Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 295

March 23, 2016: NeMLA Recaps: Creative Readings

[This past week, after many years of planning and many posts in this space, I helped host the 2016 Northeast MLA convention in Hartford. It was an amazing four days, and I could write much more than a week of recap posts—so here I’ll focus specifically on the new initiatives I brought to the convention. If you were part of NeMLA 2016 in any way, please share your own recaps and responses in comments!]On takeaways from three impressive creative writers featured at the conference.1)      Our opening night creative reader, Monique Truong, is one of the most acclaimed novelists of the last couple decades, and it showed in her mesmerizing presentation. She linked her two novels, The Book of Salt (2003) and Bitter in the Mouth (2010), to two autobiographical essays to consider themes of food and hunger, memory and identity. I was particularly struck in Monique’s presentation by the way that a great writer can use words to both captivate and challenge, to comfort and discombobulate, often at one and the same time. I can’t imagine a better writer and voice to have kicked off our 2016 conference.2)      Just before the membership brunch that concludes the conference, we featured another extremely talented contemporary writer, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel. Melissa is a Mohegan and her Native American heritage and community inform every book and work of hers; but she is also a master of multiple fictional genres, from young adult lit to mysteries and thrillers. Her reading from her newest book, Wabanki Blues (2015), demonstrated how much she’s continuing to work with and combine these different genres and themes, producing a writer who is unique and vital and one whom I was very happy to feature at the conference.3)      In between those opening and closing creative readings, we featured a number of other writers: acclaime novelist Carole Maso at our debut Meet the Author event; a number of NeMLA creative writers at our innovative Flash Readings; and more. I was unfortunately otherwise occupied with President-ing during most of those readings, and likewise was unable to attend the Friday reading by one other creative writer I invited: Leanne Hinkle, who has published under the names Leanne Tyler and Lexi Witcher. But since Leanne was kind enough to take part in our Thursday public school visits, I had the chance to spend a good deal of time with her—and found her to be thoroughly collegial and friendly, ready to share her writing and her voice with both students and NeMLA attendees. Another great addition to a particularly creative conference!Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Other NeMLA follow ups you’d share? I’d really love to hear them (and feel free to email them to meif you prefer)!

March 22, 2016: NeMLA Recaps: The Public Humanities

[This past week, after many years of planning and many posts in this space, I helped host the 2016 Northeast MLA convention in Hartford. It was an amazing four days, and I could write much more than a week of recap posts—so here I’ll focus specifically on the new initiatives I brought to the convention. If you were part of NeMLA 2016 in any way, please share your own recaps and responses in comments!]On three standout moments from Friday’s deeply inspiring series of President-sponsored sessions at the Mark Twain Houseon public humanities.1)      The opening sesson on digital humanities and the public included wonderful presentations from Ivy Schweitzer, the NEH’s Jennifer Serventi, and AmericanStudier pére. But I knew the least about the work being done by Trinity’s Jack Dougherty and a group of student collaborators on their open-sourced, digital book project On the Line , and I found it both fascinating and exciting. The project is about as interdisciplinary and as public humanities as it’s possible for work to be, but it’s also and just as importantly making vital use of technology on every level, from content (featuring interactive maps and video/audio clips in the chapters, for example) to delivery (allowing readers to download PDF or e-reader versions or order hard copies from a publisher along with reading on the website, for another). Can’t wait to learn more about it!2)      The next few sessions featured so many wonderful moments, from Carolyn Karcher discussing her brand-new book on Albion Tourgée to Capital Community College’s Jeff Partridge, the Twain House’s James Golden, and the Stowe Center’s Emily Waniewski sharing the phenomenal Hartford Heritage Project(among many other great presentations). But I have to focus here on the day’s final president-sponsored session, which featured John Jay’s Jonathan Gray, UT-Austin’s Juliet Hooker, and educator and activist Zellie Imani (a fourth presenter, Wesleyan student and #BlackLivesMatter’s Sadasia McCutchen, was unfortunately unable to make it) on the topic of “Scholarship after Ferguson.” I can’t possibly do justice to their challenging and compelling, provocative and powerful, and entirely vital talks here, so I’ll just say that this session (which followed up a roundtable in last summer’s issue of Modern Language Studies) was one of my very favorite moments from any conference ever.3)      Which is fitting, because it was followed with my very favorite conference moment, and one of my life favorites to date: introducingour keynote speaker, Jelani Cobb. Dr. Cobb’s address itself was, to be clear, even better than I could have imagined, as engaging and funny as it was nuanced and analytical, as righteously depressing and angry as it was vital and ultimately (I believe) critically optimistic. But nonetheless, the chance to introduce a talk by Dr. Cobb, as part of a conference I had helped organize, at the end of a day I had been imagining for more than three years, with my parents and fiancé and many friends in the audience (on all of whom more in Friday’s post)—yup, all-time favorite moment. Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Other NeMLA follow ups you’d share? I’d really love to hear them (and feel free to email them to meif you prefer)!

