“All art is political,” Lin-Manuel Miranda tells us in the latest issue of The Atlantic. “In tense, fractious times—like our current moment—all art is political. But even during those times when politics and the future of our country itself are not the source of constant worry and anxiety, art is still political.”

This is the rubber-stamp-approved theory of art and has been for at least 25 years if not longer. It’s wonderfully safe, as are all rubber-stamp-approved things. Not an eyebrow would be raised nor a head lifted from slumber if you, in the squeak of adolescence, were to offer such an opinion to your AP English teacher’s pleasure—and, oh, how pleased she would be.

But all art is not political, at least not in the sense that Miranda seems to mean. Truth telling is not “an inherently political act.” Only people who think of all relationships as political (including those to spouses and children) could possibly believe such a thing—and as far as I can tell, no one does. Nor is art, unfortunately, “like bypass surgery,” allowing us “to go around all of the psychological distancing mechanisms that turn people cold to the most vulnerable among us”—though it is very satisfying, I’m sure, for readers of literature to think of themselves as better than others. Frank O’Hara’s manifesto “Personism” is a joke, but he wasn’t joking when wrote this to other poets: How “can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears).”

All art, rather, is individual. I know that’s extremely ambiguous, but I don’t have time this morning to expand (I have a class to teach!). More on this later, perhaps. If there are any publishers out there who want to send me a fat book contract for 200 pages on the topic, I will consider all offers.

That Miranda piece might be junk, but it comes in a pretty package. The Atlantic has gotten a redesign.

In other news: Do you know who publishes the most translated books in the United States? That’s right: Amazon. “Amazon Crossing, Amazon’s publishing imprint focused on literary translation, was first announced in May 2010 and published its first book, The King of Kahel by Guinean author Tierno Monenembo, that November. Since the release of that first title, the imprint has published more than 400 books, from 42 countries and in 26 languages, and become the most prolific publisher of translated literature in the U.S.”

Uruguay’s detective of despair: Juan Carlos Onetti’s “chronicles of larceny, murder, and betrayal drew on the conventions of English and American detective fiction to create a desolate world that subordinates experience to philosophical dilemmas his protagonists struggle in vain to elucidate. For Onetti, crime is a pretext for exposing the emptiness of human life, the unbridgeable distance between people. His works are structured around a chain of clues, but the deductive method the detective uses to expose the criminal and motive attempts to penetrate the characters’ inner torments, which collapse endlessly, one into the other, like a series of trap doors.”

D. A. Rovinskii’s Russian lubki: “The origins of the Russian prints called lubki (singular lubok) appear to stretch back to the 1500s, when the art of block printing was introduced to Russia from Eastern Asia, around the same time German Hanseatic merchants brought the first printed books to Moscow . . . The oldest surviving lubki, according to Roatcap, were printed in Kiev (present-day Ukraine) in 1625 and depicted Orthodox religious figures and scenes. Indeed, lubki are thought by many scholars to have first gained popularity as a cheap substitute for religious icons and were used by people of the lower and middle classes to decorate the walls of homes and taverns.”

The French crack-up: “Fourquet’s thesis is that French society is breaking up into ­mutually uncomprehending and sometimes hostile social islets, separated not only geographically but by the tastes, culture, education level, and economic prospects of their inhabitants, who have little contact with or sympathy for one another. This is not to say, of course, that there ever was a golden age in which national and social cohesion were absolute. But there was a time when the population of l’Hexagone, as the French call continental France, shared an underlying sense of living in a single society. Today, what divides is more important than what unites.”

Essay of the Day:

In The New Atlantis, Jon Askonas writes about the use of military drone technology by American police and companies and how it is eroding privacy:

“Around 2006, a holy terror must have seized Iraqi insurgents. It must have seemed that, just as at Homer’s Troy, the gods were watching the battle from above and took sides. Seemingly without regard to whatever precautions they might take, insurgents were being slaughtered left and right — not only those directly confronting American troops or government forces, but even the financiers, couriers, bomb builders, and bomb placers. Death might find insurgents in their cars via Hellfire missile or in their homes in the middle of the night. Friends and compatriots were disappearing, snatched up in the desert or arrested at checkpoints. Precautions like using burner phones or in-person messengers no longer seemed to be working nearly as well. Terrorist and insurgent networks were collapsing, and the numbers of successful attacks against Americans were dropping. Why?

“Eyes in the Sky tells the story of a top-secret surveillance system that helped turn the tide in Iraq. In his debut book, Arthur Holland Michel investigates Gorgon Stare, an aerial surveillance system that uses drones or airplanes carrying massive cameras to observe areas as large as a major city. Images from the cameras are in turn fed to computer programs that allow analysts to track suspects, and even to rewind to look back over their paths, like watching TiVo. Gorgon Stare was first developed to disrupt attacks in Iraq by IEDs (improvised explosive devices), which had become the main cause of death among U.S.-led coalition forces. But Michel, who is among the most insightful writers today on how the technologies behind America’s War on Terror are shaping us, shows how similar systems are now being used by intelligence agencies, police departments, and companies — with dramatic consequences.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Fall

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