For the oft-tread territory of World War II, Helen Humphreys has the wisdom to limit the scope of her novel Coventry to create a more focused and intimate portrait. Humphreys is careful not to overload the readers with technical information on the war, instead focusing on the human elements of it, such as giving up certain imports and growing war gardens. Though the narrative spans from 1914 to 1962, the bulk of the novel is dedicated to a single date: November 14, 1940, the day of a devastating air raid on Coventry, Britain.

The action is revealed through the perspectives of two women, Harriet and Maeve, who had randomly crossed paths many years before the bombing. While Harriet’s self-absorption in a chaotic situation is understandable, she becomes a character the readers can relate to, but not one they would likely want to empathize with. Maeve, a concerned mother, is the more sympathetic of the two, though most of her action occurs in the past through fragmented flashbacks.  The more interesting characters inhabit the periphery of the drama, people scraping together semblances of sanity and normal life in light of tragedy.

By collecting together small moments of chaos, Humphreys achieves a stirring, believable portrait of the real cost of war. Unfortunately, though, she often fails to provide any real depth behind her poetic words, leaving the reader disturbed but not particularly emotionally satisfied.

by emilycurrier for Critical Mass, 2010. | Permalink | Add the first comment | Add to del.icio.us
Categories: Arts, Books, Lit Review
Post tags: helen humphreys, Lit Review, novels

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Chock-full of Bennet sisters in pastel frocks screaming “hi-ya!” and polite Englishmen eating brains, this book trailer has serious potential for a movie. What say you, Natalie Portman?

RELATED >> Kaleidoscope: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

by carolyn huckabay for Critical Mass, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Categories: Books, Now See This, trailer!
Post tags: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, pride and prejudice and zombies, quirk books, YouTube

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Julius Caesar could tell you that your curriculum vitae is basically worthless when 50 of your buddies are stabbing you and making you seem like a total douche in front of, like, everybody in the Senate. The Ides: Caesar’s Murder and the War for Rome is the latest by Stephen Dando-Collins (Tycoon’s War), and as the title may have already given away, it’s a brisk walk through Caesar’s role in the withering days of the Roman Republic, his death and the irreversible political implosion that would follow the Ides of March, 44 B.C.

The narrative is driven by an intimate and personal look at the lives of those caught in the making of legend, drawing on the most ordinary of entries in ancient Roman manuscripts and reinvigorating a number of questions and characters left obscured by time. Opening a chapter aptly named “Caesar Awakes,” Dando-Collins writes “Across the city, the breeze gusted so strongly at the Regia on the Via Sacra that all the window shutters and the door of Julius Caesar’s bedchamber flew open. The wind was so strong that it even rattled the sacred spears of Mars in the shrine next door to the Dictator’s bedchamber … Sitting up, Caesar looked at his wife, Calpurnia, lying, asleep still, beside him.” Each sentence is punctuated by an endnote that will refer you to guys like Plutarch, Dio, Suetonius and a whole host of other Roman historians to back up whether those spears actually had in fact rattled or not.(...)
Read the rest of LIT REVIEW: The Ides: Caesar’s Murder and the War for Rome (137 words)

by tom.tiballi for Critical Mass, 2010. | Permalink | Add the first comment | Add to del.icio.us
Categories: Books, Lit Review
Post tags: Stephen Dando-Collins, The Ides: Caesar’s Murder and the War for Rome

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Mark Strand	Clint Eastwood

But City Paper web guru Marc Steel says he looks like the now-deceased Charlton Heston:

Mark Strand, again	Charlton Heston

What do you say? Do you have another old white man doppelganger for Mark Strand?

Either way, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author will give a free reading at Bryn Mawr College on Thu., March 25.

by Molly Eichel for Critical Mass, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Categories: Author Events, Movies, Reading
Post tags: charlton heston, clint eastwood, mark strand

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The graphic novel is a much misunderstood genre of art. While most people associate it with superheroes like the Watchmen, it actually can stand as a unique and important form of serious, contemporary storytelling.

First Person Arts celebrates the genre with this evening’s program at Bryn Mawr, “Warning: Graphic Content.” Participating artists — Daniel Heyman, Jamar Nicholas and Josh Neufeld — tackle diverse issues in this multimedia presentation. The goal is to explore the relationship between the image and the memoir and why this marriage is so important in effective graphic storytelling.

Neufeld narrates the floods of Hurricane Katrina in graphic memoir format. In A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge, Neufeld introduces five diverse characters as they experience the struggles of post-Katrina life. The novel forces us to take a more realistic look at what happened in New Orleans in the aftermath of the storm.

