Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See. Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London

by Sue Hubbard

ScreenHunter_462 Dec. 16 09.50In their last White Cube show it was nasty Nazis doing rude things in public. This time, at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in Kensington Gardens, elegantly revamped by Zaha Hadid, it's the Klu Klax Klan. Larger than life figures wearing hand-knitted hippy rainbow socks and Birkenstocks, watching us from behind their pointy hoods, watching them. The fact that the Princess Diana Memorial is just down the road might, for those of an ironic disposition, raise a wry smile. It seems that the professional bad boys of Hoxton, Jake and Dinos Chapman, are working their way through the list of clichéd baddies. What next? Members of Al-Qaeda in polka-dot bikinis?

They are very clever. Clever in the sense that they anticipate all criticism of their work and incorporate it into what they do. The whole point is to fart loudly in the drawing room, to épater le bourgeois, as if the bourgeoisie actually care very much, for we've seen it all before. Their comic book imagery looks tired and passé: the appropriation of and drawing on older art work, the sexualised manikins of children, the Boy's Own Air Fix models of Waffen-SS killing fields – the piles of maimed bodies, the severed heads, the disembowellings and Nazi symbols ironized by the McDonalds logo – like some Disney version of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. That the self-appointed naughty boy of literature, Will Self, (forgive the pun) was asked to write their catalogue essay is no surprise. Boys like gangs.

When interviewed they are extremely articulate. They use all the right jargon. The bronze sculptures at the beginning of the exhibition play with modernist notions of the body as machine and bronze as the ultimate fine art material. Their Little Death Machine (Castrated) is a Heath Robinson contraption of hammers, circular saws, castrated penises and sliced brains. It's as if Mary Shelley's Frankenstein had collaborated with Goya. Of course the whole point of these school-boy doodlings – as if under the desk, away from the teacher's gaze, they've drawn the rudest and naughtiest things they could think of – is that they've been cast in bronze and are now ‘art'. You can almost hear the Chapmans guffaw in the wings as they watch visitors peer at each piece in deep concentration as though some arcane truth might be revealed. But the titles: I want to be popular, Striptease, I laughed in the face of adversity but it laughed back louder show their hard-wired cynicism. The Chapman brothers don't do ‘meaningful', though they do do irritating particularly well.

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Monday, December 9, 2013

A Comet Unnoticed

by Alexander Bastidas Fry

Comet ISON, HST/NASAComets have long been portents of change. They challenge the rote repetition of our skies. An astute observer of the sky will perhaps have recently noticed a new object in the sky, a comet, present for the last few weeks (you would have had to look east just before sunrise near the star Spica). This was the comet ISON. But comet ISON, having strayed too close to the Sun, has been mostly annihilated. If there is a comet in the sky and no one sees it, was it ever really there?

William Carlos William's poem, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, captures the essence of comet ISON's elusive journey around the Sun. Brueghel, the Felmish Renaissance painter, carefully recorded the event like a faithful astronomer, but the worker is not keen on the sky and Icarus goes wholly unnoticed. It is just the same to the worker, for had they noticed Icarus or not it would likely make no difference to their toils in the field. And similarly ISON went largely unnoticed.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

ISON made a brief appearance to the unaided eye for a few days before it grazed the sun and then uncoiled itself. But to the learned astronomer ISON is still interesting. Comets are rare objects in the inner solar system so even a dead comet is a chance to learn something, in fact, further spectroscopic observations of this dead comet's remains will continue to tell us exactly what it was made of. There is a legacy here.

Let us begin at the beginning. Some four or five billion years ago as the Solar System itself was forging its identity trillions of leftover crumbs were scattered into the outer solar system.

