Liza Lou. Security Fence, 2005.

Glass beads on steel and razor wire, 132x156x156″

Photo credit: Stephen White courtesy of White Cube, London.

More here, here, and here.

Patrick Cockburn in the London Review of Books:

As the attention of the world focused on Ukraine and Gaza, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) captured a third of Syria in addition to the quarter of Iraq it had seized in June. The frontiers of the new Caliphate declared by Isis on 29 June are expanding by the day and now cover an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people, a population larger than that of Denmark, Finland or Ireland. In a few weeks of fighting in Syria Isis has established itself as the dominant force in the Syrian opposition, routing the official al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, in the oil-rich province of Deir Ezzor and executing its local commander as he tried to flee. In northern Syria some five thousand Isis fighters are using tanks and artillery captured from the Iraqi army in Mosul to besiege half a million Kurds in their enclave at Kobani on the Turkish border. In central Syria, near Palmyra, Isis fought the Syrian army as it overran the al-Shaer gasfield, one of the largest in the country, in a surprise assault that left an estimated three hundred soldiers and civilians dead. Repeated government counter-attacks finally retook the gasfield but Isis still controls most of Syria’s oil and gas production. The Caliphate may be poor and isolated but its oil wells and control of crucial roads provide a steady income in addition to the plunder of war.

The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet this explosive transformation has created surprisingly little alarm internationally or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of Isis. Politicians and diplomats tend to treat Isis as if it is a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins spectacular victories and then retreats to its strongholds leaving the status quo little changed. Such a scenario is conceivable but is getting less and less likely as Isis consolidates its hold on its new conquests in an area that may soon stretch from Iran to the Mediterranean.

More here.

Colin Marshall in Open Culture:

War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich — many of us have felt the influence, to the good or the ill of our own reading and writing, of Leo Tolstoy. But whose influence did Leo Tolstoy feel the most? As luck would have it, we can give you chapter and verse on this, since the novelist drew up just such a list in 1891, which would have put him at age 63. A Russian publisher had asked 2,000 professors, scholars, artists, and men of letters, public figures, and other luminaries to name the books important to them, and Tolstoy responded with this list divided into five ages of man, with their actual degree of influence (“enormous,” “v. great,” or merely “great”) noted. It comes as something of a rarity, up to now only available transcribed in a post at Northampton, Massachusetts’ Valley Advocate:

WORKS WHICH MADE AN IMPRESSION

Childhood to the age of 14 or so

The story of Joseph from the Bible – Enormous

Tales from The Thousand and One Nights: the 40 Thieves, Prince Qam-al-Zaman – Great

The Little Black Hen by Pogorelsky – V. great

Russian byliny: Dobrynya Nikitich, Ilya Muromets, Alyosha Popovich. Folk Tales – Enormous

Puskin’s poems: Napoleon – Great

Age 14 to 20

Matthew’s Gospel: Sermon on the Mount – Enormous

Sterne’s Sentimental Journey – V. great

Rousseau Confessions – Enormous

Emile – Enormous

Nouvelle Héloise – V. great

Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin – V. great

More here.

Hillel Italie in Dawn:

In the summer of 1914, with the war in Europe just two weeks old, Henry James knew that something had been lost forever.

“Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers, and I’m sick beyond cure to have lived on to see it,” the American author, an expatriate in London at the time, wrote to a friend. “You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. … It seems to me to undo everything, everything that was ours, in the most horrible retroactive way.”

James died in 1916, two years before the armistice was declared between the allies and the Germans, and the wreckage of World War I was beyond even his imagination. Millions were dead, empires dissolved, centuries-old beliefs upended. Many survivors wondered how the world had been caught up in a war fought not for any identifiable cause, but because no one knew how to stop it.

Prolonged conflicts destroy the worlds they were born in, and few did so as thoroughly and as terribly as World War I, which began 100 years ago this month. Among writers, World War I changed both the stories they told and how they told them. Artists in general left behind an extraordinary legacy of painting, music, literature and film and many of the defining achievements of a movement, Modernism, that challenged our very identities and raised questions still being asked today.

