Newspapers are following the advertising and going online too. Sven Birkerts is just going to have to get used to being a literary blogger.

Love,
The great unwashed.

Corporate America is key to saving and promoting quality, vital literature, the very institutions that led the country so nobly into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, et cetera, ad nauseam? In Iraq, hundreds of thousands dead and dying, hundreds of billions of dollars, several million refugees, and scarcely an explicit antiwar literary peep. These literary bastions?

If one sees a certain vitality missing in contemporary literature and criticism and commentary on literature, it’s not unlikely that it’s related in part to the fact that such a sweeping and crucial statement as, “antiwar novels are belligerent,” can not only be categorically asserted, let alone with no sense of a need for support, in The New York Times Book section, but also cannot be challenged by a letter to the editor as a matter of course, especially in the time of a highly controversial war.

In early May 2007 in the NYT, Richard Eder wrote, “‘The Welsh Girl’ is a distinguished, beautifully written example of a small but enduring genre. Call it the counterwar novel. Not antiwar, exactly; it lacks the belligerence.”

I wonder what a pro-war novel, or a status quo war novel, could then be called? “Compassionate,” I suppose.

Antiwar like, say, “Homefront”?

There is scarcely an explicit US antiwar novel about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Why is that? Might it be that the US has a culture a lot like that of Germany of the 1930s and 1940s? Too many “good Germans” and “good Americans”? Too many critics and others who think antiwar novels are “belligerent”? I haven’t seen especially vital novels like Andre Vltchek’s geopolitical epic Point of No Return reviewed anywhere but online, far from the paper pages of the decapitated corporate press. Self-decapitated, that is. The corporate press is rich enough still that it can’t help but be of limited use, but a thinking person with a functioning heart knows to look far and wide from corporate realms for what is most vital in literature today. Such is the result of corporate ideology, often savage, asphyxiating, and blithely belligerent…sometimes unbeknownst to itself, sometimes not. Either way the result is the same.

Contrary to Andrew Gumbel’s recent article “Hollywood Goes to War,” Hollywood essentially plays one side of the political fence too, that of the status quo, as John Pilger makes clear in “Hollywood Hurrah”.

Links:
“Homefront”
http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/2590.cfm
“Hollywood Goes to War”
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2809181.ece
“Hollywood Hurrah”
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=1525

Actually reading this has got me in the mood for writing a book review!