Truth Marathon - art/short video 2

At BridgeText, a few sketches from the second short TRUTH MARATHON vid.

Truth Marathon art

More at BridgeText...

Wars' Hours

Since this year is the centennial of World War One -- with a lot of press to come over the summer as August approaches -- it's likely a lot of attention will be given to the origins of that war. It's generally viewed as a catastrophe that was blundered into because of iimperial interests and hubris (the belief the war would be short). And of course, there will be many references to how WWI sowed the seeds of WWII. So it seems to me a mystery why similar questions aren't asked of the origins of a much more recent conflict -- one that's still going on. Below is a speech by Philop Agee which describes the intelligence available to Western powers before the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. It also provides interesting background on the policy of the Bush administration in 1990, as well as a sketch of the American/Iraqi intelligence relationship during the Iran/Iraq war.

It's worth noting that one of Agee's points -- about elevated arms spending world-wide despite the end of the Cold War -- is still as pertinent as it was more than 20 years ago. Levi Asher has had a series of good posts at LitKicks on the distorting effects of militarism. The origins/policies forming a background to Gulf War I are a good place to start.

Noteworthy

Here's the link to the Will Self piece mentioned below

Steven Beattie on Mavis Gallant's "Varieties of Exile"

Tea culture and the fate of the novel

Will Self I

Go here

I'm still blogging. But it's almost entirely taking place here.

One year

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On the Selector Class System (1)

A while ago, I wrote to Dan Green to ask him some follow up questions to an article he wrote entitled "The Standard of Literature" at his website. In that piece, Green argued against Alison Walsh, who had previously published an article in the Irish Independent on the need for gate-keeping in literature.(Walsh is a semi-regular contributor to the Irish Independent, and generally writes on the publishing scene there.) The question at stake is a rather complicated one, since on the one hand it hinges on issues of taste and on the other rests upon very commonly held -- one might almost say axiomatic -- beliefs about the great proportions of amateurish junk that get produced in any society by people who dream of being professional artists but do not possess the requisite talent. For Walsh, it seems, this axiom is incontrovertible. Or to be more precise, for Walsh, the axiom justifies gate-keeping as it is commonly practiced by the publishing industry. For Green, this justification is questionable; the true determiner of a work of fiction's worth is the reader, and the conventional gate-keeping model -- driven by profit motives as well as personal aesthetic taste -- is not adequate to ensure the production of what the publishing industry claims it produces: the best novels, short stories, etc., that are being created by living writers.

I wrote to Green with some follow-up questions after he posted his article, and he was kind enough to answer. I'm going to post some of that discussion here. I'm also going to ask a few more questions on top of my original ones.

When I emailed Green, I asked...

more...

Upcoming

I recently received answers from Dan Green to some questions on standards in publishing (that is, the set of values that agents and acquisition editors apply/claim to apply/de facto apply) when deciding which manuscripts to print). I'm planning to write an article based on Green's responses. In the meantime, however, Green has agreed to have an online dialogue about the issue ... a sort of ad hoc mini-article before the article proper.

More soon.

Frances Madeson

 

My interview with novelist and playwright Frances Madeson is now up at my new site.

Paper Sweat

Last week, put the finishing touches on the edits of my Hiroshima novel. That brings to four the number of interconnected screenplay module fictions I have finished (one mega-project and three conventionally-sized mss.)

To see a bit more about this project, go here, or here to see pictures specifically of the Hiroshima hybrid graphic novel that is the project's most recent module.

The screenplay novel is an idea that I've been experimenting with for some time. I'm still convinced that it -- both as a hybrid graphic fiction and as a method of writing text-only narratives -- is an idea whose time has come.

Read the rest here....