Author Archive for emily
From WebContent.gov…
Presenter: Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media
Webinar Description:
Why have 40,000 applications been developed for the Apple iPhone by independent developers while other phones have to develop their own applications? Why are there thousands of mashups for Google Maps, but only hundreds for any other web mapping platform? Why are there hundreds of third party applications for Twitter? Becoming a platform that enables the success of others is the secret sauce of Silicon Valley success.
This talk addresses the question: how does government itself become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate? How do you design a system in which all of the outcomes aren’t specified beforehand, but instead evolve through interactions between the technology provider and its user community? How can open data, broadband stimulus, and other government technology initiatives spark innovation? How can we create web applications that become ever more useful through a virtuous circle of contributions from their users? More…
From the London Review of Books…
Once the most celebrated intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre had, until quite recently, almost faded from view. He was already being attacked for his ‘blindness’ about the Soviet gulags shortly after his death in 1980, and even his humanist Existentialism was ridiculed for its optimism, voluntarism and sheer energetic reach. Sartre’s whole career was offensive both to the so-called Nouveaux Philosophes, whose mediocre attainments had only a fervid anti-Communism to attract any attention, and to the post-structuralists and Post-Modernists who, with few exceptions, had lapsed into a sullen technological narcissism deeply at odds with Sartre’s populism and his heroic public politics. The immense sprawl of Sartre’s work as novelist, essayist, playwright, biographer, philosopher, political intellectual, engaged activist, seemed to repel more people than it attracted. From being the most quoted of the French maîtres penseurs, he became, in the space of about twenty years, the least read and the least analysed. His courageous positions on Algeria and Vietnam were forgotten. So were his work on behalf of the oppressed, his gutsy appearance as a Maoist radical during the 1968 student demonstrations in Paris, as well as his extraordinary range and literary distinction (for which he both won, and rejected, the Nobel Prize for Literature). He had become a maligned ex-celebrity, except in the Anglo-American world, where he had never been taken seriously as a philosopher and was always read somewhat condescendingly as a quaint occasional novelist and memoirist, insufficiently anti-Communist, not quite as chic and compelling as (the far less talented) Camus. More…
From Tim Black at spiked…
While the Enlightenment, ‘one of the most important shifts in the history of man’ as one recent account put it, has certainly had its detractors, who blame it for anything from the Holocaust to soulless consumerism, it now also has a veritable army of self-styled heirs. Militant secularists, New Atheists, advocates of evidence-based policy, human rights champions… each constituency in their turn will draw justification from the intellectual emanations of that period beginning roughly towards the end of the seventeenth century and culminating – some say ending – in the 1789 French Revolution and its aftermath. And each in their turn will betray it.
It is not deliberate treachery. This is no reactionary dissimulation – it is more impulsive than that. Still, in the hands of the neo-Enlightened, from the zealously anti-religious to the zealously pro-science, something strange has happened. Principles that were central – albeit contested – to the Enlightenment have been reversed, turned in on themselves. Secularism, as we have seen recently in the French government’s decision to ban the burqa, has been transformed from state toleration of religious beliefs into their selective persecution; scientific knowledge, having been emancipated from theology, has now become the politician’s article of faith; even freedom itself, that integral Enlightenment impulse, has been reconceived as the enemy of the people. As the Enlightened critics of Enlightenment naivete would have it, in the symbolic shapes of our ever distending guts and CO2-belching cars, we may be a little too free. More…
From Nikil Saval at n+1…
Tony Judt began as an intellectual historian; he will be remembered by many as a bracing critic of Zionism, a vigorous proponent of European-style social democracy, and—tragically—a victim of ALS. I have heard many describe as “moving” his snatches of memoir, published at intervals in the New York Review of Books over the last year of his life. This is true—but what may have been even more moving was the extent to which he devoted his last days to making the case, which he had made many times before, for the welfare state. He broached the issue as early as “The Social Question Redivivus” in 1997 (reprinted in the collection Reappraisals), and he delivered what turned out to be one of his last salvos in the magnificent “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy”—delivered in 2009 from the wheelchair where he felt like he was “imprisoned in a cell that shrank by six inches every day.”
In the way his scholarship informed his larger political concerns, Judt was an old-style intellectual, after the manner of his teacher (and New York Review of Books writer) George Lichtheim. It was a fact Judt emphasized. His titles often alluded to the debates among previous generations of writers, such as Benedetto Croce’s “What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel.” He singled out intellectuals of an earlier generation for praise (Raymond Aron, Albert Camus) and others for censure (Jean-Paul Sartre, E. P. Thompson), suggesting the models that he either followed or abjured. Though he weighed in on contemporary issues rather widely, his writings betray barely any dilettantism: except for his polemics on Israel, borne out of an initial support for Labor Zionism, his work rarely moved beyond the horizons of 20th century Europe (and even Israel could be said to fit within those horizons). More…
To those of you that joined us at the 2010 Humanities Conference in Los Angeles, or if you’ve participated in a previous conference, please share your photos of the conference with your friends and colleagues that you met while at the conference. Pictures of the conference sessions, dinner, tours and ‘down time’ are all welcome!
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From David Brooks at The New York Times…
Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Most people think it is a gift from God, who revealed His laws and elevates us with His love. A smaller number think that we figure the rules out for ourselves, using our capacity to reason and choosing a philosophical system to live by.
Moral naturalists, on the other hand, believe that we have moral sentiments that have emerged from a long history of relationships. To learn about morality, you don’t rely upon revelation or metaphysics; you observe people as they live.
This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. One of the participants, Marc Hauser of Harvard, began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate. More…
From The Guardian…
We’re so used to hearing writers worship words: “Oh, I’ve always been passionate about language, every sentence is crafted with loving care.” So used to hearing of the positive power of literature: “If only she’d read some serious fiction, the break-up wouldn’t have come as such a trauma!” Even of its supposed political importance: if only Israelis and Palestinians would read each others’ novels, says Amos Oz, they would begin to come to some accommodation. If only Americans translated more foreign literature, says translator Edith Grossman, US foreign policy would be more understanding. The mafia can be beaten, says Roberto Saviano, with words! And then, the Bible’s weird announcement: “In the beginning was the Word”. As if everything outside language were secondary and irrelevant.
But what if language and literature were as much a part of the problem as the solution?
Consider.
Invented, not part of nature, words are thrust upon us the moment we emerge from the womb. Heads stuffed with them, we start to imitate. The right sounds in the right sequences get us what we want. Soon these patterns of sound seem as natural as breathing. For stream of consciousness, read stream of words.
We could barely walk before they put books in our hands. The sounds became signs. We must read them silently, subtracted from the give and take of company, abstracted from our immediate context. Alone, withdrawn, the mind brims with words that have no material existence. More…
From 3quarksdaily.com…
I want to tell you one thing I imagine about the creation of this book. Tell me if it’s right or wrong. As the listener probably knows by now, this book is made out of transcripts of tapes you recorded while you were on the road with David Foster Wallace for five days during his publicity tour for his big novel in ‘96 Infinite Jest.
Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
It sounds like it. You didn’t end up writing the article that these notes were for, a Rolling Stone profile. That got canceled. So you had these laying around, I presume, stored somewhere. I would imagine, after David Foster Wallace’s untimely death in 2008, your mind went immediately to these materials, all this conversation you had with Wallace. I imagine a huge, crushing sense of responsibility. You’re thinking, “I’ve got to do something with themes, but what?” Is that accurate at all?
Well, no — it’s interesting, but when I first heard that he had died, like a lot of people, I didn’t think it was true. I got an e-mail from a friend, and I assumed it was a prank. Spending time with David, what you have a sense of is just how mentally healthy he was. If you had asked me in the summer of 2008 to name the most healthy, mentally, American writer, I would have without any hesitation, said David Wallace. He just seemed like he’d gone through something when he was younger, but he seemed healed. He seemed like someone who had a wise, funny, sharp way of looking at life, which would tend to make you live longer, not less long. I was shocked. My first response was just tremendous surprise. More…
The Ninth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities will be held at the Universidad de Granada, Campus La Cartuja, Granada, Spain from 8-11 June 2011.
Thank you to all of those who contributed to the 2010 Humanities Conference, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. The conference brought together delegates from many backgrounds and discipline areas, continuing the conference’s commitment to inclusive dialogue.
Both delegates who attended the conference and virtual delegates may upload their presentations and videos to the Humanities Conference YouTube channel. (Information on uploading your presentation available here.) You may also be a part of our Common Ground YouTube community by joining the conference group and becoming a subscriber (click on the yellow “subscribe” button in the top left corner of the screen).
Additionally, please join our online conversation by subscribing to our monthly email newsletter and subscribing to our Facebook, RSS, or Twitter feeds at http://thehumanities.com.
It is no doubt that the 2011 Humanities Conference will continue on the momentum and successes of this year’s conference, and we are pleased to be hosting the conference in Granada at the Universidad de Granada. Please continue to check the conference webpage, newsletter and blog for further information and conference announcements at http://thehumanities.com/.
From artdaily.org…
It seems almost Kafkaesque: Ten safety deposit boxes of never-published writings by Franz Kafka, their exact contents unknown, are trapped in courts and bureaucracy, much like one of the nightmarish visions created by the author himself.
The papers, retrieved from bank vaults where they have sat untouched and unread for decades, could shed new light on one of literature’s darkest figures.
In the past week, the pages have been pulled from safety deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich, Switzerland, on the order of an Israeli court over the objections of two elderly women who claim to have inherited them from their mother.
“Kafka could easily have written a story like this, where you try to do something and it all goes wrong and everything remains unresolved,” said Sara Loeb, a Tel Aviv-based author of two books about the writer. “It’s really a case of life imitating art.”
Literary experts in both cities are sifting through the boxes, and the contents are expected to be of priceless literary and monetary value. What exactly is there remains unknown, but the papers include handwritten manuscripts, letters and various literary works by the famed Jewish writer, said Meir Heller, an attorney for the Israeli National Library, which also claims ownership of the trove.
Loeb says the cache could include endings to some of Kafka’s major works, many of which remained unfinished in his lifetime.
“We could find out about his methods, his style, how his art was created, how he built a text,” she said. More…
From The Times Higher Education…
Never invite a zombie to meet the vicar. They are simply an embarrassment, shuffling around in a most unpleasant manner, mumbling when spoken to and with the disconcerting habit of having bits fall off into the cucumber sandwiches.
If you must invite one of the not-quite-deceased to take tea with a member of the clergy, let it be a vampire - always a much safer bet. Yes, I know they used to have a disturbing habit of arriving as a bat and feasting on the nearest jugular, but they’ve moved with the times. Since their makeover courtesy of Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer, they are as tame as pussycats and will sip their Earl Grey with the best of them. Just remember, vampires are the undead, but zombies are the living dead - an important little point of etiquette. There’s always the werewolf option, but there’s still the problem of the full moon and pet insurance. Just don’t invite a zombie.
Now that vampires are girlie and romantic, only a zombie will do for all those ghoulish thrills. Michael Jackson danced with them as long ago as 1983 and they didn’t do his career any harm. At the Grimm Up North! horror film festival held in Manchester last year, dozens of enthusiasts wearing torn clothes, green make-up and fake-bloodstained faces moaned and stumbled their way to the box office to get their horror kicks. More…
www.Humanities-Conference.com
2011 Humanities Conference
Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain
8-11 June 2011
Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins by submitting a paper proposal. More information on proposals, presentation types, and other options available here. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. 2011 Humanities Conference registration options.
Themes
From Benjamin Kunkel at n+1 magazine…
This essay is forthcoming in The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. Soft Skull. March 2011.
For half a millennium, across continents and civilizations, the human readership did almost nothing but grow and consolidate itself. Constantly more people in more and more places could read, and could read more books more cheaply, with increasing ease. And not only were they able to do this, but they chose to. It would be astonishing to learn, if some retrospective survey could be carried out, that hours per head spent reading didn’t increase across all capitalist or otherwise modernizing countries (most Communist regimes having been energetic promoters of literacy) until at least the middle of the past century.
A few years ago, the French thinker Régis Debray published a brilliant and suggestive essay placing the rise and decline of socialist movements within this frame of ever-greater literacy. The question of socialism can be bracketed for now. More relevant, for the future of reading in general and novel-reading in particular, is Debray’s periodization scheme, in which an immemorial logosphere—the spoken-word realm of the great religions, whose holy texts had been pronounced by God, transcribed and commented on by a small caste of literate men, and received as gospel by an unlettered general population—was succeeded, starting in 1464, with the invention of Gutenberg’s press, by a spreading graphosphere, in which an oral relationship to words was supplemented, for mounting numbers of ordinary people, by a literate relationship to them. The demi-millenium of the graphosphere lasted, on Debray’s account, until 1968, dawn of the videosphere. More…
From Alan Kirby at The Times Higher Education…
Postmodernism is dead. Wail and rend your clothes. Postmodernism is dead. The tyrant is vanquished!
Can the rumours be true? Can postmodernism, the darling of the humanities for a quarter of a century, really have departed this world?
Who says postmodernism is dead? Jean-Michel Rabaté, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, for one. For him, the term is “now almost completely discarded”.
