Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Good Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers

 A substantial article on The Marginalian:  Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Good Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers

"With the disclaimer that “descriptions mean nothing without examples,” Sontag points to Gordimer as the “living writer who exemplifies all that a writer can be” and considers what the South African author’s “large, ravishingly eloquent, and extremely varied body of work” reveals about the key to all great writing:

    A great writer of fiction both creates — through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms — a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will."

The Man He Killed

 
The Man He Killed

By Thomas Hardy

"Had he and I but met
            By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
            Right many a nipperkin!

            "But ranged as infantry,
            And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
            And killed him in his place.

            "I shot him dead because —
            Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
            That's clear enough; although

            "He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
            Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
            No other reason why.

            "Yes; quaint and curious war is!
            You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
            Or help to half-a-crown."

Éirinn & Iran go Brách

 Éirinn & Iran go Brách

By: Dr. Mansour Bonakdarian 

 

"This book analyzes particular patterns of nationalist self-configuration and nationalist uses of memory, counter-memory, and historical amnesia in Ireland from roughly around the time of the emergence of a broad-based non-sectarian Irish nationalist platform in the late eighteenth century (the Society of United Irishmen) until Ireland’s partition and the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922. In approaching Irish nationalism through the particular historical lens of “Iran,” this book underscores the fact that Irish nationalism during this period (and even earlier) always utilized a historical paradigm that grounded Anglo-Irish encounters and Irish nationalism in the broader world history, a process that I term “worlding of Ireland.” In effect, Irish nationalism was always politically and culturally cosmopolitan in outlook in some formulations, even in the case of many nationalists who resorted to insular and narrowly defined exclusionary ethnic and/or religious formulations of the Irish “nation.” Irish nationalists, as nationalists in many other parts of the world, recurrently imagined their own history either in contrast to or as reflected in, the histories of peoples and lands elsewhere, even while claiming the historical uniqueness of the Irish experience. Present in a wide range of Irish nationalist political, cultural, and historical utterances were assertions of past and/or present affinities with other peoples and lands."

It’s a privilege to read Dr. Bonakdarian’s new book:

Éirinn & Iran go Brách: Iran in Irish-nationalist historical, literary, cultural, and political imaginations from the late 18th century to 1921

“Mansour Bonakdarian offers a sustained, meticulously researched comparative history on Irish-Iranian entanglements spanning the long nineteenth century. Moving from the initial conduit of romantic orientalism toward a colonial lens on Imperial British world politics, it is a very welcome addition to the fields of Irish studies, nationalism studies, and comparative history.” ― Joep Leerssen, Emeritus Professor, Universities of Amsterdam and Maastricht

Bride of Acacias and Six Silent Men at Chicago Dramatists

A staged reading of Bride of Acacias and Six Silent Men at Chicago Dramatists

By CD Resident Playwright Ezzat Goushegir

Directed by Arti Ishak

Actors:
Maryam Abdi
Alex Attea
Musa Ghaznavi
Jelani Julius
Nate Vangine
Bob Jenkins
Kian Adel 

ABOUT THE PLAY:
Set in 1950s Iran and Europe, a rebellious female poet, seeking freedom and independence, strives to create a sense of self. Six puzzled, silent men, in search of their own identities, observe her as she enacts her life.

MEET THE PLAYWRIGHT:
Ezzat Goushegir is a bilingual playwright, poet, diarist, and fiction writer, whose works have been staged and published internationally, including fourteen books in Farsi. Her plays in English have been translated into different languages and produced by theater companies in the U.S., Europe, China, the Philippines, and received awards. Her latest play “My Name is Inanna” was premiered in China in 2012 and staged by Red Tape Theatre in Chicago in 2021.

MEET THE DIRECTOR:
Arti Ishak (they/them) is an actor, director and writer. Acting credits include theatres like The Second City, Haven, Circle, Writers, American Theater Company. TV: Southside (HBO); Dark Matter (Apple TV); Chicago Med (NBC). Directing credits: Shukran Bas (Means of Productions), ba la (HF Productions), Same Sects (Haven Chicago), Hatefuck (First Floor Theatre). Arti is staff with The Chicago Inclusion Project, an instructor at Black Box Acting & Depaul University. They’re represented by Paonessa Talent Agency www.artiishak.com

 

Three Guineas

Three Guineas

 Three Guineas is a book-length essay by Virginia Woolf, published in June 1938. 

The entire essay is structured as a response to an educated gentleman who has written a letter asking Woolf to join his efforts to help prevent war. War was looming in 1936–7 and the question was particularly pressing to Woolf, a committed pacifist.[2] In the gentleman's letter (he is never named), he asks Woolf her opinion about how best to prevent war and offers some practical steps. Woolf opens her response by stating first, and with some slight hyperbole, that this is "a remarkable letter—a letter perhaps unique in the history of human correspondence, since when before has an educated man asked a woman how in her opinion war can be prevented."

Drawn from life: why have novelists stopped making things up?

 Drawn from life: why have novelists stopped making things up?

....

"Where does this leave invention? The question of its meaning and value seems to grip the current tranche of autofictioneers, keen to probe the hierarchies and hypocrisies that impose themselves on writing. Long have aspiring fiction writers been told to write what they know, only to find themselves criticised for lacking imagination. In other words, give voice to your subjectivity but avoid narcissism; make it up, or we’ll think you can’t. Tell the truth, or we’ll think you’re a liar."

....

"To write autofiction, however, requires a willingness to treat oneself as the central character, a countercultural celebrity, and this is probably what has sparked resistance to it. It requires ego, it demands the bold determination to make a mark. In the case of Cusk, that started some time ago, when she wrote about motherhood and divorce in A Life’s Work and Aftermath and faced a censure that declared itself on behalf of the unknown others – the children, the husband – in her story. It seemed a convenient moment for such scruples to arise in a culture otherwise fairly used to the blithe incorporation of others’ lives, and it brought to mind Virginia Woolf’s imagined objections of those who would thwart female creativity in Three Guineas:

    But to sell a brain is worse than to sell a body, for when the body seller has sold her momentary pleasure she takes good care that the matter shall end there. But when a brain seller has sold her brain, its anaemic, vicious and diseased progeny are let loose upon the world to infect and corrupt and sow the seeds of disease in others. Thus we are asking you, Madam, to pledge yourself not to commit adultery of the brain because it is a much more serious offence than the other.

History of Mother’s Day as a Day of Peace: Julia Ward Howe

 History of Mother’s Day as a Day of Peace: Julia Ward Howe

While Mother’s Day has presently lost much of its early edge for justice, it’s important to note some of the underpinning intentions and re-commit ourselves to its prescient calling. At a time when our country is again engaged in devastating and costly wars abroad and many of our own communities are torn apart by violence, it’s time for Mother’s Day to return to its roots.

In the spirit of Ward Howe’s original call, this occasion can be a time to dedicate ourselves, on behalf of mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers everywhere, to rise up and protect our most vulnerable by calling for our leaders to make a directional shift in the course of our nation. There is no need more urgent than addressing the devastation brought on by violence in all of its forms – affecting the lives of untold millions in our nation and around the world. Then, we may finally see the carnage and devastation of violence and war fade into its own history. There could of course be no better way to honor our mothers.
MOTHER’S DAY PROCLAMATION
Boston, 1870

“Arise, then… women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism be that of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies.
Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage,
for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says:  Disarm, Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
nor violence vindicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
at the summons of war,
let women now leave all that may be left of home
for a great and earnest day of council.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means
whereby the great human family can live in peace,
each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask
that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality,
may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient,
and at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
to promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
the amicable settlement of international questions,
the great and general interests of peace.“