by Brooks Riley
Category: Monday Magazine
Though we are an aggregator blog (providing links to content elsewhere) on all other days, on Mondays we have only original writing by our editors and guest columnists. Each of us writes on any subject we wish, and the length of articles generally varies between 1000 and 2500 words. Our writers are free to express their own opinions and we do not censor them in any way. Sometimes we agree with them and sometimes we don’t.Below you will find links to all our past Monday columns, in alphabetical order by last name of the author. Within each columnist’s listing, the entries are mostly in reverse-chronological order (most recent first).
Malevich at the Tate Modern until 26 Oct 2014
by Sue Hubbard
Iconic is a much overused word but there are certain artworks that have changed the course of art history. Without them what we take for granted as contemporary art might have been totally different. Picasso’s 1907 Desmoiselles D’Avignon reconfigured the human form. His chthonic women act as a metaphor for psychological insecurity and the breakdown of old certainties rather than as a description or likeness. Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, introduced the readymade and challenged the concept of elitist craft-led art, while Andy Warhol’s early 1960s soup cans appropriated banal everyday commodities, placing them within the sanctity of the museum and gallery. But without Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, 1915, what he called ‘a bare icon… for my time’, contemporary abstract painting, as well as contemporary architecture, sculpture and design might have taken another direction altogether. It’s rare that an artist does something completely new. But Malevich, it might be argued, did. After him, painting no longer represented the world but became an end in itself, a new reality.
Born of Polish stock in Kiev in 1879, Malevich moved to Kursk in 1896. By the age of 27 this talented young man was living in the dynamic city of Moscow where successful merchants were collecting works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso. Malevich was to find himself – like Russia – balancing on the cultural fault line between Eastern and Western Europe. Should artists look back to traditional icon painting to create an authentic national art form or to the new movements coming from France?
Monday, July 14, 2014
Caliphs as Entrepreneurs
by Ahmed Humayun
Islam has a new caliph, at least if the Iraq-based militant organization that calls itself the Islamic State is to be believed.* In what was touted to be his first public appearance, self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi spoke about the necessity for implementing Sharia and using war to defeat the enemies of God, the obligation incumbent upon all Muslims to choose a leader, and issued a call for Muslims to join the jihad under his tutelage. While Bin Laden was fond of holding forth wearing commando jackets in rugged terrain, Baghdadi wears resplendent black robes and delivers his incitement to war in the form of a Friday sermon from a grand and stately pulpit in a mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
The media-savvy proclamation of Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi is not a response to popular grassroots clamor in the Muslim world. Nor should we overstate the success of the Islamic State – twenty thousand fighters, at the most, will not suffice to restore a transnational global caliphate. Polls conducted in different Muslim majority societies certainly indicate strong support for Islam in public life—and in particular, for the role of Islamic law in delivering justice and organizing society. Yet there is no indication that Muslims yearn for the return of the caliphate, an institution that was already moribund at the dawn of the 20th century before its abolition by Turkey in 1924.
As with any fledgling movement, militants assert their ideological claims to be natural and inevitable, rooted in history and justified by theology. The truth, however, is that there is little consensus among Muslims on the specific role that Islam should play in contemporary state and society. While this ambivalence has limited the moral and political resonance of militant proclamations, it has also created an opportunity to exploit the general ideological appeal of Islam. This is why militant ideology matters.
Yet we will have to look beyond religious debates in order to understand the growing strength of militant groups such as the Islamic State across large swathes of Muslim majority societies. A key factor has been the growing weakness of the political status quo and the perception of its illegitimacy for various reasons that might include failing authoritarianism, the corruption of ruling elites and the dysfunctional governance they impose, and the force of kinship bonds that disdain the boundaries of modern nationalisms.
Monday Poem
In the beginning was the word —John 1:1
Entreaty
send me a poem that hunkers on haunches
watching for the day to begin, that waits
for the right word to come with the sun
during the last hours of the night-watch
when all are asleep except the watcher
and there is still rustling in the underbrush,
the wordless sounds of something moving in the dark,
in the raw underpinning of the day,
in the interval between now and now,
at the birth of light, at the end of night
send me a poem that does not lie
that does not yield, but does not smite
.
by Jim Culleny
7/7/14
Science: the Quest for Symmetry
by Yohan J. John
Attitudes toward science in the public sphere occupy an interesting spectrum. At one extreme there are the cheerleaders — those who seem to think that science is the disembodied spirit of progress itself, and will usher us into a brave new world of technological transcendence, in which we will merge with machines and upload our minds to the cloud. At the other extreme there is decidedly less exuberance. Science in its destructive avatar is often called scientism, and is seen as a hegemonic threat to religions and to the humanities, an imperial colonizer of the mind itself.
