It’s hard to know what to think about the Coen brothers’ upcoming True Grit remake. At first glance it looks like a return to the award-winning filmmaking last seen in No Country For Old Men. But then again, remember what happened when they tried to remake The Ladykillers? Remember what a furious bodge that turned out to be? So will how will the new True Grit compare to the 1969 original? There’s only one way to settle this: comparing the trailers …
more from Film Blog at the Guardian here.
Mosharraf Zaidi in Foreign Policy:
In the opening chapter, Woodward introduces his bad guy: “the immediate threat to the United States [comes] … from Pakistan, an unstable country with a population of about 170 million, a 1,500 mile border with southern Afghanistan, and an arsenal of some 100 nuclear weapons.” Never mind the Woodward effect in Washington; in Obama's Wars, the villain is an entire country.
Relations between the United States and Pakistan have never been more fraught. Last month, NATO helicopters breached Pakistani airspace several times. In the first instance, they engaged a group of suspected terrorists, killing more than 30. On Sept. 30, in another breach of Pakistani territory and airspace, NATO gunships fired on Pakistani paramilitary troops from the Frontier Constabulary (FC). Three Pakistani soldiers were killed and another three were badly injured. No one even attempted to dismiss the incident as friendly fire. In response, Pakistan has shut down the main border crossing and supply route into Afghanistan at Torkham, and militants have attacked convoys bringing fuel to NATO forces. All this comes after the most intense month of U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan since the campaign began.
More here.
Twenty-first century Eagleton at times resembles the Dionysian persona he presented in Holy Terror, published in 2005, as the very embodiment of the Lacanian Real—excessive, sulphurous, unstaunchable. Revelling in the further release from polite dialogue that his ‘theological turn’ appears to bestow, the author of Reason, Faith, and Revolution plays Hamlet (a favourite Realist) to the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of thin-blooded rationalism (‘Ditchkins’ for short). [1] Momentarily indulging their seeming fellow-feeling, Eagleton ruthlessly exposes the nastiness beneath, resolving on final damage. He first mauled The God Delusion in a review entitled ‘Lunging, Flailing, Mis-punching’, but you would rather avoid Eagleton’s haymakers than Dawkins’s fisticuffs. The recent writings overlap heavily, such that Trouble with Strangers might be thought only to aggregate themes from the two books mentioned, plus those from two better ones—the bristlingly insightful Sweet Violence (2003), and the satisfyingly armchaired Meaning of Life (2007). [2] But more than the compilation effect, it is the internal agonistics of Trouble with Strangers that makes it both thoroughly absorbing and uneven in every sense. Organized by core Lacanian notions, which it clinically deconstructs, and alternating considered assessment with blasts of non-negotiable ‘Christian’ declaration, Strangers yields an amalgam that seems destined—perhaps designed—not to set. For all his formidable assuredness, Eagleton’s reflections on the loops that bind metaphysics, ethics, religion and politics are still very much in process.
In process, but not exactly in progress. The ‘ethics of socialism’, specified in the preface as one of the two main sources and goals of the enquiry, occupies only a handful of cursory sentences, some of them questionable—is socialism really about ‘solidarity with failure’, for example? The intention may be there, but it cannot be developed until Eagleton’s particular version of post-secularism—he does not use this term—has been talked out. According to this, a certain kind of secularist Marxism has gone, leaving us with two completely gutless alternatives: liberal rationalism and culturalist postmodernism. This spells good news for global capitalism, which rapaciously both promotes and devours such untroubling sensibilities. Progressive politics must therefore be re-imagined in the shape of a truly redemptive radicalism, its prerequisite energy stemming chiefly from the Christian preparedness for loving collective and subjective transfiguration. In order to access this last hope and opportunity, we need to see, unflinchingly, that there is nothing essentially progressive or self-sufficient about human society; that just as recto stands to verso, so virtuous sociability surfaces a void of disappointment, lack and despair. Insofar as socialist thought remains in thrall to cerebral universalism, it cannot entertain so dire a predicament from which to re-build. So Eagleton explores instead the promise of distributing moral philosophies into the psychoanalytic categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.
Over at Philosophy TV:
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According to the Past Hypothesis, the early universe was a low-entropy state, and entropy has been increasing ever since. Carroll thinks that the truth of the Past Hypothesis cries out for explanation; Callender thinks that its truth should be regarded as a brute law-like fact. They discuss this disagreement. Then (starting at 35:41) they discuss the explanatory merits of Carroll’s proposal that we inhabit a “baby universe” that is an offspring of another, higher-entropy universe.
