Jesse Thorn is the host and producer of Public Radio International's The Sound of Young America, a cultural interview program he grew from humble beginnings at KZSC, the radio station of his alma mater, UC Santa Cruz. He's also the proprietor of Maximumfun.org, which hosts such other audio ventures as Jordan, Jesse, Go!, Coyle and Sharpe: The Impostors and The Kaspar Hauser Comedy Podcast. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

We've got to do some awareness-raising. What makes The Sound different from other public radio interview shows one might hear across the dial?

More awesome.

How much more?

The premise of the show is, “a public radio show about things that are awesome.” That translates to, essentially, a public radio show from my editorial perspective. We focus on things that are fun and funny, which means you get — for lack of a less annoying word — a “hipper” public radio show, but you also get a lot more comedy, a lot more indie rock and hip-hop and books about things that are fascinating.

Is this sort of thing totally absent from the public radio airwaves other than on your show? I feel like I haven't heard many comedians anywhere but on your show.

Comedians are almost totally absent from anywhere in serious public discourse, unfortunately. The kind of stuff I cover on my show occasionally pops up on other public radio outlets, and there have been public radio attempts to hew to this formula in a more system-wide or “big money” type of way that have thus far failed.

Usually, if you hear someone who's been on my show on another show, whether a good one or a bad one — and it could be on Fresh Air, which is one of my favorite shows in the world — when you hear that person, it's like they're a visitor. They're not native to those other programs. They're a curiosity, or a novelty, or they focus on some aspect of their story which doesn't have a lot to do with their work. Maybe it has more to do with the kind of narrative theme that somebody picks out for a newspaper feature story. You know, “So-and-So Happened to Be Raised By Dogs”? On my show, I like to think they're a little more at home.
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by Aditya Dev Sood

I know the grip, more or less, but nothing else about how to swing a club. I hold the club away from me, shuffle into a likely stance, and settle its head down, behind the ball, already resting on the tee. Hold your right foot steady as you swing back, Abhinav says, and your eye on the ball. My brother is a natural coach, but I am an awkward athlete. Yet there is a determination in me to show physical and kinesthetic ability now, in full adulthood, that I never felt in my youth. I see the ball staring back at me, daring me to hit it.

My cousin Rohit has been on my mind a lot, lately, and perhaps that's why I'm here at the driving range. He was the one who first showed me how to hold a golf stick and sink balls into the little holes marked with numbered, red, rusting markers. The putting green was right next to the club house, from where a roar of social chatter rose up, among many uncles boasting and guffawing over multiple beers, each of which progressively drowned out more sound. That nineteenth hole was where my cousin really shined, winning people over with his smile, his one chipped tooth that could kick-start any number of increasingly incredible bar tales.

Rohit was born with the kind of charisma that made his odd looks irresistible. He was tall and dark, with the small sharp jaw that runs through our family like a birthmark, soodon da thappa. His thick, thatchy-wavy hair was already graying by his mid-twenties, and now and again he sported a slight paunch, which he also wore with style. Rohit attended boarding school in Darjeeling, and grew up between the Royal Calcutta Golf Club, the Saturday Club, and Tolleygunge. It was his allegiance to these clubs, it once struck me, that kept him from ever moving to New Delhi, no matter how difficult things became for him in Calcutta.

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Maniza Naqvi: You have spent a lifetime leading political, anti war and socialist activism through demonstrations, protest marches; political articles, books, lectures, interviews, and speeches . You have spoken out in all sorts of forums ranging from university settings to the streets during anti war demonstrations. You are noted as the leader of the Left in Europe. You’ve been a hero and example for many of us. So, in all of this, where does writing novels fit in? You have now written five novels, two of which I absolutely loved reading: The Book of Saladin and Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree.

Tariq Ali: I started writing fiction in 1990. Why? I don't know. I felt like it but recently on a trip to Pakistan I came across a letter I'd written my mother in 1966 or '67, soon after leaving Oxford. I was quite surprised because I'd written that I was thinking about writing a novel. I have no memory of what I might have been thinking of…then 1968 happened and swept our generation away into the utopian wilds. It was the end of that period that started me thinking of fiction again. I had written plays and film scripts in the 80's and early 90s. So a full-scale novel was not such a huge leap forward. 



