I must be getting old, too old. I keep fighting this napping thing, only to fail - I lack the will power to resist. Yesterday, we worked until 12:14, I got the 12:30 bus home, piddled with the email until two, and then slept until 6 pm. Then I tried to clean out the email that has built up over the past two weeks and work on this post. The only other thing I managed was a trip to the convenience store.
Today must be different - I need to go to Social Security, the landlord, Walmart (my only good belt broke yesterday while at work). I have 50 minutes until I must catch the bus downtown.
A rejection came in the email:
Thank you for your submission, "The Psychotic Ape." While we were glad to have the chance to read your work, we do not have a place for it at this time.
We wish you all the best with your writing.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Here is all I could do yesterday:
A Lost Bit of the Story of Merlin and Arthur Has Been Found at Cambridge (Reactor) - what can I say, I am a fan of the Arthurian legend.
Mann Men (Los Angeles Review of Books). I love Michael Mann movies. When a date complained about Heat being too long, I wrote her off.
Considering the days we have coming towards us, I had to take a look at Dissidence and Resistance also from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
The Aesthetics of Resistance is a novel—and I’ll refer to it in the singular, not the plural, even though it was published in separate volumes—that demands much of its reader. The three volumes recount the activities of a group of characters, all of them leftist workers, as they resist Nazism and fascism in Germany, Spain, France, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. It’s a novel of political engagement and choices. But it is also, as its title indicates, about art and its role in society; about the messages art communicates; and, perhaps most importantly, about how viewers and readers should learn to become active readers of those messages. It is a novel and a philosophical tome, a history of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and a rich treatise on art history. It’s not really appropriate or informative to say, “This is a novel about …” Ideas, not plot, are central to it. The Aesthetics of Resistance proves a claim Weiss makes in the first volume: “[T]here was no distinction between social and political materializations and the essence of art.” The Aesthetics of Resistance is an expression of the possibility of a revolutionary aesthetic.
That made it even more interesting, and the following made me wonder if we lost something:
The question of what is portrayed in art, and who gets the opportunity to enjoy it and participate in it, is central to Weiss’s purpose. He lays out his foundational thesis in the first volume: “[F]rom Wilhelm Meister to Buddenbrooks the world that set the tone in literature was seen through the eyes of those who owned it.” This was not only the case when it came to literature; the novel’s characters examine classical works of art in order to understand the ways the oppression of the masses has been revealed or hidden by those who created them. Class is, in an aesthetics of resistance, integral to art; so, too, are the often-ignored signs of resistance to class oppression.
Every work the novel’s art-loving characters encounter is described in detail—the gestures, the colors used in the painting, the nature of the figures in the sculptures. The art, though, is read twice: first as the simple object of the spectator’s gaze, and then as an expression of the history from which it grew, the classes it presents, and the struggles it represents, consciously or not. In the battle scene in Angkor Wat, “the hallowed despots had overcome death from the very first, [while] the countless masses, whose fists were clenched around the grips of their swords, the shafts of their lances, stood before death in searing physicality.” Viewing the frieze on the altar at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the art-loving young communists see in the battle between the Giants and the Greek gods how “the sons and daughters of the Earth rise up against the ruling powers who were always trying to rob them of the hard-won fruits of their struggle.” Viewing art does not mean taking a break from resisting fascism; it is an integral part of that struggle.
I would also point out a bit of history we should not forget about ideological political parties - the ideology looms larger than the ethics of its politics.
However important becoming a writer is to the book’s anonymous main character, the struggle against fascism and for socialism is what matters most. The communist movement was the most important revolutionary force during this period, and the members of communist parties everywhere were faced with the twists and turns of the Soviet line. This required them to engage in feats of political tergiversation in an effort to stay not only on the right side of the party line but also among the living, for though activism could lead to death at the hands of the fascist authorities, dissent could lead to death at the hands of one’s comrades. The historic case of Willi Münzenberg, a faithful communist propagandist who met his death at Stalin’s hands when he began to doubt the correctness of the Soviet line, hovers over the pages of the novel, the mystery of his death a constant reminder of the dangers of being a communist....
And about this country's future:
There are historians who have not been kind to resistance groups, asserting that their effectiveness was more symbolic than real. Weiss will have none of that. Resistance is its own justification:
[F]or all their faults […] they had still been stronger than those who had done nothing. […] The enemy, who was busy plotting a new life in the coming peace, was already at work on diminishing, distorting, and deriding everything that could be passed on about them, branding it a trivial side note in the struggle between the great powers. […] They died doing what had to be done.The Aesthetics of Resistance is a monument to their lives and sacrifices, to the possibilities of art and its role in resisting evil.
Art on the Run - by Patrick Nathan (Entertainment, Weakly). I meant to do a full post based on this essay, ran out of time, and it fits nicely with this book review. Americans think poorly of art, but it is art that makes humans special, and there is no culture without it. MAGA nuts, fascists, tyrants care not about art as the highest aspiration of the human spirit, only as propaganda for their diminution of the human to the tyrant's power.
Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance (The New Republic)
‘You're not listening to us’: Hoosiers air frustrations as public officials face access scrutiny (Indiana Capital Chronicle)
W.G. Sebald and the Politics of Melancholy (The New Republic)
Through his reading of the writers who influenced him, these early writings make plain the ethical principle that guided Sebald’s great works: Melancholy, far from being defeatist, is itself a kind of political resistance, a way of pushing back against the machinations of fascism by preserving the past against erasure.
That melancholy might have such a power will take some thinking on my part. It pulls on my sympathy to agree with it, but I live in a country that lives in fantasy rather than with history.
I am not sure what to make of the books reviewed in Gatsby by Jane Crowther; The Gatsby Gambit by Claire Anderson-Wheeler – Jay’s eternal hold (The Guardian ). The review makes them sound well-executed without discussing the reason for their appropriating Gatsby. It feels like the reason we have so many sequel and reboots in American film - marketing, rather than creativity.
I read Euripides when I was young (Medea), and I have read more since I came home, but Making Sense of Euripides’ Orestes (Antigone) is about a play I have not read. It may also do more than anything I have read to explain Euripides.
So what on earth is going on? Is this parody? And if so, of what? Perhaps self-parody? Euripides has created an ultra-dramatic, innovative, bold opera of a tragedy and pushed dramatic conventions to their edge. Cue clever metatheatrical references to and dramatic appropriations of the constraints of the Athenian theatre: Electra will keep her gloomy expression so Hermione doesn’t realise what is going on – or is that because the expression on her mask cannot change throughout the play?
***
Perhaps, in the end, Euripides just wants to peel away the glitter and show us that the old heroic legends are nothing but stories of criminals, angry old men, and pathetic kings. Apollo’s finale would thus be so intentionally incredible as to make us revolt against the whole mythological paradigm itself. Or else merely a theatrical device, bringing back the story more or less to traditional lines simply because that was what convention demanded, but doing so as outrageously as possible.
And in that last paragraph, I begin to see what I missed reading Euripides last year.
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