Mr. Vargas Llosa, 74, is one of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, frequently mentioned with his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, who won the literature Nobel in 1982, the last South American to do so. He has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including “The Feast of the Goat” and “The War of the End of the World.”
In selecting Mr. Vargas Llosa, the Swedish Academy has once again made a choice that is infused with politics. Recent winners include Herta Muller, the Romanian-born German novelist, last year, Orhan Pamuk of Turkey in 2007 and Harold Pinter of Britain in 2005.
In 1990, Mr. Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of Peru and has been an outspoken activist in his native country. The news that he had won the prize reached him at 5 a.m., when he was hard at work in his apartment in New York, preparing to set out on a walk in Central Park, he told a radio station in Peru. Initially, he thought it was a prank.
“It was a grand surprise,” he said. “It’s a good way to start a New York day.”
He is currently spending the semester in the United States, teaching Latin American studies at Princeton University.
The prize is the first for a writer in the Spanish language in two decades, after Mexico’s Octavio Paz won the Nobel in 1990, and focuses new attention on the Latin American writers who gained renown in the 1960s, like Julio Cortazar of Argentina and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, who formed the region’s literary “boom generation.”
Sloane Crosley in The New York Times:
The idea that we’re inhabitants of “Here, You Dropped This” Island somewhere in the “You Gave Me Two 20’s” Galaxy is an appealing one. More than appealing, it’s a kind of survival technique. It’s culturally ingrained in us to disprove the New York clichés of cruelty and rudeness. New Yorkers have a reputation for skin so thick it feels like rock so we adore anything that undermines this idea and confirms our secret view of ourselves as neighborly and congenial. It’s the social equivalent of owning a really docile Rottweiler. This trust-filled warmth also serves as a salve against urban haters. People who don’t develop an instant taste for New York? Well, clearly they’re just visiting the wrong parts. The problem now is that we’re confusing humanity with safety.
More here.
Testimonial
……………………
Back when the earth was new
by Rita Dove
from On the Bus With Rosa Parks,
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1998
From Science:
For many years, Juan (not his real name) led a double life. Many of his college friends knew his secret, but few did at the company where he was doing his internship. At office functions, he had to employ acts of subterfuge so as to not be found out. Juan is a gay male. “I’m 28 now, and everyone’s expecting a wife or a girlfriend,” he says. “If I bring my boyfriend along, I will say to him ‘by the way, this is important’ and then he knows that we are to be ‘friends.’” At the same company’s Christmas party he brought along a female professor. His boss got drunk at the party and started congratulating him for dating her.
“I couldn’t correct him, because he’s my boss,” he recalls.
More here.
The Mencken revival has proved so durable largely because its subject planned it that way. Mencken—who worked as a reporter, theater-fiction-music critic, newspaper columnist, magazine editor, memoirist, and linguist—catalogued and stockpiled his unpublished and uncollected writing in a conscious effort to assist future editors and biographers in the exploitation of his back pages. He also instructed his estate to stagger these papers like timed charges, dropping them in 1971, 1981, and 1991. These bursts kept biographers and anthologists busy and focused anticipation on the next blast from the archives. What’s more, all this publishing activity has kept Mencken’s name in the news and very much alive in book reviews. My Life as Author and Editor (1993), which revealed the casual anti-Semitism and racism in Mencken’s private papers, added to his notoriety and reignited the debates over his legacy.
more from Jack Shafer at Bookforum here.
Greek tragedy, Jean-Pierre Vernant wrote, presents its protagonists as objects of debate, not examples of good conduct or even heroes deserving of sympathy; the same can be said of characters in epic, like Helen. Laurie Maguire’s literary biography of Helen of Troy makes us face up to moral ambiguities as it tracks the most beautiful woman in the world across time and across media, from Homer to Hollywood, as her subtitle has it. Since historians can find no trace of the real Helen on a coin, a stone or in a factual document, the search for her leads only to dreams and fantasies. Bettany Hughes attempted an archaeological quest in her Helen of Troy (2005), but was left wistfully hoping that Helen’s tomb might be discovered one day. Maguire finds traces of Helen of Troy everywhere, far beyond the poems and plays in which she is a character, but an individual Helen disappears, to emerge as the embodiment of a fundamental principle: absolute beauty.
more from Marina Warner at the LRB here.
