meaningful—since seeing this show I know that there is no topic that the genre of musical theater could not take on, no subject that is out of bounds, no approach that is out of reach. As I've admitted before, I'm a corny old sucker, and many's the old-school musical that reduces me to tears, but they're sentimental tears, triggered by various varieties of shtick. At the end of Caroline, or Change, by contrast, I was shaken deeply, to my core, by the important story it told, the profound issues it raised—and, not least, by the unbelievable and shamefully underappreciated brilliance of Tonya Pinkins in the starring role. I remember that as I rose and walked down the stairs from the balcony and out onto the street and over to the subway, as the minutes after the final standing ovation during which I'd sobbed my eyes out passed, as it turned into five minutes since the end, then 10, then 15, I was still trembling, I still felt undone. That it was the last thing I thought about as I fell asleep that night, and the first when I awoke next day, and for many days after that. That it haunts me still. This is what the musical theater can do.

Why I did not love Little Bee

I just read Little Bee by Chris Cleave. This book, which is now a couple of years old I believe, has received oodles of adulation. It's not a bad book, it's a decent book in many ways, but for me it fell short of the hype. For a number of reasons, but mostly these:

1. Although the story concerns a Nigerian woman who is an undocumented immigrant to England, a refugee from what the novel repeatedly refers to as "the oil wars," it is strangely apolitical. Yes, it is warmhearted and humane and yes, it implicitly rebukes the anti-immigrant campaigns and exposes their racism. These are not minor attributes, and so my comments are not meant as a big rant against a book that does more or less have its heart in the right place. But you finish reading this novel without a single piece of actual information about recent events in Nigeria, about the role of the oil companies in those events or for that matter which specific oil companies they are, or about what specifically these "oil wars" consist of beyond some vague narrative about villages being invaded and destroyed. It is such an invasion and such destruction from which the title character, Little Bee, has fled, but because the story is told from her individual perspective we are left without any broader context or understanding of the forces that have destroyed her life and her family's and her village's. Above all, how is British imperialism implicated? The reader has no idea. Certainly no idea of the long history of British colonialism in Nigeria or how British colonialism and its depredations led directly to Nigeria's current situation—nor, for that matter, do you really get a sense of what that situation is. You do get a very ugly picture of Nigerian soldiers. In fact, it is Africans who carry out the most terrible deeds depicted in this novel. The British who are portrayed negatively don't do or say anything nearly as terrible as the Africans.

2. Nor does any African (except dead ones, in Little Bee's memory) do or say anything fine and good to/for/about Little Bee as do the British characters, especially the main one, Sarah. This is a novel about human connection, about the coming together of, the coming of understanding and love between two women of different nationalities and classes and life stories, a petit-bourgeois white woman and an African refugee teenager who has lost everything, and about how the white woman's child is loved by both and serves sort of as the conduit between them. This is the level on which it reaches the reader, this is why, I think, so many people have loved it, and sure, that's all okay. Ultimately, though, especially at the novel's close, I was taken aback at how wholly this is the novel's message, this we-are-all-the-same-this-is-one-world message that is neither new nor unique nor informative nor challenging in any way, let alone any sort of contribution literarily or politically. Furthermore, the novel's final passages are troubling and, at least for me, leave an unpleasant taste. (Spoiler alert here.) At the end, Little Bee not only is going to lose her freedom and probably her life, and at the hands of Nigerians who, rather than the British imperialists, are the really bad bad guys in this novel, but she does so in the process of saving the little white child of the white woman who's tried to save her. Worst of all, Cleave has this young Nigerian woman, who has survived atrocities and witnessed the torture and murder of her beloved sister, invest the white child with all the hope and optimism and dreams of a better world:

I smiled down at Charlie, and I understood that he would be free now even if I would not. In this way the life that was in me would find its home in him now. … I smiled back at Charlie and I knew that the hopes of this whole human world could fit inside one soul.

