Gabriel García Márquez: ‘His world was mine’

Salman Rushdie in The Telegraph:

GaboGabo lives. The extraordinary worldwide attention paid to the death of Gabriel García Márquez, and the genuine sorrow felt by readers everywhere at his passing, tells us that the books are still very much alive. Somewhere a dictatorial “patriarch” is still having his rival cooked and served up to his dinner guests on a great dish; an old colonel is waiting for a letter that never comes; a beautiful young girl is being prostituted by her heartless grandmother; and a kindlier patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, one of the founders of the new settlement of Macondo, a man interested in science and alchemy, is declaring to his horrified wife that “the earth is round, like an orange”. We live in an age of invented, alternate worlds. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Rowling’s Hogwarts, the dystopic universe of The Hunger Games, the places where vampires and zombies prowl: These places are having their day. Yet in spite of the vogue for fantasy fiction, in the finest of literature’s fictional microcosms there is more truth than fantasy. In William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, RK Narayan’s Malgudi, and, yes, the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, imagination is used to enrich reality, not to escape from it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is 47 years old now, and in spite of its colossal and enduring popularity, its style – magic realism – has largely given way, in Latin America, to other forms of narration, in part as a reaction against the sheer size of García Márquez’s achievement. The most highly regarded writer of the next generation, Roberto Bolaño, notoriously declared that magic realism “stinks”, and jeered at García Márquez’s fame, calling him “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops”. It was a childish outburst, but it showed that for many Latin American writers the presence of the great colossus in their midst was more than a little burdensome. (“I have the feeling,” Carlos Fuentes once said to me, “that writers in Latin America can’t use the word ‘solitude’ anymore, because they worry that people will think it’s a reference to Gabo. And I’m afraid,” he added, mischievously, “that soon we will not be able to use the phrase ‘one hundred years’ either.”) No writer in the world has had a comparable impact in the past half-century. Ian McEwan has accurately compared his pre-eminence to that of Charles Dickens. No writer since Dickens was so widely read, and so deeply loved, as Gabriel García Márquez.

More here.

The Art of Willem de Kooning

0c7e71dc-cc1b-11e3-a934-00144feabdc0Jackie Wullschlager at The Financial Times:

As postwar art recedes into history, its giant figures stand out more starkly. In American painting, the status of Willem de Kooning, last of the abstract expressionists to die, in 1997, is outstripping that of everyone else.

His career was not only longer, but more unexpected and contrary, less dependent on a signature style, than those of his peers Jackson Pollock the Dripper, Barnett Newman the Zipper, or Mark Rothko, the high priest of transcendent rectangles. De Kooning is as rowdy and irreverent as a pop artist, but tuned into European modernism in ways that give depth and emotional richness. By refusing to conform to ideals of abstraction, dissolving gaps between figurative and non-figurative, he appears immediate and present within today’s non-hierarchical approaches.

Not that he is easy. A show at New York’s Gagosian Gallery last winter reignited the debate over his old-age work: is it exquisite simplicity, or the outpourings of an alcoholic, demented fool?

more here.

Akhil Sharma: ‘I feel as if I’ve shattered my youth on this book’

Nicholas Wade in The Guardian:

GetImageIt took 12-and-a-half years and I can't believe how bad that time was,” says Akhil Sharma. “I was such a different person when I began writing it that I feel as if I've shattered my youth on this book. I still find it hard to believe that it's over, and I have this constant fear that I need to go and sit at my computer.” Sharma is talking about his second novel, Family Life, which is published in the UK next week. It tells the autobiographical story of a family's emigration from India to the US in the late 1970s, and how an accident that left the elder son severely brain-damaged brought them close to collapse. The book has already been published to much acclaim in the US – “Deeply unnerving and gorgeously tender at its core” said the New York Times – matching the praise Sharma received when he emerged in the late 90s with prize-winning short stories and then a 2001 debut novel, An Obedient Father, which won the PEN/Hemingway award. But the positive response to Family Life still feels “almost as unreal as the book being done,” he says. The intervening period of silence – although he was named on Granta's 2007 list of best young American writers – has not been easy.