The successes of science give the impression that it has no limitations, either in outer space or inner space. But this attitude attributes to science somewhat magical powers. The discourse surrounding science might benefit from an awareness that its successes are closely tied to its limitations. The relationship between scientists and the rest of society needs mutual understanding and constructive criticism, rather than a volatile mix of reverence, fear, and mistrust. The veil of the temple of knowledge must be torn in two — or at least lifted up from time-to-time.
To this end, it might be illuminating to see scientific ideas as tools forged in workshops, rather than spells divined by wizards in ivory towers. The tool metaphor also reminds us that science is not merely an outgrowth of western philosophy — it is also the result of the painstaking work of “miners, midwives and low mechanicks” whose names rarely feature in the annals of Great Men. [1]
So what sort of toolbox is science? I'd like to argue that it's a set of lenses. These lenses allow us to magnify and clarify our perceptions of natural phenomena, setting the stage for deeper understanding. The lenses of science reveal the symmetries of nature, so we might call them the Symmetry Spectacles. The Symmetry Spectacles are normally worn by mathematicians and theoretical physicists, but I think that even laypeople interested in science might find that the world looks quite interesting when viewed through them.
So what is symmetry? Most people have an intuitive sense of what symmetry is. Symmetry connotes evenness, or balanced sameness. An asymmetrical object is skewed, off-balance, and uneven. It is easy to grasp that a scalene triangle is asymmetrical, whereas an isosceles triangle is symmetrical. To many people an equilateral triangle seems even more symmetrical than an isosceles triangle. The goal of a formal approach is to make explicit our intuitions about symmetry. Mathematicians and theoretical physicists define symmetry as follows:
Symmetry is immunity to a possible change.
How can we apply this notion of symmetry to the scalene, isosceles and equilateral triangles?
A Thought Experiment, and One (or More) Earnest Questions
by Debra Morris
Imagine flipping through a copy of the academic journal Sociology and Social Research. One article in particular—”Our Schizoid Culture”—catches your eye. The author is well-known: a professor of sociology, soon-to-be editor-in-chief of the American Sociological Review, and, in something of a blow to “two cultures” thinking, future poetry editor for the Humanist magazine. Certainly you could quibble with a number of statements, and some of them seem so wide-ranging as to be inarguable, but in general you share the author's dismay at the “great deal of irrational, contradictory behavior” within contemporary American culture. You agree: “When an individual exhibits similar symptoms, the psychiatrist calls him neurotic, or if he lacks ‘insight' into his difficulties, psychotic.” This is what accounts for, and in your mind fully justifies, the article's tone: honest, emphatic, no-nonsense, but also deeply attuned to ordinary pain and suffering—quite unlike the academic caviling to which you're accustomed. Yes, someone needs to say it: in many domains of life our culture is so confused, so riven, as to be quite, well, unwell. Really, all politics aside, it would be hard to argue with any of this:
We praise competition, but practice merger and monopoly…. We praise business organization but condemn and prevent labor organization…. We give heavier and more certain sentences to bank robbers than to bank wreckers. We boast of business ethics but we give power and prestige to business [disruptors]…. Everybody is equal before the law, except … women, immigrants, poor people.… We ridicule politicians in general but honor all officeholders in particular and most of us would like to be elected to something ourselves. We think of voting as the basis of democracy, but … seldom find more than fifty per cent of eligible voters actually registering their ‘will.'… Democracy is one of our most cherished ideals, but we speak of upper and lower classes, ‘look down on' many useful occupations, trace our genealogies…. We believe in the brotherhood of man, but we are full of racial, religious, economic, and numerous other prejudices and invidious distinctions. We value equality, but tolerate greater inequality of wealth and income than has ever existed in any other society…. We drape nude statues and suppress noble books…. We try to foster participative recreation, but most of it is passive, much of it vicious, and almost all of it flagrantly commercialized…. This is the age of science, but there is more belief in miracles, spirits, occultism, and providences than one would think possible…. Our scientific system produces a specialism that gives great prestige and great technical skill, but not always great wisdom…. The very triumphs of science produce an irrational, magic-minded faith in science….
