Nathaniel Popkin in The Smart Set:

And thus, we’ve come to see Wilde’s “true literary life,” when he wrote Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, Salomé, and A Woman of No Importance, and made his mark as a piercingly funny avant garde social critic and dramatic visionary, as a kind of spontaneous explosion of genius and self-invention. Failing at brilliance, it’s been long imagined, from a somewhat determinist perspective, Wilde was so unflappably clever and intellectually original he could flip personas, almost as if playing a game. “Wilde’s game centered on masks, a game he relished…both in all seriousness and with delight in its manifest absurdities,” writes Richard Allen Cave, editor of the Penguin Classics edition of The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays (2000). Even so, this sort of psychological explanation accounts for Wilde’s personality, but not necessarily the mechanics of a career about to blossom (writers rarely become famous by accident). The hard stop, journalism is over, now I’ll write a shocking novel and scores of beloved plays, wasn’t quite adequate for John Cooper, a non-academic Wilde scholar, who runs a project called Oscar Wilde in America. Cooper understood implicitly that one thing draws from the other. “People know about Wilde’s early poetry. People know about the drama,” he says. “But this middle career: people tend to think he had merely settled down. They overlook the period as simply a domestic time.” In desiring to better understand the middle period, Cooper had often thought about something Wilde had said while at Oxford:

I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious.

He began to imagine that “to locate Wilde the writer we must use the mantra of his quotation as a roadmap.” Youthful bravado or nonsense, the sequence of poet, writer, dramatist became for Cooper a research framework. He wanted to find new Wilde material that would help tell a richer story of this evolution, both personally and professionally, and that would provide links — seams, we might venture — between poet and writer, writer and dramatist. Then, this spring, he found it: a body of work, including Wilde’s first major piece of published prose writing, The Philosophy of Dress, an essay published in 1885 and mentioned again only once more, in 1920, on clothing, dress, and fashion. In the essay, Wilde lays out an argument for clothing that hangs, properly in his view according to the human form, from the shoulders, and allows women particularly freedom of movement (even to ride a bicycle). “I hold that the very first canon of art is that Beauty is always organic,” he writes, “and comes from within, and not from without,”

comes from the perfection of its own being and not from any added prettiness. And that consequently the beauty of a dress depends entirely and absolutely on the loveliness it shields, and on the freedom and motion that it does not impede.

More here.

Rithika Merchant in The Morning News:

The Morning News: Some anthropologists theorize that early images of hybrid creatures, such as in cave paintings and Assyrian reliefs, depict shamans interacting with or transforming into spirit animals. Historically, hybrids do often represent deities and other religious figures—the elephant-headed Ganesha in Hinduism, Christianity’s winged angel Gabriel, for instance. To what extent does your art incorporate religious messaging?

Rithika Merchant: “Origin of Species” was in part inspired by the Shamanic concept of the spirit/power animal. I focused on the emotional complexes and relationships between people and animals using universally recognizable motifs. However, my work has less to do with religion and more to do with folklore and indigenous culture.

TMN: So what drew you to folklore?

RM: I first became interested in it after being introduced to Gond tribal art as a teenager. I was drawn to how each artist had their own signature decorative pattern that they used to fill their paintings. My interest in the visual representation of folklore began from looking at these drawings. Soon after that I began to seek out indigenous art and folktales from other cultures.

More here.

James C. Scott reviews Jared Diamond's The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, in the LRB (via Crooked Timber):

What were our ancestors like before the domestication of plants and animals, before sedentary village life, before the earliest towns and states? That is the question Diamond sets himself to answer. In doing so, he faces nearly insurmountable obstacles. Until quite recently, archaeology recorded our history as a species in relation to the concentration of debris (middens, building rubble, traces of irrigation canals, walls, fossilised faeces etc) we left behind. Hunter-gatherers were typically mobile and spread their largely biodegradable debris widely; we don’t often find their temporary habitats, which were often in caves or beside rivers or the sea, and the vast majority of such sites have been lost to history. When we do find them, they can tell us something about their inhabitants’ diet, cooking methods, bodily adornment, trade goods, weapons, diseases, local climate and occasionally even causes of death, but not much else. How to infer from this scant evidence our ancestors’ family structure and social organisation, their patterns of co-operation and conflict, let alone their ethics and cosmology?

