Lisa Yuskavage’s new color-infused paintings of naked sloe-eyed girls with melon-like breasts, erect nipples, and contorted bodies have the presence of lap dances. While they’re alluring and taboo, they are also self-conscious, extremely calculated, and repetitive. Women who work in strip clubs tell themselves they’re “turning the tables on men” and that they “have the power”; the men meanwhile pretend the lap dance is a chaste way of “not having sex with that woman.” As one lap dancer recently put it in The Guardian, “There’s no intimacy. One person is there because they’re being paid; the other is paying for sexual kicks.”

This is happening with Yuskavage’s recent work. Not only is it becoming repetitious, but Yuskavage is using women as bait. This is fine; all is fair in love and war and art. The problem is her viewers aren’t taking away anything other than momentary kicks.

more from the Village Voice here.

And with these posts on Pakistan and Eqbal Ahmad and Auden’s centenary, this seems appropriate.

Partition by W. H. Auden

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,

Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition

Between two peoples fanatically at odds,

With their different diets and incompatible gods.

“Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It’s too late

For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:

The only solution now lies in separation.

The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,

That the less you are seen in his company the better,

So we’ve arranged to provide you with other accommodation.

In ZNet, Pervez Hoodbhoy looks at Pakistan, 7 years after Musharraf’s coup.

Some had feared – while others had hoped – that General Pervez Musharraf’s coup of October 12, 1999, would bring the revolution of Kemal Ataturk to a Pakistan and wrest the country from the iron grip of mullahs. But years later a definitive truth has emerged. Like the other insecure governments before it, both military and civilian, the present regime also has a single point agenda – to stay in power at all costs. It therefore does whatever it must and Pakistan falls further from any prospect of acquiring modern values, and of building and strengthening democratic institutions.

The requirements for survival of the present regime are clear: on the one hand the Army leadership knows that its critical dependence upon the West requires that it be perceived abroad as a liberal regime pitted against radical Islamists. But, on the other hand, in actual fact, to preserve and extend its grip on power, it must preserve the status quo.

The staged conflicts between General Musharraf and the mullahs are therefore a regular part of Pakistani politics. This September, nearly seven years later, the religious parties needed no demonstration of muscle power for winning two major victories in less than a fortnight; just a few noisy threats sufficed. From experience they knew that the Pakistan Army and its sagacious leader – of “enlightened moderation” fame – would stick to their predictable pattern of dealing with Islamists. In a nutshell: provoke a fight, get the excitement going, let diplomatic missions in Islamabad prepare their briefs and CNN and BBC get their clips – and then beat a retreat. At the end of it all the mullahs would get what they want, but so would the General.

And see also this piece by him on related issues.

[A]t the heart of Pakistan’s problems lies a truth – one etched in stone – that when a state proclaims a religious identity and mission, it is bound to privilege those who organize religious life and interpret religious text. Since there are many models and interpretations within every religion, there is bound to be conflict between religious forces over whose model shall prevail. There is also the larger confrontation between religious principles and practices and what we now consider to be ‘modern’ ideas of society, which have emerged over the past several hundred years. This truth, for all its simplicity, escaped the attention of several generations of soldiers, politicians, and citizens of Pakistan. It is true that there has been some learning – Musharraf’s call for “enlightened moderation” is a tacit (and welcome) admission that a theocratic Pakistan cannot work. But his call conflicts with his other, more important, responsibility as chief of the Pakistan Army.

In The Nation, Amitava Kumar reviews the The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad [my late friend and mentor] by Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo and Yogesh Chandrani.

One senses that Ahmad was deeply sensitive to the waning influence of radical secular politics in the Muslim world, where Islamists increasingly led the opposition to military regimes that had betrayed the dream of independence from colonialism. It may well have been this concern that led him to return, shortly before his death in 1999, to Pakistan, where he hoped to build a university that would teach the humanities. It was to be called Khaldunia University, after the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), whom UN General Secretary Kofi Annan described as “a globalist long before the age of globalization.” (When Annan said that, he was delivering the first Eqbal Ahmad lecture at Hampshire College. Annan was no doubt also thinking of Ahmad when he reminded his audience that Khaldun had “argued that civilizations decline when they lose their capacity to comprehend and absorb change, and that ‘the greatest of scholars err when they ignore the environment in which history unfolds.'”) Alas, Khaldunia University was never built; according to The Economist’s obituary of Ahmad, he “died before a rupee was raised for it.”