Scholars who a generation or so ago built their careers on explaining the meaning of postmodernism now tell us the game is over. Linda Hutcheon, the Canadian literary critic, whose 1988 book A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction became a standard text, now calls it “a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past … Let’s just say: it’s over.” The Egyptian-born critic Ihab Hassan, who pioneered the study of postmodern culture in the 1970s, explored similar territory in a recent paper, “Beyond postmodernism: toward an aesthetic of trust”. And the American architectural theorist Charles Jencks, whose 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture helped popularise the term, now believes that postmodernism came to an end around the turn of the millennium. In fact, as the American literary critic Andrew Hoberek says, “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical commonplace”. They are everywhere … but are they true? More…
From CliveJames.com…
In the majesty of his years and accomplishments, Les Murray, sole author of the several increasingly massive editions of his New Collected Poems – one of the great books of the modern world – is in the position of a monarch who, having successfully constructed Versailles all on his own, is now pottering in the grounds building sheds. Six years ago The Biplane Houses was such a shed, and very prettily done. Now Taller When Prone is another. Perhaps I would not have had the idea of an enormous building and its satellite bâtiments if the first poem in the new book had not been about the Taj Mahal. The poem, called “From a Tourist Journal” starts like this.
In a precinct of liver stone, high
On its dais, the Taj seems bloc hail.
Immediately he’s got you in. He has always been able to do that. The way he can register, in words nobody else would quite choose, a perception nobody else could quite have, is at the centre of his art, ensuring almost infallibly that a poem will work like a lucky charm for as long as he pours in the images. A Taj made of hail: you and I might say that we would have seen that to be true eventually, and we might even argue learnedly that the word “Mahal” phonically suggested the word “hail” (points for an essay there), but the daunting truth is that he doesn’t just think that way, he sees that way. More…
From James Longenbach at The Nation…
What makes a human being make a poem? Why does the language we employ every day—language suited equally as well to thank-you notes or parking tickets—ask to be liberated from its more workaday chores, its rhythmic vitality threatening to overpower its capacity for plain sense? Why do readers enjoy the feeling of being overpowered? We don’t reread great novels or poems because we can’t remember the story; we reread because we want to feel our familiar world becoming strange again.
A friend of your brother sends you a gift, a painting of Indian Pipes, which is your favorite flower. You write a thank-you note: “I know not how to thank you.” Because your brother’s wife is your closest friend, you have refused to meet the bearer of the gift: you know, as most people do not, that your brother’s friend is in fact his mistress. You know this because their assignations have taken place in your own house, in the dining room, on a black horse-hair sofa in front of the fire. The assignations have been facilitated by your sister, with whom you share the house your grandfather built. Your brother, his wife and their three children live next door in a house your father built for them. More…
By H. ARAM VEESER at Barnes and Noble Review…
It can be difficult to put all the pieces of Edward Said together, even now, seven years after his death. He was large, he contained multitudes: both Palestinian and American; both a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University and a music critic for The Nation; both a president of the Modern Language Association and a prominent spokesman for the Palestinian National Council. Said was among the first literary scholars in the United States to champion the new ideas coming out of European debates about language and literature, and his 1978 book Orientalism made him one of the founders of postcolonial studies. But he was also scathing about how academic cultural theory tended to turn into its own playground—a substitute for engagement with the world. He was an ardent critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East, but also of the Palestinian Liberation Organization when it disappointed him. He enjoyed a certain reputation as a polemicist; and enjoy it he certainly did. I suppose that is how he is most often remembered now. More…
From Benjamin Kunkel from n+1…
The death of José Saramago at 87 brings to an end the career not only of arguably the greatest novelist of the last quarter century, but of a great political novelist. It was often noted that Saramago joined the Portuguese Communist party in 1968 and never resigned his membership, but most critics didn’t know how to square Saramago’s Marxism with his fiction. His politics, however, suffuse most of his novels. Even the ostensibly unpolitical Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, from 1986, amounted to a friendly quarrel with Saramago’s beloved Fernando Pessoa over the attractions of the latter’s quietism; the beauty, the consolation, and the mad loneliness of Pessoa’s profoundly ingrown personality, or personalities, acquired new and special definition against the background of Salazar’s emerging dictatorship. As for the premise of Death With Interruptions, from 2005, according to which the people of a nameless country simply stop dying as of one New Year’s Eve, this was not a mere magic-realist conceit but the framework for a meditation on the gray capitalism of aging European societies. The Cave, from 2001, despite an epigraph from The Republic, was a novel as much about reification in the Marxist as in the Platonic sense. More…
From Jeremy Adler at The Sunday Times…
Few writers did more to propagate the idea of a singular genius than the young Goethe, yet few can have done more than he to cultivate their relationships to others. As the studies by Rüdiger Safranski and Gustav Seibt remind us, Goethe’s interest in other people often entailed a highly conscious, indeed sometimes stylized, pose that helped him both to place himself in the world and to perfect his art. Whether dealing with writers, scholars, scientists or men of affairs, Goethe knew how to achieve the maximum mutual benefit. That he was so often able to form a productive rapport with the leading figures of his day, notably with Schiller, his only competitor as a writer, and even with the Emperor Napoleon, says much about Goethe’s culture – a self-culture or Bildung which he promulgated in his writing. Intriguingly, both Schiller and Napoleon sought Goethe out, flattered him, and won him over by literary-critical discourse. Anyone who today doubts the value of criticism could do worse than examine these instances. Goethe himself did much to foreground them. He consolidated the public image of the friendship with Schiller by publishing the Goethe–Schiller correspondence, and recorded the meeting with Napoleon in a brief sketch, as in some suggestive references to the man he liked to call “my emperor”. More…
From Geoff Dyer at The Guardian…
That the conflict in Afghanistan wasn’t an active issue in the election suggests that it is in danger of being regarded as a condition to be endured rather than a problem to be solved – much as the war in Iraq became before British troops withdrew. In their different ways, two new books – David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers (Atlantic) and Sebastian Junger’s War (Fourth Estate) – offer perilous insights into the nature of that condition. The Good Soldiers is the result of eight months spent with the US 2-16 Infantry Battalion in Baghdad, part of “the surge” confidently announced by President Bush in January 2007. War is an account of Junger’s time embedded with a platoon of American soldiers at “the tip of the spear” in the lethal Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.