March 21, 2016: NeMLA Recaps: Public School Visits

[This past week, after many years of planning and many posts in this space, I helped host the 2016 Northeast MLA convention in Hartford. It was an amazing four days, and I could write much more than a week of recap posts—so here I’ll focus specifically on the new initiatives I brought to the convention. If you were part of NeMLA 2016 in any way, please share your own recaps and responses in comments!]On a small but significant first step toward a vital connection.On the first afternoon of the convention, in an initiative on which I had been working for more than two years, four conference presenters and attendees visited two Hartford public schools. Opening night creative reader Monique Truong, her fellow convention creative reader Leanne Hinkle, and my Fitchburg State University colleague Joe Moser visited the Bellizzi Asian Studies Academy, a middle school (and part of the HPS’ theme-based academes program); another FSU colleague, Katharine Covino-Poutasse, visited the Betances Early Reading Lab, an elementary school. The visitors shared their voices and ideas with students and classes, worked closely with teachers and staff (including the wonderful principals, Mario Cruz of Bellizzi and Corinne Barney of Betances), and engaged in inspiring and powerful ways with the missions and work of these public schools.One of my most central goals for the convention, as I’m sure was evident from my earliest blog posts about it, has been to connect with communities outside of the academic and scholarly ones with which NeMLA has always worked so fully and well. Public schools are only one of many possible such connections, of course, but I think they offer a particularly strong option: not only because they are fellow educational institutions, but also and even more importantly because, around the country but especially in cities like Harford (or Baltimore, site of next year’s NeMLA convention), they are far too often under-funded and under-supported and under attack and could use all the partners and communal conections they can get. As a professor at a public university, as well as a Dad with two sons in public schools (and the proud product of a public school education myself), I feel particularly invested in the state and future of public education. Yet in truth, we are all inextricably linked to and affected by the work and success of our public schools, and to my mind no organization or institution can afford to ignore or minimize that connection.While I have no doubt that my four colleagues made a significant impact on the schools and students with whom they worked, and while I’m thus proud that we succeeded in adding this initiative to the convention’s activities, this 2016 version of linking NeMLA to public schools represents only a starting point for what that connection can and should be. As such, I’d very much love to hear your thoughts and ideas about how we might build on that starting point into next year’s convention (and beyond), and/or other ways a convention and organization like NeMLA can build connections to the communities around us. And I’ll go a step further—if you’re someone who might be at NeMLA 2017 in Baltimore and has any interest in such an initiative, I’d also love to get you directly involved and make your voice and work an integral part of those next steps. I hope and believe that these connections are vital to the future of NeMLA and of higher ed, and the more folks we can get involved in them, the stronger and more truly communal they’ll be!Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this post? Other NeMLA follow ups you’d share? I’d really love to hear them (and feel free to email them to meif you prefer)!