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A Conversation with Fady Joudah and Anis Shivani

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Fady-AnisExile is a state of mind and quite necessary in the kind of critical awareness, imaginative empathy and artistic autonomy that go into a work of excellence, a “global work.” Our lists of poets we consider as “world poets,” assuming that “world poet” is indeed a meaningful category, may vary dramatically but the criteria we are likely to agree upon for such a category, are: an agile imagination, an intuitive bond with humanity, a finely tuned connection with history, and an ability to go beyond merely utilizing language— to reach for the universally unsayable and cast it in a renewed, common language, and above all: an ability to move the spirit in an authentic way.

I recently had the luxury of conversing with Fady Joudah and Anis Shivani— two writers I admire for their range and gift for innovation. Their approach to literature, as reflected in their poetry and prose, betrays traits of the contemporary “global writer” I’m interested in—traits that ultimately cast the larger literary moment in their art. In other words, the shared and conflicted global histories they address, the deftness with which they assemble disparate cultural perspectives, and the richness of their positions—political and aesthetic—illuminate the present, and in a sense, the future, of an increasing and an increasingly globalized readership.

My conversation with these authors was centered on the idea of our literary moment, mainly keeping Fady Joudah’s book Textu and Anis Shivani’s My Tranquil War in mind.

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On the Idea of a Dialectical Fallacy

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

WwaWhy We Argue (And How We Should) is centrally concerned to elucidate the concept of a dialectical fallacy. This concept deserves comment. “Fallacy” is the name given to especially common and attractive failures of reasoning. Works in logic and critical thinking typically distinguish between formal and informal fallacies.

Formal fallacies are pervasive errors of formal inferences. Consider the argument:

If Bill is a carpenter, then Bill is handy.

Bill is handy.

Therefore, Bill is a carpenter.

This argument fails because the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion: the first premise states that being a carpenter is sufficient for being handy; it does not claim that all and only handy people are carpenters. After all, Bill could be a handy car mechanic who has never cut a piece of wood. We call this error the fallacy of affirming the consequent. This error gets its own name because we are especially prone to this kind of mistake. Once one is trained to spot it, one will find that this fallacy is committed frequently.

By contrast, informal fallacies are pervasive errors in informalinferences. Informal inferences differ from formal ones in that the latter propose to demonstrate the truth of their conclusions whereas the former aspire only to show that their conclusions are most likely true. A familiar informal fallacy is the ad populum fallacy. Consider:

Most people think that Joe is guilty.

Therefore, Joe is guilty.

This argument fails because it appeals simply to what “most people” think, without any regard for questions concerning the level to which “most people” are informed of the relevant facts of Joe's case. The mere fact that “most people” agree about some claim is no evidence at all for its truth.

The important thing about fallacies is that they are attractive and so pervasive errors of reasoning. Part of what accounts for their popularity is the way in which they mimic or ride piggyback on proper inferences. The fallacy of affirming the consequent is a mimic of the obviously successful inference known as modus ponens:

If Bill is a carpenter, then Bill is handy.

Bill is a carpenter.

Therefore, Bill is handy.

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Google Zeitgeist: Annoying Philosophers, Weird Germans and White Pakistanis

by Jalees Rehman

ScreenHunter_452 Dec. 09 10.57The Autocomplete function of Google Search is both annoying and fascinating. When you start typing in the first letters or words of your search into the Google search box, Autocomplete takes a guess at what you are looking for and “completes” the search phrase by offering you multiple query phrases. The queries offered by Autocomplete are “a reflection of the search activity of users and the content of web pages indexed by Google“. Considering the fact that more than five billion Google searches are conducted on an average day, the Google Autocomplete function has a huge database of search information that it can reference. This also means that the Autocomplete suggestions are quite dynamic and can vary over time. A popular new song lyric, the name of a viral video or a recent movie quote can catapult itself to the top of the Autocomplete suggestion list within a matter of hours or days if millions of users start search for that specific phrase. Autocomplete may also take a user's browsing history or location into account, which explains why it may offer a varying set of suggestions to different users.

