Andy Martin in The Independent:

We weren’t always racists. We were always mean, murderous bastards, of course. Rape, slaughter, and slavery were once fairly normal and frequent. The plot of Taken has been rehearsed over and over again throughout history. Rousseau’s “noble savage” was a loner, self-sufficient, a hunter roaming about the woods having little contact with anyone else. But the point about the noble savage is that she did not exist. It’s a recent invention, a retrospective myth. The truly solo human just doesn’t survive for very long. We’ve always been tribal. We had to be if we wanted to stay alive. And the main problem for tribes was other tribes. Hell is other peoples, plural.

The Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic, tells of a beautiful young woman being abducted. The hero of the story, Rama, has to go kill a lot of bad guys to get her back again. Homer’s Iliad, composed around the same era, tells of Helen being taken by Paris to Troy and the Greeks launching a war against the Trojans to get her back again. The greatest fighter according to Homer is Achilles (played by Brad Pitt in the movie).

But it should be noted that Achilles refuses to fight for most of the epic poem on account of Agamemnon (who is on his side) taking possession of his woman Briseis, whom Achilles has already acquired elsewhere in a previous successful raid.

More here.

From Art Radar:

In a short video documentary produced by the Tate Modern in London, the artist talks about her exhibition, “Letters from Home,” which opened on 28 March 2013. Through personal letters, the exhibition illustrates an immigrant’s disconnection from his or her homeland.  In the Tate video interview, Zarina discusses how working with letters from her sister, Rani, has helped her to preserve her sense of identity. “It’s almost like writing your life’s story, and it’s not just my life’s story. It’s the story of all immigrants. And that’s where the home comes in, the idea of home, and maps and floor plans,” she says. “I just made my personal life the subject of my art, so I have to write about what I have gone through”.

The video juxtaposes images of New York, where Zarina has lived and worked since 1973, with the Urdu-inscribed prints that illustrate both her physical and emotional journeys. The first artwork in the video is a detail of Atlas of My World (2001), in which a jagged black line separates India from Pakistan. “I really don’t have a family in India,” Zarina notes. She states that the significance of her family’s forced move from India to Pakistan, a result of the 1947 Partition, was not something that she fully comprehended until many years later.

Zarina’s style derives from the blending of cultures that she has experienced in her travels and studies. She completed a degree in Mathematics in 1958, but soon fell in love with printmaking. After training in woodblock printing in Bangkok and Tokyo, Zarina also studied intaglio in Paris. In Zarina’s workspace, bits of paper, covered in Urdu and cut into geometric strips, await placement in her various artistic projects. The plywood engravings she has used in the printmaking process are seen at her workbench. The softness of the wood is what attracted Zarina to the medium: “I just like the texture of the wood; I like the way you dig in.”

Zarina often uses writing as the subject of her work and is greatly influenced by the rich poetic history of her mother tongue, Urdu. “For me, the image follows the words and they all come from, they all have a reference somewhere, mostly in poetry,” she explains.

More here.

Robin Wright in The New Yorker:

The real saga of the Statue of Liberty—the symbolic face of America around the world, and the backdrop of New York’s dazzling Fourth of July fireworks show—is an obscure piece of U.S. history. It had nothing to do with immigration. The telltale clue is the chain under Lady Liberty’s feet: she is stomping on it. “In the early sketches, she was also holding chains in her hand,” Edward Berenson, a professor of history at New York University, told me last week. The shackles were later replaced with a tablet noting the date of America’s independence. But the shattered chain under her feet remained.

The statue was the brainchild of Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French expert on the U.S. Constitution who also headed the French Anti-Slavery Society. After the Civil War, in 1865, he wanted to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., enshrined in the new Thirteenth Amendment, which, in theory, reaffirmed the ideals of freedom—this time for all people—first embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The now famous line—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” from a poem by Emma Lazarus—wasn’t added until 1903, Berenson noted. The poem had been donated as part of a literary auction to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. France donated the statue; the Americans had to raise the funds to pay for its pedestal. Long after Lazarus’s death, a friend lobbied to have the poem engraved on a plaque and added to the base. It has since associated the Statue of Liberty with a meaning that Laboulaye never intended.

One has to wonder what Laboulaye would think of America today, amid one of the country’s gravest periods of racial turmoil since the Civil War. Last month, a poll by Ipsos found that an overwhelming majority of people in fourteen countries, on six continents, support the protests that erupted across the United States after the murder of George Floyd. Russia, the fifteenth country in the survey, was the only place where a minority—about a third—backed the demonstrators.

More here.

New World

I did not walk through a wardrobe
or follow a rabbit into a hole
or stare too long into a looking glass.
My house was not swept up in a tornado

The naïve woman I was, secure in my belief
that shocking lies and bad behavior
could never bear fruit, died
when the public followed the pied piper.

