Nobel Prize 2013: Alice Munro exclusive story

From Telegraph:

The final part of Alice Munro's latest collection, Dear Life, comprises four works she describes as “not quite stories”. They are, she writes, “autobiographical in feeling … the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life”. Published here exclusively is one of those:”Voices”

VOICES

Alice-Munro-story-_2698381bWhen my mother was growing up, she and her whole family would go to dances. These would be held in the schoolhouse, or sometimes in a farmhouse with a big enough front room. Young and old would be in attendance. Someone would play the piano — the household piano or the one in the school — and someone would have brought a violin. The square dancing had complicated patterns or steps, which a person known for a special facility would call out at the top of his voice (it was always a man) and in a strange desperate sort of haste which was of no use at all unless you knew the dance already. As everybody did, having learned them all by the time they were ten or twelve years old.

Married now, with three of us children, my mother was still of an age and temperament to enjoy such dances if she had lived in the true countryside where they were still going on. She would have enjoyed too the round dancing performed by couples, which was supplanting the old style to a certain extent. But she was in an odd situation. We were. Our family was out of town but not really in the country. My father, who was much better liked than my mother, was a man who believed in taking whatever you were dealt. Not so my mother. She had risen from her farm girl’s life to become a schoolteacher, but this was not enough, it had not given her the position she would have liked, or the friends she would have liked to have in town. She was living in the wrong place and had not enough money, but she was not equipped anyway. She could play euchre but not bridge. She was affronted by the sight of a woman smoking. I think people found her pushy and overly grammatical. She said things like “readily” and “indeed so.” She sounded as if she had grown up in some strange family who always talked that way. And she hadn’t. They didn’t. Out on their farms, my aunts and uncles talked the way everybody else did. And they didn’t like my mother very much, either.

More here.

Alice Munro’s road to Nobel literature prize was not easy

Margaret Atwood in The Guardian:

Nobel-literature-prize-wi-009Alice Munro has been awarded the Nobel prize in literature, thus becoming its 13th female recipient. It's a thrilling honour for a major writer: Munro has long been recognised in North America and the UK, but the Nobel will draw international attention, not only to women's writing and Canadian writing, but to the short story, Munro's chosen métier and one often overlooked.

…Munro found herself referred to as “some housewife”, and was told that her subject matter, being too “domestic”, was boring. A male writer told her she wrote good stories, but he wouldn't want to sleep with her. “Nobody invited him,” said Munro tartly. When writers occur in Munro stories, they are pretentious, or exploitative of others; or they're being asked by their relatives why they aren't famous, or – worse, if female – why they aren't better-looking. The road to the Nobel wasn't an easy one for Munro: the odds that a literary star would emerge from her time and place would once have been zero. She was born in 1931, and thus experienced the Depression as a child and the second world war as a teenager. This was in south-western Ontario, a region that also produced Robertson Davies, Graeme Gibson, James Reaney, and Marian Engel, to name several. It's this small-town setting that features most often in her stories – the busybodies, the snobberies, the eccentrics, the cutting of swelled heads down to size, and the jeering at ambitions, especially artistic ones. The pressure of cramped conditions may create the determination to break free, to gain some sort of mastery; but if you try this, you'd better do it well. Otherwise those who have laughed at you will laugh even harder, since an ice dancer who tries a triple axel and falls on her behind is hilarious.

More here.

Talking language with Ben Zimmer

From The Chicago Manual of Style website:

Shop Talk: A favorite debate in the CMOS community is whether new word usages should be allowed, with classic examples of hopefully and literally. How do you think we should draw the line between common usage and Standard Written English? Are there cultural or academic checkpoints that a word must go through before making the transition?

Ben: The first thing to recognize is that what we think of as “new” usage is very often not that new at all, thanks to what Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky has called The Recency Illusion. We tend to think of stigmatized language patterns as artifacts of our current age, when in fact they can reflect long-standing usage among established, respected writers. But just because you can find Alexander Pope writing “Every day with me is literally another yesterday for it is exactly the same” in 1708, that’s not going to assuage those who insist that literally should only be used, well, literally, rather than emphatically or hyperbolically. I often point to such historical evidence in usage disputes, but I doubt that I’m convincing anyone who has already decided that a particular point of usage is simply wrong.