Maniza Naqvi: What draws you to fiction? Can you place the role of fiction writing in your life?

Tariq Ali: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree was begun in 1991 after the first Gulf War. I wanted to excavate the history of European Islam and went, naturally, to Spain. Here I saw the Great Mosque in Cordoba, went to Granada, wandered round Seville and imagined the ruins whispering to me…stories of their past and those who had built them. So I imbibed the atmosphere and wrote the first novel of the Quintet. Edward Said read it and liked it and said: 'Don't stop now. Tell the whole bloody story.' He meant the whole bloody story of the clash between Western Christendom and Islamic Arab civilization. So I did and it was Edward who first started referring to it as the Islam Quartet, which soon became a Quintet. Writing these historical novels became the centre of my intellectual life till 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reality dragged me back to non-fiction which I had more or less given up. Now I do both, but to write fiction I have to cut myself off completely from everyday life which isn't easy. Had the US agreed to the bombing of Iran I might not have been able to finish the Quintet.

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This article is, in part, a retelling of 'The Heroic Age of Hysteria,' a section from chapter 1, 'A Forgotten History,' in the 1997 book, “Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror,” by Judith Herman, M.D. It was published by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, New York. I highly recommend this book to all interested in the subject.

In part, this article relies on the work of Harold Bloom, principally, his 1998 book, “Shakespeare: The invention of the human,” and a few of his interviews related to Sigmund Freud. The book was published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., New York.

At the time Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) began his research into Hysteria, it was understood as a malady peculiar to women (according to 25 centuries of medical thinking) and accounted for any disease whose symptoms could not be found to have an organic cause. It was manifest in symptoms like partial paralysis, hallucinations, sensory losses, convulsions, and amnesias. Lumped into these symptoms was anything found (by men) to be mysterious or incomprehensible in women. The source of the problem, it was believed, resided in the uterus, and thus the medical term, Hysteria.

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by Jeff Strabone

One of the duties of the modern nation-state is persuasion. Each state aims to keep its citizens convinced of the legitimacy of its rule. The state may be run chiefly for the enrichment of a few at the cost of the many, but the endurance of the state is widely thought to depend on its ability to sell its rule to the many as a common-sense truism. Or at least that was how it used to work. We may be entering a new era in the evolution of the state, one where the state approaches a state of utter shamelessness.

Antonio Gramsci, in his prison notebooks, called this persuasive activity 'hegemony'. According to Gramsci, hegemony occludes the domination of the state and the classes whose interests it serves. One does not have to be an Italian communist of the 1920s to see the usefulness of Gramsci's groundbreaking insight. Broadly speaking, all political actors pursue their agendas by trying to narrow other people's imaginations in order to make desired outcomes seem common-sensical and undesired outcomes outside the ambit of reasonable thought.

It seems to me that over the past decade, in the United States, the state and a narrow circle of powerful interests—banks, energy companies, and private health insurers in particular—have simply given up trying to persuade the rest of us that their interests were our interests. Could we be moving in the twenty-first century to a state that practices domination without hegemony? Or, to put it in plain English, will the state shamelessly turn itself completely over to serving the interests of a powerful few without bothering to pretend that it's not? And if it does, how should we respond?

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by Stefany Anne Golberg

Wes Anderson is a dandy who would make Oscar Wilde proud. Of all the sizzling epigrams that geysered out of Wilde’s pen, a favorite is, “A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature”. It’s a very dandy thing to say. Dandies like Wilde don't think that nature has any authority over art. They think the opposite. In dandyland, nature and reality imitate art. In other words, when we look at nature we see every nature painting and every National Geographic documentary we've ever seen. There is no “real reality” for humans without the human touch; nature is pretending to be art.

