[Ted Hughes had started an affair with Assia Wevill around the time of his separation from Sylvia Plath in late summer, 1962. David Wevill, a Canadian poet, was her husband] Assia, I tried to ring you this morning. I wanted to see you. Nothing we said the other day was right.
If you & David are going to part, it must be easier for both of you now, than after a month more of general misery.
As things are, it is bad for all of us. If you come to me, David suffers.
If you go to him, you suffer, and does he stop suffering? I don’t see how it can make him happy again, just to hand yourself over to him as a prisoner or a body, unless he’s not at all concerned how you are feeling, and quite happy to have you even against your will.
A tiny, slender woman with long hair tied back in a ponytail, regal posture, a shrewd expression and a forceful walk swept through the Pierre Matisse Gallery, an entourage of young men trailing behind her. She was dressed in black, and her presence acted on the room like a bolt of electricity. “Who is that?” I asked my husband. “Louise Bourgeois.” “Oh, of course,” I answered. A couple of years earlier, in 1982, the Museum of Modern Art had mounted a major show of her work. Curated by Deborah Wye, the exhibition brought the 71-year-old Bourgeois, who had been showing painting and sculpture in New York since the 40s, into the art-world limelight.
Since 1974, Nikon has sponsored a yearly photo competition for images that delve into the worlds beyond the reach of the unaided human eye. The $3,000 first prize in Nikon’s 2007 Small World competition goes to Gloria Kwon of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York. Kwon’s composite image of a mouse embryo, captured in both visible and ultraviolet light, reveals the inherent biochemical differences between the embryo (fluorescent red) and its yolk sac (highlighter green).
The dozen images collected here (the top 10 images, plus two Wired News picks) capture facets of living organisms that have a technical meaning to the trained specialist, but appear to be pure art to the layperson.
Many of us in the left, particularly in Southasia, have chosen to understand the rise of violent Islamic fundamentalism as a response to poverty, unemployment, poor access to justice, lack of educational opportunities, corruption, loss of faith in the political system, or the sufferings of peasants and workers. As partial truths, these are indisputable. Those condemned to living a life with little hope and happiness are indeed vulnerable to calls from religious demagogues who offer a happy hereafter in exchange for unquestioning obedience.
American imperialism is also held responsible. This, too, is a partial truth. Stung by the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States lashed out against Muslims almost everywhere. America’s neoconservatives thought that cracking the whip would surely bring the world to order. Instead, the opposite happened. Islamists won massively in Iraq after a war waged on fraudulent grounds by a superpower filled with hubris, arrogance and ignorance. ‘Shock and Awe’ is now turning into ‘Cut and Run’. The US is leaving behind a snake pit, from which battle-hardened terrorists are stealthily making their way to countries around the world. Polls show that the US has become one of the most unpopular countries in the world, and that, in many places, George W Bush is more disliked than Osama bin Laden. Most Muslims see an oil-greedy America, in collusion with Israel, as a crusader force occupying a historic centre of Islamic civilisation. Al-Qaeda rejoices. Its mission was to convince Muslims that the war was between Islam and unbelief. Today it brags: We told you so!
Editors’ Note: In his hatchet job for the New Republic on Mearsheimer and Walt’s new book The Israel Lobby, Jeffrey Goldberg dismisses their depiction of the Israel-Palestine conflict as “simply unrecognizable to anyone halfway fair and halfway learned about the Middle East,” and he recommends instead his own book on the “moral failings of israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands.” It happens that Norman Finkelstein, who is more than halfway fair and halfway learned about the Middle East, has plowed through Goldberg’s book. Here is his entirely irrefutable and absolutely devastating report. AC / JSC
Jeffrey Goldberg is the recipient of numerous journalism awards and currently writes on the Middle East for The New Yorker magazine. On its surface his book Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across The Middle East Divideinterweaves the memoir of an American Jew’s enchantment and subsequent disappointment with Israel, on the one hand, and the reportage of a knowing journalist covering the Israel-Palestine beat, on the other. Its main interest, however, is as a sophisticated work of ideology, one meriting more than passing attention. On a political level it registers the limits of what is currently permissible to acknowledge in enlightened liberal sectors of American Jewry, while on a personal level it registers the limits of what an enlightened believer in the faith can admit to himself. More broadly it signals the eclipse of liberal American Jewry’s love affair with the Jewish state, itself integral of the beginnings of a larger American estrangement from Israel.
