by Jen Paton

There is a scene in David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet where a British captain addresses his crew, men from all over the world. The Captain pauses “to let words trickle into other languages.”

The novel follows a Dutch clerk, Jacob De Zoet, at Dejima, the Dutch trading island off the coast of late 18^th and early 19^th Century Nagasaki. Mitchell’s book is full of translation and mistranslation: from Dutch to Japanese, English to Dutch. It is a problem implicit in the historical novel itself, and in history too, to translate the past to the present. It is a long way for meaning to trickle.

In the book’s Reader’s Guide, there is a short essay on historical fiction (don’t be embarrassed to read Reader’s Guides, they are often good), where Mitchell writes of the difficulties of putting words in the mouths of past people: to avoid “smacking of Blackadder” one “must create a sort of dialect – I call it Bygonese – which is inaccurate but plausible.”

One of the hardest things about studying history, and especially the distant past, is trying to understand not just the speech, but also the mindset of the people one reads, and reads about. The people of the past are just as foreign to us in history as in historical fiction. What did it feel like to enter Justinian’s Hagia Sophia? What beliefs, and how true to him, made a man carry a Saint’s bones, or a piece of wood from the ‘True Cross,’ thousands of miles? What made a noblewoman wear a hair shirt underneath her fine gowns? My favorite history book, Peter Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom, is about these questions. It is satisfying for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because it makes Other the people of the past in a way that, to me, is more honest than is usual.

Read more »

James McGirk

A year and decade after the turn of the century, things looked dire in the United States of America, but not that dire: the economy was stagnant after an exuberant but lopsided decade of prosperity, job opportunities for graduates and social climbers had dwindled to a few openings changing bedpans for the large, parasitic over-class of aging boomers, and the gleam of enthusiasm following Barack Obama’s presidency had faded quickly. But the fact that *that* and a few years of hardship was all it took for open revolt among the most highly educated, entitled generation of Americans ever to be born would have been quite unimaginable at the time. That the change they got was not at all what they were expecting is one of the great ironies of our age.

The second clamor for change was born in the creative class; brought to term by the poets, as all good revolutions are, if not precisely not in the usual way. This revolution was born from a coalition with a notorious group of email spammers. Perhaps this requires a little explantation. Let us back up a little.

Since the introduction of fax machines and the Internet into Nigeria and other English-speaking third-world countries, mysterious missives would materialize in the inboxes of the industrialized world. These would purport to be from high-ranking bureaucrats, deposed princelings and other dubious figures, and ask recipients for permission to transmit a few million dollars of embezzled funds into their bank accounts in exchange for a hefty cut. If a mark agreed, he or she would be asked for a moderate advance of funds to cover transaction fees… This was known as a 419 scam, and, given the ludicrous spellings of their messages, these emails weren’t considered much of a threat, and indeed were something of a joke (at first).

Read more »

Read more »

by Hasan Altaf

All throughout That Girl in Yellow Boots, Kalki Koechlin stomps around Bombay in a pair of mustard-yellow Doc Martens until, at the end, devoid of hope, dreams destroyed, illusions shattered, etc., she takes them off and climbs into a rickshaw clutching them to her chest. The Doffing Of The Boots turns out to have a complete lack of resonance: The Docs are practical and fashion-forward but really not much else.

I went into the movie with high expectations – an Anurag Kashyap film, a Kalki Koechlin vehicle, a project that was clearly a labor of love, written by the director and the star – and left disappointed. The meaninglessness of the boots is obviously a minor complaint (sometimes an eggcup really is just an eggcup, although then why would you put your eggcup in the title?), but it seems to me emblematic of many of the weaknesses of the movie: Nothing really resonates, nothing really means anything, nothing really counts. Much like Koechlin’s Ruth, we plod through the movie in our boots until the plot twists a bit at the end, and then we take them off and go home.

I still can’t quite decide what the problem of the movie is, but I’ve narrowed it down to two completely contradictory possibilities: Either there is too much in it, or not enough. The basic plot is theoretically interesting – girl travels to foreign land looking for missing father, discovers deep dark family secret – but the meat isn’t there, and the outlines aren’t enough, on their own. Everything is sketched in so quickly that it becomes almost generic.