Even if his dream had come to fruition, it is hard to imagine Ahmad running a university. He was too much the congenital outsider. Ahmad’s independence from institutions and political parties allowed him to deliver criticism to those least inclined to listen, and it might have been the reason why he earned the trust of statesmen and revolutionaries throughout the Third World. A critic of power rather than an intellectual seeking power, he turned his weakness into a source of strength.

From The Atlantic Monthly:

The verdict which public opinion has pronounced, or, rather, is from time to time pronouncing, on the writings of George Eliot is certainly a very complicated one. That she is an acute delineator of character, a subtle humorist, a master of English, a universal observer and a comprehensive student, a profound moralist, — all this is part of her established reputation. That she is, besides this, a poet of great force and originality would, if we took as the test the most widely published criticism, be also established. That she has also succeeded, — in an age in which the public has been satiated with novels, and critics have begun even to doubt whether novel-writing were not a thing of the past, — if not in founding a new school of novel-writing, at least in proving that this literary form could be adapted, in skilful hands, to purposes which her predecessors had never dreamed of. Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Disraeli, — between them and George Eliot there is no relationship; and yet George Eliot, in the hold which she maintains upon the public interest, is certainly their successor. But is this all? Does not everyone who reads generalizations like these involuntarily say to himself, this is nothing? To say of an author like George Eliot that she is distinguishable by this or that abstract quality is very much like trying to revive the effect produced upon our imaginations by a broad and majestic river by describing the general direction of a body of flowing water, the height of the banks between which it flows, the measurements of its soundings taken by the latest hydrographical survey. When we think of all the immense variety of her books, from the Scenes of Clerical Life to Middlemarch, of the range of feeling and thought that they cover, and the wonderful manner in which the work has been done, one is tempted to give up the task of studying this student, of observing this author who has devoted her life to observation, or of analyzing this professor of analysis.

More here.

From BBC News:

India’s Supreme Court is to review the fate of 300 monkeys captured roaming on the streets of the capital, Delhi. The court had ordered that the monkeys be relocated to forests in central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. But the animals are proving unpopular there and locals there have lodged an official objection to the plan. Thousands of monkeys roam Delhi, mostly around government offices, and are considered a public nuisance. For years the wild animals have caused havoc, riding on the city’s metro trains, roaming through parliament.

They have invaded the prime minister’s office and the Defence Ministry, helping themselves to top secret military files. They cannot be killed because many Indians see them as sacred. Instead they have been captured, their fate decided by a bench of Supreme Court judges headed by India’s Chief Justice.

More here.

For Vidal’s imagination has always operated most vividly upon the past. Einfühlen is the word he has used, borrowing it from the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder. In a 1999 interview, Vidal defined it as “an ability to get into the past, while realizing that it’s not just another aspect of the present, with people you know dressed up in funny clothes.” The present, especially in his fiction, sometimes hobbled him. The past — the pageant in the rearview mirror — gave free rein to his archeological brand of empathy with compulsively readable results.

But not, alas, this time. Despite some exquisite passages and frisky prose, “Point to Point Navigation” betrays a diminishing attention span. There are sentences so sloppy that I never would have attributed them to a spit-and-polish stylist like Vidal. There are clanging redundancies, including entire paragraphs lifted almost directly from “Palimpsest.” Nor can he resist kicking his biographer, Fred Kaplan, in the shins whenever the impulse seizes him.

That’s not the worst of it. It’s bad enough when the author turns over the microphone to a pair of his academic exegetes — one of whom helpfully informs us that Vidal “exploits the congruencies among critiques of genetic, genital, and technological determinism.” (Help!) But when one of our greatest living critics reprints a Publishers Weekly précis of a book rather than summarizing it himself, it’s really time to throw in the towel. Shame on the publisher for wheeling this subpar product into the marketplace.

As for the 81-year-old Vidal, I hope he’ll sail on to his centennial and beyond — and that he’ll go out on a more distinguished note than this one. He certainly has earned it.

more from the LA Times here.

