Need a Writing Prompt?

There are two types of writers: Writers who use prompts to navigate past their blocks and writers who don't. It's entirely possible that you will be both types of writer at different phases of your career.

If you are in the "need a prompt" phase, why not subscribe to Laura Davis? Once you subscribe you will receive a weekly email newsletter with a prompt that's partly psychological - to help you learn more about your particular blocks. Here's the latest prompt:

The Writer's Journey Roadmap
August 30, 2011

"Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."

- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Today's Writing Prompt:

What keeps you from writing that shitty first draft?

Laura Davis is a professional writer's guide. Her Facebook fan page is here.

If you are not currently in the "need a prompt" phase of your writing career, consider yourself lucky,

Aesthetic Wit(h)nessing in the Era of Trauma

I came across a strong article in EurAmerica (Dec. 2010, Vol 40, No 4, pp 829-886) today by
Griselda Pollock. She writes about Bracha Ettinger and the need for artists to approach their work with "ethical commitment" given the preponderance of trauma in the 20th century. A sample of Ettinger's art is provided here. The abstract is below.

Abstract
Israeli/French artist and psychoanalytical theorist, Bracha Ettinger has declared: "In art today we are moving from phantasm to trauma. Contemporary aesthetics is moving from phallic structure to matrixial sphere." In analysing the significance of this claim, this article will bring together the legacies of feminist, post-colonial cultural theories in relation to the current focus on trauma, memory and aesthetics in an international context. The understanding of the twentieth century as a century of catastrophe demands theoretical attention be given to concepts such as trauma, as artists with deep ethical commitments bring issues of traumatic legacies to the surface of cultural awareness and potentially provide through the aesthetic encounter a passage from the traces of trauma. This article introduces, explains and analyses the contribution of Bracha Ettinger as a major theoretician of trauma, aesthetics and above all sexual difference. In addition, it elaborates on her parallel concept of a matrixial aesthetic practice, enacted through a post-conceptual painting, that retunes the legacies of technologies of surveillance and documentation/archiving, as a means to effect the passage to a future that accepts the burden of sharing the trauma while processing and transforming it. The article demonstrates the dual functions of Ettingerian theories of a matrixial supplement to the phallocentric Imginary and Symbolic in relation to the major challenges we face as we seek to understand, acknowledge and move on from the catastrophes that render our age post-traumatic.

Checkpoint 303 Beats Drum for Resistance

Checkpoint 303 composes activist breakbeats and middle-eastern electronica to promote peace, human rights and justice in the middle-east.

Their music is available for free download at http://www.checkpoint303.com or Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/checkpoint303.

Here's a piece the band recently wrote for Common Ground News Service (CGNews) available at: www.commongroundnews.org

Tear down the wall and dance!
06 March 2008

EAST JERUSALEM and LYON, FRANCE — We had nearly finished getting our gear off the stage when someone from the audience came up to congratulate us on our show. After telling us how much he enjoyed the music and video projection, he added, with a slightly troubled look on his face: “…but I have a problem. Isn’t it somehow wrong to dance to music that deals with the Palestinian cause?” He explained that while he found himself dancing to some of the more up-beat songs, he could not help asking himself whether it was okay to dance to the message our music embodies.

We were pleased to hear about his ‘dilemma’. This is precisely what our band, Checkpoint 303, is all about. Instead of telling the audience what to think about the issue of Palestine, which would be a ridiculously naïve attitude, we try to trigger a reflective process in our listeners.

This same question is put to us every now and again. Obviously there’s no universal answer. Every individual has to discover what they consider to be right, that’s the point; it’s ultimately all about the process of figuring it out. But for those who feel guilty grooving to the sound of a serious humanitarian issue, we have one consolation: silly I-love-you-baby lyrics need not be the unique criterion for danceable music.

This said, Checkpoint 303 is not a dance music band. The songs we consider successful are ones that involve the listener in the artistic process, songs in which the listener participates in creating the statement, as opposed to passively consuming a message. This can only be achieved by avoiding music with a ready-to-go, prêt-à-porter, take-away message.


How can this be achieved from a practical point of view? By contrast to other forms of musical activism, we do not rely on lyrics to convey our message. Checkpoint 303’s music is primarily based on field we record throughout the Middle East, and Palestine in particular—covering a large spectrum of predominantly urban sounds: people talking in the old city of Jerusalem, a traffic jam in Ramallah, excerpts of a local Bethlehem radio station, the sound of an identity control at an Israeli checkpoint, the chanting of a demonstration in the west bank, etc. We then transform the audio material into loops, onto which we add electronic beats, riffs and melodies played on oud (oriental lute), keyboard or guitar.


