International Grafik (1969-1980): Graphic art behind the Iron Curtain, unafraid

“If you have talent and a need to express yourself, you live unafraid.”

(a Czech citizen who lived in Prague during the Communist Era.)

This is one of those holiday season weekends where I let the shoppers rush home with their treasures -- and without me in their crush. It was a brilliant 70-degree afternoon, and summer-like.

I spent a lazy day with doors and windows open, talking to family and friends, writing Christmas cards (seasonal duty shall not be overlooked), listening to Cistercian monks chanting "music for contemplation" on the hi-fi, and following my muse's nose into some internet links previously unknown to me. These are (admittedly) legion, but then free time and a liberal arts education has its benefits.

Here, for example, is a 2010 offering from Bohemian Ink, a site that offers a look at eastern European art and graphics. Its tagline, Budapest, Burbank and beyond, indicates the blog's broad look at the original Bohemian culture as curated by Jessica Taylor Tudzin, an American writer now living in Budapest, Hungary.

In the Bohemian Ink entry Tudzin writes: "Neil Philip, a British-based writer who also runs the online original print gallery Idbury Prints ... has graciously given Bohemian Ink permission to reprint his fascinating post on Czech graphics of the 1970s. I can only just imagine the times these featured artists endured as they bravely created their art."

Included in the post is a selection of reproductions from International Grafik magazine and its thirty issues dating from 1969; the final press run was in 1980, and was devoted entirely to works by Miraslav Matous. Read the entire post here. An excerpt:

In the 1970s I remember a great deal of interest in the West in writers behind the Iron Curtain, but almost none in artists. It was just assumed that all artists in the Eastern Bloc were producing soulless socialist realism or figurative kitsch. So it has been fascinating for me to acquire work by what seems a representative sample of Czech printmakers from that decade, all published in the Danish art revue International Grafik, edited between 1969 and 1980 by Helmer Fogedgaard and Klaus Rödel. International Grafik was an altruistic labour of love.

It published almost exclusively woodcuts, wood engravings, and linocuts, printed from the original blocks or plates, in a numbered edition of 1000 copies. No doubt many important artists are unrepresented in its pages, especially those who specialized in etching and engraving, but there are enough artists here to at least get a flavour of the currents of Czech art at this time. All of the Czech artists contributing to International Grafik were doing so from inside the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

The first surprise is that in the decade after the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, Czech artists were not retreating into safe figurative images on socialist themes, but were instead diving headfirst into experiment and abstraction. These are not cowed voices, but confident and progressive ones.

Maybe in the period of “normalization” that followed the overthrow of Alexander Dubček’s reformist government there were too many other people to police, and the graphic artists somehow operated under the radar of government surveillance. I’d be very interested to hear from anyone with memories of the cultural atmosphere of this time.

(Jaroslav Vodrázka, 1973)

Graphic artist Jaroslav Vodrázka was born in Prague in 1894. He studied at the School of Applied Art, and then at the Academy of Visual Arts under Max Svabinsky. Jaroslav Vodrázka himself became a professor of graphics. He produced wood engravings, linocuts, etchings, engravings, and lithographs, and was always interested in exploring new printmaking techniques, using materials such as plastic and plexiglass. Although he lived until 1984, Vodrázka remained rooted in figurative art, creating images of peasants, landscapes, and religious scenes.

(Joseph Weiser, 1971)

... The graphic artist, art teacher, and art theorist Josef Weiser was born in Switzerland in 1914, but moved with his parents to Moravia during WWI. In 1933 he became a teacher, and from 1950-1958 was a professor of art education in the teacher training college in Olomouc. Subsequently he became head of art teaching at the institute of advanced education for teachers in Olomouc. Besides his original graphics, Josef Weiser is also known for his bookplates. Weiser, too, remained a figurative artist; in the linocuts published by International Grafik, the predominant motif is that of a rather idealised young woman. He died in 1994.

(Miroslav Matous, 1980)

... Lastly, Miroslav Matous was born in Zdárky in eastern Bohemia in 1920. Known as painter, printmaker, tapestry designer and architect, Miroslav Matous attended the Mánes School for painting, studying under Vladimír Sychra. As a printmaker, Miroslav Matous is known for lithographs, drypoints, etchings, linocuts, and woodcuts. From the evidence of these prints, the 1960s had definitely arrived in Czechoslovakia by 1980!