Writers are not obliged to deal with current events, but it happens that the big story of our times – the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – is being told in some of the greatest books of our time. These books do not, however, take the shape and form often expected: the novel. So Finkel and Junger have their work cut out if their contributions are to squeeze on to a shelf of first-rate books that already includes Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars; Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower; George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate; Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City; and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War. More…
From Eurozine…
Analytic philosophy has a complex history of more than one hundred years and this movement is so variegated that it can hardly be characterized by a single feature. Most of those who have tried to do so either were not aware of its diversity or considered only some part of its history. For example, it is sometimes believed that analytic philosophy is committed to a thoroughly anti-metaphysical stance. Such a belief may be rooted in some of the famous pronouncements of the logical empiricists, in the philosophical method put forward by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, or in the fact that some of the works of early analytic philosophy due to Russell and Moore – two of the founding fathers of the movement – have usually been interpreted as reactions against Bradley’s metaphysics and other versions of the British idealism of the time. Other facts, however, which support a completely different view, should not be overlooked. For one thing, Russell’s theory of the proposition and his logical atomism, as well as his philosophy of logic, clearly had metaphysical implications. For another, the logical empiricists’ anti-metaphysical crusade, which had been forceful in the twenties and the thirties, began to run out of steam in the sixties. At that time, other prominent figures of analytic philosophy were much less prone to reject any form of metaphysics as fundamentally unclear or unscientific: Quine’s famous criterion of ontological commitment had already been formulated in a paper which appeared in the Review of Metaphysics, Strawson had published his Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, and Kripke’s semantics for modal logic would soon arouse a wave of metaphysical thinking about the existence of possible worlds. Today, metaphysics is a well established and respected important part of analytic philosophy – indeed, one of its main divisions – although the style of the authors who take part in it is, to be sure, not really akin to the one Hegel or Bergson used in their writings. More…
Living it is writing it is living it: Colin Marshall talks to Creative Nonfiction editor Lee Gutkind
An interview at 3quarksdaily…
Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the premiere journal of the eponymous genre of writing that combines the literary techniques of fiction with the reality of life itself. With its spring 2010 issue, it’s undergone a radical revision in look, feel and sensibility, shifting from academic journal to wider-interest magazine. He’s also the author of many books that fall under the creative nonfiction heading, exploring subjects like baseball, transplant surgeries and robotics. In Vanity Fair, James Wolcott dubbed Gutkind the “godfather” of creative nonfiction. His latest, the father-son memoir Truckin’ with Sam: A Father and Son, The Mick and The Dyl, Rockin’ and Rollin’, On the Road, comes out this summer.
From Montclair State University…
Artists and those who love the arts have tried to gain more meaning and insight by taking a critical look at what they have viewed or heard. Oftentimes, we challenge how we are affected emotionally and psychologically through the performances or artwork we experienced, seeking to process any messages that playwrights, visual artists, musicians or choreographers may be sending.
In the world of theatre, dramaturgy can be described as the art of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on stage. Applied in a sociological perspective, the idea of dramaturgy (coined in modern times by Erving Goffman in homage to G.E. Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy of 1767) contends that human actions are dependent upon time, place, and audience. As Shakespeare put it so eloquently, the world is indeed a stage.
In theatre, dramaturgy is a significant component in the construction and deconstruction of dramatic work while taking a critical look at how everything fits together. There has been no formal equivalent in the world of dance, however — until now. More…
(Image: Lois Greenfield)
From Ahmad Saidullah at 3quarksdaily…
Sylvia Beach was an independent bookseller, a publisher, a literary agent and promoter. Noel Riley Fitch dubbed her “the midwife of literary modernism.” She opened Shakespeare and Company, “a little American bookshop on the Left Bank,” in a disused laundry on rue Dupuytren in 1919 on her third trip to Paris. Drawn by the cheap franc like other expats at the end of World War I, she chose the City of Lights over New York and London.
She was also drawn to Adrienne Monnier, owner of a literary bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres in the Odéon quarter. In 1921, she moved Shakespeare and Company to 12 rue de l’Odéon, a few doors down from Adrienne’s shop. They would share their personal and professional lives until Adrienne’s death from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1955. More…
Jesse Tangen-Mills for Guernica…
When Eva Illouz says passion depends upon scarcity, she does so with the best of intentions. Recently named one of the most important thinkers of the future by German newspaper Die Zeit, Illouz could very well be the twenty-first century’s next great public intellectual. And how did she become internationally popular? Instinct. In trying to get at what most irks her, she’s analyzed everything from love’s leap into leisure, to Freud’s popularity in the American workplace, to psychobabble as a new lingua franca. Historian? Philosopher? For lack of a better term, Illouz is a cultural theorist. Unlike other theorists, however, her ideas are more than just complex complaining; they are surprising and poignant, perhaps because all of her investigations come from the heart. Things get to her, or as she told me, they “trouble” her.
Take for example her reversal of the most basic Marxist precept. Any sixteen-year-old with a Che t-shirt will tell you: capitalism makes us robots. And yet, it doesn’t, Illouz thought. In fact, it does just the opposite. Our hypermodern lives are hyperemotional. It was then that Illouz began to trace back our obsession with feeling, which, according to her, began in the workplace, where surprisingly, Freud was used to better workers’ effectiveness. Soon, the early psychologist’s ideas spread to the private sections of our daily life, to the extent that now we can’t describe our lives without psychotherapy, as Illouz points out in her most recent book, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. To explain our actions we have to hearken back to childhood memories and recognize emotional needs. She sees Howard Gardner’s concept of “emotional intelligence” as an extension of this psychological trend. What for Gardner is an aptitude for person-to-person response, Illouz sees the new calculating currency of advanced “emotional capitalism.” More…
The draft program for the 8th International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities, 29 June-2 July at UCLA is now available — 2010 Draft Program. Locate your session, search for other conference sessions and start planning your schedule for the conference.
Be sure to re-visit for updates, and please note that the final, official program will be provided in printed format at the conference.
From Christina Masters at Eurozine…
Increasing military interest in the body cancels the transgressive potential of the cyborg. Where humans become the weakest link in contemporary warfare, the cyborg represents a desire for total masculinist control and domination. Machines, not human bodies, are now the subjects of the text.
Feminisms, technology and the military
In “Fact and Fantasy: The Body of Desire in the Age of Posthumanism”, Renée C. Hoogland (2002: 214) argues that “in the increasingly technologized age of posthumanism, bodily matters are, quite simply, too substantial to be left to the ‘empirically’ inclined minds of natural scientists”, and therefore calls on cultural theorists to take up the weighty issue of bodily matters. Recent developments indicate, however, that bodily matters are more and more coming under the ambit of the “strategic” and “security” inclined minds populating military institutions and government administrative offices, in ways perhaps far more troubling and disturbing in all of its potential and real implications. In the post-9/11 context of the war on/of terror, one can scarcely overemphasize the dangerous possibilities signalled in this shift. Dangerous, in that bodily matters are being taken up by institutions primarily concerned with the defence and security of the nation-state in an increasingly biopolitical architecture of power. More…
Image: Flickr/Daquella manera
The great American writer left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death, which is now
From Guy Adams at The Independent…
Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain’s dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.
The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.
That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist. More…
Geoffrey Wall’s Literary Review of A Winter on the Nile: Florence Nightingale, Gustave Flaubert and the Temptations of Egypt by Anthony Sattin…
The best biographies, like some of the best novels, are packed with subjunctives. They are alive with a persistent, muted sense of what might have been.
