Sughra Raza. Port, Cape Town, South Africa. March, 2011.

Digital photograph.

Michael Handelzalts on Witold Gombrowicz's play “Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy” and its new staging, in Ha'aretz:

The situation in Witold Gombrowicz's play “Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy,” written in Poland in 1935, is simple yet challenging: in a small European kingdom of the sort that existed in mid-20th century films, the royal family (king, queen and princess ) admires the sunset, in full view of their subjects.

The prince, on his daily stroll, has suddenly come across a young woman. She is not pretty and does not present herself as a potential princess. Ugly, hard to size up and silent, she is accompanied by an aunt who apologizes for the strangeness of her niece.

The prince, tired of meaningless rounds of courtship, is challenged by the fact that the girl, whose name is Yvonne, radiates nothing in his presence; she is the very embodiment of passivity. It appears that anything may be done with her, and he decides to marry her. Where is it written that the prince must marry a beauty?

What begins as a game and a whim takes on monstrous proportions: Yvonne, in as much as she exists at all, wants nothing, says nothing, plans nothing, and so makes everyone uncomfortable. No one knows how to approach her. After all, there can be no creature which supplies not even a hint of its own significance and its relationship to us.

A.D. Miller in Intelligent Life magazine:

The essential theme of W.G. Sebald’s books is memory: how painful it is to live with, how dangerous it can be to live without it, for both nations and individuals. The narrators of his books—of which “Austerlitz” and the four linked narratives of exile in “The Emigrants” are the most compelling—live in a state of constant reminder. Everything blends into everything else: places, people, their stories and experiences, and above all different times, which seep into each other and blur together, often in long, unmoored passages of reported speech. The narrator of “Vertigo” gives a concise account of this method: “drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order”.

Sebald, born in Bavaria in 1944, spent most of his adult life as an academic in Britain. He died in Norfolk in 2001, after having a heart attack at the wheel of his car. He wrote in German, but worked closely with his English translators, Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell. In either language, his voice is mesmeric.

Key decision

To invent his own hybrid form. Sebald’s main works blend travelogue and meditation, fiction with history and myth. They have a narrator who both is and is not Sebald himself: a spectral character who is sensitive, digressive and restless, compulsively peregrinating around Europe and its past.

Strong points

Finding a voice to fit his preoccupations. His sentences are looping, reflexive, moving forward yet endlessly turning back on themselves. By the time he wrote “Austerlitz”, the last book he published before his death, Sebald had more or less dispensed with paragraph breaks altogether. This fluidity creates a feeling, as the character Austerlitz says of his own sense of history, that “time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back after it”—clauses that are themselves part of a much longer, circular sentence. This is a style that tries to unbury the dead through syntax.

A Five Books interview by Eve Gerber:

Finally Christine Stansell’s The Feminist Promise examines the sweep of American women’s history. What can we learn by reading it?

Stansell shows why women’s rights became a central element of modern American liberalism. And she helps us understand how liberalism evolved to embrace individual rights and privacy in the most intimate areas of personal life. That came through the women’s movement. Stansell gives a very good account of how these feminist issues, on the one hand, go very deep back in American history, and, on the other hand, reached a critical mass of popular engagement during the 1960s.

Why did women’s rights become so aligned with the left?

In the 1970s social issues became more important to the Republican Party, and the notion that the women’s movement was a threat to the family and the stability of society became a mantra among conservatives. I think it’s important to remember that it wasn’t always that way. A century ago the movement for women’s suffrage was just as likely to get support from Republicans. Even in the 1960s plenty of conservatives supported legal equality. But today women’s rights are a dividing line between liberalism and conservatism.

Amanda Marcotte in Pandagon:

With all the excitement over the last Harry Potter movie coming out, I thought it would be a fun time to float a thought I've had about the book that often seems to surprise people when I mention it. Even recently I was talking with some folks who were plowing through the books and enjoying them, and when one of them characterized Harry as “nerdy”, I had to take issue.

