At Guernica, Rebecca Solnit on 'The Hunger Games'

I thought I didn't need to read another word on "The Hunger Games." It's a bestselling book for young adults, a blockbuster movie starring an Oscar nominee who wields a bow and arrow, and it's generated almost as much Internet chatter as HBO's "Girls." But then comes Rebecca Solnit and, well, I'm curious.

One of our most interesting contemporary thinkers, Solnit has lately been looking into and beyond the surface of the news to try to understand how people exist together in the world, examining the elements of social cohesion and decay. Her recent books include "Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas," "Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics," and "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster."

In Guernica, she writes, "science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment." That trilogy is, as you can see, "The Hunger Games." She begins with the books themselves:

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like—and yet not exactly like—high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young....

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that. Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1 percent, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1 percent, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen—Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one—who refuses to be disposed of....

Then she turns to point out that the travails faced by Katniss have echoes -- much larger echoes -- in the real world. Like in "The Hunger Games," children from poor families are more likely to serve in the U.S. military, and Solnit points out that thousands of lives have been lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. She looks at real hunger, at how the burden of student debt is blocking education as a means of social advancement, at climate change and at quiet revolutions worldwide.

Along the way, she also mentions a few books: Bill McKibben's "Eaarth"; Jonathan Schell's "The Unconquerable World"; "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict" by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan; and "News from Nowhere" by William Morris.

"Resistance is one of your obligations," Solnit writes, "but it’s also a pleasure and a way of stealing back hope." Read her complete take on "The Hunger Games" at Guernica.

RELATED:

"The Hunger Games" banned, animation-style

Book review: Suzanne Collins' "Mockingjay"

Mad for 'The Hunger Games' merch: Nail polish, socks, crossbows

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss in "The Hunger Games." Credit: Murray Close / Lionsgate

Adrienne Rich in the L.A. Times

Poet Adrienne Rich, who died Tuesday at the age of 82 (see our complete obituary), was also known as an essayist. Rich moved from Massachusetts to Santa Cruz in 1984, later saying, "I don't think it's a bad thing in your life to have your whole orientation completely switched geographically." She became an occasional contributor to the L.A. Times, writing essays and criticism for the paper.

She started off explosively In 1997, when she explained her decision not to accept the National Medal of Arts; it was not about a looming vote about NEA funding, she wrote. "My 'no' came directly out of my work as a poet and essayist and citizen drawn to the interfold of personal and public experience." In her 1,800-word piece, Rich went on to conclude:

In a society tyrannized by the accumulation of wealth as Eastern Europe was tyrannized by its own false gods of concentrated power, recognized artists have, perhaps, a new opportunity to work out our connectedness, as artists, with other people who are beleaguered, suffering, disenfranchised --precariously employed workers, trashed elders, throwaway youth, the "unsuccessful" and the art they too are nonetheless making and seeking.

I wish I didn't feel the necessity to say here that none of this is about imposing ideology or style or content on artists; it is about the inseparability of art from acute social crisis in this century and the one now coming up.

We have a short-lived model in our history for the place of art in relation to government. During the Depression of the 1930s, under New Deal legislation, thousands of creative and performing artists were paid modest stipends to work in the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Art Project. Their creativity, in the form of novels, murals, plays, performances, public monuments, the providing of music and theater to new audiences, seeded the art and the consciousness of succeeding decades. By 1939, this funding was discontinued.

Federal funding for the arts, like the philanthropy of private arts patrons, can be given and taken away. In the long run, art needs to grow organically out of a social compost nourishing to everyone, a literate citizenry, a free, universal, public education complex with art as an integral element, a society without throwaway people, honoring both human individuality and the search for a decent, sustainable common life. In such conditions, art would still be a voice of hunger, desire, discontent, passion, reminding us that the democratic project is never-ending.

For that to happen, what else would have to change? I hope the discussion will continue.

That discussion surfaced in her 2004 review of "The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985" as she wrote, "Tracing the writer's development (and steadfastness) through the history he recounted of those years sharpened my sense of what's missing from the desperate, hysterical public non-conversations in which we're presently mired." She continued:

He, more than any American writer I can think of, had to make his way through the contradictions of early literary success, later iconization, vilification and incomprehension, particularly as a black writer, that fell onto his shoulders. Determined to remain a serious writer and not become a mere celebrity or spokesman, he lived for long periods, and died, outside the United States. He became a participant in the history of the civil rights movement somewhat reluctantly, seeing himself as a writer, not an activist, yet he knew he could and must bear witness to that history as it was being made, with respect and critical astuteness.