Wes Anderson’s dandy films bend reality over and paint a fuchsia moustache on its bum. They are sculpted and posed. They aren’t necessarily fake, like fantasy fake, but they are full of fakers. In all of them, the main character is a regular person upon appearance, but is basically an amateur and a fraud, playacting at greatness. Rushmore is the story of a teenage boy who masquerades as the king of his boarding school, but, in fact, he is a horrible student. The Life Aquatic is the story of a famous oceanographer, who is more interested in daring feats than science. Royal Tenenbaum, in The Royal Tenenbaums, is a wealthy and excellent lawyer, except that he has been disbarred and is a son-of-a bitch. These films are advertisements for the aestheticized life. Like Wilde, there is no true nature for Wes Anderson. Our authentic state is the one we imagine for ourselves, the trumped-up life we've convinced other people is impressive.

More than any of his previous films, The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a really well-made buttonhole. 'I didn't want it so much to be more realistic,' Anderson told the Telegraph, 'I wanted it to be more ours.' Anderson elaborates on Roald Dahl’s book with dandy aplomb. In both tales, we have a family of foxes—Mrs. Fox, little children foxes, and the eponymous Fantastic Mr.—intent on getting their daily bread by stealing it from the valley’s three farmers: Farmer Boggis, Farmer Bunce, and Farmer Bean. An epic battle ensues between animals and farmers, each trying to outsmart the other. Mr. Fox thieves not because it is necessary, but because it’s more fun than foraging in the wild like other animals. “I'm just a wild animal,” Fox says with a sigh. But his regret is not very convincing. This is a fox who sports a double-breasted corduroy suit after all. Getting his food from farmers instead of hunting is the wildness of Mr. Fox. In other words, his “natural” state is to act against nature.

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A Glimpse Into The Work of Pina Bausch

By Randolyn Zinn

Beatrice Libonati, Meryl Tankard in Walzer Photo by Gert Weigelt

On June 30, 2009, dance devotees from around the world mourned the untimely death of choreographer Pina Bausch. At 69 years of age and just four days after a diagnosis of cancer, she left behind a son, an acclaimed dance company, devoted fans, and a trove of masterpieces that changed the course of dance and theater history. Her work always left us wanting more. We were sure she had a century inside her.

Pina Bausch in rehearsal. Photo by Gert Weigelt

In Paris, whenever tickets went on sale for her company Tanztheater Wuppertal, a long line of Pina fans would snake out from the box office into the street. Television crews scrambled to put together elaborate promos, giving them pride of place on the evening news. Imagine if American news shows featured dance and theater segments alongside sports and weather. Take a look at one of these promos and be amazed not only by the snippets of the work, but by the cultural divide.

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By Olivia Scheck

Last week, while vacationing in San Francisco, I was introduced to a new and thoroughly modern form of evening entertainment. Instead of buying tickets to a concert, “getting sloshed” or simply enjoying each other's company, my hosts and I gathered around a computer to video chat with strangers.

Using a website called Chatroulette, we connected instantly to female college students in Korea, teenage boys in Brazil and one gentleman dressed as a horse. For the first few minutes of our exchange, the equine man danced before his webcam. Afterwards, he took off his mask, and we had a surprisingly intimate discussion about his life in a quiet Massachusetts town where he wished he had more friends.

Websites connecting strangers for aimless chatter are nearly as old as the internet itself. AOL chat rooms, which still provide a meeting place for groups to chat about American Idol and True Love After 40, reached their height of popularity in the late 90's. More recently, a teenage web programmer developed a website called Omegle to connect strangers in one-on-one interactions. Unlike traditional chat rooms, Omegle pairs users randomly and gives them no information about the people with whom they are chatting. (Instead of usernames, participants appear as “you” and “me.”) Either party can disconnect and begin chatting with someone new at any time.

Chatroulette, which employs the same format plus live audio and video, is the natural follow-up to Omegle, however the user experience is considerably more bizarre. With each connection, you are transported to someone's living room, bedroom or office cubicle. Unlike traditional text chat, the video feature provides much of the information (e.g. physical appearance, voice and mannerisms) that you use to read people in daily life. And the tendency towards prevarication that has historically marred internet meeting places is mitigated. You can't claim to be a 14-year-old girl if you're a middle-aged man, but you can still deny being middle aged.

In other words, Chatroulette is eerily similar to the real world.

