From The New York Times:
Lung cancer? Cigarettes. Heart attack? Out of shape. Maintaining the fantasy of this-then-that gives us at least the satisfaction of appearing to control our destiny, when clearly we do not and cannot. Without this small delusion, we’re just floating along like other hapless animals, wishing and hoping that maybe something good will drift our way. The Lotto life.
More here.
“This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war.
This is a spiritual war.”
……………… —US Presidential Candidate Rick Santorum
Die Brücke
They must have turned a few stolid German
heads in the years before the war, out to
overturn the dinner table,
bellow in the library and race around
the altar, kids playing savage, their
idea of it anyway, the id
unbridled, hands turned to thrash and
burn with primal tools, gouged wood
releasing unseen spirits, tossing them
off like two minute garage hits pressed onto
paper, burning the inked blocks to heat
their cold Dresden studio leaving
only to take in the tingle-tangle
and meet girls, that timeless rationale
of tortured artists everywhere, a
blitzkrieg bookended by the
Manifesto and Chronik der Brücke,
a short jagged run worn smooth
scoured by war, gouged away by a new
breed of savage in crisp brown shirts, ranks
in lockstep, preaching purity, wielding fire.
.
by Dave Hardin
publisher: Scrum
Mr. [Narendra] Modi’s rise is a consequence of two horrific events, which occurred in Gujarat months after he was appointed chief minister of the state.
On Feb. 27, 2002, almost 60 people, most of them Hindu pilgrims, were burned alive in a train compartment near the town of Godhra. Various investigations into the event came up with conflicting conclusions as if to suit every ideology and associated theories.
Secular Indians, whom Mr. Modi sometimes refers to as “pseudo-secularists,” wanted to believe a report that determined that the fire was a tragic accident. Others wanted to believe the reports that said a Muslim mob had planned the attack and set the train on fire, a line that Mr. Modi took in the aftermath of the incident. Last year, a special court convicted several people of murder and sentenced them to death or to life in prison.
In the days that followed the burning of the coach, riots broke out in Gujarat that left hundreds dead, most of them Muslims. As the massacre continued, journalists, activists and several senior police officers in Gujarat who spoke to the news media on the condition of anonymity said that Mr. Modi’s government was complicit in the violence. Mr. Modi, for his part, asserted that the violence was “a spontaneous reaction of the Hindus.”
While reporting from Gujarat on the aftermath of the riots, I stumbled upon the fact that a senior minister in Mr. Modi’s cabinet, Haren Pandya, had testified in a shroud of secrecy before a tribunal that was investigating the cause of the riots. When I approached Mr. Pandya about this, he told me that he had told the tribunal that on the night of Feb. 27, Mr. Modi held a meeting with senior police officers and bureaucrats during which he is alleged to have instructed the police to allow the mobs to vent their anger on Muslims. It is a charge that Mr. Modi has consistently denied.
One of Yale’s first female professors, Marcus helped carve a place for women in academia, and her groundbreaking research in the philosophy of language, ethics, metaphysics and epistemology put her at the forefront of her field. To her students and colleagues, Marcus was an academic visionary and an inspirational mentor.
“She had a kind of personal integrity and intellectual integrity that just shone through,” said Don Garrett GRD ’79, chair of New York University’s department of philosophy and one of Marcus’ former students. “People sometimes found her intellectually intimidating, but anyone who knew her knew that she was a very dear person with a very clear mind — the most logical of philosophers and philosophical of logicians.”
Marcus began her revolutionary work in modal logic during the late 1940s when she developed the Barcan formula, which developed the use of quantifiers in the field. Though Marcus initially came under fire for her radical ideas, she continued her research and eventually drew scholarly recognition and acceptance for her work, her colleagues said.
Born in New York City in 1921, Marcus grew up in the Bronx and went on to attend NYU, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy in 1941. Five years later, she earned a doctorate in philosophy from Yale. In 1959, Marcus took her first teaching post as a part-time professor of philosophy at Roosevelt University in Illinois, where she worked until becoming head of the philosophy department at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1964. Marcus returned to Yale in 1973 as a professor of philosophy and taught in the department until her retirement in 1992.
As a professor, Marcus was known for her toughness, but also for her open and supportive attitude.
While former students said they initially found her intimidating, they added that they quickly recognized Marcus’ warm, generous and funny personality. Former students also described Marcus as an excellent mentor — particularly to women entering academia — and many said she inspired them to pursue careers in philosophy.