Autocomplete can be quite annoying because the suggested lists of queries are based on their web popularity and can thus consist of bizarre combinations which are not at all related to one's intended searches. On the other hand, Autocomplete is also a fascinating tool to provide a window into the Zeitgeist of web users, revealing what kinds of phrases are most commonly used on the web, and by inference, what contemporary ideas are currently associated with the entered keywords. The Google Zeitgeist website reveals the most widely searched terms to help identify cultural trends – based on the frequency of Google search engine queries – during any given year.

The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) recently used the Google Search Autocomplete function in an ad campaign to highlight the extent of misogyny on the web. Searching for “women should…” or “women need to…” was autocompleted to phrases such as “women should be slaves” or “women need to be put in their place”. The fact that Autocomplete suggested these phrases means that probably hundreds of thousands of internet users have used these phrases in their search queries or on web pages indexed by Google – a reminder of how much gender injustice still exists in our world.

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Madiba, Mahatma and the Limits of Nonviolence

by Misha Lepetic

“And if you can't bear the thought of messing up
your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up the
whole idea of life, and become a saint.”

~ John Osborne, “Look Back in Anger”

Boxing2As the paeans for Nelson Mandela rolled in last week, observers might have been forgiven for thinking that it was not a single human being had passed, but rather an astonishing confabulation of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa. The narrative can be encapsulated thusly: a despicable regime unjustly imprisons a passionate activist for 27 years, who upon his release goes on to lead his nation into peaceful democracy and becomes an avuncular elder statesman, unconditionally loved and respected by all. But this narrative tells us little about who Mandela actually was, and why he acted in the world in the way he did. A brief examination of Mandela's involvement in the ending of non-violence and the initiation of armed struggle in the early 1960s serves to illustrate some of this nuance.

The perpetuation of the saccharine narrative is enabled by, among other things, the cherry-picking of Mandela's own words. One endlessly quoted passage has been the end of Mandela's opening statement at the start of his trial on charges of sabotage, at the Supreme Court of South Africa, on April 20th, 1964:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

This is stirring stuff, and worthy of being engraved into the marble of a monument, but only if you bother to read the preceding 10,000 words. In a far-reaching statement notable for its pellucidity, Mandela lays out the circumstances and philosophy that resulted in armed struggle against the regime.

I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto [we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC]. I, and the others who started the organisation, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalise and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

Without this context, Mandela's lofty concluding paragraph is as cheap as a Hallmark card. It's now clear to the reader exactly the lengths to which Mandela would be willing to go to die for his beliefs – not as a lamb to slaughter, but as a fiery revolutionary. It is difficult to conceive of Gandhi initiating such actions. But why was Mandela prepared at that point to resort to violence?

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Riding the American Rails

by Madhu Kaza

New_York_Central_Railroad_System_map_1926thDuring the month or so that my father spent in an Intensive Care Unit in a hospital in suburban Detroit, my travel habits changed in peculiar ways. Not knowing ahead of time the duration of my stay in Detroit nor how long I would be back home in New York before being called again to the Midwest, I was hardly able to pack anything at all. Yet I could not help but take luggage with me, so more than once I travelled with an empty suitcase, which brought to mind the image of an out-of-work businessman who still carries his briefcase everywhere. What I did pack were vegetables. I found myself regularly transporting produce from one state to the other. If I had lettuce in my fridge in New York I would carry it with me on the flight to Detroit imagining the salad I would make at my parents' house. One time, I took two carrots from my mother's fridge and put them in my vacant suitcase so that I could use them in a lentil soup I planned to make when I returned to New York. Suddenly, using an airline carrier to transport the ingredients I had gathered for the day's lunch or dinner not only made sense, but also seemed vital to my well-being. I think it allowed me to feel a kind of continuity between morning in the ICU with my father in Michigan and early evening alone in my apartment in New York at a time when I felt quite dislocated from the routines of my life. During this same period of time there was another odd development, which I understood far less: I became a person who felt compelled to take a fifteen hour train journey instead of a routine one and a half hour flight.

