Just in case you have still not seen this.

David Hajdu at The Nation:

What I experienced at the Village Vanguard in October was something more than the fulfillment of that promise: I saw Salvant transcend the conventions of multiple traditions in jazz singing, including Holiday’s, without abandoning the tenets of emotional maturity, deep musicality, and rhythmic drive that distinguish jazz. Onstage at the Vanguard, as well as on her latest album, Dreams and Daggers, Salvant made a kind of jazz that honors the history of the music while speaking with ringing, stinging cogency to a 21st-century audience.

In place of reverence, quiet, and stillness, there was an atmosphere of shared excitement. If the regulars remembered the rules about keeping quiet, it didn’t show. And there seemed to be many more newcomers than regulars in the place—unbridled fans cheering in full voice during a song, picking up on Salvant’s cheeky humor and laughing along, even calling out requests, an act of apostasy at the Vanguard. About halfway into the set, someone yelled for “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” the Rodgers and Hart ballad that Salvant reconsiders on Dreams and Daggers—a double-CD set of standards, vintage obscurities, and new songs written (or co-written) by her, including some tracks recorded at a show at the Vanguard in late 2016 that I didn’t attend.

more here.

John Ganz at The Baffler:

Lansdale’s early interventions in Vietnam during the 1950s were instrumental in installing and supporting the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. Lansdale helped rig a phony plebiscite against the emperor Bao Dai where Diem received 98.2 percent of the vote. Diem was, by most accounts, a weak leader who tolerated the repressive tactics of his brother Nhu and his sister-in-law Madame Nhu. Lansdale was put in close liaison with Diem, even living in the presidential palace for a time, and he developed a friendly rapport with the man, who was often perceived as cold. But after Lansdale helped Diem fend off his rivals for power with a combination of force and bribery with money provided by the U.S. government, Diem distanced himself from Lansdale, saying “Lansdale is too CIA and an encumbrance. In politics, there is no room for sentiment.” In trying to tease out the complexities of the relationship, Boot fails to state clearly the obvious conclusion: Diem used Lansdale and the U.S. government for his own ends, believing he could manipulate them both.

Diem pretty consistently ignored Lansdale’s advice to take the country in a more democratic direction, instead favoring the ideology of Personalism that his brother Nhu espoused. “I like the guy, but I won’t buy fascism,” Lansdale said.

more here.

George Eaton at The New Statesman:

History consists of the impossible becoming the inevitable. Universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery and the welfare state were all once dismissed as fantastical dreams. But in the Western world, politics today often feels devoid of the idealism and ambition of previous generations. As the mainstream left has struggled to define its purpose, the right has offered superficially seductive solutions (from Brexit to border walls).

One of those seeking to resolve what he calls a “crisis of imagination” is the Dutch historian and journalist Rutger Bregman. His book Utopia for Realists advocates policies including a universal basic income (a guaranteed minimum salary for all citizens), a 15-hour working week and global open borders. Since its publication last year, Bregman’s manifesto has been translated into more than 20 languages, establishing him as one of Europe’s pre-eminent young thinkers.

“I was born in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and people of my generation were taught that utopian dreams are dangerous,” Bregman recalled when we met for coffee at the London office of his publisher Bloomsbury. A softly-spoken but forceful character, dressed casually in a light blue jacket, jeans and Nike Air trainers, Bregman continued: “It seemed that the age of big ideas was over. Politics had just become technocracy and politicians just managers.”

more here.

The Spirit of Triumph

do you remember learning to tie your shoes?
astonishing! the loops you had to make the delicate
adjustments the pulling-through tightening impossible!
the things we learn!
putting a bridle on a horse when he's headshy
getting your hands under a girl's sweater
no wonder we are the crown of all that exists
we can do anything how we climb chimneys
how we put one foot on the gas one on the clutch
and make the car go nothing too difficult nothing!

crutches artificial arms have you seen that?
how they pick their cups up and use razors? amazing!
and the wives shine it for them at night
they're sleeping the wives take it out of the room
and polish it with its own special rag
it's late they hold it against their bellies
the leather laces dangle into their laps
the mechanisms slip noiselessly
lowering the hook softly onto their breasts
we men! aren't we something? I mean
we are worth thinking about aren't we?
we are the end we are the living end

by C.K. Williams
from Selected Poems
Harper Collins, 1994

Luke Leitch in The Economist:

When new acquaintances ask what I do, their eyes flick up and down my scuffed sneakers, well-loved jumbo cords and moth-kissed sweater before clouding over with inevitable confusion. A more sensitive soul might regard the effect that my clothes have as grounds for professional self-doubt. But not me. After all, isn’t football full of incisive pundits who have never scored a goal? How many respected political editors have ever stood for office, let alone won? And do theatre critics get appointed because they craft brilliant plays? You don’t have to be a clothes horse to write about fashion.