I chalk up much of this black-and-white thinking about language to pedagogy: in our schooling, we are constantly encouraged to think that there is only one right answer, which flies in the face of the flexibility and mutability of language. And so as adults, we look to authoritative texts like usage manuals and dictionaries to uphold an unequivocal standard. The messy linguistic facts reveal that there is no single standard, however, even if we limit ourselves to a supposedly unitary “Standard Written English.” Different social contexts require subtle adjustments to our language use, and for the most part we navigate these changes of register without even consciously thinking about it. It’s only when we get snagged on a shibboleth like literally or hopefully that questions of propriety arise and we expect an authority to decree that there is One Right Way.

Good usage manuals and dictionaries won’t shy away from the complexity of language but will instead offer advice about what is typically expected in different written and oral styles.

More here.

The Lustful Human Animal: Cultural Differences in Sexual Harm and Consent

Jesse Bering in Scientific American:

ScreenHunter_354 Oct. 10 18.54Most of us are convinced that we excel at being clearheaded, humane thinkers when it comes to sex. We appeal, and admirably so, to notions such as harm and consent. But since most of us aren’t anthropologists, we W.E.I.R.D. people (the anthropologist Joe Henrich’s apt acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”) often assume a false obviousness along these lines of harm and consent that, interestingly enough, simply isn’t there. Scientists have found that since we would be harmed by a certain sex act,we presume others would be harmed as well.

In fact, cultural relativism is the most glaring sign that the lion’s share of our sexual ethics is arbitrary, given that our intuitive feeling of what’s “normal” and “deviant” hinges largely on our cultural indoctrination. In the past, for instance, a proper Crow gentleman wasn’t expected to simply woo the object of his desire over a slice of homemade juneberry pie. Instead, the tradition for a man so smitten involved his crawling up to the woman’s tent in the middle of the night and fishing around with his hand under the flaps for her body. And female Crow informants explained to the anthropologists inquiring about the tradition that this manual search in the dark for her orifices was an especially romantic first move. “If he is successful,” wrote the researchers Clellan Ford and Frank Beach, “a man may by this device persuade the woman to have intercourse with him later on.” If he were successful in our society, he’d be signing his name to the sex offender registry before dawn, if he still had a hand. But in the cultural context of these Native Americans, most women, presumably, favored this custom.

More here.

David Byrne: If the 1% stifles New York’s creative talent, I’m out of here

David Byrne in The Guardian:

ScreenHunter_353 Oct. 10 18.03I'm writing this in Venice, Italy. This city is a pleasantly confusing maze, once an island of fortresses, and now a city of tourists, culture (biennales galore) and crumbling relics. Venice used to be the most powerful city in Europe – a military, mercantile and cultural leader. Sort of like New York.

Venice is now a case study in the complete transformation of a city (there's public transportation, but no cars). Is it a living city? Is it a fossil? The mayor of Venice recently wrote a letter to the New York Review of Books, arguing that his city is, indeed, a place to live, not simply a theme park for tourists (he would like very much if the big cruise ships steered clear). I guess it's a living place if you count tourism as an industry, which I suppose it is. New York has its share of tourists, too. I wave to the doubledecker buses from my bike, but the passengers never wave back. Why? Am I not an attraction?

New York was recently voted the world's favorite city – but when you break down the survey's results, the city comes in at No 1 for business and only No 5 for living. Fifth place isn't completely embarrassing, but what are the criteria? What is it that attracts people to this or any city? Forget the business part. I've been in Hong Kong, and unless one already has the means to live luxuriously, business hubs aren't necessarily good places for living. Cities may have mercantile exchange as one of their reasons for being, but once people are lured to a place for work, they need more than offices, gyms and strip clubs to really live.

More here.

Thursday Poem

The Homeland

To the faces that harden behind a mask of gloom
I bow, and to streets where I left behind my tears;
To a father who died, green as a cloud
With a sail on his face, I bow,
And to a child that is sold
In order to pray and clean shoes
(In our land we all pray and clean shoes);
To a stone I inscribed with my hunger,
Saying it was lightning and rain, drops rolling under my eyelids,
And to a house whose dust I carried with me in my loss
I bow—all these are my homeland, not Damascus.
.

by Adunis
translation by M.M. Badawi

Some Belated Thoughts on the Pedagogy of Lewd Jokes

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

6a00d83453bcda69e2019affd45e49970d-350wiI have, up until now, mostly held back my views on l'affaire McGinn, which shook the philosophy community in the United States some months ago. But there comes a point when discretion starts to feel uncomfortably similar to cowardice, and this is a moral failure I would like to avoid even more than the consternation of my peers.

