La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern

Marcia B. Siegel at The Hudson Review:

Bronislava Nijinska looked a lot like her brother, the famous dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. This proved an advantage to her own career, and a disadvantage. They’d grown up together, studied at the Imperial Ballet school in St. Petersburg, and begun their performing careers in the Maryinsky Theater. Both were trained in the virtuosic skills of the time. Acclaimed as a prodigy from the first, Vaslav left the home company soon after graduation to join Serge Diaghilev, founder of what became the legendary Ballets Russes. Vaslav’s story—his relationship with Diaghilev, his meteoric stardom in the early ballets of Michel Fokine, his budding choreographic career fostered by the possessive Diaghilev, his expulsion from the company following his marriage to Romola de Pulzsky, and his long mental deterioration—has been told many times. It’s only a sideline in Lynn Garafola’s new book La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern.

more here.

Franz Kafka: The Drawings

George Prochnik at Literary Review:

Wispy, thick, swirled and streaking, the dark lines burst outward, racing or splintering. The strongest impression one is left with while paging through this exquisitely produced volume of Kafka’s complete drawings is of minimally delineated figures in states of maximally dramatised unrest.

In two of the early single-page sketches, the human subjects – one on foot, the other riding a horse – are reduced so entirely to curling and back-slanting flourishes that they resemble lines drawn to indicate wind or the displacement of air surrounding figures in motion rather than figures themselves. Even when Kafka’s subjects are depicted on chairs or penned within enclosures in positions ordinarily associated with stationary conditions, their poses are so dynamically strained as to inject the immobilised state with high kinetic tension. Here, movement and the repressed urge thereto appear as traces of a primal survival instinct. ‘Mount your attacker’s horse and ride it yourself,’ Kafka wrote in one frantic diary entry. ‘The only possibility. But what strength and skill that requires! And how late it is already!’

more here.

Notes on the Vibe Shift

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

Living as I do, mostly by choice, in a post-Babel cacophony of languages, I find I often discern meanings that are not really there. This is particularly easy to do in the contact zones of the former Angevin Empire, where more than a millennium’s worth of cross-hybridity between English and French has brought it about that this empire’s ruins are populated principally by faux amis, so that one must not so much learn new words, as reconceive words one already knows. Thus deception becomes disappointment, to assist is not to help but only to be present, to report is to postpone, to defend is to prohibit (sometimes), to verbalise is to fine, to sense is to smell, to mount is to get in, to descend is to get out, a location is a rental, ice-cream has a perfume instead of a flavor, and so on.

The gentle shift one has to make to reconcile all these false friends occurs not only at the lexical level, but also in morphology and phonology, and once it takes place one starts to discern the likenesses of outre-Manche cousins that previously remained hidden: thus Guillaume is the cousin of William, and gardien of warden, and guichet of wicket, and guerre of war.

More here.

Noam Chomsky and GPT-3

Gary Marcus in his Substack newsletter:

Every now and then engineers make an advance, and scientists and lay people begin to ponder the question of whether that advance might yield important insight into the human mind. Descartes wondered whether the mind might work on hydraulic principles; throughout the second half of the 20th century, many wondered whether the digital computer would offer a natural metaphor for the mind.

The latest hypothesis to attract notice, both within the scientific community, and in the world at large, is the notion that a technology that is popular today, known as large language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-3, might offer important insight into the mechanics of the human mind.  Enthusiasm for such models has grown rapidly; OpenAI’s Chief Science Officer Ilya Sutskever recently suggested that such systems could conceivably be “slightly conscious”. Others have begun to compare GPT with the human mind.

That GPT-3, an instance of a kind of technology known as a “neural network”, and powered by a technique known as deep learning, appears clever is beyond question – but aside from their possible merits as engineering tools, one can ask another question: are large language models a good model of human language?

More here.

When Jawaharlal Nehru read ‘Lolita’ to decide whether an ‘obscene’ book should be allowed in India

Shubhneet Kaushik at Scroll.in:

In May 1959, DF Karaka, the founder editor of The Current, wrote a letter to then Finance Minister Moraji Desai about a book. Karaka explained that the book glorified a sexual relationship between a grown man and a teenage girl. He included a clipping from The Current that demanded an immediate ban on the “obscene” book.