When our ‘sound catchers’, SC Yosh or Cheikh Julio, are on the street with their recording gear, they are not looking for a specific sound to convey a pre-defined impression or statement. The essence of our music is to capture, fragment, and reconstruct the soundtrack of daily life in the occupied Palestinian territories. Yet we don’t restrict our music to only portraying the suffering and hardship of life under occupation. The media is doing a fantastically wrong and biased job of exclusively depicting the negative aspects of life in this tormented region of the world. By contrast, our music includes rhythms of “normal” life, the supposedly insignificant things that never make headlines, but help make possible the very idea of “hope” in Palestine.


Many Palestinian families heroically try, against all odds, to get along with their lives, educate their children, and dream of a better future—one worth living for. There are positive stories to report from Palestine. Our attempt to make music based on objective field recordings in the Middle East is in itself a challenging intellectual exercise. But, at the end of the day, that is precisely what yields the necessary degree of realism and humanity that is the backbone of our music.
Our aim, then, is to blend the aesthetics of electronic music composition with the social, economical, and humanitarian dimensions of reality in Palestine in a way that actively involves the listener in shaping the message. But does this make our work political? Although it may be perceived as such, our creative intentions are not political per se. They are driven by fundamental humanitarian values. It seems to us that the universality of human rights should in theory be both the common ground and the starting point to achieve peace. Additionally, when it comes to the question of whether our art is politically correct or not, the answer is simple: we do not care as long as it is humanly correct. We are artists, not politicians; this allows us the luxury of being able to tell the truth from a humanitarian point of view with no fear of electoral consequences!

Electronic music and audiovisual experimentation are the tools Checkpoint 303 uses to react to both the virtual and physical walls the occupation has created. These walls are also being hacked by the flourishing Palestinian hip-hop and trip-hop scene (e.g. DAM, Ramallah Underground, G-Town, Arapeyat, etc.) but also international artists such as the British graffiti artist Banksy or the American indie songwriter and political activist David Rovics to name but a few.

###

This article is part of a special series on Art and Conflict, which surveys the work of art in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and examines the political dimensions of art in general.

Copyright permission is granted for publication.

Checkpoint 303 collaborates with film-makers, musicians, and visual artists from around the globe. Its free tunes from occupied territories are an act of resistance and a celebration of hope.

Checkpoint 303 was invited by Massive Attack to be a support band for three shows in the UK in 2007 and in France in 2008. We are also very much into performing in alternative venues and spaces where the aesthetics and meaning of sound/noise and its link to social activism can be reconsidered and explored...

Over the last two years, the band has performed electronic and live sets in several countries (USA, Australia, Canada, France, Palestine, Tunisia, Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Japan, etc.) spreading the word for peace and human rights through a blend of twisted electronica, downtempo, break-beats, oriental riffs and field recordings...

Walt Whitman, Ad Man or Mad Man?

Here's an ad agency using Walt Whitman to sell jeans:



Can a poem sell? Of course. Should a poem be used to sell? Well, Walt's dead, so he has no say.

Teachers could see the ad campaign as a teaching tool, to sell students on poetry.

In New York? Come to a reading!

A Reading to Honor the Artist in Wartime issue of Fiction International. At The Lounge, Hudson View Gardens, Pinehurst Avenue and 183rd Street, NYC, Sunday, November 8th at 4:00 p.m.

Featuring contributors to the issue:

Harold Jaffe "one of our finest literary terrorists / freedom fighters" – Paradoxa

Patricia Eakins "intriguing and entertaining" – Greg Boyd, Asylum

A Tribute to Daniel Berrigan, S.J. "[Berrigan] deserves a place of honor on this century's highest shelf." - Boston Post

Reading in tribute to Father Berrigan: Joel Allegretti, Steve Brouwer, Michael Crosby, Gordon Gilbert, Deirdre Mahoney, and Peter Martin.

Harold Jaffe is the author of fifteen books of fiction and creative nonfiction, most recently Jesus Coyote (a docu-novel), and Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture, a collection of creative nonfiction. Jaffe's books have been translated into Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish. Jaffe is editor-in-chief of Fiction International.

Patricia Eakins is the author of The Hungry Girls and Other Stories and The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste (a novel), which won both the NYU Press Prize for Fiction and the Capricorn Prize of the Writer’s Voice. She is the recipient of two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Paris Review has awarded her the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

Poet, playwright, and biographer Daniel Berrigan, S.J., is an internationally renowned peace activist, a member of the Catonsville Nine and the Plowshares Eight. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is also a recipient of the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Thomas Merton Award, the Pax Christi USA Pope Paul VI Teacher of Peace Award, and the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award. He has taught religious studies and theology in various universities and has been a contributing editor to Sojourners, a magazine of faith, politics, and culture.