The lives of educated, imaginative, middle-class, mid-nineteenth century women were often tragically packed with subjunctives. Excluded from the public sphere, these women were further constrained by a scarcely figurative matrimonial corset, that patriarchal contraption so lovingly tightened of late. Subject to such chronic restriction, a young woman might take refuge in illness and romantic fiction or, more audaciously, adultery and suicide. Emma Bovary, that small-town extremist, exhausts both possibilities. For those more fortunate than her, there might be a carefully chaperoned excursion to somewhere far away - to Egypt, for example.
Anthony Sattin’s A Winter on the Nile contains the story of one such exceptional nineteenth-century journey. The book is one part travel writing, one part cultural history, and one part biography. It’s a delicious mix, skilfully blended. More…
From sightandsign.com…
The secret transcripts of Heidegger’s notorious seminar “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State” have been published for the first time. By Albert Kissler
The bitter word stands in the room. It casts huge shadows over his work. Was Martin Heidegger a “Nazi philosopher”? Did Heidegger, as his student the philosopher Ernesto Grassi emphasised in 1988, derive “justification from his theoretical principles for an anti-Semitic and National Socialist position”? The case against the dark thinker is made with recourse to passages from his “Being and Time” as well as an assortment of statements, letters and reports and, above all, the Freiburg rectoral address and a seminar from the winter semester of 1933/34.
This seminar was declared to contain decisive evidence for “the total identification of Heidegger’s teachings with the principles of Hitlerism”. This was how Emmanuel Faye expressed it in his book “Heidegger. The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy”, which was published last year in English and German translations. Faye was building on the 1987 book “Heidegger and Nazism” by the Chilean historian Victor Farias, who turned 70 last week. More…
By Anthony Shadid at The New York Times…
Report No. 25, dated April 4 and written by Col. Qais Hussein, was clinical, the anonymous survey of an explosion in a city where explosions are ordinary.
“Material damage: significant,” it declared of the car bomb that was detonated last month near the Egyptian Embassy, killing 17 people. “The burning of 10 cars + the burning of a house, which was in front of the embassy, with moderate damage to 10 surrounding houses.”
Colonel Hussein’s report didn’t mention the hundreds of books, from plays of Chekhov to novels of the writer Ghassan Kanafani, stored in bags, boxes and a stairwell. It didn’t speak of the paintings there of Shaker Hassan, one of ’s greatest, or the sculptures of his compatriot, Mohammed Ghani Hikmat. There was no note of the stone brought from an exile’s birthplace in Bethlehem that helped build the house as a cosmopolitan refuge bridging West and East. More…
Michael Dummett’s The Nature of Philosophy…
1: Philosophy as an Academic Subject
Practically every university throughout the world deems it as essential to have a philosophy department as to have a history department or a chemistry department. This is certainly a very lucky thing for philosophers. Historians can teach in schools and advise on television programs and films; the minority gifted with the ability to write popular books can subsist on their incomes as authors. Chemists can work for industry; if they are lucky, they may even be paid by their companies to do research. By contrast, only in a few countries is philosophy taught as a subject in the schools; philosophy books will never become best-sellers; no commercial enterprise will pay for original work in this field. Until recently, professional philosophers would have been unemployable had it not been for the universities. Some who specialize in ethics have obtained positions advising on bioethics, that is, on moral problems arising out of or within the practice of medicine; but of course this is an application of only one specialized branch of the subject. In the modern world, scarcely anyone can live without being employed or profitably self-employed. Philosophers not engaged in applied ethics must count themselves extremely fortunate that the state, which funds many of the universities, is willing to pay that they may devote themselves to the pursuit of their subject. More…
By Lorna Bradbury at the Telegraph…
‘Something is missing in our culture,” Ian McEwan proclaims. “We can’t quite celebrate the scientific literary tradition.” And then a little later: “We overvalue the arts in relation to the sciences.”
McEwan is taking questions at the end of a lecture he has given to the Royal Society of Literature on Darwin and Einstein and the ways in which notions of “originality” might relate to the sciences compared with the arts.
“I want to try and usefully blur the distinctions between the two realms,” McEwan tells me the next morning. “On the one hand there is a scientific tradition. Scientists do stand on the shoulders of giants, just as do writers. Conversely, in the arts we do make discoveries. We do refine our tools. So I am arguing with, or at least playing with, the idea that art never improves.” More…
From the Ibishblog…
Paul Berman’s important and frequently brilliant, but also seriously flawed, new book “The Flight of the Intellectuals” (Melville House, 2010) is an old-fashioned polemic that takes aim at two main targets. Berman’s main subject, judging from the title and certainly the conclusion of the book, are his fellow liberal intellectuals Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, who he accuses of a witches’ brew of offenses involving white liberal guilt and displaced racism, abandoning Enlightenment values and craven cowardice in the face of Islamist bullying, and who he sees as emblematic of a widespread rot in the Western liberal intelligentsia. But to get to them, he has to go through Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim academic and activist who also happens to be the grandson of the founder of the original Muslim Brotherhood party in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna, and the son of his second in command, Said Ramadan. So actually, the bulk of the book dwells on not only Ramadan but also al-Banna and, in great detail, his ally Amin al-Husseini, the one-time “grand mufti” of Jerusalem. More…
An opinion piece from Simon Critchley at The New York Times…
There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?
As Alfred North Whitehead said, philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Let me risk adding a footnote by looking at Plato’s provocative definition of the philosopher that appears in the middle of his dialogue, “Theaetetus,” in a passage that some scholars consider a “digression.” But far from being a footnote to a digression, I think this moment in Plato tells us something hugely important about what a philosopher is and what philosophy does. More…
Colin Marshall talks to David Shields, author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
From 3quarksdaily.com…
David Shields is a professor of English at the University of Washington and author of fiction, nonfiction and various hybrids thereof about sports, autobiography, celebrity and death. His new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, uses collage writing to challenge preconceived ideas about form and genre in art, especially as they pertain to literature. Shields advocates disregarding these hardened constraints, a move which will allow art to use more of and become more like life itself. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas.
By Adam Kirsch at The New York Times…
It may seem surprising that so many books continue to be written debating ’s Nazi affiliations, since the fact that Heidegger was a Nazi has never been in dispute. How could it be, when the great philosopher took office as rector of Freiburg University in April 1933 specifically in order to carry out the Gleichschaltung, or “bringing into line,” of the school with ’s new party-state? Didn’t he tell the student body, in a speech that November, that “the Führer and he alone is the present and future German reality and its law”? After the war, didn’t he go out of his way to minimize Nazi crimes, even describing the Holocaust, in one notorious essay, as just another manifestation of modern technology, like mechanized agriculture?