John D. Mullen’s review of Hitchens’ God is Not Great captures some of my frustrations with the new spirited and much needed defense of atheism. In Metapsychology Online Reviews:
There is a weak point that infects both Harris and Hitchens’ claims that religion is an important cause of human violence (indeed Harris claims that the survival of the human species requires the extinction of religion — or at least of Islam). The flaw is their failure to disentangle the religious from other potential social factors, e.g., nationalist, economic, cultural, educatioinal. Harris at least asks the question: Could the (terrorist) tactics of Palestinians warriors be a result of economic or political oppression rather than religious conviction? This is an extremely complex question of social/causal analysis. Harris’ answer is shockingly cavalier: No, you don’t see Christian Palestinians becoming suicide bombers. Does anyone believe there are no differences between Christian and Muslim Palestinians other than a (rather minor) disagreement on the status of a certain Nazarene? No economic, educational differences? No differences of group identification or empathy, no disparities of tribalist propensities?
This lack of a social-causal analysis comes up many times in Hitchens. For example he attributes a religious cause to female genital mutilation (223). This is almost certainly wrong. FGM occurs in tribal societies, where the worst evil to befall a male is for an offspring of another male to be unwittingly attributed to him. The difficulty of preventing this is heightened by polygyny, where there are more women to worry about and watch over. Thus women must be guaranteed virginal (and so unpregnant) at marriage and secluded afterwards (purdah). FGM is best understood as an element of this complex. It is required by no religion, has been practiced within or along side all three of the Abrahamic traditions and is more prevalent by far in the polygynous Muslim variations, particularly among less educated populations. (See Gary S. Becker A Treatise on the Family 2005)
Paris, France is not even included in the list of the world’s 20 largest cities, but the argument for its status of capital of world music is a strong one. Not only is there a strong native tradition of the chanson in Paris, but the City of Lights has welcomed luminaries from all over the globe to make music there…
Like New York, Los Angeles and London, Paris’ music scene has benefited greatly from an influx of immigrants. Many musicians have come from Francophone Africa and the Middle East.
Whether sunny or moody, the economical melodies of Brazilian pop music bear some similarities to the classic French chanson.
For instance, France’s top rapper is MC Solaar, a Senegal-born artist who moved to Paris and has seen his albums dominate French charts for over a decade.
Prominent rai/rock musician Rachid Taha was born in Algeria, grew up in Lyon — and has recorded much of his best work in Paris. His 1991 album, Barbes, was named after an immigrant-dominated section of Paris.
Israel’s Palestinian leadership has articulated an increasingly oppositional voice ever since October 2000, when 12 Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed during protests at the outset of the second uprising. More recently, Arab intellectuals have published several documents that question the Jewish nature of the state. Some proposals prescribe radical individual equality for Arabs and Jews, whereas others would preserve group rights. The document that attracted the most attention—and opprobrium—was the December 2006 report “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel.” The bulk of the report focuses on the quotidian sorts of discrimination faced by Israel’s Palestinian citizens, but reaction centered on the document’s caustic characterization of Zionism, as well as its demand for the recognition of Palestinians as “the indigenous people of the homeland” who have a right to “complete equality in the State on a collective–national basis.”
Such ideological opposition is interpreted as a material threat by the Israeli security apparatus. The director of the domestic security service made headlines in March when he insisted that he would use means that are normally reserved for fighting illegal activity against “elements who wish to harm the character of the State of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state, even if their activity is conducted through democratic means.”
In the decade since he graduated from CalArts’ Art and Critical Studies program, L.A.-based artist Brad Spence has produced a half-dozen remarkable bodies of work, beginning with 1998’s “Philosophy Minor,” a striking series of skillfully airbrushed paintings on paper that — on further investigation — turned out to be appropriations of vintage mass-market paperback philosophy books with the text removed. The resulting pictures — ranging from midcentury Modernist abstract designs to a photo-realist bust of Socrates — were among the most enigmatic and refreshing visual statements to emerge from the sticky swamp of passive-aggressive eye candy that was L.A. painting in the ’90s.