Tudzin adds this note: Among Neil Philip’s books are Mythology (with Philip Wilkinson), English Folktales, The Cinderella Story, Victorian Village Life, and The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse. He has also published two collections of original poetry, Holding the World Together and The Cardinal Directions. All text and photographs on this post are copyright © Neil Philip. Copyright in the artworks remains with the artists or their estates. Read more from Neil Philip on his blog, Adventures in the Print Trade.

"Vile Jelly," by C.K. Williams

"Vile Jelly"

(C.K. Williams)

I see they’re tidying the Texas textbooks again.
Chopping them down to make little minds stay
the right size for the preachers not to be vexed
as they troll for converts, or congregants, or whatever.

Troll. As in “Fishing for Men.” As in “…for Christ.”
Here’s a fisher: a pre-biblical king on a slab. Captives.
The king with a not sharp spear is blinding the first,
thrusting then twisting it into the writhing man’s eye.

Subtle carvers they were: you can see the thrust and twist.
Also how the hook, the fish hook, driven through the lip
of the victim to keep him from inconveniently struggling
and attached to a rope, tugs the lip out from the mouth.

Because the whole state of Texas buys the same book,
the import of their distortions and falsehoods is wide.
The publishers have to take them into account,
so other states’ schoolbooks are dumbed-down as well.

Who said: With my eyes closed, I see more? Not me.
Who said: I study not to learn but hoping
what I’ve learned might not be true? Not me again.
I stay still. I peek warily out the door of my stove.

That’s a story about seeing, not having to see.
A fairy tale with your usual prince, this time in a stove.
It doesn’t say why he’s there, even after he’s saved,
by your usual virgin. The scholars don’t explain either.

My theory is he locked himself in, welded the lid,
because of all he could no longer bear to behold.
Texas textbooks, for instance. Chunks of knowledge
extracted like eyes. Discarded. Thrown on a floor.

Evolution, needless to say. Sociology. Jefferson. Deism.
All these complications won’t be there anymore.
They’ll be scraped from the mold. No longer be seen.
As much is no longer seen in the real world as well.

Remember Basil the Blinder? The emperor
who had fifteen thousand enemy warriors blinded?
One of a hundred was allowed to keep one eye
to lead the rest back to their own vanquished king.

Who swooned at the sight. Then died. Actually died.
Vile jelly, it’s called in King Lear. Vile jelly. Out. Out.
“Chips of blank,” Dickinson wrote in a war poem.
“Chips of blank in boyish eyes.” Is that still in the books?

Is the king on the slab with his spear and rope?
But that was before Christ rose. Into his own stove.
“The noise of mankind,” another god groused,
“is too loud, they keep me awake. Rid me of them.”

The underling angels began boiling the acid,
but thanks be, someone had learned to write;
an inscription, visible to the irritable god,
appeared—miracle!—on a roof. Please, it read, don’t.

And the deity, sighing after for once a good nap,
decided to let us do it unto ourselves.
Which we’ve been rushing to do. As quick as we can.
By making the complications holy and blank.

By chopping eyes from susceptible minds.
To keep them from crying true tears. Thou vilest jelly.
Herds of children go bleeding into the dark.
Oh, vile. Thou chips of blank. Thou boyish eyes.

"Vile Jelly" by C.K. Williams appears in the current Winter issue of Threepenny Review. In a 2007 interview with Collin Kelly, Williams described his influences: The stuff I wrote at 19 was utterly incompetent, by 21 it was mildly incompetent, by 22 merely awful. My first models—inspiration is something else, isn’t it?—back then were Baudelaire and Yeats and Rilke. They still are, to a great extent. They more or less defined poetry for me, its splendors and its obligations, and though I’ve had many models since then, my notion of poetry still resides mostly in what I gleaned from them. His recent books are Wait, a 2010 poetry collection, and On Whitman, a study of the poet of whom he said “I felt he was overwhelming me. He was just annihilating every other notion of poetry I had."