March 19-20, 2016: Crowd-sourced Thrillers

[On March 18th, 1915, novelist Richard Condon was born—so in honor of the 100th birthday of this talented American writer, this week I’ve AmericanStudied political thrillers, one of the genres in which he wrote most prolifically. Leading up to this crowd-sourced weekend post featuring takes from fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours in comments, please!]Just one blog response this week (I was too busy NeMLA-ing to request responses enough), but a really great one, on Twitter from J.D. Schnepf, who writes, “Is the Trump narrative a 'more extreme' thriller or are we dealing with a totally different genre? … House of Cards is a liberal thriller, and a Clinton thriller at that. Suggests scandal necessary to be good politician. … I agree Trump's different but I think it's a generic difference, one that appeals to a different base than the thriller.” She concludes, “I've been thinking about this stuff + wishing a media theorist would reframe the Trump phenomenon for the TV pundits,” and I’m really glad she’s done so for this blog!Post-Northeast MLA conventon series starts Monday,BenPS. What would you add to these crowd-ourced thoughts?

March 18, 2016: Political Thrillers: Manchurian Candidates

[On March 18th, 1915, novelist Richard Condon was born—so in honor of the 100th birthday of this talented American writer, this week I’ll AmericanStudy political thrillers, one of the genres in which he wrote most prolifically. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post, so please share your own thrilling texts and takes in comments!]On political thrillers on the page and the screen, and how reality might trump both of them.Birthday boy Richard Condon published 26 novels between his 1958 debut The Oldest Confession and his 1996 death, most of them thrillers of one kind or another; but it is his second published work, the political thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1959), that remains his most famous and influential book. Condon’s science fiction-infused (and, it’s important to note, possibly partly plagiarized) tale of a brainwashed Korean War hero controlled by his mother (a KGB agent), a Communist plot to overthrow the U.S. government and install a puppet dictator (the mother’s new husband), and the war hero’s fellow veteran and best friend who discovers and thwarts the conspiracy, was a mega-bestseller that was very quickly adapted into the hugely popular 1962 film starring Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra, and Oscar nominee Angela Lansbury (as well as a much less successful 2004 film with Liev Schreiber, Denzel Washington, and Golden Globe nominee Meryl Streep).As you might expect when a film adaptation follows so closely upon the novel’s release, the film version of Candidate is similar to the novel in both its central storyline and many specific aspects. But there are a series of differences between the two versions, all related interestingly to the novel’s heavily prevalent sexual themes that are largely absent from the film. For example, in the novel the relationship between the brainwashed war hero and his mother is explicitly incestuous, culminating in a late scene where (reminded of her father, on whom she had an equally taboo crush) the mother seduces and sleeps with her son. More broadly, the hero’s Communist brainwashing not only programs him to carry out the assassination plot, but at the same time (if for much less apparent reason) turns him from a very conservative man on issues of romance into a highly sexualized playboy. These differences could be explained in many ways, including that what works in a novel wouldn’t always translate onto the screen (such as Angela Lansbury sleeping with her son). But it’s interesting to consider whether the shift from the more repressed 50s into the more liberated 60s, even within a few years, might have made the Communist sexuality of the novel seem less appropriate.And now for something completely different: Donald Trump. I’m not actually going to suggest here that Trump’s candidacy is an elaborate brainwashing conspiracy planned by Kim Jong Un or the like in order to destabilize or overthrow the U.S. government (although you have to admit, it sounds possible—and Jeb Bush and others have indeed argued that Trump is part of an elaborate liberal conspiracy). Instead, I just want to note that as our political rhetoric and realities have gotten more and more extreme, to the point where the likely Republican presidential nominee is bragging about the size of his genitalia in a nationally televised debate, it’s fair to say that political thrillers will have to get even more extreme if they want to keep up. To name an example about which I’ve written at length in this space: when the Netflix political thriller show House of Cardspremiered a few years back, its plotlines (featuring murders and other high crimes performed in service of political ambition) seemed over-the-top and unbelievable. Now? The fourth season of the show has recently been released to far less attention, perhaps because the stories on the nightly news are far more extreme. Which is to say, we might just be living in a political thriller, for good or (more likely, I’m afraid) for bad.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: thoughts on these thrillers? Others you’d highlight for the weekend post?