“Harry isn't a nerd,” I said, “Harry is a jock.” I mean, Harry has an existential crisis that gives him some depth, but social outcast and/or geek he's not. The opposite, in fact.

I realized then that the “band of misfits” theme has so much power over the American imagination (maybe not the British, which could explain Rowling's choices) that people just sort of shove Harry and his friends into that mold, and then rely on a handful of rationalizations for it—Harry wears glasses, Hermione is a bookworm, Ron is a redhead—in order for that theory to make sense. We're used to the X-Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Scooby Gang, so much so that we don't see that Harry's trajectory is the inverse of Buffy's. Buffy is a former cheerleader whose magic powers actually make her a geek and an outcast. Harry is a nobody-special who finds out that he's special, and becomes not just the star athlete and hero of his school, but an actual celebrity. Sure, there's ups and downs, but his trajectory is away from being the outcast and towards being the homecoming king. Which may not be as emotionally satisfying as “my greatness makes me an outcast”, but is probably more realistic. In his world, being a badass is appreciated and he's realistically rewarded in his society for it.

A. Ranganayaki in Open The Magazine:

One morning, two months ago, I read a horrific news report in the Hindustan Times about the rape and subsequent gangrape of an 18-year-old girl in Delhi. She was first raped by her brother’s father-in-law, who had asked her to his home on some familial pretext; she managed to escape him, found a taxi driver in her catatonic state, and asked to be dropped home. Instead, the driver and his companions took her someplace in Dwarka and gangraped her.

It was the use of the word ‘allegedly’ littered throughout the very short report that I first registered. It made me so angry, for some reason. I don’t think the word has been used or drawn my attention as sharply in reports about other crimes. Allegedly. Supposedly. Apparently. Maybe. We’re not sure.

Perhaps it is to do with my own ghosts, perhaps not. Reportage on sexual violence has, in recent years, become far more prevalent; popular, even. The typical ‘progressive’ response to this is one of affirmation, validation; the willingness to talk about it in public. My response was different. My entire being revolted against the ambivalence of the writing, because if anything, its uncertainty made the monstrosity of the act palatable. It gave me the option of feeling a passing horror at the article, and moving on. Then, there were responses from people on Delhi and its total lack of safety. That appalled me too. Is geography central to this story? I don’t believe it is. Relevant as an aside perhaps, nothing more. The cab driver and his mates raped her again. Because she told them what happened? Because she was already a tainted, violated body? Did it excite them?

Sexual violence and abuse are primal and unspeakable. It is far more comfortable to denounce them in terms of morality, emotionality and religiosity than to actually engage with them. They defy historicity, context and the narratives of modernisation. They are liminal, suspended, beyond the reach of articulation. Predicated upon cornerstones of morality, anything remotely related to sexuality is always exciting press, but it’s a fine line—you don’t want to offend sensibilities. People ask me if talking about experiences of rape, abuse and violence help “get over” it. “Is it somehow therapeutic?” they enquire sweetly and cluelessly. No, I tell them. You never “get over” violence. The experience of violence is always constitutive of our beings, our identities and sexualities. The reason I speak is because I can; because I want to; because it affords some navigability through a maelstrom which holds no “rationale”, escape or solace.

To follow up Julia Galef on the fallacy of difference in art, Samuel McNerney on confirmation bias in art, in Scientific American:

If we are defining confirmation bias as a tendency to favor information that confirms our previously held beliefs, it strikes me as ironic to think that it is almost exclusively discussed as a hindrance to knowledge and better decision-making, or as an aid to argumentation and persuasion as reinforced by Mercier and Sperber. With such a broad definition, I think it also explains our aesthetic judgments. That is, just as we only look for what confirms our scientific hypotheses and personal decisions, we likewise only listen to music and observe art that confirms our preconceived notions of good and bad aesthetics. Put differently, confirmation bias influences our aesthetic judgments just as it does any other judgment.

