Henry Reed's poem of the Second World War offers a studied, ironic catalogue of some parts of experience silencing others. Here are observable facts, given as imperative command; knowledge of their use is for the future, rather than a possession of the present, however: one of the many things we (or you) have not got. Here also is the beauty of nature and its utter irrelevance to the human struggle. “Naming of Parts” excludes more than it includes: what is not said constantly overbears and threatens to break through what is. But the balance of information is precariously maintained, the unspeakable, the horror which is the truth of the war being disguised, expressed, and controlled in the naming of parts.

In a very different register, William Gass writes in his Habitations of the Word,

Lists, then, are for those who savor, who revel and wallow, who embrace, not only the whole of things, but all of its accounts, histories, descriptions, justifications.

Contemporary culture seems to be increasingly preoccupied with the millennium. “Endism,” the cult of the end, casts a familiar shadow. As memories of the cold war fade and the threat of nuclear apocalypse recedes, concerns about the environment and the disturbing activities of millenarian sects provide new sources of anxiety. Academic texts, like Robert Sinai's The Decadence of the Modern World (1978) and Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992), echo this apocalyptic atmosphere. One of the most striking versions of the endist thesis is offered by Alain Mine who, in Le Nouveau Moyen Âge (1993), suggests that modernity's dream of a “clean, well-lighted place” is being supplanted by a new medievalism, a period characterised by doubt, fear and superstition. This entropic zeigeist is sustained by a series of obvious comparisons between the anxieties of the contemporary period and those of the last fin de siècle. Elaine Showalter's Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle details some of the points of comparison and produces an argument which identifies a strong image of the past in her vision of the present.

The Progressive movement's confrontation with big business was dominated by a paradox. Reformers constantly warned about large corporations, denouncing their capacity to abuse workers, cheat consumers, brutalise competitors and undermine the democratic system. But, despite such rhetoric, the movement did little to diminish the social, political and economic power of big business. This discrepancy has, of course, attracted many historians' attention. For some, Progressivism's “failure” stemmed from reformers' ambivalent attitude towards big business and industrialisation: while angry about the malignant results of big business, Progressives agreed that any campaign to reverse the process of industrialisation would be futile and potentially harmful. For New Left historians, such as Gabrial Kolko, Martin Sklar and James Weinstein, the explanation for the shortcomings of Progressivism is even more straightforward. They claim that, despite their disingenuous declarations in favour of democracy and equality, most Progressive leaders never intended to challenge the power of America's corporate elite.

Alfred Kinsey has long been recognized for his crucial role in the history of American sexual science. Kinsey's massive studies of American sexual behavior changed the way social scientists studied sexuality by breaking from the accepted social hygienic, psychoanalytic, psychiatric and physiological approaches. Scholars have noted that Kinsey's efforts paved the way for the work of Masters and Johnson and contributed to a postwar climate of “openness” about sexual behavior. In effect, Kinsey's studies signaled the final triumph of scientific candor over the nineteenth century “conspiracy of silence.” Furthermore, Kinsey's quantitative approach advanced what Paul Robinson has called the “modernization of sex,” and Kinsey's discussion of homosexuality inspired both the homophile movement of the 1950's and the anti-homosexual moral panic of the same decade. Yet for all of Kinsey's significance, his part in shaping the social policies of the 1950's and the “sexual revolution” of the 1960's has received surprisingly little historical analysis.

Beloved is a self-conscious examination of the possibilities and limitations of the story-making process, both for the individual and for the community. Because slavery is a highly emotive subject and because historical narratives of slavery are so controversial, the exercise is a particularly potent one. The basic problem of the novel concerns the need to transform facts of unspeakable horror into a life-giving story, for the individual, for the black community, and for the nation. It is a problem which encourages compulsive repetition and avoidance; hence the stories of slavery proliferate. On the individual level the stories are shaped by the points of view of a variety of characters; on a wider level, by the demands of different types of utterance and by the structuring power of different kinds of historical perspectives and linguistic formulations, including, most significantly, generic forms. This profusion of storytelling makes the statement at the end of the novel, that “this is not a story to pass on” exceedingly problematic, for there is no single referent for the pronoun “this”, and the article “ a ” seems singularly inappropriate in view of this profusion.

Although this quote reads like a description of Hollywood and its celluloid environs, the author is reviewing Run With the Hunted: A. Charles Bukowski Reader, a comprehensive anthology of the poet-novelist's work. From Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960), his first full-length collection of poetry, to Pulp, published shortly after his death in 1994, Bukowski chronicled the humorous, lyric, impoverished lives of prostitutes, drinkers, bums, writers, and miscreants of every description. His tales of squalor which document the starving and passionate Angeleno writer are in large measure inspired by John Fante.

Los Angeles is Buk territory. He lived in and wrote about Central Los Angeles for most of his seventy-three years. L.A. is a place where, in the realm beyond fiction, people migrate in pursuit of dreams. One category of migrant dream-seeker is the writer. Whether he/she is a neophyte seeking fortune as a screenwriter or an aging, established author reviving an endangered career, the writer confronts an industry whose interests and intents are tangential to his/her own.