Just as Sharma moved to New York with his parents and elder brother, Anup, so the eight-year-old Ajay Mishra makes the same journey in Family Life. While Ajay finds the transition difficult, his elder brother Birju thrives in America, and even wins a place at a prestigious high school. But shortly before term starts Birju hits his head on the bottom of a swimming pool and lays unconscious underwater for three minutes, resulting in catastrophic brain damage that leaves him blind and unable to communicate or move. After two years in hospital and nursing homes the family take Birju home, and the rest of Ajay's childhood is played out against a backdrop of 24-hour care, a stream of crackpot faith healers and a family increasingly defined by alcoholism, destructive tensions and lies. But while the broad facts of that story match those of Sharma and his brother Anup's own lives, finding a way to most effectively tell it proved almost insuperable. From the beginning he was aware that it was “a coming-of-age story, an illness story and the story of a child's love for his parents and his brother”.

More here.

The Romantics and the Orient: What English Poetry owes to the Middle East

Samar Attar in Informed Comment:

Borrowed-imagination-british-romantic-poets-their-arabic-islamic-samar-attar-hardcover-cover-artMany times I have asked myself how can I concentrate on the British Romantic Poets when people in Syria, the country of my birth, have been killing each other for the last four years, supposedly in the name of liberty and freedom? Thousands of men, women and children have been killed, maimed, or made homeless. Historical monuments that stood there for centuries were erased from the ground. Was I trying desperately to forget my misery and immerse myself in a mythical world? If so, I did not entirely succeed.

Ironically, even in the poetry of the Romantics, I cannot escape the haunting images of past such paroxysms of violence in my homeland. Coleridge much admired Hulagu,the brother of Kublai Khan (the Mongol Emperor of China), but Syrians remember him as a tyrant who sacked northern Syria in 1260, and attempted to destroy the latest traces of civilization. Byron greatly admired Timur Lang (Tamerlane), who destroyed Aleppo and Damascus in the fourteenth century, leaving behind him mountains of skulls out of which hundreds of towers and pyramids were built. But neither of these icons of the romantics can be blamed for the current destruction. It is the Syrians themselves who are engaged in self-destruction, not, as in former times, intruders.

More here.

Time’s Arrow Traced to Quantum Source

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

ScreenHunter_594 Apr. 26 17.55Coffee cools, buildings crumble, eggs break and stars fizzle out in a universe that seems destined to degrade into a state of uniform drabness known as thermal equilibrium. The astronomer-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington in 1927 cited the gradual dispersal of energy as evidence of an irreversible “arrow of time.”

But to the bafflement of generations of physicists, the arrow of time does not seem to follow from the underlying laws of physics, which work the same going forward in time as in reverse. By those laws, it seemed that if someone knew the paths of all the particles in the universe and flipped them around, energy would accumulate rather than disperse: Tepid coffee would spontaneously heat up, buildings would rise from their rubble and sunlight would slink back into the sun.

“In classical physics, we were struggling,” said Sandu Popescu, a professor of physics at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “If I knew more, could I reverse the event, put together all the molecules of the egg that broke? Why am I relevant?”

Surely, he said, time’s arrow is not steered by human ignorance. And yet, since the birth of thermodynamics in the 1850s, the only known approach for calculating the spread of energy was to formulate statistical distributions of the unknown trajectories of particles, and show that, over time, the ignorance smeared things out.

Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: Energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”

More here.

