Enda O'Doherty in Eurozine:

The Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller, in a chapter she contributed to a book published in 1992, stated with some confidence her view that there was no such thing as European culture. There was certainly, she wrote, Italian and German music, and Florentine and Venetian painting, “but there is no European music and no European painting”.

It is true that the history of art and culture was not really Heller's field, but it would seem that those who, in the same year as she wrote her essay, framed the Maastricht Treaty, signalling the transition from European Community to European Union, at least partially agreed with her. The treaty was the first time the community had taken for itself significant powers in the cultural field. European cultures (note the plural), the relevant article stated, were to be understood as requiring “respect” – by which one understands freedom from too much supranational interference (“The Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the member states, while respecting their national and regional diversity”). At the same time however, the Community was to be entrusted with the task of “[b]ringing the common cultural heritage to the fore”.

As with most negotiated texts, there is a compromise lurking here, or possibly a contradiction. First, cultures are to be understood as national (and grudgingly, just a little bit regional); they are even perhaps what define nations, the particular set of practices and inheritances which the Dutch, or the Germans, or the Portuguese have by virtue of their nationality, the thing that they have and no other nation has – that Dutch, that Portuguese thing. And yet it seems, according to Maastricht, that there is also a common cultural heritage which belongs equally to the Dutch and the Germans and the Portuguese. But what is this heritage? Is it something made up of a little bit of everywhere sort of tacked together (“the Europe of Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe” perhaps, to which statesmen like to pay obeisance in their speeches before quickly passing on to more important matters)? Or could it be something more mysterious, something actually European?

Maya Gonzalez interviews Irene Lusztig The New Inquiry:

What has making the film revealed, and what are the things that surprised you?

The history of Lamaze surprised me. Lamaze is a very clear case study of how childbirth is propagandized. It exposes how it’s so clearly spoken about in a completely different way as it moves from Soviet Russia to France to the U.S. I was amazed to learn that there was this whole Marxist discourse of labor pain, which I hadn’t known about. And as Lamaze leaves this kind of Socialist-Marxist labor system and moves to the U.S., that language is completely erased—but it’s still the same techniques. It lays bare the way that these things are undergirded by nationalist ideologies, state ideologies.

I guess the most important discoveries I found were histories of obstetrics and obstetrical anesthesia. I was trying to think through how we’ve thought about pain at different points in time because that’s a ­really fraught space.

And twilight sleep was probably the most interesting discovery of the project. Twilight sleep is a moment in the teens where internationally, wealthy women began traveling to Germany to a clinic where there’s a drug protocol given to laboring women, an almost homeopathic dose of morphine that doesn’t really take the pain away in any significant way, coupled with scopolamine which induces amnesia. So the experience of laboring in twilight sleep may be intensely painful, but the women forget it as they’re experiencing it. The interesting thing historically about twilight sleep is that it became a real activist cause in the U.S., and the activists who were supporting and trying to bring it to the U.S. were all feminists and suffragettes. So the early 20th century history of women being really strong advocates for medicalized childbirth, for hospital birth, for drugs, for anesthesia, is an interesting forgotten history.

Gary Olson in Dissident Voice:

It’s unarguable that human nature reveals a continuum of behaviors ranging from the most wretched to the sublime, at times bordering on the saintly. At a minimum, this means acknowledging, in the words of Amin Maalouf that “There is a Mr. Hyde inside each of us. What we have to do is prevent the conditions that will bring the monster forth.”

At the righteous end of the spectrum is our propensity for empathy, a trait deeply rooted in our primate heritage. Empathy — putting oneself in another’s emotional and cognitive shoes and then acting appropriately — is now an incandescently hot topic, virtually a cottage industry of books, articles, and YouTube videos.

Whereas the evolutionary process has given rise to a hard-wired neural system that equips us to connect with one another, many experts believe that our empathically-impaired society needs nothing less than an “empathy epidemic.” Among the factors frequently cited as interfering with constructing an empathic culture we find everything from parenting, education, and economic inequality to early childhood programs, meaningful social connections, and misplaced emphasis on achieving social status.

Dr. Marco Iacaboni, one of the world’s recognized authorities on the neuroscience of empathy, argues that the discovery of mirror neurons, the neurons responsible for empathy, is “so radical that we should be talking about a revolution, the mirror neuron revolution.” Why? Because of the profound implications for how we think about both individuals and the future of our endangered planet.

