Brian Stewart in Quillette:

Barely four decades into its existence, the Islamic republic is confronted by another eruption of public rage, this time brought about by the nation’s women, that may yet end in revolutionary change. A majority of Iranians now groaning under this austere order have no recollection of the revolution that produced it, and reject its central justification—an Islamic concept known as velayat-e faqih, or “guardianship of the jurist.” Originally conceived as a license for the clergy to assume responsibility for orphans and the infirm, the late Ayatollah Khomeini amended it to encompass the whole of society. By these means were his unfortunate subjects relegated to the status of state property.

More here.

David Goldblatt in the London Review of Books:

Today more than 2.3 million people live in Doha, while Qatar as a whole has a population of 2.9 million, just 300,000 of whom are Qatari citizens. The rest are migrant workers, only a small proportion of whom – Arabic Levantine and Indian families that arrived a generation or two back – have residence rights. Everyone else is there on a temporary work visa: professionals from the Global North; Filipinos, who make up a large proportion of Qatar’s domestic workers and cleaners; Africans, many of whom work as taxi drivers or security guards; and almost a million men from South Asia, Nepal and Bhutan who have toiled to build the new city. This racialised hierarchy, as John McManus argues in his anthropological account of Qatar, is a modern version of the British Empire’s ethnic division of labour.

More here.

Skye Thomas in The White Review:

In the three-minute short MANGOES (1999) by Berlin-based Pakistani artist Bani Abidi, two women sit next to each other on a white table, each with a mango on a plate in front of them. Both women are played by Abidi. One character has her hair up in a bun, the other loose and flowing down her shoulders. One is Indian, the other Pakistani, both members of the diaspora of an unspecified country. They slice and pull open their respective mangoes, sucking the flesh clean off the skin. The fruit is an oblique symbol of their melancholy and wistful nationalism. As they eat, they speak about the mango-eating traditions of both nation states, but the conversation soon grows strained as they compete over which has more varieties of mango. It’s an arbitrary, quasi-comic tension, but perfectly representative of the sentiments of animosity and hostility that have ruled Indian and Pakistani relations for over seven decades since the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Much of Indian/Pakistani difference is mediated and maintained by trivial, and often untrue, distinctions. But it is the myth of this difference that reinforces the border and fuels its continuing clashes. Abidi uses the mango to disturb the border relation: while the Indo-Pak border is a physical site of military presence, surveillance and catastrophe, it is also something a bit more intangible, something conjured and retained in the imagination of those that inhabit it.

Abidi is interested in the ways that we – more specifically, those of us from previously colonised countries with violent histories – internalise the grand rhetorics of nationalism.

More here.

Joanna Cresswell in Lensculture:

The Blindest Man follows the story of the elusive Chouette d’Or (or ‘golden owl’)—a golden sculpture buried somewhere in France in 1993 by an author working under the pseudonym of Max Valentin. The same year, Valentin—whose real name was later revealed to be Régis Hauser—released an accompanying book entitled On The Trail of the Golden Owl, which included 11 cryptic clues as to the statuette’s exact location. It became something of a phenomenon in France back then, and almost 30 years later, many people continue to search for it. To this day, however, it remains unfound, and the author has long since passed. Made in France between 2015 and 2018, the pictures in The Blindest Man introduce us to a number of different people on the hunt for the golden owl, following along on their failed routes. These people are referred to as ‘the searchers’.

Each of the 11 clues in Valentin’s On The Trail of the Golden Owl consists of a riddle and a painting, and these two components are heavy with symbolism. The paintings of long grasses, cockerels and keys are simple and bold, while the accompanying words speak of phantom images we have to conjure for ourselves: a spiral with four centers, the arrow of Apollo, an opening that reveals a heavenly light. In turn, similar symbols are woven throughout Graham’s photobook—a spiral staircase leading nowhere, for instance, or a single peacock lingering on a hillside.

More here.