March 17, 2016: Political Thrillers: Enemy of the State

[On March 18th, 1915, novelist Richard Condon was born—so in honor of the 100th birthday of this talented American writer, this week I’ll AmericanStudy political thrillers, one of the genres in which he wrote most prolifically. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post, so please share your own thrilling texts and takes in comments!]On an underrated political thriller that’s as prescient as it is paranoid.Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) is a non-political thriller that became almost inevitably political through forces outside of its control. Coppola had written a screenplay about a wiretapping and surveillance expert who gets entangled in potentially illegal and dangerous activities in the mid-1960s, and had made the film (which stars Gene Hackman in one of his career-best performances as protagonist Harry Caul) well before the Watergate scandal truly exploded. But by the time the film appeared in April 1974, the scandal had reached its peak (Nixon would resign less than four months later), and both audiences and critics (then and ever since) could not help connecting the film’s depictions of the technologies, possibilities, and ethical and personal dangers of wiretapping to the actions and issues at Watergate’s core. The Conversation is great enough to stand on its own as a psychological thriller, but the coincidence of its timing has made it an enduringly political one as well.Although Tony Scott’s Enemy of the State (1998) is not in any explicit way a sequel to Coppola’s film, the aging, cynical surveillance expert played in Enemy by Gene Hackman seems clearly to be in direct conversation with Hackman’s more idealistic character from that prior story (if he is not indeed supposed to be an older version of the same man). One of the key changes across the two films and their time periods, of course—and one foreshadowed by that very Watergate scandal—is that wiretapping and surveillance have gone from a specialized field practiced by highly trained individuals like Caul to a ubiquitous part of our society, culture, and government. As a result, while Conversationfocuses on its specialized expert as he gradually realizes that he is not nearly as in control of his technologies and world as he had believed, Enemy’s protagonist (played by Will Smith ) is much more of a non-technological everyman from the start, one who finds himself under surveillance and turns to Hackman’s character for help surviving and defeating that ubiquitous surveillance state.In 1998 (and I saw Enemy in theaters so I know whereof I speak), the film’s portrayal of the absolute reach and unimpeded power of that surveillance state, embodied by both its villainous NSA official(played to evil perfection by Jon Voight) and his willing underlings(played by a who’s who of young actosr including Jack Black, Barry Pepper, and Jamie Kennedy), felt extreme and paranoid, a communal extension of the final scene of The Conversation (in which Hackman’s character literally tears apart his own home in search of a non-existent wiretap). Yet the subsequent two decades have demonstrated time and again both the current reality of that surveillance state and its willingness and desire to extend its reach even further (cf. the FBI’s current attempt to force Apple to provide the tools through which the agency would be able to access all iPhones). Indeed, perhaps the only aspect of Enemy of the State that feels fantastic or even improbable when viewed from 2016 is that Smith’s character is able (with Hackman’s help and some clever twists and turns I won’t spoil here) to defeat the NSA and return to a normal, apparently surveillance-free life. Last thriller tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on these thrillers? Others you’d highlight for the weekend post?