More here. [Thanks to Muneeza Shamsie.]

George Scialabba in The Baffler:

Alexander Cockburn

We Sicilians are connoisseurs of malevolence. So I approached Paul Berman’s hatchet job on Alexander Cockburn (The New Republic, August 1) with an alacrity tempered only by my apprehension that Berman wasn’t quite up to the job. His previous attempts at character assassination (Noam Chomsky, Ian Buruma) had been disappointing: shrill, inaccurate, marred by too-obvious rancor and wounded vanity. Cockburn, in the shape of his final collection, A Colossal Wreck, seemed a perfect target: lethally sharp-tongued and infuriatingly charming while alive but now conveniently dead. I feared, though, that Berman would muff it.

From the technical point of view, he turned in a creditable performance this time. Berman (or his editor) managed to leaven his usual portentous and overwrought style—as though the intellectual honor of the age had been entrusted to his keeping—with a few dashes of wit and sly malice. Cockburn was an “eccentric British journalist,” a “famously insolent … old rogue,” who could nevertheless be “wonderfully charming,” with his “odd and clever combination of English literary self-satisfaction and outrageous raillery.” With an “air of bookish sophistication,” he was always dropping authors’ names (“Browning and Conrad and Trollope”) and quotations into his columns, though of course it was just a veneer, as was his insular New Left Review Marxism, at least when compared with the grittier, more rooted democratic socialism of Michael Harrington and Irving Howe. A glib and supercilious Euroscoundrel, in other words, unlike the high-minded, erudite Berman, the plodding but salt-of-the-earth working-class types over at Dissent, and the cold-eyed tragic realists of The New Republic.

More here.

Kamil Ahsan in Jacobin:

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove introduced the character of Gen. Jack D. Ripper, an intensely neurotic, paranoid man who insisted that water fluoridation was a Communist plot hatched against Americans. Ripper was unhinged, of course. But he was also the fictional personification of a real popular anxiety over fluoride’s medicinal benefits.

History is not kind to characters who resist scientific progress: they are consistently painted as inflexible troglodytes. Today, fluoridation sits neatly alongside electrification and other advances, triumphs of the march of technological improvement despite the opposition of a supposedly anti-science public. This is, at least, how the scientific establishment tends to tell it. To them, any criticism of this historical narrative is tantamount to wholesale opposition to science.

This is absurd. There is, of course, no merit to anti-fluoridation quackery. Neither is it correct, contrary to anti-science conservatives, that the scientific community has made a Faustian bargain to keep man-made global warming on the agenda. Similarly, it is unfortunate that after decades of biological discoveries, a third of the American public rejects evolution entirely.

But it is astonishing when defenders of science lump together global-warming-denying conservatives, anti-GMO activists, and grassroots environmental activists, treating each as disturbingly anti-science. This simplistic analysis is rooted in the arrogant assumption that science is somehow above criticism — indeed, that it’s above politics entirely.

More here.

Iris Wants to Learn to Float

Her hair knows already, freed
to its red vegetable self. Gravity dampened,
I hold her as I could her first year—
in two palms. Tell me how.

She’s willing to lean back, stare through yards of humid
space. Willing to become still. I say pretend
the water is your bed, but that’s not right.

Outside tall windows, the 21 bus courses by,
lit up. A walking woman’s grey hijaab billows
and snaps. Two boys in down jackets, hands
in pockets. Branches bend, unbend.

The surface a fine chain around my shoulders.
What are the words?

We are the saint’s saliva in a reliquary vial. I can believe
we are held here, carried along.

Think of music. Relax your legs.

What does relax mean?

Like a cooked noodle. Her body lightens,

heavies back. I tap her up, slow upside-down bounce
against the beginning of air.

Briefly, pigeons clutter past, flash
of silver bellies as they turn.

Each lift longer.

