A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America

Dave Wallace in Illinois: In Memoriam David Foster Wallace

2008-09-15T23:18:00.006-04:00

I’m a writer, and I grew up in Decatur, Illinois, 45 minutes from David Foster Wallace’s stomping grounds, so the news of Wallace's suicide has really hit me hard. I know in my bones the “true religious-type wind” that, he writes, “informed and deformed” life in the Midwest, and I whispered “Amen” when, based on this anecdotal evidence, Wallace questioned Chicago’s right to the name “Windy City.” My Midwestern upbringing doesn’t necessarily give me the ethos to hold forth on why, now that he has left this world, Wallace matters (confession: I’ve never been able to finish Infinite Jest) and has mattered for nearly twenty years, but it’s really all I have to go on.

To the best of my knowledge, he is the only writer from central Illinois—“Downstate,” Chicagolanders sniff—that has achieved such literary success. But it’s not so much his success that impressed me years ago when I first started reading his work; it’s that he consistently articulated phenomenological truths about growing up in the Midwest that I was incapable of (“[I feel] best physically enwebbed in sharp angles, acute bisections, shaved corners”) and because his work retained the ethic and aesthetic native to the region: a fundamental decency, roughened by a self-deprecating and ironic sense of humor reminiscent of central Indiana native David Letterman, who Wallace simultaneously lionizes and lampoons in his hilarious short story “My Appearance.”

Despite his highly allusive, referential, reflexive, digressive, meta-ness, Wallace was (much like Letterman) charming in a nerdy, didactic way. And he was, contrary to exasperated remarks about his use of footnotes, endnotes, sidebars and marginalia (Wallace notes on the copyright acknowledgment page at the beginning of his first book of stories, Girl With Curious Hair, that parts of his long story “Westward the Course of Empire Makes its Way” (another one I’ve always had a hell of a time finishing) were written in the margins of Barthes’ “Lost in the Funhouse and a book of stories by Cynthia Ozick) eager to make himself clear. “There’s a way, it seems to me,” said Wallace in a 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, “that reality is fractured—at least the reality I live in.” The “footnote thing”—Rose’s phrase, not Wallace’s—“is a way to speak to this essential fractured-ness without creating a text that is unreadably fractured in and of itself.”

After reading a lot of DFW (as his cultish fans refer to him, although I do not refer to him this way because I’ve never been able to finish IJ ), you come to understand that this fractured prose style, characterized by segmented super-structures, labyrinthine sentences and protracted digressions, by turns entertaining and maddening, was not just surfacey glimmer belying great depth, but an actual concern with being precise. It’s revealing that Wallace briefly pursued a PhD in philosophy at Harvard before dropping out to devote himself to being a writer.

Internet posters who are now pointing out the hypocrisy of Wallace’s apparent suicide because his work so often plumbed the icky depths of selfishness and vanity (his New York Observer article “Great Male Narcissists” takes on the likes of Updike and Roth), clearly have not read him—or perhaps any literature for that matter—closely. Wallace’s whole ouvre reveals a deep-seated concern for human frailty, especially his own.

To my mind, Wallace’s articles and essays are among some of the best examples of nonfiction’s capability and flexibility as a literary genre that can bring the personal and the global to sensible speaking terms. He avoids the shrill ad hominem attacks of most cultural commentators by taking the empathetic high road with the likes of porn directors, right wing talk radio hosts and John McCain. Oh, how I wish he were still alive so he could bring a sane perspective to the Sarah Palin hysteria.

In his much anthologized essay, “Ticket to the Fair,” (retitled “Getting Away from Pretty Much Being Away from it All” for his collection of essays Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) he does not rub elbows with the unwashed masses at the Illinois State Fair to simply make fun of the antiquated ways and facile beliefs of middle Americans, so de rigeur in this election year, nor did he do it in order to gain the populist cred that so many artists have a difficult time genuinely earning. No, it seems to me his project was more transcendental: he was interested in understanding how humans have the capacity to contain both hideousness and goodness—beauty is conspicuously absent at the fair. Wallace avoided sentimentality. I liked to think that he shared a bit of Flannery O’Connor’s view that sentimentality is the premature, unearned, naive claim to innocence, which tends by some strange alchemy to become its opposite.

His first book of short stories Girl with Curious Hair changed my life. In grad school I was under the dual influence of Flannery O’Connor and John Cheever, two of the undisputed masters of the post-war short story. I would sit in my apartment and read and re-read their stories trying to understand how they worked. The result was stories with Cheever’s lofty exposition, decorous prose and interest in domestic rifts over money and O’Connor’s penchant for characters with allegorical-sounding names and some sort of deformity eventually knocked down several pegs by an act of violence. Writing those stories felt like watch repair rather than an ecstatic rendezvous with the muse. And then one day I spotted Girl with Curious Hair in a bookstore and opened it to the title story.

