Veena Gokhale in The Wire:

Anita Desai, three time Booker Prize nominee, winner of several prestigious awards and with more than 17 books to her credit, was awarded the International Literary Grand Prize at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal, on April 29. The 10,000-Canadian dollar prize is awarded each year – since 2000 – to a world-renowned author in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement. Former winners include Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt and Amitava Ghosh. Desai, known for books like Baumgartner’s Bombay, Clear Light of Day and In Custody, spoke to The Wire in Montreal.

You have been awarded the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prize. You received the Benson Medal in 2003 and the Padma Bhushan in 2014. Do awards matter, or are they incidental to the writing?

This particular award tells me I have crossed a border and am now of an age where I can be given certain awards! (Smiles). Awards are certainly incidental. They are unexpected; they are not something you work towards, no.

What do you think is the purpose of literature? The worth of literature is being questioned these days, certainly here in Canada.

One works on two levels. At the subconscious level one is not working with an agenda, one is working out of a compulsion to tell your story, to put words on paper, to keep something from disappearing. And the joy of using language ought not to be forgotten.

On a conscious level, after you’ve written your work, sometimes it takes you by surprise. You say, oh, is that what it was about? At the end of the book you say, so that’s why it stayed in your mind for so long. What’s the reason for writing it? And invariably the reason is to tell the truth, in a somewhat sideways, somewhat subversive way. You don’t always manage to do that openly, face-to-face, you have to find a kind of a secret way.

More here.

Matthew Parkinson-Bennett at the Dublin Review of Books:

Yet the fixation on transcending traditional human existence may have something to do with a failure to appreciate the richness and fullness of lived life. Kurzweil endorses a pathetically inadequate idea of gathering data on a person’s life – photographs, biographical detail, social media activity – with which to reconstruct their personality after death. How hellish an experience would that be, condemned to live forever only what portion of life could be skimmed off the surface and recorded as data? As O’Connell puts it, “Kurzweil’s vision of the future might be an attractive one if you already accept the mechanistic view of the human being.” It’s a vision which leaves little room for the “rich inner life” prized by David Chalmers, originator of the hugely influential “hard problem of consciousness”. With the hard problem, Chalmers throws a spanner in the works of the “mechanistic view of the human being” by showing that it cannot account for the qualitative dimension of subjective conscious experience – “the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C”.

This deep incomprehension extends of course to the political. When asked whether there isn’t a risk that only the wealthiest will have access to the benefits of transhumanist technology, one prominent advocate replies: “Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.” Is that the sort of person who will control the hardware on which our minds are to live in eternal simulation?

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Sarah Nicole Prickett at Bookforum:

The West in South and West is an old destination for anyone who's read any Didion. She never wrote the piece on the South, or any piece on the South, yet though she did not write the piece she was assigned on the trial of Patty Hearst, she did eventually write an essay about her, collected in After Henry, and a somewhat personal history of California, calledWhere I Was From. We know she pays attention to snakes and likes gold silk organza. We have been told so often that she no longer has fixed ideas that it's anticlimactic to see how long-ago and odd these fixed ideas are, for instance an idea held by her middle school classmates: "We find Joan Didion as a White House resident / Now being the first woman president." Remembering only the "failures and slights and refusals"of her teenage years, she allows that, in fact, she was always an editor or a president, a member of all the right clubs, a recipient of more prizes and scholarships than her "generally undistinguished academic record" would seem to permit. (She adds proudly and a bit contradictorily, "merit scholarships only: I did not qualify for need.") She believed that she "would always go to teas," because she had not yet seen the termites in the teacups.

There are, as I learned at age twenty from Women in Love, "three cures for ennui: sleep, drink, and travel." By her own account and by the accounts of some who knew her in Los Angeles, Didion drank enough and took enough pills that I would believe she went to rehab when she said, in The White Album, that she had gone to a psych ward. (Dunne said the speed and the benzos as well as the barbiturates were prescribed for migraines, never mind the contraindication, and who knows, but I do think temporary insanity would have seemed less embarrassing to Didion, more appropriate to the period, than dipsomania.

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Nicholas Spice at the London Review of Books:

De Quincey’s size mattered to him. He was uncommonly small. But he was also uncommonly clever, and his ambitions were large. As a young man, he idolised Wordsworth and Coleridge, and then sought them out and tried to make them his friends. For a while they all got on, but then increasingly they didn’t. Wordsworth was in the habit of condescending to De Quincey, but Wordsworth condescended to most people and anyway condescending to De Quincey was hard to resist: ‘He is a remarkable and very interesting young man,’ Dorothy Wordsworth wrote, ‘very diminutive in person, which, to strangers, makes him appear insignificant; and so modest, and so very shy.’ ‘Little Mr De Quincey is at Grasmere … I wish he were not so little, and I wish he wouldn’t leave his greatcoat always behind him on the road. But he is a very able man, with a head brimful of information,’ Southey wrote. As relations soured, the belittlements grew sardonic: for Wordsworth, De Quincey was ‘a little friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’