It is here that Diamond makes his fundamental mistake. He imagines he can triangulate his way to the deep past by assuming that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are ‘our living ancestors’, that they show what we were like before we discovered crops, towns and government. This assumption rests on the indefensible premise that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies are survivals, museum exhibits of the way life was lived for the entirety of human history ‘until yesterday’ – preserved in amber for our examination.

In the unique case of Highland New Guinea, which was apparently isolated from coastal trade and the outside world until World War Two, Diamond might be forgiven for making this inference, though the people of New Guinea have had exactly the same amount of time to adapt and evolve as homo americanus and they managed somehow to get hold of the sweet potato, which originated in South America. The inference of pristine isolation, however, is completely unwarranted for virtually all of the other 35 societies he canvasses. Those societies have, for the last five thousand years, been deeply involved in a world of trade, states and empires and are often now found in undesirable marginal areas to which they have been pushed by more powerful societies. The anthropologist Pierre Clastres argued that the Yanomamo and Siriono, two of Diamond’s prime examples, were originally sedentary cultivators who turned to foraging in order to escape the forced labour and disease associated with Spanish settlements. Like almost all the groups Diamond considers, they have been trading with outside kingdoms and states (and raiding them) for much of the past three thousand years; their beliefs and practices have been shaped by contact, trade goods, travel and intermarriage. So thoroughly have they come to live in a world of powerful kingdoms and states that one might call these societies themselves a ‘state effect’.

More here.

Fox

The light that limped in lantern circles down the road
Lit the grass heaved ditches and the cobbled stars of stone,
And came upon it, bleeding in the stream's cold sleep;
Fox, red into fawn, sharp as a coin and ruined now.
While blind signals pilfered its garbling wit-
Spasm to spasm I watched, then touched its wetsmooth fur,
As it snapjawed at the air, splashed for a furious time,
Alive again in a newer fear, then blinked back to the old.
I, thinking that misery ended it, tilted my gun
And ended its misery. The lantern flicked through the leaves;
Green, back through the woods the light fumbled a path,
The stars hardened, and a fresh breeze screamed in the trees.

by John Bruce

Tolokonnikova and Žižek in The Guardian:

2 January 2013

Dear Nadezhda,

I hope you have been able to organise your life in prison around small rituals that make it tolerable, and that you have time to read. Here are my thoughts on your predicament.

John Jay Chapman, an American political essayist, wrote this about radicals in 1900: “They are really always saying the same thing. They don't change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their cause, fanaticism, triviality, lack of humour, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of persistent radicals. To all appearance, nobody follows them, yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honoured pitch is G flat.” Isn't this a good description of the effect of Pussy Riot performances? In spite of all accusations, you sound a certain note. It may appear that people do not follow you, but secretly, they believe you, they know you are telling the truth, or, even more, you are standing for truth.

But what is this truth? Why are the reactions to Pussy Riot performances so violent, not only in Russia? All hearts were beating for you as long as you were perceived as just another version of the liberal-democraticprotest against the authoritarian state. The moment it became clear that you rejected global capitalism, reporting on Pussy Riot became much more ambiguous. What is so disturbing about Pussy Riot to the liberal gaze is that you make visible the hidden continuity between Stalinism and contemporary global capitalism.

More here.