Suggested donation of $7 includes one free drink and free snacks. Reception after to meet the writers. For more information call 212-923-7800, x1342.

Alum: Roland Goity

Ever wonder what happens to Fiction International assistant editors? Do they wind up sleeping in a dusty corner of San Diego, being harassed and arrested by San Diego's finest? Or worse - sleeping in a dusty office in a university somewhere?

Worry not more: one alum, Roland Goity, is editor of the illustrious online journal Lit 'N Image - well worth a visit. While you are there, take a look at the gorgeous photographs of John Patrick Ayson, another FI alum.

Can University Presses survive this recession?

My local newspaper of choice recently printed an AP article about the possible demise of Louisiana State University Press. Seems in an era where universities are being squeezed of funding by their states, one likely victim will be the University Press.

Chancellor Michael Martin doesn't question the prestige the Louisiana State University Press brings to his school, with Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction and poetry, tomes on Southern history and culture and other noted works to its credit.

What it doesn't bring in is revenue, and, like cash-strapped colleges across the country, LSU is getting tired of propping up its press.

The school has said the 74-year-old original publisher of "A Confederacy of Dunces" doesn't generate enough money to independently function.

Fiction International understands the problem, which is why we began a drive to increase revenue. We applied a few basic accounting techniques to get expenses in line, then started (and continue) looking for subscribers. We created an online presence (including this blog) and went looking for past, present, and future contributors and avid readers.

The result is a journal that is - for now - making enough money to cover our publishing costs. A journal that is - for now - safe from the university's budget ax.

Who will be hurt most by this latest cost-cutting move by universities are the contributors, most of whom teach and need the publishing credit to retain their jobs. There are few markets for short fiction and poetry, and most are affiliated with a University, so losing fiction and poetry journals will be a severe blow.

If a university wants to save their publications, they need to find within their department an administrator who knows both literature and business. Imagine the revenue LSU Press would have if it had - for example - the publishing revenue from A Confederacy of Dunces when it was hot, instead of well after its money-generating days were over. (LSU Press quietly resumed publication of the Larg-Print version, while Penguin Classics publishes the version assigned by literature classes.)

So could LSU Press or any other university press make enough changes in their way of thinking about literature and the marketplace to increase their revenue enough to survive the recession? Yes they can.

Truth-telling doesn't always work

Chris Hedges tells the truth: The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free!

The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the irrational has become rational, where lies become true. And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of information. We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased. These lines diminish the power of reform, justice and an understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that these lines are there.

"As a writer part of what you are aiming for is to present things in ways that will resonate with people, which will give voice to feelings and concerns, feelings that may not be fully verbalized," Ewen said. "You can't do that simply by providing them with data. One of the major problems of the present is that those structures designed to promote a progressive agenda are antediluvian."

Corporate ideology, embodied in neoconservatism, has seeped into the attitudes of most self-described liberals. It champions unfettered capitalism and globalization as eternal. This is the classic tactic that power elites use to maintain themselves. The loss of historical memory, which "balanced and objective" journalism promotes, has only contributed to this fantasy. But the fantasy, despite the desperate raiding of taxpayer funds to keep the corporate system alive, is now coming undone. The lie is being exposed. And the corporate state is running scared.

Dying for art's sake

Richard North Patterson, prolific writer of thrillers, has written a novel based on the wrongful conviction and execution of Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Mr. Saro-Wiwa, a popular author who helped create a peaceful mass movement on behalf of the Ogoni people, was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmental and human rights activists on what many contended were trumped-up murder charges. His body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave.

. . .

Fourteen years have passed. General Abacha has died, and Mr. Saro-Wiwa has had a proper burial, but the circumstances surrounding the nine executions, along with related incidents of brutal attacks and torture, are getting another hearing. This month the Wiwa family’s lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell over its role in those events goes to trial in federal court in Manhattan.

Fiction International's recent theme, The Artist in Wartime, asked artists to write about war and other opressive acts of tyrants. Mr. Saro-Wiwa died because his writings provoked the ultimate in corporate/polifical tyranny. Can you, as an artist, be as brave?

Watch an interview of Richard North Patterson as he describes how he chose Mr. Saro-Wiwa as a subject for Eclipse. Oh, and enjoy the Chevron commercial that begins the Patterson interview.

J. G. Ballard, R.I.P.

J. G. Ballard, author of Crash, High Rise, and The Atrocity Exhibition, among other works, died from prostrate cancer. His works were originally categorized "sci-fi" during the era of New Wave Science Fiction, but when Star Wars killed off the New Wave, his works were adopted by Universities - as were other New Wave writers like James Tiptree Jr., Samuel Delaney, and Harlan Ellison. It's a shame that he (and the other writers) are remembered only within literature departments, because they were - and are - visionaries.