“Gimlet dreamed that if she did not see a concert last night she would become a type of liquid, therefore my friends Mr. Wonderful, Big, Gimlet and I went to see Keith Jarrett play a piano concert at the Irvine Concert Hall in Irvine last night.”

My jaw was on the floor. I laughed and looked around to see if anyone noticed. I wish I could tell you that in that instant I realized what I was doing wrong—nothing so grand happened—but at that moment I knew that I had no voice of my own. Later, after reading all the stories (with the exception of “Westward the Course of Empire Makes its Way”), it would further dawn on me that stories did not have to open and close with a sharp, neat click, like so many of O’Connor’s and Cheever’s where the endings are dramatically satisfying and pitch-perfect, some so perfect that I nearly quit writing all together. Wallace’s stories are messy and dispense with the old trope of everyday life being interrupted by crisis in favor of stories that begin, for example, in the twi-lit hyperreality of a sociopathic man with a malformed hand he calls “the asset” because he uses it to get laid, or in a recent New Yorker story, eavesdropping on a young, evangelically-Christian-oriented boyfriend and girlfriend discussing plans to abort their love child. Many writers have fecund enough imaginations to dream up such characters and circumstances, but Wallace was one of the rare few able to make them uncannily familiar to us—to see in these troubled characters aspects of ourselves.
Perhaps this is David Lynch’s influence. Wallace’s admits his indebtedness to Lynch in the essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head” about hanging around the set of Lynch’s Lost Highway: “For me, Lynch's movies' deconstruction of this weird irony of the banal has affected the way I see and organize the world..” Wallace defined Lynch’s brand of irony as the “kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." Examples of such irony abound in Wallace’s work. In “Girl with Curious Hair” the narrator is a bigoted, card-carrying, English Leather cologne wearing Young Republican who hangs out with acid-tripping punk rockers who burn one another with cigarette lighters while performing fellatio.

The David Lynch article is a wonderful, fragmented homage, but, more than that, an ars poetica displaying Wallace’s intellectual and aesthetic foundations and formation—what reviews used to be. Wallace, prone to stuttering in public interviews, points out that even Lynch’s manner of speaking is postmodern:

“like Jimmy Stewart on acid . . . This is a genius auteur whose vocabulary in person consists of things like okey-doke and marvy and terrif and gee. When a production assistant appears with the tuna-fish sandwich he's asked for, he stops in the middle of his huddle with the Steadicam operator and tells her "Thanks a million." David Letterman says this kind of stuff too, but Letterman always says it in a way that lets you know he's making fun of about 400 things at the same time.”

Wallace had this capacity, too, but instead of allowing those 400 things to hang suspended there, implied, he enumerated them.

It wasn’t that he was trying to be, as many critics and readers estimate, humorous in a po-mo ironic way, and it’s not just that he’s worried that he has not made himself clear, but that he goes beyond the point of mere worry to chronic, paralyzing self-consciousness. He does admit that if there is a “schtick” in his essays its origins are in his self-consciousness about being sent by magazines to cover events as a journalist would, press pass and notebook in hand, when he does not consider himself a journalist. And it’s not just that he doesn’t consider himself a journalist but that he knows that he in fact is not one: he has not the training or the skills. This, it seems, is the genius of Wallace’s work—and not genius in that rarified way often bandied about, meaning innate, unteachable, near-magical, but in the way that genius may be said to be something native to all humans but rarely realized; personal genius; to do much with what one has been given. In short, his genius is in his awareness of what he doesn’t know, or is not very good at, and owning up to it in such a way that paradoxically restores our confidence in the importance of searching for knowledge through personal experience.

In his essay on tennis he writes of the “unlyrical problem” of trying to accurately strike a ball within the rectilinear lines of a tennis court on windy day in central Illinois: “the best-planned, best-hit ball often [blows] out of bounds.” Wallace’s writes that his tactic was to not overcompensate for the wind but to simply hit the ball as true as he could back up the middle of the court and allow the wind to distort its trajectory. His opponents, much bigger and stronger and better-coached, were sent into racket-throwing tantrums at the unfairness of being screwed over by something as unpredictable and uncontrollable.
In the years that follow, the task of trying to estimate David Foster Wallace’s greatness will prove to be similarly unfair and maddening.

Sweet Briar College 2008-2009 International Writers Series

2008-08-11T13:48:00.001-04:00

Today Sweet Briar College announced the line-up for its 2008-09 International Writers Series. Readers will include Azar Nafisi, Zakes Mda, Yiyun Li, Zhang Er, Luis Goytisolo, Manil Suri and Bernardo Atxaga. All lectures and readings are free and open to the public.