Realize, now, that the article was written in 1935. The author was Read Bain, professor of sociology at Miami University in Ohio. As a founding editor of the American Sociological Review, he would become embroiled in early disputes between the “scientists” and “humanists” in his own discipline. He was thus involved in theorizing—and, in that spontaneous way of so many early- to mid-20th-century American academics—practicing in the mode of a “public intellectual,” that figure who today, apparently, is nowhere to be found.[i] In terms of Bain's analysis as synopsized above, and even more to the point, in terms of the social critique it so earnestly propounds, what struck me when first reading it was how contemporary it sounded and how apt its reproaches were.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
HOW TO BE A FRENCH GANGSTER
by Lisa Lieberman
As a break from the seriously depressing topics I’ve been writing about lately, and in honor of Bastille Day, I offer this tribute to French gangster films.
First off, you need the fedora. The gangster accessory de rigueur, it was already iconic by the time Paul Muni popularized the look in Scarface (1932). Al Capone, Clyde Barrow, John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly were all photographed wearing one. Baby Face Nelson was astute enough to recognize the souvenir value of his trademark fedora, bartering it for food and a place to hide after a botched bank job.
By the time Bogey donned one to play ‘Bugs' Fenner alongside Edward G. Robinson in Bullets or Ballots (1936), it was a bit passé. Robinson, you will note, sports a derby, signaling his authority over his fedora-wearing lackeys. (That's Bogey on the right, with the gun.)
Leave it to the French to reinvent the gangster look and give it panache. In Pépé le Moko (1937), Jean Gabin wears the hat, but he adds a gallic touch: a silk scarf. Gabin's character has style—something his American counterparts lacked—but more importantly, he's got heart. Love will be his undoing, and we're not talking about a fling with some cheap, two-timing dame. We're talking epic love, the kind of love that inspires poetry and songs. Ah, l'amour.
Director Julien Duvivier gives us a tragic hero in the classical tradition who is the victim of fate. Pépé is wanted in France for various crimes. He's been hiding out in the Casbah of Algiers for two years, sheltered by the local inhabitants who will take any opportunity to defy the colonial authorities. He may be king of the Algerian underworld, but exile has turned bitter for Pépé, whose longing for Paris recalls Ovid's lament in the Tristia: “Say that I died when I lost my native land.” Here we see him looking mournfully out over the rooftops of the Casbah to the sea, toward France and freedom, both of which elude him.
PROSE POEM
HISTORY’S MOST PERSECUTED MINORITY IS INSENSITIVE TO THE ASPIRATIONS OF WORLD’S MOST DISPOSSESSED TRIBE
by Rafiq Kathwari
My sister-in-law and I sat in the back seat of the Volkswagen as my older brother drove
in desperate rain through red lights to Maimonides. “Kicking,” she said, putting my
hand over her round belly. Shy, I lowered my gaze to her flip-flops on the car floor. She
gave birth to a son in Brooklyn eight years to the day JFK was shot in Dallas. A new
alien in New York, I babysat my cute nephew in a stark rental on Park Avenue in
Yorkville, with a view of Gimbels, now a long extinct department store. His dad rode the
IRT to work on Pine Street; his mom was a salesperson in Herald Square at Korvettes
another extinct store. The boy and I both discovered Big Bird on a Zenith console, my
first TV exposure at age 22. Our Park Avenue closets were stocked with handmade
Numdah rugs Grandfather had shipped from our ancestral home, Kashmir, hoping we’d
become rich fast carpeting America from sea to shining sea. I watched him dunk hoops
in Perturbia, his long hair swishing to Metallica, “Soldier boy, made of clay.” He hunted
jackrabbits at the family farm upstate, where he signed up at the local NRA, his dad’s
rifle on the boy’s shoulder. He scaled a peak one summer in Kashmir, the knotty dispute
forever a passionate subject at the dining table, sweetened often by ice cream after the
dishes were washed, and reruns of All In The Family wrapped up Prime Time. He
praised Allah at the Islamic Center Sunday School on California Road to which I once
gave a brand name vacuum cleaner that failed to suck up the holier-than-thou Talibs.