In her great poem “Questions of Travel”, Elizabeth Bishop outlines the quandary that all long-distance travellers put to themselves at some stage of their journey: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? . . . Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / in this strangest of theatres?” It’s a good question for an elderly novelist pondering a trip to Africa to revisit some of the places that inspired his earlier work. It’s one that Evelyn Waugh might have asked himself in 1959 as he set off for East Africa; one he might have reiterated as he wrote up his journey in what became A Tourist in Africa (1960) – a book that even the most fervent Waugh admirers consider his laziest and worst. Similarly, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, born in Trinidad in 1932, knight of the realm, laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, might also have questioned himself in 2008 as he prepared to leave for Uganda and other African countries, West and South, unifying his peregrinations under the vague subtitle “Glimpses of African belief”. In fact, the comparisons with Waugh don’t need to end there: it’s an interesting thought-experiment to look at the two writers’ careers and to consider V. S. Naipaul as a kind of Caribbean Waugh. Both were precocious schoolboys who won scholarships to Oxford. Waugh was a distinctively small man – so is Naipaul: both around five foot, six inches. Both took bad degrees and in the doldrums of their post-Oxford lives half-heartedly attempted suicide (Waugh by drowning, Naipaul by gassing). Their early novels were brilliantly original comic satires before the later work assumed more gravitas and the humour diminished. And in their personas, also, both men reinvented themselves in early middle age and took to wearing masks, masks that eventually “ate into the face”. In these masks they delighted in expressing outrageous, unfashionable, ultra-right-wing opinions and the more the metropolitan intelligentsia howled and railed at them the more gleeful they were. Both men, late in their lives, went to Africa to write a travel book.
more from William Boyd at the TLS here.
Tomorrow the Swedish Academy will announce the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and various sportsbooks, like Ladbroke’s, are laying odds. But since the Swedish academy’s methods for selecting the prize-winner are a mystery to all but its members, those odds reflect almost exclusively the opinions of gamblers, most of whom are rather like the horseplayers who bet their favorite number or color of the jockey’s silks. That is to say, they’re suckers.
Nonetheless, it’s always interesting to speculate on who’ll walk away with the Prize, or whether the academy will do well by literature or merely prove, again, that even Nobel nods. It is unfortunately true that many of the Nobel’s choices have little do with literary merit. Remember that even the linguistically versatile Northern European academics who award the prize read a limited number of languages, the bulk of which are European. If this year they choose Ko Un it’s not because they turn to this poet’s work in the original Korean for solace and inspiration.
That said, the academy’s reputation for selecting writers on account of their political relevance is inflated. The translators, publishers and scholars of relatively unknown authors from timely danger zones – say, the Proust of Yemen, the Yeats of Burma – would like the academy to take account of the political situation that makes their chosen figure significant, but the Swedes rarely comply. To be sure, they named a Chinese émigré, Gao Xingjian, in 2000, and in 2007 they chose Orhan Pamuk in the midst of Ankara’s prosecution of the Turkish novelist for speaking out about the Armenian issue. But consider that it’s been almost a decade since 9/11 and they have yet to name an Arab, passing up the Palestinian favorite Mahmoud Darwish, who died in 2008.
The fact is that as often as not, Stockholm goes against the grain, naming authors that are, to say the least, politically indelicate, like the great VS Naipual, 2001’s winner. In effect, forecasting the Nobel Prize for Literature is less like handicapping the ponies than shooting craps, so let the dice roll.
One night last summer, I made a chile-spiked chili for my family: my parents, my sons, my partner, and her parents. We are all Indian, but while some of us have been steeped in chiles since our births in India, others—like my Chicago-born partner and my Manhattan-born, 15-year-old son—approach the genus capsicum with trepidation. Still others just have a God-given affinity for heat. My 12-year-old son, for example, also a native New Yorker, has been enjoying chiles with his breakfast cereal since infancy. It makes me realize that the world is divided not between rich and poor, or male and female, or East and West, but between those who like spicy food and those who do not.
This was an important meal, the first time I was meeting my partner's parents. Her father likes his food spicy, her mother, less so. I decided to make two versions of the chili: hot and hotter. I prepared it carefully, soaking the beans overnight, chopping the onions and garlic, roasting and grinding the spices. I laid the table with soft linen and fresh lilies and bathed it all in candlelight, to lull everyone into a false sense of security, as if they were going to get something European, flavored with nothing stronger than tarragon. It was a warm evening in Manhattan, and I left the windows open to the breeze from the Hudson River.