What was once a granite foundation
has become sandstone, eroding from ill winds.
Apathy grows slowly like the buildup of callus.
Even war zones are homey when bombs are a habit.

The sun has set on the democracy of my youth
and I am lost in my own country.

by JeanMarie Olivieri
from The Typescript

Damilola Oyedele in The Mantle:

The first thing that strikes the reader about Yahia Lababidi’s Revolutions of the Heart  is its ‘genre-bending’ element. The book is divided into ‘Essays, Appreciations, Reflections,’ which delves into literature, religion, and global politics, and ‘Conversations & Fictions’ — a more intimate section which provides insights into Lababidi’s motivations, influences, and thoughts on an equally wide variety of topics.

The author describes himself as one who lives “for and through good conversations,” and the book gives the impression of an intimate conversation on some of the topics that matter most to him.

This collection of essays, interviews, and aphorisms is Lababidi’s invitation for his readers to encounter new ideas and refine old beliefs. Ultimately, the reader’s conversations with the author will indeed set their hearts in motion.

More here.

Robert Brenner in New Left Review:

The Fed’s 23 March declaration that it intended to provide loans to non-financial corporations was decisive in indicating the Fed’s assumption of leadership of the government’s corporate bailout, signalling what was expected of Congress and the Treasury, and specifying the intended form and level of support for big business in the coronavirus economic crisis. On cue, shortly thereafter, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that the centrepiece of their just-approved bill, soon to be called the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security or cares Act, was a giant rescue of non-financial corporations amounting to half a trillion dollars. That $500 billion was to be reserved entirely for companies with at least 10,000 employees and revenues of at least $2.5 billion per year. The Act set aside $46 billion to be shared between passenger airlines ($25 billion), cargo airlines ($4 billion) and ‘businesses necessary for national security’, a code name for Boeing ($17 billion), leaving no less than $454 billion for the political authorities to distribute to the fortunate corporate recipients they would select. Yet even this huge sum turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. The actual payday for the us’s greatest non-financial companies would be of a different order of magnitude entirely.

Congress’s appropriation for the corporate bailout, to be paid for by the taxpayers and temporarily attributed to the Department of the Treasury, was simply the required first step to enable the Federal Reserve to take over the bailout’s actual administration. The entire $454 billion remaining from Congress’s original allocation was thus credited to the Fed’s account as a cushion or backstop to cover potential losses, and this opened the way for the Fed to assume full charge of making advances to the corporations and, in particular, to leverage Congress’s original allocation by a factor of 10—from $454 billion to roughly $4.54 trillion—‘for loans, loan guarantees and other investments’. Some $4.586 trillion, roughly 75 per cent of the total $6.286 trillion derived directly and indirectly from cares Act money, would go for the ‘care’ of the country’s biggest and best-off companies.

More here.

Kate Streader in Beat:

Sister Rosetta Tharpe is a name that – despite her recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017 – is still widely unknown considering the invaluable influence she had on the generations of rock’n’roll acts which followed in her wake.

When we think of rock’n’roll in a historical sense, we think of men like Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Johnny Cash and Chuck Berry as getting the ball rolling, and later the likes of all-male bands such as The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin cementing the force of the genre which has echoed through the generations since.

However, it was Sister Rosetta Tharpe who inspired the men we associate as revolutionising the music scene and birthing rock’n’roll.

Born in 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Sister Rosetta Tharpe – born Rosetta Nubin – began playing guitar at the age of four before progressing to performing alongside her mother’s evangelist group The Church of God and Christ in churches across the South two years later.

Though these beginnings formed the foundations for the role she would eventually play in transforming the sounds of many iconic artists come, it was her move to Chicago which served as the most influential factor in Tharpe’s sound.

The urban environment and its rich musical culture influenced the young prodigy who would soon follow her musical ambitions across the country again, this time relocating to New York City to perform by the time she reached 20.

More here.

An interview with Wendy Brown in The Drift:

Margaret Thatcher famously said “there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” In a way, social distancing tests out the limits (and fundamental incoherence) of this idea. Are we learning anything new?

The extent to which the purpose of social distancing is misunderstood today is an index of the success of the mantra “There is no such thing as society.” So many treat social distancing as just about protecting yourself, so if you choose to go to the beach, the bars, or shopping, or choose not to wear a mask in public spaces, it should be up to you. It’s your life, and you’re free to do what you want with it, take your own risk. The idea that social distancing is actually a collective social pact—a worldwide mutual pact not about any individual but necessary to contain the spread of the virus—is incomprehensible from a perspective in which there are only individuals. So what do we get? Social distancing regarded as an illegitimate political encroachment on individual choice and the retort, “I can do what I want, and no state can tell me otherwise.” Interdependence isn’t just rejected here, it’s illegible, it doesn’t exist—Maggie Thatcher’s dream came true.