Ali Dayan Hasan: The Wrong Kind of Pakistani

Ali Dayan Hasan in Guernica:

ScreenHunter_593 Apr. 26 17.44On March 28 in Lahore, my friend of almost thirty years, Raza Rumi, journalist and much else, survived an attempted “targeted killing.” Miraculously, he emerged unscathed from the hail of gunfire intended for him. Raza is now in a secure location—outside Pakistan. He had no choice but to leave as the authorities felt no embarrassment in letting him know that they could not guarantee his life if he stepped outside his Lahore home. Some weeks later, the police “caught” the would-be-assassins who belong to the dreaded Taliban-affiliate Lahkar-e-Jhangvi. But police custody curtails neither the power of these terrorists nor the impunity with which they kill. The fact is that nobody can do anything to stop them and nobody will. Tens of thousands of our fellow citizens have already been killed by the same terrorists. On April 19, Hamid Mir, another journalist, was shot in broad daylight and survived. He too will live. But his attackers too, even if identified, will escape accountability.

I should just be grateful that my friend Raza is alive. I was. I am.

But then, to come to terms with my relief, I engaged in an act of self-destructive rebellion—foolhardy, irresponsible and potentially fatal. I went for a long drive through the streets of Lahore, alone. As people often do. As I did often until “security-related restricted movement” became an embarrassing part of my life. As Raza could have possibly, until recently, when the price of life became self-imposed house arrest or exile for him.

More here.

Massachusetts Maverick

Amy Chozick in The New York Times:

AmyWarren, the 64-year-old Massachusetts senator described by one reporter as “a strand of pearls short of looking like the head of the P.T.A.,” is not, however, out of central casting. A professor who spent most of her career teaching law students about bankruptcy, Warren is an unlikely icon for the Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing set. She didn’t run for elected office until 2011; the following year, she defeated the Republican Scott Brown to capture the Senate seat once held by Ted Kennedy. By the time she was prodded into running, Warren had been turned off by Washington, and her favorite activities were walking Otis, her slobbery and obese golden retriever; knocking back fried clams and beer with her husband, the legal historian Bruce Mann; and visiting her three grandchildren in California. Or, at least, that’s the narrative she lays out in a relatable, folksy voice in “A Fighting Chance.”

…Before she ran for office, she had become a leading expert in debates about predatory lending practices and bankruptcy legislation, as well as a thorn in the financial industry’s side. The idea that some banks are too big to fail, Warren writes in “A Fighting Chance,” “allows the megabanks to operate like drunks on a wild weekend in Vegas.” Families who fall behind on their debts are usually “desperately ashamed of their situation,” and have been saddled with health care costs or tricked into taking out subprime mortgages with egregious terms hidden in the fine print. That message first brought Warren national attention with her 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke,” written with her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi. In that book, they wrote about a meeting with Hillary Clinton in 1998 to discuss bankruptcy protections for struggling middle-class families. (Before Warren began her pitch the first lady “snapped her head sharply to the side and called to no one in particular, ‘Where’s lunch? I’m hungry.’ ”)

More here.

Saturday Poem

Pigs

Us all on sore cement was we.
Not warmed then with glares. Not glutting mush
under that pole the lightning's tied to.
No farrow-shit in milk to make us randy.
Us back in cool god-shit. We ate crisp.
We nosed up good rank in the tunnelled bush.
Us all fuckers then. And Big, huh? Tusked
the balls-biting dog and gutsed him wet.
Us shoved down the soft cement of rivers.
Us snored the earth hollow, filled farrow, grunted.
Never stopped growing. We sloughed, we soughed
and balked no weird till the high ridgebacks was us
with weight-buried hooves. Or bristly, with milk.
Us never knowed like slitting nor hose-biff then.
Nor the terrible sheet-cutting screams up ahead.
The burnt water kicking. This gone-already feeling
here in no place with our heads on upside down.

by Les Murray
from Translations from the Natural World
, 1992

The Accidental Controversialist: Deeper Reflections on Thomas Piketty’s “Capital

Thomas Palley over at his website [h/t: Mona Ali]:

Using a conventional marginal productivity framework, Piketty provides an explanation of rising inequality based on increases in the gap between the marginal product of capital, which determines the rate of profit (r), and the rate of growth (g). Because capital ownership is so concentrated, a higher profit rate or slower growth rate increases inequality as the incomes of the wealthy grow faster than the overall economy.

