-
Jan 13, 2025 | 
theconversation.com | Alexander Howard
In this month’s massive Los Angeles fires, so far 24 people have died, thousands of structures have been destroyed and approximately 16,308 hectares have been burned. The fires are already among the most destructive in California’s recorded history. And as happens when major fires erupt in Los Angeles, radical (Marxist) urban historian Mike Davis’s 1998 book Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster is being shared.
-
Jan 13, 2025 | 
theconversation.com | Alexander Howard
“Human life is limited, but I would like to live forever,” read the note Yukio Mishima left on his desk shortly before he left home for the final time. Mishima, who would have turned 100 today, often touted as a potential Nobel Prize winner, was one of the most acclaimed Japanese writers and seductive prose stylists of all time.
-
Nov 25, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Alexander Howard
This month, Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain turns 100. One of the 20th century’s towering literary achievements, it is a sweeping critique of the dangerous totalitarian political forces that shaped – and very nearly destroyed – Europe in Mann’s lifetime. The novel also reflects Mann’s own dramatic public and political evolution.
-
Nov 25, 2024 | 
flipboard.com | Alexander Howard
11 hours agoBorn just three years apart on opposite sides of the globe, Liliana Maresca and Gundula Schulze Eldowy were both entered into worlds of political turmoil. Maresca (b. 1951, Avellaneda, Argentina), under the fascistic rule of General Juan Perón (followed by military dictatorship in 1976), and Eldowy …
-
Oct 31, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Alexander Howard
Gavin McInnes, founder of far-right “Western chauvinist” group the Proud Boys, told a BBC documentary that “the corrupt leftwing media” was responsible for the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, it emerged this week. The documentary also showed him saying he wants to “make America hate again”. “The left are the violent ones”, McInnes told documentary makers.
-
Oct 14, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Alexander Howard
A few months ago, the president of prestigious French publishing house Gallimard reported that Meta’s generative AI tool had refused requests to write in the distinctive style of Michel Houellebecq, France’s most famous living novelist. It was deemed too offensive and discriminatory. Certainly, Houellebecq is known for his darkly satirical, mordantly comedic and unremittingly pessimistic portrayals of contemporary life.
-
Oct 14, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Alexander Howard
A century ago, French writer André Breton published a manifesto that would go on to become one of the most influential artistic texts of the 20th century. Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism launched a movement that transformed not only visual art, but also literature, theatre and film. Surrealism drew on developments in psychology to herald a revolutionary new way of doing, seeing and being.
-
Sep 22, 2024 | 
scroll.in | Alexander Howard
Rachel Kushner ranks among the finest novelists working today. The recipient of several major literary awards and a former Guggenheim Fellow, Kushner, who has a background in political economy and United States foreign policy, uses her fiction to explore the historical and geopolitical pressures that bear down on and determine everyday life and patterns of social behaviour. “What is shaping people?
-
Sep 19, 2024 | 
tolerance.ca | Alexander Howard
By Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
The shadow of Ayn Rand (beloved by Donald Trump and Elon Musk) looms large over new novels by Lexi Freiman and Lionel Shriver, which satirise cancel culture. One of them is a useful critique of our age. Read complete article© The Conversation
-
-
Sep 19, 2024 | 
theconversation.com | Alexander Howard
Love her or loathe her, Ayn Rand is an undeniably influential figure. Her contemporary admirers range from celebrities – Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe – to politicians, including Donald Trump. Cultural commentator Lisa Duggan has called her “the ultimate mean girl”. Rand was implacably opposed to all forms of altruism, social welfare programs and governmental oversight. She also harboured a lifelong hatred of communism.