More here.

The Hardys’ deep, bleak despair at the First World War runs through the collection, “its sinister shadow defiling everything”, Hardy lamented in 1916; six years later Florence remarked, “we feel now that nothing can be the same as it was before the war”. Hardy observed in his autobiography, “nobody was more amazed than he at the German incursion into Belgium, and the contemplation of it led him to despair of the world’s history thenceforward”. But for the sake of the defenceless Belgians he rallied to the public campaign of recruitment, and in November 1914, we see in Further letters, he wrote to Kitchener, now Secretary of State for War, on how music (“‘beating up’ through the streets of towns, with a band of fifes and side-drums”) might rouse the spirit to valour as it had in centuries past. In another new letter, Florence records that when “three delightful young American soldiers” made their way to Max Gate in the final months of conflict, “[Hardy] was much struck by their high ideals & the lofty view they took of their participation in the war”. The volume also provides late letters on the barbarity of cruel sports, on singing birds, on the meaning of Dorset words (for a Japanese translator), on Hardy’s support for a multi-volume English translation of Tolstoy’s works, and (to the pioneering electrical engineer Colonel Crompton), his sense that “Electricity & all its strange phenomena” were beyond him; “what it may bring about in the future I have no idea of”.

more from Angelique Richardson at the TLS here.

Numerous applications of the displacement model of secularization are current, but here I will point to just one. It concerns philosophical anthropology. The argument is that certain post-Enlightenment concepts of the human (or of “man”) remain Christian in their deep structures. Of these, the most important is the philosophical anthropology of negation (to use Marcel Gauchet’s term), according to which human nature is not just appetitive but necessarily incomplete, that is to say, inadequate to its various ecologies and conditions, and for that reason beset by fear, uneasiness, anxiety, and so on. For those who accept the displacement model, this anthropology, even in its modern forms, remains dependent on the revealed doctrine that human nature as such is fallen. Philosophical anthropology is important for thinking about secularization because the secularization thesis often becomes a proxy for the argument that secularity places human nature at risk. The displacement model also makes it difficult for theorists of secularization to suppose that total secularization will ever be achieved. But this argument—the incomplete secularization argument, as we could call it—is of especial significance because it is here that the interests that stand behind and motivate particular articulations of the secularization thesis are most clearly revealed. To show this more clearly, let me present just one version of the incomplete secularization argument—Carl Schmitt’s essay “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitizierungen” (1932).

more from Simon During at Immanent Frame here.

One can imagine how Kippenberger, a notoriously bad pupil, would have been particularly tortured as a child by the strictures of postwar pedagogy—and the accompanying threat of being sent home from school for breaking the rules. And so, as it is in the work of Hanne Darboven and Mike Kelley, school became something of an omnipresent theme in his oeuvre. School is likewise the literal site evoked in his well-known series of sculptures “Martin, ab in die Ecke und schäm dich” (Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself), 1989. These mannequins (one made of resin was on view here) are styled as the artist would typically dress himself. Installed as suggested by the title, they effectively turn the phenomenological space of Robert Morris’s 1964 Corner Piece into the disciplinary space of a common juvenile punishment. With Kippenberger, the personal always contains social and political dimensions, too. This is certainly true of Bitte nicht nach Hause schicken, its title a line that evinces Kippenberger’s phobic resistance to the private sphere. Of course, Kippenberger was not alone: His circle of artists in ’80s Cologne famously tended to favor a life in public—specifically, the public life of the bar, where they would keep on drinking. Indeed, the work’s skewed alignment even suggests that the image’s maker (if not its viewer) was (or is still) drunk.

more from Isabelle Graw at Artforum here.