Sigh. See what I'm saying here? What an ending, with the African woman sacrificing herself for the beloved white child who represents all that is pure and good, all hope for the future. (This in a scene on a beach that's filled with Nigerian children.) It's redolent of colonialist and orientalist and all that sort of literature, especially coming as it does as the coda that closes the story.

It's not inconceivable that a white British author could write a novel with an African protagonist that takes on globalization and migration and the wreckage wrought by imperialism and neocolonialism and make a real contribution with it. I just don't think Chris Cleave has done so with this novel. On the other hand, there are many fine fine Nigerian novelists who have told and are telling their own nation's stories. Readers looking for politically conscious, relevant fiction by and about Nigerians would do well to look to these artists, from the great, essential Chinua Achebe to younger voices like the terrifically talented Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The art of colluding with reaction: Lost City Radio

That book I just read? You know, the one whose author is one of the 20 Under 40 recently celebrated by the New Yorker and whose recognition and success are offered up as proof of how U.S. publishing is becoming less narrow, more inclusive? That book set in Latin America, which is also a credit to the industry, in this case one of the big houses, Harper Collins, that they are finally taking a look at the rest of the world? The one with the beautiful writing and the subtle, complex consideration of the human stories behind the blood-and-conflict-filled news headlines?

I started that book, Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón, last week, and finished it earlier this week. My feelings about it changed from appreciation of fine writing and an openhearted hope about where this read would take me, to disappointment and feelings of betrayal as it took me deeper and deeper into the same muddy old bog. The empty heart of the anti-struggle liberal intelligentsia's favorite dogma: that the left and right are equally bad, their actions equally evil, that they equally harm average individual human beings haplessly caught in the crossfire. Fascism is equated with people's revolution. When the two sides clash, and especially when fascism wins as it does in the unnamed country where this novel is set—this fable whose moral after all is that fascism will always win, that there is no point to the struggle, and that revolutionary leaders are soul-less lovers of violence who care nothing about the masses and their misery—the inevitable result is shattered lives, lost love, loneliness hopelessness ruin wreckage.

As I read on, getting toward the end of the book where this slant became clearer and clearer, I started marking the passages that ticked me off. There are too many to include in this post. Here are two to give a flavor of the whole. This passage is about the young villagers recruited into the guerrilla force:

We'll take the capital, the commanders said, and the boys repeated it to Rey, and he could tell they believed it. Meanwhile, they practiced making bombs in the jungle. None had even the cloudiest sense of what the war was about, and none had ever asked. They were happy to be out of their homes. Once a month, they marched into some town to kill a priest or burn a flag fluttering above a police outpost.

Then there's this, in an internal monologue by one of the main characters, a sympathizer and sometime collaborator with the rebels who was once captured and horribly tortured by the fascist government yet who ultimately is presented as proof of the wrongheadedness and futility of the class struggle:

Consider the improbability of it: that the multiple complaints of a people could somehow coalesce and find expression in an act—in any act—of violence. What does a car bomb say about poverty, or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement? Yet Rey had been a party to this for nine years. The war had become, if it wasn't from the very beginning, an indecipherable text. The country had slipped, fallen into a nightmare, now horrifying, now comic, and in the city, there was only a sense of dismay at the inexplicability of it. Had it begun with a voided election? Or the murder of a popular senator? Who could remember now? They had all been student protesters, had felt the startling power of a mob, shouting as one chorus of voices—but that was years ago, and times had changed. No one still believed all that, did they?

