Posted on: August 22, 2010
Robert Mueller, a frequent contributor for Spinozablue, has added to his list of publications in other venues. He has a poem in the #5 issue of Blackbox Manifold, and will be reviewing works by Robert V. Wilson in the next issue of that magazine. Robert also wrote the introduction for George Spencer’s new journal, Far Out Further Out Out of Sight, and helped him with the launch. George Spencer has contributed several poems to Spinozablue as well. We wish him the best of luck with his new magazine.…
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Posted on: August 17, 2010
Sofi Oksanen. Photo by Anneli Salo
In Purge, we have a dark world, fully imagined. We have a brutal world, fully revealed. But Ms. Oksanen does not bring us layer upon layer of meticulous detail to make that happen. Instead, she uses the brush of an impressionist, though her subject matter is closer to an unexpurgated 21st century Film Noir. She is also more direct than those who studied light to see how it changed the world from hour to hour. Hers is not an oblique rendering of the subject at hand. Purge goes for the jugular, for the underside of life, and its gaze is often pitiless.
It fits that she counters the ugliness, sadism and betrayals of the war years and their aftermath with the horrors of Eastern European sex trade cerca 1991 – 92. She uses tragedy as a fulcrum to show the continuity of cruelty through time.…
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Posted on: August 8, 2010
One of our finest historians passed away on August 6th. Tony Judt, the author of numerous historical works, with a primary focus on French intellectuals, passed away after a long battle with ALS. He was 62.
I recently read his excellent Ill Fares the Land, which would have been a strong and timely work regardless of how it was written. Given the fact that he dictated it while suffering from the ravages of Lou Gehrig’s disease made it all the more poignant and moving. Here is the opening section, first published in the New York Review of Books:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.
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Posted on: August 1, 2010
I’m a bit more than half way through Sofi Oksanen’s extraordinary novel, Purge, and wanted to jot down a few impressions before doing a complete review later. Ms. Oksanen is a young Finnish-Estonian writer, born in 1977. Purge is her third novel, and grew out of her original play of the same title (“Puhdistus”). Deceptively simple in style and structure, it’s a wonderful example of the power that art has to make us see the universal in the particular. In the details of family life, in the interaction between sisters, in the struggles of one small town, we see the wild swings of history. We see the violent shifts in power alignments. A family drama points us to the drama of time and the chaotic march of humanity.
So far, the book has concentrated primarily on the 30s, 40s, and early 90s.…
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