It’s beautiful in Sicily in the spring when
the lemon trees are in bloom

I’m writing because I attended
your concert, it was the sixteenth
of September. You played Prokofiev, and
it’s strange about music: you return
to places that don’t exist. Two questions
keep me busy. One has to do with
conditions and destiny. The other has to do with
Procris. That it occurred to her to run into the forest.
That she couldn’t trust her mate! I visited a
museum of Renaissance painting and then, everywhere,
in the streets, in subways, I saw: light, silky blue and that
special tenderness. In everyone! In the animals! I teach at a
high school here. It’s beautiful in Sicily in the spring when
the lemon trees are in bloom. Perhaps you prefer to travel
according to your own plans but I wanted to ask because music
restores us, and a cloud drifts in through the window into
my apartment as the clouds sweep by every
morning over the park where I walk.
.

by Tua Forsström
from Etter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar
publisher: Söderström Förlags, Helsinki, 1998
translation: 2009, Stina Katchadourian
.
Procris

John Bertram interview “graphic designer/creative director John Gall for the upcoming book that I co-edited with Yuri Leving entitled Lolita – The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design being published this month by Print Books,” in The Millions.

JB: Peter Mendelsund eloquently writes in “Fictions”: “in attempting to sell a book, designers must, not always, but sometimes, pander to…a public which can on occasion lack the interpretive subtlety to parse literary subtext — i.e., if the general reading public expects a schoolgirl or schoolgirl uniform on a Lolita jacket, then book buyers and booksellers will also be expecting a schoolgirl or schoolgirl uniform on a Lolita jacket; and one can then reasonably assume that marketing departments in publishing houses will want them as well. In the end, going backward, upriver towards its source, even editors begin to take their cues from misinformed readers at large.” That certainly covers a multitude of sins. What do you think?

JG: Peter is spot on about this, though it is a fine line between pandering and communicating. I am trying to connect to as many people as possible with a cover. How do you do that without dumbing things down? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had covers shot down because they are too “smart” or too clever, or worse “I don’t get it.” It can be seen as a liability. You won’t reach the people who don’t want to think for more than a second about what they are looking at.

I think a more interesting question might be: Why do people expect a schoolgirl or schoolgirl uniform or a girl in sunglasses with a lollipop? Is it all Kubrick’s fault? It wasn’t always marketing departments and editors forcing this issue. This stuff originated at the source.

Lolita is not only a book but also a cultural touchstone, and it carries a lot of baggage. There is so much visual reference associated with this book. There have been hundreds of covers. These schoolgirl uniforms and lollipops are all part of the visual language attached to the book. This has to be dealt with in some way. The visuals associated with the book are probably better known than the book itself.

For my very first attempt at designing the cover for Lolita, I attempted a typographic solution. After this was shot down, I made the decision to see if there was a way to reinterpret the iconography.

Joshua Hersh in The New Yorker:

Aboul-Ghar’s reputation in pro-democracy politics is well earned. In 2004, during the era of Hosni Mubarak, Aboul-Ghar co-founded the March 9th organization, a group of professors who bravely fought against the interference of state-security services into the operations of Egypt’s universities. In the run up to the 2011 revolution, he was an organizer and spokesman for the National Association for Change, an anti-authoritarian organization led by Mohammed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize Winner and Egypt’s most prominent liberal politician. And after Mubarak finally fell, he helped create what many viewed as the most substantial political party for liberals, the Social Democratic Party. That fall, as a temporary military regime ruled Egypt, I had met with Aboul-Ghar, who happily assured me that the military would soon be leaving the management of the country to civilians. “My feeling is that the military wants to have a safe retreat,” he said then. “A safe retreat and all their previous privileges.”

Over at Philosophy Bites, Michael Martin on Hume's essay:

In his darkest and most desolate years in Recanati, above all between 1819 and 1823, Leopardi held on to his sanity by filling his notebooks with carefully considered entries on a wide range of topics. The Zibaldone is not a personal diary. One does not find in its pages a howling heart, nor an outpouring of pain, grief and despair (Leopardi reserved that for his poetry). One finds instead a lucid mind thinking aloud by way of an ongoing conversation with the dead, above all the many ancient authors who stacked the family library. Apart from the thoughts that make up what Leopardi calls his “system” – by which he means his philosophy of life, history, nature and the human psyche – the Zibaldone is filled with philologically oriented notes that will bewilder contemporary readers who know nothing of the more obscure works he was in dialogue with. Yet even its most recondite entries vibrate with a distinctly modern voice. It is the voice of quick, free-ranging, syncopated thinking. No matter how eloquent it becomes at times – and no one in the history of Italian prose was more eloquent than Leopardi when he put his mind to it – the style never grandstands, nor does the tone ever turn shrill, as it often does in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, or, for that matter, Emerson.

more from Robert Pogue Harrison at the FT here.

Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, a series of essays loosely about story­telling, has a table of contents that sits on the page like a mountain tipped on its side. The essays’ titles mirror or refract one another, imparting symmetry. The summit, a chapter titled “Knot,” evokes another of the book’s metaphors, the bringing together of narrative threads. The tipped mountain shape resembles the traditional rise and fall of story structure. But this isn’t the only visual conceit. “Imagine all the sentences in this book as a single thread around the spool that is a book,” Solnit writes. You needn’t imagine it, though: One unspooled essay runs like a news ticker along the base of every page. Shape as a preoccupation makes sense in a book about storytelling. Shapes and lines create order out of chaos, or at least highlight possible orderly paths through it. Solnit’s personal “story of sorts” brings together episodes from a difficult year in her life, one that included a breakup, a brush with her own mortality, and her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s.

more from Robin Romm at the NY Times here.

Early in Jeff Guinn’s “Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson,” the first full biography of the infamous mass killer, there’s a moment of unexpected and discomforting empathy. It’s 1939, and Manson — 5 years old, living with relatives in West Virginia while his mother is in state prison for armed robbery — has embarrassed himself by crying in a first-grade class. To toughen him up, his uncle takes one of his daughter’s dresses and orders the boy to wear it to school. “Maybe his mother and Uncle Luther were bad influences,” Guinn writes, “but Charlie could benefit from Uncle Bill’s intercession. It didn’t matter what some teacher had done to make him cry; what was important was to do something drastic that would convince Charlie never to act like a sissy again.” That’s a key moment in “Manson” — both for what it does and for what it cannot do. On the one hand, it opens up our sense of Guinn’s subject, establishing him in a single brush stroke as more than just a monster, as a broken human being. On the other, it ends so quickly, without revealing what happened once he got to class, that it never achieves the necessary resonance.

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

From The Paris Review:

One Friday evening in March, I took the train to Columbia University and walked into one of the strangest and most interesting classes I’d ever seen. It was the Laboratory of Literary Architecture, part of the Mellon Visiting Artists and Thinkers Program at Columbia University School of the Arts, and a multimedia workshop in which writing students, quite literally, create architectural models of literary texts. For the past four years, Matteo Pericoli has led the workshop at the Turin-based Scuola Holden creative writing school, and this year, he brought the concept to New York. While the idea seems intuitive enough—each student chooses a text he or she knows inside out, and then builds it—the challenges arise in interpretation. “A text you love is not, necessarily, the best for this project,” said Pericoli. He adds that it is crucial that students work from another author’s text, rather than their own, to facilitate the true objectivity necessary.

…To the Lighthouse bears no resemblance to an English country house by the sea, but rather becomes a structure that centers around a vacancy: that of the mother. The exercise demands both serious imagination and intense discipline—qualities essential to the disciplines of both writing and architecture but presented as dauntingly unfamiliar challenges that both force participants out of their comfort zones, and ultimately create new ones: different, yes, from the initial familiar comfort of a beloved text, but functional and fascinating all the same.

More here.

Rahul Bhattacharya in The New York Times:

For two months in spring, the Indian Premier League is watched more than anything else on Indian television. Test cricket is played between nations over five days, without guarantee of a winner. I.P.L. matches last three hours and are played between Indian teams owned by businessmen and movie stars. Results are guaranteed. There have been unforgettable moments. Five years ago, one player slapped another as they left the field. The slapped player was arrested in May and accused of fixing I.P.L. matches. Also arrested was the son-in-law of the cricket board president, who owns a team, on suspicion of gambling on matches. His accomplice was thought to be a C-list actor, who once won the Indian version of “Big Brother.” Tamasha, the Hindi word for “spectacle,” begins to describe it.

…“The Great Tamasha” is a series of excursions into a cricket-fixated society. For four years Astill, a descendant of a cricketer who played for England in the 1920s, was stationed in New Delhi as the South Asia bureau chief of The Economist. He devotes much of the book to recounting how Indian cricket went from colonial recreation to national addiction, and while treading this familiar ground, the narrative lacks the propulsion of discovery. The sport’s interactions with race, nationalism, religion and caste, for example, have been treated with greater depth and nuance in Ramachandra Guha’s extraordinary social history “A Corner of a Foreign Field.”

More here.

