May 2007

An announcement: “Please keep fighting for our rights to freedom of speech, just make sure not to use it.”

Quoted: The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops’ online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

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Quoted: “The reputation of the Army is maintained on many fronts, and no one fights harder on its behalf than our young soldiers. We must allow them access to the fight,” Robbins wrote. “To silence the most credible voices — those at the spear’s edge — and to disallow them this function is to handicap ourselves on a vital, very real battlefield.”

Are books too complex to be the inspiration for mass killers?

Quoted: My feeling is that the novel is too complex a form for the embroyonic mass killer. Even one as chock-full of violence as Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho is too ironic, too layered, to hand them the simplistic message they need. The desperate-for-celebrity American children thinking of perpetrating this stuff aren’t interested in twists and turns: they just want to embody a one-dimensional dark cartoon.

Noted Booker Prize-winning author Yann Martel has vowed to send a book every other week to Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. This week’s selection? “Animal Farm.”

Quoted: Yesterday, the Booker Prize-winning author, who may fast be becoming Stephen Harper’s most annoying pest, dropped off the second volume in his supply-the-PM-with-good reading campaign - which more honestly should be described as a guerrilla campaign to affirm the importance of the arts and literature in the national discourse.

An opinion piece in the NYT by the screenwriter of “School of Rock” exploring the boundary of responsible film making.

Quoted: To defend mindless exercises in sadism like “The Hills Have Eyes II” by citing “Macbeth” is almost like using “Romeo and Juliet” to justify child pornography.

Author Jonathan Bell explores the hidden strata of violence just outside his door.

Quoted: To the outsider glancing at the newsstands, modern London must appear as a fearful, dark, Dickensian space of casual, perpetual youth violence, where social conventions have crumbled and a misplaced look or accidental elbowing earns you a death sentence. Since the start of 2007, seven young men—six of them teenagers—have been murdered in the capital; four stabbed and three shot. The nature of the deaths—several victims were directly targeted by their killers, either in their own homes or in very public places—has created an indelible and visceral image of streets awash with lawless youth, with little respect for authority and no disdain for violence as common currency to solve the most trivial issues.