Robert D. Atkinson and John Wu over at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation:

It has recently become an article of faith that workers in advanced industrial nations are experiencing almost unprecedented levels of labor-market disruption and insecurity. From taxi drivers being displaced by Uber, to lawyers losing their jobs to artificial intelligence-enabled legal-document review, to robotic automation putting blue-collar manufacturing workers on unemployment, popular opinion is that technology is driving a relentless pace of Schumpeterian “creative destruction,” and we are consequently witnessing an unprecedented level of labor market “churn.” One Silicon Valley gadfly now even predicts that technology will eliminate 80 to 90 percent of U.S. jobs in the next 10 to 15 years.

As the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has documented, such grim assessments are the products of faulty logic and erroneous empirical analysis, making them simply irrelevant to the current policy debate. (See: “Robots, Automation, and Jobs: A Primer for Policymakers.”) For example, pessimists often assume that robots can do most jobs, when in fact they can’t, or that once a job is lost there are no second-order job-creating effects from increased productivity and spending. But the pessimists’ grim assessments also suffer from being ahistorical. When we actually examine the last 165 years of American history, statistics show that the U.S. labor market is not experiencing particularly high levels of job churn (defined as new occupations being created while older occupations are destroyed). In fact, it’s the exact opposite: Levels of occupational churn in the United States—defined as the rates at which some occupations expand while others contract—are now at historic lows. The levels of churn in the last 20 years—a period of the dot-com crash, the financial crisis of 2007 to 2008, the subsequent Great Recession, and the emergence of new technologies that are purported to be more powerfully disruptive than anything in the past—have been just 38 percent of the levels from 1950 to 2000, and 42 percent of the levels from 1850 to 2000.

Other than being of historical interest, why does this matter? Because if opinion leaders continue to argue that we are in unchartered economic territory and warn that just about anyone’s occupation can be thrown on the scrap heap of history, then the public is likely to sour on technological progress, and society will become overly risk averse, seeking tranquility over churn, the status quo over further innovation.

More here. The full report can be found here.

Robert Johnson and Arjun Jayadev over at INET Economics:

What happens to racial prejudice during economic downturns? This paper analyzes white attitudes towards African Americans in the United States at different points in a business cycle from 1979- 2014. Using a number of indicators of hostility towards African Americans available from the General Social Survey we develop an indicator of racial prejudice. We combine this with data on unemployment from the Current Population Survey and find robust evidence that racial hostility as measured by our indicator of prejudice is counter cyclical and rises during periods of higher unemployment for whites. Specifically a one standard deviation in the unemployment rate being experienced by whites is associated with a .03 to.05 standard deviation increase in the discrimination index. This is of a magnitude comparable with one year less of education. We undertake a quantile regression to show that this effect is widespread across the distribution of prejudice and that apart from those with initially low levels of prejudice, increasing own group unemployment results in statistically significant increases of similar magnitude in prejudice across that distribution. Finally, we show that discrimination is robustly positive correlated with measures of life dissatisfaction, further underscoring the significance of periods of distress in generating racial hostility.

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Owen Hulatt in Aeon:

Hegel was, in many ways, the father of what we now call the history of art. He gave one of the earliest and most ambitious accounts of art’s development, and its importance in shaping and reflecting our common culture. He traced its beginnings in the ‘symbolic art’ of early cultures and their religious art, admired the clarity and unity of the ‘classical’ art of Greece, and followed its development through to modern, ‘romantic’ art, best typified, he claimed, in poetry. Art had not just gone through a series of random changes: in his view, it had developed. Art was one of the many ways in which humanity was improving its understanding of its own freedom, and improving its understanding of its relationship to the world. But this was not all good news. Art had gone as far as it could go and stalled; it could, according to Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1835), progress no further:

the conditions of our present time are not favourable to art […] art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.

In 1835, Hegel claimed that art had ended. Almost exactly 10 years later, the German composer Richard Wagner premiered Tannhäuser in Dresden, the first of his great operas; the beginning in earnest of a career that would change musical composition forever. Less than a century after Hegel’s claim, the visual arts saw the onset of Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and Fauvism, among other movements, and literature, poetry and architecture were deeply changed by Modernism.

In 1964, Danto attended an exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York. He came across Andy Warhol’s artwork Brillo Boxes (1964) – a visually unassuming, highly realistic collection of plywood replicas of the cardboard boxes in which Brillo cleaning products were shipped. Danto left the exhibition dumbstruck. Art, he was convinced, had ended. One could not tell the artworks apart from the real shipping containers they were aping. One required something else, something outside the artwork itself, to explain why Warhol’s Brillo Boxes were art, and Brillo boxes in the dry goods store were not. Art’s progress was over, Danto felt; and the reign of art theory had begun.