I bought my ticket for the Lake Shore Limited departing from New York on September 21st. The #49 train departs daily from New York Penn Station at 3:40pm and reaches its final destination, Chicago's Union Station at 9:59 the following morning. Another section of the Lake Shore Limited departs from Boston. In Albany, the New York and Boston trains are hitched together for the journey to the Midwest. I would be getting off in Toledo, OH around 5:55am and would continue by car for another hour to Detroit.

I had enough experience on Amtrak's well-trafficked Northeast Corridor routes to not be romantic about American train travel. But I also knew that the railroads had been fundamental to the (often mythologized) American past. 19th century railroads, including those regional lines that were consolidated into the powerful New York Central Railroad, facilitated the economic development and westward expansion of the country. Given the proliferation of railroad companies in the 19th century, many ventures bankrupted investors and owners. On the other hand, the success of the New York Central Railroad made the Vanderbilt fortune.

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A Refutation of the Undergraduate Atheists

by David V. Johnson

UnamumoIn “San Manuel Bueno, Martir,” the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno tells the fictional story of a parish priest in Valverde de Lucerna, a small Spanish town, and his successful conversion of a sophisticated favorite son, Lazaro, who had left to seek his fortunes in America and returned an atheist.

“The main thing,” San Manuel says, in summarizing his ministry, “is for the people to be happy, that everyone be happy with their life. The happiness of life is the main thing of all.”

When Lazaro arrives from the New World, he dismisses the town's medieval backwardness and begins confronting villagers about their superstitions. “Leave them alone, as long as it consoles them,” San Manuel tells him. “It is better for them to believe it all, even contradictory things, than not to believe in anything.”

Lazaro confronts San Manuel with a mixture of curiosity and respect, since San Manuel is not only beloved by Lazaro's family for his piety but also because he appears educated. Over time, the two become friends and, eventually, Lazaro rejoins the Church and takes communion, to the tearful delight of all.

The twist: Like Lazaro, San Manuel doesn't believe the articles of faith. (“I believe in one God, the Father and Almighty, Creator of heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen …”) What he believes in, rather, is administering to the needs of the villagers, in putting on such a convincing performance of dedication to Christ that they all believe he is a saint and have their faith in the Church and in life everlasting sustained. Lazaro's “conversion,” then, is one consistent with atheism. He becomes a lay-minister of sorts under San Manuel and eventually dies a Catholic.

I think of this story when I hear the arguments against religion of the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. If Unamuno's story were updated, I could imagine Lazaro coming home to Valverde de Lucerna with a copy of God Is Not Great under his arm, ready to do battle with San Manuel. And if the story makes sense, we can imagine someone who has imbibed the arguments of Hitchens, yet converts to the faith under the saint's arguments.

The question is why.

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Food Fights: Are They about Mouth Taste or Moral Taste?

by Dwight Furrow

Human beings fight about a lot of things—territory, ideology, religion. Food fights play a special role in this fisticuff economy—they fill the time when we are between wars. Beans or meat alone in a proper chili? Fish or fowl in a proper paella? Vegetarians vs. carnivores. Locavores vs. factory farms. These are debates that divide nations, regions, and families. But they are nothing new. Taboos against eating certain foods have always been a way of marking off a zone of conflict. Kosher and halal rules have little justification aside from the symbolic power of defining the Other as disgusting.

PizzaConflict persists even when food is intended as entertainment. The competition for global culinary capo continues to heat up. The French jealously guarded their supremacy for centuries until supplanted by the upstart Spanish with their molecular concoctions, only to be cast out by the Norwegians who have convinced us of the savor of weeds. Meanwhile the Italians wait for the fennel dust to settle, confident that in the end we always return to pizza and pasta.

