The Next Superpower

On the much-publicised full moon
festive youths and families gorge

on overpriced moon-cakes
to celebrate mid-autumn. How

very poetic. Not all that far away
the plants’ wastes flow

to choke the Yangtze. I can’t
appreciate the taste of the cakes,

their severe sweetness. The Chinese
cherish the stuff. This, they say,

is a beloved tradition. I can’t
remember ever loving anything

resembling one. You can’t finish
yours, and stroll onto the balcony

to view the fireworks. I’m worried
about the colossal dam cracking

and the River devouring this stuffy,
miasmic city. Will nature

ever know what to do with
humans? Will humans surpass words

like “nature”, “river” and “moon”?
The cake, I’ve been told, grows

every year in price. China swells
every year in wealth and power. I’m

frankly terrified of an ecological
armageddon. You seem bored with

the festivities and utterly finished
with the West. We left Australia

for an ancient culture. How
perturbed we are to discern

this country’s gargantuan
industrialisation. I leer at the remnants

of the pungent cake. The West
has traded its soul for a few dollars. Will

China remember the Opium War or
keep eating the impossibly rich

sweets? Am I being simply
disrespectful? What

of it? Glaciers melt and, yes,
this autumn is hotter than summer. So

Capitalism won; the cadres swapped
their gray Mao-esque suits

for the latest Armani. Indeed
your ennui and my disenchantment

match. We’re in love, two ex-pats
struggling to finish our moon-cakes

in the furnace of “the next Shanghai”.
.
.

Vivian Gornick in The Nation (image from Wikimedia Commons):

When I stumbled on the writing of A.B. Yehoshua, it was as though a fault line had opened in a hardened surface to expose me to an emotional insight that life on the Israeli street had denied me. Interestingly enough, I met the author before I read the work, and only later realized that it demonstrated beautifully the old chestnut about the best part of a writer residing in the work, not in the person. Yehoshua’s prose penetrated to a level of psychological understanding that moved me deeply, whereas he himself could have doubled for the bullying Israeli with whom I dealt daily.

I met him in Haifa, where he lives and teaches. A friend in New York had sent him a letter of introduction on my behalf, and one day when I was in the city, I called and was invited to come right over. He was sitting at his desk when I arrived: a man in his mid-40s with a bulky body, a powerful face and a mass of curly black hair. He looked up and said in a voice rising on a note of insinuation, “So why are you still living in the Diaspora? Why aren’t you living here where you belong?” I laughed. “You’re kidding,” I said. He told me that he most certainly was not kidding and went on to sketch a picture of my life in the States as one at risk in a Christian nation that, at any time, might turn on me; right now, at this very minute, I was standing on a narrow strip of beach with the sea at my back and the goyim, for all I knew, beginning to advance on me. The visit lasted an hour, during which I said little while Yehoshua harangued me.

When I got back to Tel Aviv, I bought a collection of his early stories and sat down in my rented apartment with its stone floors, shuttered balcony and long door handles to read the writing of this fiercest of old-fashioned Zionists. I began to read in mid-afternoon and continued straight through to the last page of the last story, whereupon I remained sitting with the book in my lap, staring into a room now shrouded in a darkness that, mysteriously, felt lit from within.

While Yehoshua’s conversation mimicked the national idiom, his writing was soaked in existential loneliness. The stories, all of them set in modern Israel, were uniformly tales of disconnect in marriage and friendship. At once timeless but of their Israeli moment, they were the work of a writer who, wanting to dive down into those psychic regions of loss and defeat common to all humanity, knew how to make metaphorical use of a sick, sweating man awakening in an empty flat in Tel Aviv on a hot summer morning sometime in the 1970s.

Ann Friedman in The Cut (via Andrew Sullivan):

Many corporations now strive for a veneer of family friendliness, so it’s not likely a woman will get the stink-eye for leaving early to catch her kid’s soccer game. Which is a feminist victory. But if a childless employee cops to the fact that she’s ducking out for a yoga class? It’s seen as downright indulgent and may even show up on a performance review. In interviews, Mayer has suggested that the professionally ambitious woman pick one thing — one thing! — that helps them unwind, and do it every week. (In other words, it’s okay to go to yoga, but only yoga.) I want all working women to have opportunities — and all working men to have life balance, too — but have caught myself thinking, why is it easier to ask me to work during my three-day weekend than it is to demand my co-worker check e-mail while on vacation with her kids? “Work-life balance” has become synonymous with “upper-class working moms,” and that’s a problem for everyone.