Tom Gallagher review Nick Turse's Kill Anything that Moves, in the LA Review of Books:

[N]o one came away from the war unfamiliar with the killing of Vietnamese civilians, if only due to the public exposure of the March 15, 1968 My Lai massacre, where American troops murdered an entire village of 300–500 unarmed South Vietnamese, in addition to raping civilians, killing their livestock, mutilating corpses, burning down houses, and fouling drinking water. (In the official record, the Americans recorded killing 128 enemy troops and suffering no casualties.) But where My Lai, Turse writes, “has entered the popular American consciousness as an exceptional, one-of-a-kind event,” his investigation caused him to see “the indiscriminate killing of South Vietnamese noncombatants” as “neither accidental nor unforeseeable.”

For Turse, a journalist and the author of a previous book on the military industrial complex’s impact on daily life, the first glimmer of understanding came in 2001 when, as a graduate student researching post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans, he happened upon the records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. This was “a secret Pentagon task force that had,” he writes, “been assembled after the My Lai massacre to ensure that the army would never again be caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal.” The papers “documented a nightmare war that is essentially missing from our understanding of the Vietnam conflict.”

In this book, the devil is truly in the details. There were, for instance, the military units placed in kill-count competition so that, one soldier recalled, “as you passed through the chow line you were able to look up at a chart and see that we had killed so many.” How to decide if a corpse was Viet Cong, and thus merited a chow line check mark? As the saying went, “If it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese, it’s VC.”

Ian Leslie in Aeon Magazine:

[W]hat if the problem isn't Facebook’s privacy settings, but our own?

Afew years ago George Loewenstein, professor of behavioural economics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, set out to investigate how people think about the consequences of their privacy choices on the internet. He soon concluded that they don't.

In one study, Loewenstein and his collaborators asked two groups of students to fill out an online survey about their lives. Everyone received the same questions, ranging from the innocuous to the embarrassing or potentially incriminating. One group was presented with an official-looking website that bore the imprimatur of their university, and were assured that their answers would remain anonymous. The other group filled out the questions on a garishly coloured website on which the question ‘How BAD Are U???’ was accompanied by a grinning devil. It featured no assurance of anonymity.

Bizarrely, the ‘How BAD Are U???’ website was much more likely to elicit revealing confessions, like whether a student had copied someone else’s homework or tried cocaine. The first set of respondents reacted cautiously to the institutional feel of the first website and its obscurely concerning assurances about anonymity. The second group fell under the sway of the perennial youthful imperative to be cool, and opened up, in a way that could have got them into serious trouble in the real world. The students were using their instincts about privacy, and their instincts proved to be deeply wayward. ‘Thinking about online privacy doesn’t come naturally to us,’ Loewenstein told me when I spoke to him on the phone. ‘Nothing in our evolution or culture has equipped us to deal with it.’

Noah Feldman in Newsday:

In case you still thought Egypt's coup was leading to democracy, the violent destruction of Muslim Brotherhood protest camps and the appointment of 19 generals as provincial governors — occurring more or less simultaneously — should cure you of that appealing fantasy.

When generals come to power, even if they are initially motivated by the ideal of restoring democracy, the attraction of remaining in power for as long as it takes to establish a military order tends to be decisive. When a regime that generals have deposed was democratically elected, as it was in Egypt, the odds of restoration are even more remote.

Western democrats want to love the Egyptian liberals who bravely helped bring down Hosni Mubarak and then misguidedly followed the same playbook to sink the legitimately elected Mohamed Mursi. But the emerging reality poses a puzzle about those Egyptian liberals and their country's future: Why in the world did thoughtful believers in democracy think that it was a good idea to stage protests that would invite the army to take out Mursi? And what, if anything, can be done now to get democracy back on track in Egypt?

More here. [Thanks to Vali Nasr.]

For all their playfulness, the original ornamental hermits were not a joke. Rather, we enact our personal and societal dramas in the gardens we create, and Georgian hermits (or their spectres) were acting out their century’s preoccupation with Nature and with the great philosophical and scientific questions of the Enlightenment. Campbell’s train-spotting approach at times obscures such deeper meanings. A simpler format might have served him better, with thematic chapters followed by a gazetteer of hermits and hermitages in the style of Barbara Jones’s magisterial Follies & Grottoes (1953), which Campbell acknowledges as one of his reference sources. This is altogether a smaller book, in ambition and execution, but commendable nonetheless for Campbell’s dogged enthusiasm in assembling the first work devoted solely to ornamental hermits and their habitations, copiously illustrated with grainy black and white photographs (many the author’s own), and a handful of colour plates. I would have liked more on Thomas Wright, who straddled the worlds of astronomy, mathematics and garden design, and who might have better illuminated the shift from emblematic architectural fantasies in the style of William Kent to the blander, Edenic landscapes favoured by Lancelot “Capability” Brown, swept clean of such follies, which nonetheless crept back with the Picturesque landscapers and designers such as Humphry Repton. How garden fashions ebbed and flowed throughout the Georgian age is left to the reader to piece together.

more from Jennifer Potter at the TLS here.

