mark your calendars!

since this year for me has been all about bad timing, it only seems fitting that i miss out on this, too. but so that other folks who may be interested do not, i'm using my little blog to shamelessly promote my college best friend...

remember all those old posts about my friend dave's book? it's finally coming out this month. and he's going to be in pittsburgh giving a reading. everyone should go. this kid's got skillz. i mean it -- i'm not just biased because he's my friend and all. here are the details:

Dave Griffith -- _A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America_
Thursday, May 25th, 7:30 pm
Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
6300 Fifth Ave, Pgh

here's the press release for the book:

1-933368-12-8 Trade Paper Original
5 1/2 x 7 1/2 192 pp. $15.00
B&W photos and illustrations throughout
Current Affairs & Politics May 28^th, 2006

Inspired by the recent Abu Ghraib torture photos, this is Griffith's journey through the vast catalogue of violent and sexual images that have accumulated in our collective unconscious, a journey he seeks to understand through filters ranging from Flannery O'Connor to Susan Sontag to Andy Warhol.

Griffith offers gripping personal testimony to the difficulties of living out the Christian imperatives of love and forgiveness amid a culture that legitimizes government violence as the only "real" way to establish social order.—Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking

David Griffith is a writer to watch--politically engaged and bitingly funny, but never shrill. His passion for social justice is grounded in his understanding of art and religion-two forms of vision that, rightly understood, increase our awareness of irony and ambiguity rather than stifle them. This combination of talents and interests is rare indeed: Griffith is working the same territory as Thomas Merton in books like Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and Seeds of Destruction. In short, this is cultural criticism with a soul. -- Gregory Wolfe, editor, Image journal

In the wake of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, American leaders from different fields, politics, journalism, law, psychiatry struggled to understand what happened in the notorious prison, and why. In this astonishingly elegant and passionate series of essays, David Griffth contends that our society's shift from language to image has changed the way we think about violence and cruelty, and that this best explains the ongoing prisoner abuse scandals in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo.

In effect, Griffith argues, our much-touted visual “savvy” has lead to a true science fictional moment: a disconnect between the image and the consequences of the actions depicted—-a problem Anthony Burgess meditates on via Alex’s experimental “rehabilitation” in A Clockwork Orange.

In the spirit of Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Griffith meditates on images and literature, from the Abu Ghraib photos themselves, to Andy Warhol and even Star Trek; but Griffith in particular suggests that Flannery O'Connor—whose writings explored the gulfs between faith claimed and lived and the meaning of human evil—might offer the most potent insights into the failures at the prison facility.

Unlike Sontag, however, the narrative focuses inward, on the story of Griffith's own visual education, in order to expose the roots of a new violence, the violence of disbelief. Ultimately therefore, this book is more in the tradition of Joan Didion’s Salvador and Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved”—a dramatic, experiential first-person story from inside the mess and noise of the culture, inflected by a radical Catholic philosophy.

First serial rights to Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion

David Griffith has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA in English from the University of Notre Dame. He is the chair of creative writing at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, a frequent contributor to Godspy, a quarterly magazine about faith and culture, and is affiliated with the Catholic Worker houses in South Bend, Indiana, where he presently lives.

seriously, friends! make me proud and go check this out!