Aretha Sills in the LA Review of Books:

What I remember most about the AP obituary that ran fifteen years ago tomorrow was its brevity — given that it was written for one of the most influential songwriters of our time — and a quote from Katie Belle, Townes Van Zandt’s five-year-old daughter who was with him: “Daddy’s having a fight with his heart.”

When he died at age 52 on New Year’s Day 1997, fans of the legendary Texas singer-songwriter were saddened but not surprised. He had, after all, named his 1972 album The Late Great Townes Van Zandt — possibly a joke about his perpetual obscurity, or possibly because he and everyone who knew him thought he would die young like Hank Williams (who also died on January 1st). As his friend Guy Clark said at the memorial, “I booked this gig thirty-something years ago.” Townes’s seemingly brief turn on this plane was characterized by staggeringly self-annihilating behavior — behavior that had in many ways defined that turn, and has often overshadowed the powerful and transcendent body of work he left behind.

If I had a nickel I’d find a game.
If I won a dollar I’d make it rain.
If it rained an ocean I’d drink it dry

And lay me down dissatisfied.

— from “Rex’s Blues”

Townes’s obituary offered just enough room to recap a few basic facts: that his songs were recorded by singers more famous than he would ever be, including Emmylou Harris, Merle Haggard, and Willie Nelson; that though he sang about prostitutes and bums and emulated Lightnin’ Hopkins, he was the scion of a prominent Texas oil family; and, the often-told tale, that Steve Earle once threatened to jump on Bob Dylan’s coffee table to proclaim just who was the better songwriter. The obituary politely left it to Van Zandt’s lyrics (from “A Song For”) to hint at his lifelong struggles with mental illness and addiction: “There’s nowhere left in this world where to go. My arms, my legs they’re a tremblin’. Thoughts both clouded and blue as the sky, not even worth the rememberin’.”

The day after New Year’s 1997, I was working at Streetlight Records in San Francisco. A co-worker gingerly handed me the newspaper, fearing I’d be crushed.

Sheldon Richman in Reason:

Sometimes a step back helps to provide perspective on a matter. President Obama provided such a step with his March 16 Executive Order—National Defense Resources Preparedness. In it we see in detail how completely the government may control our lives—euphemistically called the “industrial and technological base”—if the president were to declare a national emergency. It is instructive, if tedious, reading.

President Obama claims this authority under the Constitution and, vaguely, “the laws of the United States,” but it specifically names the Defense Production Act of 1950. As Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute and a Freeman columnist observed, the government’s authority to commandeer the economy, which was “abandoned” after World War II then substantially reinstated with the Korean War,

was retained afterward in the form of statutory authority for its reinstatement whenever the president might so order under the authority of the Defense Production Act of 1950, as amended. . . . Under this statute, the president has lawful authority to control virtually the whole of the U.S. economy whenever he chooses to do so and states that the national defense requires such a government takeover.

No Academic Exercise

The Executive Order, which requires no additional congressional approval, details who within the executive branch has what precise authority in the event the President invokes his emergency powers. We shouldn’t assume this is merely an academic exercise or that a third world war would need to break out. In the last decade, under circumstances representing no “existential threat” to our society, the executive branch has exercised extraordinary powers.

Ben Davis reviews Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics, in artnet:

The Politics of Aesthetics is a quick and dirty tour of a number of these themes. It features five short meditations on various conjunctions of art and politics, plus a lengthy interview with Rancière by his translator Gabriel Rockhill titled “The Janus-Face of Politicized Art,” an introduction by Rockhill and a concluding essay by the art world’s other favorite quirky philosopher, Slavoj Zizek. It is a short but serious book and, in keeping with French intellectual practice, sensuously impenetrable, coming equipped with a glossary of terms for the uninitiated.

Politically, Rancière favors the concept of equality. “Politics exists when the figure of a specific subject is constituted, a supernumerary subject in relation to the calculated number of groups, places, and functions in a society” (p. 51). Translated into layman’s English, Rancière is saying that politics is the struggle of an unrecognized party for equal recognition in the established order. Esthetics is bound up in this battle, Rancière argues, because the battle takes place over the image of society — what it is permissible to say or to show.