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Junot Diaz and Samuel Delany in Boston Review:

JD: People have called you a sex radical. What do you suppose they mean? What does it mean to you? Does it come with any political commitments?

SD: Intellectual radicals, rather than actual radicals, are people who say things where they are not usually said. And, yes, all true radicalism has to begin in the body—so being a sex radical means you have to be ready to act radically and be willing to speak about it in places you ordinarily wouldn’t—such as an interview about an activity you might otherwise confine to a journal. That’s how I started—and the world got started around me, as it were, when my mother found my secret writings, took them to my therapist, and they ended up in an article: Kenneth Clarke, who was the head of the Northside Center where I was going for child therapy, quoted them in an article in Harper's and again in his book, Prejudice and Your Child (1955), and I found myself published because of it. My first professional sale, as it were. I got a lot of attention for it, too. It is the source of most of my “radicalism.”

JD: You once said that “there were far more opportunities for sex among men before Stonewall than since.” Let’s expand that a little to the larger question of what generational differences among gay men strike you as most significant?

SD: You have to remember there’s always what’s said and then there’s what happens. And there’s always a discrepancy between them. Human beings are definitely tribal, as much as wolves and apes are. And the fact that only one sex carries the young to term immediately starts the separation into cultures. Do you want it in public, in private, or in a special space that’s socially marked out? Do you want pictures or reproductions (and if so, what sort) of those public or private or socially marked out space? That’s finally what my book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) was about.

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Zaheer Kazmi in 3:AM Magazine:

One night in my early teens, my father pulled into the road where we lived in the Lozells district of Birmingham. We had just returned from a family visit to a relative’s house on the other side of town. A few yards from home, we were met by a wall of police officers with helmets and shields blocking the street and told to exit our vehicle. Unknown to us – in a time before the internet, mobile phones, and 24-hour news – riots had suddenly broken out earlier in the evening and our home was near the epicentre of the disturbances. An officer escorted us to our door telling us to keep it bolted and not to venture out. As we awoke the next morning to the detritus of a night’s violence strewn along the streets, politicians and TV cameras at our doorstep, we also learned that two brothers had been killed in a blaze in the local post office. It was 1985, and the scale of the riot had eclipsed even the previous one there only four years earlier.

In her semi-autobiographical debut novel, The Handsworth Times, Sharon Duggal takes the reader back to the scene of the original riots of 1981 at a time when she too was a resident of Handsworth, of which Lozells is a sub-district. The ‘Handsworth Riots’ of 1981 were a seminal part of the first wave of so-called ‘race riots’ that rocked England’s inner-cities, from Liverpool to London, that Summer. They were to erupt again with even fuller force at the height of Thatcherism in 1985 culminating in the murder of police officer Keith Blakelock on the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham and the deaths of the post office brothers in Birmingham.

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In the Economist:

A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now similar concerns are being raised by the giants that deal in data, the oil of the digital era. These titans—Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft—look unstoppable. They are the five most valuable listed firms in the world. Their profits are surging: they collectively racked up over $25bn in net profit in the first quarter of 2017. Amazon captures half of all dollars spent online in America. Google and Facebook accounted for almost all the revenue growth in digital advertising in America last year.

Such dominance has prompted calls for the tech giants to be broken up, as Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. This newspaper has argued against such drastic action in the past. Size alone is not a crime. The giants’ success has benefited consumers. Few want to live without Google’s search engine, Amazon’s one-day delivery or Facebook’s newsfeed. Nor do these firms raise the alarm when standard antitrust tests are applied. Far from gouging consumers, many of their services are free (users pay, in effect, by handing over yet more data). Take account of offline rivals, and their market shares look less worrying. And the emergence of upstarts like Snapchat suggests that new entrants can still make waves.

But there is cause for concern. Internet companies’ control of data gives them enormous power. Old ways of thinking about competition, devised in the era of oil, look outdated in what has come to be called the “data economy” (see Briefing). A new approach is needed.

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Claude S. Fischer in Boston Review:

Many explanations for growing inequality are on the table. Technical and structural changes, such as computerization and globalization, have strengthened the market position of educated specialists while undermining that of uneducated workers. Business rearrangements, including the growing role of finance in the economy and of “shareholder value” in corporate affairs, enrich managers and asset-holders more than workers. Social trends, such as the increasing delay of marriage, more children raised by single parents, women’s entry into the professions, and growing marital “homogamy”—high earners marrying high earners—have also widened the economic gap between top and bottom.