March 16, 2016: Political Thrillers: The Pelican Brief

[On March 18th, 1915, novelist Richard Condon was born—so in honor of the 100th birthday of this talented American writer, this week I’ll AmericanStudy political thrillers, one of the genres in which he wrote most prolifically. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post, so please share your own thrilling texts and takes in comments!]On what’s not distinctly political about the John Grisham thriller, and what is.It’d be easy to pidgeon-hole John Grisham as writing “legal thrillers,” and to be sure almost every one of the bestselling lawyer-turned-novelist’s books does feature one or more protagonists from within the legal profession. But while his second novel, The Firm (1991), was overtly and centrally set within the world of lawyers and law firms, his debut, A Time to Kill (1989), did feature a lawyer hero but focused on a case that linked to not only legal but also social and cultural issues and stories (including race and racism in the contemporary South and debates over vigilante justice). And in many ways those first two novels have foreshadowed a prolific career that has included (among Grisham’s more than 30 total novels to date) a consistent back-and-forth between overtly legal thrillers (such as The Client, The Runaway Jury, and The Last Juror) and those that use the law as a way in to examinations of other issues (such as The Rainmaker, The Street Lawyer, and The Confession).Given that The Pelican Brief (1992), Grisham’s third novel, begins with the dual assassinations of two sitting Supreme Court Justices, it’s logical enough to locate within that latter category, and to note that it examines political issues through its legal lens. Yet it’s important to add that Pelican also reveals the limits of Grisham’s genre-stretching, at least in his early efforts (I haven’t read his more recent works to see if the pattern holds). That is, his novels may diverge in the particular worlds and themes that set each of their plots in motion, but as they play out those plots tend to follow very similar patterns: everyman (or woman, as in the case of Pelican’s protagonist Darby Shaw) protagonists seeking to reveal the truth behind powerful, shadowy conspiracies while on the run from the dark, potentially fatal forces which their discoveries have set in motion. I don’t know if anyone has made a mega-cut of running scenesfrom the films into which so many Grishman novels have been made, but I know that it would be possible to do so—and in the moments when a character is running from a would-be assassin, I’m not sure that the larger social or cultural forces much matter.At the same time, a novel can be a character-on-the-run thriller and still engage with broader themes, and in at least one significant way The Pelican Brief is interestingly political (SPOILER ALERT in this paragraph). The shadowy conspiracy that Darby uncovers (and eventually brings to light, with the help of intrepid reporter and love interest Gray Grantham) involves a oil magnate who has had the Justices assassinated so that the president (a former business associate of the magnate) can appoint new Justices of a less environmental bent who will rule in the oil company’s favor in a pending case. I’m familiar with plenty of political thrillers that focus on the presidency, but there aren’t nearly as many that recognize and utilize the literally equal power (thanks to those pesky checks and balances) possessed by the Supreme Court. Pelican doesn’t just open its plot machinations with the Supreme Court—its conspiracy, like the revelations Darby and Gray are able to preserve and make public, is entirely dependent on the Court’s unique national role and work. Next thriller tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on these thrillers? Others you’d highlight for the weekend post?

