Arts of War on the Web

The University of Iowa’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the University’s Veterans Center, is offering Identity and Social Issues: Wounded Warriors: Veterans in Literature and Film, a class this summer taught by creative nonfiction instructor Stephen A Kuusisto. The class runs from June 9 to July 31 and meets twice a week on the Iowa City campus.

“Disability has always been a difficult subject in literature and film,” the course description says. “Disabled characters often challenge cultural ideas of ‘normalcy’ while they also complicate the symbolism of the ‘heroic’ body. This course explores the contradictions in the representations of disability in literature and film by focusing on the experiences of veterans with disabilities.

Specifically we will analyze representations of veterans with disabilities in literature and film and seek to understand the wounded body in its political, social, and cultural contexts. Additionally we will explore how literature both reflects and distorts the experiences of returning veterans.”

The films and books the course cover will include several dealing with the Vietnam War, such as Ron Kovic’s primal scream of a memoir, Born on the Fourth of July and the accompanying film by Oliver Stone, and The Deer Hunter (above). It also includes the great post-WWII film the Best Years of our Lives, as well as selections from the writings of Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Studs Terkel, and Norman Mailer.

For info, email stephen-kuusisto@uiowa.edu or john-mikelson@uiowa.edu, go to www.uiowa.edu/~uiva ohn D. Mikelson or call 319-384-2020.

Richard Currey’s classic Vietnam War and post-war novel, Fatal Light, which came out to sterling reviews in 1989, is about to be published in a new 20th Anniversary Edition from the Santa Fe Writers Project (204 pp., $14, paper). That most excellent event will be celebrated with a reading by Currey, who served as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, on Sunday, April 5, at 2:00 p.m., at The Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Currey has written an introduction to the new edition, which sets the novel in its overall place and links it to future wars, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can read the intro on Currey’s web site.

The new web site, Stories of War, created by Alex Haldi, Brian Turner, and Eric Leventhal, wants to hear from from veterans of all ages and wars who have stories to tell. “It can be any experience you’ve had–from facing combat to returning home or just taking a day off,” they note on the sites’ homepage. “We are also interested in stories from loved ones about people who have gone to war. These stories can be either positive or negative; we want to hear them all.”

The web site’s production team will take some of the submitted stories and turn them over to professional artists, photographers, and musicians, who, in turn, will create artistic works based on those words. A portion of the profits gleaned from those professional art works will be donated to support veterans’ groups, Turner told us.

Entries should be under 300 words and emailed to storiesofwar09@gmail.com Submissions or any artistic endeavors created from them will not be published without the consent of the author.

Take a look at the site and if you decide to submit a war story, please mention your read about it on this page, VVA’s Arts of War on the Web.

When a big Hollywood movie with big Hollywood stars goes straight to video, it usually is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong. That’s what I thought when I heard that the new Tommy Lee Jones film, In the Electric Mist, never made it to the theaters and went right into the video stores (and Netflix).

The movie is based on the great James Lee Burke detective thriller In the Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead, in which his Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux, solves a couple of grisly murders and overcomes his own Vietnam-War induced flashbacks that feature dead Confederate soldiers arising from the Louisiana swamps to have conversations with him about life and death and war.

I just watched the video. The movie was–surprise to me!–terrific. Tommy Lee Jones was great as he usually is, as the haunted but honorable and morally upright Dave. The french director Bertrand Tavernier got southern Louisiana beautifully on film. The pictures were as evocative as Burke’s always great writing. The plot hummed along.

The other actors (including John Goodman doing a great bad guy, Julie “Baby Feet” Balboni; Mary Steenburgen as Dave’s paitent, put-upon wife Bootsie; Justina Machado–best known for her role as Rico’s wife on Six Feet Under–as FBI agent Rosie Gomez; and the always-reliable Ned Beatty as Twinky LeMoyne) were all but perfect.

The plot is essentially the same as the book’s, but moved up from the early ’90s to the present day, or at least post-Katrina. Dave gets sucked into a nerve-rattling investigation of a dead prostitute, which leads to re-opening the case of the murder of a prisoner that he happened to witness three decades earlier. Dave, as he is wont to do, takes the law into his own hands (above) once or twice. He has flashbacks, including several talks with Confederate Army Gen. John Bell Hood, played eerily well by Levon Helm, best known as the drummer in The Band.

Dave’s Vietnam War service is an important part of the novel. It is not mentioned in the film, which is too bad. It could have further flushed out his character. The only hint is when Helm addresses Dave as “lieutenant” a couple of times.

Lem Genovese, our favorite Vietnam veteran singer/songwriter, has just updated his excellent website, wwwyankeemedicrecords.com The site now offers videos and free down-loadable music of Genevese’s excellent folk-tinged tunes. There also are links to the “story behind the song,” a biography, reviews, and tour dates.

Speaking of which, Genovese will do a benefit concert on Friday, April 24, at The Coffee House, the famed Milwaukee venue, at 631 North 19th Street, which was founded in 1967 and is one of the longest-running non-profit coffee houses in the nation.

“A group called Guitars for Vets, co-founded by Vietnam veteran Dan Van Buskirk,” Genovese told us, “provides free guitar lessons to veterans. If they stick with the lessons, they receive a free guitar after ten sessions.”

One of the most tenacious “what-ifs” of the Vietnam War is what John F. Kennedy would have done as far as prosecuting the war had he lived. For years, Kennedy partisans have been postulating that he would have pulled out the 16,000 or so American “advisers” that he sent there and would not have escalated the war as Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1965.

For evidence, they point primarily to speeches and press conferences that JFK made in which he said things that could be interpreted that he was leaning toward withdrawing.