For two decades, Easy Rawlins has walked the streets of Los Angeles, and the city has given him everything: friends, family, two homes, three apartment buildings, a dog and any number of people willing to pay him to fix their broken lives. Yet something’s gone wrong. Two years after the riots, Watts smolders, Vietnam rages and Easy is losing it. He knows it. His friends know it. And, of course, Walter Mosley knows it.
The 10th Easy Rawlins novel is unlike any we’ve read. “I lit a Camel,” Easy tells us early in the book, “thought about the taste of sour mash . . . and climbed out of the car like Bela Lugosi from his coffin.” Gone is the man once happy to own a home with an avocado tree in his frontyard. Gone is the man content to nurse a drink and a smoke in a bar like Joppy’s. Gone is the man whose dalliances in bed were his most reliable and consistent solace. Still the tough-minded, tough-hearted private detective of earlier novels, the Easy of “Blonde Faith” is haunted and more vulnerable, trying to atone for his mistakes, find love and acceptance and make it through to the next day.
“Exit Ghost.” Great title. The book of a great writer. A great book? Maybe it’s just another piece of a puzzle. A great puzzle, and true to life in being so. In these strange and wonderful books that he writes under or about another name than his, Roth has been mapping the geography in an area of life where only his literary heroes — Kafka, of course, is one of them — have ever gone. The labyrinth of consciousness is actually constructed from the only means by which we can find a way out of it. It’s a web that Ariadne spins from her own thread. You don’t get to figure it out. You only get to watch it being spun. And if you are Nathan Dedalus (it was Zuckerman’s name for himself in the running heads to the second chapter of “The Ghost Writer”), you are in love with her for life, even if it kills you.
Gary Taubes is a brave and bold science journalist who does not accept conventional wisdom. In “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” he says what he wants is a fair hearing and rigorous testing for ideas that might seem shocking.
Yet much of what Taubes relates will be eye-opening to those who have not closely followed the science, or lack of science, in this area. (Disclosure: At one point he approvingly cites my articles on the lack of evidence that a high-fiber diet protects against colon cancer.) For example, he tells the amazing story of how the idea of a connection between dietary fat, cholesterol and heart disease got going and took on a life of its own, despite the minimal connection between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol for most people. He does not mince words. “From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day.” The story is similar for salt and high blood pressure, and for dietary fiber and cancer.
When you walk into the enormous central hall of the Lahore Museum, your eye is quickly drawn to the two rows of miniature paintings displayed along the walls on either side. Women on horseback playing polo; Radha and Krishna consorting under a mango tree. You approach the glass cases to observe the minute details of individual strands of hair, of eyelashes, of fingernails. Perchance, you look up.
And you are transposed. Telescoped from the micro to the macro! There, 11 metres in the air, are the sparkling stars, the whirling planets, the spiralling galaxies, all beaming directly at you. A viewer may not be able to immediately recognise the intricate Kufic calligraphy, the use of the letter noon as a design element, but the dynamism of the geometric shapes, the bold and energetic lines, the feverish cross-hatching, will intrigue and engage any imagination. This is a mammoth, 29×7.8-metre oil painting by the famed Pakistani artist Sadequain, rendered in a genre called ‘calligraphic cubism’, spanning the entire ceiling of the entrance hall. If your vision is sharp and you know Urdu, you will read the line of a poem by Mohammad Iqbal painted on one panel: Sitaaro’n ke aage jaha’n aur bhi hai – Beyond the stars there are still other worlds. Standing there, humbled by the celestial orbs, another poet’s lines echo through this writer’s mind: Aur bhi dukh hai’n zamaane me’n mohabbat ke sivaa/ raahate’n aur bhi hai’n vasl ki raahat ke sivaa. These are Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s immortal words: There are sorrows in this world other than those of love/ joys, other than those of union with one’s beloved.
Between 1920, when she was thirty, and her death in 1976, Agatha Christie published seventy-one full-length murder mysteries. She also brought out five collections of stories, two volumes of poetry, a number of successful West End plays and a couple of autobiographies; five non-crime novels by her appeared under the name of Mary Westmacott. In some years there were several publications; between 1939 and 1946 there were nineteen. By 1950, she had sold a total of 50 million books and she is still the bestselling author in the world. It seems reasonable to wonder where it all came from.