March 15, 2016: Political Thrillers: Ripley and Bourne

[On March 18th, 1915, novelist Richard Condon was born—so in honor of the 100th birthday of this talented American writer, this week I’ll AmericanStudy political thrillers, one of the genres in which he wrote most prolifically. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post, so please share your own thrilling texts and takes in comments!]On the very American meanings of two thrilling characters.
There’s a lot that links today’s two subjects, starting with the fact that both were played onscreen by Matt Damon: first Tom Ripley, the con artist protagonist of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); and subsequently Jason Bourne, the fugitive former-assassin protagonist of The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007; another Damon Bourne film is due out later this year). There’s plenty that could be said about each of these films, including the very impressive supporting casts (Jude Law has never been as good as he is in Ripleyand the Bourne films almost made me like Julia Stiles, to cite two particularly impressive examples). Similarly, each character was created by an interesting and underrated late 20th-century American novelist whose works still have a great deal to offer in their own right: Ripley appeared in four novels by Patricia Highsmith, whose ground-breaking psychological thrillers also included Strangers on a Train (1951); Bourne in three novels by Robert Ludlum, whose dense espionage thrillers without question inspired future bestsellers such as yesterday’s subject Tom Clancy. But for this blog, what’s most interesting about both Ripley and Bourne is how much they connect to and yet complicate and critique dominant American narratives.
Tom Ripley, at least in the film’s representation of him (while I’ve read both Highsmith and Ludlum, it was a while ago and for this post I’m going with my much clearer memories of the films; I’ll also be spoiling those films a good bit, so feel free to stop here if you haven’t seen ‘em!), has a great deal in common with one of the most iconic American fictional (in every sense) characters: Jay Gatsby. Like Gatsby, Ripley is born into poverty but will do whatever it takes to become wealthy, successful, and (perhaps most importantly) accepted by the most elite and upper-crust of his countrymen; also like Gatsby, Ripley is most talented precisely at performance, at inhabiting every aspect of the character and world he is continually creating. While both men’s stories end with a great deal of death and destruction, it’s certainly true that Ripley is a far more overt cause of that chaos than Gatsby; Ripley, in short, is willing to murder in order to keep up his performances, while Gatsby’s undeniable culpability lies more in his various forms of cheating (financial, adulterous) and his sins of omission. Yet you could make a convincing case that Gatsby is nearly as reprehensible as Ripley, and that the main difference lies in the fact that we see Gatsby through the eyes of Fitzgerald’s novelist-narrator Nick Carraway, a man who both falls under Gatsby’s charm and who (to an extent) shares Gatsby’s culpability in the novel’s final events; our vision of Ripley, unmediated by such a narrating voice, makes it easier to judge his most heinous actions for the atrocities that they really are. And as destructive as both men’s ambitions and desires ultimately are, it would also be important to keep in mind how fully they line up with some of America’s defining narratives, most especially the self-made man and the prominent place he occupies in the American Dream.
Jason Bourne’s American connections (again, in the film version of the character) are in many ways much more explicitly contemporary, more directly in conversation with national narratives and realities post-9/11. The series’ engagement with those contemporary and political issues has been present since the first film but was ramped up in each subsequent sequel; the villain played by the great David Strathairn in Ultimatumrepresents a particularly clear stand-in for American “war on terror” policies and practices and their logical yet terrifying endpoints. Moreover, both Bourne’s complicity in those extremes and horrors and his gradual but absolutely determined extrication of himself and his prior identity from them can be read across the three films as a powerful argument for how the nation as well can and must leave behind what we’ve become in the decade since 9/11. Yet on another level Bourne connects to a centuries-old and archetypal American hero, the kind of character described by literary critic R.W.B. Lewis as “the American Adam”: these Adamic heroes, who originated as many American literary images did with James Fenimore Cooper (and specifically with his recurring hero Natty Bumppo), seem to exist as innocent and largely self-made“new men,” outside of (or at least not ultimately bound by) the limits of history and society. Bourne is not the first character who can be said to reveal the fundamental flaws in and even impossibility of such an Adamic identity—Lewis rightly notes that Gatsby can be read in precisely that way—but he is a particularly compelling case: an Adamic hero who comes to realize that he has been instead an anti-hero, and must fight to escape and destroy that anti-heroic identity and the myths that come with it. Both Ripley and the Bourne films are great entertainments on their own terms, but as with all of the best art, they also echo and engage with and amplify ongoing narratives and images, with our ideas about who we are and with what those stories often leave out or gloss over. And that’s a very impressive talent for sure. Next thriller tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on these thrillers? Others you’d highlight for the weekend post?

March 14, 2016: Political Thrillers: Tom Clancy

[On March 18th, 1915, novelist Richard Condon was born—so in honor of the 100th birthday of this talented American writer, this week I’ll AmericanStudy political thrillers, one of the genres in which he wrote most prolifically. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post, so please share your own thrilling texts and takes in comments!]On learning from political thrillers that (eventually) make us cringe.He wasn’t the first author I truly loved—that honor would go, if I have to settle on one, to Edward Ormondroyd (whose book I shared with my boys in a pivotal period in our lives). Nor was he the first in whose library I read multiple works—Tolkien takes that crown, as I ploughed through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the summer before 6th grade (and have been very excitedly sharing them with my boys this winter). But Tolkien’s books are all connected, and in fact he even considered Lord of the Rings one long novel (it was his publisher who insisted that it be divided into a trilogy). And so I would have to admit that the first non-children’s book or young adult author for whom I read multiple unconnected books—who, that is, inspired me to check out different offerings not because a series compelled me, but just because I needed more—was none other than the dean of American military, espionage, and political porn (I mean, thrillers), Tom Clancy.It’s easy, and not entirely inaccurate, to claim that the Clancy beloved to the 11 year old AmericanStudier was substantially different than the author he would become in subsequent decades (and remain until his October 2013 death). I would certainly argue that around the time of Debt of Honor and Executive Orders Clancy decided to make his right-wing politics much more central to his books, and it’s no coincidence that this decidedly not right-wing reader found those novels much less appealing; I made it through Rainbox Six and then said “No mas.” But honesty compels me to admit that in looking back at the Clancy books I loved, a list headed by The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising , I find them full of similarly objectionable adulation for the military, contempt for the “bureaucrats” who try to limit it, xenophobia (other than toward those foreigners who are also true soldiers, who are wonderful in every culture), and more. They may have been better novels than the later books, that is, but I still feel pretty guilty about how much pleasure I got out of them.Yet if I move beyond that guilt, I think it’s fair to say that I can learn a good deal from my youthful infatuation with the Clancy. Partly, of course, I can learn about how talented, best-selling authors find their niche audiences and deliver the goods—for Clancy, it’s fair to say that middle school boys (or men who haven’t quite outgrown that phase) are a core such audience, and he gave us all the submarine battles, tank warfare, and macho heroics we could handle. (In Red Storm, a meek weatherman finds his inner macho warrior and wins a blonde Icelandic beauty.) But Clancy’s appeal isn’t that simple—I’m sure there are lots of authors who write about similar subjects and themes and yet would not have done it for me nearly as fully. He also constructs perfect thriller plots, whether on a small scale (as in October) or the broadest (as in Storm); and the truth, even if we lit snobs don’t like to admit it, is that the same can be said for many of the great novels. Scarlet Letter? Absalom? Beloved? All thrillers in their own way, perfectly plotted to lead us to their climactic revelations. I’m not saying Clancy is on par with those folks—but they’re all writers, all novels, and all worth our analytical time.Next thriller tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on these thrillers? Others you’d highlight for the weekend post?

