The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,300 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
“A truly great novel is a story to the simple, a parable to the wise, a direct revelation of reality to the person who has made it part of his or her being.”
“The novel is a work of fiction in which the imagination and the intellect combine to express life in the form of a story; the imagination is always directed and controlled by the intellect. It is interested chiefly, not in romance and adventure, but in men and women as they are; it aims to show the motives and influences which govern human life, and the effects of personal choice upon character and destiny. Such is the true novel; and, as such, it opens a wider and more interesting field than any other type of literature.”
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“The novel is the extended story of a group of individualized characters who are made to come alive in a normal background, and whose personalities interact on one another toward a specific outcome. The ultimate test of a true novel is its character drawing. In a good novel the incidents must be not only possible but probable; in a great novel, they must be inevitable.”
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From “The Writer’s Task,” An Address by Bernard Malamud, author, March 1959:
“It seems to me that the writer’s most important task, no matter what the current theory of man, or his prevailing mood, is to recapture his image as human being as each of us in his secret heart knows it to be, and as history and literature have from the beginning revealed it. At the same time, the writer must imagine a better world for men while he shows us, in all its ugliness and beauty, the possibilities of this. In re-creating the humanity of man, in reality his greatness, he will, among other things, hold up the mirror to the mystery of him, in which poetry and possibility live, though he has endlessly betrayed them. In a sense, the writer in his art, without directly stating it–though he may preach, his work must not–must remind man that he has, in his human striving, invented nothing less than freedom; and if he will devoutly remember this, he will understand the best way to preserve it, and his own highest value.”
From
On Moral Fiction (1978)
Notes put together from the book; each passage could be a starting point for discussion.
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Criticism, like art, is partly a game [but the game has a point].
My basic message . . . drawn from Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, and the rest, and a standard in Western civilization down through the eighteenth century . . . : TRUE ART IS MORAL: it seeks to improve life, not debase it.
Trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of more serious art.
Art is essentially serious and beneficial, a game played against chaos and death, against entropy.
Art re-discovers, generation by generation, what is necessary to humanness.
The critic’s proper business is explanation and evaluation, . . .
To understand a critic, one needs a clear head and a sensitive heart, but not great powers of the imagination.
Criticism and art, like theology and religion, are basically companions but not always friends. At times, they may be enemies.
True art is a conduit between body and soul, between feeling unabstracted and abstraction unfelt.
Dullness is the chief enemy of art.
True art is too complex to reflect the party line.
True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.
**Morality is nothing more than doing what is unselfish, helpful, kind, and noble-hearted, and doing it with at least a reasonable expectation that . . . we won’t be sorry for what we’ve done. Moral action is action which affirms life.
True morality [is] life-affirming, just, and compassionate behavior.
Great art celebrates life’s potential, offering a vision unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love.
In art, morality and love are inextricably bound: we affirm what is good . . . because we care.
Critics would be useful people to have around if they would simply do their work, carefully and thoughtfully assessing works of art, calling attention to those worth noticing, and explaining clearly, sensibly, and justly why others need not take up our time.
A good book is one that, for its time, is wise, sane, and magical, one that clarifies life and tends to improve it.
The chief quality that distinguishes great art . . . is its sanity, the good sense and efficient energy with which it goes after what is really there and feels significant.
The true artist’s purpose, and the purpose of the true critic after him, is to show what is healthy, in other words sane, in human seeing, thinking, and feeling, and to point out what is not.
The theoretical border between art and madness seems to be, then, that the artist can wake up and the psychotic cannot. When Hamlet plays mad, he takes a step toward real madness. Sanity is remembering the purpose of the game.
**The business of civilization is to pay attention, remembering what is central, remembering that we live or die by the artist’s vision, sane or cracked.
BY: JAMES F. O’NEIL
I have been a War Lover as long as I can remember. I loved John Wayne as a military hero: Flying Tigers, The Fighting Seabees [the word “Seabee” comes from initials “CB” which in turn comes from the term Construction Battalions], They Were Expendable, Sands of Iwo Jima:
John Wayne
Then Steve McQueen, in The War Lover or Hell Is for Heroes or The Great Escape.
I grew up with Two-Fisted Tales comics, and Frontline Combat.
Favorite War Comic Book
“CALL UNCLE BILL!” my mother shouted from the bathroom. He came on a Saturday morning, March 10, 1951. Off I went to see The Steel Helmet at the Ogden Theater in Chicago (at 63rd and Marshfield, a favorite place I could walk to). And after the movie–VOILA!–I had a new baby brother. That was neat. Go to the movies–and get a brother. (That is one of my fondest memories of a time–and one of my favorite movies, yet to this day.)
And then, older, I became so aware of content and history. In addition, after years with studying and teaching Shakespeare–and reading of war, like The Iliad and The Aeneid, like For Whom the Bell Tolls or All Quiet on the Western Front–I realized that if the essence of a tragedy is our awareness of the WASTE OF GOOD, then surely the essence of war is double tragic: waste upon waste.
I asked, What of this loss of all that is good or could be good in a man?
War brings out the worst: disregard for all that has been taught to be valued, to be sacred: life and property, manhood itself. It is often a rite of passage, a ripping from the womb of adolescence or youth (or younger, with boy-soldiers), tearing at morals, sensibilities, a sense of love and decency. And war tears apart, rips from limb to limb, often literally.
This is nothing new: we have wars, we live war. Some live for war itself; for some, it is a job, maybe even a duty. Sometimes only the players change; sometimes the same territory is fought over and paid for again and again, in human life, in human misery.
Arma virumque cano: “I sing of arms and the man,” Virgil put it so aptly many years ago (29-19 BCE) in a “great” war story. However, what is so “great” about a war story, so great that I “love” such tellings of action or characters in military situations.
A war story is truly a work of art, a play that pits human against human in extremis, in the extreme. It is a show from an artist’s perspective, a show of good and goodness–if such is possible in this Game of War, which relates hurt and hurting, winners and losers, death and destruction.
“Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies,” said Picasso (1923). The artist of war, as in Guernica, shows the truth of the story: that war IS hell, that war IS a double tragedy, that the truth of war needs to be told, to be shown: heroes die, we die. Death is real: portrayed, acted, dramatized.
Guernica
Of course, there is often much more to it: morality, politics, history–even theology (a story of gods and about God, perhaps?). For me, however, it is character (Saving Private Ryan), story (The Hunt for Red October), emotion (even with Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” mournfully played while I watch Platoon, tugging at my senses). Sometimes I cry, I mourn, I laugh (even); I am moved. I often think of the artist trying to exorcise his devils (Shakespeare’s “war” stories like Othello?), showing the waste of souls (like Apocalypse Now), or relating war’s errors and futility (A Bridge Too Far).
I am a War Lover. I have my favorites, even those about love-in-war (like The English Patient). But I do hate war and what necessitates it and what it does solve or not solve. Yet I am not a “hawk” by any means. Nevertheless, I have accepted the reality of it. And I am aware as an American citizen that I am a recipient of the spoils of war (The Patriot). And so it goes (Slaughterhouse–Five). Perhaps, someday–highly unlikely–we may experience A Farewell to Arms.
© James F. O’Neil 2015
ADDENDUM: Full Metal Jacket was recently “voted” the best war movie ever made–arguably, very arguably. Stanley Kubrick’s film was “victorious” in a title matchup of Military Times‘ “Military Movie Madness,” downing Patton by a sizable margin vote to determine the best military movie ever made.
Memories of a Time 