When Vladimir Nabokov started teaching Russian literature at Wellesley College in 1944, he was frustrated by the lack of an adequate literal translation of Eugene Onegin, which he referred to as “the first and fundamental Russian novel.” He prepared his own extracts for class use and invited Edmund Wilson to work with him on a full translation. Wilson had nurtured Nabokov’s early career in the States, and Nabokov had reciprocated with many generous hours of patient tutorial—often via letter—on the finer points of Russian literature, history, politics, and scansion. The two had grown to be great friends but never collaborated on a full-length work. The 1964 publication of Nabokov’s solo translation of Onegin effectively ended their friendship and sparked one of the best-known intellectual debates of the last century. The project began promisingly enough for Nabokov, though Wilson had misgivings from the get-go. When Nabokov first decided to prepare a prose translation of Onegin, “with notes giving associations and other explanations for every line,” Wilson and Nabokov had been exchanging letters about Russian poetics for a decade, often with barely masked stridency on both sides.
more from Sarah Funke Butler at Paris Review here.
Who is the greatest novelist called Roth? Philip and Henry both have their claims, but the one who will still be read in centuries to come is not an American but a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Joseph Roth. The name – pronounced ‘rote’ in German – means ‘red’, and that is appropriate, for Roth was a lifelong socialist. But he was also an ardent monarchist, long after the demise of the House of Habsburg. Roth’s life was a losing struggle with authority, money and drink. But he wrote like a recording angel, setting down his recollections of ‘the world of yesterday’, as his friend Stefan Zweig called the Vienna of the haute bourgeoisie: a world that embraced the remotest regions of the realm. For Roth, a native of Galicia, the old emperor was a sacral father-substitute and his empire ‘a kind of relic’. His greatest novel, The Radetzky March, is an elegy to this paradise lost. The facts of Roth’s life are by no means straightforward, for he reinvented himself in later life in order to lend plausibility to his monarchist leanings. In one 1932 letter to the author of a flattering review, for instance, he claims that in the First World War he was commissioned as a lieutenant in a prestigious regiment and was decorated for valour three times. To those on the Left whom he wished to impress, he boasted that he had been taken prisoner by the Russians and escaped, changing sides after the Revolution and fighting for the Red Army.
more from Daniel Johnson at Literary Review here.
One thing in these films, though, is rarely confusing. Despite the gore, the manipulative music, the pre-kill mouth-breathing, the ominous whisper-creep—or, a lot of the time, because of them—these movies are fun to watch. They are also, often, funny. In Susan Sontag’s treatise “Notes on ‘Camp,’” she defines camp as “a certain mode of aestheticism” that acknowledges, in campy objects and artifacts, “a large element of artifice,” exaggeration, or outlandishness. She goes on to make a valuable distinction between “naive and deliberate camp”: the former “rests on innocence” and ventures “a seriousness that fails,” while the latter is “wholly conscious” of itself as camp, can be said to be “camping” or trying on camp, and is usually, according to Sontag, “less satisfying.” A Nightmare on Elm Street is outwardly campy—the campiest of the five. It’s serious, yeah, but it’s also grotesque, in a silly, manic sort of way. Freddy’s a burn-unit case doing stand-up.
more from Adrian Van Young at The Believer here.
Adam Johnson’s latest novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, is one of those rare works of high ambition that follow through on all of its promises. Set in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it examines both the Orwellian horrors of life in the DPRK and the voyeurism of Western media. North Korea is a two-way mirror, a country in lockdown; we can see in, but they can’t see out. North Koreans’ isolation and reliance on shameless state propaganda for any understanding of the outside world, or even of their own country, create a culture of such outlandish misinformation that the Western media and its audience often respond with laughter. Incredulous, horrified, uncontrollable laughter, more indicative of disturbance and fear than amusement. As outsiders, spectators, we have no way to connect: There is either the black humor of a country where Kim Il-Sung created the world and Kim Jong-il controls the weather, or the tragedy of unrelenting state-perpetrated murders, where almost 1 percent of the population are sent to die in concentration camps. We see a case study in mass manipulation, or a crowd of faceless victims. Neither is conducive to true understanding.
All the more credit to Adam Johnson, then, for even attempting to set a novel in the DPRK. The Orphan Master’s Son is Johnson’s third work — he has published a book of short stories, Emporium, and a novel, Parasites Like Us — and he appears to be in his natural element of black dystopian humor. Johnson’s great strength lies in the bait-and-switch: He lures his readers in with comedy and then overwhelms us with the tragedy that underscores every joke. He makes unexamined caricatures human again. His novel is essential reading for its cynical, media-swamped audience; it is one of those rare vindications of fiction’s potential, its power to humanize the Other and light the way of empathy and understanding.