From The Paris Review:

It’s a gray day in April and after nine hours on a crowded BoltBus I arrive in Philadelphia to see my old friend from college, Nicole, a fellow writer and veritable one-woman repository of Philadelphian history. I’m here to celebrate her birthday, to drink wine, and to comb through the detritus of a difficult past year for both of us. Really, I’m not here for research. So, of course it makes perfect sense that within five minutes of picking me up she turns her car toward 4100 Pine Street, an address I’ve seen scrawled on the front of numerous letters, in nineteenth-century directories, in the chicken-scratch handwriting of an 1870 Philadelphian census worker, and in journal after journal of Amy Ella Blanchard. I first encountered Blanchard’s work as a sullen adolescent, forced to go to an island in Maine every other weekend with my father and soon-to-be stepmother. The house where we stayed was built by Blanchard in the early twentieth century and her books lined the shelves, but I was too busy reading classics like Salem’s Lot to be bothered with these dusty old tomes. The fact that she was a relative of my father’s girlfriend made Blanchard’s novels even less attractive to me.

Not many readers these days know who Blanchard was, but just barely a century ago she published at least a book a year, sometimes more, for girls and about girls. During her lifetime she wrote over eighty books, a play in 1896 about the importance of exercise for women, and even a couple of small booklets flouting such morals as “fritterings” and being “pound foolish.” A self-described late bloomer, Blanchard’s writing career started, and sputtered, with a story she published in a Salem, Massachusetts newspaper when she was in her teens, but it wasn’t until she was well into her thirties that her novels became an indispensable part of every young girl’s library.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In the pageant of life, we are genetically bloated. The human genome contains around 20,000 protein-coding genes. Many other species get by with a lot less. The gut microbe Escherichia coli, for example, has just 4,100 genes.

Scientists have long wondered how much further life can be stripped down and still remain alive. Is there a genetic essence of life? The answer seems to be that the true essence of life is not some handful of genes, but coexistence. E. coli has fewer genes than we do, in part because it has a lot fewer things to do. It doesn’t have to build a brain or a stomach, for example. But E. coli is a versatile organism in its own right, with genes allowing it to feed on many different kinds of sugar, as well as to withstand stresses like starvation and heat. In recent years, scientists have systematically shut down each of E. coli’s genes to see which it can live without. Most of its genes turn out to be dispensable. Only 302 have proved to be absolutely essential. Those essential genes carry out the same fundamental tasks that take place in our own cells, like copying DNA and building proteins from genes. And yet the 302 genes that are essential to E. coli turn out not to be life’s minimal genome. Scientists have come up with lists of essential genes in other microbes, and while the lists overlap, they are not identical.

More here.

The Furies

Banished from sin and the sacred
Now they inhabit the humble intimacy
Of daily life. They are
The leaky faucet the late bus
The soup that boils over
The lost pen the vacuum that doesn’t vacuum
The taxi that doesn’t come the mislaid receipt
Shoving pushing waiting
Bureaucratic madness

Without shouting or staring
Without bristly serpent hair
With the meticulous hands of the day-to-day
They undo us

They’re the peculiar wonder of the modern world
Faceless and maskless
Nameless and breathless
The thousand-headed hydras of efficiency gone haywire

They no longer pursue desecrators and parricides
They prefer innocent victims
Who did nothing to provoke them
Thanks to them the day loses its smooth expanses
Its juice of ripe fruits
Its fragrance of flowers
Its high-sea passion
And time is transformed
Into toil and the rush
Against time

.
by Sophia de Mello Breyner
from Obra Poética III
publisher: Caminho, Lisboa, 1991
translation: 2004, Richard Zenith
.
Original Portuguese after the jump

Read more »

From Jam and Idleness:

What is the one book you love so much that you can’t be objective about other people not loving it as well?

I know you’re expecting me to say Middlemarch, but actually I have worked with it so often professionally that—while of course I love it profoundly—I have had to develop a thick skin for dealing with haters. The books I absolutely cannot be objective about are all six volumes in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles. This amazing series captured my imagination utterly the first time I read it, decades ago now, and I have only to flip through a few pages to find myself once again under its spell—and especially under Lymond’s. If you have tried them and not loved them, I have nothing to say to you! Well, OK, I’d still talk to you, but I’d always quietly count it against you as a character flaw.

What is your favourite either unknown or underappreciated book?

I hardly ever run into anyone else who has read Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field, which is one of my very favorite contemporary novels. It is beautifully written and structured, and exceptionally smart. It’s a novel about women’s friendships and about families, but more than that it’s a novel about the examined life and the myriad ways our hearts perplex our heads. It contains some of the best writing I know about music—and about loss.

More here.