In the most honorable tradition of writing, he found a seam, planted a mine, and slipped away.

It's easy, from the perspective of the present, to minimize just how revolutionary all this was - we now live, after all, in Ballard's world. Ballard, though, produced work that not only challenged his audiences but also actively provoked them, in some cases literally moving people to vandalism, as when he staged a 1970 exhibition of crashed cars at a London art gallery. This show, intended to illustrate the fetishization of machinery and violence, was a seminal moment for Ballard: It led to the publication of "Crash" in 1973.

"The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century," the author wrote in a 1974 introduction to the French edition of the novel, "has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia."

Warr Games

A Docufiction by Harold Jaffe.

Night after night throughout the wrecked city contingents of US troops in cartoon video uniforms hunt for hidden roadside bombs.
        On a recent night, a unit from Company B of the Fifth Engineering Battalion, out of Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., met in a darkened tent to prep for their road-clearing mission in a 27-foot armored vehicle called Cowpoke.
        At the end of their meeting, Staff Sgt. Jessie McGah, 31, of Greenville Arkansas, led his team in prayer.

Out on what passes for a road, crawling along at five miles per hour, the unit peer through blast-resistant glass windows, using giant floodlights and a remotely operated steel arm to help detect any telltale disturbance in the pavement or median that would reveal a buried bomb.
        To accomplish their mission, the engineers, or sappers, try to get into the enemy’s mind.
        "When we're out," Sgt McGah said, "we're thinkin’ like how the bad guys think, even like how we'd blow ourselfs up to keal Americans.”

Wolfing trash food, the bright American male 17-year-old sits cross-legged on the floor, pavement, tarmac, astroturf playing warr games.
        Video velocity, hand-eye coordination, game-theory-fantasy-slaughtering- cartoon-state-of-the-art weaponry.
        Speed speed.
        In warr games the fierce-eyed baddies wear long beards and turbans.
        Make agitated gestures and scream Jihad! Jihad! when they’re not sticking their collective butts in the air praying to Allah.

Meanwhile the bright 17-year-old’s older brother, dad and uncle are murdering the fierce-eyed baddies in their long beards and turbans.
        In what used to be called “real time.”
        Murdering the long beards’ wives and children.
        Infinite children, since the phrase “birth control” has never been translated into Arabic.
        There is no corresponding phrase in Farsi.
        In Urdu.
        No corresponding phrase in the million and one regional dialects of tribal Africa.

Hyper-brained 17-year-olds play warr games in their techno-caves
while their older brothers, sisters, National Guard dads, uncles are killed and maimed by roadside bombs.
        Poisoned by xenophobia.
        Sickened unto death by depleted uranium.
        Zombied home with PTSD.
        Resume a life of legislated dysfunction with sharply reduced benefits.
        Migrating patriotism.

40 years ago, before Starbucks, the internet, and boutiqued angst, 20-something males refused to kill while contesting the real-time war, and (no matter what the Discovery Channel tells us now) raised consciousness, as the phrase went, helped end the holocaust.
        End the war that in hindsight nobody wanted, not even one of its chief architects, Defense Secretary McNamara, previously a car salesman, president of Ford Motor Company, who long after the war received a seven-figure advance for dictating his old man’s recantation to a ghost writer.
        In Retrospect, 1995, Random House.
        Then gave contradictory lectures based on the book he didn’t actually write for big $$ where he bristled when the audience interrogated him.

“Mr. Secretary, you say you objected early in the campaign to the bombing, napalming, wanton murder of innocents, carpet bombing of neighboring Cambodia which was not even a player in the war.
        “Mr. Sec, if you had these objections early on, like you say, why didn’t you make a case for stopping the war to the president, to the congress, to the American people?”

Mac’s peeved response: “I was a member of the team.
        “I was not in position to instruct my President.”
        From the audience: “What about after you left Defense and headed the World Bank? It was ‘68; the war was still raging.”
        Mac’s response: “As president of the World Bank I had pressing responsibilities, no time for distractions.”
        “Mr. Sec, are you calling the genocidal Vietnam War a distraction?”

Do 17-year-old males playing video warr games in their techno-caves constitute a distraction?
        Are “real time” wars a distraction from accountable reality?
        What counts more than Reality (TV) in your palm in a strip mall in anywhere, America?
        More than the NFL, America’s game, with a GDP higher than Sub-Saharan Africa?
        More than XXXtreme Games?
        With God, family, hedge funds, and Xtreme patriotism, McNamara, an advocate of game theory and the technological “revolution,” has never (he says proudly) found time for play.

**

        Intelligence officers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) have been studying postmodern theory.

        You’re lying.