Yet by the time of his 80th birthday, in 1969, Heidegger had largely succeeded in detaching his work and reputation from his Nazism. The seal was set on his absolution by Hannah Arendt, in a birthday address broadcast on West German radio. Heidegger’s Nazism, she explained, was an “escapade,” a mistake, which happened only because the thinker naïvely “succumbed to the temptation . . . to ‘intervene’ in the world of human affairs.” More…
From Sam Harris at The Huffington Post…
Over the past couple of months, I seem to have conducted a public experiment in the manufacture of philosophical and scientific ideas. In February, I spoke at the 2010 TED conference, where I briefly argued that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science. Normally, when one speaks at a conference the resulting feedback amounts to a few conversations in the lobby during a coffee break. I had these conversations at TED, of course, and they were useful. As luck would have it, however, my talk was broadcast on the internet just as I was finishing a book on the relationship between science and human values, and this produced a blizzard of criticism at a moment when criticism could actually do me some good. I made a few efforts to direct and focus this feedback, and the result has been that for the last few weeks I have had literally thousands of people commenting upon my work, more or less in real time. I can’t say that the experience has been entirely pleasant, but there is no question that it has been useful. More…
A review from Benjamin Kunkel at London Review of Books…
Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard to dispute. Part of the tribute has been exacted by his majestic style, one distinctive feature of which is the way that the convoy of long sentences freighted and balanced with subordinate clauses will dock here and there to unload a pithy slogan. ‘Always historicise!’ is one of these, and Jameson has also insisted, under the banner of ‘One cannot not periodise,’ on the related necessity (as well as the semi-arbitrariness) of dividing history into periods. With that in mind, it’s tempting to propose a period, coincident with Jameson’s career as the main theorist of postmodernism, stretching from about 1983 (when Thatcher, having won a war, and Reagan, having survived a recession, consolidated their popularity) to 2008 (when the neoliberal programme launched by Reagan and Thatcher was set back by the worst economic crisis since the Depression). During this period of neoliberal ascendancy – an era of deregulation, financialisation, industrial decline, demoralisation of the working class, the collapse of Communism and so on – it often seemed easier to spot the contradictions of Marxism than the more famous contradictions of capitalism, and no figure seemed to embody more than Fredric Jameson the peculiar condition of an economic theory that had turned out to flourish above all as a mode of cultural analysis, a mass movement that had become the province of an academic ‘elite’, and an intellectual tradition that had arrived at some sort of culmination right at the point of apparent extinction. More…
In 1905 modernism and fantasy met in the jungles of colonial Ceylon
From The Believer…
Before he became the husband of Adeline Virginia Stephen—later a novelist of some considerable reputation—Leonard Woolf was a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. At Cambridge, Woolf had been a member of the Apostles, the exclusive secret society that also included John Maynard Keynes and the philosopher G. E. Moore. But he didn’t graduate from Cambridge with any particular distinction, and unlike his peers he didn’t have very much money: he was one of nine children, and his father, a Queen’s Counsel, had died when he was eleven, of tuberculosis and workaholism. Woolf couldn’t afford to read for the bar himself—the registration fee alone was forty pounds—and he wasn’t especially confident that, as a Jew and an atheist, he was cut out for school teaching, which would have been the other conventional option. So in 1904 he took the British civil service examination. He placed sixty-ninth out of ninety-nine. More…
From n+1…
Alexander Blok was enchanted by the Bolshevik Revolution. The leading poet of the pre-revolutionary symbolist school, Blok and his pale handsome face had been freighted in the years before 1917 with all the hopes and dreams of the Russian intelligentsia. In early 1918, when that intelligentsia was still making fun of the crudeness, the foolishness, the presumption of the Bolsheviks—the way contemporary intellectuals once made fun of Wikipedia—Blok published an essay urging them to cut it out. “Listen to the Revolution,” he counseled, “with your bodies, your hearts, your minds.”
…
Ninety years later, we are living through a different revolution. Like the Russian one, it will seem in retrospect—may already seem—like a smooth inexorable process, but was in fact a series of discrete advances: First, the creation of easy-to-use web interfaces (the first recognizable browser, Mosaic, launched in 1993) and blogging platforms (Moveable Type, 1999), which enabled non-specialists to navigate and publish on the web. Second, the improvement of search technology, so that search spam could be weeded out and relevant results delivered (the most radical advance in this field was made by a Stanford graduate student named Larry Page in 1998; his PageRank algorithm would also prove the eventual financial salvation of the internet, via search-based advertising). More…
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From The Guardian:
Animal Farm, as its author later wrote, “was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole”. And indeed, its pages contain a synthesis of many of the themes that we have come to think of as “Orwellian”. Among these are a hatred of tyranny, a love for animals and the English countryside, and a deep admiration for the satirical fables of Jonathan Swift. To this one might add Orwell’s keen desire to see things from the viewpoint of childhood and innocence: he had long wished for fatherhood and, fearing that he was sterile, had adopted a small boy not long before the death of his first wife. The partly ironic subtitle of the novel is “A Fairy Story”, and Orwell was pleased when he heard from friends such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Sir Herbert Read that their own offspring had enjoyed reading the book. More…
By Patricia Cohen at The New York Times…
To illustrate what a growing number of literary scholars consider the most exciting area of new research, Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, refers to an episode from the TV series “Friends.”
(Follow closely now; this is about the science of English.) Phoebe and Rachel plot to play a joke on Monica and Chandler after they learn the two are secretly dating. The couple discover the prank and try to turn the tables, but Phoebe realizes this turnabout and once again tries to outwit them.
As Phoebe tells Rachel, “They don’t know that we know they know we know.”
This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. More…
Zizek on Love and everything in between…
From Inside Higher Ed…
Anthropology may loosely be defined as the study of human culture — but throughout the discipline’s history, some cultures have been deemed more worthy of study than others. Who determines which cultures merit the most study — and how, and why?
