https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUsnVOqrqqE

Things I Didn’t Know I Loved

it’s 1962 March 28^th
I’m sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain
I don’t like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn’t know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn’t worked the earth love it
I’ve never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

and here I’ve loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can’t wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you’ll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow
I know this has troubled people before
……………………………….and will trouble those after me
I know all this has been said a thousand times before
………………………………and will be said after me

I didn’t know I loved the sky
cloudy or clear
the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino
in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish
I hear voices
not from the blue vault but from the yard
the guards are beating someone again

I didn’t know I loved trees
bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino
they come upon me in winter noble and modest
beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish
“the poplars of Izmir
losing their leaves. . .
they call me The Knife. . .
…………………………………….lover like a young tree. . .
I blow stately mansions sky-high”
in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief
……………………………………………………………to a pine bough for luck Read more »

Tony Perrottet in The Paris Review:

Even Che Guevara, the poster boy for the Cuban Revolution, was forced to admit that endlessly trudging the Sierra Maestra mountains had its downsides. “There are periods of boredom in the life of the guerrilla fighter,” he warns future revolutionaries in his classic handbook, Guerrilla Warfare. The best way to combat the dangers of ennui, he helpfully suggests, is reading. Many of the rebels were college educated—Che was a doctor, Fidel a lawyer, others fine art majors—and visitors to the rebels’ jungle camps were often struck by their literary leanings. Even the most macho fighters, it seems, would be seen hunched over books.

Che recommends that guerrillas carry edifying works of nonfiction despite their annoying weight—“good biographies of past heroes, histories, or economic geographies” will distract them from vices such as gambling and drinking. An early favorite in camp, improbably, was a Spanish-language Reader’s Digest book on great men in U.S. history, which the visiting CBS-TV journalist Robert Taber noticed in 1957 was passed around from man to man, possibly for his benefit. But literary fiction had its place, especially if it fit vaguely into the revolutionary framework. One big hit was Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin, a novel recounting the brutality of the occupation of Naples after World War II. (Ever convinced of victory, Fidel thought reading the book would help ensure that the men would behave well when they captured Havana.) More improbably, a dog-eared copy of Émile Zola’s psychological thriller The Beast Within was also pored over with an intensity that could only impress modern bibliophiles.

More here.

Lionel Shriver in Harper’s Magazine:

I have a new fear. And this one’s a doozy.

I write a fortnightly column for the British barely right-­of-­center magazine (that’s left-­of-­center, in the United States) The Spectator. Having weathered more than one social-­media shit storm, I’m one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career for good. As Roseanne Barr and Megyn Kelly can testify, it doesn’t take a thousand words, either. A single unacceptable sentiment, a word usage misconstrued, a sentence taken out of context suffices these days to implode a reputation decades in the making and to trigger ­McCarthyite blacklisting. When I’ve floated this anxiety past the odd friend and colleague, their universal response has been a sorrowful shake of the head. Repeatedly I hear, “You’re exactly the sort of person this happens to.”

But that isn’t the fear in its entirety.

More here.

Quintard Taylor in Black Past:

On August 15, 1970, Huey P. Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, gave a speech in New York City where he outlined the Party’s position on two emerging movements at the time, the women’s liberation movement and the gay liberation movement.  Newton’s remarks were strikingly unusual since most conservative, moderate, and radical black organizations remained silent on the issues addressed by these movements.  The speech appears below.

During the past few years strong movements have developed among women and among homosexuals seeking their liberation. There has been some uncertainty about how to relate to these movements. Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. I say “whatever your insecurities are” because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the woman or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us or take the nuts that we might not have to start with.

We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people. We must not use the racist attitude that the White racists use against our people because they are Black and poor. Many times the poorest White person is the most racist because he is afraid that he might lose something, or discover something that he does not have. So you’re some kind of a threat to him. This kind of psychology is in operation when we view oppressed people and we are angry with them because of their particular kind of behavior, or their particular kind of deviation from the established norm.

Remember, we have not established a revolutionary value system; we are only in the process of establishing it. I do not remember our ever constituting any value that said that a revolutionary must say offensive things towards homosexuals, or that a revolutionary should make sure that women do not speak out about their own particular kind of oppression. As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite: we say that we recognize the women’s right to be free. We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society.

And what made them homosexual?

More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month).