Let's observe music, a popular topic in the psychology world. One of the common themes to emerge from the literature is the importance of patterns, expectations, and resolutions. Many authors argue that enjoyable music establishes a known pattern, creates expectations, and resolves the expectations in a predictable way. As neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music explains, “as music unfolds, the brain constantly updates its estimates of when new beats will occur, and takes satisfaction in matching a mental beat with a real-in-the-world one.” This is one reason we repeatedly listen to the same songs and bands, we know exactly what we are going to get, and love it when they fulfill our preconceived expectations.

In this light, the relationship between confirmation bias and music is clear. In the same way that we decide to watch Fox or MSNBC, we decide to listen to Lady Gaga or The Beatles. In either case, our brains are latching onto patterns and getting pleasure from accurately predicting what comes next. Here is the key: your brain doesn’t “know” the difference between Glen Beck and Paul McCartney, but it does know, and it does care about confirming each in the context of their work: McCartney sings the chorus to “She Loves You,” while Beck reams Obama's latest political move. In other words, its predictions don't discriminate between different mediums; it just wants its expectations to be fulfilled. So ask yourself this: is there really any difference between a Beatles concert and a Glen Beck rally? Are people not just going to these events to have their opinions confirmed?

Katrina Onstad in the NYT Magazine:

Miranda July stood in her living room in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, apologizing for the sunflowers. It really was a copious amount of sunflowers.

They sprouted from Mason jars and vases, punctuating the austere, Shaker-like furniture in the sunny home that July, who is 37, shares with her husband, the filmmaker Mike Mills, who’s 45. Noticing me noticing the sunflowers, she interjected: “We just had a party. We don’t usually have sunflowers everywhere.”

In person, July was very still, with ringlets of curly hair falling over her wide blue eyes like a protective visor, and she seemed perceptively aware of the “precious” label that is often attached both to her and to her work. At a different point in our time together, I followed her into a hotel room in San Francisco, where Mills had left her a knitted octopus wearing a scarf and hat on the couch. She laughed when she saw it but also appeared a bit mortified: “Oh, God,” she said. “It’s kind of a joke. . . . It’s not. . . . Really, this isn’t us at all.”

At their house, Mills emerged from his office; in contrast to July’s measured composure, Mills seemed in constant motion, often running his hands through his Beethoven hair. Both he and July have directed new films being released this summer. His film, “Beginners,” is loosely based on the true story of his father’s coming out at age 75. July’s film, “The Future,” is her second feature as a director, and it’s a funny, sad portrait of a couple at a crossroads. Sophie, played by July, works at a children’s dance school, and Jason, played by Hamish Linklater, provides tech-support by telephone from their sofa. The couple is weeks away from adopting Paw-Paw, an injured cat and a symbol of impending adulthood who is also the film’s narrator. A talking cat is exactly the kind of detail that might endear people who are endeared by Miranda July and infuriate people who are infuriated by her. There are plenty of both.

Our own Azra Raza and Sara Suleiri Goodyear in Asymptote:

When we first embarked on our project to translate a selection of Ghalib's ghazals, we foolishly chose to begin with Dil e nadaan tujhey hua kiya hay…a ghazal that struck us as exceptionally lucid in its simplicity and brevity. After several hours of arduous labor, we discovered our mistake and Ghalib's beguiling force. It made us conclude that there is little distinction between surface and depth in Ghalib's most seemingly accessible ghazals and so we began once more armed with the understanding that the mystery of Ghalib's poetry is its mirage-like quality: it is most opaque when it appears to be crystalline with clarity. This opacity however posed a challenge to the translators, who then had to further acknowledge that translation and interpretation were nearly synonymous. We read widely in available translations of Ghalib and finally decided that our mode and methodology should be based on dialogue because it best represents the continuum and the dynamic flow that initiates the acts of translation. As Walter Benjamin wisely observed, “Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original—not so much for its life as from its afterlife.”

