Elif Batuman in the NYT Magazine:

During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature.

The contents of Brod’s suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. While about two-thirds of the Kafka estate eventually found its way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the remainder — believed to comprise drawings, travel diaries, letters and drafts — stayed in Brod’s possession until his death in Israel in 1968, when it passed to his secretary and presumed lover, Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe’s death in late 2007, at age 101, the National Library of Israel challenged the legality of her will, which bequeaths the materials to her two septuagenarian daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler. The library is claiming a right to the papers under the terms of Brod’s will. The case has dragged on for more than two years. If the court finds in the sisters’ favor, they will be free to follow Eva’s stated plan to sell some or all of the papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. They will also be free to keep whatever they don’t sell in their multiple Swiss and Israeli bank vaults and in the Tel Aviv apartment that Eva shares with an untold number of cats.

The situation has repeatedly been called Kafkaesque, reflecting, perhaps, the strangeness of the idea that Kafka can be anyone’s private property. Isn’t that what Brod demonstrated, when he disregarded Kafka’s last testament: that Kafka’s works weren’t even Kafka’s private property but, rather, belonged to humanity?

It’s been one month since the final episode of Work of Art: The Next Great Artist aired on Bravo. For those who don’t know, I was one of four regular judges on the show, which, much like Project Runway or Top Chef, asked fourteen aspiring artists to compete for $100,000 and an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. I’m told the show got bigger ratings than Project Runway in its first season (whatever that means), and blogs have reported that the network is committed to a second season. (If that’s true, I haven’t been contacted yet. Hello?) Should Work of Art return, prepare for a collective shriek of horror. The art world, for the most part, despised the show, describing it as, among other things, a disaster for art. The New York Times reported that a Brooklyn Museum trustee resigned in part because of the museum’s partnership with Bravo. Blogs blasted me as a sellout and fraud; one called the show “a glitter-dipped, shellacked turd” (sounds like a Chris Ofili painting); another said it “promulgates a massive deception that out-deceives all other reality programs.” (Take that, Fox News!) William Powhida, whose pointed cartoons of the art world were on my 2009 top-ten list, complained that being on my list was now “more like an anchor around my ankle than a life raft.”

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

The president of the French republic raised a mountain, and it has fallen on his toes. In launching its offensive against the Roma, the French government believed it could turn to its electoral advantage a problem which is essentially a problem of border policing and the state authorities. Major error. The question of the Roma is not about public or social security, it is about mental security. And it is not a uniquely French problem, it is a European problem. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the American daily the Los Angeles Times conducted one of the first polls in Eastern Europe in 1990. The results showed that for 80 percent of the populations freshly freed from Communism – Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians and Poles, the ‘Gypsy’ was the incarnation of the diabolical other. In the nineties and in the face of strong popular resistance, Czech President Vaclav Havel tore down a ghetto where his people wanted to see the “travelling people” incarcerated. The hatred of the “Gypsies” may be widespread and have seen its worse excesses in Eastern Europe, but it is certainly no stranger to the West. Nineteen century literature and opera – from Victor Hugo to Verdi – amply betrays the fears of the sedentary about the non-territorial collective. Begging, disease, thieving, and even fantasies about child snatching – such were the associations that for centuries haunted a European mind living in fear of “people who don’t live as we do”. Propelling this hysteria to its extreme, the Nazis sent these “sub-humans” to the gas chambers.

more from Andre Glucksmann at Sign and Sight here.

No biographer of George Washington has failed to remark on his inscrutability. In “Washington: A Life” (Penguin; $40), Ron Chernow calls Washington “the most famously elusive figure in American history.” Sparks eventually published eleven volumes of Washington’s writings, together with a one-volume biography. In 1893, Worthington C. Ford published the last installment of a fourteen-volume set. An edition of thirty-nine volumes was completed in 1940. Of the University of Virginia Press’s magnificent “Papers of George Washington,” begun in 1968, sixty-two volumes have been published so far. But, for all those papers, Washington rarely revealed himself on the page. Even his few surviving letters to his wife are formal and strained. Those diaries? Here is Washington’s entire diary entry for October 24, 1774, a day that he was in Philadelphia, as a delegate to the Continental Congress, debating, among other things, a petition to be sent to the King: “Dined with Mr. Mease & Spent the Evening at the New Tavern.” Here is how John Adams’s diary entry for that same day begins: “In Congress, nibbling and quibbling, as usual. There is no greater mortification than to sit with half a dozen Witts, deliberating upon a Petition, Address, or Memorial. These great Witts, these subtle Criticks, these refined Genius’s, these learned Lawyers, these wise Statesmen, are so fond of shewing their Parts and Powers, as to make their Consultations very tedius. Young Ned Rutledge is a perfect Bob o’ Lincoln—a Swallow—a Sparrow—a Peacock—excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady—jejune, inane, and puerile. Mr. Dickinson is very modest, delicate, and timid.” Aside from chucking Washington in favor of writing about Adams, what’s a biographer to do?