The artist, Baldwin wrote in a 1959 review of a collection of Langston Hughes poems, needs to be "within the experience and outside it at the same time." His own awareness of this difficult position (If I am, in spite of all, an American, what does this mean, for me and for America?) was, I think, a supreme artistic strength, giving him prescience, narrative power and an early and vivid anticipation of the real internal trouble toward which this nation, in its blur of wealth and fantasies, has been heading.

In March of 2001, Rich looked back at her prose pieces collected in the April 2001 book "Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations." In our pages she wrote:

For more than 50 years I have been writing, tearing, up, revising poems, studying poets from every culture and century available to me. I have been a poet of the oppositional imagination, meaning that I don't think my only argument is with myself. My work is for people who want to imagine and claim wider horizons and carry on about them into the night, rather than rehearse the landlocked details of personal quandaries or the price for which the house next door just sold.

At times in the past decade and a half I have felt like a stranger in my own country. I seem not to speak the official language. I believe many others feel like this, not just as poets or intellectuals but as citizens -- accountable yet excluded from power. I began as an American optimist, albeit a critical one, formed by our racial legacy and by the Vietnam War. In both these cases it was necessary to look hard truths in the face in order to change horrible realities. I believed, with many others, that my country's historical aquifers were flowing in that direction of democratic change. I became an American skeptic, not as to the long search for justice and dignity, which is part of all human history, but in the light of my nation's leading role in demoralizing and destabilizing that search, here at home and around the world. Perhaps just such a passionate skepticism, neither cynical nor nihilistic, is the ground for continuing.

RELATED:

Poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died

Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska dies at 88

Juan Felipe Herrera is appointed California Poet Laureate

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Adrienne Rich accepting the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 2006 National Book Awards. Credit: Stuart Ramson / Associated Press

This Sunday: John Leonard, AIDS and Carl Hiaasen, too

He was once the literary editor of the Nation and editor of the New York Times Book Review, but John Leonard was perhaps the most important literary critic in the last half of the 20^th century. Our book critic David L. Ulin examines Leonard’s collected work “Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008” and finds that Leonard articulated “a worldview through his criticism, to refract his reading through a wider lens.” Ulin also notes that Leonard was “widely credited with bringing such writers as Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Maxine Hong Kingston to the attention of an American readership…”

Ulin also describes his passionate commitment to writing in a passage in which Leonard describes the death threat, the fatwa, against Salman Rushdie. “It has been a disgraceful week. A maniac puts out a $5.2-million contract on one of the best writers in the English language, and how does the civilized world respond? France and Germany won’t publish 'The Satanic Verses'; Canada won’t sell it … and a brave new philistinism struts its stuff all over Mediapolis USA, telling us that Rushdie’s unreadable anyway.”

Strong stuff from a firm believer in a writer’s right to write. Ulin’s review leads our coverage in Sunday Arts & Books.

About 180 degrees away from Leonard’s work is the latest young-adult offering from Carl Hiaasen. The title is “Chomp” and the story is a sendup of reality television. In this story's case, the show is “Expedition Survival,” and its star is Derek Badger, a former Irish folk dancer, who can swallow a live salamander without actually vomiting. And while he may not throw up, he has other attributes that are a bit troublesome in a reality setting populated by cumbersome critters. He’s a klutz. And that’s how the story develops. Carpenter calls this “delightful” and “laugh out-loud” funny.

Also this week, Thomas H. Maugh, a former staffer who made science and medicine issues easily understandable for decades, turns his hand to  “Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It,” a history of the pandemic by journalist Craig Timberg and Daniel Halperin, a medical anthropologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health’s AIDS Prevention Research Project. Repeated analyses have shown, the authors argue, that AIDS became epidemic only in regions where the number of each person’s sexual activity was high. The authors' views on controlling the spread of the disease suggest that “the best solution is a change in sexual mores.” They cite the example of Uganda, where the biggest inroads against the disease were made in the 1980s and 1990s. Leaders in that country used a potent weapon: fear.

 “Thinking the Twentieth Century” is a fearless exploration of ideas from a great public intellectual, Tony Judt, while he lay dying of Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). This is Judt’s swan song, and he's joined by Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor. Our reviewer, Martin Rubin, writes that Judt’s focus is on Europe and takes the reader “on a wild ride through the ideological currents and shoals of 20^th century thought.”