The dishes we consume or refuse express our style, our values, and the allegiances to which we pledge. And so it has always been. “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are,” wrote the gourmand Brillat-Savarin in 1825. Food not only has flavor; it apparently has a “moral taste” as well that informs our self-image as individuals and as members of communities or nations. This “moral taste” is no fleeting or inconsequential preference. It matters and matters deeply. The vegetarian not only prefers vegetables and sees herself as a vegetarian but is taking a moral stance, takes pride in the stance, sees it as a project, a commitment superior in value to the alternatives. The Italian feels the same about eating Italian. It means slow eating, communal eating, la dolce vita. A Genoan's taste for pesto is not merely a preference for the combination of garlic, olive oil, basil, pine nuts, and Parmigiano Reggiano but a moral taste that carries meaning. Contemporary foodies exhibit a similar zealous commitment. The search for the best barbeque in town is not merely a search for a good meal, but a quest for a peak experience, a realization of a standard, a moral commitment to refuse the taste of the ordinary.

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AfPak Revisited

by Asif Faiz

Afpak2-570x426There has been a flurry of doomsday scenarios in US political circles predicting the collapse of the Afghan regime following the US/NATO withdrawal and grim consequences for Pakistan if it continues to pursue its Great Game policies of the last three decades. However, few of these dire predictions take cognizance of Afghanistan’s turbulent history and the long, uneasy relationship, first between British India and Afghanistan and after 1947, between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is the internal ethnic divisions of Afghanistan that have prevented the emergence of an Afghan nation state and no foreign intervention or assistance can remedy that.

One needs to view the Afghan- Pakistan relationship through the prism of history. There have been over a dozen changes of monarchial ,republican and emirate regimes, mostly violent, in Afghanistan since 1901. The cavalcade of Afghan flags over this period (see here) is a testament to the political volatility of the country and the forces that have influenced its recent history. Pakistan was unilaterally involved (with military and financial support) in just one of those regime changes, i.e. the installation of the Taliban emirate in 1996; in another two it served as a US proxy, and in the bargain brought violence, instability, and mayhem to its borderlands and now its urban centers. What foreign intervention does in Afghanistan is unite the Afghans temporarily against a perceived common enemy and once the foreign intervention is over, they go back to their internal squabbling and scramble for power.

Overlay on this historical background, the mosaic of Pashtun tribes and clans, artificially split by the Durand Line. British India had the strategic depth to treat the Frontier as a borderland buffer to protect
its political and commercial interests in the context of the Great Game. Pakistan unwittingly has followed the same colonial policies to this day, notwithstanding the fact that the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line have a common heritage, culture, language and history. Any mischief or turmoil on either side of the Durand Line invariably spills over to the other, with Peshawar and Quetta (and now Karachi) absorbing the shocks of instability and displacement in eastern and southern Afghanistan.

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Monday, December 2, 2013

The 400 Blows

by Lisa Lieberman

The opening credits sequence of The 400 Blows (1959) takes us for a drive along the empty streets of Paris on a gray morning in early winter. Bare trees, a glimpse of the weak sun as we make our way toward the Eiffel Tower: a lonely feeling settles over us and never really leaves. This world, the world of François Truffaut's childhood, is not the chic 1950s Paris of sidewalk cafés, couples strolling along the Seine, and Edith Piaf regretting nothing.

Eleven-year-old Antoine Doinel is in school when the film begins. We see him singled out for misbehavior by a teacher. He may not be a model student, but he's no worse than any of the other boys. Nevertheless, an example must be set pour encourager les autres. Draconian punishment of a potential ringleader is a time-honored means of enforcing discipline among the troops. Antoine is sent to the corner, kept in during recess, assigned extra homework. Even so, the teacher's authority is subverted. Small insurrections break out in the classroom when his back is turned. Exasperated, he threatens reprisals. “Speak up, or your neighbor will get it.”

We begin to suspect that we are not in 1950s Paris. We are in Paris during the German occupation—the era when Truffaut was actually growing up. The somber mood, the furtive acts of rebellion and retaliation, as when some of the students, led by Antoine, destroy a pair of goggles belonging to the class snitch.