Back-to-back with this “esthetics of politics,” in Rancière’s thinking, is a “politics of esthetics” itself. To unlock its nature, much time is spent picking over the idea of modernism and placing it within Rancière’s tripartite scheme of art “regimes.” This complex intellectual equation can be simplified substantially if one realizes that what he is doing is combining, in a clever way, art history with labor history.

Prayer

The sea engulfed a sailor in its depths.
Unaware, his mother goes and lights
a tall candle before the ikon of our Lady,
praying for him to come back quickly, for the weather to be good—
her ear cocked always to the wind.
While she prays and supplicates,
the ikon listens, solemn, sad,
knowing the son she waits for never will come back.

by C.P. Cavafy
from Collected Poems
translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
Edited by George Savidis
Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992

From The New York Times:

Many people mistakenly call the last book of the Christian Bible “Revelations.” It is actually the (one) Revelation to John. Elaine Pagels may be playing on that common error with the title of her latest book, “Revelations,” though in this case it is accurate: she ­places the biblical Book of Revelation in the context of other ancient narratives of visions and prophecy. Her account highlights several prophetic works and visionaries, from Ezekiel to Paul to the ancient sect of prophesying Christians called the Montanists, and others. Pagels also discusses the afterlife of Revelation in the Christianity of late antiquity through the fourth century. Her thesis is that apocalyptic literature — visions, prophecies, predictions of cataclysm — has always carried political ramifications, both revolutionary and

“Revelation” is from the Latin translation of the Greek word apocalypsis, which can designate any unveiling or revealing, fantastic or ordinary. Scholars also refer to the document as the Apocalypse of John. And that same Greek word provides the label for all sorts of ancient literature that scholars call “apocalyptic.” The biblical text purports to relate a real vision experienced by an otherwise unknown Jew named John — not the Apostle John, nor the same person as the anonymous author of what we call the Gospel of John. But we have no reason to doubt that his name was really John. It wasn’t an unusual name for a Jew.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

Every afternoon, a young man runs barefoot down the middle of our street. He’s one of those paleo-fitness people—the ones who believe we should go shoeless like the cavemen when we exercise. I’m not necessarily a detractor—as a runner myself, I think about things like long-term impact on my joints, heel strike and arch support, all of which are purported to be better when barefoot—but given that our environs are now covered in asphalt, broken glass, and worse, I’m also not eager to take up this practice.

The barefoot approach is just one among a variety within a movement known as minimalist running. Going shoeless is both the most extreme and the most low-tech of the options for “reducing your shoes.” For those who prefer an intermediary between their skin and the street, there is barefoot-inspired footwear, like the ever more prevalent Vibram 5 Fingers (I’ll reserve my opinion on the aesthetic consequences of this trend). Recently, Nike announced a new shoe for the lightweight category that responds to many of the desires of minimalist runners, and then‚ since Nike likes to push the innovation envelope, goes further, tackling some of the bigger challenges inherent to mass-manufacturing shoes. The Nike Flyknit takes its cues not so much from bare feet as from socks. The company had heard from runners that the ideal fit for a shoe would be the snug feeling of knit material. “But all the features that make a sock desirable,” Nike says, “have proven to make them a bad choice for a running upper [the part of the shoe that is not the sole or the tongue]. An inherently dynamic material like yarn generally has no structure or durability.”

More here.

An excerpt from Adam Kotsko’s Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide To Late Capitalist Television in The New Inquiry:

My greatest regret is that I’m not a sociopath. I suspect I’m not alone. I have written before that we live in the age of awkwardness, but a strong case could be made that we live in the age of the sociopath. They are dominant figures on television, for example, and within essentially every television genre. Cartoon shows have been fascinated by sociopathic fathers (with varying degrees of sanity) ever since the writers of The Simpsons realized that Homer was a better central character than Bart. Showing that cartoon children are capable of radical evil as well, Eric Cartman of South Park has been spouting racial invective and hatching evil plots for well over a decade at this point. On the other end of the spectrum, the flagships of high-brow cable drama have almost all been sociopaths of varying stripes: the mafioso Tony Soprano of The Sopranos, the gangsters Stringer Bell and Marlo of The Wire, the seductive imposter Don Draper of Mad Men, and even the serial-killer title character of Dexter. In between, one might name the various reality show contestants betraying each other in their attempt to avoid being “voted off the island”; Dr. House, who seeks a diagnosis with complete indifference and even hostility toward his patients’ feelings; the womanizing character played by Charlie Sheen on the sitcom Two and a Half Men; Glenn Close’s evil, plotting lawyer in Damages; the invincible badass Jack Bauer who will stop at nothing in his sociopathic devotion to stopping terrorism in 24—and of course the various sociopathic pursuers of profit, whether in business or in politics, who populate the evening news.