Revisiting Nader's fantasy: a world where OWS and Ayn Rand warily coexist

Forget John Galt for the moment: who is Brovar Dortwist, and does he really own a Doberman named Get 'Em? Actually, it doesn't take much to figure out this novel-without-a-key, and intentionally so. "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" (Seven Stories Press) -- the title with its quotation marks and exclamation point included -- is Ralph Nader's 736-page first novel, and he makes no bones about it: the thinly-disguised double of Grover Norquist, anti-tax advocate, is about the only real-life figure in Nader's assault on the best-seller lists who isn't named outright.

Everyone else, from Warren Buffett to Warren Beatty, gets name-checked and suitably prominent roles in Nader's self-described new fictional genre, "the practical utopia." Occupy Wall Street might see the novel's unlikely outcome of benevolent corporatism as a heart-warming holiday dream in a cold season of continuing police actions. Ayn Rand, presumably, would be preparing Nader Shrugged.

How much of a utopia does the lifelong consumer advocate foresee? As described by Raffi Khatchadourian in his 2009 New Yorker Nader profile, a cast including Ted Turner, Yoko Ono, Phil Donahue and many others "act out Nader's political fantasies ... Corporations are neutered. Third parties win. America is reborn." That description bears more than a passing resemblance to what many people expected in the first months of an Obama presidency, and it would be a quite a reward considering Nader's own political achievements in the 2008 Presidential campaign: the New Yorker takes a bit of glee in providing the exact figure of five-tenths and six-hundredths of one percent of the popular vote.

Presumably, on his days off, the candidate was dreaming of that practical utopia and putting the finishing touches on his ultimate what-if novel.

"Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us!" is written in the peculiar style of airport-book fiction -- Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol come easily to mind -- in description that is rich in adjectives but flattens out like the Nebraska prairie outside Warren Buffett's picture window:

"In the cozy den of the large but modest house in Omaha where he has lived since he started on his first billion, Warren Buffett watched the horrors of Hurricane Katrina unfold on television in early September 2005. . . . On the fourth day, he beheld in disbelief the paralysis of local, state, and federal authorities unable to commence basic operations of rescue and sustenance, not just in New Orleans, but in towns and villages all along the Gulf Coast. . . He knew exactly what he had to do. . ."

"Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" arrived in 2009 -- a bit of relief in an overheated season of screaming over health care and other such minor scrapes. Occupy Wall Street was a season or two ahead in public response to the economic bubble burst. Ironically, it's entirely possible that some unexpected real-life events may have just seemed too much even for Nader's manual Underwood typewriter to imagine. (When an electrical storm once knocked power out at his home, Nader continued typing the pages by candlelight.)

Nader's unlikely utopia is, of course, meant to scratch the itch of any political reader -- the fact that the lifelong crusader for consumer rights sees the triumph of corporations is admittedly a fantasy, no matter how benevolent.

And whether such a future is fulfilling or frustrating depends on how much one heeds the siren call of talk-show radio hosts who have their own fantasy take on political reality.

In a courteous gesture, Nader alerted many of the book's real-life counterparts to their supporting roles in his novel; in The New Yorker, Nader reported that some of them "were hard to get." (One imagines Nader attempting to reach Barry Diller in China using a rotary-dial phone, but that could just be imagination.) Yoko Ono slyly asked of her character, "does she look like a tiny dragon?" And, as the New Yorker article reports, the novel's consummate baddie Grover Norquist wished Nader would have contacted him earlier, though not for the expected reason. "I don't like dogs. He should have checked," Norquist said.

In the pages of immortalizing fiction, apparently, all can be forgiven, even for political opposites. Norquist went on: "I like Ralph, and I have the warm fuzzies for him on a number of levels." That was one of the few truly surprising and civilized comments to be heard in that polarizing, long-ago season -- but, then again, it also has the ring of fictional jacket-flap copy for a book called "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" -- with quotation marks, exclamation point, and all.

Vonnegut on Twain, born November 30, 1835: "how appalled this entertainer must have been"

Above: Twain and his daughters,

photographed by Thomas Edison in 1909.

