Well, I'm really not that sorry about my lack of updates these last few days. I've been taking some time off, visiting friends and family in Minneapolis and New York. But, I'm back now.
Also, more press for me and Oberliner. I entered an essay competition for the magazine, The Nation a while back, and, dispite the fact that I have yet to hear directly from The Nation itself, it looks like I've won. Here's what they excerpted:
A NEW DEAL (RE)GENERATION? To commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New Deal, and to remind the next generation of progressive leaders of their movement's historical roots, The Roosevelt Institution and The Nation sponsored a student essay contest, asking young writers to reflect on the importance of the New Deal to current political thought. The winner, John West of Oberlin College, composed a spirited defense of the New Deal's collective civic consciousness. His essay, "When and How?" is excerpted below. To read it and the four finalists' entries in their entirety, go to www.thenation.com/student.
"The ethos of the New Deal is gone today. 'The era of big government is over,' President Clinton proclaimed, and, with a stroke of his pen, stripped welfare from its moral underpinnings. Social Security, one of the last tangible policies of the New Deal era, has been divorced from the spirit of Roosevelt's vision.... If we reject this conservative framework, we can replace it with our own. If we argue that government has a responsibility to the most vulnerable, we can make the debate about the methods government will use to fight injustice, rather than about how small government should become. If we take this stand, not only will we fulfill the moral imperative of the New Deal, but we can, once again, build a progressive electoral majority."
Next up, new comics and books and sketches of upcoming reviews.
I'll start by talking about Jason Aaron's Scalped put out by Vertigo--the HBO of the comics world (I'm not sure who said that, I think Brian Vaughan). It's a gritty, pulpy crime story set on a Lakota indian reservation. The lead character, Dashiell "Dash" Bad Horse--I can only assume it's a reference to The Maltese Falcon--is, rather perfectly an FBI agent, "undercover as himself".
In many ways it like Northlanders, just with a tighter thematic foucus on the conflict between one's cultural identity and one's personal agendas. Obviously, Northlanders has Vikings and there's more poignancy with its sweet, sad, crushing inevitability. Scalped is anger--raw and unremorseful.
I'm reading Egger's short stories again--How We Are Hungry. They're well-crafted and well-written and, often, quite beautiful. Eggers does, however, have the unfortunate habit of being obnoxiously cute. Lines like "The horses had no symbolic value" and "This story is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love" can be somewhat frustrating when stuck in the middle of otherwise ernest and subtle stories. Its like he can't help himself; he needs to let the reader know that he isn't that self-serious.
The Proulx isn't bad. And Chabon's novel The Final Solution was excellent, aside from the occasional the overly long and complicated sentences. It's fun to see a good writer expariment with themes and modes. It's Sherlock Holmes, but, thematically new and fun. Here's the epigraph:
The distinction's always fine
between detection and invention.
-Mary Jo Salter
All right. I'm going to bed. More to come.
|