Steven Rosenfeld in AlterNet:

Prehistoric cave paintings across the continents have similar geometric patterns not because early humans were learning to draw like Paleolithic pre-schoolers, but because they were high on drugs, and their brains—like ours—have a biological predisposition to “see” certain patterns, especially during consciousness altering states.

This thesis—that humanity’s earliest artists were not just reeling due to mind-altering activities, but deliberately sought those elevated states and gave greater meaning to those common visions—is the contention of a new paper by an international research team.

Their thesis intriguingly explores the “biologically embodied mind,” which they contend gave rise to similarities in Paleolithic art across the continents dating back 40,000 years, and can also be seen in the body painting patterns dating back even further, according to recent archelogical discoveries.

At its core, this theory challenges the long-held notion that the earliest art and atrists were merely trying to draw the external world. Instead, it sees cave art as a deliberate mix of rituals inducing altered states for participants, coupled with brain chemistry that elicits certain visual patterns for humanity’s early chroniclers.

More here.

Daniel Ellsberg in the Washington Post:

Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago.

After the New York Times had been enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers — on June 15, 1971, the first prior restraint on a newspaper in U.S. history — and I had given another copy to The Post (which would also be enjoined), I went underground with my wife, Patricia, for 13 days. My purpose (quite like Snowden’s in flying to Hong Kong) was to elude surveillance while I was arranging — with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI — to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other newspapers, in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a “fugitive from justice.”

Yet when I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind.

There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to “incapacitate me totally”).

More here.

YOU CANNOT GET AWAY FROM IMPORTANT men in Patna. On street corners and traffic roundabouts, they stand on tall pedestals, solemn men saying not much at all, as if they have paan in their mouth and are getting ready to spit. Nearly all of them wear dhotis, and sometimes sport a khadi vest. They all wear glasses. The size of the paunch varies. The men often stoop; shallow chests, small paunches, sunken cheeks. A decrepit eminence. The only statues of youth are of the seven martyred schoolboys from the Quit India Movement of August 1942. The tall statues, forming a fluent tableau on a high plinth, were the work of a Bengali artist and were minted in Italy. Young sinewy men, wearing dhotis, holding high the makeshift flags in their hands; one of the youths is bare-chested, showing a powerful chest and muscles—entirely missing in the physiques of the men walking on the street below them. Still, no women. There is double irony in this. Patna is the capital of a state where many women successfully contest elections, but in many cases these women are wives of bahubalis, or strongmen, who have criminal cases lodged against them. Even when these women are elected, their victory belongs to others. A recent example is Annu Shukla, a legislator belonging to chief minister Nitish Kumar’s party; she won the seat vacated by her husband, Munna Shukla, who was barred from the election after a murder conviction.

more from Amitava Kumar at Caravan here.

We tend to talk about suicide most when a famous person kills himself. There was, we all remember, the flurry of argument about suicide — much of it indignant, even outraged — when David Foster Wallace took his own life. His friends were deeply hurt, and many of them were writers, so they wrote about it. “[E]very suicide’s an asshole,” wrote Mary Karr, in a poem about Wallace’s death. “There is a good reason I am not/ God, for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten.” Suicide, seen as among the most selfish of acts, pushes a button in us that even murder doesn’t. That self-destruction should be morally blameworthy because of its selfishness is, if not paradoxical, at least a bit odd. After all, if there is one thing I am entitled to as a human being, only one right I am permitted, it ought to be the right to life: this right, it has often been argued, is a kind of necessary precondition for any other right one might claim. But does it make sense to say that I have the right to life if I don’t have the right to end it when and as I choose?

more from Clancy Martin at Harper’s here.

František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová (1967) is a virtual terra incognita. Thirty years after its release, it was named overwhelmingly by a poll of Czech critics and filmmakers as the best movie ever produced in Czechoslovakia, yet it remains little known outside its native land. Even as national epics go, Marketa Lazarová is unusually off-putting to outsiders. Violent and anti-heroic, the movie opens on a note of mordant self-deprecation (“This tale was cobbled together and hardly merits praise”) and goes on to represent thirteenth-century Bohemia as a backwater of Conan the Barbarian’s Hyperborean Age—the province of halfwits, rapists, and brutes. Aside from repeated, if intermittent, screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (and a relatively recent Vláčil retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center), the movie has hardly been shown in the United States since its 1974 American release, for which it was shortened by over an hour. (Supremely unimpressed, The New York Times at the time characterized Marketa as “a colossal—and very near interminable—hodgepodge of medieval mayhem and myth, leaden symbolism and bloated piety,” featuring characters of “such unmitigated savagery that next to them the Visigoths would resemble a Red Cross mercy mission.”) Now released as a Criterion DVD in its full 165 minutes, Marketa Lazarová may finally reach a wider American audiences in all its sprawling glory.

more from J. Hoberman at the NYRB here.