Marvin Bell and Mark Strand walk into a bookstore in Iowa City. Neither of them sees any of his books on the shelf. Dejected, Bell says, “They must not stock any of my books.” Strand replies, “They must be sold out of mine.” Even in an age so densely populated with poets, few escape anonymity, and those who do usually escape into a life as the circus animal of some university’s English department. A few of these poets, such as Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, or Ted Kooser, even sell a hundred thousand copies of their books. But Mark Strand embodies a different sort of “celebrity.” After all, how many contemporary poets are reviewed in the pages of Elle (where Blizzard of One was praised as a “beautifully wrought collection of poems”)? Good luck finding Kooser’s name in Liz Smith’s gossip column, or Collins’s among the elite of the New York art world. Elsewhere, a former colleague at the University of Chicago writes, “He’s also deadly handsome, tall and rugged; classic good looks. If God were to put an instrument on earth to make women suffer, Strand is it.” (As if his Pulitzer were not enough . . .) Not only do Strand’s poems, stories, and reviews appear frequently in The New Yorker, but the magazine also made his film debut (in Ethan Hawke’s Chelsea Walls) the subject of a “Talk of the Town” piece. It is strange, then, that most critical responses to Strand’s work have emphasized his evacuation of the self.

more from Virginia Quarterly Review here.

Clark: Immensely hard to talk about these things, Kathryn—but you’re right, they’re ultimately what the book is about. These days I can’t get the lines by Emily Dickinson out of my mind: “Because I could not stop for Death—/He kindly stopped for me”. I guess it’s Dickinson’s verb that particularly strikes home. Death is everywhere, but we can’t stop for it. We can’t make it part of our lives—and therefore of our politics. The capital D Dickinson was able to give it is way beyond us.

Yeah, yeah… I don’t mind you bringing on the word “spectacle” at this point, just as long as we’re not using the word to reduce the issues simply to “too many images too fast!” It’s not the technics and quantity that matter most, it’s the shattered sociality in which the images circulate. It’s the dismantling, over the past half-century, of so many forms of resistance to the image—so many of the forms of life in which the image-life of power could once be derided or spoken back to. Who was it who called the spectacle “the totalitarian dictatorship of the fragment”? It’s a bit clumsy, that formula, but it gets a lot right.

more from the interview at Brooklyn Rail here.

The Personages are, I think, the highpoint of Smith’s art and a series that could have gone on for as long as there was metal to be had. They are the very essence of creativity. Smith coined the term carefully: something between persona and assemblage, they are collaged characters, vivid figures that have force of personality without ever quite devolving into people.

A vertical crowned with a bowl that contains light but reflects it back becomes the embodiment of a smile. Another, dividing like tweezers, has the hint of a sashay. The tips of two arabesques meet like fingers, or lips if viewed from another angle. Rectangles or discs on rods seem caught in headstrong propulsion, while more fragile constructions hover like dragonflies. There is a photograph of Smith between two entirely abstract figures, neither man nor beast, and they appear to be standing shoulder to shoulder in the hills – a trio of equal friends.

more from The Guardian here.

In Die Welt, Georg M. Oswald reviews Gerhard Schröder’s memoirs, Entscheidungen (or Decisions). (Translated by signandsight.com.)

Then with Afghanistan, a couple of Red-Green do-gooders immediately started kicking up a fuss in the Bundestag and refused to understand that there was no going back. The allegiance to NATO left no room for manoeuvre. Chancellor Schröder called for a confidence vote and because no one was that keen to surrender the so-called responsibility of government so quickly after all, everyone voted in favour of joining Enduring Freedom. Now that’s convincing decision making!

The media soon adjusted to the new circumstances. But just when they thought things were starting up again, this time in Iraq, Chancellor Schröder pulled the rug out from under them. “I have ensured that Germany will not take part in the Iraq War. But of course it will fulfil its duties to the NATO Alliance.”

Aha. And we thought it was a contradiction to fly “No War” banners out the window and at the same time guarantee fly-over rights, take-off and landing rights and security services. But things are not as simple as all that. We did not take part in the Iraq War because there was no UN mandate to do so. But we did provide the USA with logistical support and the help of “our services,” as Schröder discretely calls the Federal Intelligence Services. Of course Schröder doesn’t mention that “our services” by the looks of things also had a hand in the torturing.

In The Nation, Richard Goldstein asks: what are we laughing at when we laugh at Borat?

Variations on these themes shape Baron Cohen’s new film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit of Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. This flimsy mock doc, in the spirit of gross-out shows like Punk’d and Jackass, might have faded into dating-movie oblivion but for the vehement reaction of the Kazakh government. It didn’t appreciate Borat’s references to a national wine made from equine urine, or his observation that “America is strange country: Women can vote but horses cannot.” By protesting, the Kazakhs gave Baron Cohen a place on US news pages. But there’s more to this comic than politically incorrect creds.

