Yevtushenko: A Russian Poet Steeped in America (New York Times)

"With a bright patchwork jacket from Guatemala covering his broad shoulders, the graying lion of Russian letters, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, paced and shouted as he read some of his poems that once shook the world. Between verses he tossed off advice and opinion about life, love and literature.
His audience did not fill a theater in Moscow, London or New York, but a classroom of English students at the University of Tulsa here. Somewhat improbably, Mr. Yevtushenko has found a home here."
Full report

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Karl Dallas

New York Times on C.S.Lewis: A Mind That Grasped Both Heaven and Hell

New York Times: A Mind That Grasped Both Heaven and Hell
"If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next," he wrote in "Mere Christianity," one of his best-known works. "It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this." In an era when God himself seems to be on trial, that's a timely message — for the half-hearted pilgrim as well as the devoted doubter. Probably just what C. S. Lewis had in mind.

A Portrait of the Artist's Troubled Daughter

A Portrait of the Artist?s Troubled Daughter

She was the light giver, the "wonder wild," James Joyce wrote of his daughter, Lucia. She was what Joyce scholars call the "Rainbow girl" in his masterpiece, "Finnegans Wake," Issy the temptress, who magically breaks up into the colors of the rainbow. Lucia had a mind "as clear and as unsparing as the lightning," Joyce once wrote in a letter. "She is a fantastic being."

Philip K. Dick, paranoid genius

The World Jones Made, by Philip K. Dick
(Gollancz, £6.99, ISBN 0-575-07457-4)

Philip K. Dick was crazy. He was an alcoholic and drug addict, who believed the FBI was spying on him. He also wrote paranoid letters to J. Edgar Hoover claiming the Commies were out to get him. He believed he had been transported back to Roman times. His books have been made into blockbuster Hollywood movies (Bladerunner, Total Recall), which are travesties of his vision, whatever their merits as films in their own right. He was also the most significant science fiction writer of his generation.

The World Jones Made is one of his earlier novels, written for a pulp paperback from the SF-exploitation publisher Ace back in 1956. As far as I know, it has never been published in Britain before.

It displays many of his characteristics, the main one of which is that he doesn’t really write science fiction, as such – or if he does, it is the science of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle rather than the hardware-oriented world of Werner von Braun and his V2 space rockets. His depiction of a future dystopia places him more in the line of succession of Huxley’s Brave New World and even Orwell’s savage satire on his BBC bosses, 1984.

The term coined by John W. Campbell Jnr when he changed his SF magazine’s name from Astounding to Analog is more appropriate, for writers like Dick create analogies, possible worlds where “what if?” is the inspirational spark.

What if, in this case, there was a man who could perceive the future, just one year in advance. Great! we lesser mortals might exclaim, we’ll know Derby winners, be able to predict political outcomes, or whatever is our special interest. But to Floyd Jones, the main character in Dick’s scenario, it’s a terrible burden, since he lives a double, twilight existence, both in the now and 12 months hence.

He lives in an entirely predestined world, where all he can do is to fulfil the vision he has had of the future, using his talents to become ruler of the world, knowing as he does that his efforts are doomed to failure. But at the eleventh hour he seizes control of his destiny, and wins in the end.

The world he is destined to overthrow is one where certainty has become a sin and relativism the guiding principle of life. And here Dick examines another “what if” scenario, the opposite of Jones’s.

Indeed, if this book has any fault – and though written at such an early stage in his career, it is a remarkably mature work – it is that it is too crammed with ideas, so that none is developed as fully as one would like. And the focus switches from one character to another, so that none is developed in the round and in depth (as was Deckard, the anti-hero of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the book that became Bladerunner).
But like everything Dick wrote, it is important, and stimulating, even if his vision is so disturbingly bleak that the happy ending of this early work doesn’t really ring true.–KARL DALLAS

To order The World that Jones Made, click here. UK customers: (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0575074574/intrevbks), US customers: (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0575074574/intrevbksus).