I don't really want to discuss McGinn himself. I want to discuss the response to the affair offered by Louise Antony in a New York Times 'Stone' piece of September 5, 2013, entitled “Academia's Fog of Male Anxiety.” In particular, I want to respond to the suggestion that 'lewd conversation', including not least doubles entendres about handjobs, can be eliminated from the repertoire of possible topics of discussion between professors and students without any danger of compromising the educational experience.

We sometimes hear grumblings about an encroaching Stalinism in academia, where good folk are rubbed out of memory for failing to follow, in every respect, the party line. This does not get it right, and indeed goes much too far. The current era is not Stalinist, but Brezhnevite: where dull-minded, rule-loving functionaries move in to manage the legacy of a glorious revolution.

To continue the analogy, I declare that I remain loyal to what I take to be the core principles of the revolution in question –the sexual revolution–, which had already begun to degenerate by the time I was born, and which in the broad sense in which I understand it began long before the era of rock-and-roll, and includes, inter alia, the life-affirming effulgences of the Montanan libertine Mary MacLane, and Walt Whitman's celebration of his own beard and musk and semen: of his own infinite desire and his freedom to express it in words.

I believe lewd jokes are a crucial part of what brings joy in life, and I believe the sexual revolution was important in enabling people in free societies to seize this joy.

More here.

The pseudo-profundity of Malcolm Gladwell

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

ScreenHunter_352 Oct. 10 11.37Gladwell is a brilliant salesman for a certain kind of cognitive drug. He tells his readers that everything they thought they knew about a subject is wrong, and then delivers what is presented as a counterintuitive discovery but is actually a bromide of familiar clichés. The reader is thus led on a pleasant quasi-intellectual tour, to be reassured at the end that a flavour of folksy wisdom was right all along. Little things really can make a big difference; trusting your gut can be better than overthinking; successful people work hard.

The art here lies in making the platitudinous conclusion seem like a revelatory place to end up, after one has enjoyed the colourful “stories” about carefully described plucky individuals with certain hairstyles and particular kinds of trousers. (Actual quote: “He is a tall young man with carefully combed dark-brown hair and neatly pressed khakis.”) Such books must thus be constructed with a certain suspenseful cunning. Gladwell likes first to tell an apparently convincing story and then declare that it’s not true, like a magician pulling an empty hat out of a rabbit. Thus does his book begin, relaying the standard version of David and Goliath – plucky shepherd defeating fearsome giant with fortunately slung pebble – and then announcing that “almost everything about it is wrong”.

More here.

I am Malala

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi in The Telegraph:

Malala22_2696060aMalala Yousafzai’s story begins with her parents being commiserated with after producing a baby girl. In their part of northern Pakistan, she says, rifle shots ring out in celebration of a baby boy’s arrival. But there is no such fanfare for females: their destiny is to cook and clean, to be neither seen nor heard. When Mr and Mrs Yousafzai were married, a small boy was placed on their laps to encourage the birth of a son. It didn’t work: their first-born was a girl who “popped out kicking and screaming”. Her father was mocked by relatives for bothering to add her name to the family tree, which only featured men. So how did Malala, who barely warranted a mention in her family’s genealogy, become destined for the history books as a powerful symbol for girls’ universal right to an education? Her memoir I am Malala tells us how. Almost a year ago, the world became aware of Malala when she was shot by the Taliban for what they deemed a crime: going to school, and fighting for that right.

…Malala and her family have an answer to some of the man-made problems: education. As she says, describing her father: “Education had been a great gift to him. He believed that lack of education was the root of all Pakistan’s problems. He believed schooling should be available for all, rich and poor, boys and girls.” That is why the UK government is working with the government of Pakistan to deliver better quality and more widely available education. This will put four million children in school by 2015, recruit and train new teachers, and construct or rebuild more than 20,000 classrooms. She may not have warranted an entry on her family tree, but today Malala is known across the world. “I’m one of the few fathers known by his daughter,” Mr Yousafzai is quoted as saying towards the end of the book. She has turned a potential tragedy into a positive – bringing to the world’s attention that crucial issue of a girl’s right to an education. This is certainly not the last we have heard from Malala.

More here.