OK, we get it already. Violence is bad. Any and all violence is equally bad and its perpetrators equally evil, or maybe, probably, those fighting the status quo are worse, more to blame, because if they'd just lay down their weapons the fascist state could stop slaughtering people and things might achieve at least a semblance of normalcy. Whooey—that's some slippery slope the author is skidding down. That's liberalism. Ostensibly opposing political reaction while objectively enabling its continuance by siding with the status quo as opposed to actual action in struggle against it. Liberal, too, is the depiction of revolutionary warfare as aimless random terrorism, of its soldiers as clueless ignorant delusional saps, of its activists and partisans as a misled misguided hypnotized mob. There is no place in this model for an honest depiction of guerrilla warfare as something other than crazed meaningless violence, or of the armies that successfully took power after strategically waged revolutionary wars based on profound popular support like those led by Fidel and Che, or Mao, or Ho Chi Minh, or Leon Trotsky; or those like the FMLN in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the New People's Army of the Philippines, the fighters in Guatemala, in Puerto Rico, everywhere people have taken up arms against neocolonial repression. There is certainly and absolutely no acknowledgment of the U.S. role in the mass misery—deep poverty, lack of potable water, decent housing, education, health care—that is engendered by imperialism and upheld by the comprador bourgeoisie in these countries.

Have I said oy yet?

When I started reading Lost City Radio, I thought I was entering a thoughtful fictional treatment of recent history in Argentina and the Dirty War in which tens of thousands were disappeared by the fascists, or perhaps Chile where the Pinochet coup assassinated an elected president and also killed and disappeared tens of thousands, or Peru where the Fujimori government waged war against the Shining Path people's army, or Colombia where the FARC is up against government by death squad—in each case, again, the ever-increasing poverty and ever-worsening overall conditions of life caused by capitalism, by U.S. imperialism in particular—but no. I was entering instead that territory most beloved by literary commentators in this country, in thrall as they all are to bourgeois consciousness. It is called by various names. "Subtle." "Complex." "Humane." "Chaotic." It is a landscape devoid of political consciousness or artistic responsibility to the reality of the raging class struggle, substituting instead a cynical rejection of the possibility of revolutionary change. This default to support for the status quo is couched, swathed, smothered in beautiful writing, in lovely language conveying the pain and suffering of various characters. We are meant to feel these characters' individual pain and suffering as at once more important than the pain and suffering of the vast masses from whose numbers are drawn the ranks of revolutionary warriors, and at the same time as symptomatic, emblematic, of the rank wrongness of the revolutionary project. There is not one sentence's acknowledgment that all this pain and suffering is caused by a particular system and that it takes a struggle for revolutionary change to overturn that system and replace it with one that is just and equitable and might end the pain.

I've written before on this blog about a genre of U.S. fiction I think of as "the madness of the 60s" novels, books that portray the great struggles of that time as crazy and misguided and powered mostly by white middle-class youthful drugged self-centered idiots. I've also complained about that vastly populated category, the counter-revolutionary emigrant's tale, which most often takes the form of a screed against the Chinese or Cuban Revolution. This novel I just read falls in yet another category: the fictionalized polemic against revolutionary struggles in progress. All three types (and they're not the only three in the bourgeoisie's endless artistic arsenal) so starkly give the lie to the "literature shouldn't be political" cant chanted ceaselessly by the literary powers that be in this country that you'd think it'd be put to rest for once and for all. Or at least that they'd admit what they really mean is "literature must not be allied with the workers and oppressed."

I am sorry to say all this. I wanted to like this novel. But because it takes sides against the revolutionary struggles that are currently on the rise in Latin America, I couldn't. Once again, then, we who long for fiction that stands with the workers and oppressed and tells their true stories are left in the lurch. And here's the thing: those stories are out there. I never doubt this. Is there a great novelist in the Colombian jungles camping with the FARC? I know there is. Are there wondrous political poets locked in the stinking jails of Peru? No doubt. But theirs is not the work we get. What we get is this, and, as I write this, a month after the Nobel ascension of Mario Vargas Llosa, I know I shouldn't be surprised. The search continues, for the words of our side.