It is important to note that this is not A Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich; Johnson does not confine himself to grim realism, but instead races through North Korea at a breakneck speed, like a crazed tourist guide who won’t let you out of the car. His North Korean everyman, Jun Do (consideration of the similarities to the appellation “John Doe” is encouraged but not required) is propelled through a dizzying array of settings and identities, from North Korea to Texas, from an orphan to a state-manufactured national treasure. Our hero’s childhood is dispensed of in 10 pages. His entry into the army and training as a tunnel fighter occupies one paragraph, after which point he emerges, blinking in the light of day, to fulfill his duties as our unwitting guide to North Korea. Nor does The Orphan Master’s Son attempt to describe a representative sample of North Korean daily life; there is something else going on here.
Most of the literature on the EU, as noted in [The New Old World's] foreword, is highly technical, enjoying little currency among non-specialists; in addition much of it is so ideologically uniform as to stifle, rather than arouse, any interest in the variety of political conflicts and cultures across Europe. The result, reinforced by a widespread conformism of media opinion, remains a surprising intellectual parochialism—a lack of any genuinely European public sphere. This will only be remedied when political curiosity can cross national borders in a natural to-and-fro of the kind that marked the continent’s republic of letters in the time of Montesquieu or Hume, even that of Curtius or Benda, not to speak of its revolutionary versions in Trotsky or Gramsci. The aim of writing about the core countries of the Union, and its Eastern Question, on the plane where politics retains vastly greater popular meaning than in the rarefied machinery of Brussels, was to offer some reminder, however diminished, of this tradition.
To national introversion has corresponded, over the same period, continental self-satisfaction. This was the second target of The New Old World. If in the case of the first, the critical intention was performative, in that of the second it could hardly be more demonstrative. The book is a systematic attack on the European narcissism that reached a crescendo in these years: the claim that the Union offers a ‘paragon’—in the formula of the late Tony Judt, echoed by so many other pillars of European wisdom—of social and political development to humanity at large. Since 2010, the lacerations of the Eurozone have left their own cruel commentary on these vanities. But have they, for all that, disappeared? That it would be premature to think so can be seen from an august example. Jürgen Habermas has just published another book about the eu, now following Ach, Europa (2008) with Zur Verfassung Europas (2011). [2] Its centrepiece, an essay entitled ‘The Crisis of the European Union in the Light of a Constitutionalization of International Law’, is a remarkable illustration of the patterns of thought indicated. Some sixty pages in length, it contains around a hundred references. Three quarters of them are to German authors. Nearly half of these, in turn, are to three associates whom he thanks for assistance, or to himself. The residue is exclusively Anglo-American, dominated—a third of the entries—by a single British admirer, David Held of recent Gaddafi fame. No other European culture figures in this ingenuous exhibition of provincialism.
More arresting still is the theme of the essay. In 2008 Habermas had attacked the Lisbon Treaty for failing to make good the democratic deficit of the eu, or offer any moral-political horizon for it. The Treaty’s passage, he wrote, could only ‘cement the existing chasm between political elites and citizens’, without supplying any positive direction to Europe. Needed instead was a Europe-wide referendum to endow the Union with the social and fiscal harmonization, military capacity and—above all—directly elected Presidency that alone could save the continent from a future ‘settled along orthodox neo-liberal lines’. Noting how far from his traditional outlook was this enthusiasm for a democratic expression of popular will that he had never shown any sign of countenancing in his own country, [3] I commented that, once the Treaty was pushed through, Habermas would no doubt quietly pocket it after all.
Is Europe anything more than the remnants of a grand political delusion? Is there a cultural bond that unites the nations and peoples of this fragmented continent? From Max Weber to Norbert Elias, the greats of European intellectual history have described and re-described Europe as the birthplace of modernity; not, like the other continents, as the “heart of darkness”, but as the energetic centre of civilizing progress. Their attention has focused on the “grand narratives”: industrialization and economic productivity, state and nation building, science and art. Yet might not an examination from the other side – through an investigation of the marginal – provide essential insights into Europe's development over the longue dureé? Might not the history of the Roma, a group marginalized like none other, reveal a less auspicious aspect of Europe's grand narrative of modernity?
