“All This Life Made This Play”: An Interview with Keith Hamilton Cobb

Los Angeles Review of Books

JY: It seems like theater makes possible a certain kind of community. While I was watching American Moor, people around me were moving in their seats, zipping up their jackets, shuffling. Maybe, the audience is pulling in different directions, but we’re all in this space together having to face the truth or a truth. It is a community at least for a couple hours. What kind of community can be formed by the experience of theater?

KHC: First, I think you’re right. Audiences don’t know what to expect from theater, and it’s expensive, but once people are in there, they see themselves reflected in the play. It may make them uncomfortable. What do I do with this moment? If we’re talking about American Moor, people from across the spectrum have responded to this work brilliantly and thoughtfully. We are having a real and authentic moment with this play.

Kafka’s Vanished World: On Reiner Stach’s ‘The Decisive Years’ and ‘The Years of Insight’

The Millions

The clubby literary world of early-20th-century Prague, the anxious and unfulfilled courtship, the grinding filial obligations — none of it seems to promise an extraordinary literary career. What distinguished the Prague novelist and short-story writer from his contemporaries, the largely-forgotten Symbolist and Expressionist writers that he shared stage and page with?

The Stick and Move: Rehabilitation and Rope-a-Dope in a Louisiana Prison

The Ring

Longlisted as “Notable Sports Writing of 2010,” Best American Sports Writing 2010, ed. Jane Leavy

“Soon after the budget cuts were announced last May, the prison newspaper, the Chainlink Chronicle, reported that a wry comment was posted on the RCC’s bulletin board: “Due to economic conditions, the light at the end of the tunnel will be turned off until further notice.”

Reign of Terror: Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantanámo Diary

The Millions

The text is heavily redacted. Offering further testimony to the incompetence of his captors, the redactions are clumsy, tone-deaf, and poorly weighed. Details about a female interrogator and the pronoun “she” is deleted but it’s easy to infer from the rest of the text. “Gamal Abdel Nasser,” despite his death over 40 years ago, is obscured, presumably because the redactor didn’t recognize the name of the most seminal Arab leader of the 20th century.

The handwritten pages that are interspersed throughout the book have the chastening effect of authenticity. The pages are blotted with excisions that create a literal void, the names, details, and locations that are still classified. They also come to represent a more pervasive void: an incomplete reckoning with the unconscionable policies performed in the name of American citizens.

More Steps Than the Stairway of a Minaret

Los Angeles Review of Books

Al-Shidyāq’s arrival in English-language bookstores has a special timeliness in the fourth year of the Arab Spring; a poet, essayist, publisher, and newspaper editor, he is known as a pioneer of modern Arabic literature, and the father of Arabic journalism. He coined the modern Arab words for democracy, socialism, newspaper, and election. Perhaps portentously, his neologisms were threaded with subversive irony. He derived the translation for the thoroughly modern “newspaper” from a Classical Arabic term for Medieval Ottoman accounting books (jarīdah). The word he chose for election (entikhab) shares a three-letter root with the word for “ant-bites.” Not for nothing did al-Shidyāq work for one of the Ottoman Empire’s propaganda organs, though that newspaper, Al Jawā’eb, was one of the more contrarian official publications.

Michel Tournier and the Novel of Ideas

The Rumpus

What is novelistic thought?

There’s architectural thought, part-to-whole thinking, the relationship of Part A (Ulrich’s recognition that he is a “man without qualities”) to Part M (Ulrich becomes involved in the Parallel Campaign). Novelists need a grasp of plotting and character logic; in A Brief History of Seven Killings, how does the charismatic, sadistic gangster Josey Wales’s Character Trait lead to his Tragic Mistake?”

But I mean a different kind of thinking. I have in mind what Aristotle talks about in his Poetics. Aristotle placed thought (dianoia) behind only plot (mythos) and character (ethos) in importance.

Thought is every part that is related to speech: proving and refuting, provoking feeling, suggesting importance or triviality. Thought is one of the causes of action… it covers the mind’s activities from reasoning, perception, and emotion. Thought is expressed in speeches and is therefore closely linked to diction.

Novels are valuable because they express consciousness so elegantly. It’s that transfixing ability to provoke and dramatize thought that distinguishes the novel from any other form, but it’s under-utilized generally.

Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life by Stephen Parker

The Rumpus

In his mature work, Brecht would develop an approach to theater that denies any sentimental attachment to the characters or action. Cue cards signaled the events in the scene, reminding the audience of the play’s fictiveness. His actors cultivated a highly stylized technique that was diametrically opposed to the more prominent methods taught by Stanislavski.

What seems so painfully transparent, though, is Brecht’s own attachment to wish fulfillment and catharsis. His Galileo, an astronomer persecuted by willfully obtuse church officials, is a man who commands absolute loyalty from his circle of followers and views his own moral and professional genius as self-evident.