The conventional character of Piketty’s theoretical thinking rears its head in his policy prescriptions. His neoclassical growth framework leads him to focus on taxation as the remedy. There is little attention to issues of economic institutions and structures of economic power because these are not part of the neoclassical framework. That substantially explains progressive economists’ diffident embrace of the book. Furthermore, even if technically feasible, Piketty’s tax prescriptions are politically naïve given capital increasingly controls the political process.

These features have led some critics to raise old “Cambridge” arguments about the intellectual incoherence of marginal productivity income distribution theory. Critics also assert Piketty conflates physical and financial capital, overlooking the role of finance in determining rates of return and patterns of income and wealth distribution. There are two problems with these responses. First, mainstream economists determined long ago to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to such arguments. Second, these arguments miss the bulls-eye which is the nature of capitalism.

A better response is for critics to stick with the rate of profit versus growth argument while dumping the neoclassical marginal productivity aspect of Piketty’s theoretical argument. Mainstream economists will assert the conventional story about the profit rate being technologically determined. However, as Piketty occasionally hints, in reality the profit rate is politically and socially determined by factors influencing the distribution of economic and political power.

More here.

Revolutionary Russia

Kustodiev_The_BolshevikOrlando Figes at Lapham's Quarterly:

In all revolutions there comes a moment when the high ideals of the revolutionaries crash onto the hard rocks of reality. In Russia that moment came in March 1921, when the Bolsheviks retreated from their first attempt to introduce a planned economy—by which they had thought to impose communism by decree—and let back elements of private trade to rescue their regime from popular rebellions.

Chronic shortages had built up over seven years of war, revolution, and the Civil War, especially in the austere years of the latter, between 1918 and 1920, when the Red Army had fought against the Whites, and leather-jacketed commissars had waged another war on the market.

Townsmen traveled to the countryside to barter with the peasants, who were reluctant to sell foodstuffs for paper money when there was nothing they could buy with it. They left with bags of clothes and household goods to sell or exchange in the rural markets and returned with bags of food. The railways were paralyzed by these armies of “bagmen.”

more here.

Thomas Piketty Undermines the Hallowed Tenets of the Capitalist Catechism

Jeff Faux in The Nation:

ScreenHunter_592 Apr. 25 16.00Thomas Piketty just tossed an intellectual hand grenade into the debate over the world’s struggling economy. Before the English translation of the French economist’s new book,Capital in the Twenty-first Century, hit bookstores, it was applauded, attacked and declared a must-read by pundits, left, right and center. For good reason: it challenges the fundamental assumption of American and European politics that economic growth will continue to deflect popular anger over the unequal distribution of income and wealth.

“Abundance”, observed the late sociologist Daniel Bell was “the American surrogate for socialism.” As the economic pie expands, everyone’s slice grew bigger.

The three-decade long boom that followed World War II seemed to prove Bell’s point, tossing Karl Marx’s forecast of capitalism’s collapse into the dustbin of history.

Marx predicted that as markets expand, profits from technological innovation would gradually dry up, depressions would get more severe and capitalists would drive labor’s share of income in the advanced industrial economies so low that revolution was inevitable.

But twentieth-century capitalism proved more resilient than Marx thought. New technologies continued to generate more profits and jobs. Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies prevented cyclical business downturns from triggering depressions. And the investor class, threatened by the specter of communism, agreed, grudgingly, to the New Deal model of strong unions, social insurance and other policies that forced them to share the profits from rising productivity with their workers.

More here.

writing john updike

140428_r24941_p465Louis Menand at The New Yorker:

Updike’s longtime friend Joyce Carol Oates has published more books than he did. His admirer Philip Roth has won more prizes and awards. (Roth has accumulated something like fifty-five to date; Updike racked up more than thirty, including the Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, in 2008, an honor that has thus far eluded Roth.) But Updike acquired, early on, a singular reputation for effortless virtuosity and steady professional recognition.