The tendency of existing research to treat the Roma as having first entered European political history with the Nazi genocide disregards a unique six-hundred-year history. It is indeed the case that the Roma, who over long periods of time lived nomadically and possessed no written culture of their own, have left almost no historical accounts of themselves. The heritage and documents therefore do not permit a history of the Roma comparable to that, for example, of the persecuted and expelled French Huguenots. What is available to us, however, is evidence – in the form of literature and art – of the way in which the settled, feudally organized European population experienced a way of life that it perceived as threatening. Despite consisting solely of stories and images that are defensive “distortions”, this evidence provides a far from unfavourable basis for an examination of the six-hundred-year history of the European Roma, insofar as it is a history of cultural appropriation characterized by segregation. We encounter the traces of the reality experienced by the Roma almost exclusively through depictions by outsiders, and must use these to imagine those parts considered impossible to represent. The extraneous cultural depictions of the Roma – variously referred to as gypsies, zigeuner, tatern, cigány, çingeneler, and so on – have created heterogeneous units of “erased” identity and cultural attributes. The “invention” of the Gypsy is the underside of the European cultural subject's invention of itself as the agent of civilising progress in the world.
The Roma occupied a unique position from the outset. They belonged to those who were not there from the beginning, who were not expected and who therefore had to disappear again. They were seen as sinister because they “lurked everywhere” and “came and went” according to inscrutable rules. This gave rise to a uniform moment of perception and encounter: the ambivalence of contempt and fascination. A repository of stereotypes, images, motifs, behavioural patterns and legends developed early on, at the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern period. Repeatedly, exterminatory fantasies turned into exterminatory practices.
A large banner proclaimed the demonstrators’ allegiance to the Syrian National Council: ‘No! To imaginary opposition, fabrications of Assad’s gangs. The SNC unites us, factions divide us.’ All around, mountains of rubbish cluttered the streets; ever the since the revolt started, refuse has no longer been collected from opposition neighbourhoods. Songs and dances, which take the form of zikr, the mystic dances of the Sufis, roused the crowd, while the leaders chanted slogans: ‘Idlib, we are with you! Teblisi, we are with you! Rastan, we are with you until death!’ This yearning for a union of communities, faced with the regime, was explicit: ‘We are not rebelling against Alaouites or Christians! The people are one!’ ‘Wahad, wahad, al-shaab al-suri wahad!’ shouts the crowd, ‘The Syrian people are one!’ Standing on a man’s shoulders, a red-headed boy of about 12 called Mahmoud led the crowd, chanting the cult poem by the murdered Ibrahim Qashoush, ‘Get out, Bashar!’
What is striking in these exuberant demonstrations is the power they produce. They serve not only as an outlet, a collective release for accumulated tension; they also give energy back to the participants, fill them with a little more vigour to endure. The group generates energy and then each individual reabsorbs it; that is also the point of the music and dancing. They’re not just provocations or slogans, they are also, like the Sufi zikr, ways to generate and receive strength. The Syrian revolution – a rare thing – survives not just because of the weapons of the FSA, or even the courage of the rebels; it keeps going because of joy, dance and song.
Michel Bauwens in Al Jazeera:
This is not a new debate. It resurfaces regularly in the blogosphere and academic circles, ever since Tiziana Terranova coined the term “Free Labour” to indicate a new form of capitalist exploitation of unpaid labour – firstly referring to the viewers of classic broadcast media, and now to the new generation of social media participants on sites such as Facebook. The argument can be summarised very succinctly by the catch phrase: “If it's free, then you are the product being sold.”
This term was recently relaunched in an article by University of Essex academics Christopher Land and Steffen Böhm, entitled “They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free“. In this mini-essay, they make a very strong claim that “we can certainly position the users of Facebook as labourers. If labour is understood as 'value producing activity', then updating your status, liking a website, or 'friending' someone, creates Facebook's basic commodity.”
This line of argument is misleading, however, because it conflates two types of value creation that were already recognised as distinct by 18th century political economists. The distinction is between use value and exchange value. For thousands of years, under conditions of non-capitalist production, the majority of the working population directly produced “use value” – either for themselves as subsistence farmers, or as tributes to the managerial class of the day. It is only under capitalism that a majority of the working population produces “exchange value” by selling their labour to firms. The difference between what we are paid and what the market pays for the products we are making is the “surplus value”.
But Facebook users are not workers producing commodities for a wage, and Facebook is not selling these commodities on a market to create surplus value.
More here.
Vijay Prashad in Jadaliyya:
One of Hamid Dabashi’s most acidic critiques of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is that she indulged in the “systematic denigration of an entire culture of revolutionary resistance.” A simple index for the Left is to protect itself from this kind of amnesia. The Syrian people threw off the violent regime of imperial France in their Great Revolt from 1925 to 1927. The revolt inaugurated a trek into Arab nationalism, whose most eloquent energies were absorbed and distorted by the Ba’athist party that has ruled Syria since 1963. Nonetheless the Syrian people incubate a thirst for freedom from their suffocation by the Ba’ath regime. The problem has been that the power of the Syrian state and the enchained geopolitics of the region have denied them, for now.