How else is the ethos of neoliberal rationality, which you’ve described as transposing democratic concerns into economic ones, shaping our experience of the pandemic?

I think it’s pretty obvious that the preoccupation not only with getting the economy open, but also with the tremendous threat to economic growth that the pandemic produced, together give us the stage on which much of this crisis is playing out.

The economy is predicted to decline or shrink by up to 3 percent this year. Now, that could be a wondrous thing. It could be phenomenal for the planet. It could sustain the crisis-induced reduction in the amount of stupid work many people do—producing useless stuff or useless services. It could reduce consumption of needless stuff, use of fossil fuels, the rate of waste and the pileup of garbage on the planet. It could be an extraordinary lesson in living smaller, better, slower.

More here.

Mark Mazower in The New York Review of Books:

When Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012 at the age of ninety-five, he was probably the best-known historian in the English-speaking world. His books have been translated into every major language (and numerous minor ones), and many of them have remained continuously in print since their first appearance. Though his work centered on the history of labor, he wrote with equal fluency about the crisis of the seventeenth century and the bandits of Eritrea, the standard of living during the industrial revolution and Billie Holiday’s blues. For range and accessibility, there was no one to touch him. What he gave his readers was above all the sense of being intellectually alive, of the sheer excitement of a fresh idea and a bold, unsentimental argument. The works themselves are his memorial. What is there to learn from his biography?

Historians lead for the most part pretty dull lives: if they make it big enough to warrant a biography of their own, it is unlikely to feature anything more exciting than endless conferences, gripes about publishers, and the eventual bestowal of honors. Readers do not generally care about infighting in academia. Nor is it easy to be gripped by the more important but largely abstract questions of intellectual argument and debate that articulate positions and create schools of thought. In Hobsbawm’s case, however, the scale and nature of his achievement raise questions of their own. How do we explain his vast readership? How did a Marxist historian achieve such success during socialism’s decline in the second half of the twentieth century?

More here.

Daniel Trilling at The Guardian:

Perhaps the most groundbreaking discoveries of recent years have been in genetic history. It has already been several decades since the study of DNA revealed how little substance there was to claims of racial difference. Study of genetic material found in ancient bones also suggests that, rather than a single migration out of Africa, humans populated the globe in waves that intermingled, coming back as well as going forwards. “We weren’t migrants once in the distant past and then again in the most recent era,” Shah writes. “We’ve been migrants all along.”

That general truth might not be enough to defuse conflicts over migration by itself. But Shah’s tone is neither smug nor triumphalist. She is clear about the power and the danger of xenophobic politics, tracing the anti-refugee backlash that has been mobilised by the right, as well as the threat to our lives posed by the climate emergency. Hers is an optimistic book nonetheless, because it tells us that this is just the latest chapter in a long story of survival and adaptation.

more here.

Melinda Harvey at The Sydney Review of Books:

Angela said she had read Cusk’s newest book on the plane over. It slowly dawned on her that the essays in that collection contemplate a variety of ostracisms: from being given the silent treatment by one’s own parents to the exclusion of women writers from the literary canon. Aftermath, Medea, the Outline trilogy – they’re all about being cast out into the wilderness. In an essay called ‘Coventry’ Cusk characterises such exile as ‘ejection from the story’. The only thing to do once you’re ‘living amidst the waste and shattered buildings, the desecrated past’ is to search ‘for whatever truth might be found amid the smoking ruins’.

It’s bad enough for adults when they’re cast out of Eden. But adults have usually had some sort of hand in determining their fate; children have theirs thrust upon them.

more here.

Chris Murphy in BJMP:

As a philosopher turned GP myself, David Hume has long been my favourite philosopher. He lived in 18th-century Scotland, with renowned Scottish physician William Cullen as his own doctor and friend. Hume attended university at age 12, early even in those days, pushing himself so far that he ended up developing the ‘Disease of the Learned’ — a malady that seems to have been a sort of depression or nervous breakdown. Philosophers can suffer from burnout too.

In philosophical circles, Hume is considered to be ‘one of the most important philosophers to write in English’¹ but his isn’t the name that springs to mind if the man on the street is asked to name a famous philosopher. In fact, there’s much to recommend Hume as the most ‘GP’ figure of the Enlightenment. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding he sets out to apply the scientific method to the study of human nature. I can’t think of a more succinct way to describe the aims of modern general practice. A morning surgery can provide several patients with not much in the way of textbook pathology, but human nature is always on full display. If Hume himself was sitting in on my consultations, I imagine him suggesting that, because reason is ‘impotent’, I must ‘excite the moral passions’ of my patients. If smokers really wish to change their behaviour, Hume would think that it is not enough to print ‘SMOKING KILLS’ on the packet — you must also include a disgusting picture of a diseased lung. And he might have a point.