Systemic solutions like more flexible family-leave policies and subsidized childcare would be game-changers for mommy warriors. But, ironically, when such policy solutions are on the table, the people on the front lines agitating for them aren’t professional-track mothers. They’re usually low-wage workers of all genders. Case in point: New York City Council Speaker and mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn is single-handedly blocking a bill that would ensure paid sick days for all workers in the city. This news item, which should be at the heart of the work-life balance conversation, has rarely been noted as we huff and puff about Sandberg’s circles and Mayer’s nursery. “While we all worry about the glass ceiling, there are millions of women standing in the basement,” British feminist Laurie Penny once wrote, “and the basement is flooding.” Have you read much about the domestic workers’ strike in California, much less participated in a Twitter debate about it? Me neither. The “mommy wars” is like a discourse borg that manages to absorb and distort all conversations about women and work.

For this International Women's Day, Ingrid Robeyns in Crooked Timber (image from Wikimedia Commons):

I want to use this occasion to share some thoughts about how to given women in academia a fair chance. I’m not talking about affirmative action or quota, but rather making both the environment more welcoming to women, the formal practices fairer to women, and the informal practices such that they are less disadvantageous for women. The reason why these things need to be discussed is that I increasingly encounter academics (mostly men, I fear) who think that there are no further issues with the environment/procedures/practices, and who believe that in reality women now get better chances in academia than men. While there may be isolated cases of such favorable treatment of women, my judgement of the situation is that all things considered many women are still in many (subtle and not-so-subtle) ways disadvantaged, and that unfortunately many academics do not understand how the practices in academia are disadvantaging women. So, let us look at some of these factors, and ask what each of us can do to give women an equal chance in academia.

Implicit bias
In many situations the causes of women’s unequal chances are small and not visible to those not trained to diagnose the situation. One cause is the effects of implicit bias, which implies that if a piece of work is being done by women, it will be judged of lower quality than exactly the same piece of work done by me, due to non-conscious associations we hold. Or, a certain skill, capacity or personality trait will be judged positively if we see it in a man, and less positively or even negatively if it’s a trait of a woman. A typical case is being assertive, which is in men seen as a sign of leadership, but in women quickly interpreted as being aggressive. Implicit bias is often at work in how we judge CV’s and publication list: a woman with a strong publication list will be seen as ‘promising’, a man will be seen as ‘excellent’. These differences in evaluation are documented in studies on implicit bias, but many colleagues (from various universities and fields) who know about implicit bias, have seen it work in evaluative situations (like hiring committees) in which the work and capacities of men and women were evaluated.

Historically, as we have seen, ages of virtual, credit money have also involved creating some sort of overarching institutions – Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place some sort of controls on the potentially catastrophic social consequences of debt. Almost invariably, they involve institutions (usually not strictly coincident to the state, usually larger) to protect debtors. So far the movement this time has been the other way around: starting with the ’80s we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system, operating through the IMF, World Bank, corporations and other financial institutions, largely in order to protect the interests of creditors. However, this apparatus was very quickly thrown into crisis, first by the very rapid development of global social movements (the alter-globalisation movement), which effectively destroyed the moral authority of institutions like the IMF and left many of them very close to bankrupt, and now by the current banking crisis and global economic collapse. While the new age of virtual money has only just begun and the long-term consequences are as yet entirely unclear, we can already say one or two things. The first is that a movement towards virtual money is not in itself, necessarily, an insidious effect of capitalism. In fact, it might well mean exactly the opposite.

more from David Graeber at Eurozine here.

In the early 20th century, incipient Modernists, most notably T.S. Eliot, found new layers of value in Donne. His perceived cool intellectualism seemed fresh and vigorous to poets grown weary of Romanticism’s emotionalism and emphasis on the self. Donne soon became a favorite of the New Critics as well. That school’s emphasis on reading poems as autonomous systems—discounting extra-textual considerations such as the author’s intentions and historical situation—was well suited to Donne’s poetry; his intentions are difficult or impossible to determine, and each poem he wrote seemed designed to function as, to use a phrase from one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, “a little world made cunningly.” Donne’s poems in general, and “A Valediction: of Weeping” in particular, are certainly cunning. But it would be a mistake to think of them as nothing more than exercises in cleverness.

more from Joel Brouwer at Poetry here.