On a certain level, this trend may not seem like anything new. It seems as though most cultures have lionized ruthless individuals who make their own rules, even if they ultimately feel constrained to punish them for their self-assertion as well. Yet there is something new going on in this entertainment trend that goes beyond the understandable desire to fantasize about living without the restrictions of society. The fantasy sociopath is somehow outside social norms—largely bereft of human sympathy, for instance, and generally amoral—and yet is simultaneously a master manipulator, who can instrumentalize social norms to get what he or she wants.

Julian Friedland responds to Colin McGinn in the NYT's The Stone:

[W]hat objective knowledge can philosophy bring that is not already determinable by science? This is a question that has become increasingly fashionable — even in philosophy — to answer with a defiant “none.” For numerous philosophers have come to believe, in concert with the prejudices of our age, that only science holds the potential to solve persistent philosophical mysteries as the nature of truth, life, mind, meaning, justice, the good and the beautiful.

Thus, myriad contemporary philosophers are perfectly willing to offer themselves up as intellectual servants or ushers of scientific progress. Their research largely functions as a spearhead for scientific exploration and as a balm for making those pursuits more palpable and palatable to the wider population. The philosopher S.M. Liao, for example, argued recently in The Atlantic that we begin voluntarily bioengineering ourselves to lower our carbon footprints and to become generally more virtuous. And Prof. Colin McGinn, writing recently in The Stone, claimed to be so tired of philosophy being disrespected and misunderstood that he urged that philosophers begin referring to themselves as “ontic scientists.”

McGinn takes the moniker of science as broad enough to include philosophy since the dictionary defines it as “any systematically organized body of knowledge on any subject.” But this definition is so vague that it betrays a widespread confusion as to what science actually is. And McGinn’s reminder that its etymology comes from “scientia,” the ancient Latin word for “knowledge,” only adds to the muddle. For by this definition we might well brand every academic discipline as science. “Literary studies” then become “literary sciences” — sounds much more respectable. “Fine arts” become “aesthetic sciences” — that would surely get more parents to let their kids major in art. While we’re at it, let’s replace the Bachelor of Arts degree with the Bachelor of Science. (I hesitate to even mention such options lest enterprising deans get any ideas.) Authors and artists aren’t engaged primarily in any kind of science, as their disciplines have more to do with subjective and qualitative standards than objective and quantitative ones. And that’s of course not to say that only science can bring objective and quantitative knowledge. Philosophy can too.

Nadia Chaudhury “asked an assortment of literary-inclined people to revisit the books they loved back in the day, the ones that make them absolutely cringe today” in The Awl:

Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine

Oh man, I suspect you're going to be hearing this answer a lot, but: the complete works of Ayn Rand. I discovered them toward the end of high school and walked around for a couple of years giving Howard Roark-like speeches to everyone about “the highest blazing good of selfish free-market epistemology” or something. In retrospect, it seems pretty clear that my Objectivist phase had more to do with the subjective agonies of post-adolescence (insecurity, narcissism) than it did with pure reason. (And you could argue the same thing about Ayn Rand's relationship to it.)

Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh: A Novel

In high school I read a brisk mix of science fiction, fantasy and gay potboilers (Mass Effect 3 now is perhaps the best way to imagine my brain then). So, the novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley—I still can't look at Mists of Avalon—plus the Darkover novels, which all had some gay potboiler action, now that I think of it. And hello Gordon Merrick, famous for The Lord Won't Mind but I am thinking of The Great Urge Downward.

Yes, that is the title.