The book in question was Lolita, written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, and published in 1955.

A month earlier, on April 6, 1959, the collector of Customs in Bombay had detained a consignment that included imported copies of the novel belonging to Jaico Publishing House. The collector of Customs referred the matter to the police, the Ministry of Law as well as the Ministry of Finance.

More here.

Writing Is a Monstrous Act: A Conversation with Hernan Diaz

Rhian Sasseen talks to Hernan Diaz at The Paris Review:

There’s always something relevant in clichés. If you think about it, every literary genre is a collection of clichés and commonplaces. It’s a system of expectations. The way events unfold in a fairy tale would be unacceptable in a noir novel or a science fiction story. Causal links are, to a great extent, predictable in each one of these genres. They are supposed to be predictable—even in their surprises. This is how we come to accept the reality of these worlds. And it’s so much fun to subvert those assumptions and clichés rather than to simply dismiss them, writing with one’s back turned to tradition. I should also say that these conventions usually have a heavy political load. Whenever something has calcified into a commonplace—as is the case with New York around the years of the boom and the crash—I think there is fascinating work to be done. Additionally, when I looked at the fossilized narratives from that period, I was surprised to find a void at their center: money. Even though, for obvious reasons, money is at the core of the American literature from that period, it remains a taboo—largely unquestioned and unexplored. I was unable to find many novels that talked about wealth and power in ways that were interesting to me. Class? Sure. Exploitation? Absolutely. Money? Not so much. And how bizarre is it that even though money has an almost transcendental quality in our culture it remains comparatively invisible in our literature?

more here.

Arcades, Churches and Laundromats: A Trucker’s Haven

Jamie Lee Taete at the New York Times:

In the parking areas, the drivers nestle their trucks in tightly packed rows. Their cabs function as kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms and offices. At night, drivers can be seen through their windshields — eating dinner or reclining in their bunks, bathed in the light of a Nintendo Switch or FaceTime call home.

Small truck stops have just a few parking spots. By contrast, the Iowa 80 Truck stop, in Walcott, Iowa, bills itself as the largest truck stop in the world and has 900. Across the country, entire temporary cities form and disperse daily.

“Everybody has different stories,” Elaine Peralta said of the truckers that pass through her salon inside the TA Travel Center in Barstow, Calif. “There’s a lot of couples that are driving. There’s a lot of students driving. Young people are driving, and they do their school work, if they’re in college, on the truck. A lot of different ages.”

more here.

Two January 6th Defendants and the Consolidation of Right-Wing Extremism

Bernstein and Marritz in The New Yorker:

In March, Guy Reffitt, a supporter of the far-right militia group the Texas Three Percenters, became the first person convicted at trial for playing a role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. After three hours of deliberations, a federal jury found Reffitt guilty on all five counts, including entering a restricted area with a firearm and obstructing an official proceeding. After the verdict, Reffitt returned to the section of the District of Columbia jail where, for more than a year, the mostly white rioters have been held separately from the jail’s mostly Black and brown general population. The January 6th defendants call it the “patriot wing.” Each night, they sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” together.

Reffitt resumed his jailhouse pastime, playing Magic: The Gathering—a card game that involves wizards, spells, and strategy—with Jessica Watkins, a bartender and militia leader from rural Ohio who is awaiting trial on seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, and four other charges. Watkins has pleaded not guilty. Of the more than eight hundred people charged with participating in the insurrection at the Capitol, Reffitt and Watkins have been accused of some of the most significant crimes.

Since meeting in jail, they have become close friends. With other defendants, they helped start the tradition of singing the national anthem, Watkins said. She taught Reffitt how to play Magic using copies of cards that her fiancé had sent her. In a message sent on a jail-approved e-mail system, Watkins called the game “cardboard crack,” because it’s so addictive. “I tear the pictures in half neatly to make two magic cards, and I’ve taught my fellow inmates to play,” she wrote. Reffitt, in a message of his own, said that he loves Magic as well. “It’s a very intellectual game and keeping focus can be strained in this environment,” Reffitt wrote. “We tune out the loud noises when we can, the noise level is very stressing.”

