Lazy, as usual, I’ve decided to take care of this entry with an example of my reviewing for Small Press Review instead of the piece I said would be here (and, I hope, will be here tomorrow); it’s one I just finished this morning, and think rather fair-minded for me:

Left Curve. No. 38. 2014. 144 pp.
Editor: Csaba Polony. Pa;
http://www.leftcurve.org. $12.

My review of Left Curve will be politically biased.  I’m pro-Israel, for instance, so had trouble its over 20,000 words by Harry Clark, “The End of Modern Jewish History,” which is so far left as to attack Noam Chomsky, famous for his opposition to Israel, and his leftist followers for—finally—not acknowledging Zionism as “the major source of genocide and destruction in western Asia.”  However, if I were editing a book of pro and con essays about Israel, I’d definitely want it in it.

While politics is a part of almost everything in Left Curve, it has non-fiction about a variety of subjects not directly political, like film criticism by Christy Rogers of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, visual art criticism of “Rodochenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism” and by Rahela Mizrahi about the supposed “appropriation of Palestinian Heritage (malignly, of course) by Israeli fine arts (yes, back to Israel).”

Its literary criticism includes some densely Franco-academic stuff by E. San Juan, Jr. about Kafka which I can’t follow well enough to be sure it doesn’t make any sense at all (exaggeration—it veers ridiculously far from sense at times, but makes a few interesting points along the way), what seems to me an idiotic protest of Walt Whitman’s “appropriation of Native American names” by Patrick Cahill; and Robert Buckeye’s discussion of Croatian poet Irena Vrkljan’s Marina; Or, About Biography.  Here’s one snippet from the latter indicating the sort of literary criticism prominent, it seems to me, in all leftist discussions of literature: Marina “constantly interrogates itself (my italics) with a tenacity and relentlessness with which a lawyer questions his witness. It must answer the world to justify its existence.”  I’m referring mainly to its puritanical need to cleanse . . . basically, everything.

Left Curve also features poetry, some of it by two members of the Academy of American Poets, James Skully and Jack Hirshman, as well as short stories and memoirs—one of the latter by Susan Gallymore so artfully self-revealing to capture me fully in spite of its passionate leftism (which Gallymore got me to sympathize with emotionally though not agree with intellectually).

Conclusion: I’d call Left Curve must reading for anyone with a leftward lean politically, and worth trying for anyone leaning right with a serious desire for widening his political knowledge, for the magazine seems notably honest, clear-headed and mostly intelligent in its portrayal of its political curvature.
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