As many of you know, I now teach at Sweet Briar. This is going to be an amazing year. John Gregory Brown, director of Creative Writing, has put together a stellar slate of writers. If you are in the area please stop in.

For more information, please visit the official Website at

http://www.events.sbc.edu/international_writers.html

Just When I think I Can get Away from Writing About Torture...

2008-08-10T23:28:00.008-04:00

Do yourself a favor and read the NY Times article on about the art installation on the boardwalk at Coney Island, NY. It depicts an interrogator in executioner's hood waterboarding a detainee in an orange jumpsuit.

The story is not straight news, nor is it strict editorial; I guess it's more of a feature. In terms of contemporary journalistic practice, this is both nothing new (articles of this sort are written every day) and very important because in the absence of an actual serious review of the art she allows the multiple layers of cloying irony surrounding the art and its exhibition to overrun the the article.

The first level of irony is that Steve Powers, the artist, is totally not what you would expect. Kaminer focuses, in keeping with narrative journalistic convention, on his manner of dress: he is wearing pink seersucker shorts when the author interviews him and is pushing his 15 month old in a stroller. I know, spooky. Then there's the irony that the installation is at Coney Island, home to the ghost of freak shows past, right across from where, according to Kaminer, the World's Tiniest Woman used to chill. Then there's the irony of the disparate responses to the installation. Some actually feel that waterboarding is a fine way to get terrorists to talk! Some even think it's funny!! Then there's the voice (and style) of the article, full of asides and editorializing, which totally provides a house for this irony orgy to go down--come on over to my house; I'm totally down--*wink*. Stylistically speaking, there's no accounting for taste, but the result I'm more concerned with as a reader is that Kaminer isn't a credible reviewer of the work; in fact, she doesn't review the work at all--she's in bed with artist, so to speak. Steve Powers' art, on the strength of his politics and depth of his empathy, is given a free pass.

Now, Kaminer and Powers are, no doubt, talented people (Kaminer has recently been named editor of the Art and Leisure section at the NY Times and Powers is, according to the article well-represented and financially supported by a community arts organization, Creative Time), but my point is this: If we're gonna call something art--in this case an animatronic interrogator waterboarding an animatronic detainee that writhes for 15 seconds after being doused--then there needs to be some accounting for whether it's successful or not. Kaminer doesn't explicitly go there. She is caught between her journalistic duty to remain objective and, it seems, her cynicism that such art will change hearts and minds. Fair enough, but it also feels to me that in dodging any sort of judgement she is saying that she is either too cool to actually say anything earnest about art and its capacity to change our minds about anything--let alone torture--or that she feels incapable of it. There is also the possibility that the tone and style of Kaminer's article are actually calculated to subvert Steve Powers' work. She does seem to have a problem with the fact that he doesn't particularly have a agenda other than to get people thinking about the issue. But I think that this kind of looking-down-the-nose treatment is even more distasteful (and, frankly, typical of the Times). I mean, look, I'm totally against waterboarding, but do me a solid and tell me whether the art is good or not. That's why I read the Times. I'm looking for an informed view not coyness.

I'm not calling for a hatchet job; I'm just looking for a voice of reason. Let's cut through the b.s. and tell it like it is. It's clear to me that Kaminer, as editor, could do this if she wanted, but instead she sticks with the dominant cosmopolitan brand of narrative journalism in which on the surface the author appears objective, but underneath there is a holier-than-thou current.

I would recommend Dave Hickey's book of art criticism/essays, Air Guitar and some of Virginia Woolf's book reviews.

I did have a thing here about how much I love David Lynch because he doesn't mess around with low levels of irony. He goes right for the uncanny, the unsettling, the unheimlich. But I took that out. I'm sure you are all sick of hearing me crow about how brilliant Lynch is.

I wonder if the NY Times would publish this as a letter to the ed?

Artist of Month and Review of Standard Operating Procedure

2008-08-10T21:28:00.005-04:00

Sorry for the long radio silence. I was away for the last six weeks in Erie, PA teaching fiction writing at the PA Governor's School for the Arts. This was my eight summer up there. Hard to believe. It was glorious. The kids blow me away every year. Anyway, back to my excuse: My schedule up there is crazy (M-F 8 :00 am-6:30 pm, with a break for lunch and dinner, as well as a morning class of Saturday), so needless to say when it comes to the end of the week I do not feel like writing.

The other reason why I haven't been keeping up with the blog is because I'm beginning a new book project. And with a new book project--the working title is Any Poorer Than Dead--comes a new blog, which you can find over on Wordpress at www.davegriffith.wordpress.com. It's really just a notebook, a place to throw words around, but you can check it out if you like.

All that aside, I felt compelled to write a post here because a couple Abu Ghraib/A Good War is Hard to Find related things have happened in the last week.

1.) The literary journal Image has named me Artist-of-the-Month. Check that out here. Image is a beautiful journal. Great production value. Great writing. Great people running it.

