MEMBER BLOG TAG: justice
| Monday, May 3, 2010 5:06PM | | | | Javier Cercas/Amanda Vaill | Tags: Fascism, Spanish Civil War, novels, justice, truth, lies, Javier Cercas, Amanda Vaill, Eduardo Lago
| | | I came to this session because of my interest in the Spanish Civil War. This was my father's war; when the brigadistas had their reunion in Spain a few years ago, I attended this moving event with members of my family.
Javier Cercas read from his book SOLDIERS OF SALAMIS a passage in which the a republican fighter escapes the Fascists, and a Fascist soldier who discovers him does not turn him in. Cercas read in Spanish; the passage was then read in English by Amanda Vaill.
She started her interview by asking him how he began writing novels, but this soon led to an interesting discussion of how his main character, often named Javier, is like him and not like him. Cercas... | | | | | | | Sunday, November 1, 2009 12:41PM | | | | Fairness to the Rabbit and the Wolf | Tags: Wild Justice. Marc Bekoff, Jessica Pierce, wolves, ravens, morality
| | | | In their splendid book Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals, Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce argue that animals have a morality, in that their behavior is governed by codes based on moral qualities such as "forgiveness, fairness, retribution, reciprocity, and empathy." They generally assume, however, that animal morality is species-specific, and that may not necessarily be the case. People have, and have always had, moral precepts governing our interaction with animals and the environment, even if these are usually harder to formulate than those that concern interaction with other human beings. Animals often, perhaps invariably, live in symbiotic relations with other species. As Lawrence Kilham has documented, wolves and ravens not only hunt cooperatively but even sing together. And if both the pack of... | | | | | | | Monday, May 4, 2009 11:29AM | | | | Writers and Politics at PEN | Tags: Writers and Politics, PEN World Voices, Nadeem Aslam, Khet Mar, Domenico Starnone, Norbert Gstrein, Mariken Jongman, Larry Siems, Justice for All, Richard Crasta
| | | WRITERS AND POLITICS AT PEN WORLD VOICES
Featuring Nadeem Aslam, Norbert Gstrein, Mariken Jongman, Khet Mar, Domenico Starnone, and Larry Siems.
With politicians becoming writers (Obama, Nixon), and writers becoming politicians (Mario Vargas Llosa, Vaclav Havel, Shashi Tharoor), is it possible to draw a line between politics and literature, and declare that one should never include the other?
Art as neutral to and indifferent to and above politics: it is an appealing self-deception, a bit more prevalent in the West, with writers whose professed stance, “I am not my brother’s keeper; I’m an artist, and that is all I am” seemingly carries this subtext: "I’ve got to look out for Number One,... | | | | | |
|
|