A broad spectrum of human life is seen throughout Neufeld’s book. We see his characters face the choice to leave pets in the flood waters. Others cannot find their loved ones. Bodies and boats float in the streets; people are forced to live off  sparse, rationed foods. Through these gripping images, we are not only able to understand the plight of Katrina’s victims, but truly empathize with them. This, along with the engaging and meticulous artwork, creates a graphic window into a very real world.(...)
Read the rest of TONIGHT: First Person Arts’ “Warning: Graphic Content” at Bryn Mawr (229 words)

by mandybee for Critical Mass, 2010. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Categories: Arts, Arts Events, Books, Comics
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There’s no telling how you came across this interview. It could have been on Facebook or Twitter or someguysblog.com. The Internet, as described by Berkley-based virtual reality patriarch Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget, rewards aggregation of free content more than a work by any single person. In the race to aggregate as much content as possible, and then to aggregate the aggregators, the individual is lost. And where individuals can ostensibly showcase their singularity, they’re usually reduced to streamlined categorization. Essentially, they become gadgets. City Paper spoke to Lanier about the Internet, the sanctity of advertising in the new digital age and the irony of this interview.

City Paper: This interview will go on our A&E blog, which the paper will probably link to on our Facebook and a Philly tech site will hopefully link on their page as well. Is this interview now completely ironic?

Jaron Lanier: Well, every impulse to change the world is ironic because unless you’re a completely destructive revolutionary. I work within the system, and I have to work with what’s available. I often wish that some company would change its policies in this way or that way, but I’m part of the loyal opposition, and I accept that irony. I personally don’t use things like Facebook and Twitter, but I wouldn’t expect someone I work with to pass some purity test. Finding this balance where you’re trying to find some sense of idealism without becoming some dysfunctional Utopian and giving in and mindlessly going along with whatever the flow is, finding that in between space where you have a shot of both being effective in the world as it is and being able to nudge it a little bit is always key.

CP: You say that the Internet as it exists has become paradoxically both Libertarian and Maoist. Could you speak to that?

JL: In a strange way that Libertarianism manifests itself in the online world, which was to demonetize everything [Laughs]. It’s a strange idea. In order to to treat information as having value in the online world, there has to be some sort of structure that says it has value, because everything of that information is just made up. And that structure could be laws or something about the code. But everything about the information is made up, so we can either decide it has value or that it’s free. Because libertarians want as little government as possible, or they want as little structure to anarchy as modulated by money, so their inclination is to get rid of any structure that would say anything about what information would be and then that would take away the idea that information as value. That leads you in sort of the Communist or Maosit direction where everything is shared. Very, very weirdly in the information world, the Libertarian impulse leads to a Communist result, and … I’m not sure if Communist is the right word. I prefer to use Maoist because it’s a way to ask people to earn their living for more and more physical things and disenfranchising intellectuals. So trying to be Libertarian in the real world makes you Libertarian, but trying to be Libertarian in the online world makes you a Maoist. (...)
Read the rest of “It has to change for the good of civilization”: Q&A with virtual reality patriarch Jaron Lanier (1,639 words)

by andrew thompson for Critical Mass, 2010. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Categories: Books, Interview
Post tags: jaron lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

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FOR THOSE OF us who grew up going to church, it was almost impossible to like Paul, regardless of whether we liked Jesus. Sarah Ruden, who has a doctorate in classics from Harvard and has translated such works as The Aeneid, was originally among these ranks. Yet in her new work, Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, she argues that much of that dislike for the angry and arrogant — and highly effective — missionary of the early Christian movement is a matter of misunderstanding. Using her knowledge of early Greco-Roman literature and society, Ruden depicts what Paul’s message would have sounded like to its original audience. In doing so, she takes a man preachers and parents have long used to support restrictive rules and judgmentalism, and transforms him into an advocate for love, equality and human freedom.

The chapters break down into all the major controversial social issues found in Paul’s writings and today’s society: sex and marriage, homosexuality, women’s rights, the role of the State, slavery and love. Using a wide range of Greek and Latin works, Ruden attempts to show the situation of these issues in Paul’s context, sometimes quoting so liberally that it breaks her train of thought and makes the arguments hard to follow — even while providing livid examples of the topic at hand.(...)
Read the rest of LIT REVIEW: Paul Among the People (226 words)

by eric.pettersson for Critical Mass, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Categories: Arts, Books
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We may be ripping off the title of CP contributor Amy Strauss’ delectable food blog here, but bear with us: Posters and tees, we think, are an excellent combo for a sludgy Friday afternoon spent blog-browsing.

First, and most angry-making: The Lost Valentine’s cards we showed you earlier today got us thinking about the show (and how we’re pretty damn sure Sayid is the new Jacob and why the hell was Desmond on the alternate-universe Flight 815?). Lo and behold we found these amazing vintage-y Lost-inspired posters — like the polar-bear-meets-smoke-monster style, above, and the infinity bunny, right — but, judging by the psycho comments on Mattson Creative’s site, they’re not for sale. Come on! It’s not nice to tease. mattsoncreative.com, spied first at sharesomecandy.com.

Speaking of vintage-y: Book-jacket design is half the reason we get so mad when we hear the word “Kindle.” There’s something magical about the old-school-iest covers of our favorite novels, and we are just plain sad to see them electronified. Out of Print understands our bookish woes, and thus has created an assembly of iconic and out-of-print books made into tees. We’re partial to Slaughter-house Five, but there’s something for everyone (for now, only men’s sizes are available, but they’re remedying that in the spring). $28, outofprintclothing.com, spied first at designworklife.com.(...)
Read the rest of COVETED: Posters and tees, please (186 words)