Subtending Koolhaas’s decision to build in Beijing was a feeling of disgust with mass culture and free-market capitalism that came to a head in the early aughts. In 2002, the same year he won the commission for the CCTV complex, he published an essay called “Junkspace.” It takes the form of an obsessive list of definitions, in the vein of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” Junkspace, narrowly defined, is the opposite of what Koolhaas means by architecture. Lacking substance and form, “it is subsystems only, without superstructure, orphaned particles in search of framework or pattern.” But junkspace is not a technical term. It fuses with Koolhaas’s anxieties about suburbanization, Americanization, malls, air conditioning, casual Fridays, and vast cultural leveling to become something more symbolically vivid. Junkspace is “kindergarten grotesque,” “mini-Starbucks on interior plazas”; it “is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends.” What emerges is a conflicted blend of angst, glibness, Western Marxism, and arch patrician contempt.

more from Colin Jones at Dissent here.

Following Frida

That mono-brow wouldn’t work today.
Girls wax the in-betweens, the ups and
downs, smooth, smooth. Sometimes,
the greenery around the hacienda
itches so much we sneeze and tickle,
create unnecessary frowns, a slippage.
There’s always Dr. Death, of course,
his bright smile, that happy mouth
inviting us to pout and make kiss shapes.
Kiss, kiss! Kiss, kiss! he urges. His short needle
makes cushions of our worries. Little prick here,
another there, there, there,
it’s all right darlings, growing old
needn’t hurt so badly.
The hairs remind us, marching to link brow
to brow, shadowing our lips.
We want to be Frida, earnest with hair,
mocking Dr. Death's short needle
before it punctures our flesh.
Old, old! we shout the words he hates,
loose and old, not tight and old!
Senses, raging, in need of colour
as we behold ourselves, mirror-wise,
the women we always were,
just older, looser, still there.
.
.

Salima Hashmi in Himal Southasian:

Faiz on Gandhi

At the height of the Kashmir conflict in 1948, Faiz flew to Delhi for Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral. In his editorial in the Pakistan Times dated 2 February 1948, Faiz wrote:

The British tradition of announcing the death of a king is “The king is dead, long live the king!” Nearly 25 years ago, Mahatma Gandhi writing a moving editorial on the late C R Das in his exquisite English captioned it as “Deshbandhu is dead, long live Deshbandhu!” If we have chosen such a title for our humble tribute to Gandhiji, it is because we are convinced, more than ever before, that very few indeed have lived in this degenerate century who could lay greater claim to immortality than this true servant of humanity and champion of downtrodden. An agonizing 48 hours at the time of writing this article, have passed since Mahatma Gandhi left this mortal coil. The first impact of the shock is slowly spending itself out, and through the murky mist of mourning and grief a faint light of optimistic expectation that Gandhiji has not died in vain, is glowing.

Maybe it is premature to draw such a conclusion now in terms of net result, but judging by the fact the tragedy has profoundly stirred the world’s conscience, we may be forgiven if we may store by the innate goodness of man. At least we can tell at the top of our voice suspicious friends in India that the passing away of Gandhiji is as grievous a blow to Pakistan as it is to India. We have observed distressed looks, seen moistened eyes and heard faltering voices in this vast sprawling city of Lahore to a degree to be seen to be believed.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Honeybees, like tired office employees, like their caffeine, suggests a new study finding that bees are more likely to remember plants containing the java ingredient. Caffeine occurs naturally in the nectar of coffee and citrus flowers. Bees that fed on caffeinated nectar were three times more likely to remember a flower's scent than bees fed sugar alone. The findings, detailed Thursday in the journal Science, show how plants can manipulate animals' memories to improve their odds of pollination. “Remembering floral traits is difficult for bees to perform at a fast pace as they fly from flower to flower, and we have found that caffeine helps the bee remember where the flowers are,” study leader Geraldine Wright, a neuroethologist at Newcastle University, UK, said in a statement. “Caffeine in nectar is likely to improve the bee's foraging prowess while providing the plant with a more faithful pollinator,” Wright added.