Well-connected hemispheres of Einstein’s brain may have contributed to his brilliance

From KurzweilAI:

Einsteins-brainThe left and right hemispheres of Albert Einstein’s brain were unusually well connected to each other and this may have contributed to his brilliance, according to a new study [1], the first to detail Einstein’s corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is the brain’s largest bundle of fibers that connects the two cerebral hemispheres and facilitates interhemispheric communication. The study was published in the journal Brain. Lead author Weiwei Men of East China Normal University’s Department of Physics developed a new technique to conduct the study. Men’s technique measures and color-codes the varying thicknesses of subdivisions of the corpus callosum along its length, where nerves cross from one side of the brain to the other. These thicknesses indicate the number of nerves that cross and therefore how “connected” the two sides of the brain are in particular regions, which facilitate different functions depending on where the fibers cross along the length. For example, movement of the hands is represented toward the front and mental arithmetic along the back.

In particular, this new technique permitted registration and comparison of Einstein’s measurements with those of two samples — one of 15 elderly men and one of 52 men Einstein’s age in 1905. During his “miracle year” at 26 years old, Einstein published four articles that contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed the world’s views about space, time, mass and energy. The research team’s findings show that Einstein had more extensive connections between certain parts of his cerebral hemispheres compared to both younger and older control groups.

More here.

the forbidden painting

A_560x0Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

Henry Darger’s little girls, Gustave Courbet’s genital close-up, even Picasso’s explicit depiction of fellatio: You might think we had passed the point where a major painting by a first-tier artist is still taboo. Nonetheless, The Guitar Lesson, from 1934, by (the bogusly named) Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, better known as Balthus, is just such a forbidden work. At its 1934 debut in Paris, it was shown for fifteen days, covered, in the gallery’s back room. In 1977, it appeared for a month at Pierre Matisse’s 57th Street gallery. It has never been exhibited again, as if it were some metaphysical equivalent of the cursed videotape in The Ring that kills anyone who views it.

In his review of that 1977 show in New York Magazine, Thomas Hess lamented that it “can’t be illustrated in the pages of New York.” (Well, times change.) Alas, you also won’t see it in the scintillating “Balthus: Cats and Girls,” opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this week. The exhibition’s organizer, Sabine Rewald, is by far the greatest Balthus scholar ever, and her show’s theme and focus may justify its exclusion. So it remains frustratingly, heartbreakingly hidden from view.

more here.

Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

2823058Olivia Laing at The New Statesman:
In 1952, the then 48-year-old Christopher Isherwood met a beautiful teenage boy on the beach in Santa Monica. None of his friends thought the liaison would last but it proved unexpectedly durable. Despite a 30-year age gap and affairs on both sides, the two men remained emphatically together until Isherwood’s death in 1986 – a relationship considerably longer-lasting than most Hollywood marriages.
Like many couples, they communicated in a private language, a sort of nursery camp in which they were cast as the “Animals”, sometimes beleaguered by the human world (the “Others”) and sometimes resplendent in their difference. The Animals were evidently well established by the time written communication began, on a trip to London in the winter of 1956. They make their inaugural appearance not in the first, rather shy letter from Isherwood but in Bachardy’s reply. “I miss rides through London on old Dobbin,” he writes, “and think a lot about him, sleeping in a strange stable, eating cold oats out of an ill-fitting feed bag and having no cat fur to keep him warm . . . And tell him an anxious Tabby is at the mercy of the RSPCA and counting the days till his return.”
more here.

Julia Margaret Cameron: photography in the 19th century

ID_VS_POLCH_CAMER_CO_003James Polchin at The Smart Set:

The camera her daughter and son-in-law gave her that winter was a heavy machine, awkward to move around, made of wood and the size of a large birdhouse. It was the most modern of its time. We can easily forget today how arduous and dangerous the process of photographing was back then. The glass plates used to expose the image (the forerunner to film) were there own chemistry lab, requiring a coating of a thick and flammable collodion solution, followed by a quick dash to the camera to insert the class behind the lens and expose it to the light before the plate dried. Then, through a series of sliver nitrate washes (the fumes could be deadly) and drying, washing and drying again, the glass negative was ready to transfer its image to the prepared albumen paper that was brushed with a frothy mixture of egg white and silver nitrate to give the paper a glossy texture. The plate was placed on the paper, exposed to the sun, and then, it too was washed and let dry. At any one point in this process, the photographs could easily be destroyed. This mixture of science and art burdened these practices with certain standards of skill. Photography was still considered a scientific experiment; it’s practitioners more akin to chemist than artists. What constituted a good photograph was as much about the process as the composition.

While there is little evidence that she was much interested in visual art before the 1860s, Cameron took to this process with her usual energy. Her interest was in what this process can create more than what it should create.

more here.

