Last weekend I took my oldest son and his friends to see the new Narnia film; “Prince Caspian”. They were entranced: this is a near-perfect movie for eight year old boys. And the story remains faithful to the spirit of the book, and even improves upon it.
As a child I loved the Narnia books. Though their deficiencies are obvious: there is a general distrust of women, a certain middle class priggishness and occasional racism. But the values of C. S. Lewis were typical for a man of his class and background at the time he wrote them; and the same attitudes were equally found in other children’s books of the period, like Frank Richards’ Bunter books or the Biggles books by W. E. Johns.
The difference is that the Narnia stories are so good that the books are still read, while childrens’ books by C.S Lewis’s contemporaries are not. This is of course something that Lewis shares with another great writer with outdated social attitudes, Rudyard Kipling.
Gore Vidal once wrote that L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Wizard of Oz, was one of the most important influences upon him, because if children learn to dream of alternative and different worlds, then they learn to dream that our own world could be changed for the better. Narnia is a beautiful imaginary for children, where animals talk and magic is real.
The religious content of Narnia is very clear, reflecting Lewis’s devout Protestantism, but only in the weakest of the books, The Last Battle, does the religion become so pompous as to drown the story. Generally, the didactic content of the Narnia books is a discussion of ethics, questions of right and wrong, free will, temptation and redemption that are useful ideas for children, and go beyond Christianity. …
The Second World War that contextualised Narnia also saw the shift of popular national understanding of what England and Britain represents. The old Britain of Empire loyalism and Anglicanism was reimagined as a new Britain that defined itself by the war against fascism, and the promotion of egalitarianism, of Beveridge and comprehensive schools. Narnia was dead.
Poem of the week: For Aneurin Bevan by Danielle Hope.
Bevan! You should be living at this hour
the NHS has need of you. She is a shell
sapped of spirit, a disoriented hull
a revengeful return of the Mayflower.
Her decks brim with pristine shops and babble,
burble like a jaunty airport mall.
Her cargo strains with episodes, manpower
and medicines, each counted to cut costs.
Below she battles ageing, accidents and old super-bugs
that breed below adverts for tomorrow’s drugs.
Passengers please travel on for health care
you’ll find private dentists, stocks, shares
and lawyers on each turning of the stair.
About the poet
Danielle Hope was born in Lancashire but now lives in London. She has had three collections of poetry, Fairground of Madness, City Fox and The Stone Ship, published by Rockingham Press.
John Rety of Hearing Eye Press and Torriano Meeting House is a former editor of anarchist paper Freedom.
This exhibition shows beautiful 17th, 18th and 19th century plaster casts of the finest sculptures of Antiquity. The timeless beauty of classical sculpture is the focal point of this exhibition. Further attention is paid to the role played by plaster casts in science, art criticism and art education in the past four hundred years.
He started with talking about Rome, as in that city, in the sixteenth century, were the origins of copying sculptures from antiquity. When, early in that century, visitors came to Rome, they might know from writings that during antiquity, there had been many sculptures in public places. However, when they visited the city, they saw only a few sculptures said to have survived from the Roman empire or earlier: the she-wolf of Capitol hill; the Marcus Aurelius statue; Trajan’s Column.
When, while building churches or other buildings in medieval Rome, sculptures or parts of them from antiquity had been found, they had been recycled as building material. After 1500, however, people found out that discoveries like these might add to knowledge about antique art. In this way, new sculptures which became famous, were found, like the Laocoön group and the Apollo of the Belvedere. They attracted many artists and other visitors from many European countries to Rome.
The popes and other elite people from the papal state sometimes, as a favour, started giving plaster copies of antique sculptures to princes in other countries. One example was Trajan’s column, a copy of which was given to King Louis XIV of France. In 1824, these plaster copies were found in a windmill in Leiden. the Netherlands. It is not known how they had ended up there. As, since the seventeenth century, in the open air of Rome, the original Trajan’s column has suffered much from pollution, these plaster copies are today valuable, as they show details which are no longer clear in the original.
In the exhibition are also cork models of ancient Roman buildings, which used to be sold to tourists. And reproductions of idealized paintings of ancient Roman remains, by the neo-classicist Giovanni Paolo Panini (1692 - 1765).
During the eighteenth century, drawing academies, based on neo-classicist views, arose in many countries. First, the students had to learn to draw skeletons and muscles for human anatomy. Then, they had to make drawings of Greek and Roman sculptures, considered as models of perfect human bodies. Only after that did they draw nude human models, with bodies not as perfect as antique sculptures.
Among the plaster copies often found in drawing academies were the Venus of Arles. And the “Borghese gladiator” which does not really depicts a gladiator, as gladiators did not fight while naked. The nude statue probably depicts a hero.
The Venus of Arles was considered the ideal female form, until 1820, when the Venus de Milo was discovered in Greece.
One of the drawings, depicting a statue of the Greek god Apollo, at the exhibition, is by nineteenth century drawing academy student, later famous painter, George Hendrik Breitner.
When female students had to draw plaster copies of statues, fig leaves were attached to prevent the women from seeing male genitalia.