There are other clues. A scene that evokes the hunger, when wartime rationing was in effect. Antoine spends a night on the streets, afraid to go home after he's been caught in a lie. As dawn approaches, he steals a bottle of milk from a caddy he spots on the curb in front of a shop and drinks it ravenously. Later, Truffaut draws our attention to a notice about exterminating rats on the wall of the police station where Antoine is locked up after his stepfather turns him in for a petty theft. Equating Jews with vermin was de rigueur in Vichy propaganda, a standard feature of the newsreels shown before the movies that the future filmmaker sneaked into when he was supposed to be in school.

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Monday Poem

Picking the World Apart
Speaker 3

When Lao Tzu
(or the composite of poets grouped under his name)
talked of Tao, The Way, he said,

“If you talk about it, it’s not Tao.
If you name it, it’s something else”

I don’t think he was being metaphysical

He suggested something practical which,
if taken at face value, ought to be paid attention to
you scientist, you theologian

Lao Tzu says,

“When you speak its name
it’s not there. That’s not it.

That right there, which you’ve just named
is nothing split.”

And, as if to cover the old poet’s back,
Buddha said, “Nothing in the world
is created. Nothing is created.”
(the last three words of which
is an oxymoron of enormous proportions)

Finally, the Hebrews said, “Never speak the name
of the Lord.”

All three bits of advice are invaluable
to have and take to heart
for any scientist or theologian
who sets out to pick nothing apart

by Jim Culleny, 11/25/13

The Squirrel Is behind the Tree…

by Tom Jacobs

http://www.spacetimestudios.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=23790&d=1359779088

I have been thinking about memory quite a bit lately. More specifically, my memory and the objects of its interest and desires, and the ways that it fails or warps or enables me to see/hear/re-experience what actually happened in the past, whatever that phrase might actually mean.

I mean, whatever actually happened was obviously filtered through my body and mind, and so it’s always going to be incomplete, partial, and aggravatingly not quite the whole story. But all of that is fine to some extent. I understand it and I accept that these are the limitations that each of us face. It’s our condition. What aggravates me is that I want to fling myself carelessly and sometimes with full deliberation into the future, but the past always, always, seems to pull me back in some way, to weigh me down, to fuck up every attempt to experience the bliss of casting oneself thoughtlessly into the future. The past makes everything difficult. Nostalgia, the longing for what’s gone does too.

These are not bad things, or at least not exactly. We’re all hamstrung by the past. There are clear patterns and predictable outcomes that over time become ever more clear and predictable. It’s never too late, that’s true, but there is the sobering and unhappy bromide that, say, if you haven’t done what you really want to do by the time you’re 40, you’ll probably never do it. I think this is bullshit, but there is the faint ring of truth there. Most of us succumb to the quiet understanding that we’re not geniuses, that we will never quite arrive at the spot in the future that we had thought or hoped we might occupy, and then we go about our work accordingly, in whatever small way we know how.

And how do we know where to begin? How do we begin the project of remembering even as we seek to waft away the fog and smoke of the present?

I have such great hopes. But I am over forty now and because it hasn’t worked out just yet and I can see the patterns and repetitions in the rug of my life’s bedraggled course, it seems unlikely that it ever will. I can see it and there are no two ways about it. That’s just the way it is if one looks at it correctly. But who knows?

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Accidental Legacies

by Mara Jebsen

Photo 509Every once in a while, a book comes out about the Dulles family. It is in the interests of the writers, of course, to remind the world who the Dulles’ were, because the world has mostly forgotten. There’s the airport, but not that many people know the fellow it is named after. At one time the Dulles’ hobnobbed with the Rockefellers, and were even compared to the Kennedys, but now they aren’t–and nobody minds. Few of their progeny carry the name, and in many ways, the Dulles’ have disappeared. However, every once in a while, historians and political scientists and writers of spy novels like to conjure them, as they get taken with the tales of a forgotten American family, one that included three secretaries of state, a director of the CIA, the head of the Germany desk, and cardinal.