Melissa N. Shaw in AAIHS:

In 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. In 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. In the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million black Americans to West Africa. Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey—as well as Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell—are part of an overlooked and understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the World on Fire, the first book to examine how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as an era of declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist—and particularly, black nationalist women’s—ferment.

In Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe, agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom. Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers, government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)

Santiago Zabala in Public Seminar:

Given our prejudice towards innovation, everything labeled as “new” captures our interest with the promise of genuine improvement. But are new politicians, technological discoveries, and works of art necessarily better than previous ones? As we enter 2018 we recall last year’s breakthroughs as improvements in politics, technology, and art. It is as if novelty were the only criteria: the young president of France will not only reform his country but also save Europe; new facial-recognition (Face++) software will provide access to buildings, authorize payments, and also track down criminals; and Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable overpowers his previous works.

These things may all be new, but they are not necessarily improvements. “Every innovation,” as Boris Groys explains in his book On The New, “results from a new interpretation, a new contextualization or decontextualization of a cultural attitude or act.” The new, in other words, is relative. But if innovation cannot be defined simply by our compulsion for progress, growth, and improvement, how can we know when something new occurs?

While the search for the new used to be driven by the aspiration to discover truth, essence, and transcendental meaning beyond cultural differences, today the new is primarily defined in relation to what is considered traditional, old, and surpassed. Instead of following a tradition and complying with its criteria, politicians, scientists, and artists are today required to produce new traditions and criteria. But do previous traditions ever really come to an end?

More here.

Adam Becker in Signs of the Times:

The idea that the future can influence the past may finally explain the inherent randomness of quantum theory and bring it in line with Einstein's space-time

If you were to break your arm tomorrow afternoon, would you suddenly find it hanging useless in a sling this morning? Of course not – the question makes no sense. Cause always precedes effect. But maybe life isn't quite so straightforward for a photon. In the subatomic realm, where the laws of quantum physics make seemingly impossible feats routine, the one thing that we always considered beyond the pale might just be true.

This idea that the future can influence the present, and that the present can influence the past, is known as retrocausality. It has been around for a while without ever catching on – and for good reason, because we never see effects happen before their causes in everyday life. But now, a fresh twist on a deep tension in the foundations of quantum theory suggests that we may have no choice but to think again.

No one is saying time travel is anything other than fantasy. But if the theorists going back to the future with retrocausality can make it stick, the implications would be almost as mind-boggling. They could not only explain the randomness seemingly inherent to the quantum world, but even remake it in a way that finally brings it into line with Einstein's ideas of space and time – an achievement that has eluded physicists for decades. "If you allow retrocausality, it is possible to have a theory of reality that's more compatible with lots of things that we think should be true," says Matthew Leifer at Chapman University in Orange, California.

More here. [Thanks to Huw Price.]

Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

In the wake of last week’s indictments alleging that 13 Russian nationals and entities created fake social media accounts and sponsored political events to sow political discord in the U.S., something of a consensus has arisen in the political and media class (with some notable exceptions) that these actions not only constitute an “act of war” against the U.S., but one so grave that it is tantamount to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Indeed, that Russia’s alleged “meddling” is comparable to the two most devastating attacks in U.S. history has, overnight, become a virtual cliché.

The claim that Russian meddling in the election is “an act of war” comparable to these events isn’t brand new. Senators from both parties, such as Republican John McCain and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, have long described Russian meddling in 2016 as an “act of war.” Hillary Clinton, while promoting her book last October, described Russia’s alleged hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email inbox as a “cyber 9/11.” And last February, the always war-hungry Tom Friedman of the New York Times said on “Morning Joe” that Russian hacking “was a 9/11-scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor-scale event.”

But the last few days have ushered in an explosion of this rhetoric from politicians and journalists alike.

More here.

In honor of Virtue and Moir, who won a gold medal last night, here is something of a tribute (!) to Virtue and Moir and to ice dancing in general (!!) that I published at The Smart Set during the 2014 Winter Olympics:

For smooth sweeping – the very essence of skating on ice – it is best to watch the skaters who do fewer tricks. And that is why the highest form of skating on ice is skating in pairs and the highest form of skating in pairs is ice dancing. When you skate with another person, you are performing a kind of dance. Great dancers are often described as being able to “glide across the floor.” In skating on ice, you really can glide across the floor. The shared gliding of two human beings is, in fact, a thing stupendous. That is why ice-skating has always carried a sense of romance. When you’ve “swept smooth” with another person, you’ve shared something. Witness, if you will, the ice skating scene from the classic Cary Grant film, The Bishop’s Wife. Phenomenologically speaking, “smooth sweeping” is connected to wonder and love. Love in the romantic sense, yes. But more deeply, love in the sense of loving the world — and wonder that such a form of motion is possible at all.