Comparative European Politics has a symposium on Mark Blyth's Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, with comments from Nicolas Jabko, Jamie Peck, Wolfgang Streeck, Helen Thompson and Mark Blyth. Wolfgang Streeck:

Why write a comment on a book that must command as much respect and indeed admiration as Blyth’s? Fortunately one can always ask questions, extend one or the other line of argument to see where it may lead and probe for underlying assumptions that might usefully be uncovered. Having convincingly demonstrated that ‘austerity doesn’t work’, Blyth in my view remains conspicuously silent on what would work and for whom. This is, of course, entirely legitimate in principle; he or she who undertakes to explain a problem cannot be obliged to deliver a solution as well. However, although Blyth refrains from explicitly telling us what might replace austerity, it seems to me that implicitly he suggests that the alternative is just around the corner, too obvious to be in need of discussion, in the form of monetary and fiscal expansion. It is here that I have my doubts.

Before I get to them, let me reassure the reader that I have not overlooked the last chapter of the book where Blyth does turn policy advocate, if only with respect to public debt, for the reduction of which he recommends a combination of fiscal repression and higher taxes. In recent months that combination seems to have become popular even among governments and their economists, and Blyth is to be commended for having seen this coming. Whether there are good reasons to be as enthusiastic about it as he is, however, a different matter. Fiscal repression is predicated on high growth, real or nominal or a combination of the two, plus low interest rates secured by, presumably, monetary expansion. As to real growth, the problem, nowhere mentioned by Blyth, is that is has been and continues to be on a long-term decline. Up to now nobody can convincingly say how that trend may be reversed; while opinions differ, however, few if any have suggested that the thing to do would be raising taxes. To the contrary, the mantra has been and still is that growth is stimulated, not by raising but by cutting taxes, promoting investment at the high end of the income distribution or consumption at the lower end. (There is also the minor problem of tax flight, although governments are about to take care of this, or so they say.) Hence, the growth trick must almost entirely be done by monetary expansion, and indeed against the odds of the growth-impeding effects of a tax increase.

Fortunately, if the real growth trick refused to work, monetary expansion could also do with the nominal growth trick. Inflation, however, seems hard to engineer in the absence of strong trade unions, that is, by easy money alone. This at least could be the lesson of recent years, when central banks were expanding as though there was no tomorrow but inflation remained miraculously absent. Maybe this would at some point change. However, what would be supposed to cure public indebtedness could have serious side-effects. If easy money eventually did cause inflation, this would disproportionately punish people on fixed incomes. Of these, because of a changed demography, there are many more today than in the 1970s.

More here.

Annie Lowrey in the New York Times:

This fall, a truck dumped eight million coins outside the Parliament building in Bern, one for every Swiss citizen. It was a publicity stunt for advocates of an audacious social policy that just might become reality in the tiny, rich country. Along with the coins, activists delivered 125,000 signatures — enough to trigger a Swiss public referendum, this time on providing a monthly income to every citizen, no strings attached. Every month, every Swiss person would receive a check from the government, no matter how rich or poor, how hardworking or lazy, how old or young. Poverty would disappear. Economists, needless to say, are sharply divided on what would reappear in its place — and whether such a basic-income scheme might have some appeal for other, less socialist countries too.

More here.

John Quiggin in Jacobin:

David Graeber’s denunciation of “bullshit jobs” resonated with many, producing a string of responses. Alex Tabarrok and Brad DeLong have suggested that the apparent inverse relationship between earnings and the social value of work done is simply an illustration of “diamond-water” paradox, that prices and wages are determined by marginal, rather than absolute values and that marginal values reflect scarcity as well as utility. Peter Frase refutes this claim in both empirical terms (noting for example the fact that the price of diamonds is set by the De Beers cartel rather than pure market forces) and as a resurrection of the discredited marginal productivity ethics of the 19th century.

I’d like to look at a specific question raised by the discussion of private returns and social value, namely: can Wall Street, in its present form, be justified? That is, does the share of income flowing to corporations and professional workers in the financial sector reflect their marginal contribution to the total value of social output, so that, if their work ceased to be done and their skills were allocated elsewhere, we would all be worse off?

