En 1936, Joris Ivens, Hemingway, Lillian Hellman, Robert Flaherty y Dos Passos fundaron la Sociedad Contemporary Historians, con el objetivo de producir una película que mostrase al mundo la lucha de la República Española frente al alzamiento militar fascista. "Tierra de España" es uno de los documentales más crudos sobre la guerra civil española. La voz en off es de Hemingway.

i like tough colloquialisms. from the 42nd parallel: What you wanna cry for; this aint no Johnstown flood.

i like america. from the 42nd parallel: American shouldn’t cry he should look kind and grave and very sorry when they wrapped me in the stars and stripes and brought me home on a frigate to be buried I was sorry I never remembered whether they brought me home or buried me at sea but anyways I was wrapped in Old Glory.

Paul Auster:
A menudo me pregunto porqué escribo. No es sólo para crear obras hermosas o relatos entretenidos. Es una actividad que parezco necesitar para sobrevivir. Me siento muy mal cuando no lo hago. No es que escribir me produzca un gran placer, pero es mucho peor si no lo hago.
(…)
Escribir, en cierto sentido, es una actividad que me ayuda a aliviar la tensión de esos secretos sepultados. Recuerdos ocultos, traumas, cicatrices infantiles…es evidente que las novelas surgen de una parte inaccesible de nosotros mismos.

John Dos Passos:
Al escribir te aligeras mucho el pecho, echas fuera emociones, impresiones, opiniones. La curiosidad te empuja a continuar, es la fuerza conductora. Hay que librarse de lo que se ha reunido; es algo que hay que decir acerca de la literatura. Hay mucho alivio en un volumen grueso.

Franz Kafka:
Flaubert escribe en una carta que su novela era una roca a la cual se aferraba para no desparecer bajo las olas del mundo que le rodeaba (…) Sólo que en mi caso resulta algo complicado este asunto. Con ayuda de mis garabateos huyo de mí mismo, para llegar a atraparme a mí mismo en el punto final. No logro escapar de mí.

Textos extraídos del libro El oficio de escritor (selección de Ana Ayuso -- ediciones y talleres de escritura creativa Fuentetaja)

In January 1933, Adolf Hitler, the head of the Nazi party, became chancellor of Germany. Within two months, the Nazis had gained virtually total control of the country and had begun what would be a 12-year nightmare eventually engulfing the entire world.  For starters, Germany's labor unions and opposing political parties were banned.  Civil liberties were suspended.  And the purging of Jews from the German government and universities was launched. 

Although much of the world greeted the Nazi takeover with indifference or apathy, some people were alert to what was happening and the threat it represented.

In July 1933, a committee of 51 prominent Americans was established in New York at the request of German-born physicist Albert Einstein in his role as head of the International Relief Association.  The Americans included intellectuals, artists, and members of the clergy.  Among them were the philosopher John Dewey, the writer John Dos Passos, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. 

The committee established offices at 11 West 42nd St., opposite Bryant Park and not far from our current headquarters location.  Its mission, as The New York Times reported on July 24, 1933, was to "assist Germans suffering from the policies of the Hitler regime."  And so came into being the organization that would grow into today's International Rescue Committee.  Although the IRC today is vastly larger and more complex than it was at the beginning, we are still motivated by the same concern that led to our founding: a commitment to fellow human beings who are suffering as the result of persecution, war, or civil conflict. ]]> http://crcb.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/writers-i-like-more-than-i-should/ Fri, 09 Nov 2007 07:05:23 +0000 crcb http://crcb.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/writers-i-like-more-than-i-should/ Mood: charmed, I'm sure

Recently, I wrote about writers I don't like. Criticism is cheap fun, but risks nothing. This time, I thought I'd put my taste on the line by listing writers I consider underrated, or whom I like more than they deserve.

• John Dos Passos. He's out of style now, but his U.S.A. trilogy is the Great American Novel. The later Dos Passos, like the later Wordsworth (and for many of the same reasons), is best left to oblivion. The younger Dos Passos lives on in Eternity.
• H. P. Lovecraft. He gave novice writers wonderful advice. He followed none of it. You don't read him for his characters (colorless and passive), or his plots (he only had one), or his eldritch, dank, squamous, adjective-laden style. You read him for his cosmic imagination. He was a bad writer, but a great one. (Borges agreed with me on this.)
• William Morris. A revolutionary whose motto was "forward to the 13th century!" The archaic prose of his fantasy novels moves, if it can be said to move, with glacial slowness. There's little I like better than getting lost in one of his pre-raphaelite worlds. I can also recommend his translations of Scandinavian literature, and such of his poetry as is not "improving."
• Kenneth Patchen. He wrote too much, too quickly, and his experiments often seem purposeless. But he was his own storm, and I stick around for the occasional blinding crash of lightning. His poem "In order to" is marvelous.
• Edgar Allen Poe. No one denies his primacy as a short story writer, but I'd like to see his poetic reputation revived. His most famous pieces are not always his best. I used to have "Dream-Land" memorized, and it's a fairly long poem. I liked it that much.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was preachy, self-righteous and condescending. His personal life was a tangle of troubled relationships. As a thinker, he was vague and self-contradictory. His poetry is diffuse. Yet, there's something about him that appeals to me. Maybe I see more of myself in him than I'd like to admit--and if I could become as good a poet, I'd be happy to be in the second tier of literature. Also, his poetic reputation has suffered because modern poetry has cast Abstraction into the outer darkness. But with political poetry so much in vogue, isn't Shelley due for a comeback?
• A.E. van Vogt. Nominally, van Vogt wrote science fiction, but his understanding of science was neither deep nor broad. He wrote insanely dream-like stories -- cheap diner Kafka with a side of Breton (and Breton's lack of humor).