More here.
From lensculture:
Lens Culture is pleased to present the winning photos here. Our high-resolution slideshow of the winning images shows the most detail.
Comments about the winning photo by members of the jury: Koyo Kouoh
“It is a photo that speaks for the entire region. It stands for Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, for all that happened in the Arab Spring. But it shows a private, intimate side of what went on. And it shows the role that women played, not only as care-givers, but as active people in the movement.”
More here.
From New York Magazine:
André Balazs could come up with an even more lucrative nightclub by studying TED’s marketing model: Create a Boom Boom Room that not only won’t let you in but also videocasts what’s happening inside so you’ll know exactly what you’re missing. Imagine, further, that everyone in the club is miked, so you hear them going on about how �amazing� it is and how �combined our contacts reach pretty much everyone who’s interesting in the country if not the planet,� as TED’s curator, Chris Anderson, told one TED crowd. TED Talks, curated clips of the eighteen-minute lectures that are gathered on ted.com, have become today’s Cliffs Notes to sounding smart. They are, despite their length and seriousness, some of the most popular material on the Internet. TED is now on something of a populist kick. Three years ago, it spun off a franchise version of itself, called TEDX, of which there have been thousands so far. Last month, it announced a global American Idol�style search for speakers for next year’s main conference.
More here.
Late
Late have I called &
late my
beloved
was blessing me
I was covering
my breasts with my arms
…………. “Those doves”
…………. you said
In the sun ………… I took my arms away
by Jean Valentine
from Barrow Street
Winter 2011-2012
It’s difficult to make sense of the reactions of many Western governments and international actors to the disastrous elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on November 28, 2011. Initial responses from the United States and the European Union were muted, and Belgium later congratulated President Joseph Kabila on his reelection. As the extent of fraud and lost votes have became clearer, some governments have come out with stronger criticisms of the elections. US Secretary Clinton was “deeply disappointed,” while EU High Representative Catherine Ashton echoed Clinton’s assessment and said that the EU would “re-evaluate” its cooperation.
Yet today, both Western responses to the elections and their policies are unclear and tending dangerously toward the status quo of the last five years. The US Government, according to some, is very divided on Congo, and its public representatives have recently provided cautious statements on the elections and their aftermath. Consumed by their own economic troubles, no member of the EU has the interest to take the lead on reconsidering Europe’s Congo policy, while the UN stabilization mission in the Congo (MONUSCO) wants to move on from the elections and renew its focus on civilian protection.
However, these signs of policy inertia could prove disastrous, since Western policies have so far done little to strengthen Congo’s governance, a key goal of many bilateral programs. While the Congo’s GDP growth for 2011 was just under seven percent, Congo dropped to last place in the UNDP’s latest Human Development Report, and its business environment, dominated by the corruption-laden mining industry, is considered one of the worst in the world. (It is telling of the personal nature of business in Congo, for instance, that the death of key Kabila-adviser Katumba Mwanke in a plane crash on 12 February has left foreign investors worried.) Above all, the 2011 presidential and legislative elections, which were an important indicator for the state of democratic governance in the country, were so compromised that the final results are called into question.
It was damp and cold as Anthony Shadid and I crossed in darkness over the barbed-wire fence that separated Turkey from Syria last month. We were also crossing from peace into war, into the bloodiest conflict of the Arab Spring, exploding just up the rocky and sparsely wooded mountain we had to climb once inside.
The smugglers waiting for us had horses, though we learned they were not for us. They were to carry ammunition and supplies to the Free Syrian Army. That is the armed opposition group, made up largely of defectors from President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal army, we had come to interview, photograph and try to understand.
The ammunition seemed evidence of the risk we were taking — a risk we did not shoulder lightly. Anthony, who passionately documented the eruptions in the Arab world from Iraq to Libya for The New York Times, felt it was essential that journalists get into Syria, where about 7,000 people have been killed, largely out of the world’s view. We had spent months planning to stay safe.
It turned out the real danger was not the weapons but possibly the horses. Anthony was allergic. He did not know how badly.
He had a terrible allergic attack that first night after we crossed over the barbed wire. He had another attack a week later, as horses led us out of Syria, just 45 minutes from safety. He died during that attack, at only 43, his wife and nearly 2-year-old son waiting for him in Turkey.
He did not write his articles from our eventful week of reporting and shooting pictures in Syria; his notes, taken obsessively, are barely decipherable. But he would have wanted a record of this final trip, some hint of the questions we sought to answer: Who were these fighters, and did they have any chance of beating the Syrian government? How were they armed and organized? Was the conflict, as in Iraq, worsening sectarian tensions? Just who supported whom?