more from Jill Lepore at The New Yorker here.

From Big Think:

Kwame Anthony Appiah is a philosopher, novelist, and professor of philosophy at Princeton University. Appiah was born in London but moved as an infant to Ghana, where he grew up. His father, Joseph Emmanuel Appiah, a lawyer and politician, was also, at various times, a Member of Parliament, an Ambassador, and a President of the Ghana Bar Association. His mother, Peggy Appiah, whose family was English, was a novelist, children’s writer, and social activist. In 1970, Appiah’s great-uncle, Otumfuo Sir Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, was succeeded by his uncle, Otumfuo Nana Poku Ware II, as king of Ashanti.

Appiah was educated abroad in England, ultimately graduating from Clare College, Cambridge University, in England, where he took both B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in the philosophy department. Since Cambridge, he has taught at Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard universities and lectured at many other institutions in the United States, Germany, Ghana and South Africa, as well as at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Appiah is the author of several books including “The Ethics of Identity,” “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers,” “Experiment in Ethics,” and “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.” He has also written three novels and reviews regularly for the New York Review of Books. 

He currently serves as President of the PEN American Center. He has homes in New York city and near Pennington, in New Jersey, which he shares with his partner, Henry Finder, Editorial Director of the New Yorker magazine.

A Birthday Poem

Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.

by Ted Kooser

A terrifying and very short story by Mohsin Hamid in the current issue of Granta, which is devoted to Pakistan:

I hear the window shatter. There’s no air conditioner on to muffle the sound. I get out of bed. I wish I wasn’t my age. I wish I was as old as my parents. Or as young as my son. I wish it didn’t have to be me telling my wife to stay where she is, saying everything will be fine in a voice she doesn’t believe and I don’t believe either. We both hear the shouting downstairs. ‘Put on some clothes,’ I’m saying to her. ‘It’ll be better if you’re wearing clothes.’

The electricity’s gone so I use my phone to light the way. already there’s the sound of men running up the wooden stairs. I shut the bedroom door and lock it behind me. Shadows are jumping and stretching from multiple torches. I raise both my hands. ‘I’m here,’ I say to them. I want to say it loudly. I sound like a whispering child. ‘Please. Everything is all right.’

I’m on the floor. Someone has hit me. I don’t know if it was with a hand or a club. My mouth is full of liquid. I can’t get any words out. I’m gagging and I have to let my jaw hang open so I can breathe. Behind my back my wrists are being taped together. It feels like electrical tape, the kind of tape you wrap around a tennis ball for street cricket when you’re a kid. I’m lying on my face and there’s a grinding pain from that so I make some noise before I black out.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

In the early pages of “Big Girls Don't Cry,” Salon's Rebecca Traister seems determined to alienate every female reader over 40. Had I fallen for her false start, I would have missed her considerable contributions to the ongoing feminist narrative described by Gloria Steinem as the “revolution from within.”

At first, Traister gleefully harpoons the warriors of old to explain why her younger generation is done with antiquated notions of feminism. Consider, for example, her description of the women at a nonpartisan, pro-abortion-rights gathering: “It was a crowd of monied, Botoxed, electorally enthralled dames who, in the popular imagination of the time, should have had 'Hillary '08' mown into their Hamptons house topiary, if not their bikini lines.” That comes a mere four pages after she argues that, if young women are to care about feminism, the “conversation had to be drained of some of its earnest piety. Talking about gender in the new millennium required us, I thought, to get over ourselves a little bit, to dispense with the sacred cows, to question power and cultivate new ideas and leaders.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Where are you right now? Maybe you are at home, the office or a coffee shop—but such responses provide only a partial answer to the question at hand. Asked another way, what is the location of your “self” as you read this sentence? Like most people, you probably have a strong sense that your conscious self is housed within your physical body, regardless of your surroundings. But sometimes this spatial self-location goes awry. During a so-called out-of-body experience, for example, one's self seems to be transported outside the physical body into a surreal perspective—some people even believe they are viewing their bodies from above, as though their true selves were floating. In a related experience, people with a delusion known as somatoparaphrenia disown one of their limbs or confuse another person's limb for their own. Such warped perceptions help researchers understand the neuroscience of selfhood. 