The Plant Wizard

Luther Burbank was born in a brick farmhouse in Lancaster Mass,
he walked through the woods one winter
crunching through the shinycrusted snow
stumbling into a little dell where a warm spring was
and found the grass green and weeds sprouting
and skunk cabbage pushing up a potent thumb,
He went home and sat by the stove and read Darwin
Struggle for Existence Origin of Species Natural
Selection that wasn't what they taught in church,
so Luther Burbank ceased to believe moved to Lunenburg,
found a seedball in a potato plant
sowed the seed and cashed in on Darwin's Natural Selection
on Spencer and Huxley
with the Burbank potato.

Young man go west;
Luther Burbank went to Santa Rosa
full of his dream of green grass in winter ever-
blooming flowers ever-
bearing berries; Luther Burbank
could cash in on Natural Selection Luther Burbank
carried his apocalyptic dream of green grass in winter
and seedless berries and stoneless plums and thornless roses brambles cactus---
winters were bleak in that bleak
brick farmhouse in bleak Massachusetts---
out to sunny Santa Rosa;
and he was a sunny old man
where roses bloomed all year
everblooming everbearing
hybrids.

America was hybrid
America could cash in on Natural Selection.
He was an infidel he believed in Darwin and Natural
Selection and the influence of the mighty dead
and a good firm shipper's fruit
suitable for canning.
He was one of the grand old men until the churches
and the congregations
got wind that he was an infidel and believed
in Darwin.
Luther Burbank had never a thought of evil,
selected improved hybrids for America
those sunny years in Santa Rosa.
But he brushed down a wasp's nest that time;
he wouldn't give up Darwin and Natural Selection
and they stung him and he died
puzzled.
They buried him under a cedartree.
His favorite photograph
was of a little tot
standing beside a bed of hybrid
everblooming double Shasta daisies
with never a thought of evil
And Mount Shasta
in the background, used to be a volcano
but they don't have volcanos
any more.

I am on my way to having internet at home! After spending almost 6 hours with the AT&T people today I have a landline now. Apparently, the problem was that a disgruntled previous tenant actually cut the phone wires in the wall, which meant that they had to re-wire my apartment (including drilling holes into the basement and all). So, not only did I have the pleasure of looking at technician buttcracks all day but they also made the time enjoyable for me by attempting to include me in their debate regarding the physique of women in my neighborhood. Haven't been in the presence of this much masculinity since I worked in the marketing department of Old Spice deodorant. Ok, that was a lie. That department is all female.

Let's see...what else happened? Oh, we got paid today! Yay! I am able to buy food (well, if ramen counts as food, that is)! Last night was also quite enjoyable--Q101 broadcast the first reunion live apearance of Rage Against the Machine in its entirety. Yeah, yeah, people who do cultural studies and just read Adorno's culture industry for the first time will say that this is nothing to get excited about, since they make money off their music and are thus a part of the capitalist system--hence there is no political potential in Marxist rock music. But that is a) not a very critically rigorous attitude (rather, it is a popular beginning-grad-student-form of political critique that is pure negativity without that actually interesting Hegelian touch) and b) not a very honest account of the nature of the political, which is, after all, firmly located within the cultural realm at this point. There's no way around it (debate me on this--I dare you!). Hence, we need to formulate much more critically rigorous accounts of how politics and ideology actually function within culture. The idea of total capitalist co-optation is a pseudo-lefty copout that arises mainly out of the "tragically hip" influence of Foucault's formulation of discursive power--i.e. it is not a valid and accurate historical materialist argument/analysis at all. This is just one of the few examples of how Foucault has severely damaged supposedly progressive scholarship (while admittedly providing us also with some very important and helpful theoretical frameworks). But without going into a rant about all of this I will just return to my initial point: I greatly enjoyed hearing RATM play again, which is in part due to the fact that I must honestly include them in the forces that shaped my early political education--that may not be a big thing but it is certainly not nothing.

In work-related news I broke down and decided that I should re-read Dos Passos' USA. I really do not have time for this but I figure I owe it to the editors of the textbook. The problem is that I have to focus on my MLG presentation and the conference next week, which means that I will have to write this essay over the weekend. If I just devote Sunday to writing I would have only tonight and tomorrow to speed-read my way through roughly 1300 pages. The other problem is that I got paid today, which means that I will have to have a payday beer somewhere. I cannot really get around this--it is an integral part of the Ph.D.-student-underpaid-teacher codex. Maybe I'll just go down to my dive bar around the corner, have a quick beer and then try to get more reading in afterwards. I had also planned to be all healthy and go running by the lake tonight. Seems like the health part of the day will once again turn into lots of coffee, reading and writing, followed by a beer and more reading. Man, I hope my future job (should I actually manage to convince a university that it is worth hiring an English professor instead of another mechanical engineer) comes with a good health care plan. Oh--I also got a pretty funny list of characteristics that help you identify if you are a real grad student. Pretty damn funny. I will post that tomorrow, so that I have a quick post ready and can concentrate more on reading.

Oh: does anyone have anything smart to say about Barthelme??? God, I hate this fucking PoMo aesthetic/formal experimentation stuff--so self indulgent and politically useless (well, actually I argue that it is a symptom of a specific socioeconomic condition, which makes it at least somewhat interesting to me--but still only as an heuristic). Can someone please tell me why I should be interested in Barthelme on a level other than the one I just described? Really--any suggestion will do.

Sorry--I did not mean to end on such a negative note. Let's go for something more positive: I took a quick shower earlier today, wasn't partially boiled and consequently my ass feels just fine today.