pptechnochief

Bogdanov, Gorki and Lenin, playing chess in Capri (1908)

=By= Gaither Stewart

A bit of Lenin before breakfast gives you the strength of a hundred camels in the courtyard. (My adaptation of a Paul Bowles’ Arab adage)

(Rome) Il signore Drin Drin, Capri fishermen called Lenin in 1910 and 1912 when the revolutionary and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya visited the Russian writer Maxim Gorky in his villa on the now famous island near Naples. Lenin did not speak Italian but he had heard the men he learned to fish with use a word he understood as drin drin (in Italian the onomatopoeia associated with ring or buzz) so the day he felt a bite on his pole, he shouted “drin drin.” Thus Vladimir Ilyich acquired his only known non-revolutionary nickname.

=By= Gaither Stewart

I just read the novel, EUPHORIA, by the young American writer, Lily King, a TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR in 2014, published by Grove Press, New York. Readers of this article do not have to worry; this is not to be a dry a book review. Instead, I have permitted myself to examine some of the ideas of this thought-provoking intellectual novel, loosely based on the life of famed anthropologist, Margaret Mead (1901-1978).

=By= Gaither Stewart

A chasm separates The People
from their rulers, the corporate state.

Dictionaries relate the word mimesis, of ancient Greek origin, to imitation, representation, mimicry, similarity, or the act of resembling. Today, mimesis is most often related to literary and societal functions.

=By= Gaither Stewart

WWhere do human rights come from? Who decides which laws are just? Do other humans like myself decide what our rights are and which laws are just laws? Or is there a source superior—nature and morality—to which oppressed humanity can turn for justice

=By= Gaither Stewart

“Any nation’s victory against imperialism is our victory, as any defeat is also our defeat.”

The short biography: Ernesto Guevara was born in Rosario in western Argentina on June 14, 1928 of well-to-do, leftwing parents, the oldest of five children. He died in the Bolivian village of La Higuera on October 9, 1967 at the age of 39. His family moved to Buenos Aires when he was 17. He learned chess from his father of Irish heritage, read from the family of library of 3000 books and was home-schooled by his radical mother. He read Pablo Neruda, John (I want to do the world some good) Keats, Walt Whitman, Jack London, Federico Lorca, Faulkner, Gide, Camus, Sartre, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Marx, Engels, Lenin and many Latin American writers. He studied medicine and motorcycled through much of Latin America. He studied Marxism also while in the youth brigades in Guatemala during the Jacobo Arbenz leftwing government before it was crushed by a CIA-organized coup d’état. In 1955 he joined Fidel Castro in Mexico where the Cubans began calling him el Che because of his constant use of the common Argentinean interjection, Che, that means something like Hey! Or, Eh? Argentineans use the interjection so often that other Latin Americans sometimes use the word for a man from Argentina. In effect, “Che” Guevara came to imply also something like “our comrade from Argentina.”. Despite their contrasting personalities he and Fidel formed a “revolutionary friendship to change the world”, which expressed their common desire. He sailed with the Castro brothers and Cienfuegos on the Granma to Cuba where they overthrew the corrupt Batista regime—the four who made the Cuban Revolution. Twelve years later, as a commander of the guerrilla movement in Bolivia, he was wounded, captured and executed by a Bolivian soldier on orders from the CIA.

=By= Gaither Stewart

I think of the modern citizen who knows that he is at the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom whose functioning is directed by authorities that remain nebulous to the executive organs, let alone to the people they deal with. Walter Benjamin (1892- 1940 in Illuminations, in reference to Franz Kafka’s novel Der Prozess, (The Trial) written, 1914-1915.

So as not to lose any potential readers of these columns before I have even gotten started, I offer d’emblée an apology for these ‘thoughts about fiction writing’, which I promise not to repeat. At least not frequently. But it seems important to spell out at the beginning and admit that my preference for writing fiction over non-fiction has ever less significance in modern times (explained in more detail below), and nonetheless to show some of the reasons for that preference in the first place and how I see the current situation of the literary composition in change.