Bush in Babylon: the recolonisation oF Iraq
by Tariq Ali
(Verve, £13)
Whatever you might think of Tariq Ali’s history as a campaigner on the ultra-left, there is no getting away from the fact that he is a great polemicist. And this is certainly a great polemic, un-put-downable, not a page of which doesn’t have something enlightening, thought-provoking, and sometimes just plain incredible, to enchant and/or irritate the reader, sometimes simultaneously.
Anyone expecting to receive a stale reprocessing of the arguments against George W. Bush’s aggression against Iraq is going to be delightfully surprised when they read it.
It is a typically Tariq production, with digressions into Arabic poetry, a section from a novel about Iraqi exiles, and of course the usual crop of ego-enhancing “as I said at the time” references, depicting the author as someone who’s been at it since year one, which in a sense he has.
As a poet myself, I was pleased to see his acknowledgement of the subversive role of poetry in Arabic culture and politics, and was inspired by it to strive to emulate that commitment in my own work.
However, under this shiny surface, there is a very serious and well-researched history fighting to get out. He is particularly good on the experiences of the Iraqi Communist Party and its disastrous alliance with Saddam Hussein, and includes a brief reference to its participation today in the puppet “governing council”, which he describes as no surprise. He makes no reference, however, to the so-called “patriotic opposition” within the ICP, led by Ahmed Karim, and its forthright declaration that “While the party leadership is opening offices all over the place under the protection of the US occupation forces, many communists turn their backs towards the party and join the ranks of the resistance. The party which was once the strongest party of Iraq is like a dead corpse.”
Interestingly, for someone with his quasi-Trotskyist background, he acknowledges that, making comparison with imperialist attacks on Egypt and Cuba, “The difference, of course, is that now there is no Soviet Union to be considered in the calculus of aggression”.
As I say, as a history of how we got where we are today, and the continuity of contemporary Yanqui imperialism with the whole history of US hegemony dating back to the end of the 19th Century and McKinley’s adventures in the Philippines, when 220,000 Filipinos died, his book is essential reading, but he also has some trenchant, and typically controversial things to say about the way forward.
He has little time for the slogan of UN take-over in Iraq, declaring that “it is futile to look to the United Nations or Euroland, let alone Russia or China, for any serious obstacle to US designs in the Middle East”. Where should resistance start? he asks.
And he replies: “The immediate tasks that face an anti-imperialist movement are support for Iraqi resistance to the Anglo-American occupation, and opposition to any and every scheme to get the UN into Iraq as retro¬spective cover for the invasion and after-sales service for Washington and London. Let the aggressors pay the costs of their own imperial ambitions.
“All attempts to dress up the recolonisation of Iraq as a new League of Nations Mandate, in the style of the 1920s, should be stripped away.”
“Sooner or later,” he concludes, “the ring of corrupt and brutal tyrannies around Iraq will be broken. If there is one area where the cliché that classical revolutions are a thing of the past is likely to be proved wrong, it is the Arab world. The day the Mubarak, Hashemite, Assay, Saudi, and other dynasties are swept away by popular wrath, American – and Israeli – arrogance in the region will be over.”
Outside the Middle East, he urges the World Social Forum to address the logic of the link between economics and global politics: “Why should it not campaign for the shutting down of all US military bases and facilities abroad – that is, in the hundred plus countries where the US now stations troops, aircraft or supplies?
“What possible justification does this vast octapoid expanse have, other than the exercise of American power? The economic concerns of the Forum are in no contradiction with such an extension of its agenda. Economics, after all, is only a concentrated form of politics, and war a continuation of both by other means.”
While one could quarrel with the wording of the first part of that latter formulation, in charting a possible way forward, Tariq Ali is to be congratulated. He may not have had the last word, but he has certainly given us a good first one.-KARL DALLAS
Published in the Morning Star.