2.) My review of Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure is up at Bookslut.com. If you read it, please bear in mind that my crankiness is the result of the fact that I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours reading articles and interviews about Abu Ghraib for my own book, and so I set the bar very high for a book whose publisher basically claims it is THE book to end all books on the subject. More than that, Penguin claims that it should be considered in the same league as Dante's Inferno, Heart of Darkness and "The Grand Inquisitor" of Brothers K fame. I'm a liberal arts educated kid, so I've read all of those books, and I'm here to say, it ain't in the same ballpark. Not that it's a bad book--quite the contrary. It's just not life-changing if you've kept up with coverage of the scandal the way I have. Although I have to say I'm concerned that this means I won't be publishing in the Paris Review EVER (aside: Gourevitch is the editor).

I'll continue to post here when relevant to Good War, but I'll be spending most of my energy over at the other blog, Any Poorer Than Dead.

Peace

Dave

John Wideman Has Won the Pulitzer

2008-04-27T10:26:00.002-04:00

John Wideman's new book, Fanon, reviewed today in the New York Times Book Review should win the Pulitzer Prize if it's as good as advertised. I'm calling it right now. I just ordered it and can't wait for it to arrive. I haven't been this excited about a book in a long time. Check out the review here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/books/review/Siegel-t.html?ex=1366862400&en=85b22786dd151e74&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Depravities of War at 2nd Street Gallery

2008-04-10T10:33:00.005-04:00

I wanted to put up some pictures from the panel discussion I was a part of at the end of March. The work on the wall behind me is Sandow Birk's, the man sitting to my right, and is part of his new exhibition, Depravities of War. It is a truly stunning body of work. Check it out if it comes your way.

"Funny Games"

2008-03-14T10:40:00.004-04:00

You have to check out A.O. Scott's review of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's
new film, Funny Games.

Here's a taste of it:

It is likely that Mr. Haneke would take the last two adjectives as praise — it’s fine with me if they show up in advertisements — or at least as the acknowledgment of fulfilled intentions. His is an especially pure and perverse kind of cinematic sadism, the kind that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism. We will endure the pain he inflicts for our own good, and feel bad about it in the bargain.

“Funny Games,” Mr. Haneke’s first English-language film — and a compulsively faithful replica of his notorious 1997 German-language feature of the same title — subjects its viewers to a long spectacle of wanton and gratuitous brutality. So, of course, do countless other movies, though few of them can claim this one’s artistic pedigree or aesthetic prestige. And indeed, the conceit of “Funny Games” is that it offers a harsh, exacting critique of vulgar, violent amusements, a kind of homeopathic treatment for a public numbed and besotted by the casual consumption of images of suffering. That the new version takes place in America is part of the point, since Americans — to a European intellectual this almost goes without saying — are especially deserving of the kind of moral correction Mr. Haneke takes it upon himself to mete out.

Bravo. But what's strange is that Scott was not so tough on Tarantino's Grindhouse. That film--gory, campy and masturbatory as the day is long--won Scott over, it seems, because he saw it as a hearkening back to the good old days of midnight showings of tasteless B movie:

“Grindhouse,” soaked in bloody nostalgia for the cheesy, disreputable pleasures of an older form of movie entertainment, can also be seen as a passionate protest against the present state of the entertainment industry.

It seems to me that Haneke's film hits a bit too close to home for Scott's likening. Throughout his review he passive aggressively attacks Haneke's implication that Americans are intellectually shallow, have coarse (or at best) unrefined tastes, and are driven and derided by blood-lust.

Here is Scott ranting about the film's self-awareness--the killers in the film look into the camera and address the audience:

At these moments, using techniques that might have seemed audacious to an undergraduate literary theory class in 1985 or so, the film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.

So why does Scott see metaphor and meaning in Tarantino, but film school pretension with Euro-trash B.O. in Haneke? It's tricky to parse, but I'll give it a shot. First, Scott is right on the money with his assertion that Haneke's film engages in the "kind of cinematic sadism . . .that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism." He is also dead-on with his sense that a tied-up Naomi Watts hopping around in her underwear is, as academes say, problematic. Scott wonders aloud at the possibility of audiences finding this titillating.

And to give Scott further credit, he is careful to say that Haneke is trying to evoke such problems and effect, not that he has successfully done so. Only a handful of film masterpieces like Lynch's Blue Velvet and Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour have, I think, successfully entered and dabbled in such dark territory. In Blue Velvet we become voyeurs and detectives along with Jeffrey and learn how the two are, to say the least, in conflict. In Mon Amour we are told that we (Westerners) have actually seen nothing and know nothing of Hiroshima--don't even try.