A new paper offers examples of rare bodily illusions that are not confined to a single limb, nor are they complete out-of-body experiences—they are somewhere in between. These illusory body perceptions, described in the September issue of Consciousness and Cognition, could offer novel clues about how the brain maintains a link between the physical and conscious selves, or what the researchers call “bodily self-consciousness.”

More here.

Akeel Bilgrami has picked the three winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Justin Erik Halldor Smith: More on Non-Western Philosophy (the Very Idea)
2. Strange Quark, $300: Tomkow: The Retributive Theory of Property
3. Charm Quark, $200: Brian Leiter's Nietzsche Blog: Katsafanas on “Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology”

Here is what Professor Bilgrami had to say about them:

Blogs are not easy to assess for a prize.

For one thing, unlike the standard journal article, the length of blogs is quite variable as is evident among the finalists for the 3 Quarks Daily prize for philosophical blogs. The short blogs are at a disadvantage because they are bound –prima facie– to be more limited in ambition and in patient development of an argument. This was true for most of the shorter blogs I was sent –and I found myself wishing that the authors had allowed themselves more words.

For another, blogs are often embedded in larger contexts of writing because they are often responses to earlier postings. This is fine for the devoted reader who has been following the entire thread of postings. But for someone wheeled in as a judge for a prize, the most embedded of blogs are willy-nilly given as self-standing. Of course, if one is alert, one can surmise the larger context sufficiently to get a sense of the blog’s chief points and purpose. Still, it puts those blogs, which are more deeply embedded in earlier discussions at a disadvantage when compared with blogs which are first off and therefore manifestly self-standing.

Following instructions, I’ve selected three blogs.

The third prize goes to the blog on the Nietzsche discussion site. It had a number of interesting points to make and it may well have been placed higher if I had had a chance to read the earlier posting to which it was a response. As it happens, since I didn’t, I was left with a blinded appreciation of the overall dialectic on the issues at stake, but nevertheless appreciated some of the philosophical points that could be distilled despite missing the full sense of the background to the discussion.

The second prize goes to the longish self-standing discussion of property rights. The essay is smart, it is written with verve and high spirits, even as it makes its several historical and analytical claims concisely. I would have thought that what it says of property rights could not possibly extend to some rights that are not part of the standard liberal repertory of rights, even though the author begins with a discussion of a retributive theory of rights, in general.

The first prize goes to the essay on Western and non-Western philosophy. Despite one of the responses to it which makes a claim to exceptions, I think, the essay gives a more or less accurate description of the assumptions underlying the angle we have tended to take on non-Western philosophy and it makes a telling criticism against those assumptions. It is a good example of how one can learn about our own limitations by taking a critical look at how we tend to view others. It, like the previous blog I mentioned, is also very engagingly written and, I daresay, (despite one or two moments of hyperbole), it is measurably more believable.

My congratulations to the winners.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (I will send the prize money later today–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Akeel Bilgrami for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Carla Goller, Sughra Raza, and me. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

William Hogeland in the Boston Review:

Because populism seeks, ostensibly, to enshrine and advance the rights and hopes of ordinary people, and because liberalism believes itself to be those rights’ best protection, populism’s rightward allegiances can be distressingly counterintuitive for liberals. Why, liberals wonder, don’t populists vote their economic interest? Liberals have long been asking about the white working class’s tendency to vote for Republican candidates, whose programs benefit the wealthy, and to reject the Democrats, whose programs, liberals keep insisting, benefit the working class. Liberals look wistfully to the New Deal days, when their predecessors banded together with populists and elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt president four times.

Yet the New Deal was a brief and possibly exceptional period, full of changes so big and important that it tends to block our longer-range historical view. American political and cultural life has more often involved mutual incomprehension and outright hostility between liberalism and populism. Repeatedly in U.S. history, the two have defined themselves publicly, as they are doing now, by rhetorical rejection of the other. Both ways of thinking may be fundamentally American, but that also may be all they share.