Not too long ago, stand-up stars like Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay went after women, gays and immigrants in a revanchist show of spleen, and it was boffo. But backlash entertainment has lost its sting–if only because it no longer represents a dissent from the orthodoxies of social politics. There’s a new comedy in which the ambiguities of laughter are explored and the connections between mockery and sadism are revealed. If you examine your response to Borat, you’ll have to face some dicey truths about the joy of bigotry.

After all, who is the butt of his jokes: those Americans straining to be polite to a foreigner or the foreigner who appalls them by expressing primitive sentiments? Are the rich and famous who curdle at the stupidity of Ali G the objects of our laughter, or is it Ali G, who could be the ignorant son of immigrants? Baron Cohen’s comedy rubs against fear and loathing of the Muslim Other. But what about those Jew jokes–why are they so funny? And why are some of the friendly Americans Borat encounters so willing to join in the fun?

Since much of the English world has decided to not notice Auden’s centenary, I’ll just celebrate with Abbas and any other who cares to join me. Here’s an audio recording of Auden reading his “On the Circuit”:

Among pelagian travelers/Lost on their lewd conceited way/To Massachusetts, Michigan/Miami or L.A.

An airborne instrument I sit/Predestined nightly to fulfill/Columbia-Giesen-Management’s/Unfathomable will

By whose election justified/I bring my gospel of the Muse/To fundamentalists, to nuns/to Gentiles and to Jews

And daily, seven days a week,/Before a local sense has jelled,/From talking-site to talking-site/Am jet-or-prop-propelled.

And on this day after elections, I want to note also the seemingly appropriate (in an out of context way) last verse from “A Walk After Dark”:

But the stars burn on overhead,

Unconscious of final ends,

As I walk home to bed,

Asking what judgment waits

My person, all my friends,

And these United States.

I’m tempted to invite: “Open thread: favorite Auden poem”.

On the day following the elections, DeLong offers this observation:

I wrote:

One way to look at last night’s election is that the implicit gerrymandering of the Senate and the in-the-tank-ness of the press corps are keeping people from realizing how big the blowout was. Consider this: it looks like 32,100 thousand Americans voted for Democratic Senatorial candidates, and only 24,524 thousand Americans voted for Republican Senatorial candidates. That’s a 13.4% margin of Democratic victory.

Hoisted from comments are Mo:

Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: Fair and Balanced Almost Every Day: 32,100,000 vs. 24,524,000: Here are the totals for the complete Senate, using Brad’s numbers for last night:

Dem/Rep:

21,428,784 18,665,605 02

37,645,909 38,164,089 04

32,100,000 24,524,000 06

Total:

91,174,693 81,353,694

From Time:

Ebullient Democrats declared victory as months of brutal campaigning yielded one big prize they had been fighting for Tuesday night: control of the House of Representatives in the next session of Congress, under the first female Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. With results projected in most races, the Democrats were set to win key battles in Connecticut, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Arizona, capitalizing on anger against the war in Iraq, Republican scandals and a broad anti-incumbent sentiment.

With momentum at their backs, Democrats were set to claim a gain of between 20 and 35 seats, well beyond the 15 they needed to take control. That in turn will give Pelosi a mandate for change to launch the kind of tough anti-GOP agenda the White House and their Republican allies on the Hill had feared. “The campaign is over,” Pelosi shouted on election night, grinning with confidence in front of hundreds of roaring supporters blocks from the Capitol in Washington D.C. “Democrats are ready to lead!” A hoarse Rep. Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic.

More here.

From Nature:

The war in Iraq, the price of oil, the deadlock over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the terrorism of al-Qaeda and the tensions surrounding immigrant communities in Europe ensure that Islam is rarely far from the headlines. But you would have to be an avid student of Muslim affairs to come across any discussion of science and technology not linked to the development of nuclear weapons.
In this week’s issue, Nature offers an unprecedented look at the prospects for science and technology in the Muslim world.

In ignoring Muslim science, the West follows the lead of the Muslim world itself. Low investment and a low profile combine to keep the scientific community small, marginalized and unproductive. This is not simply a matter of underdevelopment; the oil-rich Gulf states invest pitifully in R&D. The poor scientific track record of Islamic countries might suggest that there is something about Islam inherently inimical to research. Muslims bristle at this idea, pointing to the major achievements of Muslim scholars under the Islamic caliphate.