There is a valuable, vital debate to be had over how much the federal government, in its intelligence programs, ought to be permitted to violate Americans’ privacy in an effort to protect Americans from a dangerous world that includes people who want to kill Americans. There are many different places where the important red lines can be drawn in this debate. It is a debate strewn with well-intentioned, conscientious people who would draw those lines at very different places. Let’s even be generous and stipulate that the question of whether the statutorily provided oversight of these programs is sufficient belongs, as well, to that debate. The terrifying thing is that we are not having that debate. As these documents are the latest things to demonstrate, the various overseers as well as the public do not have access to the information that even the current rules assert they should have. That is how I can state with certainty that we are not having that vital debate: We do not have the means to have that debate with any kind of authority; therefore, no matter how much we discuss these issues, we are not having that debate.

more from Marc Tracy at the New Republic here.

Today marks the 16th death anniversary of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

From Dawn:

Khan brought to the world audience Qawwali, a form of music performed at the shrines of the Sufis of South Asia for centuries. Qawwali has a system of progression of its own when it is performed with an intricate link to rituals which help transform the experience of listeners.

The San Francisco label Six Degrees, that released the Qawwali legend’s dub-laced collaboration with London producer-composer Gaudi in 2007, says of the legend,

Dubbed by many as the “Elvis of the East” and the “Bob Marley of Pakistan” these titles are not without foundation. Some have claimed he has sold more albums than Elvis, and he has reached as many hearts and souls and crossed as many cultural and spiritual boarders as Bob Marley with his unique mix of poetic eastern spiritual and western musical themes.

Khan was one of the rare performers of an ancient musical tradition refined with delicate elements of generations of Qawwals through centuries. Taking the universality of its devotional appeal, he fused it into a style that was flexible enough to be adopted by an international audience.

He teamed with Peter Gabriel on the soundtrack to ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ in 1985, and with Canadian musician Michael Brook on the albums 'Mustt Mustt' (1990) and 'Night Song' (1996) and with Pearl Jam lead singer, Eddie Vedder in 1995 on two songs for the soundtrack to Dead Man Walking.

Peter Gabriel said at the time of Nusrat’s passing:

I have never heard so much spirit in a voice. Nusrat was a supreme example of how far and deep a voice can go in finding, touching and moving the soul.

Khan also contributed to the soundtrack of 'Natural Born Killers'.

More here.

Laura Agustín in Jacobin:

I explained my skepticism about prostitution law at length in an academic article, Sex and the Limits of Enlightenment: The Irrationality of Legal Regimes to Control Prostitution. All prostitution laws are conceived as methods to control women who, before ideas of victimhood took hold, were understood to be powerful, dangerous figures associated with rebellion, revolt, carnival, the world upside down, spiritual power and calculated wrongdoing. Conversations about prostitution law, no matter where they take place, argue about how to manage the women: Is it better to permit them to work out of doors or limit them to closed spaces? How many lap-dancing venues should get licenses and where should they be located? In brothels, how often should women be examined for sexually transmitted infections? The rhetoric of helping and saving that surrounds laws accedes with state efforts to control and punish; the first stop for women picked up in raids on brothels or rescues of trafficking victims is a police station. Prostitution law generalizes from worst-case scenarios, which leads directly to police abuse against the majority of cases, which are not so dire.

In theory, under prohibitionism prostitutes are arrested, fined, jailed. Under abolitionism, which permits the selling of sex, a farrago of laws, by-laws and regulations give police a myriad of pretexts for harrying sex workers. Regulationism, which wants to assuage social conflict by legalizing some sex-work forms, constructs non-regulated forms as illegal (and rarely grants labor rights to workers). But eccentricities abound everywhere, making a mockery of these theoretical laws. Even Japan’s wide-open, permissive sex industry prohibits “prostitution” defined as coital sex. And in recent years a hybrid law has arisen that makes paying for sex illegal while selling is permitted. Yes, it’s illogical. But the contradiction is not pointless; it is there because the goal of the law is to make prostitution disappear by debilitating the market through absurd ignorance of how sex businesses work.