        They recognize that the principles of waging warr must change in the new millennium.
        For Israel to contain its enemies on every side without taking big losses, the intelligence officers have studied Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Althusser, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Bourdieu . . .

        Whole lot of Frogs.
        The French and Israelis don’t even like each other.

        They’ve read PoMo architects and scrutinized their erections.

        Okay.

        Origins are out.
        Except for the origin of the disputed territories, which belong to the Jews, indisputably.
        Perpendicular is out, swarm is in.
        If insurgent street fighters have mined an alleyway and are wedged into sniper positions in the buildings lining the alley on either side, the Israelis don’t enter the alley from the front and proceed forward.
        Instead, small contingents of Israeli commandos break through the walls of apartments in the buildings lining the alley.

        What do they do with the families living in those apartments?

        Lock them in a room, bolt the door.
        The commandos unwall the walls, collapse the space, swarm into the alley from either side.
        In medias res.
        Like ants, like killer bees.
        They blast the insurgents.
        Or they disrupt them, startle them out of their holes.

        I didn’t think freedom fighters startle that easy.

        Not easy.
        Reading postmodern culture theory isn’t easy.
        Applying postmodern culture theory to warr ain’t easy.

        What happens if the freedom fighters are not in the alleys?

        Then Israeli intelligence hacks into their technology.
        PoMo warr is fundamentally a discourse between enemies.

        They discourse in different languages.

        Incidental.
        If the enemy’s lines of discourse are impeded they can’t communicate.
        An isolated, incommunicable enemy cannot warr effectively.

        You’re saying that the IDF, with their ruthless reputation world-wide, wage warr on their computers?

        PoMo battle-space is various.
        Situational.
        A network of interfacing but also unlooped spaces, offline and on.
        Battle-space is inseparable from living space.
        The souks, sewers, streets, mosques, kasbahs are where the enemy live, shit, pray, terrorize.

        How does the IDF distinguish combatants from innocents?

        Vermin is vermin.
        Nobody is innocent.

        Nobody on the insurgents’ side.

        It’s all in the mind.
        Which is the technology.
        Space is relational, subject to interpretation.
        So is innocence.
        We have the technology.

        True.

        The principle is if you can’t kill or brutalize the enemy, impede him.
        While the enemy moves haltingly, the IDF glides effortlessly.
        Online, off.
        Smooth, liquid, permeable movement vs striated, opaque, impeded movement is how the texts put it.

        The PoMo culture theory texts?

        Previously, the IDF, like other well-equipped, rigidly organized armies, warred strictly off-line via a traditional, Euclidian -- so to speak -- perspective.
        Now that centralized perspective has been put under erasure.
        Torqued, ruptured, shattered.

        If the freedom fighters are not murdered they will regroup.
        Resume fighting.

        Less effectively.
        Confidence shattered.
        An enemy does not have to be annihilated to lose a battle.
        Lose the warr.
        When the battle resumes the IDF “reads” and analyzes the dynamic; it kills with hardware, disorganizes with stratagems, reorganizes with software.
        One can win a post-millennial battle purely by reorganization.

        Were -- are -- any of those postmodern theorists soldiers, fighters?

        Postmodern theorists are pussies.
        Especially if they’re French.
        They’ll murder their wives.
        Or themselves.
        They do what they do.
        So long as they leave their texts behind.

        What happens to the unwalled walls?
        The inhabitants bolted into their rooms?
        What happens to the buildings the IDF breaks through in order to swarm like killer bees, reorganize space?

        The buildings remain unwalled.
        The inhabitants are not a factor.
        It could be they don’t even notice the unwalled walls.
        That is one of the advantages of warring with an impoverished enemy.

        You talk of the new post-millennial battle plan.
        Startle, swarm, disrupt, rupture.
        Battling situationally, with knowledge gained by studying the postmodern culture theorists?
        But isn’t this the way the most impoverished guerrillas on every bedeviled continent have been warring all along?
        Without having to read those French pussy theorists?

        Maybe.
        But without our technology.


[Part 2 is drawn from Eyal Weizman, “Walking through Walls,” Radical Philosophy #136, March/April 2006.]

Writers Living in Economic War Zones

Harold Bloom just published an article about how the lessons learned from an economic meltdown informed his writing. The writer? Ralph Waldo Emerson.

While Emerson is a great source for "self-reliance" and "transcendence" in a country gone mad from greed and power, other writers -- like Walt Whitman (who can teach us about transcending war) and Henry David Thoreau (who can teach us about transcending both greed and war) are Emerson's equals -- not his pupils, as Bloom suggests. (Bloom does love a hierarchy!)

               

Looking for a New York Reading!

One of Harold Jaffe's scheduled readings in NY, at the Brooklyn Public Library, had to cancel because of withdrawal of city funds!