On the other hand, there are those who point out that JFK was an ardent cold warrior who made speeches throughout his public career on the necessity to stop the spread of communism with force if necessary. Plus, he greatly increased the number of American “advisers” from around a thousand when he took office in January 1961 to that 16,000 figure when he was assassinated in November 1963. And, besides, no one knows what JFK would have done if he had been faced with the circumstances that LBJ encountered in 1964 and 1965, including the stepped-up VC attacks on American troops in Vietnam.

The latest artistic endeavor to make the pro-JFK case is a documentary film called Virtual JFK - Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived This is the work primarily of James Blight, a Brown University research professor and a crony and literary collaborator of Robert S. McNamara. That should tell you oceans about Blight’s view of the situation.

The theme of the big, splashy feature article in the March 17 Washington Post Style section on the new exhibit, “May Lin: Systematic Landscapes,” running through July 12 at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, was the fact that the renowned artist was having her first show in the nation’s capital since 1981. That’s when her Vietnam Veterans Memorial design was unveiled.

Lin went on to design several other memorials and “monumental landscapes,” and the show is “her attempt to bring indoors” the work “that she has been doing for the past 15 years,” reporter David Montgomery wrote in the article.

Montgomery asked Lin about her famed reticence to speak publicly about The Wall. “She was busy processing the precocious success and controversy,” he said, referring to how young Lin was (a college junior) when she won the nationwide design contest, and the loud criticism of her abstract design from some quarters, “trying to figure out who she was as an artist. And she was working hard at her art–’obsessively,’ she says. Her instinct was, don’t look back, keep creating.”

Lin said she continues to have conflicting feelings about the experience. “It’s not bad memories,” she told Montgomery. “Let’s put it this way: I didn’t have a really nice time.”

“I do think I have this big white elephant right here,” she said, pointing to the area of the Memorial. “Like, ‘Oh, God, she did that, it’s so great. You know, this [other] stuff is crap.’ It’s going to happen.”

Lin said she was “desperately trying to move past the Memorial as fast as possible as an artist. I was trying to prove to myself that I could balance out my life in a different way. After the Vietnam Memorial, I don’t think you can prove it to the world to a degree that you would need to, so I’m just not interested.”

It’s “not that I don’t love the Memorial,” she said. “But you do feel it’s like this big galumphing elephant. And I think you move on. And yet, at the same time, it’s a big piece. It will always by my biggest piece and I’m very proud of it.”

She visited the Memorial while in D.C. with her husband and two daughters, something, Lin said, she likes to do at night. “It was really magical,” she said. “In a funny way, the popularity of it is a sign it’s working. But when you’re dealing with intimacy and connection, there’s something when you see it with a lot of people that’s different from when you see it on your own.”

Tobias Wolff, the acclaimed short story writer and memoirist (This Boys Life, In Pharaoh’s Army), who served in the Army Special Forces in the Vietnam War, received the 2009 Story Prize for short fiction on March 4. He was honored for his 2008 collection, Our Story Begins.

The Story Prize, in its fifth year, includes a $20,000 award. Wolff’s book and two other finalists were chosen from among 73 story collections published by 56 different publishers or imprints.

Wolff received the award and an engraved silver bowl at an the Story Prize awards ceremonies, which took place at The New School in New York City. The other finalists, Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth) and Joe Meno (Demons in the Spring), received $5,000 prizes. The three authors also read from their work at the event.

Here’s what I had to say about the collection in my review, which appeared in the May-June 2008 issue of The VVA Veteran:

In this collection of old and new stories, Wolff creates one or two sharply drawn, compelling characters and puts them through fast-paced, intriguing stories that quickly come to a fascinating (if sometimes inconclusive) end. These stories are set in many different locations: college campuses, Army bases, prep schools, rural areas, cities.

A few deal with Vietnam veterans. But these aren’t Vietnam War stories. They are three decades worth of first-rate short fiction from one of the greatest literary lights of our generation.

Tim O’Brien, the acclaimed novelist (Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, et al.) and Vietnam War veteran who teaches at Texas State University, San Marcos, will take part in two events on Sunday, March 8, and Monday, March 9, at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey.

He will host “An Afternoon With Tim O’Brien” on March 8, at 1:00 p.m., and be the featured guest in the college’s Visiting Writer Series on March 9 at 7:00 p.m. The events are sponsored by the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation and Brookdale’s Visiting Writers Series.

The $5 donation suggested for the Sunday event will benefit the New Jersey Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Foundation. For info about the Sunday event, call 732-335-0033 or go to the N.J. Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial website. To learn more about the Monday talk, email sparker@brookdalecc.edu, call 732-224-2650, or go to http://www.app.com/article/20090304/GETPUBLISHED/90304039

The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland (just outside of the nation’s capital) will hold a second veterans’ writing workshop April 6-May 18. This free, six-week prose-writing workshop is aimed at active-duty troops, veterans, and their dependents. The workshops are part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, the innovative program that documents and preserves the wartime experiences of men and women in uniform and their families.

The newest Operation Homecoming workshops will be held at VA Medical Centers, military hospitals, and affiliated centers such as the D.C. Writer’s Workshop, in communities around the country. Operation Homecoming is a partnership with the Department of Defense and the VA, and is strongly supported by The Boeing Company.

The Writer’s Center workshop will be led by James Mathews (above), an Iraq War veteran and the author of the award-winning short story collection Last Known Position. He joins an impressive list of writers who have conducted more than 60 Operation Homecoming writing workshops here and overseas. That list includes Tobias Wolff, Jeff Shaara, Marilyn Nelson, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joe Haldeman, Richard Currey, and Mark Bowden.

This workshop is limited to 16 participants who will be selected on a first come, first served basis. For info or to register, call 301-654-8664.