In a new book, Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (Duke University Press), Lee Baker explores how anthropological study of American Indians helped to shape academic and popular ideas about race and culture — and how those same concepts informed the discipline’s very different treatment of African American culture in the 20th century. More…
Cypher wheels and snobbery: the strange story of how Shakespeare became separated from his works
From Charles Nicholl, The Times Literary Supplement…
What, aside from international fame, did Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Henry James, Sigmund Freud, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles have in common? The answer is that they all believed that the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare were really written by someone else. The first three belong to the classic “Baconian” era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the claims of Sir Francis Bacon’s authorship were uppermost; and were argued most vociferously in America. Freud and Welles were more modern “Oxfordians”, believing the true author to be Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as first proposed by J. Thomas Looney in 1920. Chaplin was a floating voter, a generic “anti-Stratfordian”. He did not know who wrote the plays, he explained in his 1964 autobiography, “but I can hardly think it was the boy from Stratford. Whoever wrote them had an aristocratic attitude”. More…
From n+1 magazine…
Walter Benjamin, or rather, the now-beloved figura of Benjamin—shuffling, myopic, mustachioed, fat, unhealthy, small round glasses glinting like flashlights—was largely unattractive in his own lifetime. Introducing Benjamin, a precis of his life and work in comic-book form, spends an inordinate amount of time demonstrating that Benjamin had no positive libido—and that, in fact, women just could not under any circumstances find him attractive. How strange is it now, then, to read in the Guardian that “as a teenager,” the novelist Nicole Krauss “had a crush on the German philosopher.” How odd to reflect upon the growth and consolidation of a veritable Benjamin industry in the sixty-five years since his death, an industry that extends well beyond the academy, to art-pop songs like Laurie Anderson’s “The Dream Before (For Walter Benjamin),” and Jay Parini’s embarrassingly unreadable “novel of ideas” Benjamin’s Crossing. A movie must surely be on the way: can I start by suggesting Tim Robbins as Benjamin? More…
From Elif Batuman at Salon.com…
Every March, the Believer magazine publishes its annual Film Issue. This year’s number features — among other things — the complete budget, line by line, of a $15,000 feature film; Brian T. Edwards on watching “Shrek” in Tehran; specious life advice from comedian Julie Klausner; and a DVD of rare, beautiful and funny short films from the Yugoslavian Black Wave. In the excerpt below, Elif Batuman (whose wonderful new book, “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them,” was recently published by FSG) unearths seven never-produced screenplays penned by famous intellectuals. More…
From Marco Roth at n+1 magazine…
Jacques Derrida died last weekend. Polite French journalese will refer to “sa disparition,” his disappearance. Now, if I were a “deconstructionist,” this would be the moment to reflect on the words disappearance and appearance. We only say someone has disappeared, we do not speak of his life as an appearance, but yet this is what is implied by someone’s disappearance. He was, at one point, present, here, appearing, now he has disappeared. But everyday French language only has the negative without the positive. There is not first, in the order of things, something called appearance and then something called disappearance which happens later. There is always the trace of disappearance inside of every appearance, absence within presence. More…
From London Review of Books…
Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard to dispute. Part of the tribute has been exacted by his majestic style, one distinctive feature of which is the way that the convoy of long sentences freighted and balanced with subordinate clauses will dock here and there to unload a pithy slogan. ‘Always historicise!’ is one of these, and Jameson has also insisted, under the banner of ‘One cannot not periodise,’ on the related necessity (as well as the semi-arbitrariness) of dividing history into periods. More…
From Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions…
When I first encountered the work of Péter Esterházy, at the 2008 PEN World Voices festival, all I knew of him was his name. But what a name! The House of Esterházy, like an Eastern European amalgam of the Medicis and the Kennedys, was prominent in Austro-Hungarian culture and politics for centuries, until the upheavals of the 20th Century cost the family almost everything. It’s a cost Esterházy assesses in his magnum opus, Harmonia Caelestis (2000), from which he read that night, in his native tongue. “I don’t speak English,” he said. “You don’t speak Hungarian. This is the problem.” Nonetheless, he sent his audience rushing to the merch tables, where his books promptly sold out. More…
From Haaretz.com…
Philosopher, professor and author Judith Butler arrived in Israel this month, en route to the West Bank, where she was to give a seminar at Bir Zeit University, visit the theater in Jenin, and meet privately with friends and students. A leading light in her field, Butler chose not to visit any academic institutions in Israel itself. In the conversation below, conducted in New York several months ago, Butler talks about gender, the dehumanization of Gazans, and how Jewish values drove her to criticize the actions of the State of Israel. More on this interview…
Stay on-site and book your accommodations for the conference at UCLA. You may book your reservation during registration or through the conference secretariat.
www.Humanities-Conference.com
2010 Humanities Conference
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
29 June-2 July
Plenary Speakers
- Joyce Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
- Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
- Jodie Parys, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater, USA
- David G. Stork, Stanford University, Stanford, USA
- Edward A. Tiryakian, Duke University, Durham, USA
- Tricia Wang, University of California, San Diego, USA
Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins by submitting a paper proposal. More information on proposals, presentation types, and other options available here. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. 2010 Humanities Conference registration options.
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Conference Dinner and Tours
From Marina Warner at The Liberal…
Writers don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them. Even Homer was telling stories that his audience already knew. If some individuals present weren’t acquainted with Odysseus’s wanderings or the Trojan War, and were listening in for the first time (as I was when a child, enthralled by the gods and goddesses in H.A. Guerber’s classic retelling), they were still aware that this was a common inheritance that belonged to everyone. Its single author – if Homer was one at all – acted as a conduit of collective knowledge, picking up the thread and telling it anew.
In an inspired essay on ‘The Translators of The Arabian Nights’, Jorge Luis Borges praises the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures, and points out that the more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become. Borges wasn’t a believer in anything – not even magic – but he couldn’t do without the fantastic and the mythological. He compiled a wonderfully quixotic and useful bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings, to include the fauna of world literature: chimeras and dragons, mermaids and the head-lolling catoblepas whose misfortune is to scorch the earth on which he tries to graze with his pestilential breath. But Borges also included some of his own inventions – The Creatures who Live in Mirrors, for example, a marvelous twist on the idea of the ghostly double. More…
An interview from the series ‘The Books Interview’ at the NewStatesman by Jonathan Derbyshire…
There’s a good deal of nostalgia in your new book, The Task of the Critic, for the “socialist culture” of the Seventies.
What’s wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press. One of Walter Benjamin’s extraordinary achievements, for example, was to make a kind of revolutionary virtue out of a certain concept of looking back, or nostalgia. As a tutor at Oxford during that period, I could see all kinds of energies that simply had no outlet - all kinds of radical impulses that were rather inchoate, but certainly present. So I think nostalgia is justified to some extent.There was at least one outlet for those energies, though: the Marxism seminar you ran at Wadham College, which you describe as a “hostel for battered leftists”. The left took even more of a battering in the intervening 30-odd years, didn’t it?
I think the Gramsci formula about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will gets at something. But I was struck, when I spoke recently at King’s College London, by the extraordinarily diverse number of militant projects and campaigns that were being either conducted or planned. It was like being back in the Seventies, or the late Sixties. For the full interview…
Is true translation impossible?
From the Poetry Foundation: Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch…
ADAM KIRSCH: First of all, let me say congratulations on The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. It’s a moving and impressive book, and I hope you’ll be able to talk a bit about how you edited it—there are so many poets from so many parts of the world, I wondered how you found them all. There are famous poems here—one of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” Celan’s “Deathfugue”—but I think every reader will make a lot of discoveries, too. I particularly liked W.S. Merwin’s translations of the Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz, whose “Life Draws a Tree” is a wonderfully spare defense of art as the third force that balances life and death.