Certainly since the 1960s in the Netherlands, neo-classicist ideas in art education became weaker. For the plaster copies, that often meant they were hidden away or even destroyed.
In the sixteenth century, mainly Roman sculpture and Roman copies of Greek sculpture had become known in western Europe. In the early nineteenth century, for the first time, classical Greek sculpture became widely known. Eg, after the Parthenon marbles arrived in London. People had difficulty in getting used to them. The poet John Keats was one of not very many people admiring the Marbles right from the start. While fellow poet Lord Byron attacked Lord Elgin for taking the sculpture from Athens.
When sculpture from the Aegina temple, still older than the Parthenon, became first known in Germany, famous author Goethe did not like it, as it did not conform to his preconceived ideas of what Greek art should be.
The exhibition covers the past 12 years and it’s striking how the earlier cartoons seem to come from a completely different era. Much of the humour concerns Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadillos, or former Tory leader William Hague’s bald head.
But 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq transform the tone of the exhibition. It also brings out the best in the cartoonists, as their outrage turns to focus on the lies, murder and torture doled out by George Bush and Tony Blair.
“The Iraq war is the overwhelming event of the century,” says Tim Sanders. “The world has become darker since then and cartoonists – who tend to be dark and twisted people – come into their own.
“Cartoons act as a wonderful historical record – you can look at them to see the world expressed in ink and bile on paper. It’s in black and white, a stark and violent expression appropriate to violent times.”
Part of the reason for this was the decision by the Independent to play a campaigning role against the Iraq war in 2003. Since then it has kept up its critical coverage of the “war on terror” with reports from journalists such as Patrick Cockburn and Robert Fisk.
Booker-shortlisted novelist begins hunger strike over Bhopal
Randeep Ramesh in Delhi
Thursday June 12, 2008
Indra Sinha, the author of a Booker-shortlisted novel set in the aftermath of the tragedy of the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, yesterday began an indefinite hunger strike in support of survivors protesting against “government indifference” over their plight.
Sinha, a longtime supporter of the Bhopal campaign, told the Guardian that he wanted to “give something back to people who had given me so much. The survivors have gone through hell and been let down by everybody that matters. The judges, politicians have all sold them down the river.”
Sinha joins another nine activists in Delhi who began fasting this week. The protestors, who include children and survivors, have complained of being beaten by police after they demonstrated outside the prime minister’s office in the Indian capital.
Set in the slums of a town a re-imagined Bhopal, Sinha’s Animal’s People is a damning indictment against corporate greed and indifference to human suffering. Its climax is a hunger strike to shame the authorities into helping the survivors.
“I know the problem with a hunger strike is that it hurts you more than the government but there has to be some moral pressure on this government which appears dazzled by Dow Chemicals (which brought Union Carbide in 2001) and promises of god knows what investment. How long can I go on (without food)? I don’t know honestly.”
The author, who is based in southern France, said that the real problem is that there has been no case made against Union Carbide, the question of Dow becomes one of “public relations”.
“Because no American executive has ever been brought before a court of law there has been no rigorous investigation of the facts. So it is not a legal or moral problem but one of image. Next week Dow are sponsoring an event at the Cannes advertising festival which is about using marketing for good causes. It is absurd.”
Dow, one of the world’s largest chemical companies, purchased Union Carbide in 2001 and says it never owned or operated the Bhopal plant. Therefore it has no responsibility for the events in 1984. The disused Union Carbide factory in Bhopal contains about 8,000 tonnes of carcinogenic chemicals which continue to leach out and contaminate water supplies used by 30,000 local people.
Satinath Sarangi of the Sambhavna Trust, which helps to rehabilitate victims, said the government is washing its hands of Bhopal. No one, he says, has taken responsibility for cleaning up the site and paying the high cost of medical bills.
“We need to catalyse global opinion about the issue. The government tries to buy us off with empty promises but really there’s nothing.”
Henrik Ibsen had a rough ride from the critics when Rosmersholm had its London premiere at the Vaudeville in 1891. They dismissed his play as provincial, preposterous, morbid, tiresome, gloomy, nauseating, contemptible and childish.
August Strindberg got it absolutely right when he declared that the play was “crystal clear to anyone with knowledge of modern psychology.”
Sigmund Freud, incidentally, would later become one of the play’s greatest admirers.
Rosmersholm was written in response to the political revolution in Norway in 1884 when there were serious clashes between the traditional conservatives and the liberal free-thinkers and socialists.
Ibsen was strongly critical of the way that politicians and the scandal-mongering press had acted during the election.
Rosmer (Paul Hilton) had once been a priest and married. He abandoned his faith and became an atheist. His wife committed suicide.
He seeks a new morality and looks to a time when there will be harmony and truth in politics with everybody working together to the same end.
Rosmer’s housekeeper Rebecca West (Helen McCrory) had been his late father’s mistress. Under his tutelage, she too had become a free-thinker and an atheist.
POEM OF THE WEEK: A Waste of Time by Jacques Prevert.