More after the jump

Book news: 'Albert Nobbs,' lady friends, and fiction and place

Are you going to see "Albert Nobbs"? The film, which has been nominated for three Oscars (cross-dressing Glenn Close is thought to give Meryl Streep some competition) may be among the award season's most literary. It was adapted from a short story by Irish writer George Moore, the screenplay was co-written by Booker prize-winner John Banville, and it was directed by Rodrigo Garcia, son of Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Speaking of literary people and the screen, writer A-J Aronstein writes in The Millions about HBO coming to the suburban neighborhood he grew up in to film "The Corrections." Aronstein's childhood home was up to be the Lamberts', right at the center of the book; Aronstein wrote his undergraduate thesis on Franzen's 2001 novel. What are the odds? Too great, apparently. They picked another house. Which was probably for the best; John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote about the mixed experience of his North Carolina home being used in "One Tree Hill." That essay, which appeared in GQ, is in "Pulphead: Essays:," a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle nonfiction award.

Susan Straight's 2001 novel "highwire Moon" was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Southern California writer has made her hometown, Riverside, the setting and center of much of her work. Now she's writing at KCET about the Inland Empire; she has explored a sheep farm, looked at metal sun shades and visited her grandmother's old trailer park. Her fantastic essays are accompanied by photographs that make the place look like a mid-century heaven that time forgot.

A fantastic new essay by Emily Rapp appears in The Rumpus, where she writes of the power of female friendship. "Here’s the truth: friendships between women are often the deepest and most profound love stories, but they are often discussed as if they are ancillary, 'bonus' relationships to the truly important ones. Women’s friendships outlast jobs, parents, husbands, boyfriends, lovers, and sometimes children." If that last bit sounds alarming, wait until you reach the end of her piece.

RELATED:

John Banville, a master at work

Book review: "Poster Child" by Emily Rapp

Jonathan Franzen reads in L.A. and Oprah is in the air

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Sunday: Pico Iyer's long sentences and Stephen Hawking's birthday

Call it the value of complexity in a frantic time. That’s the thought that came to mind when I first read Pico Iyer’s engaging essay on why he’s made the conscious decision to write longer sentences. What Iyer, whose latest book, “The Man Within My Head,” was published this month, is saying to us (and for us) is that the world of instant communication is far too distracting and that there is gratification -- and a relief from the mundane -- in reading something complex and engaging. It is an interesting proposition by one of our favorite writers. His essay begins on the front page of Sunday’s Arts & Books section. (For more on this topic, I would recommend David Ulin's book "The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time," which was developed from Ulin's article in the Aug. 9, 2009, issue of The Times.)

Sunday is also Stephen Hawking's 70^th birthday and, to mark the occasion, Sara Lippincott is reviewing Kitty Ferguson’s latest book on the eminent physicist: “Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind.” As Lippincott notes, 70 is a real milestone for the superstar of the cosmos who has lived almost 50 years with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease). Also, Carolyn Kellogg reviews “Power Concedes Nothing: One Woman’s Quest for Social Justice in America, from the Kill Zones to the Courtroom,” the memoir of Connie Rice, the civil rights advocate and agitator who has made it her business to balance the scales of justice in Los Angeles.

On the fiction card, book critic David L. Ulin assesses playwright and television writer Alan Bennett’s latest work, a collection of  stories called “Smut.” And Susan Carpenter looks at “A Million Suns,” the second installment in the “Across the Universe” young adult fantasy trilogy by Beth Revis. Universe? Hawking? A birthday present?

And, of course, we have our weekly look at the bestsellers.

Thanks for reading.

-- Jon Thurber, book editor

Photo: Stephen Hawking at the 2010 World Science Festival opening night gala in New York. Credit: Jemal Countess/Getty Images

 

This Sunday: James M. Cain minus the noir

As we look forward to 2012 with all its hope, promise and presidential politics, it seemed a good idea to also look back to a simpler time in Southern California. Or at least that’s the goal in reprinting James M. Cain’s extensive essay “Paradise”: We've included an excerpt in our Sunday print edition of Calendar’s Arts & Books section and the full text of the piece is available online.