More here.

The end of history is history

Sean Illing in Vox:

Francis Fukuyama is easily one of the most influential political thinkers of the last several decades.

He’s best known for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, which arrived on the scene as the Cold War was ending. Fukuyama’s central claim was that liberal democracy had won the war of ideas and established itself as the ideal political system. Not every society around the world was a liberal democracy. But what Fukuyama meant by declaring it “the end of history” was that it was only a matter of time. The claim made a big splash.

Now, 30 years later, Fukuyama’s written a new book called Liberalism and its Discontents. It’s both a defense of liberalism and a critique of it. It does a great job of cataloging the problems of liberalism, but also argues that liberalism is still the best option there is. Fukuyama writes about some very current challenges, like the American right’s move toward authoritarianism, and the resurgence of nationalism around the world. The upshot: It’s not clear that liberal democracy really is the end of history. I reached out to Fukuyama for a recent episode of Vox Conversations. We discuss the promise of liberalism, whether he thinks it’s failing, and if there’s anything he’d like to revise about his end of history thesis.

More here.

Tuesday Poem

Dawn

It was not the beginning
Nor the end
Taking this for that
We stumbled
And lost our way

Less free now
to go to our temples
Doors battered, broken, boarded
We stumbled
And lost our way

Regroup
Retreat
Advance anew

There is a dawn
Not this dawn
Nor that dawn
But a dawn

We’ll know
When the light falls
On all of us
All of us
ALL of us.
____________
subh-e aazaadii. Translations in Baran Farooqi, Khalid Hasan,
Shiv Kumar, Victor Kierman.

by Anjum Altaf
from More Transgressions,
Poems inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
LG Publishers Distributors, Delhi, 2021

‘On Love: Selected Writings’, by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Paul O’Mahoney at the Dublin Review of Books:

Nietzsche’s protest that one cannot cleave to a moral system originating in Christianity after denying the Christian God has implications far more profound than appear at first blush. Nietzsche could already see that purportedly secular doctrines in the ascendancy in his time, and which looked set to become orthodoxy – the sanctity and inherent dignity of human life, the fundamental equality of human lives – were in their origin and character inescapably Christian. It was an absurdity, he felt, that people should, at the moment of the “death of God”, cleave all the more fiercely to the doctrines which depended on Him; or to imagine that one could keep and could promote the gamut of Christian virtues – lovingkindness, humility, charity, counsels of gentleness or forgiveness – when the religious-metaphysical belief system underpinning them had been renounced. If one gives up the God, one ought also, or must also, for the sake of what Nietzsche called one’s intellectual conscience, give up the teachings of the religion. In this Nietzsche foresaw the coming orthodoxy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: secularised Christianity that calls itself by the names of humanism, egalitarianism, human rights, and which (quite unknowingly) preaches Christianity without Christ.

more here.

CAPTCHAs, Kant, and Culture

by Charlie Huenemann

“Thus the concept of a cause is nothing other than a synthesis (of that which follows in the temporal series with other appearances) in accordance with concepts; and without that sort of unity, which has its rule a priori, and which subjects the appearances to itself, thoroughgoing and universal, hence necessary unity of consciousness would not be encountered in the manifold perceptions. But these would then belong to no experience, and would consequently be without an object, and would be nothing but a blind play of representations, i.e., less than a dream.” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 112(A))

[IN OTHER WORDS: Without concepts, experience is unthinkably weird.]

Back in the 17th century, some philosophers tried to place all knowers on a level playing field. John Locke claimed the human mind begins like a blank tablet, devoid of any characters, and it is experience, raw and unfiltered, that gives the mind something to think about. Since everybody has experience, this would mean everybody could develop knowledge of the world, and no one would be inherently better at it than anybody else.

It’s a valuable idea, and in the neighborhood of a great truth, but not very plausible as a model of how we manufacture knowledge. Later philosophers argued that, if this is how we do it, then we really don’t know much. For example, David Hume could not see how anyone could ever develop the idea of causality: you can watch the events in a workshop all the livelong day, and though you might see patterns in what happens, you will never see the necessity that is supposed to connect a cause with an effect. (Philosophers writing about this stuff have a hard time avoiding italics.) 