From The Guardian:

“The Tribute” by Jane Gardam (1980)

John McGahern and Annie Proulx are among my favourite authors, but to dispel gloom I choose this story from Jane Gardam’s 1980 collection The Sidmouth Letters. Reading this gleeful story in my expatriate days, I recognised the cast of “diplomatic wives”, trailing inebriate husbands through the ruins of empire. Mostly dialogue, it is a deft, witty tale in which a small kindness – though not by a diplomatic wife – pays off 40 years later. I must have read it a dozen times, to see how its note is sustained and the surprise is sprung; every time it makes me smile with delight. Hilary Mantel

“The Stone Boy” by Gina Berriault (1957)

This great and underrated masterpiece is a meditation on good and evil and especially about the way that people’s expectations and assumptions about us may wear us down and eventually force us into compliance with their view. But it is a much deeper and more biblical story than that and, like any great work of art, resists reduction. Berriault, who died in 1999, is known as a San Francisco writer. A wonderful sampling of her stories is available in Women in Their Beds: New & Selected Stories. George Saunders

“The Love of a Good Woman” by Alice Munro (1998)

Among the handful of short stories closest to my heart, I’ve chosen “The Love of a Good Woman” by Canadian writer Munro, from her 1998 collection of that name. It’s about a murder – probably it’s a murder, because nothing is certain – and a love match that depends on keeping that murder secret. Like so many of Munro’s stories, this one has the scope of a novel yet never feels hurried or crowded. The sociology of a small town in rural Ontario is caught on the wing in the loose weave of her narration; the story takes in whole lifetimes, and yet its pace is also exquisitely slow, carrying us deep inside particular moments. A woman moves among the willows beside a river at night, making up her mind. Tessa Hadley

More here.

Sheila Marikar in More Intelligent Life:

On a Monday afternoon in December, Sarah Jones, a Tony award-winning playwright and impressionist, sits at a flimsy metal table in Los Angeles’s Grand Central Market, a cavernous food hall hawking a vast array of cuisine: grass-fed lamb, vegan ramen, tacos, acai bowls. Around her, scruffy workers in baseball caps take their lunches next to corporate types in suits. In a city where the car culture promotes a gas-guzzling form of isolation, the market offers an alternative atmosphere: it buzzes with the energy of happenstance meetings.

This is why Jones chose it for the first day of shooting “She the People”, her forthcoming television series which will take on topics like gender, race, sex, power and ethnic identity in much the same way that the chef Anthony Bourdain documented global cuisine. In each episode Jones will travel to a different part of the world, from Amsterdam’s red-light district to the US-Mexico border, drawing these subjects out through the lives of ordinary people. “Every episode is going to put Sarah on the front lines of an issue,” says Justin Wilkes, the president of Imagine Documentaries, which is producing the show.

But Jones is no ordinary interviewer: she’s an impressionist, who morphs between characters seamlessly. Watching her is like observing a master magician at close range, as you try and fail to catch the moment when the trick happens. These transformations make the often dry social issues she tackles in her shows relatable, poignant and hilarious, and have turned Jones into one of America’s most subtle examiners of stereotypes and clichés. That art has defined her stage work; this autumn, TV audiences will be able to enjoy it too.

More here.

In a Station

Once I walked through the halls of a station
Someone called your name
In the streets I heard children laughing
They all sound the same
Wonder, could you ever know me
Know the reason why I live
Is there nothing you can show me
Life seems so little to give

Once I climbed up the face of a mountain
And ate the wild fruit there
Fell asleep until the moonlight woke me
And I could taste your hair
Isn’t everybody dreaming
Then the voice I hear is real
Out of all the idle scheming
Can’t we have something to feel

Once upon a time leaves me empty
Tomorrow never came
I could sing the sound of your laughter
Still I don’t know your name
Must be some way to repay you
Out of all the good you gave
If a rumor should delay you
Love seems so little to save

by Richard Manuel
from Music From Big Pink

Listen

Angela Woodward at The Quarterly Conversation:

Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache produced “a voluminous body of illegible writings.” This phrase from the editors’ brief afterward is in itself so evocative I can hardly go further, that body light and aloft, setting sail on an invisible current of the thoughts beneath words, the feelings beneath skin.

She preferred “publication and distribution” rather than exhibition, seeing her work as books, as stories, as newspaper pages that could be read intently and then set to other uses, the mopping of wet basements, the stuffing of shoes by the destitute in cold weather.