Almost all the possible causes of growing inequality are, however, conditioned by policy. Inequality trends vary substantially among Western nations. Inequality has surged in the United States and a few other English-speaking countries since 1970, while other countries, such as Australia and France, have experienced only mild or even negligible increases in inequality. Even within the United States, states vary in the pace of increasing inequality, variation that seems connected to state policy. Economist Thomas Piketty, whose work has been interpreted as suggesting that rising inequality is inevitable, demurs: “The history of the distribution of wealth has always been deeply political. . . . It is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result.”

As British economist Tony Atkinson wrote in his last book, Inequality (2015), even the most seemingly technical or market forces are guided by government actions. For Atkinson the rise in inequality has been the joint result of market forces driving inequality (such as global trade) and weakening state action against such forces. Policy can affect earnings through, for example, rules for wages, corporate governance, and labor bargaining. The weakening of organized labor has been the key force, Atkinson argues, for worsening income inequality in the United States and the UK. And policy of course affects any post-market adjustments through taxes, subsidies, health provision, and so on. Policy even shapes social trends such as delayed marriage through provisions for housing and child care, equal rights laws, and the like.

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Edward W Said London Lecture 2017 – Mahmood Mamdani: Justice Not Revenge – Examining the Concept of Revolutionary Justice from The Mosaic Rooms on Vimeo.

Mark Haber at The Quarterly Conversation:

Somehow, South Korean author Bae Suah weaves the strangest and most human narratives from the events of our lives. In her two recent titles, A Greater Music and Recitation, she finds the mysterious border where life and dreams, travel and place, the past and future merge.

Readers that rely on plot will find themselves on unpredictable ground. Bae Suah is a circular writer, and a circle, as we know, has no end. Recitation, especially, whose protagonist is a wandering actress, whose stories and memories become the stories and dreams of other characters, seems akin to gazing at a beautiful painting without a point of focus. Perhaps this is the point; where does one draw a map of life? Or art? Where do these things start and end? Are they supposed to start and end? García Márquez insisted that intuition was fundamental to writing fiction; Bae Suah seems to support this belief, demonstrating how this conviction shapes their work. As the characters in both these books wander through their lives, their pasts, and their memories, so too does the reader.

The main character of Recitation, Kyung-hee, is stateless, traveling across Europe and Asia, between Vienna and Seoul and several other cities, staying at stranger’s homes or hostels. As she tells her stories to different hosts and old friends, her listeners interject, often with their own stories, and soon the contrast between plot and story is evident; plot is altogether absent, but Recitation is replete with stories, awash with characters eager to disclose their theories on life and travel, destiny and family.

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Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

Again and again, the 19th-century European novel returns to its favorite theme: lost illusions. Balzac’s fiction regularly tracks the corruption of visionaries and idealists; “War and Peace” ends with its surviving characters abandoning the romantic dreams of youth to embrace a complacent, bourgeois middle age; those famously restless wives — Emma Bovary, Effi Briest and Anna Karenina, among many others — learn that adultery can be at least as disappointing as marriage.

In some ways, disillusionment might be viewed as simply another name for maturity. That’s certainly among the underlying meanings of “The Same Old Story ,” Stephen Pearl’s English title for his new translation of Ivan Goncharov’s tragicomic first novel. But there are other, more jaded implications, too, mainly concerning love.

Because 19th-century Russia abounds in stupendous literary figures, Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891) can be easily overlooked, though his masterpiece, “Oblomov ,” should sound vaguely familiar, if only because it is sometimes described as the story of a guy who doesn’t want to get out of bed.

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Joe Klein at the New York Times:

Patrick J. Buchanan is a merry troglodyte, a naughty provocateur. He still calls homosexuality “sodomy,” just to get the goat of a community he will only reluctantly call “gay.” He writes that he wanted to be named ambassador to South Africa by President Ford so he could support the apartheid government. He thinks public television is “an upholstered playpen” for liberals. He considers “The New York Times” an epithet. His stump appearances in his outlaw 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns were a guilty pleasure for the reporters who followed him, a hilariously clever, and prescient, exhibition of right-wing populism. “Buchanan,” Richard Nixon once told him, “you’re the only extremist I know with a sense of humor.”

And it is Buchanan, not Nixon, who emerges as the central — and most intriguing — character in “Nixon’s White House Wars,” an entertaining memoir of that benighted presidency. Buchanan’s Nixon is a familiar figure: distant, awkward, smart, defensive and damaged, caring a bit too much what the Establishment — a word Buchanan uses frequently — thinks of him. The not-so-tricky president is a policy moderate; he has surrounded himself with brilliant, if mainstream, experts like Henry Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. There is also a retinue of traditional moderate Republican aides like Ray Price and Leonard Garment, and technocrats like H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Buchanan, the house wing nut, finds all this moderation frustrating; he began as a peripheral figure in the Nixon White House, a political gunslinger perhaps a bit too hot for the high-rent nuances of governance.

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