LITERATURE AND SOCIETY dance a duet and take turns leading.  It isn’t always apparent that changes in Art are a response to changes in society and culture  or whether the order is reversed. Yet the very “ominous” poem, The Second Coming by Yeats was written just after WWI, the “war to end all wars” (https://www.moviesmarketsandmore.com/twilight-in-the-land-of-more/). And Orwell’s dystopian 1984 (published 1949) was a response to totalitarianism before, during, and after WWII (https://www.moviesmarketsandmore.com/orwells-1984-is-the-book-of-our-time-a-canticle-for-eric-blair/ ). In the Roaring Twenties, the male and privileged romanticism of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were the rage. By the end of the Depression, the mantle of social authority was transferred to the destitute masses in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or the more haunted existences of the Deep South revealed in

When John LeCarre died, I assumed I’d read his last book.  A friend texted me that a new LeCarre book was coming out. I investigated and ordered it immediately. The title was Silverview. I wasn’t through the first two chapters before I sensed a younger, more daring author. The author had died at 90 years of age.  He had begun the Silverview manuscript over a decade ago but paused time and time again, in search of a missing element. His son–also a writer– fulfilled a promise and saw the project through. It’s a shorter novel, but has the watermark of his best work: two ideals compete for devotion, be they patriotism and love, the individual and the institution, or conscience and expedience. It’s typically a somber

    “THEY WERE GARGANTUAN creatures. The earth was helpless before them as they devoured at their leisure whatever in their path might satisfy their appetites for another day.” Of course, this quote might be from a curator leading a fifth grade class through the Natural Science Exhibit on dinosaurs. But it could also be a future curator—from an orbiting city— lecturing about the now extinct giant corporations – many of them with sales figures that dwarfed the economic output of whole countries. “These “machines” as we now think of them, were so focused on meeting their insatiable quotas for growth, they altered the proximate ecosphere and even economically colonized the inhabitants. Of course, after exhausting the resources of the surface they scoured the ocean

    THE PRESENT has the unique quality of being so imposing–so suddenly familiar–that despite more surreal or otherworldly events that history will deem “tumultuous” or “cataclysmic,” people never quite view themselves as living in a time of great change. Of all the happenings in the US that have broken the rules of logic, sanity,  or even common sense in recent years–and they are legion–one stands out to me. But first, I am going to list things that, twenty years ago, I would have sworn could never happen in the US during my lifetime: The US electoral system elected a “reality” TV show star who had filed for bankruptcy a number of times, had no political experience, and claimed to never read books. He also

  I BEGAN READING THE SPY NOVELS of the late John LeCarre’ thirty years ago (see https://www.moviesmarketsandmore.com/the-author-who-came-in-from-the-cold-on-john-le-carre/). I have reread most of them many times. The experiences–the places of being he draws you into–become a destination each time you open one of his books: an exotic canyon, a rare geological formation, or a hiking trail that weaves into and out of vistas and panoramas and naturescapes. And each time there’s something new you missed the last time. One drawback to reading his more “believable” espionage novels is that having been a spy, he dramatizes the plots of high intrigue that do occur, but are covered up in the interest of national security. Too much spy novel reading can leave you spotting conspiracies in even the

[Below: Soviet Poster, 1931 Public Domain.  In fact, “2+2 = 5.” is also a slogan from “1984”]     THE REPUBLICANS and their messaging partners seem to want to sabotage Biden’s Covid-19 success and don’t much mind that it shortens the life expectancy of their own voters, weakens the economy, kills innocent bystanders, and incubates new, deadlier strains of the virus. As with their Clueless Leader, they don’t seem to think or plan, but rather derive their actions from a collective Oppositional Defiant Disorder–opposing and defying order itself and most of the tenets of a functioning democratic society. But it’s gone too far with the deliberate and deadly lies. This country needs to enact some anti-propaganda legislation. Just as the right to bear arms does

A very long time ago, my brothers and I slept three beds across in the same room downstairs. Several times each week our father made popcorn, drank soda, and read his magazines in the kitchen at the top of the stairs.  It was a ritual of his, and my mother apparently gave him that space; he worked long days and Saturdays, too. Some nights, after we were supposed to have been asleep, we heard the sound as he shook the iron skillet across the stovetop. This while the smell of fresh-popped corn wafted down.  Occasionally one of us would creep upstairs and ask for a bowl–but we would not be asking for a bowl of just any popcorn. The kernels came from the farmers in

  ONLY TWO WEEKS AGO, when I posted The Sun, the Moon, and the Truth (https://www.moviesmarketsandmore.com/1838-2/), it hadn’t occurred to me that the financial sector might slip in at the back of the alternate reality parade and march into make-believe with other swarms of society.  In hindsight, there was already a “mania for the ages” in progress (https://www.moviesmarketsandmore.com/a-mania-to-rule-them-all/), and what is a mania if not an alternate reality and a distortion of truth–in this case truth as value?  One source I trust cited a pandemic-induced surge in day-trading as a source of fuel for the markets (most day-traders play the “long” side only–they are buyers who follow an uptrend or  “momentum traders.”).  This surely helps to explain the near vertical rise in the S&P500 index

IN THE COLLEGES where I learned and taught, students were required to write papers and reports to demonstrate their understanding of topics or concepts. The emphasis was always to support a premise or an argument using credible sources: facts and authorities, proven theories or accepted logic, studies, and experiments. The strength of a paper or report relied upon the foundation of existing knowledge–of Truth.  Almost all we  can point to as human progress is a result of the process of establishing what is True and then building on it. The structure of human advancement is a citadel atop a mountain of Truth. Certainly the leaps in sciences could not have occurred if we had designed our cars and boats and planes  based on how we

IMPORTANT SPIRITS FROM OUR PAST summoned their experiences, perspectives, and talents to deliver blessings and admonitions—invaluable gifts–to posterity. Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Hugo, Sappho, Simone De Beauvoir, Ursula Le Guin are just a few that come to mind. They used books, plays, and poems to craft messages and warnings that would be relevant for millennia. After all, the human drama is nothing if not a series of remakes and sequels. Because human group behavior is so repetitive, many such messages and warnings have the clarity of a premonition or a revelation. I just finished reading the George Orwell (his real name was Eric Blair) classic 1984 for about the seventh time. I have read it every four or five years since I was in college and