Allah alone knows what seeds they sowed in his receptive mind for he made his little
sister weep, shaming her for wearing leotards to her ballet class. She loved ballet classes,
and she always looked up to her big brother. He persuaded his dad to stop serving liquor
to guests, and he made his parents proud calling out the Call to Prayer at an annual apple
picking at the farm, an odd religious intrusion that on a crisp Fall day made me feel sad,
because I like my cider with a splash of vodka.
The obstaclean theory of matter
by Charlie Huenemann
Denying the existence of the material world never goes down well. No matter how clever and compelling the arguments, most of us want to insist that matter exists – and as our insistence becomes more vehement, we start pounding tables, as if that will impress our interlocutors.
Time and again over the years, I have tried selling idealism to students through George Berkeley's arguments. “You know, all you ever experience are perspectives of the world, right? So what idea can you possibly have of a world existing in itself, independently of any perspective? None, of course. So why not dispense with it, and just believe in perspectives that are coordinated with one another?” No dice. They are unmoved.
And I have also tried the more Greco-Germanic route. “You know, the more we strive to understand the physical world around us, the more we end up expressing the world in mathematical structures and relations. So why not think of the world as a set of mathematical structures, and forget about the alleged 'matter' that is supposed to instantiate those structures?” Again, blank stares (thought perhaps it is because I used the word “instantiate”).
In any case, most of us feel a deep need to assert the reality of the material world. Indeed, some of us sneer at the idea of trying to go without it. “Good luck crossing the street,” some may advise a would-be idealist. “The cars might not share your philosophy.” But I wonder – what is behind this deep need? What does the idea of “matter” do for us to earn such dedication on our part?
The more I have thought about it, the more I am drawn to an “obstaclean” theory of matter. To put the theory as simply as possible: matter is ultimately stuff that gets in our way. Material objects are obstacles, pure and simple. We might want this or that, and so we embark upon some plan, but then – wham! Something gets in our way. We didn't plan for that, and we certainly didn't want it. It's there independently, on its own. That's what matter does. That's what matter is. It is the sh*t that gets in our way.
Monday, July 7, 2014
Revisiting Kristof’s Criticism of Academic Irrelevance
by D.E. Wittkower, Evan Selinger and Lucinda Rush
Some time has passed since Nicholas Kristof published his controversial Op-Ed “Professors, We Need You!“, and the time is ripe for us to approach the issue afresh. After briefly revisiting the controversy, we’ll offer some thoughts about how to promote public engagement by changing academic cultures and incentives.
When Kristof’s Op-Ed came out back in February, it provoked widespread discussion about whether academics—particularly in the social sciences and humanities—are socially relevant. Much of the heat stemmed from Kristof’s biting central claim: “Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.”
Rebuttals to Kristof came swiftly and appeared in different venues.
The New York Times itself published critical responses that highlighted the existence of socially relevant academic contributions in lots of places, including “use inspired research” and “blogs, TED talks, congressional and expert-witness testimony, support of social movements, advice to foundations, consultation with museums, summer programs for schoolteachers and work with prisoners.”
This crucial point that a wider net needs to be cast for defining ‘engagement’ was expressed elsewhere, too. Undeniably, counter-examples abound, including in high profile fora. “Kristof need only open the pages of the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Boston Review, The American Conservative, Dissent, The American Prospect.” Indeed, a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that there’s actually robust public academic engagement occurring. “Spend a few hours reading news and opinion pieces, surfing interesting blogs, or dipping into conference-based hashtags on Twitter, and you will find academic voices speaking out—everywhere.”
Shortly after Kristof’s piece ran, the hashtag #EngagedAcademics gained traction on Twitter. Its creator Chuck Pearson lamented that when Kristof wrote about academics he was referring to “research one schools,” and perpetuating an argument predicated upon undue, elitist assumptions: “It still assumes that academics are those pipe-smoking, office-dwelling, masses-disdaining figures from another place. In other words—as the New York Times is so prone to do, when talking about higher education—it assumes that regional universities and state colleges don’t exist. It assumes that teaching-centered liberal arts colleges don’t exist. It assumes that most church-affiliated schools don’t exist. Good heavens, don’t even speak of the community colleges. And it assumes that everyone who could possibly serve as a public intellectual is a FULLPROF or is on the path to FULLPROF status. Non-tenure-track instructors? Visiting professors? God forbid, adjuncts?”
