Criticism
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. . . and More in the New Year
Traveling to Los Angeles recently, I saw one young woman wearing a Che Guevara shirt and another clutching a handbag decorated with Mao’s face. The high-end toy and gizmos store near my office sells an expensive statue of Joseph Stalin; maybe it’s ironic in intent, but still. In other words, Marxism may have gone down…
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Steinbeck’s Synthetic Grapes
One of the major social justice novels of the Depression era, The Grapes of Wrath, just turned 75. National Public Radio commemorated this milestone. John Steinbeck’s 1939 Dust Bowl epic about the Joad family was based on articles he wrote for the San Francisco News and the Nation on the plight of agricultural workers migrating from…
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Painting the Culture Black
As in, The Black Notebooks. This site, as you know, is dedicated to mapping left-totalitarianism’s attractions for artists and intellectuals. We would be remiss if we did not do the same for right-totalitarianism. The influence that enthusiasts of the Third Reich have had on philosophy and literary theory has long been known. However, new details…
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Last Word on “Llewyn”
O Brother! Why Bother? The latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books has a masterful essay by the critic Martha Bayles. It’s framed by discussion of the Coen Brothers movie so often mentioned on this site. But this is more than a movie review. Bayles covers allied subjects—1930s folk music, 1960s folk music, figures like…
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Tretyakov
Sex, eugenics, and gender battles in early Soviet Russia! That’s the cheery blurb on the handbill of Swarthmore College’s 2002 production of I Want a Baby by Sergei Tretyakov. Tretyakov (1892-1937) wrote the play in 1926. It’s about Milda, a young Latvian woman of humble origins “who is helping to build a new, communist way of life in…
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Baal-ieve It or Not
Oskar Homolka and David Bowie—not much in common there, right? Guess again. The Viennese actor (I Remember Mama, War and Peace, Funeral in Berlin) played Baal, the frolicsome sociopath in Bertolt Brecht’s play of that name, and so did the British rock star. Homolka, who died in 1978, was Baal during the Weimar Republic, not…
Painting the Culture Red 