He will be in NY between Oct 8-13, reading at the KGB Bar on October 10, but he's looking for another reading venue to replace the cancelled Brooklyn Library reading. Can any NY fans help?

What type of "Artist in Wartime" are you?

Traditional Battlefield-Style Warfare?


War Re-enactment?


War metaphors?


Cold War?


Guerilla War?


War of Words?

War of Wills?


War as "hot, man-on-man action"?


Submissions are now being accepted for Fiction International's "The Artist in Wartime" issue.

Guernica

What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who, if he is a painter, has only eyes, if he's a musician has only ears, if he's a poet has a lyre in each chamber of his heart, or even if he's a boxer, just muscles? On the contrary, he is at the same time a political being, constantly alert to the heart-rending stirring or unpleasant events of the world, taking his own complexion from them. How would it be possible to dissociate yourself from other men; by virtue of what ivory nonchalance should you distance yourself from the life which they so abundantly bring before you? No, painting is not made to decorate apartments. It is an instrument for offensive and defensive war against the enemy.

Pablo Picasso, Les Lettres Francaises, March 1945

Harold Jaffe, in Rain Taxi

Author Harold Jaffe just posted an interview he did with Larry Fondation for Rain Taxi, which is being published Summer 2008. In it he defines 'docufiction,' discusses his newest docufictions, and offers observations about contemporary society. An excerpt:

Official culture's facility to deceive is infinitely more advanced than in the Sixties. Successful revolutionary models are either not represented or brazenly misrepresented. And Americans are trained to rely on official representations far more than on their unmediated experiences.

Among other lies, we are told that the worldwide student revolt in '68 was a failure, that revolution as such has lost its purchase, when in truth revolution and the ethical dissent which leads to revolution are ongoing, perennial.

Video Writing

Writers, take note -- here's some kick-ass art:



Watch him make his point in 2:20. Notice the quick-cuts which simulate a too-slow-internet-connection effect. Observe his hip-hop presentation -- poetic, with a beat.

Observe, too, how the 2:20 is a complete story, as it is divided into scenes by: 1) a change in camera angle; and 2) Jay Smooth's change in body angle (turning to presumably work on his computer).

All the result of good and thoughtful writing. Genius!

See more at illdoctrine.com.

Herbert Marcuse Documentary

This documentary examines the turbulent life in California of political philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), author of One-Dimensional Man, Reason and Revolution and Eros and Civilization, among other books, professor of philosophy at the University of California San Diego, and a visionary and influential force for the student movement worldwide during the Sixties and Seventies. Blending archival footage, interviews, re- created scenes and voice-over narration, the video profiles not only the life of Marcuse but also the history of student protest and social activism. The video features interviews with Marcuse's student Angela Davis, former UCSD Chancellor William McGill, colleagues Fredric Jameson and Reinhard Lettau, and rare footage of Marcuse and former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Directed by Paul Alexander Juutilainen.

"Hijab," by Harold Jaffe

Here's a docufiction from Harold Jaffe's latest collection, Orfeo:


French bureaucrat and Muslim teenager at the entrance to the lycée outside Paris.

     Bonjour Mlle.
     You are required to remove your headscarf.

     Bonjour Monsieur.
     I never remove the hijab in public.

     This is a state-supported lycée, Mlle.
     It is not a mosque.
     It is not a souk.
     In France we maintain separation of church and state.
     That is the established policy.

     We understood the established policy to be cohabitation.
     Former colonies are encouraged to cohabit with their benefactors—you white French—with their native customs intact.
     Cohabitation you virtuously opposed to assimilation, such as the United States promotes, where everyone is expected to suppress their native language and staple the American flag to their forehead, indistinguishable one from the other.

     Mlle, the correct opposition is not between cohabitation and assimilation but between a secular state such as we have in France and a theocracy.

     Is the US then a theocracy?

     Without question.


Two global reprobates slouching outside the Bourse, in Paris.

     Who set the Reichstag fire in 1933 and as a consequence facilitated Hitler?

     The Jew.

     Who toppled the World Trade Center in 2001 and as a consequence facilitated Bush?

     The Muslim.

     Who "emigrated mentally" while living unmolested in Nazi Germany and Austria?

     "Aryan" intellectuals and artists.
     With the exception of a very small minority.

     Who, post 9/11, duct-taped US intellectuals and artists into the condominiums of their minds?

     The crusading US government.
     Taking a page from the Red-baiting McCarthy era.
     Even as the US government was apologizing for actual McCarthyism as a shameless departure from capitalist democracy's firmest values.

     The US also apologized for interning Japanese-Americans, then did it all over again with Muslim-Americans.
     9/11 gave them the excuse to reinvent history.

     As farce.

     Farcical genocide.