A Game of Chess

In Washington Square Park, astonishing late October
turns a yellow leaf as airily as spring.
Everything slices up the light—the office towers,
the bough above a woman cutting a man’s hair

by the finished roses. Water blazes from the fountain
and bible quotes done in chalk are dust beneath
the feet of the fiddler playing bluegrass for a few coins.
It is so very hard to get close to anything.

Over where the public chess tables
stand in latticed shade, their concentration
makes the players seem all of a piece,
and the heart wants to sleep. But even here
a small upheaval . . .

A black man, serious and soft, and a white boy
maybe ten years old, pressed into his sharp collared shirt,
engage in the abstract and the real.

Here, I am given the space to see
the boy let go his queen
too soon, the look on his face.

The man takes the queen away
and the empty square is an immensity
the boy cannot move

then the man succeeds in taking us all in
when he puts her back contrariwise,
leans and smiles—Don’t you be doing that again.

And a boy grows in the light, and a man loses
because he loves. And all the season does
is throw down leaves and divvy up the sun
above the chessmen on their chequered field.

by Cally Conan-Davies
from the Hudson Review

Bad Patriot Poem

sun bears are the smallest bear species
the 2nd smallest bear species is
not the moon bear although they are
relatively small when compared
to other bears such as polar bears
if left alone most dog breeds would
die off and the ones remaining would
adapt through natural selection
to survive in the wild like wolves
the new variety of poodle will be
smaller but also have warmer legs
because humans will be gone
and their fur will not be shaved
for aesthetic reasons

this morning i woke up in iowa city
in seoul my brothers who i may
or may not have are getting ready
for bed no one here looks like
me everyone looks at me hi
hello i say i’m trying my best
to be american no one here thinks
i can be an american

by Sean Cho A.
from The Rumpus Magazine

Jake Mearns at the LARB:

THERE IS NO other novel quite like Michael Fessier’s 1935 genre-bending Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind. At first glance, the San Francisco–set tale is classic noir, narrated in the steely patter of Depression-era hard-boiled crime fiction. An average Joe, John Price, happens upon a murder in the street; he then becomes unwillingly entangled in the perpetrator’s subsequent killings; and finally, he must prove his innocence when the police try to railroad Price for the other’s crimes. But what elevates Fully Dressed into a class all its own is how Fessier incorporates fantastical characters and events that are alien to noir. The incongruity between the novel’s deadpan, tough-guy prose and its wildly surreal content makes Fully Dressed and in His Right Mind a haunting novel that’s impossible to put down.

more here.

Haruki Murakami at the New York Times:

What books would you recommend to somebody who wants to understand present-day Japan?

The same trend is found almost everywhere, I think, but in Japan, too, women writers — especially those of the younger generation — are quite active in publishing novels and are gaining a large, receptive readership. Personally, I like Mieko Kawakami’s novel “Natsu Monogatari” (“Summer Tales”). She has such sensitivity as a writer and is a deeply committed storyteller. This novel was translated and published in English in 2020 under the title “Breasts and Eggs.”

What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?

It’s an interesting question, but I’ve never really thought about it. Writing a lengthy novel is a job that takes time and patience over the long haul, and it’d be kind of disruptive if I had to give up reading the books I want to read while I’m writing.

more here.

Howard LaFranchi in The Christian Science Monitor:

Just how anti-American is Pakistan?

Judging by the outpouring of domestic political support that former Prime Minister Imran Khan received when he claimed the United States was in on the assassination attempt against him this month, quite a lot. Go back to 2018, when the Trump-like populist Mr. Khan swept into power by shrewdly tapping into a deep vein of anti-American sentiments over the war on terror, and the antagonism seems confirmed. Top it off with widespread support for Mr. Khan’s further claim that it was U.S.-engineered “regime change” that caused his ouster from power in April of this year. It would all seem to add up to a deep well of anti-Americanism.

But hold on.