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This Christmas season I totally shocked my friends and family in a way that I probably haven’t managed to since I announced I was moving in with a man I had known for a few weeks (I married him in the end.) Seemingly, I reversed myself on a topic on which everyone, myself included until recently, thought I was resolute. My husband still hasn’t quite forgiven me for my change of course and was totally unmoved by my rationale. I bought my daughters a Wii for Christmas. For many years they have bemoaned the fact that, apparently, they are “the only children that don’t have a Wii or a DS.” Actually, I think that may actually be true, at least if our family, friends, extended family and acquaintances are anything to go by. My original feelings on the subject, which do still hold fast for the DS and many other video gaming systems, is that children spend far too much time on these things, to the detriment of imaginative play, outdoor play and reading. I hate nothing more than seeing children who can’t seem to go for an hour at a time without playing on a device, sitting at the dinner table disengaged from the conversations around them, not able to find any other way to amuse themselves whether they’re alone or with friends. My children expended quite a bit of debating energy trying to persuade me that the Wii is different; it involves physical participation, it’s a more social gaming system, and based on some research and informal polling on my Facebook page, I came to the conclusion that they did have a point. But ultimately, this wasn’t really what finally pushed me over the Amazon edge to the purchase of a Wii console and assorted games. What really caused me to rethink my previously intransigent position on gaming devices were the articles and books I’ve read recently, in the course of my innovation-related reading, about the educational virtues of gaming and most especially, the place of fun in learning.

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“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
………………………………………… –Bob Dylan

Eclipse

at a wall on a corner of the world
I’m still waiting for Godot as mullahs
and priests go by in the robes
of their pride incensing and
murmuring. I’m thinking
burn-poles and bombs and wonder
how many gods must there be
in the world before too many
people have died

down the ages they come and go
hot and promising as new stars
then collapse and freeze
unyielding and grasping
as black holes

the latest on the block,
intent upon eclipsing Christ
who subsumed Yahweh
who buried a pantheon of Ba’als
who defeated the sea god Yam
who rose fresh and dripping
from fathoms of the unfathomed
is on the tragic course
of those before who
by fatwa or inquisition
by crusade, by imposition
with unwarranted holy assurance
and a fire-in-the-belly mission
marked their highways to heaven
in blood

isn’t it good for the world
that this one’s not triune
since one god over-reaching
is all it takes to leave
a million mothers weeping
…………………..
it takes just one
with a new moon of magic
to eclipse the light of earth
with a teaching

by Jim Culleny;
Jan 13, 2009

This is your very breakable brain on NFL Sunday.

I opened an otherwise innocuous copy of a magazine the other day, and my shoulders leapt up in a shudder. Couldn’t help it. I was being confronted by the snout of a tiger snake, a closeup snapped from a low angle, so that a good third of the son of a bitch’s body seemed to be hovering off the ground—coiled, tense, about to strike. I have no idea if tiger snakes are poisonous, but that didn’t matter: before my conscious brain could react the fear had already shivered outward from somewhere in my own reptile brain. The same thing happens if I dream about sitting in a tall swaying tree or imagine cleaning windows on a skyscraper. Brrr. Obviously I’m in no danger from a picture or fantasy, but again, the frisson is a reflex, uncontrolled behavior when I glimpse something potentially perilous.

Shudders like that don’t have to be inborn instinct, either; they can be the result of conditioning, too, something learned over time from the coupling of vivid images and nauseous stimuli. All of which is to say that I’m starting to feel the same snaky shivers, subtle but growing, each time I sit down to watch football nowadays. Not quite to the point of having to look away yet, but I’m always slightly relieved when someone just runs out of bounds, and I don’t chuckle anymore when the body count gets too high on gang tackles. The worst are kickoffs and punts, when bodies hurtle in from crazy angles, whipping around like bats. I feel the snags because with every hit I can imagine—sometimes practically hear—the splat of the players’ brains inside their helmets.