Read more »

by Ryan Sayre

Sitting in a circle around my computer with Kumagaya and his fellow fishermen at an evacuation center up north, we watched footage taken by him of the tsunami coming in. A good number of clinical terms offer themselves up to help understand Mr. Kumagaya's seemingly untroubled manner when explaning whose boat that was being pulled under now, whose fishing nets washed inland there, whose homes brought out to sea over yonder. Why is the mood closer to good humor than sorrow, nearer to excitement than despair? We can guess what words diagnosis will throw at us; words like 'shock' and 'truama'. But these terms are of limited use. The creases on Kumagaya's sun-beaten cheeks hold his visage to a single benign expression, sorrow having little room in it. It is a face reminicent of Basho's line, fishes weep with tearful eyes. Sorrow would be filtered immediately out of his face by the creases just as the salty tears of basho's fish are devoured by the vastness of the salt-sea the moment they spill from the eye. Where does all the sorrow go without the possibility for outer expression?

A few days ago my dearest informant and quasi-host father, with whom I am staying at present, took me aside to demand a strict outwardly emotional suspension. I was given orders not to offer tears, hugs, or even a listening ear to my host mother when she returned the following day from the funeral services for her father who had died the previous week. I was to use with her a certain one-word greeting generally offered after a long day’s work, a road-trip, or any minor daily task at all. This simple recognition of fatigue was the only one made permissable to me. I forced myself to agree that talk does indeed have something monstrous in it, all its energies being directed to the ear, leaving the rest of the body, and the rest of the enormous event, adrift. My host father was inviting me into a more delicate kind of care, a non-event-based care, an abeyant care. He was offering me in on a relationship honoring silence precisely where to me talk would seem most in order.

Read more »

Read more »

by Meghan Rosen

On the morning of April 8th, the day the government was scheduled to shut down if a budget deal couldn’t be reached by midnight, Arizona’s Junior Senator, Jon Kyl, made a passionate plea on the Senate floor for bipartisanship. He urged congressional leaders to “bridge the differences between the two parties” and reach an agreement.

The House had already passed a bill that made dramatic cuts to government spending, and it was time for the Senate to follow suit. The problem? Senate Democrats refused to vote for a bill that (among other cuts) defunded Planned Parenthood, and President Obama threatened to veto.

Senator Kyl, however, believed the bill was a reasonable measure to keep the government running; in fact, he said, it was necessary. To him, it just didn’t make sense to shut down the government over a program that cost taxpayers 300 million dollars a year. He wanted to put things in perspective.

For the first few minutes of his speech, Kyl sounded like the second-highest ranking Republican in the Senate leadership should sound: bold, confident, and committed to solving tough fiscal problems. In these (fleeting) minutes, it was easy to see why he was unanimously elected by his party in 2008 to serve as the Republican Whip.

And then he clarified his position. It wasn’t that the amount of money going to Planned Parenthood was too insignificant, in the grand scheme of budgets and deficits, to warrant a government shutdown; rather, it was that 300 million was too much. Why hold up the budget debate for such a costly organization? Especially one that peddles abortions. After all, according to Kyl, “If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood. That’s well over 90 percent of what [they] do.”

Read more »

by Dave Maier

He knew very well the dilettantes' manner (which was worse the more intelligent they were) of going to look at the studios of contemporary artists with the sole aim of having the right to say that art has declined and that the more one looks at the new painters, the more one sees how inimitable the great old masters still are. – Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

An interesting phenomenon of contemporary cultural life is that attitudes towards art, while often closely connected with one's political and ethical beliefs, are only with difficulty associated with points on the political spectrum. One finds populists, elitists, traditionalists, philistines, and even revolutionaries on both left and right. In addition, not surprisingly really, one generation's radical bomb-throwers can turn into the hidebound old fuddy-duddies of the next.

Even so, the rhetorical battle lines are fairly predictable. Progressives regard conservatives, whether elitist or populist, as stuck in the mud, while conservatives regard the left as rashly throwing away our cultural heritage in a mad dash for the latest trend, or as indulging in hyperpoliticized provocation instead of Real Art. There have been innumerable books and articles about the radical assault on traditional artistic values, and they all seem to follow the same script, even using the same handful of examples of (and yes, some do use this term, albeit possibly ignorant of its historical resonance) degenerate art: Andres Serrano (Piss Christ!), Robert Mapplethorpe (those icky pictures!), Karen Finley and her unspeakable yams, etc., etc.