I hate to disappoint, because of course the story of these political men (and one woman) and what they did, and what they meant, is what is most sexy and most scary and most pertinent to most people—but the truth is, I have very little knowledge about it and if I did, I wouldn’t share it. In fact, I am much less interested in Allen Dulles, Director of CIA and John Foster Dulles, secretary of state, than I am in Allen’s wife, Clover (hostess, mother and poet.)

This is largely because I am a woman, and because heredity and legacy, and the randomness of the traces our lives leave behind, is a topic that has always mystified me. Clover Todd Dulles was my great-grandmother, and though I’ve never met her, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at this photograph, trying to read this particular expression.

The picture makes me ask: What kind of person is this and what is it like to be marrying the future director of the CIA under Eisenhower–someone who, some say, will be one of the most powerful men in the world? By most accounts, it is difficult.But no one bothers to make accounts that are even close to complete, because the wives of famous and infamous men are not really of interest. And anyone's marriage is difficult to describe, and thier own business, anyway.

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Mónica Mignone

by Maniza Naqvi

MonicaMónica was introduced to me, by her sister Isabel, on the kind of clear October day, when a sense of beauty, mirrors its temporal nature. She appeared into my conscience, just as Isabel and I walked past the Old Executive Building, past the White House, past museums and other buildings housing law firms, foundations, security agencies and lobby firms: past their plush and well-appointed interiors and past their very busy, busy staff in the heart of the city.

Isabel and I used to work together; frantically trying to meet deadlines to get things done against timelines and schedules spanning several time zones and trying to secure funding for social safety nets and cash transfers to the poorest people in a country in Africa. There hadn't been a moment to talk about anything else. In fact till about midnight of a date last year—we were doing just this in two separate locations working on our computers, when she was cut off from where I was logged on to. She had retired that day and at midnight, as was the procedure, she was no longer part of the system.

Then, a few weeks ago, Isabel sent me an email and wondered if her book group could read one of my books: On Air. I knew she would have a hard time finding copies on Amazon and so when we met over lunch, I brought along a few copies of another one: Stay With Me.

As we walked to lunch she told me about how she was now working as a human rights activist in Argentina with the institution which her father, a celebrated human rights activist, had founded. I had no idea about this. “I consider myself a human rights activist, but you know how it is. I could not work with Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) before now because I had this job but in reality I had been supporting them in the past on a volunteer basis.”

“Wow,” I said, “Good for you!”

Then she told me about her sister, Mónica María Candelaria Mignone. Her sister worked in the slums of Argentina in 1976 with Catholic priests, nuns and several young adults to organize the poor. Her sister Mónica had been disappeared by the Military Junta on May 14, 1976. Mónica in 1976 was 24 years old. She became one of the 30,000 desaparecidos: the disappeared ones.

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Poem

MOTHER’S SCRIBE

TO HER HUSBAND’S NEW WIFE

I rule an urge to jump in the sea. No
one taught me how to swim, and if
someone had I would be diving

in the Atlantic now lapping the sea
wall around my son’s home in New
York. A rogue assaults my senses,

flouting even American laws, digging
deeper to find more than gold. Spineless
like his father, my son is scared to seize

the rogue. Don’t treat me like a child
I tell Giselle, the maid from Haiti, who
is her own asylum as she wraps a bib

around my neck. How long more must
I bear this circus? My son has promised
to fix my departure date for Kashmir, but

I know he is only teasing, “Stay, now that
you are here,” he says, “No one to care
for you there in deep winter, no power, no

water, no heat, Dal Lake iced over, army
everywhere?” But my heart yearns to walk
under almond trees blossoming, sip noon

chai poured from a samovar at the Shalimar,
receive kisses from my great, great grandchildren,
one at a time on both cheeks. I hope you will

repaint my room, install modern sanitary fittings,
for I am still the head of our household despite
what the rogue whispers, always the whispers.