French bureaucrat and Muslim teenager at the entrance to the lycée outside Paris.

     Mlle, the ordinance is in place.
     Nor does it refer exclusively to Muslims.
     Conspicuous religious items of various kinds are prohibited.
     Jews are forbidden to wear skullcaps.
     Hindus are forbidden to paint their faces.
     Christians are forbidden to wear visible crosses larger than three centimeters.

     Are Catholic nuns forbidden to wear head coverings?

     Catholic nuns would have gone beyond the lycée, Mlle.
     The ordinance does not apply to education beyond the lycée...

     Why not?

     That should be self-evident, Mlle.
     The intention of the ordinance is to instill the ideal of secular education in the young.
     Before religious habits or customs become irreversible.
     Our obligation is to attend to children who enter the French public school system, and the fact is that young Muslim females are often coerced into wearing the headscarf.

     Wearing the hijab is a fundamental principle of Islamic teaching, Monsieur.
     To assert that the hijab is forced on Muslim females is both ignorant and paternalistic.
     The "secularism" you are attempting to impose is to us another sign of intolerance towards the growing Muslim community.

     I refuse to engage in an argument about semantics, Mlle.
     That is the way the ordinance reads.


Two global reprobates slouching outside the Bourse, in Paris.

     When I say hijab what comes to mind?

     The veil.
     Taking the veil.
     Entering the convent.
     France, for example, is proud of its various orders of nuns, "les bonnes soeurs."
     The sisters are picturesque; they don't disrupt the body politic; they have an esthetic dimension.

     Gliding about in their habits noirs.
     Esthetic, bien sur.

     I think too of raising the veil, uncovering.
     Which invokes the practice of clitorectomy or infibulation.
     What percentage of Islamic females worldwide are subjected to this practice?

     Legitimate numbers would be hard to come by.
     I wouldn’t trust whatever estimates the "First World" puts out there.
     What percentage of males worldwide are subjected to circumcision?

     Are clitorectomy and circumcision comparable?

     You tell me.

     Couldn't the veil also be identified with movement induced by natural forces.
     The aeolian harp stroked by the wind.
     Creative imagination without artifice.

     There is artifice in the construction of the harp.
     Winds are increasingly produced by global warming disruptions of the weather cycles.

     What does hijab signify to you?

     The sacred prepuce of its white male leaders.


French bureaucrat and Muslim teenager at the entrance to the lycée outside Paris.

     France--before Sarkozy--officially objected to the invasion of Iraq.
     France objected to Israel's violent annexation of Palestine.
     But what France is doing in its own country to its female Muslim minority is no less prejudicial.

     One thing has nothing to do with another, Mlle.
     The ordinance is unambiguous.
     Islamic females of lycée age are required to remove their head and face coverings while in the lycée or on the grounds of the lycée.
     Once you leave the lycée you may dress and do as you please.
     So long as it is within the law.

     Senegalese and Ivory Coast former subjects of lycée age are not required to remove their dashikis and bubas.
     Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan former subjects of lycée age are not required to remove their kaftans and jubbahs.
     Caribbean former subjects are not required to undo their dreadlocks.
     It is just your orthodox Muslim females of lycée age who are required to remove their hijabs, correct?
     What is it about young Muslim females that intimidates their former colonial occupier?

     You are imagining things, Mlle.
     The official ordinance reads as I indicated.
     I do not propose to argue with you over niceties.


Two global reprobates slouching outside the Bourse, in Paris.

     Except for its Muslims and Jews, France is officially uncircumcised.

     What if someone not Muslim or Jewish elects to be circumcised?

     Unless for reasons of health, which must be officially vetted, he will have to do it outside the law.
     Hijab—as a so-to-speak implied prepuce--can also signify the formal body coverings of its political leaders, graduates of the same elite écoles.
     Have you noticed how indistinguishable France's presidents and prime ministers--Giscard, Pompidou, Mitterand, Chirac—look in their somber double-breasted suits?
     Pale, stiff, fastidious, marmoreal.

     Sarkozy isn't marmoreal.

     Sarkozy is arboreal.

     Was it William James who remarked that the sheerest of veils separates the mundane, agitated, war-making world from the world inhabited by the higher spirits?
     Yet this sheer, transparent veil is so infrequently parted.

     William James was American.
     I don’t read Americans.

     William James's younger brother Henry's platonic version of himself was as un Francais de plaisir.
     The father, Henry senior, was an internationalist and a Swedenborgian.
     Alice James, like Proust, was bedridden.
     Why don't you read Americans?

     They are without history.
     Virtually no lived history from which to draw.

     Is that less privileged than having a long history but drawing the same opportunistic conclusions?

     You mean the French?

     Not exclusively.


French bureaucrat and Muslim teenager at the entrance to the lycée outside Paris.