He began as a prodigy—in his nineteen months as a staff writer, The New Yorkerpublished eighty items by him—and he somehow remained one. His style never chastened or mellowed or became grand with age. He was forever the wise boy. Even after he had published all those books and won all those prizes, he still radiated precocity.

All of which makes him a challenge for a biographer. Updike spent almost his entire life writing; he had very few professional tribulations; and whatever personal adventures he had, no matter how private, he turned into fiction.

more here.

Would Chekhov have stood up to Putin?

Rosamund Bartlett in The Telegraph:

Anton_2885547bIn recent weeks the world’s attention has been focused on the Crimea, whose annexation by Russia was announced by Vladimir Putin on March 18. Pundits have had recourse to a variety of political and historical figures in their quest to find meaningful historical precedents. Yet none seems to have turned for insight to Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer who spent the last few years of his life living in the main Crimean resort of Yalta at the beginning of the 20th century. The wisdom to be found in the writings of this apparently apolitical writer is typically oblique, but his stance on Russian pre-revolutionary policy in Crimea has a great deal of resonance with what is happening there today. “The sofa is a most inconvenient piece of furniture. It is far more frequently indicted for its role in lechery than is actually the case. I have only once in my life had recourse to a sofa, and I had cause to curse it.” Thus reads the most innocuous part of a letter written by the ebullient young Anton Chekhov to his editor and closest friend, Alexey Suvorin, in November 1888.

Chekhov never imagined that his bracing account of the practical obstacles involved in pursuing amorous liaisons would see the light of day, and for nearly a century after his death it didn’t. Along with salacious accounts of encounters with Japanese prostitutes and outspoken references to indelicate parts of the anatomy, it was surgically excised from editions of his Collected Works first by Chekhov’s squeamish sister, who lived until the Fifties, and then by the Soviet establishment.

More here.

Recycling: You May Be Doing It Wrong

Helen Thompson in Smithsonian:

CycleRecycling technology has improved a lot over the last decade, which in a way has made the logistics of what you can and can’t toss in the recycling bin a lot more confusing. “All garbage goes somewhere; it does not go away. So we must all take more responsibility to sort our discards into the proper bins,” says Robert Reed, a spokesperson for Recology. Recology runs recycling collection programs along the west coast including San Francisco’s highly successful program, which recycles about 80 percent of the city’s waste. Doing a bit of research before you try to recycle can make all the difference. Recycling rules of course vary from one municipality to another, but here are a few ways to improve your recycling routine.

Don’t put your recyclables in a plastic bag.

It’s not that we don’t have the technology to recycle plastic bags. They just cause a lot of issues in the recycling process. Though the type of plastic (#2 and #4) that’s used to make plastic bags is recyclable, throwing them in with the rest of your recycling has ramifications down the line. “Plastic bags cause problems in all of our operations,” says Reed. “They wrap around and jam recycling equipment. They contaminate paper bales. They cause problems at our compost facilities. They blow off of landfills and wind up in waterways and oceans and seas.” If you accumulate a lot of plastic bags, your best options might be recycling programs that focus exclusively on them. Many grocery stores collect plastic bags, and some city recycling programs offer plastic bag pick-up or drop-off programs. In some cases, recycling programs may ask users to put items like packing chips or shredded paper in plastic bags.

More here.

Let the Past Collapse on Time!

Vladimir Sorkin in NY Review of Books:

Putin_vladimir-050814_jpg_250x1294_q85In 2014, Lenins were felled in Ukraine and were allowed to collapse. No one tried to preserve them. This “Leninfall” took place during the brutal confrontation on Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), when Viktor Yanukovych’s power also collapsed, demonstrating that a genuine anti-Soviet revolution had finally occurred in Ukraine. No real revolution has happened in Russia. Lenin, Stalin, and their bloody associates still repose on Red Square, and hundreds of statues still stand, not only on Russia’s squares and plazas, but in the minds of its citizens.