Dermisache invited her audience “to sit and manipulate the printed matter” in a process that was so open that anyone could make anything of the lines, the words, the pages. A total freedom of interpretation, where a series of tiny open boxes could mean bread, could mean windows, could mean the exhaustion of a typist’s fingers after a long day producing legal documents. Her text-like pages lean towards meaning, as evocative of intelligence as the lines chewed by beetles beneath tree bark.

more here.

Anna Girling at the TLS:

Certainly, even as Cunard’s own work – long overlooked in favour of works about her, including a number of biographies – has recently begun to be recognized and republished, attention has still tended to focus on those of her writings with links to the more outré figures and avant-garde aesthetics of the 1920s. Of her poetry, it is the long Parallax (1925), a response to The Waste Land (and, like T. S. Eliot’s poem, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press), that is best known – only partly because it is her best. Meanwhile, her prose, which includes extensive political journalism and several works of memoir, remains largely out of print, and her extensive career as an anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-imperial writer and activist is often characterized as a series of dilettantish enthusiasms.

Cunard’s reputation has, however, been enjoying a gradual revival, driven largely by the work of Jane Marcus. The past two decades have seen the republication of selections from her journalism and poetry, along with a noticeable growth in academic interest. Perhaps most significantly, her ambitious black internationalist anthology, Negro (1934), was reissued in full last year, encouraging renewed attention to her cultural and political work of the 1930s.

more here.

Mallika Rao at The Atlantic:

Jhabvala may have written of Indians, but she wrote largely for the Western Hemisphere. “I have no fans in India,” she told a Los Angeles Times writer in 1993, with what the article described as a “one-note laugh.” A self-confessed “chameleon” at ease in saris or slacks, Jhabvala doled out insights not often shared across racial or class lines. Such a position—an “our woman in India,” to remix the Graham Greene title—would be harder to pull off today, when few audiences are ever exclusive, when everyone seems able to hear everyone else.

The characters collected in At the End of the Century thus deploy, through Jhabvala’s satirical lens, what could be thought of as endangered speech. “Even physically the English looked cold to her,” goes a line in the story “Miss Sahib,” “with their damp white skins and pale blue eyes.” The England-born teacher who moors the story finds during a stint at home that she longs to return to India, to be once more “surrounded by those glowing coloured skins; and those eyes! The dark, large, liquid Indian eyes! And hair that sprang with such abundance from their heads.”

more here.

David Olusoga at The New Statesman:

The trade in ideas, technologies, art and culture between Africa and her partners flowed both ways, a reality that was accentuated by the slavery trade – something that Green explores in great depth. Not only did African goods and commodities pulse through the arteries of the Atlantic world, cultural knowledge and intellectual capital was taken to the New World in the minds of the millions of human beings who were themselves commodified and exchanged. The Maroons, communities of escaped slaves that emerged in Jamaica, Panama and elsewhere, fought their wars using military theories they had learnt on the continent of their birth. Likewise, the rice plantations of South Carolina were cultivated using not just African labour but also African knowledge. This expertise was intentionally transplanted into American soil by British slave traders who had enslaved thousands of people from the rice-growing regions of Sierra Leone. These Africans were kidnapped to order, their minds as valuable a commodity as their bodies.

more here.

Nick Cowen in Notes on Liberty:

Edmundson has written an admirably concise yet powerful book. It blends a critical account of Rawls’ work with an original case for democratic socialism hewn from Rawlsian stone. In my opinion, this case has some flaws but it remains a timely contribution to the enduring quest for justice and social stability.

The initial chapters dispatch the common misconception of Rawls as a supporter of welfare-state capitalism, unpack the Rawlsian case against private property in the means of production being a basic liberty, and examine what Rawls means by liberal socialism and property-owning democracy. Edmundson emphasizes James Meade and Joseph Schumpeter as inspirations for Rawls’ understanding of these regimes, as well as the British Labour Party’s policy of nationalizing major industries. Liberal socialism aims to achieve social equality through nationalization while property-owning democracy pursues the same end through the systematic distribution of the means of production among private individuals.

These two regimes vie for the crown of justice. Edmundson marches us through the controversies emerging from Rawls’ work before settling the argument decisively in favor of liberal socialism.

More here.