Most of this criticism is mere harrumphing, the negative image of art-world puffery, neither of which it is worth our time to discuss. However, some more serious critiques raise important issues, not easily dismissed. Indeed, to the extent that such criticism questions the value of artistic radicalism, it may be congenial even to those who do not identify themselves as conservative. What should artistic progressives say about these things? Can these “conservative” points be adapted to provide a defense of non-radical progressivism? Or are they too alien, forcing us to choose between a) rejecting progressivism entirely in order to acknowledge them, and b) resisting the points themselves even when stated in their strongest form?

Read more »

by Jeff Strabone

What happens when a great artist in one medium exhibits work in another? 'Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art asks us to consider this question. For forty-some years, Serra has developed a non-representational sculptural practice based chiefly on physical properties of mass, weight, and counterbalance, as opposed to visual agendas of image and representation. In doing so, he has opened up new ways of thinking about art in an era when representation and image-making, no longer the raison d'être of art, are simply two among a smorgasbord of options.

Although the world's attention has gravitated to his sculptures, Serra has been drawing for his entire career. That the Met's exhibition is the first retrospective devoted to his drawings is telling, particularly given his many exhibitions of sculpture and site-specific works around the world. We must ask then, Why has it taken so long, and what do Serra's drawings have to offer us?

Read more »

by Alyssa Pelish

For Julia Turner, who, on Slate’s Culture Gabfest of 30 March 2011, declared, “I hate epigraphs!”

You see how cream but naked is;

Nor dances in the eye

Without a strawberry;

—Robert Herrick, “The Lily in a Crystal”

There is a scene in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin that, I must admit, I was pretty crushed out on in my younger years. In it, the novel’s young heroine, Tatiana, pores over the private library of Onegin, dandified object of her unrequited love. Here, she finds not only the books (heavy on the Byronic heroes) from which he has clearly fashioned himself, but his marginalia: “crosses or a jotted note /…the question mark he wrote.” There it is: his soul laid bare, the primary sources of his character. And the truth is, she’s not sure she likes what she sees; he’s so obviously cloaked in the robes of someone else’s genius – “a Muscovite in Harold’s cloak,” she thinks, noting how ostentatiously Onegin has affected the world-weariness of the first Byronic hero.

What makes the scene doubly great is that Pushkin is all the time inviting us to level a similar charge of appropriation at his entire novel. And it’s true: Eugene Onegin emphatically borrows characters and tropes from the body of Western European literature and culture that once cast a long shadow on Russia’s literary aspirations. As if this weren’t enough, Pushkin inscribes his novel with many, many epigraphs plucked from the Western canon, playing with the idea that his sprightly “novel in verse” is just a hodgepodge of re-heated scraps from the real geniuses over in France, Germany, and England. But of course that emphatic playfulness is what makes Pushkin’s novel: the constant Western references (Onegin eating Strasbourg pie and reading Byron next to his bust of Napoleon, Tatiana captivated by the sentimental heroines of Richardson and Rousseau) and, most visibly, the epigraphs that front every canto. Pushkin is wildly, dazzlingly aware of the role his consumption of Western European culture has played in his literary creation, and he now re-animates the lines he’s learned – in the context of his own verse[1]. The difference between Pushkin and Onegin, you could say, is that Pushkin takes those old lines and makes you see them anew; Onegin, alas for Tatiana, merely takes them.

In fact, the difference between Pushkin and Onegin is really the difference between a well-deployed epigraph and an ill-used one.