by Rafiq Kathwari, the first non-Irish winner of the Patrick Kavanagh 2013 Poetry Award

On Watching “Wages of Fear” with my 11-Year-Old Daughter

by Debra Morris

ScreenHunter_434 Dec. 02 09.55The 1953 French thriller Wages of Fear, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, would seem an odd pick for Family Movie Night. But there we sat, side-by-side one Saturday night, to watch a movie I had bought based on the cover photograph and some vague sense of its cinematic status, its reputation as the kind of bold art film that “stays news.” This is the story: after an oil well located in a South American country catches fire, its American owners hire four European men, all down on their luck and effectively stranded in the country, to drive two trucks over mountainous dirt roads, carrying the nitroglycerine needed to explode and thereby cap the well. The first hour, roughly, was high on dialogue and character exposition, exploring the desperation that might lead these men to undertake a suicidal mission, and it was brilliant and gripping to the adults on the couch but our daughter was ready to renounce the film and the evening's experiment: “When is something going to happen?”

The film brought Clouzot international fame. Even sixty years later, in 2010, Empire magazine ranked it #9 among the “100 Best Films of World Cinema.” And it is a masterwork of suspense, one all the more painful for there being hardly any glimmer of redemption throughout the film: at times it is just very difficult to believe that any of the four men will survive. The film refuses, even during that psychological first hour, to show us the hero among them. If it did, this might explain the film's suspense—explain, that is, our willingness to enter into the manifest dangers on the screen, so that we felt and believed them more fully than if we were certain no one would survive. A hero could transform suspense into a more tolerable, if still fraught, anticipation.

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When Art is Research

by Monica Westin

The Way of the Shovel, an ambitious group show focused on artistic production as a mode of “history, archaeology, and archival research” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago last month. Much of the work in the show takes the form of documentary photographs and films that attempt to create alternative historical narratives, filling out our everyday understandings of the world and its pasts. In my interview with him last month, curator Dieter Roelstraete noted that the show, based on his previous e-flux essay of the same name, grew out of his observation that

“in the last ten to fifteen years the rhetoric of art has been rephrased in broad terms using the language of research…I really appreciate the ambition of artists to think of themselves as not just working with forms and ornaments, but also with information…. But while I'm interested in the critical charge of art's claim to be some kind of research, the whole discussion of artistic research is a huge one that is also based in the academization of art in recent years. There's increasing pressure on students to present what they do as some kind of intellectual enterprise, which has its own advantages and disadvantages.”

Roelstraete's salient point is that artists are encouraged to frame their work as research at a time when discourses surrounding art are increasingly influenced by science and other academic disciplines. But what practices should “count” as research, and which are just part of the process of art-making?

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Mark Dion, Concerning the Dig, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Installation view, The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, MCA Chicago November 9, 2013 – March 9, 2014.

In the western tradition, we have historically understood artists' contributions to social consciousness as generally either representing/preserving images of the world as it is, or imagining ways it might be otherwise. For the ancient Greeks, art was exclusively concerned with mimesis, or the direct copying of nature, and ancient art criticism judged successful art as that which depicted its subject with the most realism. It wasn't until the second century AD that the sophist Philostratus first argued, in his biography of the mystic Apollonius, that phantasia, or creative imagination, was a more important quality in the artist than mimesis. (And it arguably took centuries after that before western artists themselves began to make this argument for their work and to break from imitation in their practices.) The western history of art can often largely be read as a tension between changing technologies of mimetic representative realism (increasing understanding of perspective in the Renaissance, the invention of the photograph) and intellectual movements towards new modes of phantasia or reaching for that which is beyond the skills of technological reproduction (Mannerism as a reaction to the Renaissance, Impressionism as a reaction to photography).

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