Zachary Mason’s remarkable new novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, is based on a grain of fact. Before the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey were crystallized and canonized in the books of Homer sometime in the 8th century B.C., various (and often conflicting) tales of the Trojan War and its heroes had floated around in various forms for hundreds of years. Some of these variants survive in fragments of other ancient works, like ghostly echoes of alternative universes. Mason’s intriguing fictional conceit is that he is translating one of these: a "pre-Ptolemaic papyrus excavated from the desiccated

While Chris has been away, I went through the latest brouhaha with the Wiki Police over at Wikipedia – there seems to be a right wing contingent there that doesn’t like Chris and they finally deleted his Wikipedia entry completely last week citing there was not enough proof and he was a ‘nobody’ – which enraged me. So I simply built another Wikipedia page today with 30 citations and references. I look forward to see their new arguments. 

I have almost been working with Chris for five years now – we started

I’m heading out for a few days, with connectivity and opportunity for posting still unknown. Meanwhile, here’s a very rough piece of lumber to keep the fire crackling until I get wired up again. (Lyrics here.)  

The American way of war is a marvelously ingenious thing. And thoroughly modern too. No more of that "don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes" jazz; your modern "warfighter" (they aren’t called "soldiers" anymore, you know)  prefers to view his targets through, say, a computer screen safely ensconced back in the Homeland or thousands of feet in the sky, or else through the unearthly greenish glow of night-vision scopes. And open combat? Forget it. The new American way is the sneak attack on civilian homes in the dead of night. You creep up, you break in, you

Arthur Silber outdoes himself with this one-two punch of an essay. It begins with a tale that pierces to the essence of what we are — and what we are becoming — under our murderous imperium. The second half unfolds some of the implications of the fable in the hard facts of the present day, taking off from the almost indescribable depravity of the current "debate" over Barack Obama’s open assertion of the power to assassinate anyone on earth at his arbitrary order, and the continuation of torture under the current administration, despite all the bright shining lies to the

The fact that the Obama Administration is operating a secret prison in Afghanistan in which captives rounded up on the usual little or no evidence are being tortured even as we speak — and even as the president was making his funny-haha jokes about predator drones — does not come as any surprise. The horror of this reality is by now so routine that it almost defies comment. Or as Arthur Silber puts it in a powerful new essay: The concept of "depravity" has been rendered close to meaningless. When so much of what happens every day, here and abroad,

The found poetry of state terror continues its strange mutilations of the English language. The bizarre verbal heavings of Donald Rumsfeld, for example, are rightly celebrated as choice examples of the genre. And noted English playwright David Hare once fashioned a whole play built largely on the “thought-tormented music” wrought from verbatim transcripts of the principal authors of the war crime in Iraq. In this regard, as in almost every aspect of the Terror War, “continuity” has been the hallmark of the Obama Administration. But we would do the progressive, forward-looking president a grave disservice if we were to imply

Der Spiegel has published a series of striking pictures recently discovered in the forgotten archives of a Berlin publishing house: photographs of city scenes in the immediate aftermath of Nazi Germany’s surrender. First, in what the magazine aptly calls a "surreal image," Red Army soldiers gather before the ravaged Brandenburg Gate for a poetry reading, with the city still smoking from its death-struggle. Next, grim street scenes: one of the innumerable suicides of German civilians as the Russians entered the city, wreaking a dreadful vengeance for their 20 million dead; and one of the thousands of Nazi soldiers killed in

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” — Shakespeare, Julius Caesar “Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand.” — Homer Simpson Our text today is from Tom Englehardt, who is on the case with yet another ignored atrocity by our super-duper Special Ops boys in the goodest good war of them all out in Afghanistan. (See the original for the many links): “Afghan lawmaker says relative killed after U.S. soldiers raided her home.” … [H]ere it is in a nutshell: there was a U.S. night raid somewhere near

"Don’t even hear the murmur of a prayer…." — Brother Bob Illness and other aggravations have hindered the blogivating of late, so below are some choice items from other quarters that are well worth your attention. The Children’s Crusade Andy Worthington tells the truly horrendous story of Omar Khadr, who was taken captive as a child by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and has now spent eight years in the lower depths of the American gulag. He is now being "tried" in the kangaroo "tribunals" of the Bush-Obama Continuum, under arbitrarily concocted, illogical "laws" whose cruel absurdity would shame a Stalinist