Finally, beyond the questions over whether Kristof was missing all the action happening right in front of him, some worried that asking academics to be more relevant might very well be a tacit invitation to requesting they avoid rocking the boat with controversial assertions: “. . . if ‘relevance’ means becoming mouthpieces of our new ruling class, then Kristof can keep it.”
Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner, and a clock for the next 10,000 years
by Charlie Huenemann
In 1671, in some letters exchanged with the French mathematician Pierre de Carcavy, Leibniz mentioned his plans to create a calculating machine. Apparently, he had been inspired by a pedometer, probably thinking that if machines could count, they could then calculate. Within a couple of years, he hired a craftsman build a wooden prototype of his machine, and he packed it along in a trip to London in 1673.
He presented the machine to the Royal Society, but his presentation failed. The machine was supposed to not only add and subtract, but multiply, divide, and even extract square and cube roots. But it just didn't work, though everyone was faintly impressed by the attempt. Well, almost everyone. Robert Hooke made close examination of the machine and asked detailed questions of its inventor. Afterward he set about both disparaging Leibniz's attempt to his friends and making a copy of the machine himself and showing it off.
Leibniz went back home, improved his design, and hired a better craftsman. Then, after two decades of tinkering, adjustments, and debugging, he finally had something to show: the Stepped Reckoner.
A little over a year ago, Stephen Wolfram visited the Leibniz Archive in Hanover and saw the Stepped Reckoner for himself, as well as Leibniz's cramped and ingenious pages of calculations and designs. Wolfram notes that the most interesting “idea before its time” element in the device is Leibniz's appreciation for binary arithmetic. Really, the central idea of modern computing is right there, enshrined in beautifully sculpted gears, with a crank on the side.
Monday Poem
Again
My father, at the kitchen table,
in a rare expression of mystery,
said, I think life is a cycle
But he was not a mystical man to me,
nose to the grindstone he ground
day after day, pressed
by incessant work, bound
to contingencies
like Sisyphus to his stone
linearly, but uphill
in his black boots and socks
his blue shirt and pants
cinched with a black belt,
sometimes a fedora,
often a smile through
cigarette-clinched lips,
he trucked on (unbeknownst to me,
and despite his flat trajectory)
mulling over vicissitudes,
contemplating repetitions,
weighing the properties of circles,
as does any common philosopher
hoping to unravel the hiddeness
under blood and bone,
coming to the conclusion
that to begin again
was the only thing that made sense
to him
.
by Jim Culleny
7/1/14
The Meaning of Apples
by Emrys Westacott
What is it about the apple? Common, easily grown, and cheap to buy, yet when you think about it the apple is a major character in the history of our culture. It pops up continually to play significant roles in religion, mythology, science, and the arts, and remains metaphorically active in everyday language.
The first example that comes to mind, of course, is the apple that Adam and Eve partook of in the garden of Eden, thereby precipitating the Fall thanks to which we now have to toil among thorns and thistles, earning our bread in the sweat of our brow instead of lounging around in paradise. Scholars and pedants will immediately point out that the bible doesn't say that what Eve plucked from the tree of knowledge was actually an apple: it just describes it rather vaguely as the tree's fruit. Since there was only ever one tree of knowledge, it quite likely produced a unique fruit that is no longer available, not even at Whole Foods. But that's beside the point. In the popular mind Eve bit into an apple, thought it tasted good (so we know it wasn't some mealy Golden Delicious) and offered it to Adam; he took a bite, and the rest is a lot more mythology eventually feeding into history. Here the dual character of the apple is revealed for the first time. As coming from the tree of knowledge it's presumably good, knowledge itself being a fine thing. But since eating it is sinful, the initial sweetness turns bitter, and what at first gives delight leads to shame, exile, labour and death.
It was also an apple that set in motion the events leading to the Trojan War, tragic and glorious in equal measure according to our primary source. The wedding of Peleus and Thetis had an impressive guest list that included all the Olympian gods but not Eris (a.k.a. Discordia) goddess of Chaos and Strife. She wasn't invited for obvious reasons, but she came anyway and true to form tossed into the midst of the revelers a golden apple inscribed, “To the fairest.” Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite all claimed it; Zeus appointed Paris, a prince of Troy, to decide who should have it; Aphrodite offered the best bribe—the beautiful Helen of Sparta—so she got the apple, Paris got Helen, and Troy got razed to the ground after a ten-year war. In this case, too, the apple's outward appeal–it is brilliant, beautiful, and desired by three goddesses–hides a dark core that breeds rivalry, envy, seduction, betrayal, war, and destruction.