     Mlle, I will not stand here arguing with you.
     The ordinance is clear.
     If you or any among you wish to dispute it, that must be done formally and lawfully.

     You've repeated lawful several times.
     To you, law precedes justice; to us it is the other way round.
     Isn't it a fact that you formulate then implement laws as you choose, according to your own advantage?
     All the time professing that these laws are immutable, engraved in stone by your Christian god?

     Mlle, I have done my best to be courteous, even as you have insisted on arguing.
     Now you have come dangerously close to blasphemy.
     I hereby terminate this discussion.
     Good day, Mlle.

     You white French fuss about courtesy, which you use to mask your hypocrisy.
     We wonder whether you've considered the repercussions your anti-Islamic ordinance might produce.
     Good day, Monsieur.


Two global reprobates slouching outside the Bourse, in Paris.

     We were discussing the images invoked by the hijab, or veil.
     We've cited nuns; prepuces; the somber formal wear of our leaders; music stirred by the wind; clitorectomy and circumcision; the sheer veil which according to William James separates elevated vision from the every day.
     What about the now-defunct Red Chinese and their Bamboo Curtain?
     The now-defunct Soviets and their Iron Curtain?
     The privileged quartiers of Paris?
     The gated communities globally, with its tiny minority of nervous rich?

     And with its exponentially multiplying oppressed Muslim underclass.
     Enraged and desperate behind their Muslim curtain.
     Which could end up being the most horrific "veil" of all.
     Agreed?

     No.
     I believe the greatest horrors will be inflicted by the other side.

***

A French woman who alleged she had been the subject of an anti-Semitic attack invented the story, police sources now say.

The admission came shortly after the she was taken into custody--four days after the alleged assault on a commuter train south of Paris.

The 24-year-old woman claimed six men accused her of being Jewish, then forcibly cut off her clothes with sharp, long knives and spray-painted swastikas on her nude body.

The woman, who is not Jewish, has been detained for falsely reporting a crime, state prosecutor Didier Merleau-Ponty told AFP news agency.

She could face up to six months in prison and an 8,000-euro ($13,000) fine if convicted.

The case has sparked widespread condemnation amid concerns that anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in France, which of course has a long and sordid history of anti-Semitism.

The men, described as of North African appearance and indeterminate age, are also said to have deliberately upended the woman's 8-month-old infant from its stroller.

The child fell on its head but was reportedly uninjured.

The woman claimed that about 20 people witnessed the attack but that nobody offered her support.

However, investigators, studying footage from surveillance cameras at the Gare d'Austerlitz station where the six alleged North African attackers were supposed to have exited, found no evidence to support the woman’s claim.

Nor has a single witness come forth even after urgent appeals in the newspapers and on television.

Now police sources who requested anonymity say that under "firm questioning" the woman has recanted her accusations. She has admitted cutting off her own clothes and spray-painting the swastikas on her naked body with the help of her boyfriend who is also in custody. Like her, the boyfriend is neither Jewish nor North African, but French and white.

Le Monde, the left-leaning French daily, reports that the same woman had filed several complaints in the past about being the victim of racist or fascist violence.

The reported brutality of the attack on the woman, its anti-Semitic character and the fact that no one came to her help provoked outrage.

It also added to the growing concern over racist and anti-Semitic attacks.

President Nicolas Sarkozy, who condemned the alleged assault as "pitiless and reprehensible," said he would deny clemency to any prisoner serving a sentence for a racist or anti-Semitic crime.

Government spokesman Jean-Francois Irigaray told RTL radio that the rising trend of anti-Semitic attacks was "a genuine evil" in France, even though the woman's case "proved to be imagined rather than real, as such."

Mark Twain and the (Spanish-American) War

Finally -- nearly 100 years after his death -- the MSM feels brave enough to acknowledge "the man Ernest Hemingway said all of modern American literature could be traced back to," Mark Twain, and how he utilized his art (writing) to thwart war and oppression.

His humor, Arnold sniffed, was "so attractive to the Philistine." It would be truer to say it was attractive to anyone who valued plain speaking and the kind of deadly wit that could cut through the cant and hypocrisy surrounding any topic, no matter how sensitive: war, sex, religion, even race. Twain was righteous without being pious, angry for all the right reasons and funny in all the right ways. You might say he gave virtue a good name.

Contrast this now-reverential endorsement of Twain's wit with NPR's and Fox News' reaction to comedian Al Franken's run for Senate.

Just as in Twain's time, conservatives have a love-hate relationship with artists (love making money off their product, hate their unconventional lifestyles). When it comes to art and politics converging, Americans have always hated the left-of-center artist who becomes involved in political campaigns or causes but love, and even elect, conservative "artist"-politicians.