I argue that society as a whole would be better off if the financial sector were smaller, and received much smaller returns. A political strategy based on cutting the financial sector down to size has more promise for the Left than any alternative approach now on offer, and is a necessary precondition for a broader attempt to make the distribution of wealth and power more equal.

More here.

Esther Inglis-Arkell in io9:

Sleeping Beauty is put under sedation on a Sunday. A coin is flipped. No matter what, she is woken up on Monday. She is briefly interviewed, but before she is put back to sleep, she is given a drug that wipes out her memory of the interview, and being woken at all. If the coin comes up heads, she is only awakened on Monday. If the coin comes up tails, she awakened on Monday and on Tuesday. During each interview, before she is given the amnesiac drug, she is asked what she believes the result of the coin flip was. Should she say heads or tails? Or should she just bolt for the door?

There is always the conventional view. The coin came down on one side or another. When Sleeping Beauty awakes, she has no way of telling whether it's Monday or Tuesday, and she doesn't know whether she's been awakened before. No matter what she guesses, she has a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

Or does she? Consider a world so depraved that it could get 1000 different volunteers to participate in this experiment. The coin will be flipped 1000 times, and 500 times it will come up heads, and 500 times it will come up tails. But Sleeping Beauty won't wake up 1000 times. She'll wake up 1500 times. Every time the coin comes up tails, she gets two interviews — making for 1000 wake up calls. When the coin comes up heads she gets a paltry 500 awakenings. Out of 1500 creepy interviews, two-thirds will be prompted by tails, and one-third by heads. Therefore, she should guess tails, knowing that there's a 2/3 probability she'll be right about a fifty-fifty coin flip.

There is a third school of thought about this experiment. Its philosophy runs thusly: who cares? Each interview is the same.

More here.

Simon Schama at the Financial Times:

Kennedy knew better than to hide his wiry Irish mop beneath a titfer. It was the crest, the crown, the brand. Everything about him was calculated to give the impression of an almost casual ease beneath the weight of power: the splashing around on Cape Cod; the kid daughter romping through the Oval Office, the droll wit which came as naturally to him as his habitual satyrism. Of the acute physical pain, the relentless drug treatments, the hospital visits, Addison’s disease, spastic colitis we knew nothing. Horsing around with the brothers and the children on the Massachusetts beach, he was President Fine Fettle, rough-house glamour with the bonus of brains. When we looked around at our own politicians we saw pipes, tweeds, the brandy snifter or the mug of tea. So of course we took his murder personally, angry at being robbed of the merry mind; a big chunk of the future blown away in the Dallas motorcade. Norman Mailer spoke for all of us when he said, “For a time we felt the country was ours. Now it’s theirs again.”

A lot of the Best and Brightest who had worked for and with JFK felt much the same way. Nine months after his death, during the 1964 Democratic Convention that was more like a coronation than a nomination for Lyndon Johnson, you could hear the sound of one hand clapping among the survivors of Camelot.

more here.

David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

Als is not denying Mathers' whiteness, just saying that it's trumped by class, by economics, by his awareness of being on the outside looking in. It's a terrific point, and Als pushes it further by suggesting that “rap's dissonant sound … was as familiar and natural to the burgeoning artist as the short story form was to Flannery O'Connor.” Notice what he does there: arguing not that rap and short fiction are the same (this would devalue both forms by forcing a false equivalency) but that for these artists, the drive to create comes out of a common otherness.

The O'Connor reference highlights another kind of doubling, since Als has already written about her in the book. What he's getting at is how these artists come together in his imagination, echoing one another and himself. This makes “White Girls” more than a collection of disparate pieces but rather a coherent portrait of Als' inner life.

The focus is privilege, who has it and who will never have it, and what those without it are supposed to do. As Als notes of Capote, “It is hard to garner privilege when you begin with none — for those who have to reach for it, it remains perpetually out of reach.”

more here.