Over at the LSE, Maurice Bloch reviews Nicholas Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness (you can find the first chapter of the book here at Princeton University Press):

This is an extraordinary book as it attempts to explain all the most distinctive things about human beings in a few hundred pages. It is written by a swashbuckling character who clearly does not hesitate to take up the most daring challenges. Perhaps such characterisation will be enough to put off the majority of social and cultural anthropologists who have grown weary of grand generalisations about our species made by scholars from the natural sciences who have very little understanding of why our subject has abandoned making such grandiose pronouncements. So often these proposals seem mere repeats of older theories which have subsequently been found wanting for reasons of which their new advocates are unaware. At least in this case such condemnation would be somewhat unfair as it is clear that the author is well acquainted with what many anthropologists write and have written and he is not unsympathetic as so many natural scientists are. Another reason why anthropologists might reject this book out of hand is less admirable; it may simply be a manifestation of the sad theoretical timidity which has recently characterised much of the subject.

Whatever the causes for reluctance, such dismissal would be a pity. The book is written in a fun manner which will both delight and annoy but will never bore. I believe the discussion it contains, or at least parts of it, can prove excitingly thought provoking to all practitioners of social and cultural anthropology. What I therefore say to my anthropological colleagues is: “Prepare to be infuriated but read the book all the same”. Darwinian evolutionary theory frames the thesis. The argument is about the vexed question of the nature of human consciousness and what it implies. It thus attempts to explain the least obviously useful aspects of human beings as adaptations which account for their presence and survival. This however is not the usual ignorant reductionist stuff that we have all come to fear.

Hartosh Singh Bal in Open the Magazine:

A dharna, Wikipedia informs us, ‘is a fast undertaken at the door of an offender, especially a debtor, as a means of obtaining compliance with a demand for justice, such as payment of debt.’ Clearly then, at the very root of our most potent symbol of political protest, lies the fast.

But in its original form, the idea is not a modern or medieval invention, it is part of a much older Indo-European tradition. To turn to Wikipedia again, ‘Fasting was used as a method of protesting injustice in pre-Christian Ireland, where it was known as Troscadh or Cealachan. It was detailed in the contemporary civic codes, and had specific rules by which it could be used. The fast was often carried out on the doorstep of the home of the offender.’

For an idea to be shared between Aryavarta and Ireland, it must have had roots deep in the Indo-European past. Vinay Lal, in a fascinating piece on this shared idea, delves into the Indian evidence for this practice:

There can scarcely be as dramatic a text for insights into traditions of political fasting in India as Kalhana’s 12th century ‘Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir’ known as the Rajatarangini. This book by a Kashmiri Brahmin furnishes incontrovertible evidence of the widespread recourse to fasting. King Chandrapida himself fasted as a form of penance, in atonement for his inability to bring to justice the murderer of a man whose widow sought death by starvation unless punishment were inflicted on the guilty man (IV:82-99). The remedy of fasting, however, appears generally to have been available only to Brahmins, and Kalhana was not averse to passing sharp remarks on the ease with which members of his community would, singly or collectively, stage a hunger strike to safeguard their interests. As an illustration, Kalhana describes the events of the year 1143, in the reign of Jayasimha. Enraged by a plot to overthrow the king, in which they suspected the hand of the ministers Trillaka and Jayaraja, ‘and anxious to safeguard the country’, the Brahmins commenced a hunger strike ‘directed against’, notes Kalhana, ‘the king’—the king because he had, through his weakness and inaction, permitted the kingdom to fall into ruin. Kalhana suggests that the Brahmins may at first have been moved by noble intentions; but, ‘intoxicated with their own knavery’, they ‘obstinately persisted in their perfidious course’ until they had prevailed upon the king to dismiss his honest minister Alamkara and promise them that he would ‘uproot Trillaka after he had disposed of the pretenders to the crown’ (VIII:2737).

Brahmins may have been the source of many of these hunger strikes, at least in Kashmir, but clearly their aims were as political as they were religious.

Last fall, television stations carried a 60-second ad for Audi’s A6 car. The opening images showed a pitted, potholed American road while the voice-over gloomily intoned, “Across the nation, over 100,000 miles of highways and bridges are in disrepair.” Fear not, said the voice; Audi’s smart gizmos would help. The spot’s message was clear: Roads in the United States are now so bad, you need a foreign car to negotiate them. The Audi ad was seized upon as evidence of American decline, now such a regular meme that the Foreign Policy magazine Web site runs a dedicated blog, “Decline Watch.” Books have been in plentiful supply, and now come two more, helpfully approaching the subject from left and right, as if to demonstrate declinism’s bipartisan credentials. The authors are big hitters in the geopolitics genre. Robert Kagan coined what passes for a catchphrase in the international relations field when he declared a decade ago that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” At the time, Kagan, a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s State Department, was one of the leading advocates of military action against Iraq. Zbigniew Brzezinski, still best known for his service as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, has filled the three intervening decades with a throng of books on the same terrain: what America should do in the world.

more from Jonathan Freedland at the NY Times here.