Encounters in the Passing Moment
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy
Last week I ran into a faintly familiar face and looked at him quizzically as he said, “You asked a good question yesterday. At the talk.” I thanked him, we muttered names; I don't think I heard his name, and I don't think he caught mine. We exchanged a sentence in a bakery of some repute and then went our opposite ways. I felt suitably flattered; the feeling lasted for an hour.
One could argue that the politics of this encounter lie in prolonging its affect without ever completing its narrative. After all, they tell me that the beauty of the fleeting encounter lies in its imminent disappearance. All narratives as we well know, are already rigged, and the novel, as we are told again and again, has been long dead. (Don't believe any of it). This man that I will never see again, this woman who I will not call. Futures, possibilities, rumours, closures, openings, continuations, none need ever bother except to open oneself to these delicious punctuations. But still, aren't some chance encounters also the beginning of long fantasies? And hence I think about the politics of the chance encounter. A glance here, a smile there, a blink-and-you-miss-it moment participating in no pre-determined destiny and yet one that has the possibility of solidifying into fate (never ill-fatedness).
In her beautiful book Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant calls this a “situation”, “a state of things in which something that will perhaps matter is unfolding amidst the usual activity of life.” In Berlant's words, this is “a state of animated and animating suspension that forces itself on consciousness, a sense of the emergence of something in the present that may become an event.” I therefore understand vaguely that one shared stop in a present continuous time-frame adds to the je ne sais quoi of daily life, staving the disenchantments of modernity, holding at bay my certain knowledge that nothing will happen today. After all, how would we live life if we were to actually believe that nothing will happen today? So the chance encounter punctuates such hope, delivering small bits of evidence that guarantee the possibility of that event, the one event that will deliver us all.
Does the Utilitarian Argument for Vegetarianism Add Up?
by Thomas Rodham Wells
The contemporary animal rights movement owes a great intellectual debt to Peter Singer's pathbreaking book ‘Animal Liberation' (1975). In that book Singer made a break with the dominant moral argument for treating animals well, the Kantian line that mistreating animals is a bad – inhumane – thing for humans to do. In its place, Singer advanced a utilitarian case against harming animals, such as by using them for food or experiments, in terms of respecting their right to have their suffering counted equally with that of humans.
Singer's book has had an enormous influence, directly and indirectly, on how many people see the moral status of animals. I include myself among them. But nevertheless I am not sure it is a good book. Despite its rhetorical effectiveness and despite going through multiple revised editions, Singer's official argument is far from compelling. And this is a problem for the animal rights movement. For if Singer's utilitarian account is only a kind of sentimentalism in academic drag then the intellectual respectability it has granted the animal rights movement is a sham. Singer's utilitarianism can't do the job it is supposed to do – it can neither justify the normative conclusions of the book nor meet the minimalist standard of internal coherence. Furthermore, the domination of Singer's flawed argument in the intellectual self-understanding of the animal rights movement may be crowding out other more relevant ethical accounts, most obviously those that directly engage with sentimentalism rather than being embarrassed by it.
In this essay I will focus on the utilitarian case for vegetarianism. Singer argues for the moral recognition of the suffering of animals in the livestock industry and exhorts his readers to end it by not eating meat. But both the form and content of his argument are open to strong challenges.
Towards Independent Creativity
by Carl Pierer
It is a good situation for European students in Scotland. We get to study at excellent universities with outstanding research. We do not pay any tuition fees. The institutions are well funded. As part of the EU, access and living is easy. What more could we wish for?
The campaign against Independence for Scotland usually raises worries that this, our, privileged situation might be put at risk by a yes vote. Leaving the United Kingdom might mean that universities in Scotland will lose access to UK-wide research funds. English, Welsh and Northern Irish students would have the status of European students, probably making it illegal for the universities in Scotland to charge them the fees they charge now. Supporters of Independence retort that they have plans for how to cope with these problems. With both sides presenting disagreeing “evidence” for their cause, it is difficult to estimate which hypothetical promise is more likely to be kept. The argument offering the most economic route wins the battle for plausibility.