Kurt Vonnegut on Mark Twain, 2007: " ... He himself was the most enchanting American at the heart of each of his tales. We can forgive this easily, for he managed to imply that the reader was enough like him to be his brother. He did this most strikingly in the personae of the riverboat pilot and Huckleberry Finn. He did this so well that the newest arrival to these shores, very likely a Vietnamese refugee, can, by reading him begin to imagine that he has some of idiosyncratically American charm of Mark Twain." Earlier in his remarks, Vonnegut explained Twain's "necessary miracle":

... This is the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound. A storyteller, like any other sort of enthusiastic liar, is on an unpredictable adventure. His initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself.

The wildest adventure with storytelling, with Missouri calculation, of which I know is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It was written in this sacredly absurd monument -- as were Tom Sawyer, A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, from which I have quoted, and the world masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn. Twain's most productive years were spent here--from the time he was 39 until he was my age, which, is 56. He was my age when he left here to live in Europe and Redding and New York, his greatest work behind him.

That is haw far down the river of life he was when he left here. He could not afford to live here anymore. He was very bad at business.

About A Connecticut Yankee: its premise, its first lie, seemed to promise a lark. What could more comical than sending back into the Dark Ages one late nineteenth-century optimist and technocrat? Such a premise was surely the key to a treasure chest of screamingly funny jokes and situations. Mark Twain would have been wise to say to himself as he picked that glittering key, "Keep your hat on. We may wind up miles from here."

I will refresh your memories as where he wound up, with or without his hat. The Yankee and his little band of electricians and mechanics and what-have-yous are being attacked by thousands of English warriors armed with swords and spears and axes. The Yankee has fortified his position with a series of electric fences and a moat. He also has several precursors to modern machine guns, which are Gatling guns.

Comically enough, thousands of early attackers have already been electrocuted. Ten thousand of the greatest knights in England have been held in reserve. Now they come. I quote, and I invite you to chuckle along with me as I read:

"The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand. They halted,they stood their ground a moment against that withering deluge of fire, and then they broke, faced about, and swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment; the three-fourths it and plunged over-to death by drowning.

"Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us."

End quote.

What a funny ending.

Mark Twain died in 1910, at the age of 75 and four years before the start of World War I. I have heard it said that he predicted that war and all the wars after that in A Connecticut Yankee. It was not Twain who did that. It was his premise.

How appalled this entertainer must have been to have his innocent joking about technology and superstition lead him inexorably to such a ghastly end. Suddenly and horrifyingly, what had seemed so clear throughout the book was not clear at all -- who was good, who was bad, who was wise, who was foolish. I ask you: "Who was most crazed by superstition and bloodlust, the men with the swords or the men with the Gatling guns?"

And I suggest to you that the fatal premise of A Connecticut Yankee remains a chief premise of Western civilization, and increasingly of world civilization, to wit: the sanest, most likable persons, employing superior technology, will enforce sanity throughout the world.

Shall I read the ending of A Connecticut Yankee to you yet again?

No need. ...

William Blake, born November 28, 1757

Blake's "How sweet I roamed from field to field" as performed by Ed Sanders of The Fugs (1965). Visit The Allen Ginsberg Project for a transcription of Ginsberg's 1975 Naropa class on Blake, along with many links.

Open Culture's 25 best non-fiction books, suggested by readers

Open Culture asked its readers to name the best non-fiction books (of all time!) and, as this kind of open-call goes, the results were pretty broad and with a few surprises here and there. The top 25 were selected primarily through a process of repeat nominees, and it would be interesting to see what else was nominated but didn't make the cut -- for example, Howard Zinn's APeople's History of the United States.

Still the list leaves a wide range of reading -- much of it 20th century history, some American school-room classics, and the thoughts of a Roman emperor. Commenters tossed a few zingers: only two women writers made the top 25, and suggested Beryl Markham's excellent West With the Night and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

And at least the number one nomination reveals all that heavy reading doesn't ruin a sense of humor.

It is encouraging to see that the list isn't top-heavy with university-taught philosophy: whoever the readers of Open Culture might be, they are obviously reading for themselves and not for a college curriculum. And not a single book about the death of the printed word -- an encouraging sign that readers are still cracking open books, although Open Culture contributor Sheerly Avni does admit that the selection process "leaned toward books that are available for free online."