When the two pots of chili appeared on the table, my younger son smiled, my older son groaned.
“They're very spicy, be careful,” my parents warned my partner's parents.
“How spicy can they be?” my partner's father scoffed.
Forewarned, my guests commenced to eat. They began with a taste of the lower-voltage version and then, unable to help themselves, switched to the maximum version. Shouting ensued.
From Salon:
Peterson most assuredly knows his subject, having visited Iran more than 30 times since 1996, just before Mohammad Khatami's short-lived reformist government won power in an electoral landslide. He's talked to leaders (though the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reneged on a promised sit-down), clerics, apostates and activists, but even more important, he seems to have interviewed every street vendor, shopkeeper, field-tripping teenager and farmer he's ever encountered. In one of the book's most piteous scenes, he tentatively approaches a young man weeping over a grave in a cemetery. A paint factory worker, the man mourned both his beloved brother and the revolution his brother died for, betrayed by the government that claims to be defending it.
More here.
From The New York Times:
Graphene is a form of carbon in which the atoms are arranged in a flat hexagon lattice like microscopic chicken wire, a single atom thick. It is not only the thinnest material in the world, but also one of the strongest and hardest. Among its other properties, graphene is able to conduct electricity as well as copper does and to conduct heat better than any other known material, and it is practically transparent. Physicists say that it could eventually rival silicon as a basis for computer chips, serve as a sensitive pollution-monitoring material, improve flat-screen televisions, and enable the creation of new materials and novel tests of quantum weirdness.
More here.
On certain weekday evenings, I leave the visitor parking lot of San Quentin, the decrepit state prison that sits on the edge of the San Francisco Bay, and as I look out at the night sky rising above the Richmond Bridge—an arch of highway sending me home—I seem to be moving across the hinge of a great disproportion. It was the first thing I noted about teaching in prison, the way the impression of the place overtook speech. At first this impression was physical, then moral, and finally emotional. Teaching often facilitates a relationship with one’s own ignorance: only by confronting the limits of my knowledge can I begin to ask questions, begin to imagine how questions will be asked of me. This is a confrontation I have learned to accept readily, as a useful practice, a gentle intellectual and spiritual stretching in the safe and narrowed context of a classroom. But outside the door of the San Quentin classroom is a prison yard, and beyond that, stairways that lead to cellblocks and dorms where thousands of men live literally stacked against each other. I do not understand how to live out there. I don’t have to. But more significantly, I don’t know how to think about what a life there means. For some hours after teaching—sometimes days—I can’t reconcile the scale of my daily existence with the scale of a world which has brought about this other place.
more from Kathryn Crim at Threepenny Review here.
Geert Wilders is slowly but surely making Islamophobia an accepted element of political rhetoric in the Netherlands — and he's got his eyes on the United States, next.
Ferry Biedermann in Foreign Policy:
The Dutch coalition deal was done before the end of September, marking the political whitewashing of the previously unacceptable Geert Wilders, the brash, provocative, and peroxide-blond political wunderkind MP, and his right-wing Party for Freedom. He has agreed to lend his support in parliament to a minority government of conservative Liberals and the smaller Christian Democrats. In return Wilders has been given freedom to pursue many of his favorite policy projects, including anti-immigrant measures and several openly anti-Muslim initiatives, including a burqa ban and closer monitoring of Islamic schools.
More here.
Bankers have experienced a dramatic drop in social status thanks to the economic crisis. Humiliating public hearings featuring once mighty bankers in the U.S. Congress, court verdicts and fines against top financial brass have severed the profession of practically all moral authority. And recently the German Bundesbank expelled one of its board members, Thilo Sarrazin, for racist and Islamophobic positions in his book “Deutschland schafft sich ab. Wie unser Land aufs Spiel setzen” (DVA Munchen 2010). It must be quite a relief for the banking profession to see a monument to one of their own unveiled in front of the Nederlandsche bank in Amsterdam, followed by a exhibit opening in the Verzetsmusem, the museum of the Resistance movement. The exhibition, “Wally van Hall, Banker of the Resistance Movement”, places a banker in the role of cultural hero and presents him as an icon of national history decades after this remarkable story sank into collective oblivion. Van Hall (1906-1945) was a Dutch banker who, like many others, continued his work after the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, hoping that he would be able to prevent further damage.
more from Dragan Klaic at Sign and Sight here.