The hugely popular Mr. Khan appeared to switch gears this week when he told foreign journalists that he is ready to work with the U.S. – and even more surprisingly, that he no longer blames the U.S. for his removal from power in a vote of no confidence.

More here.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

Timothy Noah in The New Republic:

Tycoons are susceptible to the misconception that if you know how to make billions you know how to spend them. Sam Bankman-Fried, the “unkempt millennial” (The Wall Street Journal) and founder of the cryptocurrency firm FTX, demonstrated that he knew how to make a fortune that peaked at $26.5 billion. Then he demonstrated that he also knew how to lose it, under circumstances that are now under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department. But what caught my eye was Bankman-Fried’s aspiration to use his billions to save the world through a modish variety of philanthropy especially popular right now among millennial and Gen Z cybernerds called effective altruism.

Effective altruism, or E.A., is a movement created 10 years ago by William MacAskill, a 35-year-old associate professor of philosophy at Oxford. E.A. tries to distinguish itself from routine philanthropy by applying utilitarian reasoning with academic rigor and a youthful sense of urgency.

More here.

J. Hoberman at Artforum:

A ROMANIAN FILMMAKER who regularly deflates Romanian myths of national greatness, Radu Jude recently graced the New York Film Festival with a compact, farcical essay on the material basis of historical memory, or, to use Trotsky’s term, “the dustbin of history.”

The Potemkinists takes the form of a conversation between a would-be public artist and a prospective state patron. Those familiar with Jude’s tricksy, appalling account of a staged historical pageant, I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians (2018), will recall considerable screen time devoted to a similar debate. Indeed, Alexandru Dabija, the affably sly ministry official in I Do Not Care, appears here in the guise of a garrulous sculptor selling a proposal to rehabilitate a glorious moment from Romania’s past. His possible benefactor is a generally unimpressed cultural bureaucrat (Cristina Drăghici, who delivered an inspired rant as a shopper in Jude’s 2021 Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn).

more here.

Rachel Cooke at The New Statesman:

The creation of Steven Knight of Peaky Blinders fame, it shares with that series a fondness for mythologising and aphoristic dialogue. Set in the Egyptian desert in 1941 as the British army struggles to defend besieged Tobruk from the Germans, its tone is midway between the war comics my brother used to read as a boy (he favoured Battle) and a Duran Duran video – and I mean this as a compliment.

If it’s both silly and cynical, it’s also affectionate, sending up the war in much the same spirit as, say, Noël Coward once did (his “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” is on the soundtrack, along with a ton of heavy rock and a bit of George Formby). Most of the time, it’s self-consciously edgy: foul language, bad behaviour, bodies piled like bags of pasta. But at other moments, it’s almost old-fashioned. All these men in khaki, smoking their pipes! If Kenneth More or Richard Attenborough suddenly appeared, you’d hardly be surprised. (Instead, we get Dominic West, as a character called Lt Col Wrangel Clarke, in full make-up, for reasons as yet unexplained.)

more here.

John O’Rourke in BU Today:

It is hard to imagine anyone who has done more to champion poetry than Robert Pinsky. The author of 10 collections of poems—including the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996—Pinsky has edited anthologies, written more than a half-dozen prose books about poetry, and translated Dante’s Inferno and the poems of Czesław Miłosz. As director of BU’s Creative Writing Program, he has helped launch the careers of many of the country’s most accomplished young contemporary poets.

But Pinsky, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and College of Arts & Sciences professor of English and of creative writing, exerted perhaps the greatest influence as US poet laureate. During his three terms (1997-2000), he launched the Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans of all ages and walks of life to share the poems that matter most to them. More than 18,000 answered the initial open call for submissions, resulting in dozens of videos of people reading beloved poems. Those films are available for viewing in a recently completed digital database, housed at Boston University. Pinsky became a de facto ambassador for poetry, appearing on shows as varied as The PBS NewsHour, The Stephen Colbert Show, and The Simpsons.

More here.