Marilyn Robinson in The New York Times:

This slender, charming book must be approached with a special tact. To read it feels a little like an intrusion on inwardness itself. The volume contains, alongside a lightly corrected transcription, a facsimile of the Sterling notebook in which Flannery O’Connor, just 20 years old, began a journal addressed to God. Written in her neat hand, it is reproduced complete with the empty final pages (her concluding words are “there is nothing left to say of me”) and not omitting a bit of musical notation floating on the inside of the back cover. The prayers, attempts at prayer and meditations on faith and art contained in it were written in 1946 and 1947, while O’Connor was a student in Iowa. The brilliance that would make her fictions literary classics is fully apparent in them.

The complexity of O’Connor’s thinking, together with the largely flawless pages in her hand, suggest that these entries may be fair copies of earlier drafts. Clearly O’Connor’s virtuosity makes her self-­conscious. Young as she was, new to writing, she could only have been pleased, even awed, at having produced these beautiful sentences. Perhaps nothing written is finally meant to go unread, even if the reader is only a creature of the writer’s mind, an attentive and exacting self that compels refinements of honesty. After a little joke about the pedestrian uses we would make of a knowledge of heaven if we had been given one, she says, remembering her intended Hearer, “But I do not mean to be clever although I do mean to be clever on 2nd thought and like to be clever & want to be considered so.” Her mind is examined, faith questioned, weakness confessed, powers tried as they might not have been under the eye of any human observer. Youth and loneliness and the unspent energies of a singular mind are testing the possible and must be allowed free play.

More here.

Raheel Lakhani in Aaj News:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field; I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

-Rumi

When one reads the Persian mystic Rumi allegorically, it feels as if both the creator and the created are speaking. As if Truth is saying that He dwells beyond the fields of paradise and hell, essentially everywhere and the creation shows readiness to indulge in love and praise of HIM. If this talk of sacredness is outside the measures of right and wrong then Rumi here is inviting us to embrace pluralism while appreciating God’s creation.

…A poet from Sub-continent who refers Rumi repeatedly is Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai. He was a Sindhi mystic saint, poet, and musician. His collected poems were compiled as Shah Jo Risalo. Hossein Nasr described Shah Latif as a direct emanation of Rumi’s spirituality in the Indian world (Nasr, 1974).

The whole creation seeks Him,

He is the Fount of Beauty, thus Rumi says:

If you but unlock yourself, you will see Him

More here.

A Crow

In a vast expanse of field
a crow with the sun on its back
flying vigorously
suddenly died.
It fell straight down from the high sky.
And at the same time
its huge shadow
dashed into its dead body
at lightning speed
from the horizon of the crimson field.
Having cast a great shadow on this earth
the crow’s heart quit.

by Shinjiro Kurahara
from Iwana
publisher: Dowaya, Tokyo, 2010
translation: 2010, Mariko Kurahara, William I. Elliott, Katsumasa Nishihara

Mohammed Hanif in The New Yorker:

During his four years as the head of the T.T.P., Mehsud raised the Taliban game in Pakistan. No longer were they just tribal men fighting to preserve their way of life; they started dreaming they could convert everyone to it. Mehsud consolidated a number of small but ruthless militant and sectarian groups into close-knit fighting units that seemed able to strike anywhere at will. He ordered attacks on Pakistan’s military bases, organized a couple of spectacular jailbreaks, and sent an endless stream of suicide bombers after politicians and religious scholars who didn’t meet his exacting standards. After his men kidnapped an Army colonel, Mehsud delivered a short speech, and then shot him in front of a video camera.

Yet the state seems to have lost the will to fight its old foe, Fazlullah, and his followers. When Mehsud was killed, instead of celebrating or letting out quiet sighs of relief, politicians and journalists reacted as if they had lost a favorite son. He had killed many of us, but we weren’t craving vengeance; we were ready to make up and cuddle.

Why does Pakistan’s political and military élite celebrate the very people it is fighting?

More here.