Howl & how not to hear poetry

Last night I watched the movie Howl. It's still showing in theaters but cheaper to see via cable's movies on demand gizmo that also keeps me home, which is where I mostly prefer to be and which I might add is, unlike movie theaters, guaranteed (so far at least) to be bedbug-free. But I digress. Howl. James Franco was great as the young Allen Ginsberg. Much of the movie consists of Franco, as Ginsberg, talking to an unseen interviewer about poetry, about the poetic process, himself as a poet, his life and its connection to his poetry, and about his great poem Howl. I found these segments riveting. I'd have happily sat through two hours of just this. There are also courtroom scenes, from the 1957 obscenity trial in San Francisco where the state tried to ban the City Lights publication of Howl in book form. While not fascinating the way Ginsberg talking about poetry was, these segments are interesting too. Interspersed with both are scenes of Ginsberg reading the poem in, I assume, San Francisco, in 1955. I very much liked this too, Franco's bravura capture of Ginsberg's unique persona.

What I did not like one bit were the animated sequences. These are literal, if whimsical, depictions of various passages from the poem that take over the screen enacting the words that we hear in voiceover. For me, they damned near ruined the movie. I can only guess that the filmmakers worried they would not hold an audience's interest with only the scenes of Ginsberg talking, Ginsberg reading his poem, and testimony at the obscenity trial, that they had to insert some visually arresting element. Well. I think it would have worked if the visual element had been abstract, suggestive, evocative, something to simply capture the eye, perhaps hypnotize us further into the poetic dream as the words washed over us aurally. Instead what we get is an interruption, a barging in on our attention to the poem's words, rhythms, layers of meaning, a most unwelcome assault on our ability to take in the poetry. An intrusion! I wanted to scream and throw something at the screen every time the animations appeared.

The problem, for me at least--and I know this sounds odd and contradictory but it isn't really--is that literature is not a literal art form. Poetry least of all. Yet with these animations in which the "story" of Howl is acted out, Ginsberg's creation is removed from the ineffable realm of imagination and yanked back down to earth, reduced to a matter of plot and character and this and that. To me this feels like a sad disservice to a great poet and a great poem.

I've read Howl twice (and now definitely want to read it again). There's no way I came close, in either of those readings, to truly understanding it. But, as with any quality literature, poetry or fiction, reading it was an intereactive experience between the words and me, between the mind of the poet and the mind of the reader, with me, the reader, my reading brain, creating images, ideas, feelings from the words created by the writer. As any writer knows, book, story, or poem, no reader reads the same thing. The words may be the same in every edition, yet every reader's brain makes of the writer's words something else. Even with fiction, even with the most straightforward conventionally written plot-driven story or novel, the act of reading is an imaginative, creative act--what each reader sees in her mind's eye is her own translation of the writer's words. This is what I mean when I say literature is not a literal art form--although on one level there is nothing more precise than words, on another, the most meaningful level, I think, the words serve as merely a sort of gateway, opening up worlds that the reader enters and creates as she reads. This is the interactive alliance between writer and reader. This is why reading, at least when the material you're reading is at the level of art, is a thrilling and creative act.

It's also why I generally feel that movies aren't the sublime art form that literature is, a view that I know opens me to all sorts of attack and that, truthfuly, I probably can't defend terribly articulately and am even willing to allow might turn out to be harebrained once someone argues me out of it. Till then, though, I can't help but feel that because movies depict everything right there on the screen, show every character's facial expressions, broadcast every character's voice, breathing, tone, tears, display brick buildings, green fields, bullets, blood, and so on--because, that is, they leave little or nothing to the viewer's imagination, they can't and don't achieve what books can. I think this is why film adaptations of books almost always disappoint. It's not just that Hollywood's crass profit-driven aesthetic sabotages any hope of capturing the depth and beauty of a great novel. It's that, just by the act of taking all those words that had been left to the reader's imagination to conjure into images and ideas each inside her own mind, taking those words, stripping them of multiple levels of meaning and alternate interpretations and transforming them into one inescapable literal depiction, the movie by definition destroys, subverts, dumbs down, dare I say erases the art from, the novel, story or poem.

