Let Argument Breathe
2009; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/abr.2009.0079
ISSN2153-4578
Autores Tópico(s)American Political and Social Dynamics
ResumoPage 8 American Book Review Let Argument Breathe Oliver Conant Benj DeMott, the editor not only of this compilation but of the arresting, fractious, tabloid newspaper of the radical imagination from which it is drawn, started publishing First of the Month in 1998, with what he likes to call a “crew” of fellow writers, as in “our editorial crew never had any use for the neo-liberal orthodoxy associated with the Clintons” or “First’s crew won’t stop looking to (un)cover a truly new left in America.” The publication took its name from a rap song by Bone-Thugs-n-Harmony about “welfare paydays that spoke to those in the struggle for happiness all over the world.” By echoing the song, DeMott writes, “we evoked ‘black and going on’ emotions while signaling our refusal to separate race from class analysis.” The title also, of course, suggested that the newspaper would appear monthly, a periodic feat that has so far evaded it. DeMott ruefully recalls how he “had to write the poet Philip Levine apologizing for having taken so long to publish lines he’d given us” for the inaugural issue of First. Levine replied that “maybe we should change the title of our newspaper from First of the Month to Last of the Year.” Vonnegut was so taken with First’s quality that he mailed them a $100 check. The nucleus of First’s crew, its founding members , are DeMott, whose father was the well-known critic and cultural historian Benjamin DeMott, the film criticArmond White, often described as a “maverick ,” and the radical cultural and political writer Charles O’Brien. The three became aware of each other while writing for The City Sun, a black paper based in Brooklyn whose motto was “speaking truth to power” and which from 1984 to 1996 functioned as an alternative to mainstream black media outlets like The Amsterdam News. From the outset, First garnered praise from a wide variety of sometimes oddly assorted readers (some of whom became contributors). My collection of Firsts includes promotional circulars with the closely printed testimonials of Ossie Davis, Noam Chomsky, Julian Bond, Howard Zinn, Frank Rich, Kate Millet, Philip Levine, and the late Kurt Vonnegut . Vonnegut was so taken with First’s quality (in particular O’Brien’s savagely satirical attack on the literary pretensions of George Steiner) that he mailed in a check for $100 with a note reading, “I was so thoroughly demoralized by awareness that brilliant pro-bono writing was going on all over the fucking country. Now Claremont Avenue, for Christ’s sake, checks in!” (Like Dwight Macdonald’s legendary radical little magazine politics, another mom-andpop operation, First was and is edited in DeMott’s apartment on Claremont Avenue, a street that runs parallel to Riverside Drive, faces the rear of Barnard College and extends into Harlem). DeMott’s goals for his publication were at once contrarian, ambitiously inclusive and wide ranging. As he explains in First of the Year: 2008, First was conceived in opposition to flagship papers of smart sets in academia (The New York Review of Books) and bohemia (The Village Voice). DeMott points delightedly to a Time Out columnist who wrote that “First was the ‘only leftist publication [he] could imagine being read at both Columbia University and Rikers.’” The remark is featured prominently on First’s website, http://www.firstofthemonth.org. DeMott, White, and O’Brien are well represented in First of the Year: 2008. DeMott provides short introductions to each section and such pieces as the 2002 “Safe American Home” on the Southern rock band Drive-By Truckers, and the 2005 “With Friends Like These,” a pointed examination of Victor Navasky and the “in-crowd” mentality of The Nation. ArmondWhite’s pieces include the 2006 “Never too Soon” which argues with characteristic eloquence for the “commemorative and restorative purpose” of Oliver Stone’s film World Trade Center (2006) and the hilarious 2003 “History Gets Lost in the Matrix,” a puncturing of the absurd academic solemnity inspired by the Matrix movies. Charles O’Brien’s trenchant polemical writings include pieces in support of the Iraq War and against the peace movement, both from a left...
Referência(s)