Read more »

A particle accelerator in the US has shown compelling hints
of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say.
…………………………………………. –BBC 4/7/2011

More Splintered Than Common Sense

Having heard hints
of a never-before-seen particle
my day becomes new;
the blue day is fractured further

What were small thoughts become
more pint-sized then the nonsense
of politicians: smaller even
than the bits of stained tile mosaic
under my feet beneath
a urinal

But I’m disappointed. I’m told
this is not the much-sought-after
Higgs boson that I’ve been chasing
my whole life, looking for it between
the pillows of my couch where I
often find keys and nickels or dimes.
Hope surged when I first heard the news;
but now, again, life seems to be shy
of something elemental, and yet my
tomatoes have just perked green
in several of my potting flats
their petite leaves pulling-in
light

Disappointment aside, scientists say
this hinted-at particle could be a
new force of nature —beyond sex and
maybe greater than greed? Who knows
what new element of nature they’ve
found hinted-at in their accelerator
in unexpected bumps in jets
of colliding particles which they
note while sipping Starbucks
as the white dust of a sugared torus
settles upon the lapels of their lab coats
and the micro-world simultaneously
fragments with the macro
into something even more splintered
than common sense

by Jim Culleny,
© 4/9/2011

by Sarah Firisen

If there’s anything that we should have learned from the world events of the past couple of months it’s that the desire to be autonomous is a universal human one. Events in Egypt seem to show that when people feel empowered and can taste freedom, anything is possible. Perhaps this insight into the human psyche can be used to think more creatively about education.

I recently came across this blog piece by a 6th grade teacher discussing his school’s recent, inaugural Innovation Day during which all the 6th grade students were told, “that they would have an entire school day to learn about what they wanted and to create evidence of their learning in any way they chose.” The end result was over 200 learning projects made up of students working independently initially and then often merging into groups as they began to help each other with projects. One of the most telling findings that this teacher notes when answering the question, ‘Did you have any discipline issues with giving kids the freedom to day what they wanted for a whole day?’ was, ‘None! When you give kids a highly engaging activity that they choice in [sic] and buy into; behavior problems are nonexistent.’

Read more »

by Kevin S. Baldwin

One of the more anticipated and dreaded publications of the year is the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue (SISI). It arrived again this year with the usual fanfare and condemnation. The battle lines are familiar: To some it is a celebration of idealized feminine beauty, to others its representations of women are so far removed from reality as to be laughable, except that some consequences are so serious.

What may not be obvious at first glance is that this tension is a very old one: What is perfection and how do we as individuals compare to these perfect forms? It is well represented in Raphael's 1509 painting, The School of Athens. At its center, Plato is pointing up to the heavens where perfect, transcendent forms reside, while his pupil Aristotle is pointing to the earth, where we live our lives. Though Aristotle was closer to our modern conception by focusing on what “is,” he was still guilty of typological thinking. That is, he recognized organisms as belonging to abstract classes or representing idealized forms. As an example, Ghiselin (1969) makes a distinction between seeing “the horse” as opposed to “this horse” or “that horse.” The recognition that populations are composed of individuals that have variation in traits is a recent one, only going back to the time of Darwin. Before then, Platonic Essentialism, Aristotelian typology, and their Christian derivatives held sway over much of Western thought (Mayr 1982).

The Neo-essentialism and typological thinking provided by the SISI is not subtle and provides wonderful opportunities to market wares and services. Not blonde enough? Here is some peroxide. Bust not measuring up? Push-up bras or implants can be yours! Nose too big? No problem. We can trim other parts too (If you really want an eyeful, try Googling “labioplasty before after” with SafeSearch toggled off). Overweight? Here's a diet; or how about liposuction? Razors, depilatories, & wax can mask your mammalian characters. And so on.

The thinking behind SISI doesn't do men any favors either. How many of them are waiting for “the one” who looks like a supermodel while barely acknowledging the existence of fabulous women around them who happen to dwell in something other than so-called perfect forms?

Read more »

by Feisal H. Naqvi

Most people know the former Chief Justice of Pakistan, A. R. Cornelius, as one of the great jurists produced by this benighted country. He is remembered fondly as the lone dissenting voice in the infamous Dosso case (which was the first of a long line of cases to justify military rule) and as a crusader for fundamental rights. Very few people though know that Cornelius was a champion of recasting Pakistan’s entire jurisprudence in Islamic terms.