From The Guardian:

I was on the Victoria line with my boyfriend, telling him about a new book by the American author Daniel Bergner, called What Do Women Want? Its headline, traffic-stopping message is that women, routinely portrayed as the monogamous sex, are actually not very well-suited to monogamy. In fact, far from being more faithful than men, we may actually be more naturally promiscuous – more bored by habituation, more voracious, more predatory, more likely to objectify a mate. The expectation upon us not to feel, still less exhibit, any of these traits causes us to bury them, Bergner argues, giving rise to two phenomena.

First, women experience a loss of interest in sex within a marriage – commonly ascribed to low libido, but actually more a thwarted libido. Bergner interviewed a number of women in long-term relationships, many of whom elaborated on this waning desire. One woman said of her husband, “We did have sex maybe once a week, but it didn't reach me. My body would respond, but the pleasure was like the pleasure of returning library books. And the thing about being repulsed by him was, I felt my body was a room that I didn't want to mess up. Unlike that openness at the beginning, when my body was a room and I didn't mind if he came in with his shoes on.” The second, and perhaps more surprising phenomenon, is that all this thwarted sexual energy, like anything suppressed, has its power redoubled, to become something violent and alarming, if for any reason the brakes come off.

More here.

About my Tortured Friend, Peter
.
he lives in a house with a swimming pool
and says the job is
killing him.
he is 27. I am 44. I can’t seem to
get rid of
him. his novels keep coming
back. “what do you expect me to do?” he screams
“go to New York and pump the hands of the
publishers?”
“no,” I tell him, “but quit your job, go into a
small room and do the
thing.”
“but I need ASSURANCE, I need something to
go by, some word, some sign!”
“some men did not think that way:
Van Gogh, Wagner—”
“oh hell, Van Gogh had a brother who gave him
paints whenever he
needed them!”

“look,” he said, “I’m over at this broad’s house today and
this guy walks in. a salesman. you know
how they talk. drove up in this new
car. talked about his vacation. said he went to
Frisco—saw Fidelio up there but forgot who
wrote it. now this guy is 54 years
old. so I told him: ‘Fidelio is Beethoven’s only
opera.’ and then I told
him: ‘you’re a jerk!’ ‘whatcha mean?’ he
asked. ‘I mean, you’re a jerk, you’re 54 years old and
you don’t know anything!’”

“what happened
then?”
“I walked out.”
“you mean you left him there with
her?”
“yes.”
Read more »

From Newsroom UCLA:

How do ideas spread? What messages will go viral on social media, and can this be predicted? UCLA psychologists have taken a significant step toward answering these questions, identifying for the first time the brain regions associated with the successful spread of ideas, often called “buzz.” The research has a broad range of implications, the study authors say, and could lead to more effective public health campaigns, more persuasive advertisements and better ways for teachers to communicate with students.

There will never be more than a few people in each generation for whom literature has the force of law, for whom, as Bialik puts it, “real art” is “like Torah.” In Bialik’s generation, one of those few was surely Marcel Proust. The two writers are not often thought of together, but they were near-contemporaries; Bialik was born in 1873, Proust in 1871. And Proust’s seven-volume novel, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), is among many other things the story of an artist coming to realize his vocation—a vocation which he describes in religious terms, as an ethical and absolute duty. Proust’s greatest statement of this theme comes in the famous passage in The Captive describing the death of the writer Bergotte. Once a writer dies, Proust wonders, what does it matter whether he wrote well or badly, since he will never know the fate of his works in this world? What he is grappling with is the disparity between the artist’s sense of his commitment, which is absolute and infinite, and the finite, transitory nature of all human achievement. In other words, Proust is asking a religious question, and he ends up giving what is essentially a religious answer…

more from Adam Kirsch at Jewish Review of Books here.