This current article is, as it were, our tribute to the two past masters, Ghalib and Benjamin in that it represents the afterlife of our initial project Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance. Here, we essay a return to a few of the shers [couplets] that we previously translated and interpreted in order to witness how our own perspectives have evolved and modulated our prior readings of these verses. In the process, we took care not to consult our original interpretation but juxtaposed our readings only after we had completed the second version.

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

Think of some of your most powerful memories, and there’s likely a smell attached: the aroma of suntan lotion at the beach, the sharpness of freshly mown grass, the floral trail of your mother’s perfume. “Scents are very much linked to memory,” says perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. “They are linked to remembering the past but also learning from experiences.” But despite its primacy in our lives, our sense of smell is often overlooked when we record our history. We tend to connect with the past visually – we look at objects displayed in a museum, photographs in a documentary, the writing in a manuscript. Sometimes we might hear a vintage speech, or touch an ancient artifact and imagine what it was like to use it. But our knowledge of the past is almost completely deodorized. “It seems remarkable to me that we live in the world where we have all the senses to navigate it, yet somehow we assume that the past was scrubbed of smells,” says sensory historian Mark Smith.

Arcynta Ali Childs in Smithsonian:

Through September 5, the National Portrait Gallery is displaying 60 paintings on loan from private collections in Washington, D.C. Among the portraits is that of Judith Martin, better known as advice columnist “Miss Manners.” The first lady of etiquette spoke with the magazine’s Arcynta Ali Childs.

What etiquette breach do you most dislike?
The major etiquette problem in American nowadays is blatant greed. It’s people who are scheming to get money and possessions from other people, and who believe they are entitled to do so. Whether it is the gift registry—or people who claim to be entertaining and are telling their guests to bring food, to bring drink and sometimes even to pay—the ancient practices of exchanging presents and of giving hospitality are being undermined by this rampant greed.

In a December 2010 survey, Travel + Leisure magazine rated Washington, D.C. as the fifth rudest city in America. As a Washington, D.C. native, etiquette authority and frequent traveler, what are your thoughts?

I’m often told that when I travel. And I have to say to these people, whom are you talking about? I was born in Washington, and I’m not rude. You’re talking about people that you sent here. You’re talking about people you voted for and you sent to Washington. So if you have complaints, and when people do, they often say to me, well what can we do about it? I said the answer there is something called an election. That’s something you can do about it. The idea has gotten around that people who are virtuous are unable to restrain themselves by the decencies of etiquette and unable to deal with people who disagree with them. And therefore, the people who are the most contentious often win elections. But the voters forget, first of all, that we have a cooperative form of government. They have to get along if they’re going to get anything done. And second of all, that they themselves don’t like it. They think thatit’s amusing during the races, but then they don’t like it afterwards. So don’t vote for it. These are not native-born Washingtonians.

More here.

The Economist on the art of Laurel Nakadate:

THE current exhibit of Laurel Nakadate's work at MoMA PS1 raises more questions than it answers. This may be what this artist needs right now, considering how even the praise she has received tends to focus on the least challenging aspects of her work. For several years she made videos featuring lonely older men who started conversations with her in grocery stores and parking lots; she would agree to go home with them as long as they allowed her to film what happened, which would usually turn out to be a scenario of her choosing. In some cases this meant a pretend birthday party (we see the man eating a slice of cake and then singing to her) or a pretend music video (we watch her dance to “Oops, I Did It Again”, Britney Spears’s paean to inadvertent seduction). Ms Nakadate, who was 25 when she started to make these videos in 2000, would often film herself gyrating in flimsy camisoles while the men looked on.

Marilyn Minter, an American artist, has praised Ms Nakadate's attempt “to own the creation of sexual imagery” in the service of self-expression: “When you're a young woman, and beautiful, all eyes are on you. Can you capture that experience?” (For the current issue of the Paris Review, Ms Minter curated a portfolio that includes Ms Nakadate's photographs and stills from her work.) Ms Nakadate's critics, meanwhile, accuse her of using her sexuality to exploit the men in her videos—beer-bellied, awkward loners who seem remarkable mainly for how unremarkable they are.