And how to say
be. And how to say
float. How to say every
body floats differently. Feel
where you must hold yourself.
.

Carolyn Williams-Noren
from The Baltimore Review, Summer, 2014

Peter Lopatin in The Weekly Standard:

Damon Galgut in The Guardian:

Most writers battle with periods of being blocked; it's almost an occupational hazard. But in the writing of his last and greatest novel, A Passage to India, EM Forster got stuck for nine years. Now that is unusual. The book took him 11 years in total to complete, which means the actual physical work – setting the words down on the page – lasted two years. All the rest was hesitation. What tripped him up so badly? We may never know. There were two areas of his life, physical intimacy and writing, which Forster kept highly private. For the rest, his diaries and letters are full of self-examination, giving the impression of somebody free with his emotions. But he shared his sexual secrets with very few people, and in his journals he usually recorded such matters in a very oblique way. His writing he hardly mentions at all. At the time that he embarked on A Passage, Forster was at a curious point in his creative life. All of his other published novels were written in a flurry between 1905 and 1910. He had published some short stories too, but there are strong indications that his novelistic impulses were running dry. He had started a new one, which he called “Arctic Summer”, in 1911, but it had already stalled before he set out on his first visit to India and it would never be completed.

His motive for going to India was to see Syed Ross Masood, a young Indian man whom he'd befriended in 1906 and with whom he was deeply in love. The affection was lopsided: Forster had twice declared his feelings, but Masood was straight and couldn't reciprocate. Nevertheless, the two men were close, and when Masood completed his legal studies and returned to India, Forster followed a few months later.

More here.

From The Philosophers' Mail:

At the moment, food is highly prestigious. A vast amount of attention is paid to celebrity chefs, dietary advice, new restaurants and cooking shows. We have, it seems, become collectively obsessed with what we eat.

But the question of what we need from food, other than just physical sustenance, is rarely taken up. The issue sounds a bit weird. And yet food is evidently not just ‘fuel’. It offers help with certain of our psychological needs. It has, if you like, therapeutic potential.

That’s because every kind of food not only has nutritional value (the sort you’ll see on the label), it also carries with it what one might term a psychological value. The value emerges from its character. Every food hints at a personality, an orientation, a way of apprehending the world, who it would be if it was magically turned into a person. You could ascribe to it a gender, an outlook, a spirit, even a political dimension.

Take the lemon. Nutritionally-speaking, it has 29 calories per 100g, 2.8g dietary fibre, 2.5g of sugar and so on. But psychologically-speaking, it has also ‘ingredients’. It is a fruit that ‘speaks’ (quietly but eloquently) of such things as: the south, the sun, the upstanding and the hopeful, the morning and the simple. It suggests calls to action, it wants us to brace ourselves to take on what matters and focus on what we know we have to do. It is against sentimentality: it is brutally honest, but kind. Or take the hazelnut. Again, full of nutritional value, but at the same time a receptacle of such things as: autumnal briskness, maturity, soberness, self-sufficiency and an almost childlike neatness (like a 10-year-old who keeps his drawers tidy…).

More here.

Jarett Kobek in NYU Magazine (via Hussein Ibish):

Like Iraq’s other minorities, the Yezidi are exactly the kind of people for whom the ideal of Operation Iraqi Freedom held the most promise—a group long persecuted for their religious beliefs welcomed into the fabric of a newly “pluralistic” society. Reality has worked out differently. In the seven years since the American-led invasion, the Yezidi have suffered relentless violence and are presently caught in the middle of territorial disputes between the central Iraqi government and Northern Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government. The Kurdish director of Yezidi affairs told The New York Times in 2007 that of a population estimated between 200,000 and 500,000, more than 70,000 have fled into exile. “It’s very grim,” said Samer Muscati, co-author of the Human Rights Watch’sOn Vulnerable Ground, a recent report on minority communities in Iraq. “If the pressures they face continue and the Yezidi keep fleeing the country, the future looks bleak.”