However, ultimately (ostensibly), Scott is reviewing the film, not Haneke, right? Well, Scott is subtle about it, or maybe even unaware, but his reaction to Haneke's film seems tinged by a cultural clash. American film is big-budget, slick, sexy, garish--the term embarrassment of riches springs to mind--violence is lovingly and spectacularly (sublimely!) rendered. Haneke's film and filmmaking--an English language remake of his own 1997 film with Hollywood actors (though the leads are not American)--is "immaculate," "manipulative, "clammy" and "repellant." According to Scott, the camera remains still, steady, gazing on the violence. Something anathema in Hollywood film. And while I'm sure Scott can name many films, foreign and indie, that share these same anti-Hollywood, anti-American qualities, I can't escape the feeling that calling Haneke a fraud is an easy way out. If he is a fraud, then he has no strength of conviction. His ouvre is not driven by vision but by pure intellect. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing I hate more than art that comes with a prerequisite reading list in order to understand it, but Scott sounds here in his appreciation of Tarantino and scorn for Haneke, like one who still refers to french fries as Freedom Fries.

Depravity, Upheaval and the 'Good War'

2008-03-08T09:13:00.003-05:00

If you're anywhere near Charlottesville, Virginia in late March have to check out Second Street Gallery and their exhibition of LA-based painter/illustrator Sandow Birk's work on the Iraq War, straightforwardly titled "The Depravities of War."

And if you happen to by passing through at the end of the month you can check out a panel discussion at Second Street Gallery featuring Sandow Birk, myself and composer Judith Shatin, moderated by Bill Cleveland, author of the forthcoming Art and Upheaval. The panel is titled "Depravity, Upheaval and the 'Good War'" and is a part of the Virginia Festival of the Book, which is a big to-do replete with high teas, luncheons and banquets feting famous writers.

Should be a great evening. Hope to see you there.

Up in Michigan

2008-03-06T11:01:00.004-05:00

So I did a reading at Hope College in Holland, Michigan two weeks ago with Lewis "Buddy" Nordan, my mentor from grad school. Here are pictures of the marquee outside the theater where we read. We learned just before taking the stage that Harry Houdini once performed on the very same stage.

If you don't know Buddy's work, please please please do yourself a huge favor and pick some up. His novels Sharpshooter Blues and Wolf Whistle are devastatingly funny and tragic, and his short stories Sugar Among the Freaks and Music of the Swamp are necessary reading if you consider yourself an connoisseur of the short story. Those of you into memoir should read his genre-bending book Boy with Loaded Gun.

Criticisms Welcome

2008-02-11T13:55:00.000-05:00

I just read this review of my book on a blog called Unionstreet

The author is a PhD candidate in Education and seems to know his stuff, which is why I'm putting part of his critique up here. The review is, on the whole, positive--I get likened to W.G. Sebald--minus the "transcendent" quality, which I'll take any day of the week. The gist of his critique takes aim at the perceived "pop-culture is to blame" message in my book. I don't think that's really what I'm saying, but enough caveats--here it is (note that my last name is Griffith, no "s":

Griffiths periodically succumbs to a familiar argument: that it is our pop culture that has inured us to violence, that has removed any shame that we may feel from the sight of people being humiliated, burned, tortured in our name. But his own experience indicates something more subtle, and difficult to diagnose, at work than this. One of the most riveting passages of the book recounts the events of a Halloween party, in which he poses as a guard from Abu Ghraib, giving the notorious ‘thumbs-up’ sign before another guest, hooded for the moment as an unfortunate prisoner while carrying a beer cup in one of his outstretched hands (Griffiths includes the photo into the narrative, and the reaction becomes all the stronger when you realize that it’s not from Abu Ghraib, but from the party itself). How could someone so sophisticated in his sensibilities succumb to such moral indecency? Surely it is too lame an answer to blame it on Pulp Fiction, video games, or the stupidities and embarrassments of youth.

Readings in the New Year

2008-01-11T15:31:00.001-05:00

It's been awhile. I just finished my first semester as a full-time, tenure-track faculty member, so I think that explains the long radio silence.

Lots happening in this New Year pertaining to my book. Here's a list (to be followed by specifics as we get closer to the date):

1.) Saturday, February 2nd: I'll be reading in some illustrious company as part of Soft Skull Press' 15th Anniversary Reading at the Associated Writing Program conference in NYC. Here's the line-up: Lynne Tillman, Matthew Sharpe and Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz. All of them are tremendous writers. Hope to see you there.

2.) Thursday, February 21st: Reading at Hope College in Adrian, Michigan with Lewis "Buddy" Nordan, who is hands down one of the best fiction writers in America.

3.) Friday, March 28th: Panel, Virginia Festival for the Book with Bill Cleveland, author of Art and Upheaval (other visual artists to be announced).

Hope to see some of you at these events.