Hume teaches humility. A recent thoughtful editorial about medically unexplained symptoms² drew a variety of responses. It is clear that, for some doctors, the idea that certain things might be ‘unexplained’ or even ‘unexplainable’ is anathema. Their message is clear: we must simply try harder.³

But Hume spilt a lot of ink concerning the idea of cause and effect, and indeed expressed ‘sceptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding’.⁴ He thought many of the beliefs we form seem to be the product of ‘some instinct or mechanical tendency’ rather than any truly rational process.

More here.

RK As a Young Gardener

where is the grass in your garden, bob, that thrives in drought at 40
below,  and drives spikes into the heart of the garden you are
hoping to turn into a hot bed of noxious poetry and how beset by
mildew and beetles does your cabbage grow

i sing of pig weed dock and lamb’s quarter sing the cows who
amble stoically through the ragweed taller than rain forests you
felled and ploughed by dandelions that shone like wet suns witness
to your faith in cauliflower until you pulled one just for a fistful of
yellow a clump of dirt you raked spring looking for snakes and
crickets and what we called portulaca that clung to clay roads and
gravel lanes and your front yard except it was camomile where
they propped cars and thistles popped like revolutionaries from
shadow and from the shallow dirt into proper muffs that
turn purple and bristle under a sun that shriveled your mother’s
petunias the cows knowing there was stinkweed first thing in
spring, shockingly lush, which they leaped moons and fences to
eat, trampled wire and post, spoiled the milk with their slobbery
green breath moseyed near the leggy brown-eyed susans alongside
the ditches that rolled in clover a hard row to hoe where the
potatoes dug in like sappers and someone plucked the lady bugs
doused them in kerosene

by Robert Kroetsch
from The Typescript

Clyde Haberman in The New York Times:

Kuhn, who has written before about white working-class Americans, builds his book on long-ago police records and witness statements to recreate in painful detail a May day of rage, menace and blood. Antiwar demonstrators had massed at Federal Hall and other Lower Manhattan locations, only to be set upon brutally, and cravenly, by hundreds of steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers and other laborers from nearby construction sites like the nascent World Trade Center. Many of those men had served in past wars and viscerally despised the protesters as a bunch of pampered, longhaired, draft-dodging, flag-desecrating snotnoses.

It was a clash of irreconcilable tribes and battle cries: “We don’t want your war” versus “America, love it or leave it.” And it was bewildering to millions of other Americans, including my younger self, newly back home after a two-year Army stretch, most of it in West Germany. My sympathies were with the demonstrators. But I also understood the working stiffs and why they felt held in contempt by the youngsters and popular culture.

New social policies like affirmative action and school busing affected white blue-collar families far more than they did the more privileged classes that spawned many antiwar activists. For Hollywood, the workingman seemed barely a step above a Neanderthal, as in the 1970 movies “Joe,” about a brutish factory worker, and “Five Easy Pieces,” in which a diner waitress is set up to be the target of audience scorn. (Come 1971, we also had “All in the Family” and television’s avatar of working-class bigotry, Archie Bunker.)

It was, too, an era when New York was changing fast and not for the better.

More here.

Madhuri Sastry in Guernica:

Megha Majumdar’s polyphonic debut novel, A Burning, follows the loosely intertwined lives of Jivan, Lovely, and PT Sir in Kolkata, during a time of rising Hindu Nationalist sentiment. Jivan, a Muslim girl, happens to be present at a train station during a terrorist attack that ends with a locomotive in flames. Soon after, she makes a Facebook comment critical of police inaction, and government’s consequent complicity in the deaths of innocent people. She writes: “If the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean that the government is also a terrorist?” She is arrested and imprisoned for her “anti-national” comment, her religious identity serving as ostensibly irrefutable evidence of her disloyalty to the Indian state. Before her arrest, Jivan taught English to Lovely, a transgender woman with silver-screen dreams. Lovely has information that could exonerate Jivan, but her Bollywood dreams hinge on the role she will play in Jivan’strial. PT Sir, the Physical Education teacher at Jivan’s school who occasionally shares food with her out of pity, taps into political aspirations he didn’t even know he had, rising steadily through the Jana Kalyan Party ranks and accumulating power at great costs, including to Jivan.

Majumdar’s novel — and our conversation about it — centers on the oppressive nature of systemic marginalization, and how it affects individual existence and political participation.

More here.