Head injuries have dogged the National Football League since its very early days, since even before facemasks. But, donning the proud mantle of tobacco scientists everywhere, the NFL’s experts refused to admit until just a few months ago that it wasn’t a coincidence so many former players ended up with neurological damage by the time they turned fifty. The word going around is that a few skeptical medical men in charge of the NFL’s official investigation into the matter, a team led by one Dr. Ira Casson, had been dismissing the link between concussions and cognitive difficulties. Casson seemed obviously full of crap, and after Congress hog-piled onto the issue to scold the league, the NFL finally dismissed Casson and reevaluated the evidence. It was damning. In one study, coroners discovered that twelve of thirteen former NFL players had a buildup of a plaque in their brains—a plaque—called tau, a snarl of protein that disrupts neuronal function and that has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Many of the NFL players died in their forties; another autopsy revealed the beginning of tau tangles in an 18-year-old.

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by Evert Cilliers

Before I tell you how I'm a coward, and how Dick Cheney is a coward, and how President Obama is a coward, and how everyone in America is a coward, I want to suck you into my story by starting on a positive note.

To wit: I have a failsafe strategy for when I'm gobsmacked by the exceptionalism of our incompetent institutions, like the Fed missing the bubble, our intelligence services not nixing the visa of the Explosive Gonads Bomber, our incompetent pols giving an incompetent Wall Street the right to ruin us again in a few years, the Senate letting Joe Liebermann take one last bite out of the healthcare bill, or the CIA putting out the welcome mat for a triple agent who's about to blow them up. And then there's Obama asking ex-Presidents Clinton and Bush to help Haiti, when Bush destroyed Haiti's democracy in 2004 and Clinton's been trying to turn the country into a sweatshop.

I've got this default setting that stops me from foaming at the mouth in Sartrean nausea and grinding my teeth into Heideggerian nothingness. Here's what I do: I sit myself down and zen in on how much I still love our failed state of America, and how there are things about America that are actually exceptional.

Freedom of speech. MLK. Geeks. The internet (invented by the Pentagon). Entrepreneurs. Paul Krugman. Elizabeth Warren. Steve Jobs. Our generosity to disaster victims. 24/7 innovation. Matt Taibbi. John Cassavetes.The Great Gatsby. Flash drives. Sylvia Plath. Wallace Stevens. A can-do attitude that once landed us on the moon.Andy Warhol. Bob Dylan, still doing it.A Streetcar Named Desire.The Decemberists. Warren Buffett.My Fair Lady.New York women who don't take crap from men like women do in other countries yet give better blowjobs than women in other countries. And Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.

Meditating on these things of wonder and beauty helps. Especially these days.

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Due to Christmas gallery closures, time away over New Year in Jersey in the Channel Islands, and terrible snow and ice that has made it difficult to get around, I shall not, this week, be posting an art review but three poems written in Kerry, on the west coast of Ireland, from my forthcoming suite 'The Idea of Islands'.This will be published later in the spring by Occasional Press with drawings by the Irish artist Donald Tesky.

Ballinskelligs

They come to me in dreams
Scariff and Deenish, rising like those islands
floating in a veil of mist in Japanese prints,
their peaks in a halo of cloud.
Early morning the sun casts
rings of bright water, stepping stones of light
out to the distant shore. Midnight
and the islands are sleeping, turned in
on their own emptiness as if remembering
those ghostly lives gleaned on the barren cliffs
stinking of sea birds and herring,
the air thick with turf smoke and old rain.
Now they’ve gone the islands lie empty
as picked crab shells, the battering sea lashing
their glassy rocks with the spittle of lost tongues.
Outside my window the strait is moon-streaked,
silver as a hairline crack across
an old mirror. It’s as if I could simply rise
from this bed and walk to that distant shore.
Yet the night holds its secrets.
To feel this flat blackness, where even
the stars are hidden, is to understand what
we cannot see at the edge of the visible world.
The single blip of the lighthouse appears
then disappears every fifteen seconds,
its pulsing beam tracing an arc
across the endless sky, a blinking Cyclops
in the inky dark, till suddenly its morning
and the sun comes up;
streaks of blood-red leaching into the grey.

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To Question a Corpse

I cannot call a poem, it calls me
It comes, I never go to it
.