Have a peaceful and prosperous 2008!

Reading at Gist Street tomorrow Night 8 pm

2007-12-06T23:50:00.001-05:00

All you Pittsburghers check me and fiction writer Ben Percy out at the Gist Street reading series tomorrow night at 8pm. Get there early if you want a seat--at least this is what I'm told.

Good Jazz is Hard to Find

2007-12-04T20:57:00.001-05:00

This is a clip of a friend of mine George Burton's group. If you're not into jazz then don't watch.

clipped from www.youtube.com

The Limits of Social Justice?

2007-11-28T08:12:00.001-05:00

I'm beginning to research attitudes towards the homeless and homelessness for my next book, and it just so happens that a very interesting debate is underway in Roanoke, VA, about an hour southwest of where we live now.

In January 2007, Roanoke conducted a study of the homeless population and found that the number of homeless had increased 326% since 1987. The City Council is worried that Roanoke is attracting too many homeless people. Councilman Bev Patrick is characterized in the Roanoke Times journalist Mason Adams as being "fed up."

clipped from www.roanoke.com

"It's about the fact that we're letting people come here because we're too daggone nice," he said. "They find out about it, and they're coming. We've got to corral that. I just say plug it, somehow, so we're doing the right thing for the people of this valley who need us and we're not doing it for everyone else."

The Content of this blog is "Genius"

2007-11-19T14:49:00.000-05:00

Someone sent me a link to a service that will evaluate the reading level of your blog. You put in the url and it scans the content and voila! I'm not sure what the different levels are--I saw one site that said "undergraduate." After only a few seconds an icon with a brain came on the screen proclaiming that goodwar.blogspot.com is "Genius."

My parents will be happy to hear this.

You can get your blog evaluated here: http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx

Good News All Around

2007-10-23T16:17:00.000-04:00

Just a quick post to spread some good news.

Last week my wife, Jessica Mesman, found out that her essay "It's a Wonderful Life" received an "notable essay" distinction in the 2008 edition of Best American Essays, edited this year by one of my heroes, David Foster Wallace.

The essay orginally appeared in Image, which is a fantastic journal and worth subscribing to.

I also got word that my book was reviewed in the American Book Review, which is available on-line if your academic institution or library has a subscription to Lexis/Nexis or the like. It was a very positive review/essay by Christopher Robbins, Assistant Professor of Social Foundations at Eastern Michigan U. I'll try to put excerpts up here, but I haven't figured how to turn a pdf into html. I am computer illiterate.

Colgate University

2007-10-10T15:37:00.000-04:00

I'm on a little break before I give a reading here at Colgate University--what a beautiful place!--and while checking my email ran across this article in the San Francisco Catholic, a diocesan newspaper in SF, covering a recent talk by retired Army General Taguba at the University of San Francisco. Taguba is, of course, the author of the Taguba Report, the official report commissioned by the US Military to investigate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison.

His talk reveals much of what we already know, but it is well-worth repeating: Defense Sec. Rumsfeld was antagonistic toward Taguba after learning of the unfavorable nature of the investigation and, it seems, either lied under oath in the Senate hearings looking into the prison scandal, or was intentionally not fully briefed by his aids on the investigation's findings in order to shield him from being complicit in the scandal.

The most poignant aspect of his talk was his statement that though he was not responsible for leaking the now-infamous Abu Ghraib images to CBS, which ended up on 60 Minutes in 2004, he believes that whoever did were within their First Amendment rights and, furthermore, that if it weren't for CBS the world would still be in the dark about what happened there. In fact, he said at his talk, the American public and the world still doesn't know the half of it. There are images, according to Taguba, that make the ones leaked seem tame--a video of a female detainee being sodomized by a soldier, for one. A video, it should be mentioned, that shows another soldier in the background with a video camera taping the assault.

I'm off to the reading. More on Colgate later.

Here's the link:

http://www.catholic.org/diocese/diocese_story.php?id=25621

Internet Radio

2007-09-25T16:43:00.000-04:00

Just a quick update to tell you that you can hear an interview with me and Wayne Koestenbaum, author of the fantastic new book, Hotel Theory on "The Eclectic Word," a radio show hosted by Victor Infante.

Check it out here: www.blogtalkradio.com/...serid=4073

We talk about everything from Abu Ghraib to George Hamilton--no kidding.

Also, for those of you in upstate New York, I'll be reading at Colgate coming up in October. See the links along the right side of this blog for more details.

Grace Paley, Dead at 84

2007-08-27T12:11:00.001-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/books/24paley.html?ex=1345694400&en=2c87a6330233bece&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Iraqi detainee numbers up 50%

2007-08-25T12:11:00.000-04:00

A bit from the NY Times article by Tom Shanker:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 — The number of detainees held by the American-led military forces in Iraq has swelled by 50 percent under the troop increase ordered by President Bush, with the inmate population growing to 24,500 today from 16,000 in February, according to American military officers in Iraq.

...Nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody are Sunni Arabs, the minority faction in Iraq that ruled the country under the government of Saddam Hussein; the other detainees are Shiites, the officers say.

Military officers said that of the Sunni detainees, about 1,800 claim allegiance to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led. About 6,000 more identify themselves as takfiris, or Muslims who believe some other Muslims are not true believers. Such believers view Shiite Muslims as heretics.

Those statistics would seem to indicate that the main inspiration of the hard-core Sunni insurgency is no longer a desire to restore the old order — a movement that drew from former Baath Party members and security officials who had served under Mr. Hussein — and has become religious and ideological.

But the officers say an equally large number of Iraqi detainees say money is a significant reason they planted roadside bombs or shot at Iraqi and American-led forces.

***

The rise in numbers seems to indicate that the US military is using similar insurgency-combating tactics as the French in Algeria: round up the suspected and...then...what? Is there any other way to put down an insurgency? Just when you think you've got all the politically and religiously motivated rounded up, here come the soldiers of fortune.

Is there any denying that War is attractive because it is profitable, especially when your economy is struggling.

I Have Moved

2007-08-16T07:17:00.000-04:00

Sorry for such a long hiatus--not that anyone is really out there waiting with bated breath for my posts--but I like to err on the side of decorum.

One reason for the long break is that we have moved to Virginia. I am now gainfully employed at Sweet Briar College. Extremely beautiful country down here. Cell phone reception is awful, but that's a perk as far as I'm concerned. I'll post pictures ASAP.

Those of you in Southern Virginia: I'm giving a reading at the College Sept 5th at 8 pm. Mail me for more info at dgriffith@sbc.edu

Peace--

Breaking Radio Silence for News of Lynndie England

2007-07-15T10:31:00.000-04:00

I'm away on a summer teaching gig, so I haven't been keeping up with the blog, but this AP story picked up b the Press of Atlantic City, New Jersey seemed worth posting.

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/nation/story/3658936p-13022021c.html

Essentially, England, after being released from a San Diego military prison in March, has been hired to the volunteer recreation board of Keyser, West Virginia, a town in the state's eastern panhandle.

Here's a bit from the article:

...England, 24, contributed her knowledge of computers, electronics and graphics for Keyser's Strawberry Festival, which helped her land the unpaid position, said Roy Hardy, the England family's attorney.
"When (council members) saw how hard she worked for the festival, they didn't hesitate to put her on the board," said Hardy, who is also a board member. "If it wasn't for her, we wouldn't have been able to pull off (the Strawberry Festival). She was an absolute asset."

England handled the festival's advertising, scheduled entertainment acts and helped set up vendor booths and stages, among other things. She also helped organize a spring fishing contest and the city's Independence Day activities.

**

I'm going to let John Stewart and Stephen Kolbert handle this one...

Proximity to Darkness: The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels

2007-06-10T09:16:00.000-04:00

For those of you who have never read Leonard Michaels, or just read one story and thought "he's a pervert," here's your chance to really get to know and appreciate his work better. FSG has just published his Collected Stories and republished his autobiographical novel, Sylvia. Both books are reviewed by Mona Simpson in today's NY Times Book Review. Simpson "gets" Michaels--at least I think so--and gives some fascinating insight into how he a New York Jew who only spoke Yiddish untl the age of 6 came to be one of the most lyrical writers of American vernacular.

I teach his story "Murderers" often and I write about its influence on me in my book. Uncannily, Simpson focuses on the same story in her review. In fact, the title of the review, "Proximity to Darkness" is, uncannily, very close to the title of the chapter in my book, which I titled "Some Proximity to Darkness."

The thing that makes Michaels worth reading, especially now, is that his stories span the spectrum from young boys fascinated by the mysteriousness and strangeness of sex to adults mired and addled by their own sexual rapacity. I took immediately to Michaels' work, because unlike his contemporary, Phllip Roth, he is able to express the the sorrow and disillusionment of the libertine lifestyle, while making you laugh. His work is not merely cleverly, ironically or situationally funny, but comedic in that deep divine way which has you smirking to yourself because you recongnize the impulses driving the characters.

Michaels' work helped me to see that there was a way to write about being an adult male that wasn't annoyingly self-lacerating or idiotically macho.

Are the Restrictions on War Journalists Doing Us a Disfavor

2007-05-29T09:26:00.000-04:00

Check out this op-ed by David Carr in the NY Times. Not sure that I can agree 100% with his thesis, but it's a provocative piece.

One corrective I'll point out immediately is that Carr sites Matthew Brady as one of the pioneers of war journalism, but neglects to point out that Brady came along after the battle was over and took photos of the fallen, often having his aides move the bodies to create more dramatic poses.

