29 November 2011

Happy to announce the arrival of SAGINAW no.1, featuring work by Erika Staiti, Geof Huth, Matthew Lusk, Chad Lietz, and K. Silem Mohammad.

If you're not on the SAGINAW mailing list and would like a copy, send an email with your postal address to unionherald@gmail.com.

November 19, 2011

Eric Bentley, "Introduction", in Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Intro, 1952; Signet Classics, 1980).

"Above all, Six Characters was not experimental. No first-rate art is. Experiments belong to science: The scientist decides on a hypothesis and then tests it, knowing that many tests will fail, but that he might make a breakthrough someday. That is not how artists work, and the 'experimental forms' of, say Conrad or Faulkner are really quite unexperimental: They evolved from the authors' original sense of narrative. And so, while Six Characters was something that came to his mind quickly, as in a vision, Pirandello had been working toward it for years . . . (ix).

November 13, 2011

Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1937; repr. Dover, 2004)

This week's subway read resonates all over the place: with what's happening in Beijing, what's happening in Oakland (America in general), and the failure of the Eurozone. A lot of Trotsky's animus comes from bureaucratic mismanagement and the cooking of the books that is necessitated by said mismanagement. Sure, he had Stalin in his sights, but it doesn't take much to use his rubrics, extrapolate a smidge, and analyze current situations.