But clearly we do end up with causal knowledge, as Hume himself never doubted, and we manage to navigate our ways through a steady world of enduring objects. We somehow end up with knowledge of an objective world. And we don’t remember that arriving at such knowledge was all that difficult. We just sort of grew into it, and now it seems so natural that it’s really hard to imagine not having it, and it’s even difficult not to find such knowledge perfectly obvious. But in fact it is anything but obvious (as Jochen Szangolies recently explored).  Read more »

New Zealand Is Trying to Kill Me

by Deanna K. Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog)

Kiwi idea of an easy hike

I am writing this essay during my ninth trip to New Zealand, a country that I love dearly and that is also trying to kill me. The first time I nearly died here was 21 years ago, and it’s been happening with a fair degree of regularity ever since. In 2001 my Kiwi spouse was required, by the terms of his student visa, to return home for two years, so we relocated to Aotearoa for what we thought would be a lengthy sojourn.[1] We arrived at his mum’s house in the middle of the North Island in the middle of the night and in the middle of the winter, emotionally battered, drained from 24 hours of plane travel, and with a crippling case of jet lag. For days my lovely mother-in-law took great and tender care of us, refusing to let us to go to sleep at 5:00 p.m. when our bodies were screaming for bed—unfortunately, she tried to keep us awake with episodes of “Monarch of the Glen” and “Coronation Street,” literally the two most soporific television programs ever devised by the mind of man. So many solicitous cups of tea! So many somnambulist games of Scrabble! So many furzy Scottish landscapes melting drowsily into cobblestoned Mancunian streets![2] Her ministrations were kindly meant, if largely inefficacious.

But that is not how I almost died. Just a couple of days into our sleep-deprivation program, my sister-in-law M. decided it would be an excellent idea to take us caving. Clearly my brain was not working properly from lack of rest, so I agreed to this plan and a day later we all piled into her car for the first, and not least hazardous, part of the expedition: the trip from the Bay of Plenty to Waitomo, which was my first experience of cross-country travel in my newly adopted homeland. For Americans used to interstate highway travel, the process of getting from Point A to Point B in New Zealand by car can seem daunting and even surreal. Read more »

Monday Poem

“This guided Theseus thro’ the Maze;
And sent Him home with Life . . . “
………………… —Matthew Prior

Love is a Cord, a Chord, Accord

a boy at his labyrinth’s door
grasped the end of the string of a spool
proffered in the hands of a woman
who knew that once within, if
without tether, if no more than
a floating mote, if bound to nothing,
disoriented, he would, at each
critical turn, run the risk
of being zero or fool

once you step in, she sang,

and a chorus swelled behind
and a drummer struck a chime
and a cornet blew a mind
and an artist drew a line
and a poet spoke divine:

do not release this thread, she sang,
even as you reach the core

it’s the one way true,
your only means to find again
this door

Jim Culleny
6/2/22

Rudolf Rocker for the ages: His life and times

by David J. Lobina

It was no accident that it was an immigrant who revived the debate. While Marxist thought provided (…) a lens through which to observe the nation from the outside, the experience of living as an “alien” (…) proved an almost indispensable condition for (…) more advanced tools of observation.

—Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People.

One Rudolf Rocker

Who he? Exactly.

An “anarchist rabbi” nowadays mostly known for a book on Anarcho-Syndicalism as well as for his involvement with the Jewish anarchist movement in East London at the turn of the 20th century, the life and work of the German thinker Rudolf Rocker has much to teach us in these most modern of times, if only we were to read him more often. Of particular interest to me is his magnum opus, Nationalism and Culture, a work now basically forgotten but which was regarded as a genuine contribution to the study of nationalism (and other topics) when it was published in 1937 by people as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and Herbert Read. The book, and Rocker himself, are now due a revisit.[i]