Oliver Wiseman at CapX:

Take a look at the world poverty clock, which shows in real time the fall in the number of people living in extreme poverty. Or consider two recent bestsellers – Enlightenment Now by the American Psychology Professor Steven Pinker and Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling – both of which have gone some way to bridging the gap between people’s hardwired pessimism and the much happier truth about the state of the world. Under Marian Tupy, a CapX regular, the team at Humanprogress.org works as a kind of societal fitbit, keeping count of the steps humanity takes in the right direction. Over at Our World in Data, Max Roser and his colleagues produce richly detailed graphics that help bring that progress to life. This is the tip of the iceberg, and the result of all these endeavours, and many, many more, is a body of evidence that is as overwhelmingly persuasive as it is reassuring.

Some, however, remain unconvinced. Writing in the Guardian this week, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the University of London, argues that this good news story, in particular the dramatic fall in extreme poverty is a “powerful narrative”, but “completely wrong”.

More here.

Kevin Blankinship in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ON VALENTINE’S DAY 1989, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared a death sentence on British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses, along with any who helped its release: “I ask all Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.” The Ayatollah accused Rushdie of blasphemy, of sullying Islam and its prophet Muhammad, though many saw it as a desperate cry for popular support after a humiliating decade of war with Iraq. There followed riots, demonstrations, and book burnings across Europe and the Middle East. Death threats poured in. Viking Penguin, Rushdie’s UK publisher, was threatened with bombings. The author himself was forced into hiding under the pseudonym “Joseph Anton,” a mash-up of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov and the title of Rushdie’s 2012 memoir of the controversy. The media and public still remember it as “The Rushdie Affair,” though most people born after the 1980s have never heard of it.

Unlike the recent attack on lampoon magazine Charlie Hebdo or the threats against Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the creative text behind the Rushdie Affair was renowned as high art. It netted the 1988 Whitbread Award and was named a Booker Prize finalist (Rushdie had already won a Booker for his second novel, Midnight’s Children). It was lauded by the Who’s Who of 20th-century literature: Norman Mailer, Bruce Chatwin, Marina Warner, Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Carey, David Lodge.

More here.

Dylan Riley in New Left Review:

Debates around the politics of Trump and other new-right leaders have led to an explosion of historical analogizing, with the experience of the 1930s looming large. According to much of this commentary, Trump—not to mention Orbán, Kaczynski, Modi, Duterte, Erdoğan—is an authoritarian figure justifiably compared to those of the fascist era. The proponents of this view span the political spectrum, from neoconservative right and liberal mainstream to anarchist insurrectionary. The typical rhetorical device they deploy is to advance and protect the identification of Trump with fascism by way of nominal disclaimers of it. Thus for Timothy Snyder, a Cold War liberal, ‘There are differences’—yet: ‘Trump has made his debt to fascism clear from the beginning. From his initial linkage of immigrants to sexual violence to his continued identification of journalists as “enemies” . . . he has given us every clue we need.’ For Snyder’s Yale colleague, Jason Stanley, ‘I’m not arguing that Trump is a fascist leader, in the sense that he’s ruling as a fascist’—but: ‘as far as his rhetorical strategy goes, it’s very fascist.’ For their fellow liberal Richard Evans, at Cambridge: ‘It’s not the same’—however: ‘Trump is a 21st-century would-be dictator who uses the unprecedented power of social media and the Internet to spread conspiracy theories’—‘worryingly reminiscent of the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s.’

More here.

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

In 1995, Edward Wolff, an economist at N.Y.U., published a short book called “Top Heavy,” which detailed the increasingly alarming concentration of wealth in the United States, and warned of the threat that it posed to American democracy, as the ultra-rich sought to exercise more political power. At the time, the richest one per cent of families controlled about forty per cent of all household wealth—defined as stocks, bonds, other financial assets, equity in private businesses, trusts, real estate, and bank deposits—while much of the population had virtually no wealth at all once debts and mortgages were taken into account. To address this disparity, Wolff called for the introduction of an annual tax on wealth. Aware that this might be considered a radical idea, he kept his proposed tax rates at pretty low levels. Under his plan, households with a net worth of a hundred thousand dollars would pay five cents in tax on every hundred dollars of their wealth; the rate would rise to thirty cents per hundred dollars for households worth a million dollars or more. (Back then, about three per cent of U.S. households fell into the latter bracket.)

Despite the modest scale of Wolff’s proposal, it didn’t get much traction in the policy world. Prior to publishing the book, he did have a lunch meeting with Bill Bradley, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, where they discussed the idea, but that was as far as it went. “He sounded enthusiastic at the lunch, but when push came to shove he walked away,” Wolff recalled when I spoke with him earlier this week. “He thought that politically it was dynamite.”

Twenty-five years later, how have things changed?

More here.