Some days working alone
one will muscle in and say
let’s scope this out
—it’ll pry at essentials and tug
lifting the lid on the casket of the past
to question a corpse
.

think happenstance—
a thing coincidentally side-lit
glancing off bone, or the sound of a song
falling from a window to the street
as I walk by

.

a brush with a miracle might do
and a poem will come, as when alyssum
looks so perfect in July

.

there’s no such thing as inspiration
other than that I inhale whatever comes
and exhale the words a poem discards
as it vanishes in a clear sky

by Jim Culleny, 1/1/10

by Colin Marshall

Silent Light's opening shot, a gradual four-and-a-half-minute predawn push across a bucolic field as the sun inches over the horizon, signals everything about the sensibility and aesthetic to come. It's a cautious yet intimate venture into several different levels of foreignness at once, reverently observational and hyper-aware of the wealth of detail that surrounds it. Here, I suddenly and gratefully recognized upon first viewing, is a film that's not going to mess around with the usual cinematic shorthand of visual, sonic and narrative cliché.

Given that, perhaps “first experience” should replace “opening shot.” Carlos Reygadas demonstrates beyond all doubt that he both understands and readily wields cinema's potential to happen to its audience, rather than merely to throw up sound-and-light summaries of one damn thing after another. Many directors have worked for twenty, thirty, forty years — often prolifically and lucratively — and still failed to grasp this range of their medium's capabilities. But a film like this makes up for several hundred of those content to be their own Cliffs Notes.

Its simple story centers on a romantic dilemma endured by Johan Voth, a middle-aged Mennonite farmer embedded in his remote northern Mexico community. After having fathered a lookalike brood and ostensibly settled down with the unthrilling but loyal and patent Esther, he's discovered the fascinatingly distant, exotically angular Marianne. One of Johan's confidants calls her his “natural woman,” and he grows more and more inclined to agree. Meeting Marianne for assignations on isolated hills or above her restaurant, Johan comes to believe he's hitched himself to the wrong woman. But how on Earth, so deep in such a cloistered, frowning milieu, to right his mistake?
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By Tolu Ogunlesi

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the Unites States of America

*

I stayed up all night to watch Barack Obama become the President-elect of the United States of America. At that time I lived in a hotel room in Uppsala, a Swedish University town, far away from home (Lagos). It was hard to feel that the Swedes were in any way excited at the prospects of the sort of momentous change that was about to be unleashed on the world.

I recall comparing the apparently unconcerned Uppsala with the Lagos I left behind, a city throbbing with the nervous anticipation of History bearing down on it at top speed (even though nothing like that was happening). Even before I left two months earlier Nigeria had already been overrun by Obamastickers and Obamatalk. There was even an Obama fundraiser that brought in millions of naira; money we later learnt US campaign guidelines prohibited the Obama campaign from accepting. A friend told me that he would be attending a party hosted by the American Embassy in Lagos, where they would keep vigil as the election results came in.

*

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Elatia Harris

The child on the left rests her hand atop the head of the other, working her fingers gently through smooth hair like her own into the scalp. Her expression is inspectorial, proprietary – and openly so. The other gazes out at us – nonplussed, plotting. You know without being told that these two could have but one relation to each other: they are sisters. It is your sister, and only your sister, whom you may handle like this in the expectation she will take you back.

These are the Gainsborough girls, Mary and Margaret, as painted by their father, Thomas, in 1758. The double portraits Thomas Gainsborough left of Mary and Margaret, from early childhood through their late twenties – at which point he died, or surely he would have gone on painting his daughters – are the most penetrating exploration of the theme of two sisters that art has to show us. As well they might be, for it was just once that a great genius of English painting begat two nervous girls close in age, and trained his eye upon them for over a quarter of a century, recording their dominance play, their tremendous naturalness with each other – even when sisters pose, there is no posing – and, their striking individuation in late girlhood.

As they hurtled towards thirty, their father the painter did the only thing he could do – he sat them into single portraits, into superb examinations, like all great portraits, of the separateness, and the fatedness, of one being who exists apart from all others. Apart even from her sister. This is the job of portraiture, to fashion personality and character into that mute and singular appeal across centuries: Behold me — for I am yet present.

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