“The past is never dead,” Faulkner famously wrote in “Requiem for a Nun.” “It’s not even past” — and nothing demonstrates that maxim better than the discovery of a “new” painting by a revered, long-dead artist. Suddenly, it is as if that person is alive and well again and walking among us. Art collector Peter Silverman had such a jolting recognition concerning a painting he saw in the late 1990s and again at a New York City auction in 2007. He was convinced it must have been executed by the one and only Renaissance master from Vinci — a story he relates, with Catherine Whitney, in “Leonardo’s Lost Princess: One Man’s Quest to Authenticate an Unknown Portrait by Leonardo da Vinci” (Wiley: 256 pp., $25.95). The painting that beguiled him — a 9-by-13-inch drawing in chalk and pen and ink — seems hardly dramatic: A young woman in profile, her brown hair bound in ribbons. Simple. Plain. Leonardo? Really?

more from Nick Owchar at the LA Times here.

In a nation of lies, sometimes only fiction tells the truth. So Adam Johnson‘s new novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, already a New York Times bestseller, may offer new insights about North Korea, the country he says is too often dismissed as a mélange of “buffoonery, madness or evil.” With the launch of a long-range rocket scheduled around April 15, the world is turning its eyes again on North Korea. An outraged world clamors to know what can be done to contain a dangerous pariah state. Johnson’s prediction? “They’re going to send up a big-ass rocket and whatever happens, the North Koreans will call it a startling success.” “It’s not about science,” the Stanford associate professor of English explained. “It’s about the consolidation of power so Kim Jong Un doesn’t get murdered in the night.” Johnson suggests we look to the country’s new leader, the third generation in a totalitarian dynasty, to explain the newest flare-up of celestial ambitions. “In North Korea, everything is a message. Often, it’s a message about survival. Even if it appears malicious, it’s just a message.”

more from Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven here.

This video piece in the NYT with Alan Gilbert, complete with motion capture, is very interesting.

Christine Smallwood reviews Susan Sontag's journals in Bookforum:

THE TITLE OF THE SECOND VOLUME of Susan Sontag’s private writings is taken from an entry dated May 22, 1965, when Sontag was thirty-two years old. “Novel about thinking—” it begins. “An artist thinking about his work.” In the margins, she adds, “A spiritual project—but tied to making an object (as consciousness is harnessed to flesh).”

It’s a strange and spooky phrase, the richest image in the diary’s five hundred pages. There’s something sad about this emblem of captivity, the spirit being put under reins. There’s also something enabling and empowering—the inanimate being directed, gaining strength, driving forward. Being harnessed to flesh means being flexible enough to move.

The animating force at the heart of everything Sontag wrote—the cultivation of aesthetic and intellectual experience—is not properly speaking an idea; it’s a stance, or an attitude. It is itself a way of moving. There is no magnum opus or theoretical treatise that we can point to as Sontag’s distinct contribution, no “takeaway” we can pierce under glass. So it may not be very surprising that since her death eight years ago, the many provocations of her thinking have drifted out of view to make room for the more obvious fact of her celebrity. Besides, she’s a woman; we make good icons.

As a personality, Sontag just keeps giving—the famous marriage, the semi-closeted sexuality, the reenacted dodging from sniper fire—and so we have been treated to many biographies in miniature, memoirs and readings of her reinventions, her snobbishness, her grandeur, her condescension, her streak. But to focus on the persona instead of the work is to miss the point. They go together. Sontag knew very well that thinking is the person bent into form, the consciousness harnessed to flesh. To hate or love someone’s writing is to hate or love that person’s soul. There is no great life apart from great work. In my mind, that means what matters about Sontag is already in her criticism and her fiction. Her private writings do not expose personal secrets that explain her work; the opposite is true. We need her work to understand her notebooks.