Laura Thompson has been given full access to the unpublished letters, papers and notebooks kept at Greenway, the house in Devon that Christie purchased in 1938 and later turned into a family trust to avoid tax. There Thompson discovered a lifetime’s worth of old exercise books, scraps of paper, receipts, banker’s orders, souvenir menus and family albums. She also discovered that Christie, who never dated a letter, falsified the details of her life in her memoirs and lied about her age on her marriage certificate. But in any case Thompson’s biographical method is not organization but evocation; rather than order the material into a chronological narrative, she wants us to know what her Agatha feels and offers novelistic insights into her state of mind. “Her life, on the surface, was as grey and dreary as a prison exercise yard, her mind a prey to a daily succession of torments” is how she describes Christie’s reaction to her divorce from her husband Archie sometime in 1927, an important event in Christie’s life, the facts of which remain uncertain.
Shalom Auslander ends “Foreskin’s Lament,” his memoir of growing up in, and eventually breaking away from, the Orthodox Jewish community here, not with an acknowledgments page but with a list of people God might consider punishing instead of the author’s family. Mr. Auslander is no longer observant, but he is still a believer, and he believes in a wrathful, vengeful God who takes things personally and is not at all pleased when someone leaves the fold and writes an angry and very funny book about it.
“The people who raised me will say I am not religious,” he writes. “They are mistaken.” He adds: “I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumbfounded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each more hateful and bloody than the next, as I’m doing my best to lose Him. I’m failing miserably.”
Most of the controversy around Learning to Drive has been around the title story and especially its followup, “Webstalker,’ which are about a painful breakup and its aftermath. As in the other essays, I aimed to put close together sadness and comedy, high diction and low, the romantic and the reflective. It’s not for me to say if I achieved those effects– but that was the idea. What has really floored me, I must say, is that the book is controversial. I thought I was writing about experiences that are shared by many, if not indeed most people, including men. Who doesn’t have areas of incompetence and fear — mechanical stuff for me, maybe foreign languages, or I dunno, cooking, for you? Who hasn’t been hurt in love? And not just young people, either, thank you very much.
This, as I see it, is the pass to which we have come. Women can write about shooting heroin and being sex workers and spending years zoned out on prozac and having nervous breakdowns and hating other women and lord knows what else and that’s okay by feminism, as indeed it should be. But writing that you didn’t learn to drive for years and years out of technophobia and overreliance on men? Loving a man unwisely and feeling terrible for more than a long weekend when he left? Writing about how another person really got to you and how you even, OMG, googled him and the other women in his life rather a lot for a while, which is basically all that happens in “Webstalker”? Oh, that is so unfeminist–and from a longtime feminist political columnist too! That really undermines all our progress. Now we’ll never get the ERA.
The distance between reading and seeing has been an ongoing interest for me. Since 1998 I have been exploring this space through the use of letterforms, and have used the letter E as my primary starting point for the last two years. Since E is often found at the top of vision charts, I questioned what I saw as a familiar hierarchy. Was this letter more important than other letters? E is, after all, the most commonly used letter in the English language, it denotes a natural number (2.71828), and has a visual presence that interests me greatly. In my research E has become a surrogate for all letters in the alphabet. It now replaces the other letters and becomes a universal letter (or Letter), and a string of Es now becomes a generic language (or Language). This substitution denies written words their use as legible signifiers, allowing language to become a vacant parallel Language— a basis for visual manufacture.
After months of compiling Es into abstract compositions through various systemic arrangements, I started recognizing my studio time as a quasi-monastic experience. There was something sublime about both the compositions that I was making and the solitude in which they were made. It was as if I were translating some great text like a subliterate medieval scribe would have years ago—with no direct understanding of the source material. The next logical step was to find a source. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, a story rich in theology, philosophy, and psychosis provides me with a roadmap for my work, but also with a series of underlying narratives. My drawings, prints, and collages continue to speak of language and the transferal of information, but now as a conduit to Melville’s sublime narratives.