March 12-13, 2016: Puerto Rican Posts: The Statehood Debate

[On March 9th, Raúl Juliáwould have turned 76. To honor one of the most famous and talented Puerto Rican artists, this week’s series will feature a handful of Boricua blogs, leading up to this special weekend post on Puerto Rican statehood!]Five historical moments and trends that have brought the debate over Puerto Rico’s potential future as the 51st state to its present place.1)      A War’s Aftermath: The Spanish American War was largely fought in other places (the July 1898 Battle of San Juan Hill is often mistakenly identified as taking place in Puerto Rico’s capital, but San Juan Hill is actually in Cuba), yet one of its most significant effects was that the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States as part of the 1899 Treaty of Paris. The initial US leaders of the island were military governors, but the 1900 Foraker Act (or Organic Act) established a civilian government, with Charles H. Allen the first civilian governor.2)      Citizenship and Pseudo-Sovereignty: It took nearly two decades of debate, but in early 1917 Congress passed and Woodrow Wilson signed the Jones Act, a law that gave Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship and established a Puerto Rican Senate and House of Representatives. Yet at the same time, the Foraker Act still superceded this new law, meaning for example that any laws passed by those new legislative bodies could be vetoed by the Governor, the President, and the U.S. Congress—and that the U.S. federal government retained final say over the island’s economic and defense concerns, among others.3)      Clarifying Territorial Limits: In 1922, the Supreme Court rendered a decision in Balzac v. Porto Rico . Jesús Balzac, a Puerto Rican citizen, declared that his 6thAmendment rights had been violated as part of a criminal libel case against him, and appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. But in their ruling, the Court unanimously ruled that Puerto Rico’s territorial status did not mean that it had been incorporated into the union, and thus that the U.S. Constitution did not apply to its citizens.4)      Political Support: In the century since Balzac, there have been a number of interesting moments in which American political parties and leaders have expressed their support for Puerto Rican statehood. One of the first was the 1940 Democratic Party platform, which argued, “We favor a larger measure of self-government leading to statehood, for Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico”; two decades later (in 1959) the first two would become the 49th and 50th states, but Puerto Rico remained in limbo. President Gerald Ford overtly proposed Congress take up statehood legislation in December 1976, perhaps the most aggressive of many such political statements, but no such law was passed.5)      The 21st Century: On a November 2012 ballot, Puerto Rican voters strongly expressed two concurrent sentiments: rejecting the island’s current territorial status 54% to 46% on one question, and on a second with more than 61% choosing statehood as their preferred status. Yet once again, the U.S. federal government has superceded these Puerto Rican voices, with 2014 Congressional resolutions to support the voters’ preferences dying in committees in both the Senate and House. The next steps for all these histories, and this complex American community, remain to be seen.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other PR connections you’d highlight?