More here.

The strain Hazlitt caught in Wordsworth’s face can be attributed in part to the project he and Coleridge set themselves: looking beyond or through “outward appearance”, often cruel and contradictory, to an underlying unity and benevolence. Sisman somewhat undervalues this strain in discussion of the poetry. He is writing biography not criticism, but he might have said more about the poetry’s often divided character, the struggle of the poets to sustain their faith in nature and the powers of the imagination. “Though he could no longer feel the ‘aching joys’ and ‘dizzy raptures’ of his boyhood”, writes Sisman, of the speaker in “Tintern Abbey”, “he had found ‘abundant recompense’ elsewhere”. This is a reading of the lines “for such loss, I would believe [italics added], / Abundant recompense”, one of several disquieting or disturbing notes in the poem (“If this / Be but a vain belief”, “And so I dare to hope”). In later poems – “Resolution and Independence”, “Ode: Intimations”, “Elegiac Stanzas” – similar notes sound more ominously; the assertion in “Tintern Abbey” that “Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her” becomes increasingly dubious. From the start, what Harold Bloom calls a “dark undersong”, that of nature as “hidden antagonist”, shadowed Wordsworth’s faith in the one life. Coleridge’s poems are even more divided, likewise in ways that call his and Wordsworth’s “joint labour” into question. Beneath the biographical factors which Adam Sisman so vividly and movingly recounts lies the difficulty of the labour itself.

more from the TLS here.

Still, when it comes to the state of the novel, to the future of the novel, I feel rather optimistic. Numbers don’t count where books are concerned, for there is only one reader, each and every time only one reader. That explains the particular power of the novel and why, in my opinion, it will never die as a form. Every novel is an equal collaboration between the writer and the reader and it is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.

I have spent my life in conversations with people I have never seen, with people I will never know and I hope to continue until the day I stop breathing.

It’s the only job I’ve ever wanted.

more from the Guardian Unlimited here.

From a new HRW study written by Farida Deif and our friend Lucy Mair:

A significant number of women and girls in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are victims of violence perpetrated by family members and intimate partners. While there is increasing recognition of the problem and some Palestinian Authority (PA) officials have indicated their support for a more forceful response, little action has been taken to seriously address these abuses. Indeed, there is some evidence the level of violence is getting worse while the remedies available to victims are being further eroded.

Defenders of the status quo on this issue typically justify the PA’s failure to take more decisive action by highlighting the many critical political, economic, and security matters facing the PA, a situation only exacerbated by events following the electoral victory of Hamas in January 2006. While it is true that Israeli actions since the outbreak of the current intifada in September 2000—including attacks on PA institutions and security services, and Israel’s current refusal to remit tax revenues, among others—have significantly weakened PA capabilities, this is no excuse for inaction. There is much that PA officials could be but are not doing to end violence against women inside the family. This report offers concrete suggestions for change, some of which are highlighted in the key recommendations listed at the end of this section.

Update: Also see The New York Times article on the study here. Lucy Mair:

“The problem is that no one sees this abuse as a crime,” Lucy Mair, a researcher in the Middle East and North Africa Division of Human Rights Watch and a co-author of the report, said in an interview. “It’s seen as a family or social problem, and some behavior is not even criminalized.”

Stanley Fish in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Some years ago, just after Salman Rushdie was made the object of a fatwa, I found myself at an academic conference listening to a panel address the issues raised by his situation. A member of the audience rose and, without a trace of irony, gave voice to this question/accusation: “What’s the matter with those Iranians? Haven’t they ever heard of the First Amendment?” The empirical answer to the question was maybe yes, maybe no. Some individual Iranians and many members of the Iranian legal community would have heard of (and studied) the First Amendment, but even those who had read it could not have been counted on to affirm the assumptions informing it — the assumption that expression as an abstract category is to be valued over the content of what is expressed; the assumption that no content is to be either stigmatized or embraced in advance of its having been subjected to the test of rational scrutiny; the assumption that contents (ideas, ideologies, opinions, hypotheses) are equal before the law, and none is to be prohibited unless it is put into (dangerous) action; the assumption that religious pronouncements, even those that issue from revered authorities, are in no way privileged, exempt from criticism, or entitled to a place in the policy deliberations of the state; the assumption that the holding of views, however unpopular or even sacrilegious, cannot be a reason for the denial of rights, the withholding of privileges, or the distribution of rewards.

More here.