In front of the factory gate
the worker suddenly stops
the fine weather has tugged him by the sleeve
and as he turns around
and looks at the sun
all round and red up high
smiling down from its blazing sky
he winks
familiarly
Say comrade Sun
don’t you think
that’s a dead loss
to give a day like this
to a boss?
A turn toward history we need: Paris Commune at the Public Theater in New York
4 June 2008
Paris Commune, written by Steven Cosson and J. Michael Friedman, directed by Steven Cosson, and performed by The Civilians at the Public Lab Series Workshop at the Public Theater in New York City, April 4 to 20
Paris Commune, staged recently at the Public Theater in New York, is a musical about the first government established by the working class, which ruled the French capital from March 18 until May 28, 1871, when bourgeois troops crushed it and massacred thousands.
The artistic quality of the work and the seriousness with which the creators treat the material make this theatrical piece unusual in the current cultural environment, especially in the US. It suggests that the general restiveness and discontent in artistic circles is beginning to find a more focused expression.
Plays and other works of art about the lives of ordinary people are not entirely lacking, but a consideration of those moments when daily life becomes charged with great historical purpose has been more or less off the map for most artists.
In Paris Commune, we are presented with a thoroughgoing and lively presentation of precisely one of those moments in history.
Writers Steven Cosson and J. Michael Friedman uncovered new material from primary sources for this work. They present facets of French life often missing from accounts of the Commune—in particular, with the Public Theater production’s 14 songs and dance numbers, the popular culture of Paris in the 1870s.
The play lets the workers of Paris speak for themselves, but it fills in many of the gaps in historical knowledge that a contemporary American audience might have. (For that matter, the Commune is not widely taught in French schools, either.) At one point, for example, the play combines a lesson in French revolutions from 1789 to 1871 with a dance number that simultaneously teaches the history of the famous dance, the can-can. This scene, literally breathless, puts the Commune in context as the final and greatest revolutionary struggle of the nineteenth century.
The writers, of course, can’t fill in all the blanks in 90 minutes. A sense of the French Second Empire (1852-1870) and its Napoleon III is largely missing. That is a shame, too, since the period resembles our own in many ways: the frantic greed of the ruling classes, the social polarization, the stifling political atmosphere, the constant military adventures and provocations, a vulgar and dimwitted ruler.
DAVID BETTERIDGE talks about his first book of poetry, an eclectic celebration of Glasgow’s wide-ranging radical artistic and political traditions.
Poet David Betteridge has worked as a teacher and teacher trainer in Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Pakistan and Nepal.
He was, until recently, head of a primary school in Glasgow. He has co-authored several books for the classroom, but Granny Albyn’s Complaint is his first book of poetry.
It is a love letter to the city where he has spent the best part of his life. Lyrical, narrative, satiric and reflective, the book celebrates Glasgow’s radical political and artistic traditions, in despair and hope, struggle and advance, continuity and loss.
At the heart of Granny Albyn’s Complaint are two long poems celebrating the “fair field full of folk” that gathers on Glasgow Green to celebrate May Day.
On every side are Chartists and Suffragettes, trades unionists and communists, tourists and film crews, artists and asylum-seekers, the homesick and the homeless.
As the title suggests, the book looks back to the Scottish polemical tradition of the “complaynt,” most famously the 15th [sic; 16th] century Complaynt of Scotland.
Zach Zill reviews a book that sets Howard Zinn’s history from below in a new form–the graphic novel.
May 29, 2008
OVER THE past 25 years, anyone coming to radical conclusions about the U.S. and its history has likely traveled through the pages of at least one Howard Zinn book. A People’s History of the United States is undoubtedly the most popular, widely read radical analysis of U.S. history.
First published in 1980, it has sold more than 1.7 million copies, become required reading in many high school and college classrooms and spawned several offshoot projects–most notably, the primary source reader Voices of a People’s History of the United States.
Now, Zinn, along with cartoonist Mike Konopacki and historian and activist Paul Buhle, has delivered a new book that is sure to delight and enlighten activists, radicals and those newly come to left-wing ideas.
A People’s History of American Empire is the first attempt to recreate Zinn’s history in a new form–that of the graphic novel. Like the theatrical performances of Voices and the forthcoming documentary The People Speak, A People’s History of American Empire uses a new medium to spread Zinn’s basic message to a wider audience.
The book provides an animated, bottom-up telling of U.S. history, with a focus on U.S. military interventions and their repercussions at home.
Here, the reader discovers one of the most consciously disguised historical facts: the U.S. was not born “the world’s greatest democracy,” destined to spread its message of freedom around the globe. Rather, from early in its history, it has striven to become a new form of empire, time and again playing an anti-democratic role in the world.
Zinn’s version of history draws out the social forces whose interests have driven the American empire–major corporations, the U.S. military, the ultra-wealthy American elite and politicians of both major parties.
Zinn, Konopacki and Buhle show how the promise of American democracy has been realized only as a result of struggle against these interests, locating the source of progressive historical change where it rightly belongs–with the millions of people around the world who resisted the encroachment of U.S. empire.
