July 2009 News
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Double Entrapment review in Stop Smiling
July 30, 2009
The problem with a writer like Nelson Algren — a writer who’s at once so good and so inexplicably forgotten — is this: how do you get readers to remember how good he is? We’re talking about a writer whose core beliefs include the statement that “I can see no purpose in writing about people who have won everything” — but in America in the 1950s, the book-buying public had won everything, and Algren — and the seething, fantastic underbelly of America he chronicled — faded from their sight.
But the double review of Entrapment and Other Writings in Stop Smiling is a hopeful sign. From Beth Capper:
. . . Algren comes out swinging with prose so shattering that it makes the whole read worthwhile. Such writing demonstrates that the America Algren canonizes is both nostalgic and ever-present, as though if you scrubbed hard enough at the sidewalk on Chicago’s Division Street — now lined with fashionable boutiques, cafes and condos — you might see the scuffed heels of the prostitutes he was so fond of writing about. . . his word on Chicago has become the final one.
Tags: algren at sea, entrapment, fiction, man with the golden arm, nelson algren, reviews, stop smiling
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Paranoia and Heartbreak reviewed in Kitsap Sun
July 28, 2009
. . . We have an epidemic of damaged and literally demoralized young people for whom we have failed to find satisfactory remedies or solutions. Gold’s journal entries present the raw daily life inside the cottages that house these offenders. There are tensions, power struggles, feedback groups and one-on-one discussions. There are snacks and games and suicide attempts. There are classes, confrontations, medications and paperwork. Gold’s assertion that what this state’s system for juvenile offenders does best is “simply to remove these kids from their environment and put them in a place where they [have] a chance to grow up without someone trying to kill them” is feeble comfort, indeed.
. . . I’d suggest that this nonfiction work by Seattle author Jerome Gold, subtitled “Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility,” should be read by every adult living in the state of Washington. Something very bad is happening to too many of our children, and we need to know about it. —Barbara McMichael, Kitsap Sun
Tags: jerome gold, memoir, paranoia and heartbreak, prison, reviews, washington state
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“The people of this country are no longer making the rules by which they wish to live”: Talbott/Johnson, Part III
July 24, 2009
From Part III of the Talbott/Johnston exchange at Salon.com on the following topic:
The economic crisis: Who caused it? Was it preventable? Was criminal activity involved in bringing it about? And is it over?
John Talbott:
I don’t think the current challenge is figuring out exactly what caused the crisis. Focusing on what caused this episode will lead to narrow regulatory reform that reminds me that we all now take off our shoes at airports because one crazy fellow had the idea of putting a bomb in his heel. So while reform is needed in subprime mortgages, securitization, derivatives, and even in the magnitude of our financial institutions, none of these get at the fundamental problem: The people of this country are no longer making the rules by which they wish to live.
Tags: articles, john talbott, salon.com, simon johnson, the 86 biggest lies on wall street
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Endgame reviewed in L Magazine
July 24, 2009
It’s a lot to ask of folks to suggest they tackle a two-volume work that uses as its cornerstone the idea that “civilization is not and can never be sustainable.” Tough: life’s too short, and too important, to read Danielle Steele. What I really want to say is that everyone should read at least one of Jensen’s works: He approaches the destruction of the environment with both more emotion, and more poetry, than anyone else I know of. End Game, his largest and most comprehensive work, approaches the problem of civilization and its possible remedies. Read it and weep, really, for the mess we’ve made of things.—L Magazine
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Check out Endgame Volume 1 and Volume 2 today.
Tags: derrick jensen, endgame, l magazine, reviews, what we leave behind
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“I would shut down the hedge fund industry”: Talbott/Johnson, Part II
July 23, 2009
From Part II of the John Talbott/Simon Johnson exchange at Salon.com:
People today seem to think that just because two people want to trade something, it must be good. Because the CDS market is big, it must be useful, goes the argument. It gets at the belief system that you suggested people have adopted: that markets are inherently good. Maybe always efficient, but not always good. There are some things like company default risk that shouldn’t be traded. In the past people wanted to buy and sell slaves, child pornography, women’s bodies. . . Just because a market can develop does not mean the functioning of that market is good for society. Markets cannot self-reflect. That is what humans do. Only we can decide if a particular market is doing more harm than good.
Tags: 86 biggest lies on wall street, articles, john talbott, salon, simon johnson
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Who caused the economic crisis? Simon Johnson and John Talbott at Salon.com, Part I
July 22, 2009
From June to July, John R. Talbott, author of The 86 Biggest Lies on Wall Street and Obamanomics, sat down at his keyboard with Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz professor of entrepreneurship at MIT, former chief economist of the IMF and current BaselineScenario.com blogger and cofounder, for an exchange of emails and ideas. The topic of conversation:
The economic crisis: Who caused it? Was it preventable? Was criminal activity involved in bringing it about? And is it over?
Tags: 86 biggest lies on wall street, articles, Authors, blogs, john talbott, salon.com, simon johnson
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Jerome Gold interviewed in Reading Local Seattle
July 22, 2009
. . . you have talked about how poverty and abuse is portrayed in mass culture. I remember you once saying that naturalistic books about the working class poor tend not to do very well and tend to be misunderstood. . . Why do you think that is?
I think novels about the working poor, or the poor generally, whether or not they’re working-class, don’t sell well because, by and large, the people who read novels aren’t from that class and don’t want to encounter the unpleasantness they associate with that class. It’s much easier to look at the poor as a people apart. That way, too, when they commit crimes, it’s easy to look at them as inherently bad, even evil. —Seattle Reading Local interviews Jerome Gold
Tags: Authors, interviews, jerome gold, paranoia & heartbreak, reading local, seattle, washington state
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Paranoia & Heartbreak reviewed in the Seattle Times
July 20, 2009
The Seattle-based author’s capacity for absorbing horror is considerable; his years in the U.S. Army Special Forces during the Vietnam War must have ensured that. But it is a mistake to take his unvarnished chronicle about these juvenile delinquents as another set of war stories, even when he confesses that he often thinks of the boys as his little soldiers. Within a few dozen pages, it becomes clear that this is a story of miracles. . . I ask myself, as I always do, “Would I read this if it wasn’t a review book? Why?”. . . Yes, because it’s real. Yes, because this is the world and the time in which we live. Yes, because Jerome Gold survived living it and the telling of it, so people like me can see the miraculous, awful truth and, maybe, step up and question why it has to be. —Seattle Times
Tags: jerome gold, paranoia and heartbreak, reviews, seattle, seattle times, washington
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Barry Gifford and Rue 89 talk Imagination of the Heart and Sailor & Lula
July 20, 2009
Rue 89: Throughout this saga, you have a very strange view of time—should one see in this a relationship to David Lynch’s artistic work, which is also very irrational? You’ve been a screenwriter for his movies.
Gifford: David Lynch’s work is David’s. Mine is mine.
Any relationship or influence between one and the other?
I see our collaborations as compatible inspirations.
Has the cinema changed your literary work?
No. My writing has changed the cinema. —Translated from the interview at Rue 89
Tags: articles, barry gifford, france, imagination of the heart, interviews, rue 89, sailor & lula
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Forget Shorter Showers by Derrick Jensen
July 16, 2009
This piece by Derrick Jensen originally appeared in the July/August issue of Orion Magazine on July 7, and immediately sparked a debate among Orion readers about the nature and goals of the environmental movement—and about the “magical thinking” that leads to a reduced ability to meet those goals. To add your opinion, visit the discussion page here.
Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”? —Derrick Jensen, from Forget Shorter Showers
Tags: articles, Authors, derrick jensen, endgame, orion magazine, what we leave behind