Drama: Another Casualty of War

2007-05-27T09:06:00.000-04:00

Check out this insightful article exploring Time's theater columnist, Christopher Isherwood's, "certain impatience" with "Journey's End," a critically well-received play now on Broadway written by a WW I survivor about British solidiers waiting for a German attack.

From the article:

[As to why "Journey's End" is flopping with audiences]:

"A potential conclusion: War in the newspapers isn’t necessarily good for war on movie screens and stages. The conflict in Iraq (and Afghanistan) is so much with us these days that maybe audiences have no inclination to engage with stories from old battlefields.

"Can you blame them? We absorb images and information about the current strife every time we turn on the television, listen to the radio or pick up a newspaper. Obviously not much of the news is good. As the steady drumbeat of grim statistics rolls on — the rising death tolls, the roiling sectarian violence — Americans can perhaps be forgiven for failing to warm to entertainment that underscores what journalism is making brutally plain every day: War is a cruel and destructive enterprise that maims or destroys the lives of people on all sides, even when fought for a noble cause.

"Perhaps right now audiences don’t need to — or can’t bear to — revisit testimony from the past, however artfully and honestly it is presented, to experience the range of emotions that an encounter with the ugly realities of war elicits. Compassion for human suffering, dismay at man’s brutality, understanding of both the moral beauty of courage in the face of danger and its often painful inefficacy: We can cycle through these again every time we read or see detailed accounts of the everyday human costs of the conflict — in life, in prosperity, in dignity and happiness. Art can evoke little more pity and terror, to use those old Aristotelian words, than the immediate news of the waste going on in the world today, intimately taken account of in the best journalism.

"If the freakish success of the recent movie “300” is any indication, a lot of Americans are hungry for narratives that offer escape from the uncompromised truths of the world as it is today. This luridly silly epic offers refuge from the increasingly unavoidable idea that war is always an ethically complex enterprise that can be as demoralizing — and dehumanizing — for the apparent victors as it is for the subjugated. War as a cartoon battle between good guys and monsters more easily satisfies a taste for vicarious excitement after all."

**

So, I'm with all of this, especially the success of "300," which I haven't seen, but a friend of mine whose judgment I trust says she just laughed her ass off the entire movie because it was just so over-the-top, melodramatically masculine.

What I'm disappointed with in Isherwood's article is his comparison of previous wars to the current:

"...Several years into a confusing war with complicated foes and several years after the Sept. 11 attacks, we may have finally reached a point where the old forms of war fiction are no longer capable of giving us the solace and understanding we look for from this kind of material. Stories of noble sacrifice amid the comparatively uncomplicated moral climate of the two world wars seem so remote that emotional indulgence in them seems too much like escapism, a turning away from the truths that we need to keep our eyes sharply focused on."

Indeed, the reason our current "foes" are our foes is very "complicated," as is the reason why we're in Iraq in the first place (Afghanistan isn't so hard to understand, intially, since that's where Osama was shacking up). BUT to say that the first two world wars, from our historical perch, were waged in a "comparatively uncomplicated moral climate" is, if not historically farsighted, at least hubristic--to use another of Aristotle's dramatic terms.

What's wrong about it? Well, there was tremendous reticence to enter WWI. In fact, war was seen by many in the U.S. as barbaric, irrational, something of the past. The U.S. involvement in WWII was delayed, in part, by fears of getting involved in another war like the first. And it should be pointed out that in neither war was the "moral climate"--an unfortunate, inexact, yet smart-seeming po-mo phrase that has made its way into our lexicon as shorthand for the shifting attitudes of the people, that is subtly disapproving of "moral" as an ethical category--"uncomplicated" for untold numbers of conscientious objectors who went to jail for refusing to fight, or the many women involved in the pacifist movement.

Also, to say that the current war is more "confusing and "complicated" is to surrender to the post-modern tendency to see all contemporary situations as irreducible to any one set of analytical tools or cultural perspective. Indeed, it is important to try to understand the impulses that lead many young people of the Islamic faith to become suicide bombers. In fact, art is trying to pick up that slack with a rash of books dramatizing the lives of such people (Delillo's "Falling Man" dramatizes the last moments in the cockpit of one of the planes that hit the WTC on 9/11). But of what use is such fine rhetorical gesturing, concentrated cultural analysis or artistic exploration if we (and I mean everyone), at the end the day, can't agree, or just plain refuse to pass judgement, on whether or not violence is a workable solution to conflict?

If we really want truly complicated drama, we need to start looking more closely at those who refuse to fight under any circumstances, who would turn the other cheek, not just as a thought-experiment but as an ethic to live by, no matter the consequences. My guess is that such drama would strike audiences as tragic, but in that contemporary sense of the word, wasteful.