My father is a Turkish Muslim turned New Ager. My mother is Irish-American and raised me Catholic. This upbringing left me fascinated by those who elude easy categorization. So when I read about the Yezidi—whose practices resemble a spiritual pastiche with traces of Sufism, the mystical strain of Islam, as well as the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism and Kurdish folk belief—I was rapt. Yezidism holds that God created seven angels, chief among them Melek Ta’us, the Peacock Angel, who in turn created the world and is the source of all beauty and good.

But for almost as long as there have been Yezidi, their culture has been misinterpreted by neighboring Muslims, who identify Melek Ta’us as Iblis, the Islamic Satan. Muslims believe the Yezidi worship the devil.

More here.

Matt Sheedy in Religion Bulletin:

Rosamund Bartlett at the Financial Times:

At the beginning of the 20th century, there were more people reading Tolstoy in translation than any other writer. That this was an extraordinary phenomenon becomes clear from reading an unsigned review of 13 new volumes of Tolstoy translations published in Britain’s liveliest literary periodical, the Saturday Review, in 1905. “Twenty years ago Tolstoy was hardly known outside Russia”, it begins. “We remember mentioning his existence to an American novelist of first rank, a great admirer of Turgenev, who did not seem inclined to believe that people would soon come to recognise the greater power of Tolstoy. Who has not heard of Tolstoy now?”

The novelist in question is undoubtedly Henry James, a friend and well-known admirer of Ivan Turgenev, the first leading Russian writer to be widely translated and recognised abroad. The critic is almost certainly James’s protégé HG Wells, one of a number of brilliant young writers drafted in to shake up the Saturday Review by its new editor in the 1890s. A year after this review was published, Wells would write Tolstoy a fan letter, telling him he had read everything by him he could find in English, about 18 volumes, and that, in his opinion, of all the works he had had the fortune to read, War and Peace and Anna Karenina were the “most magnificent and all-encompassing”.

more here.

David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

Haruki Murakami's “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” begins with a simple premise: A Tokyo railroad engineer, the Tsukuru Tazaki of the novel's title, unable to get over the summer of his sophomore year in college, when for no reason he can determine he was cut off by his close-knit group of high school friends. This unit of five was once inseparable; “We had several unspoken rules,” he explains, “one of them being As much as we possibly can, we do things together, all five of us.”

The betrayal sends Tsukuru into a spiral. “It was as if,” Murakami writes, “he were sleepwalking through life, as if he had already died but not yet noticed it.” It's a condition that lingers into adulthood. “Though he lacked a striking personality,” the author continues, “or any qualities that made him stand out, and despite always aiming for what was average, the middle of the road, there was (or seemed to be) something about him that wasn't exactly normal, something that set him apart. And this contradiction continued to perplex and confuse him, from his boyhood all the way to the present, when he was thirty-six years old.”

more here.

Vivian Gornick at the New York Times:

Freud was stunned by the stories people invent in describing their childhoods. In time he would become absorbed in showing us “how ingenious we are at not knowing ourselves, and how knowing ourselves . . . has become the problem rather than the solution.”

The discovery of and exploration of the unconscious was the central drama of Freud’s life, the one thing he kept passionate faith with throughout private and professional vicissitudes. It was through attention to the unconscious that he made his major discoveries, the most important being that from birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; hunger for sexual pleasure, dread sexual pleasure; hate our own aggressions — our anger, our cruelty, our humiliations — yet these are derived from the grievances we are least willing to part with. The hope of achieving an integrated self is a vain one as we are equally divided about our own suffering; we do in fact love it and want — nay, intend — never to relinquish it. What Freud found most difficult to cure in his patients, Phillips tells us, “was their (mostly unconscious) wish not to be cured.”

more here.

The Fall of Rome

The piers are pummelled by the waves; In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves.  Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns.  Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep An imaginary friend.  Cerebrotonic Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines, But the muscle-bound Marines Mutiny for food and pay.  Caesar’s double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form.  Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city.  Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

by W.H. Auden
from Another Time
Random House, 1940