For those who think of Cain as a writer of three great noir novels set in California -- “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce” -- his life as a journalist should be something of a revelation. In the 1920s and early '30s, he wrote articles for H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury and was an editorial writer for Walter Lippman at the New York World. For a brief time, he was managing editor of the New Yorker working for the legendary Harold Ross. The job didn’t fit, however, and after nine months he left for Paramount Studios to be a screenwriter, even though eventually he wound up, again, as a freelancer writing numerous articles for magazines and newspapers.

Cain's essay “Paradise” was the cover story of The American Mercury’s March 1933 issue. Book critic David L. Ulin also offers an introduction to our coverage of “Paradise.” I hope you’ll give “Paradise” a look: Many of his observations of Southern California seem spot on today, while others may surprise you.

Also this week Ulin reviews Tom Zoellner’s effort to make sense of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting in “A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America.” Ulin and Carolyn Kellogg offer some Faces to Watch in the book world next year, and Kellogg also weighs in with a review of “Karaoke Culture,” a compelling collection of essays by Dubravka Ugresic. In her Not Just For Kids column, Susan Carpenter looks at the YA title “Cinder,” an inventive retelling of the Cinderella story. And we have our weekly bestsellers list.

Happy new year to all and thanks for reading.

 --Jon Thurber, book editor

 Photo: James M. Cain in 1946.  Credit: Associated Press 

In Sunday books: On Patti Smith, Tolstoy and life in the marginalia

What's in a book? Ideas and language, of course, and, remarkably, Lynell George has been able to trace her mother's life in the marginalia she left in many of her books. As George notes in her essay, "A Life in the Marginalia," that starts on the cover of this Sunday's Arts & Books section, to open her mother's books was "to reveal all manner of ephemera -- from transit passes to cards to notes in her mother's elegant English teacher cursive -- and all marking chapters in a rich, full life. And, in a way, a gentle guidance." Just as her mother's books and love of reading were a gift to her, George's memoir reminds us of the gift of books in enhancing the fabric of a home.  

Also Sunday,  David Ulin checks in on Patti Smith's "Woolgathering," a collection of prose poems that Ulin says speaks volumes about the broad diversity that makes up the life of Smith as a rocker, mother, poet, artist.

You can also listen here to an excerpt of Smith reading from her award-winning memoir "Just Kids," which has just been released as an audio book: Pattismithexcerpt

Daniel Handler, known more familiarly to some as Lemony Snicket, is back with his YA-debut "Why We Broke Up," which Susan Carpenter describes as "a brief but intense teen relationship gone wrong." Carpenter says that few of these "tragic trajectories have been written about as poignantly" as in this book, which is illustrated by Maira Kalman.

Then there's Tolstoy. Yes, the life of the count is detailed in Rosamund Bartlett's "Tolstoy: A Russian Life." Reviewer Martin Rubin notes that Tolstoy was "a loner, a quintessential outsider and a generally awful and quarrelsome individual." So how was he able to "understand and evoke the glittering social whirl and intricacies of fashionable salons" that made up much of his fiction?

Shari Roan reviews Mary Johnson's "An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service and an Authentic Life," a memoir that will "fascinate not only Catholics but anyone who has wondered about the human capacity to vow lifelong celibacy, poverty and charity" and gives us a fascinating portrait of Mother Teresa. Online at The Siren's Call, Nick Owchar talks to novelist Richard Zimler about his recent visit to Poland to discuss the novel "The Warsaw Anagrams" with Polish audiences.

And, of course, we have our Best-Sellers lists of what's hot at Southern California stores.

Again, thanks for reading (and for listening).

-- Jon Thurber, book editor 

Photo: One of several books that were part of writer Lynell George's mother's collection. George's mother imprinted the book with a hand and footprint of her daughter when she was a baby. Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

 

Christopher Hitchens, writer and intellectual, dies at 62

Christopher Hitchens, the author and essayist who saw great success with his controversial 2007 book "God Is Not Great," died Thursday in Houston, where he'd been undergoing treatment for esophogeal cancer. He was 62.

Hitchens' "polemical writings on religion, politics, war and other provocations established him as one of his generation's most robust public intellectuals," writes Elaine Woo in The Times' obituary.

Erudition, a roguish sense of humor and passion for intellectual combat were hallmarks of his writing, which was prolific. In addition to Vanity Fair, he was a columnist for the online magazine Slate and contributor to Harper's, the Atlantic and a number of British publications. He wrote two dozen books, including highly regarded biographies of George Orwell, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine,  and co-wrote or edited at least eight others.