More here.

The Hidden Singer

The gods are less
for their love of praise.
Above and below them all
is a spirit that needs
nothing but its own
wholeness,
its health and ours.
It has made all things
by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come
together—the seer
and the seen, the eater
and the eaten, the lover
and the loved.
In our joining it knows
itself. It is with us then,
not as the gods
whose names crest
in unearthly fire,
but as the little bird
hidden in the leaves
who sings quietly
and waits
and sings.

by Wendell Berry
from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry;
Counterpoit Press, 1998

From Science:

Narcissists, new experiments show, are great at convincing others that their ideas are creative even though they're just average. Still, groups with a handful of narcissists come up with better ideas than those with none, suggesting that self-love contributes to real-world success.

Narcissism and creativity seem to go hand in hand. Creative people often appear self-important, hungry for attention, and unconcerned with others' ideas and opinions— all traits narcissists share. Think of Pablo Picasso, famous for his iconoclastic paintings but infamous for declaring, “I am God.” Like Picasso, narcissists often rise to positions of importance in art, business, and other endeavors, suggesting that they have ability and ideas that others do not.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Our neurons are basically fancy photodiodes, producing electric bursts in response to incoming signals. But the conscious experiences they produce contain far more information than in a single diode. In other words, they reduce much more uncertainty. While a photodiode can be in one of two states, our brains can be in one of trillions of states. Not only can we tell the difference between a Chaplin movie and a potato chip, but our brains can go into a different state from one frame of the movie to the next.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

My friend lives in Brixen (Bressanone in Italian), one of the major cities of the Südtirol, though it contains only 21,000 people. The city of Vahrn (the Italians call it Varna) is, today, essentially the northern suburb of Brixen. I travel up here every so often to chart the progress of my friend, to bring him word from the civilization the rest of us inhabit beneath the sky. A Pakistani by birth, and a New Yorker for many years by choice, my friend has become Südtirolian in his heart. He has absorbed, without exactly trying, the specific passions and distractions of these parts. The mountains simply claimed him, I suppose.

One thing that bothers him is that Brixen (Bressanone), Varhn (Varna), and the other cities of this region always bear two names. It gnaws at him, this Alpine schizophrenia. The Südtirol, formerly a part of Austria, was given to Italy as a reward for joining the winning side after World War I. Various attempts to make the area more “Italian” ensued. But the wheels of Italianization really began to move once the Fascists took power in Italy in the late 1920s. In 1939, Mussolini decided it was time to take the final step. Hitler, for his own Hitlerian reasons, had never cast his otherwise covetous eye on the Südtirol. He was happy to let the Italians have it, thinking that the Germans in the Südtirol should come back down to the German heartland where they could hear him better. So, Hitler and Mussolini cooked up a scheme whereby the German-speaking citizens of the area would be encouraged to move away, into Greater Germany. At that time, Greater Germany included much of the northern and western coast of the Black Sea. The plan, then, was to move the people of the Südtirol from Varna to Varna, more or less. From the Alpine mountains to the coast of the Black Sea.

Thus, the troubled dreams of my Pakistani/American/Südtirolian friend, strange things he hears from inside the mountains. He is having nightmares of relocation. People in the Südtirol don’t talk about these things very much anymore. Why should they? But the old fears can still trickle back after the midnight hour, in the dark mountain nights when a clump of Alpine rock can take any form the imagination will give it. A sensitive man, if he listens hard enough on a moonless night, he can almost hear the waves of the Black Sea lapping up against the rocks of the Dolomites.

More here.

Garrett Baer responds to Nicholas D. Kristof's NYT article “Is This America?” in Killing the Buddha:

Unfortunately, contemporary Islamophobia is not a stain against the otherwise spotless canvas of American history. If anything, that canvas is filthy and should be acknowledged as such. This, Mr. Kristof, is America: land of the screed, home of the enraged.

Rather than viewing the “shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe” as rare, exceptional tests in American history, we need to view those events as constitutive elements of the American experience. Was America not American prior to the abolishing of slavery? Was America not American prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, during the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the Zoot Suit Riots, or the pursuit of Manifest Destiny? Anti-miscegenation laws were belatedly toppled in the ’60s, but today 37% of Americans would not approve of a family member marrying outside of his or her race. Are those people not American?