The List, in descending order:

Hunter S. Thompson - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science

Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

Wendell Berry - The Way of Ignorance

Joseph Mitchell - Up in the Old Hotel

Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe

Norman Lewis - Voices of the Old Sea

Joan Didion - The White Album

Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Tony Judt - Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Henry David Thoreau - Walden

Marcus Aurelius - Meditations

Bill Bryson - A Walk in the Woods

George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia

Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem

Booker T. Washington - Up From Slavery

Jorge Luis Borges - Other Inquisitions (1937-1952)

Marcus Rediker - Villains of all Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Lao Tzu, Stephen Mitchell, trans. Tao Te Ching

Victor Klemperer - I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years (1933-1941)

Greil Marcus - Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

Philip Gourevitch - We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families

Winston Churchill - A History of the English Speaking Peoples

and as any journalist might add to the top 25:

Lastly, and only in part because we’ve been warned that we would be roundly scolded for the omission: The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White.

One writer's manifesto against censorship

Ellen Hopkins is the New York Times bestselling author of Crank, Burned, Impulse, Glass, Identical, Tricks, and Fallout. Her novels are praised by teens and adults, as she has said, because her readers tell her "that my books don't feel like fiction, and that my characters feel like friends."

She wrote at The Huffington Post about her experience with parents and schools that find her books and their subject matter too adult for young readers. This has resulted in cancellations, school bans, and "dis-invitations," as Hopkins refers to the awkward process of rescinding appearances before school groups, made sometimes by representatives who have not actually read her books.

Earlier this year she created an anti-censorship poem, "Manifesto." Her publisher, Simon and Schuster, supports Hopkins's efforts to confront censorship and prominently features a link to the poem on her author page. Here's an excerpt from her article at The Huffington Post. "Manifesto" can be read there as well.

Some call my books edgy; others say they're dark. They do explore tough subject matter -- addiction, abuse, thoughts of suicide, teen prostitution. But they bring young adult readers a middle-aged author's broader perspective. They show outcomes to choices, offer understanding. And each is infused with hope. I don't sugarcoat, but neither is the content gratuitous. Something would-be censors could only know if they'd actually read the books rather than skimming for dirty words or sexual content.

My first dis-invitation was last year in Norman, Oklahoma. I had donated a school visit to a charity auction. The winning bid came from a middle school librarian, who was excited to have me talk to her students about poetry, writing process and reaching for their dreams. Except, two days before the visit, a parent challenged one of my books for "inappropriate content." She demanded it be pulled from all middle school libraries in the district. And also that no student should hear me speak.

The superintendent, who hadn't read my books, agreed, prohibiting me from speaking to any school in the district. The librarian scrambled and I spoke community-wide at the nearby Hillsdale Baptist Freewill College. (The challenged book, by the way, was later replaced in the middle school libraries.) The timing was exceptional, if unintentional. It was Banned Books Week 2009, and my publisher, Simon & Schuster, had recently created a broadside of a poem I'd written for the occasion. My "Manifesto" was currently

being featured in bookstores and libraries across the country.

Segue to August 2010. Simon & Schuster repackaged "Manifesto" just about the time another dis-invitation took place. Humble, Texas is a suburb of Houston, and every other year the Humble Independent School District organizes a teen literature festival. I was invited to headline the January 2011 event. The term "invitation" would later be debated, as no formal contract was signed. But through a series of email exchanges, the invitation was extended, I agreed, we settled on an honorarium, and I blocked out the date on my calendar (thus turning down other invitations).

This time it was a middle school librarian who initiated the dis-invitation. Apparently concerned about my being in the vicinity of her students, she got a couple of parents riled and they approached two members of the school board. Again, no one read my books. Rather, according to the superintendent, he relied on his head librarian's research -- a website that rates content. He ordered my "removal" from the festival roster, despite several librarians rallying in my defense.

According to the National Coalition Against Censorship, removing an author from an event because someone disagrees with their ideas or content in their books meets the definition of censorship. And in protest, five of the seven other festival authors -- Pete Hautman, Melissa de la Cruz, Matt de la Pena, Tera Lynn Childs and Brian Meehl -- withdrew. Our books are all very different. But our voices are united against allowing one person, or a handful of people, to speak for an entire community. ...