Alas, the Olympic rule-makers have tried to destroy love and wonder by means of the progressive scoring system, which rewards skaters for doing many jumps and twirls and anything that has a high probability of landing them on the fanny. You’d think that something as pure and lovely as the scene from The Bishop’s Wife would not be welcome in a commercialized and crass event like the modern Olympics. But you would be wrong.

Ice dancing lives.

more here.

Will Leurs at berfrois:

We don’t have a word to properly describe the cognitive space of the reader, the way a text triggers personal trails of thought and imaginary possibilities of an emerging fiction. In Terminal Identity, Scott Bukatman compares the de-narrativized spaces in postmodern literature and author Samuel Delany’s notion of “paraspace,” a term referring to “a science fictional space that exists parallel to the normal space of the diegesis- a rhetorically heightened ‘other realm.’” (157) The emblematic use of paraspace is at the end of Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey, where astronaut Bowman (and we the viewers) experience a loss of narrative and spatio-temporal coherence as he/we enter an alien world. “The intensification of this paraspatial sequence performs an ontological deconstruction within the diegesis as well as for the film viewer.” (177) In science fiction movies and novels, many of these paraspatial techniques draw on avant-garde practices (abstraction, rapid montage, concrete poetry or fragmentary prose) to introduce an unknowable realm within the emerging known of the narrative world. The notion of a space parallel to that of the narrative space and yet within the diegesis; that introduces processes disruptive to coherent narration and yet has a narrative purpose, seems to get at the complexity of narrative virtuality in digital texts.

If electronic literature remains tied to, as Ryan argues, Roland Barthes notion of a plural text – “[a] galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds” (from S/Z in Ryan (3587) – this heritage extends well beyond modernism and postmodernism.

more here.

Andrei Pleșu at Eurozine:

Engaged as we East Europeans were in the process of re-entering the European community, we were unaware of, or overlooked, the old and lasting tensions of continental history, its constituent polychrome nature. Europe has a long tradition of self-segregation, of multi-dimensionality, of debates on national identity that can go as far as internal conflict. The first failure of our ‘common home’ was the fracturing of the Roman Empire into a western and an eastern segment. Rome broke away from Byzantium, Catholicism from Orthodoxy, Protestantism from Catholicism, the Empire from the Papacy, East from West, North from South, the Germanic from the Latin, communism from capitalism, Britain from the rest of the continent. The spectre of division is what the Belgian philosopher Jacques Dewitte (admiringly) called the ‘European exception’. We easily perceive the differences that make up our identity; we are able at any time to distance ourselves from ourselves. We invented both colonialism and anti-colonialism; we invented Eurocentrism and the relativisation of Europeanism. The world wars of the last century began as intra-European wars; the European West and East were for decades kept apart by a ‘cold war’. An impossible ‘conjugal’ triangle has constantly inflamed spirits: the German, the Latin and the Slavic worlds. An increasingly acute irritation is taking hold between the European Union and Europe in the wider sense, between central administration and national sovereignty, between the Eurozone countries and those with their own currencies, between the Schengen countries and those excluded from the treaty. All seasoned with the noble rhetoric of ‘unity’, a ‘common house,’ and continental solidarity. Where were we, the newcomers, to place ourselves in a landscape that by no means erred towards monotony? In the following, I shall choose three of the front-lines that marked and still mark the family portrait of Europe’s complicated fabric: 1) the North–South division; 2) the East–West division; and 3) the centre–periphery division.

more here.

Francis Gooding at the LRB:

Such images reveal a profound unease about the very idea of extinct, prehistoric creatures. In a Christian society, the precise place these newly discovered animals held in God’s creation was a source of debate and consternation. Were they antediluvian beings, who had been destroyed in the Flood? Did that mean they’d been wicked – undeserving of the salvation afforded other animals? Did they date from a time earlier still, a ‘pre-Adamic’ moment of creation? Or had they never lived at all, their bones having been placed in rocks by the Creator as a test of faith? In 1830, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology had argued that the Earth was much older than the six thousand or so years suggested by scripture, and in 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Speciespromoted a new theory that scandalously linked all of organic life together through an iron law of competition and extinction. Meanwhile, the factories of the industrial revolution were issuing forth new, smoke-belching, roaring creations. The wild violence of much early palaeoart, with its images of frenzied consumption and environmental disaster, were symptomatic of these alarming uncertainties.

Alongside these visions of universal catastrophe, a more peaceful ancient world also existed. In much early British palaeoart, the dinosaur is dignified lord of creation not hellish dragon. These visions of a sublime prehistory can be seen as a transformation of Romantic landscape painting, and in them dinosaurs appear as the just rulers of a natural kingdom.

more here.

Mrs. Kessler