In their study, Wright and colleagues measured how much caffeine was in the nectar of three different species of the Coffea plant, including the “robusta” plant used to make freeze-dried coffee and the “arabica” plant used to make espresso and filter coffee. They also measured the amount of caffeine in four species of the Citrus plant: grapefruit, lemons, pomelo and oranges. All of these plants contained caffeine. [10 Things You Need to Know About Coffee] Plants produce caffeine as a defense mechanism — a bitter-tasting brew to fend off insects. Fortunately for the bees, the caffeine levels are below the threshold that they can taste, but high enough to affect their memory, the authors say. Next, the researchers used a form of Pavlovian conditioning to test how the caffeine affected the bees' memory. Bees have a reflex where they stick out their mouth parts when they encounter something sweet. The scientists trained the bees to extend their mouths in response to a floral scent, in order to receive a reward of sugar alone or sugar containing different levels of added caffeine. Caffeine had a strong effect on the bees' memory. Even 24 hours later, three times as many bees remembered the scent that was paired with a caffeine reward as the plain sugar. Twice as many bees remembered the flowers' scent after three days.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Recent accounts of Hugo Chávez's politicized necrophilia may seem almost too lurid to believe, but I can testify from personal experience that they may well be an understatement. In the early hours of July 16—just at the midnight hour, to be precise—Venezuela's capo officiated at a grisly ceremony. This involved the exhumation of the mortal remains of Simón Bolívar, leader of Latin America's rebellion against Spain, who died in 1830. According to a vividly written articleby Thor Halvorssen in the July 25 Washington Post, the skeleton was picked apart—even as Chávez tweeted the proceedings for his audience—and some teeth and bone fragments were taken away for testing. The residual pieces were placed in a coffin stamped with the Chávez government's seal. In one of the rather free-associating speeches for which he has become celebrated, Chávez appealed to Jesus Christ to restage the raising of Lazarus and reanimate Bolívar's constituent parts. He went on:

“I had some doubts, but after seeing his remains, my heart said, 'Yes, it is me.' Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: 'It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.' “

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the New York Times (image from Wikimedia Commons):

HISTORY will affirm, justifiably, the role Hugo Chávez played in the integration of Latin America, and the significance of his 14-year presidency to the poor people of Venezuela, where he died on Tuesday after a long struggle with cancer.

However, before history is allowed to dictate our interpretation of the past, we must first have a clear understanding of Mr. Chávez’s significance, in both the domestic and international political contexts. Only then can the leaders and peoples of South America, arguably the world’s most dynamic continent today, clearly define the tasks ahead of us so that we might consolidate the advances toward international unity achieved in the past decade. Those tasks have gained new importance now that we are without the help of Mr. Chávez’s boundless energy; his deep belief in the potential for the integration of the nations of Latin America; and his commitment to the social transformations needed to ameliorate the misery of his people.

Mr. Chávez’s social campaigns, especially in the areas of public health, housing and education, succeeded in improving the standard of living of tens of millions of Venezuelans.

One need not agree with everything Mr. Chávez said or did. There is no denying that he was a controversial, often polarizing, figure, one who never fled from debate and for whom no topic was taboo. I must admit I often felt that it would have been more prudent for Mr. Chávez not to have said all that he did. But this was a personal characteristic of his that should not, even from afar, discredit his qualities.

One might also disagree with Mr. Chávez’s ideology, and a political style that his critics viewed as autocratic. He did not make easy political choices and he never wavered in his decisions.

Exactly what happened at around 11 o’clock on the evening of August 13, 1922 in the Vittoriale, the retreat on the shores of Lake Garda of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s most celebrated war hero and writer, is unclear. He was sitting in pyjamas and slippers, his back to an open window, in the raised ground floor of the music room, listening to Luisa Baccara, the latest of his long-suffering mistresses, play the piano. Suddenly he toppled headfirst ten feet on to the gravel below and fractured his skull. According to one witness he had been fondling Luisa’s sister: perhaps he had lunged forward and lost his balance; or perhaps she had pushed him away a little too brusquely. Or it could be that he had simply been overcome by momentary dizziness: he was consuming quite large quantities of drugs at this time, including cocaine. He himself subsequently chose to shroud the episode in mystery, referring, with his characteristically teasing eye for self-glorification, to his “archangelic flight” – and noting, with a further twist of irreverent immodesty how, after three days in a coma, he had risen again.

more from Christopher Duggan at the TLS here.

Though he left Cairo at twenty-one, Albert Cossery never forgot its condition, even as he sat daily at Brasserie Lipp, a dandy to the outside world. Henry Miller, who helped get Cossery’s first book published in the United States, confirms this preoccupation, writing in a 1945 essay, “Despite the seemingly unrelieved gloom and futility in which his figures move, [Cossery] nevertheless expresses in every work his indomitable faith in the power of the people to throw off the yoke.” It’s a message that also finds affirmation in the work of Sonallah Ibrahim, the political prisoner turned Cairene slacker-novelist whose debut work, That Smell, was published in translation by New Directions two weeks ago (and happens to have been translated by Robyn Creswell, this magazine’s poetry editor). This darkly biting take on politics is finally seeing the light of day as a global literature, though its origins are in the tragic failures of Egypt’s mid-century political transition. Today’s rise of a suppressive Brotherhood in the face of Tahrir’s youthful spark has bred a new, mordant pranksterism, reminiscent of Albert Cossery yet unencumbered by the weight of history. With the “Satiric Revolutionary Struggle,” this strategy may have finally found its rightful place in Egypt’s opposition politics.

more from Mostafa Heddaya at Paris Review here.