To me, that's what the animation does in this movie. Otherwise, it would have been an intelligent, interesting consideration of art, the artistic process, the clash of art and commerce, censorship, gay oppression, all spiced with enough exciting readings of parts of Howl to entice viewers to read, or reread, Ginsberg's masterpiece. It's still that, but just barely, because, for this viewer at least, the animation sequences deny me entry into the heart of the poem and the mind of the poet.

Four points

1. Fragments, a book of "poems, intimate notes and letters" by Marilyn Monroe, is just out.

I'm interested in reading it. For many reasons, related to Joyce Carol Oates, to Monroe the serious reader (which I've blogged about, a post I can't seem to find), to ephemeral other points of departure.

2. This too interests me. Disconnect by Devra Davis. Almost as much as it terrifies me. The terror? Perhaps the book's subtitle will provide a clue: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family. Should you see fit to join me in fearville, check out this interview with the author at Salon.com. Yikes! Not that I talk on my cell phone much, hardly at all in fact. Still I'm sticking to my yikes.

3. Over three weeks since I finished reading The Warmth of Other Suns, I haven't stopped thinking about it. Every day something brings it to mind, or rather some point or passage from the book rises in my mind and something I've seen or heard gets refracted through it. It is an indispensable trove of information, insight and analysis. How pissed off have I been, then, since yesterday's announcement of this year's National Book Award nominations? Very pissed off. It seems impossible that Isabel Wilkerson's masterwork was passed over. Patti Smith's memoir? OK, yeah, sure, we all love Patti Smith, nice that she got the nod, but jeez, it's as if a culinary award went to a single lovely quirky grain of rice while a great brilliant magnificently complex risotto was ignored. WTF?! And yes fine it's inconsistent to complain, or even care, given all I know, all I've ranted about, regarding the character of these establishment literary awards. Doesn't it say a lot, though, that the literary establishment can't bring itself to acknowledge a book like Wilkerson's?

4. I also can't stop thinking about the ongoing rash of suicides by lesbian and gay youths. Today, happily, a couple items that point in a more positive direction. This editorial in Workers World, about the role of the struggle. And this, finally: a youngster who's been the victim of anti-gay bullying launches a protest. Marco Melgoza, our hero!

A Nobel hand to the counter-revolution

Latin America is indisputably a vital center of the struggle for socialism. In so many places, the working class and oppressed peoples are in motion. In country after country, exciting, even revolutionary developments are under way. Is there a cultural component to this upsurge? Of course there is. Is there a revolutionary Spanish-language literature? You bet.

Naturally, then, this year's Nobel prize in literature went to a committed counter-revolutionary. In fact, yesterday, just before the prize was announced, Mario Vargas Llosa was being heckled and booed in Chile by indigenous people for his alliance with reaction. Vargas Llosa, who himself ran for president of Peru on a right-wing ticket back in the 1990s, is actually supporting and campaigning for the Pinochet-ist party in the current Chilean elections.

In fact, the novelist is all over Latin America doing his ineffectual best to stomp out the fires of working-class struggle. He's quite the cheerleader for the anti-Chavista counterrevolution in Venezuela. I could go on with examples of his awfulness, but it's not as if it's in dispute. He's a spokesperson for capitalism, the system of oppression, exploitation, racism and mass misery. This is the guy's passion. In person and in print. For this, the Nobel.

Compare & contrast

I sold some books yesterday at the funky little Saturdays-only used bookstore in my neighborhood. I hadn't planned to buy any, and I didn't search the shelves, but somehow while I was glancing around as I stood at the counter waiting for the guy to tote up what I'd brought in, one book grabbed my attention and stared me down until I walked over and picked it up. Don't know where the intuition came from that this title, which I'm not conscious of having heard of, was one that would interest me. But wow am I glad I gave it a look.