However, facts about higher education in an independent Scotland would require Scotland to be independent. The issues at hand, the impossibility of a transnational research fund to name just one, cannot be decided upfront. Therefore, this article is not in the business of arguing for either case. Rather, it sketches a framework for a less economised higher education in an independent Scotland.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Two women painters: Jenny Saville at Gagosian and Celia Paul
by Sue Hubbard
Jenny Saville. Oxyrhynchus. Gagosian, 6-24 Britannia Street, London WC1X9JD. June 13 – July 26, 2014
Celia Paul. Victoria Miro, 16 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW. 12 June – 2 August 2014
Two current shows at major London galleries illustrate that painting is not only alive and well but a vibrant, intellectually and emotionally challenging force. Both these shows are figurative and both are by women. I first met Jenny Saville when she was 22. She'd just left Glasgow School of Art and Charles Saatchi had purchased her MA show and offered an 18-month contract to support her while she made new work to be exhibited in his London gallery. Interviewing her for Time Out, I found her idealistic and determined that Saatchi ‘wouldn't change her'. Her work was aggressive, personal, raw and highly accomplished. Flesh and the female body were her subjects and graffiti-style texts that subverted traditional notions of feminine beauty were scored, like self-inflicted wounds, into the thick impasto of the body of her subjects. Although part of a generation for whom painting – in particular figure painting – was not considered fashionable, she was soon to be seen as the heir to Lucien Freud.
Now Gagosian Galley is presenting her first-ever solo show in London: Oxyrhynchus. A number of these new works are inspired by the rubbish dump found on this ancient Egyptian archaeological site where heaps of discarded documents were preserved in the area's dry climate, including Euclid's Elements and fragments of Sappho's poems. This historic palimpsest has given Saville an intellectual armature on which to hang much of her imagery that often involves the complex layering of bodies. Faces and limbs overlap and ghostly reflections create a series doppelgangers or shadow selves. The viewer's eye slips between forms, uncertain which limb belongs to which figure, as in Leonardo's cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John Baptist, circa 1499, where theownership of individual arms and legs is ambiguous. In the exhibition's title work, (pastel and charcoal on canvas), bodies have been reduced to fragments. A foot sticks from a heap of marks as though broken from an ancient sculpture. Elsewhere there's a pile of breasts. This intermingling and cross-referencing runs through Saville's work; black bodies intertwine with white, genders are blurred. Modern life is not seen as fixed but as complex and fluid. Boundaries and borders dissolve. Saville pays a conscious debt to art history with her references to Degas' Olympia, and her nervy abstract marks that wrestle to find form and space in the manner of De Kooning.
The Loneliness of the Modern Warrior: Matt Murphy’s “A Beckoning War”
by Prashant Keshavmurthy
If there is a literary history of the modern warrior then Matthew Murphy's A Beckoning War should be its latest chapter and, surely, its finest. Told in the third-person, the novel narrates “the Allied advance through the Gothic Line in Northern Italy in September 1944” almost wholly through the perspective of Captain Jim McFarlane of the Canadian Fifth Armored Division.
In the face of his wife Marianne's objections – they have been married less than a year – Jim volunteers to go to war out of a citizenly sense of duty to the Allied cause. The voluntary character of this decision places the novel in a modern tradition of war novels all of whose protagonists enter the fray out of a sense of righteous duty. Among these is Paul Bäumer of Eric Maria Remarque's 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front and Robert Jordan, the protagonist of Ernest Hemmingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemmingway's famously bleak recreations of machinegun slaughter are the ancestors of Murphy's dense descriptions of war machines and wounding.
As both these canonical examples attest, the modern war novel has been an anti-war novel. I prefer to identify Jim McFarlane, not as a soldier, but – despite the archaism of the term – as a warrior. Doing so places Jim in an older lineage of epic heroes (Beowulf, Tristan and Faraydun and Rustam come to mind) each of whom chooses to go to war with an enemy of his people. In so doing, he battles monsters (Beowulf with Grendel; Tristan with Morold; Faraydun and Rustam with a variety of demons) by destroying whose gigantic bodies he defines himself as his people's ideal and marks out a land as his people's homeland. This, at any rate, is the epic norm.