The fury of our politicians’ and bureaucrats’ response to the mass destruction of Soviet idols in Ukraine is revealing. You might think, why pity symbols of the past? But Russian bureaucrats understand that their beloved Homo sovieticus crumbled along with Lenin. “They are destroying monuments to Lenin because he personifies Russia!” one politician exclaimed. Yes: Soviet Russia and the USSR, the ruthless empire, built by Stalin, that enslaved whole peoples, created a devastating famine in Ukraine, and carried out purges and mass repressions. The recent Ukrainian revolution was indeed directed against the heirs of that empire—Putin and Yanukovych. It is telling that pro-Russian demonstrations in Crimea and eastern parts of Ukraine invariably took place next to statues of Lenin.

Unfortunately, what happened in recent weeks in Ukraine did not happen in Russia in 1991. Yeltsin’s revolution ended up being “velvet”: it did not bury the Soviet past and did not pass judgment on its crimes, as was the case in Germany after World War II. All those Party functionaries who became instant “democrats” simply shoved the Soviet corpse into a corner and covered it with sawdust. “It will rot on its own!” they said.

Read the rest here.

It Wasn’t Just a European War: WWI in Arabia

Shehryar Fazli in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Lawerence-243x366If the year 1914 was once said to have inaugurated the 20th century, it appears now to have outgrown it. Its resilience lies not just in the many ways the war that began that year shaped the world, but in the basic mystery of how that war came to be in the first place. Debates about where and when a titanic clash of empires became inevitable, and whether it could have been avoided, are as lively 100 years on as they were in the early decades after its conclusion. What would have happened if a driver hadn’t made a treacherous wrong turn and instead left a dejected Gavrilo Princip to stay seated in a Sarajevo café? What could have happened differently after Princip’s assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to avoid the human and political carnage that followed? Last year, ahead of the war’s centenary, several leading scholars took a fresh crack at examining the origins of the Great War; while each is satisfying in its way — especially Christopher Clark’s superb Sleepwalkers and Margaret MacMillan’s The War That Ended Peace — the war’s inception will probably always remain in part a mystery.

More here.

The Hamid Mir case: ‘In Pakistan, they used to censor journalists – now they shoot us’

On Saturday in Karachi, one of Pakistan's most famous journalists survived being shot six times. Soon after, the TV news channel he works for blamed the feared Inter-Services Intelligence agency for the attack. Author Mohammed Hanif reports on a fourth estate under siege.

Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian:

ScreenHunter_591 Apr. 25 12.35More than a hundred bouquets line the lobby of the private ward of Karachi's posh, private Aga Khan Hospital. Outside, dozens of policemen with bulletproof vests and automatic weapons look at every visitor suspiciously, officers speaking urgently into their walkie-talkies. The Karachi police force is really good at strutting about after a high-profile crime has happened. One of the largest bouquets in the lobby is from the force. “Get well Hamid Mir,” it says. “We may not be able to protect you,” it implies, “but we know where to order the best flowers.”

Mir is upstairs recuperating. He took six bullets – in the ribs, thigh, stomach and across his hand – in an assassination attempt on Saturday as he came out of the airport to present a special broadcast on Geo, Pakistan's largest news channel. Mir had warned about a possible assassination. He had also named his would-be killers. That's what his brother claims, that's what his colleagues and managers at the channel say. Geo, just after the attack, broadcast the allegation and, in an unprecedented move, also flashed the picture of the accused: the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence chief, Lieutenant General Zaheer ul-Islam. In that picture he comes across as a big man. We are not supposed to know much about him except the fact that he is a very professional general. According to an internet myth very popular in Pakistan, the ISI has been rated as the world's No 1 intelligence agency: Mossad is No 5 and MI6 languishes at No 9. According to television ratings, the man with three bullets still in his body is Pakistan's top-rated TV journalist and one of the most vocal critics of Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies.

More here.