It is the novel The Stars Look Down by A.J. Cronin. The book, originally published in 1935, was reissued in the U.S. in this 1963 edition by Little, Brown (not the edition featured on Amazon.com). It's beautiful, substantial, a sturdy paperback, the cover made of a heavy stock that's got a great weave texture with a stunning black and tan graphic design. Here's how the back cover describes this book:

The Stars Look Down is recognized as one of the most powerful novels of social protest ever written. It is set during the years 1903-1933 in a desolate Scottish mining district which produces both war profiteers such as the ruthless Joe Gowlan and gentle idealists such as Arthur Barras, who becomes a conscientious objector to prove his opposition to his own father's policies. The Neptune mine disaster, where one hundred men are killed and ten trapped miners starve to death in a blocked shaft, is one of many unforgettable scenes.

Sounds great, right? Here's something else to love: the introduction is "by Joseph Mersand, chairman of the English Department at Jamaica High School in New York City." I can't imagine that a Queens high school teacher today would get to write the introduction to a major novel.

And a major novel this is. Little known though it may now be, it had a great impact upon first publication in 1935. The New York Times reviewer, for instance, wrote, "It is impossible to conceive of a reader laying aside The Stars Look Down once he has started the tale. It is equally impossible to conceive of any reader not recommending the book far and wide."

During the Great Depression there was a flowering of proletarian literature such as this novel. People would have laughed in the face of anyone who mouthed some folderol about politics and art being incompatible. Even almost 30 years later, when this edition was published, Mersand wrote in his introduction: "Many works of fiction deal with a trivial aspect of life or superficial people, and they are forgotten almost before the works are finished. The Stars Look Down deals with a universal theme--the theme of capital versus labor and the human relationships involved."

Oh-ho! A universal theme! Right you were, Mr. Mersand, but I wonder if you suspected that a time would soon come when any attempt to express that theme would be quashed, silenced, ridiculed as antithetical to art. And that what you correctly characterized as the "trivial" aspects of life would be deemed the sole suitable focus.

It's interesting to read the few reviews of this novel at Amazon. One derides it as Marxist propaganda. The rest rave, one reader even calling it the greatest novel of the 20th century. Can it be that despite the ruling class's best efforts, their proscription against class-struggle fiction crumples uselessly when readers actually get a chance to pick up and read such a book? That's the rub, of course, that such books no longer get published and readers get no chance to read them.

This book, though, did have quite a time of it. Not only was it hailed as a masterpiece. It was made into a movie starring Michael Redgrave and Lionel Barrymore that is still considered one of the best movies ever. Later, it was a TV miniseries in Italy starring Giancarlo Giannini. A few years after that came another TV miniseries, this one in England. It has also been a stage play, adapted several times. Finally, and this was news to me (well, all this is news to me), it turns out that this novel that I'm now dying to dive into was a major inspiration for the current Broadway musical Billy Elliot, whose opening number is titled "The Stars Look Down."

Compare and contrast, then. On our left: A.J. Cronin and The Stars Look Down. On the right: the  bourgeois-imperialist lit hero of the moment (see previous post) explaining that fiction is about personal relationships. Can anyone still need convincing that the class struggle is playing out all the time not only on the job and the battlefield but on the cultural front as well?

That was more or less a rhetorical question, but in case anyone answered yes, here's more proof. Cronin, a doctor, also wrote a novel called The Citadel. Keeping in mind the pitfalls of crowdsourcing, here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on this book:

The Citadel, the tale of a mining company doctor's struggle to balance scientific integrity with social obligations, incited the establishment of the National Health Service in the United Kingdom by exposing the inequity and incompetence of medical practice at the time. In the novel, Cronin advocated a free public health service ...

OK I need not go on and on. Obviously, I've entered another one of my book excitements. A chance glance at a book garage and I'm all agog about a novel I'd never heard of, itching to enter its pages and be transported.