A swashbuckling opinionator, he loved few things better than a good argument — and he knew how to pick one. Once described by the New Yorker as "looking like someone who, with as much dignity as possible, has smoothed his hair and straightened his collar after knocking the helmet off a policeman," he tarred Bill Clinton  as a rapist, Mother Teresa as a fraud and Henry Kissinger as a war criminal. He argued in Vanity Fair that women were less funny than men, which stoked the wrath of female comics. "I am programmed by the practice of a lifetime to take," he wrote, "a contrary position."

Hitchens' contrariness ran deep. A former Marxist, he found himself in conflict with his allies in the American left after 9/11, when he declared his support for the Bush administration's war on terror. He stepped down from his column for the liberal magazine the Nation, which he'd been writing for more than 20 years.

Many of Hitchens' essays are online. Vanity Fair remembers him and links to nine of his recent pieces for the magazine, including writing about his illness. Granta has posted excerpts from essays from 1990 and 1985. The New Yorker has posted links to a number of stories by and about Hitchens, and Christopher Buckley writes there of his friendship with the argumentative writer.

Hitchens' death was announced by his agent Steve Wasserman, former books editor of The Times.

RELATED:

Book review: "Arguably" by Christopher Hitchens

Book review: "Hitch-22" by Christopher Hitchens

Book review: "The Quotable Hitchens"

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Christopher Hitchens, right, with author Mark Danner, signing books at the L.A. Times Festival of Books in 2004. Credit: Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

Joan Didion discusses 'Blue Nights'

In Sunday's Arts & Books, book critic David L. Ulin talks to Joan Didion about her new memoir, "Blue Nights." The book, which moves back and forth between the death of Didion's 39-year-old daughter, Quintana, six years ago and the author's reflections on aging, is a follow-up to 2005's "The Year of Magical Thinking," in which she wrote about the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Ulin visited Didion at her apartment in Manhattan; here is more of their conversation.

Jacket Copy: Throughout "Blue Nights," you speak (or write) directly to your readers. How did you develop that device?

Joan Didion: It just started. I started writing, and suddenly I was talking directly to the reader. I was telling the reader that I had to talk directly. I was telling the reader what I had to do when I hadn't done it yet, and then it was a little hard to talk directly to the reader, and so that became a paragraph. I was just making it up as I went along. I didn't have a plan.

JC: Your language is very stripped down in the book: spare, declarative. That makes for a certain tension, given the emotional murkiness of the narrative.

JD: I don't know how this got so murky. But part of it was this wish on my part to make it direct and to be as straightforward as possible. That, for some reason, led me into murkiness. I don't know how or why, but it did. "Magical Thinking" was much clearer -- at least, the emotional part.

JC: How much does that have to do with the difficulty of writing about a child? It's harder than writing about a spouse.

JD: Absolutely. Absolutely. For every possible reason. I had not written about her at all. John had written about her. He had written a piece about her called "Quintana," and he published a book of pieces called "Quintana and Friends." She was on the cover ... but he hadn't written about her in any way that got into what her problems later turned out to be. She was also very young.

JC: What was her reaction to being written about?

JD: She loved being written about. It was like being a star. The fact that she loved being written about should have been a clue. But it was just one of those ... she was actually an amazing little person, at every age. I don't know how much I got of that. But we never know how much we got right or wrong about our children. Because there they are.

PEN Center USA 2011 awards to feature Dave Eggers, Robert Pinksy

PEN Center USA will present its 21st Annual Literary Awards on Nov. 8, the literary nonprofit announced Monday. Dave Eggers, Robert Pinsky and Charles Bowden were named special honorees. Literary awards will be presented in eleven categories.

With more than 600 members, PEN Center USA has in previous years given awards to Woody Allen, T.C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros, George Clooney, Cameron Crowe, Betty Friedan, Matt Groening, Vaclav Havel, Charlie Kaufman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Elmore Leonard, Dan Savage, Neil Simon, Alice Walker and others.

Pinksy, a poet, essayist and translator, will receive the lifetime achievement award. He is a Los Angeles Times book prize winner and a former U.S. poet laureate. Eggers, known for his writing, the magainze McSweeney's and the 826 tutoring centers he founded, will receive the award of honor. The First Amendment Award will go to Bowden.

The PEN Center USA literary awards are designed to recognize the best writing in the Western states. Each winner will recieve a $1,000 cash prize; the complete list of winners is after the jump.