The basic idea of a retreat from society for the sake of contemplation goes far into the past. The Tang Dynasty scholar-official writing affectionate poetry about his rude bamboo cottage is a familiar image. Even such sophisticates as the author of the Georgics enjoyed imagining being a farmer. The draw of a primitive life, one perhaps offering spiritual refurbishment, has always been strong. What was new in the 18th century was the decorative aspect. To the gardening gentleman or lady of the time, it was the idea of a hermit that attracted, not the prospect of being a hermit oneself. As Campbell makes plain, the impetus behind the advent of the garden hermit was a taste for the gothic and the picturesque sponsored by such trendsetters as Alexander Pope and Horace Walpole. Melancholy was suddenly considered admirable. Deliberate gloom implied deep thoughts and an affinity with nature. Where better than in the garden to express it? And what better expression of a dedication to melancholy than a real hermit’s cell occupied by a real hermit?

more from Charles Elliot at Literary Review here.

Michael Idov in The New Yorker:

Leonid Mozgovoy, the owl-eyed seventy-one-year-old actor, has played Chekhov (goatee), Hitler (mustache), and Lenin (goatee, bald cap), all in films by the famed Russian director Alexander Sokurov. And sometimes, in his natural hair, he becomes Humbert Humbert in “Lolita,” a one-man show featuring Humbert reading his own story out loud, that has played in Saint Petersburg on and off over the last two decades. When it was first staged, the monologue had to pass muster with the khudsovet, a Soviet censorship organ. It did. “They said I perform it rather chastely,” Mozgovoy recalled in an interview.

On a snowy night in early 2013, “Lolita” went up once again, unchanged, but it had suddenly become the most scandalous show in town. The performance had been postponed since last October amid threats to Mozgovoy and others. In January, three men jumped the play’s twenty-four-year-old producer, Anton Suslov, giving him two black eyes and a concussion while calling him a “pedophile”; a murky video of the beating was posted online. The same libel was slashed in spray paint across the walls of the Nabokov museum in St. Petersburg and the writer’s ancestral estate in Rozhdestveno, about fifty miles from the city. Anonymous activists had petitioned to have the play banned, the museum closed, and Nabokov’s books purged from stores. The author, whose novels thrum with ironic recurrences, might have been perversely pleased with this: thirty-six years after his death and twenty-two years after the fall of the Soviet Union with all its khudsovets, Vladimir Nabokov is, once again, controversial.

More here.

Eva Wiseman in The Observer:

Casey Legler is standing, topless, by our rail of clothes, reading them like they're credits on a film. Some are “drag”, some “boy”. Some she'll wear if she wants to “serve you 'girl'”, some she won't wear at all. As a child, all she wanted to do was sit by a swimming pool in a pink tutu, and read her difficult books. She moved a lot when she was younger, between Louisiana, Florida and Aix-en-Provence, and, noticing that the fashions (and prejudices) in France and America were completely different, Legler “learned early on,” she tells me later, “that what you looked like wasn't necessarily who you were”. People had “different armour. I realised things only mean what we want them to mean, and it's not appropriate information for differentiation. What you look like is just what you look like. Then there's… everything else.”

Legler is 6ft 2in, 35 years old, and the first woman to sign exclusively as a male model. She is muscular and cheery, with the awkward swagger of a rock star. Her voice is soft and earnest, and when she talks, she holds unblinking eye contact. In front of the camera, edges appear. Spikes. She juts her chin; she becomes a boy.

Fashion has always played with gender, from 18th century men in their wigs and make-up, to Patti Smith and David Bowie, through to the recent success of Andrej Peji'c, the male model who FHM named as the 98th “sexiest woman in the world”.

More here.

Noam Chomsky in AlterNet:

The term “capitalism” is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, with substantial state intervention ranging from subsidies for creative innovation to the “too-big-to-fail” government insurance policy for banks.

The system is highly monopolized, further limiting reliance on the market, and increasingly so: In the past 20 years the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, reports scholar Robert W. McChesney in his new book “Digital Disconnect.”

“Capitalism” is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support – both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz.

Some might even use the term “capitalism” to refer to the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, America’s leading social philosopher, in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.”

More here.