AN OPEN LETTER TO OPEN LETTER WRITERS: STOP WRITING OPEN LETTERS

Stephen Marche in Esquire:

ScreenHunter_351 Oct. 09 13.05To all open letter writers,

First of all, hello. I've never met you, but I've been reading a lot of your open letters lately. Sinead O'Connor, just recently, you posted your third open letter to Miley Cyrus. That's about three too many, but I want you to know that I understand why you write open letters and I sympathize with your motives. I'm saying that because all open letters begin with this false sense of intimacy and the bogus claim that the writer really wants the best for the person he or she is addressing.

The time has come, open letter writers, to sit back and ask yourself why everybody is writing open letters. You all have your own explanations of course. Sinead, you opened your first letter to Miley Cyrus with the following justification:

“I wasn't going to write this letter, but today I've been dodging phone calls from various newspapers who wished me to remark upon your having said in Rolling Stone your 'Wrecking Ball' video was designed to be similar to the one for 'Nothing Compares' … So this is what I need to say … And it is said in the spirit of motherliness and with love.”

I'm sorry but the spirit of motherliness cannot really be enough of an answer to why you're writing. I think even you can see that attacking somebody publicly for what they're wearing isn't exactly the definition of “motherly love.”

More here.

You don’t normally expect to find Jesus Christ at The Jewish Museum in New York City, but there he is

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

ID_IC_MEIS_CHAGA_CO_001Jesus is hanging on the cross, or floating in the sky all over the second floor of the museum. This is all because of Marc Chagall.

Many critics have called Chagall the preeminent Jewish artist of the 20th century. Yet, Chagall had about a five-year period during the Second World War in which he became utterly obsessed with painting Jesus Christ. Mostly, Chagall painted Crucifixion scenes. A number of these paintings, along with Chagall’s work just before and after the war, can be seen as part of The Jewish Museum’s Chagall: Love, War and Exile show, which runs through February 2, 2014.

Looking at the paintings, one thing is clear right away. The paintings have little to do with Jesus as we usually see him — the central figure in the Christian Passion narrative. Chagall’s Jesus is a Jewish Jesus through and through. In many of the Crucifixion scenes (like The Artist with Yellow Christ, 1938 and Persecution, c. 1941) Jesus’ nether parts are covered with a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl. In Study for The Yellow Crucifixion(1942), Jesus is wearing tefillin, little black boxes containing verses from the Torah that are wrapped around the head and arm, with black straps going down to the hand.

More here.

How Prisons Have Changed America’s Electoral Politics

Heather Ann Thompson on politics and incarceration in The Atlantic:

Prisons thomasWith so many powerful arguments being made against our current criminal justice system, why then does it persist? Why haven’t the American people, particularly those who are most negatively affected by this most unsettling and unsavory state of affairs, undone the policies that have led us here? The answer, in part, stems from the fact that locking up unprecedented numbers of citizens over the last forty years has itself made the prison system highly resistant to reform through the democratic process. To an extent that few Americans have yet appreciated, record rates of incarceration have, in fact, undermined our American democracy, both by impacting who gets to vote and how votes are counted.

The unsettling story of how this came to be actually begins in 1865, when the abolition of slavery led to bitter constitutional battles over who would and would not be included in our polity. To fully understand it, though, we must look more closely than we yet have at the year 1965, a century later—a moment when, on the one hand, politicians were pressured into opening the franchise by passing the most comprehensive Voting Rights Act to date, but on the other hand, were also beginning a devastatingly ambitious War on Crime.

More here.

The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam

Malise Ruthven reviews Akbar Ahmed's book in the New York Review of Books:

9789351160007Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murad opens with the image of a beautiful thistle flower, wrenched from a ditch, that the narrator seeks to add to his bouquet. His effort to pluck it, however,

proved a very difficult task. Not only did the stalk prick on every side—even through the handkerchief I wrapped round my hand—but it was so tough that I had to struggle with it for nearly five minutes, breaking the fibres one by one; and when I had at last plucked it, the stalk was all frayed, and the flower itself no longer seemed so fresh and beautiful…. But what energy and tenacity! With what determination it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life!

This late masterpiece, written in 1904 but never published in Tolstoy’s lifetime, was based on a real-life episode. In 1851 the Avar warlord Hajimurad al-Khunzaki, a confederate of the Imam Shamil, who led the resistance to Russia’s annexation of the Caucasus, betrayed his ally and went over to the Russians. In Tolstoy’s story he is driven by ambition, hoping to govern the Caucasian tribes under the “white tsar.”

More here.