But neither view conveys how uncomfortable it is to watch Ms Nakadate's work.

Over at The Immanent Frame, Gil Anidjar,Bruno Gulli, Nancy Levene, George Shulman, Anders Stephanson, and Paul W. Kahn on Paul Kahn's Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, which “contends that American political experience is incomprehensible outside the terms of political theology—not because the United States is, or ever was, a 'Christian nation,' but because the state 'creates and maintains its own sacred space and history.'” Stephanson:

Unending controversy, raw and existential, attaches to Carl Schmitt, but Paul Kahn cleverly (and, given his aims, rightly) avoids all, or almost all, of that by taking Political Theology as a pure reference text and simply rewriting it in his own idiom and according to his own inclinations. This is a bold move, which works well, though in the end I am not persuaded. And persuasion is in fact very much the name of the game, for Kahn is preoccupied with what he thinks of as “rhetoric”—philosophy and politics as dialogue and persuasion. Thus, he refers throughout to the inclusive “we,” an imagined community of Americans in general and liberals in particular. Because I do not belong to that community, I am not rhetorically addressed, which is not to say that the exercise fails to stimulate.

Schmitt’s basic idea, in the Theology, is that any normal constitutional order of “sovereignty” presupposes the abnormal, the exception, and the right to decide when that condition exists. Beyond the norm and the normal, then, there is no super-norm that informs all the others; there is only the lurking decision about the exception of existential emergency. That “space” becomes the overdeterminant of sovereignty. What makes this “theological” in a hidden way is that (i) actual historical developments turned Christian/religious notions into secularized concepts of the state; and (ii) those concepts, by analogy, include the premise of the miracle, here turned into the “exception.” Deism and liberalism eventually banished both God and the miracle from the proceedings, creating an agreeable façade of order, normality, rationality, science, legitimacy, and civilized conversation amongst those of requisite, recognized competence. The transcendent power is bracketed, the immanent will of the people or nation becomes constitutive.

Kahn’s riff on this is, strictly speaking, not a gloss; he has not set out to expand the contended body of Schmittiana. He wants instead to argue the case for Schmitt’s decisional exception and political theology in a contemporary U.S. liberal frame—a tall order.

Vladimir Tolz remembers Yelena Bonner, who, I just found out, died a month ago, in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty:

It often happens that even when you try to prepare yourself for something tragic and inevitable, you find yourself completely unprepared when it actually occurs. That is what happened to me when I heard the news of the passing of Yelena Bonner. Forgive me, but I can't get used to calling her anything other than what I called her during the many years of our friendship — Lusya.

I was awakened by the buzzing of my iPhone. One after another came e-mails from our friends in English and in Russian: “Yelena Georgiyevna is dead.” “Lusya, may God protect you!” A friend called from Paris, crying, unable to speak. All I could make out was: “I feel so bad. They are all leaving. All the closest ones….” She hadn't cried so fiercely even when her mother died. And it kept on and on.

Of course, throughout the last few months, when Lusya was suffering in hospitals (undergoing yet another heart surgery), we understood that the end was near. Last autumn she called and said: “Fly out here. It is time to say goodbye.”

But when I arrived, we spent a week together in a little cottage on Cape Cod, where we spent our days on the veranda. Our farewell somehow moved to the back burner. Instead, we spent whole days remembering events from our past (mostly the funny ones) and reciting beloved poems. Lusya remembered so much — Pushkin, Baratynsky, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva. She burst out laughing when I recalled these lines from Joseph Brodsky's “Cape Cod Lullaby”:

Stuffiness. A person is on a veranda with a towel wrapped around
His throat. A night moth, with all its unenviable body,
Strikes the iron screen, and bounces away, just like a bullet
Sent by nature from an invisible bush
To hit nature itself, to strike one in a hundred
In the middle of July.