The first thing one notes when approaching Nationalism and Culture is its impressive combination of breadth and depth. The book covers multiple time periods, thinkers, and artistic developments, and in doing so Rocker chronicles how the state and the nationalist worldview have combined to shape the contemporary world, influencing life and manners, thought and culture, and much else – and for this alone it should be more widely known.[ii]

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As is often the case, Rocker’s outlook was partly a product of the times he lived, so let’s start with that first and I will come back to the book next month. Read more »

Against the Erasure of Dissent

A Conversation between Andrea Scrima and Anike Joyce Sadiq

“Against the Erasure of Dissent,” part of the exhibition “Mit Glück hat es nichts zu tun” (It has nothing to do with luck), Anike Joyce Sadiq at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany (2022). Photo: Andrea Scrima

The following conversation took place from November 2021 to February 2022 via e-mail in reaction to a general meeting of the Villa Romana Association that took place on October 28, 2021 in Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. The authors participated in this meeting in their function as members, having been actively involved for two years in a group of artists that had formed in response to a new funding situation. When there was no longer any way to prevent a simultaneous changeover in directors, the group sought to at least preserve the Villa Romana as a place created by artists for artists and to ensure that the general direction of the program established under Angelika Stepken be continued.

The Villa Romana was founded in 1905 as a German art association in Florence. In addition to an exhibition program and numerous collaborations with artists as well as with art and cultural institutions both local and international, the Villa Romana Prize is awarded each year to four artists or collectives from Germany in the form of a ten-month residency and grant.

This conversation attempts, from the authors’ perspective, to reconstruct, contextualize, and archive the discussions that occurred between artist members and the board and the course these took over time. It poses questions about membership and the extent of agency it allows, and inquires into the role artists play in shaping institutional structures. Financial and political dependencies, the seeming openness of a diversity-based policy toward art and culture, and the (re)distribution of the real and symbolic capital that becomes legitimized by a non-profit status are subjects of investigation. Read more »

Boilerplate Thoughts and Prayers: The Aftermath of Uvalde

by Mark Harvey

I’m not a schoolteacher so I don’t know the exact routine that teachers have every morning before they leave their house, but I’m certain it shouldn’t involve checking the magazine of a 9mm Glock and perhaps even chambering a round before their commute to school. I have known several teachers and in general, they are idealistic, hard-working, and underpaid. The challenges of teaching 30 hyper 10-year-olds how to write a clear sentence or conquer fractions has to be consuming enough without also having a counter-assault plan in the back of your mind.

The ideal of school as a safe, wholesome place for learning has been part of American culture since the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock. Obviously that ideal isn’t always achieved and failures in our educational systems abound. But the notion of arming teachers—a notion that always comes up after mass killings in schools—suggests a societal failure at nearly every level. Teachers should be armed with things like chalk, markers, and pencil sharpeners, not 9mm pistols. And there was a time when our society was safe enough for schools to be open, breezy places, not “soft targets” that needed to be “hardened.”

What has to have been the worst day of their lives for the surviving children, teachers, and parents of Cobb School in Uvalde, Texas, is, I’m sorry to say, so routine in American life that one can predict the ensuing national dialogue, almost word for word, without any effort. It’s predictable, repetitive, and only punctuates the short spans between mass shootings. And it isn’t doing any good. Read more »

Poetry in Translation

Two Versions after Iqbal

Withered Rose

With what words shall I call you
desire of the nightingale’s heart?

In a Country of Roses
you were named Laughing Rose,

the morning breeze was your cradle,
a garden a tray of perfumes.

My tears rain like dew
and in my barren heart your ruin

is an emblem of mine.
A reed plucked from its native soil

I sing sweet songs of souls in exile.
My life is a dream of roses

Bright Rose

You cannot loosen the heart’s knot,
perhaps you have no heart,

no share in the turmoil
of this garden, where I yearn

but gather no roses.
Of what use to me is wisdom?

Once out of the garden,
you are at peace.

I am anxious,
scorched as I search.

Even *Jamshid’s empty cup
foretold the future: may wine

always satisfy my mouth
that open circle in the mirror.

***

* The mythical Persian king Jamshid saw the reflection of all events in a wine cup.

By Rafiq Kathwari