Although responses from Christian organizations have been overwhelmingly against Pastor Terry Jones’ proposal to burn Qur’ans—the World Evangelical Alliance, the National Association of Evangelicals, the Vatican, the Church of Jesus of Latter Day Saints, etc., etc.—the characterization of Jones as a fringe extremist reflecting little upon the values of America as a whole is highly questionable.

Consider a recent survey of American Protestant pastors, ministers, and priests. When asked to identify with either George Bush’s statement that “the Muslim faith is based upon peace and love and compassion” or Franklin Graham’s controversial 2001 remark that Islam is “a very evil and a very wicked religion,” 47% of the respondents were on the side of Graham, 12% agreed with both, and only 24% agreed with Bush.

Maybe we need to redefine the fringe?

More here.

The year is 1979. Stage lighting shouts disco Xs across the stage, and everything is in soft focus. He’s really got us now….but then — hold on, isn’t that…? Yes, it is. Twenty-three seconds into the Chopin, Liberace has switched into a flowery version of “My Funny Valentine.” His fingers flutter across the keys—who knew this song had so many notes? We are back into Chopin again — “Nocturne in E flat, Op. 9,” but it doesn’t matter that we don’t know the name; we’ve all swooned to this melody before. The camera now wears a big pink filter in the shape of a heart with Liberace playing at the center. He’s moving at top speed, slipping from one Chopin melody to another, all the while filling the cracks with Funny Valentine. It’s impossible to follow, and it’s not worth trying. You just have to allow yourself to be swept away. With a flourish (always), Liberace finishes the medley. He turns to the audience and bows. He rises from the bench, stands before us, bows again, then once more, raising his arms, smiling his gentle smile. This is not just romance I’m giving you, the smile says. This is love. I love you.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Robertson Davies — a man with a considerable talent for creative insult — reserved one of his best for the writer, painter, and critic Wyndham Lewis. In a dismissal so sublime as to test the limits of intelligibility, he said that Self Condemned, Lewis’s recently reissued novel about Canada, read “as though it had been written in lemon juice, with a rusty nail, on a piece of tin.” If his point was that Lewis was bitter, the evidence is certainly on his side. Hester Harding, the heroine of Self Condemned, is probably the only character in literature to kill herself out of sheer hatred for Canada. In the suicide note she leaves her husband, a disillusioned English historian, she says, “I loathe this country so much, where I can see you burying yourself. I cannot leave you physically — go away from you back to England. I can only go out of the world.” She is not alone in finding life in Canada loathsome. Professor Harding calls it “an outlandish culture-less world” — a “tenth-rate alternative to what had been his backgrounds.” The novel focuses its vitriol on Momaco, Lewis’s code name for World War II Toronto. “Momaco was so ugly, and so devoid of all character as of any trace of charm,” he writes, “that it was disagreeable to walk about in. It was as if the elegance and charm of Montreal had been attributed to the seductions of the Fiend by the puritan founders of Momaco.”

more from Adam Hammond at Walrus here.

What Markson’s fans had stumbled on was the strange and disorienting world of authors’ personal libraries. Most people might imagine that authors’ libraries matter–that scholars and readers should care what books authors read, what they thought about them, what they scribbled in the margins. But far more libraries get dispersed than saved. In fact, David Markson can now take his place in a long and distinguished line of writers whose personal libraries were quickly, casually broken down. Herman Melville’s books? One bookstore bought an assortment for $120, then scrapped the theological titles for paper. Stephen Crane’s? His widow died a brothel madam, and her estate (and his books) were auctioned off on the steps of a Florida courthouse. Ernest Hemingway’s? To this day, all 9,000 titles remain trapped in his Cuban villa. The issues at stake when libraries vanish are bigger than any one author and his books. An author’s library offers unique access to a mind at work, and their treatment provides a look at what exactly the literary world decides to value in an author’s life. John Wronoski, a longtime book dealer in Cambridge, has seen the libraries of many prestigious authors pass through his store without securing a permanent home. ”Most readers would see these names and think, ’My god, shouldn’t they be in a library?’” Wronoski says. ”But most readers have no idea how this system works.”

more from Craig Fehrman at the Boston Globe here.