She said: “That's us. That's about me…”

From The Telegraph:

From The City Journal:

It’s possible that Francis Fukuyama does not take unmixed pleasure in his fame as the author of The End of History and the Last Man. Ever since Fukuyama published that book in 1992—indeed, ever since he published the article on which it was based in The National Interest in 1989—he has been shadowed by the phrase “the end of history.” Since then, he has written five more books on big, complex subjects, ranging from the decline of trust in American society to the future of genetic engineering, and he has participated in countless policy debates. Yet on the cover of his new book, The Origins of Political Order, he once again is identified as “the author of The End of History and the Last Man.”

Will this book—a 500-page survey of the growth of states “from prehuman times to the French Revolution,” with a promised second volume taking the story up to the present—finally be the one to emancipate Fukuyama from the end of history? The question is justified not simply by the size, scope, and ambition of the project but, above all, by its emphasis on origins. If the end of the Cold War represented the end of history, Fukuyama’s new book starts over at the beginning, with the emergence of the first states out of kin-based tribes more than 4,000 years ago. In the introduction, Fukuyama explains that his purpose in The Origins of Political Order is to offer a new theory of political development, to supersede the one that his mentor Samuel Huntington advanced in his 1968 study Political Order in Changing Societies.

More here.

The Language

Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything.

I
love you
again,

then what
is emptiness
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full

of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.

by Robert Creeley

Guilt was Patricia Highsmith’s great theme. In her books even the good know they’re not innocent, and they carry an apprehension that they too will be found out. “Night was falling quickly, with visible speed like a black sea creeping over the earth,” reflects Robert Forester at the beginning of “The Cry of the Owl” (Grove: 272 pp., $14), one of her lesser-known works from 1963 and one of her most unsettling. Which is saying plenty. Forester is driving through the woods of Pennsylvania, about to do something he knows he shouldn’t. He’s an ordinary, decent guy and has a good job as an engineer with a firm called Langley Aeronautics. But he’s recently divorced and depressed, and he likes to stand in the dark, watching a woman he doesn’t know through her kitchen window. He sees her frying chicken or hanging the curtains or setting the table for dinner. He never gets close enough to tell whether she’s pretty or not, but he already knows she has a boyfriend she likes. She drives a light-blue Volkswagen. The happiness that Robert imputes to the life of this woman he’s never met calms him and gives him comfort. He genuinely wants the best for her. Yet he’s a voyeur, and doesn’t he deserve to be punished? He will be, beyond all measure.

more from Richard Rayner at the LA Times here.

We know their stories far better than we think. One was bitten by a radioactive spider. One vowed revenge when his parents were shot dead by a mugger. One is a billionaire who built a metal suit to keep his heart going. And one has an origin myth so familiar that it could be summed up in four captions, eight terse words, on the first page of a recent retelling: “Doomed planet. Desperate scientists. Last hope. Kindly couple.” Superhero comics – secular modern myths, written in collaboration by generations of writers – have tracked our culture for more than 70 years, providing wish fulfilment fantasies, cultural exemplars, vehicles of satire and cautionary tales of the abuse of power. Attempts to work out what they say about us have been around nearly as long. When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in 1938, as fascism took Europe in its grip, they intended him to be, in Siegel’s words, “a character like Samson, Hercules and all the strongmen I ever heard of, rolled into one”. Umberto Eco proposed, in a 1970s essay on Superman, that in a society increasingly dominated by machines, it was down to the “positive hero” of myth to “embody to an unthinkable degree the power demands that the average citizen nurtures but cannot satisfy”. As the comics writer Grant Morrison pithily observes in Supergods, his book-length analysis of the superhero phenomenon, the idea of these characters has long been “at least as real as the idea of God”.

more from Tim Martin at the FT here.