M.R. Kayani, the former Chief Justice of what was then called West Pakistan, is on his terms, just as well known as Cornelius. Like Cornelius, he is remembered as a great jurist. Like Cornelius, he is remembered as a voice of strength and courage, one which refused to be silenced by the might of the state. But unlike Cornelius, his view on religion was that it was a dangerous tool in the hands of fanatics. As one of the co-authors of the famous 1953 report on the causes of the anti-Ahmedi riots, he wrote:

If there is one thing which has been conclusively demonstrated in this inquiry, it is that provided you can persuade the masses to believe that something they are asked to do is religiously right or enjoined by religion, you can set them to any course of action, regardless of all considerations of discipline, loyalty, decency, morality or civic sense.

The Cornelius-Kayani debate is examined at length in a brilliant upcoming article by Professor Clark Lombardi of the University of Washington. In brief, his view is that (a) as argued by Cornelius, human rights norms are strongest when entrenched in public acceptance of those norms, (b) Pakistan’s public discourse is dominated by considerations of what is Islamic, (c) the experience of Egypt’s Constitutional Court shows that a secular institution like the courts can imaginatively and sensitively reinterpret Islamic norms in a modern and progressive manner and therefore (d) countries like the United States which are interested in promoting liberal secularism in Pakistan should also consider promoting if not Islamization, then “at least a certain type of Islamization.”

As much as I respect Professor Lombardi’s acumen and learning, I disagree. In my view, the legal and political system in Pakistan needs to be kept as de-Islamized as possible.

Read more »

by Dave Munger

Whenever I call my stepbrother Mark, one of his persistent complaints is how prices are going up. “Everything costs more,” he tells me. Yet for the past two years, he's received no increase in his Social Security Disability check. His money, which never went very far, now barely seems to be enough to get by. But when I read about inflation in the media, a very different picture emerges. Kevin Drum says inflation is the lowest ever. Paul Krugman says that worries about inflation are misplaced. What's wrong with this picture? Could Mark have a mistaken impression of what things really cost?

I decided to take a closer look at how inflation figures are actually derived, to see if the numbers are painting a misleading picture of what real people pay for the goods they need to survive. Inflation in the US is tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which has a very informative web site explaining exactly how they arrive at their figures. Prices are tracked by looking at a typical “basket” of goods and services people buy, currently set at a value of $100 in 1983 dollars. This is the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, which is used, among other things, to determine the annual increase in Social Security payments. The most recent BLS figures put the CPI at about 220. So the stuff that cost $100 to buy in 1983 now runs you $220. That's the basic idea, anyways.

In practice, my purchases, like those of most people, are a lot different from what they were in 1983. I'm not buying a lot of vinyl LPs any more, and my budget for skinny pink ties has significantly diminished. In 1983, I didn't have a cell phone or internet service bill, and instead of buying iPad apps, I was pumping quarters into Donkey Kong and Q-Bert. How does the BLS account for all that?

Read more »

by Tom Jacobs

All the time there is this split in the American art and art-consciousness. On the top it is as nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey. […] You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness. That blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knows disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise.

Always the same. The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish. Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! Hums the under-consciousness. Love and Produce! Cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and-Produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time as it will have to hear.

–D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

One of the most upsetting scenes in Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” (1994)—a film full of upsetting scenes—is what one would probably have to call the “rape scene.” It’s the scene where Bruce Willis’s character (Butch Coolidge) returns to save Ving Rhames’s character (Marsellus Wallace), from an already-in-progress rape and, presumably from a subsequent certain death. All of this takes place in the basement of an already disturbingly creepy pawnshop run by a coupla good old boys. This, in and of itself, is not funny. It’s hard to imagine how or why it might become funny. But it does, oddly, become funny. This is intriguing: how does it comes to pass that we laugh not so much at suffering, but rather at violence, even if it’s fictional.

Susan Sontag, the prophet of how we consume suffering, says this: “Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.” She also says this: “For the photography of atrocity people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance.” Imagination and contrivance, it seems, are the problems that plague us. She is right, of course. We don’t understand images of suffering either because we can’t completely empathize because we see these images everyday, or else because they seem too contrived, too beautiful (and one might check the front page of the NY Times…it invariably presents us with an image of beauty and death). We don’t imagine ourselves, not really, in the sufferer’s shoes, and the representations of their lives seem distant and abstract. This is a problem. It is all so far away, so distant and remote, and I asked for a grande not a venti, type of thing.

Read more »