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Local News & Opinion
01.26 Local Democrats Invited to Brainstorming Session on Sun., Jan. 31 Ref. : Local Newsbriefs Travel
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02.04 'The Power of Nightmares': Underwear vs. Reason Letters
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Video National Health Care Systems In Other Countries 02.03 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients 01.18 Drugmaker Got Kickbacks for Nursing Home Patients Media Watching
02.04 Err-America 02.03 The Right Gets Itself 'Wired' Ref. : The Daily Howler Legal Matters
01.25 Thinking About Fictions 01.24 US Democracy's End of the Road 01.22 Editorial: U.S. Supreme Court Nails Down the Coffin of Democracy 01.22 Security Fools US Politics, Policy & Culture
02.09 Palin, Psy-Ops & 'Condescending' Libs 02.09 Growing Hunger in America 02.08 The US Government has Lost its Reason for Being 02.08 Thinking About Oracles 02.06 No Direction Home: Pakistan and the Imperial Principle 02.04 Howard Zinn and the State of the Union 02.04 The US Supreme Court: Vanguard of Friendly American Fascism? 02.04 The New War Against Money 02.04 David Brooks Goes After Greedy Geezers 02.02 Obama's Budget Ducks Pentagon Cuts 02.02 Budgets, War and Blind Ambition: The Limited Minds of the American Elite 02.01 Thinking About Definitives 02.01 Remembering Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010) 01.29 American History 101: We Are Devo 01.29 Obama's Outreach to Americans: Empty Rhetoric, Business As Usual 01.28 The Supreme Court's Partisanship 01.27 Freeze Frame: Flopsweat and Farce in the Hollow Halls of Power 01.25 Granny D on Campaign Finance Reform 01.25 S.C. Republican’s Plan: Starve the Poor So They’ll Stop “Breeding” 01.23 It's Time for Kucinich, Conyers, Feingold and Other `Progressives' in Congress to Take a Stand 01.21 Massachusetts' Message of Stupid 01.21 Terrorism Defined: Bill Clinton Lights Our Way to Truth 01.21 How Obama Lost His Way 01.21 Political Earthquake Rocks Massachusetts 01.20 Obama Cuts Deal that Will Reduce Social Security, Medicare and all Entitlements 01.20 Critical Mass: Dem Agenda Opens Right-Wing Doors 01.19 Outsourcing War: The Rise of Private Military Contractors High Crimes?
01.25 The Silence and the Shield: Depraved Indifference to the Atrocities of Power 01.19 Dark as a Dungeon: A Brutal System Stripped Bare Economics & Business Non/Mis/Malfeasance
02.07 AIG-Gate: The World's Greatest Insurance Heist 02.06 The Free Market Fetish 02.04 The Crisis is Not Over 02.03 States Face Worsening Recession with Health Care Funds on the Chopping Block 02.02 Rule by the Rich 01.29 The Battle of the Titans: JPMorgan vs. Goldman Sachs 01.27 State of the Union: Obama’s “Automatic IRA” Plan Could Make Bush’s Wildest Dreams Come True 01.26 Obama, Read Your Reagan on Capital Gains Taxation 01.24 Funding Public Health Care with a Publicly-Owned Bank: How Canada Did It 01.18 Thinking About Accelerants International
02.08 Aafia Siddiqui: Victimized by American Injustic 02.07 Annals of Liberation: Obama Surge Driving Thousands From Their Homes 02.05 Human Rights Abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestine 02.03 Child Slavery in Haiti 01.30 Blood is His Argument: Tony Blair's Gentle Cuddling at Iraq "Inquiry" 01.28 Obama Ignores Key Afghan Warning 01.27 Haiti's Earthquake: Natural or Engineered 01.26 Helping Haiti’s Elders 01.26 Focus on Israel: Harvesting Haitian Organs 01.25 Focus on Haiti: Washington's Militarized Takeover 01.22 The Lessons of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions 01.18 Disaster Capitalism Headed to Haiti We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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CRITIQUING A LITERARY CRITIC:Critical Malfunction: Misreading Gore VidalTuesday, 24 June 2008Anyone who claims that the Lincoln of Lincoln and the Grant of Lincoln and 1876 are somehow self-portraits of Vidal could fairly be said to "not know how to read."
