Bill Marx
As the year nears its end, time is running out to write at length about some of the new books that gave me pleasure. Thus this quick list of favorites. As usual, my taste runs to prose that’s off-the-beaten-path.
Ben Jonson is one of the great unknown geniuses of the English theater and of western literature. Ian Donaldson’s new biography of the playwright/poet successfully makes the case that he deserves to be better known.
For all of his claims to being a subversive termite, Jonathan Lethem the puffy white elephant appears more often in this collection, trudging down a much safer, much happier road — leave the negativity to the snotty aristocrats.
As the Occupy and Tea Party movements attest, this is a time in America of social action and political upheaval -– not to the degree that we see in “Battleship Potemkin,” but significant nonetheless –- and this classic silent film has resonance today in that regard.
Playwright John Hodge chooses to ignore the complexity of the dissident writer’s experience — expedience for the sake of protecting something of value from destruction, an author fighting his inner demons to live long enough to finish what he believes to be a work of art that is also an act of political defiance.
Along with its puppets and spectacle, “The Snow Queen” gives the audience a chance to become part of the action. Kids of all ages are invited to put down their electronic toys and enter a fanciful — rather than frenzied — theatrical world.
We need the humanities because we need imagination that works outside the narrow channels where the sciences succeed.
Both of these novels about social corruption should be in every Occupy Wall Street library in the country: inequality is not a matter of fate but the result of an exhausted acquiescence to subterfuge.
Essentially, Kaiser’s plaint about the vanishing critic is useless because he, and so many other cultural kingpins worried about the end of professional criticism, offer no solutions.
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