In a review of a new selection of Gore Vidal's essays, Lou Bayard unwittingly proves the truth of Vidal's recent observation about literary critics: "they don't know how to read." Before finally getting around to discussing the essays, Bayard -- who writes thrillers based on someone else's literary characters (Tiny Tim grows up and hunts killers in London!) or other writers (young Edgar Allen Poe finds murder afoot at West Point!) -- goes to great lengths to downgrade Vidal's fiction. He says that Vidal has never written a great novel (which is a matter of opinion, of course) because "he could never...convince us that we were reading about someone other than Gore Vidal." Referring to Vidal's historical novels, Bayard tells us that their main characters were all just ventriloquist dummies for Vidal, including -- astonishingly -- the fictional portraits of Lincoln and Grant. Anyone who claims that the Lincoln of Lincoln and the Grant of Lincoln and 1876 (neither of which gives more than passing, if revealing, glimpses of Grant, by the way) are somehow self-portraits of Vidal could fairly be said to "not know how to read." Lincoln in particular is an impressive display of "inhabiting other minds" -- Bayard's definition of great fiction -- from the sanctimonious greasy-pole climber Salmon Chase to the scruffy young assassination conspirator David Herold to the tormented Mary Lincoln, and many others as well. As for the president himself, Vidal has often pointed out to critics what should be obvious from reading the book: he never tries to "inhabit" Lincoln's mind at all, but instead shows him exclusively through the eyes -- and minds -- of others. Again, it's a unprovable matter of opinion whether you consider Lincoln a "great" novel or not. (I think it is; one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century, in fact. Bayard thinks it isn't. Is he "right"? Am I right? Who knows? Who cares?) But a critic should read and judge the work that is actually in front of him. If Bayard has come away from Vidal's historical fiction thinking that Burr, Lincoln, Grant (as well as Wilson, Harding and Franklin Roosevelt) are identical hand-puppets expressing Vidal's own personality, then he has patently failed at this essential task of criticism. As for the rest of the review, it is largely laudatory, although larded with the usual canards and distortions -- employed chiefly to distance Bayard from a too-close associaton with any position that might cause discomfort at, say, a convivial gathering of middle-brow literati. Such as Vidal's "defense" of Timothy McVeigh and his "cockamamie theorizing about 9/11." Vidal's "defense" of McVeigh, over the course of several articles, was actually an unambiguous condemnation of the bombing itself, coupled with questions about McVeigh's actual role, and an examination of the wider societal and political factors that lay behind that monstrous action. Now I doubt very seriously if Bayard, a staff writer for liberal Salon.com, aligns himself with those right-wing ranters who condemn all attempts to understand the roots of Islamic terrorism as a "defense" of its atrocities. He almost certainly believes that we should try to fathom these root causes -- the various injustices and inequities and suffering in foreign lands -- in order to allieviate them if possible. But the idea that there could be any serious, systemic injustices and inequities and suffering in the United States that might drive someone to violence and despair, systemic problems which need to be addressed and allieviated -- this apparently cannot even be considered. In fact, says Bayard, it is "insupportable." Vidal's "cockamamie theorizing about 9/11" involves examining the historical record of America's overt -- and covert -- dealings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere in the "arc of crisis;" outlining the many warnings of an impending attack from a variety of credible sources; and noting the many vast, gaping holes in the "official" account -- which itself underwent a number of shape-shifting convolutions until taking more-or-less final form at the hands of a toothless commission appointed by the Bush Administration and run by a crony of Condi Rice. Given all this, Vidal believes we should have a truly independent investigation into the 9/11 attacks. What a "cockamamie" notion, eh? Best not let a nut like that get too close to the canapes. To further denigrate any of Vidal's political observations that he doesn't like, Bayard drags out the old chestnut that Vidal can't possibly understand the nitty-gritty of American culture because he lived in Yurp for so many years. This ignores the fact that Vidal normally spent large parts of each of those years, er, living in America. But any appreciable amount of residency in foreign parts is evidently an insurmountable handicap for understanding the sacred Homeland. I'm looking forward to seeing Bayard rip the lid off that old poseur Mark Twain, who spent 17 whole years of his adult life abroad -- without jetting back for months at a time each year. Bayard does allow that when it comes to literature, Vidal himself is an astute and suprisingly generous critic, because he is "genuinely engaged with the matter at hand and willing to be changed by it." This is indeed an excellent quality in a literary critic. Bayard might want to give it a try sometime. Chris Floyd has been a writer and editor for more than 25 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University. Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque, and is also chief editor of Atlantic Free Press. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.This column is republished here with the permission of the author. Copyright © 2008 The Baltimore News Network. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. Baltimore News Network, Inc., sponsor of this web site, is a nonprofit organization and does not make political endorsements. The opinions expressed in stories posted on this web site are the authors' own. This story was published on June 25, 2008. |
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