But let me start by asking you about the book’s title, which points to one of my own persistent doubts about poetry in translation. Wouldn’t you agree that there is no such thing as an international poem? A poem can only be written in one language, just as it can only be written by one person at a given moment in history. This is, in fact, one of the great themes of twentieth-century poetry, as your anthology makes very clear—the obligation of the poet to his place and time. As opposed to Symbolist and Modernist poetry, which made art a separate kingdom, most twentieth-century poets reacted to the horrors of the age by insisting, as a matter of moral and aesthetic honor, that they too are casualties of history. This is a central concern of Czeslaw Milosz, whose “Bobo’s Metamorphosis” you include: “In every pocket he carried pencils, pads of paper / Together with crumbs of bread, the accidents of life.” For more…
Op-Ed by Alain Badiou at Infinite Thought….
For almost thirty years, the present, in our country, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that does not offer its youth, especially the youth of the popular classes, any principle to orient existence. What is the precise character of this disorientation? One of its foremost operations consists in always making illegible the previous sequence, that sequence which was well and truly oriented. This operation is characteristic of all reactive, counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve been living through ever since the end of the seventies. We can for example note that the key feature of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals impeded any political understanding. This view of things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to disorient the people, which was considered to be, as it always is, potentially revolutionary.
To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.
In the debate concerning the rationality of the French Revolution during the Third Republic, Clemenceau produced a famous formula: ‘The French Revolution forms a bloc’. This formula is noteworthy because it declares the integral legibility of the process, whatever the tragic vicissitudes of its unfolding may have been. Today, it is clear that it is with reference to communism that the ambient discourse transforms the previous sequence into an opaque pathology. I take it upon myself therefore to say that the communist sequence, including all of its nuances, in power as well as in opposition, which lay claim to the same idea, also forms a bloc. More…
From n+1 magazine:
To read the 1,802 pages of the Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is to be told that, for all their perceived virtue, the institutions of social democracy are a farce. In Larsson’s books, American readers will find the Sweden they expect: the welfare-state comforts, Volvo security, and Ikea practicality for which the country is known. But they will also find a country they didn’t expect. In this Sweden, the country’s well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors are crooked. And the criminals, of course, are crooked, though not always: it’s often the case that criminal acts committed by do-gooders in the name of justice—from petty larceny to massive bank fraud—are the only means by which to overcome the comprehensive failure of the world’s most comprehensive welfare system. More…
From It’s Nice That:
Feminist Press is an independent nonprofit publisher based in New York. Founded in 1970, they have a wide variety of material that ranges from fiction to feminist theory. Promoting freedom of expression and social justice, they now own a great collection of books from around the world and from diverse racial and class backgrounds, as well as a section on African Women’s Writing.
Recommended reading, Waiting, a novel by Goretti Kyomuhendo.
By Daniyal Mueenuddin From The Washington Post…
Because of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Rohinton Mistry, to mention just a few of the most prominent authors, American readers have long been able to enjoy one terrific Indian novel after another. But Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is likely to be the first widely read book by a Pakistani writer. Mueenuddin spent his early childhood in Pakistan, then lived in the United States — he attended Dartmouth and Yale — and has since returned to his father’s homeland, where he and his wife now manage a farm in Khanpur. These connected stories show us what life is like for both the rich and the desperately poor in Mueenuddin’s country, and the result is a kind of miniaturized Pakistani “human comedy.”
In the original Comédie humaine, Balzac had the ingenious notion of tying his various novels together by using recurrent characters. Eugène de Rastignac is the protagonist of Le Père Goriot but is subsequently glimpsed in passing or sometimes just referred to in several other books. In like fashion, Mueenuddin interlaces eight stories, while also linking them to the household of a wealthy and self-satisfied landowner named K.K. Harouni. In “Saleema,” for instance, Harouni’s elderly valet, Rafik, falls into a heartbreaking affair with a young maidservant, and we remember this, with a catch in our throat, when in another story we see him bring in two glasses of whiskey on a silver tray. In “Our Lady of Paris,” we discover that Harouni’s nephew is madly in love with a young American woman named Helen; later on, we discover that he is married — to an American named Sonya. More…
From Richard Eskow at 3quarksdaily.com…
Occasionally an idea will come to mind that’s claimed quickly and eloquently by someone else before you have a chance to execute it. When Michael Jackson died I began dabbling with the subject of Jackson as Transhumanist, but my piece was only half-written when RU Sirius pretty much nailed the topic. Nick Gillespie at Reason found the key lines from Sirius: “Michael Jackson is obviously not an example of transhumanism to be followed. But he is a signpost on the road to post-humanity. I believe the future will study him from that perspective, and in some odd way, it will learn from his many mistakes.”
Well said, and lesson learned: When it comes to the world of ideas, if you snooze you lose. (Unless you enhance your work capabilities with Provigil, of course, in which case you won’t do as much snoozing.) But although the Michael Jackson moment has come and gone, a new event was commemorated this week: the 75th birthday of Elvis Presley. Elvis was the primogenitor, the Omo I of rock and roll culture. He didn’t just “ship a lot of units,” as they used to say in the record biz (back when there was a record biz.) He changed everything.
Elvis was certainly considered different. From his early days on he was an agent of radical transformation in sexuality, culture, and appearance. At nineteen, he and his musicians seemed so unusual to the announcer at the Louisiana Hayride that he was asked, on the air, “You all geared up with your band there?”
“I’m all geared up!” Elvis answered.
But suspicious minds require proof for Elvis as transhumanist. Let’s define transhumanism as a rejection of traditional human biology and its limits, an assertion of the right to remake yourself radically (what Max More called “morphological freedom”), and an embrace of technology as the instrument of both self-expression and self-transformation. More…
Oskari Kuusela, from The Philosopher’s Magazine, on why Wittgenstein rejected theories…
A distinctive feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy is his rejection of philosophical theses and theories. Instead he comprehends philosophy as an activity of clarification. How he understands the contrast between this activity and philosophical theorising, however, is not immediately obvious and constitutes a disputed topic among his readers. Apparently symptomatic of this unclarity is that many of Wittgenstein’s interpreters in fact attribute various philosophical theories to him either explicitly or implicitly, against their own self-understanding. Either way, this constitutes a problem. To attribute theories to Wittgenstein is to characterise his work as inconsistent, as containing a contradiction between his methodological statements about philosophy and his actual philosophical practice. Beyond scholarly concerns, to attribute theories to Wittgenstein is to miss out on the possible benefits of rethinking the nature of philosophy with him. More specifically, he claims to have found a strategy for avoiding dogmatism in philosophy, a problem he sees as intimately connected with philosophical theories. The problem of dogmatism thus understood might also be seen as one central reason why philosophy remains enmeshed in dispute, and doubts persist about its value. More…
From Leland de la Durantaye at Boston Review:
LAST WISHES
In 1965 Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “the bitterness of an interrupted life is nothing compared to the bitterness of an interrupted work: the probability of a continuation of the first beyond the grave seems infinite by comparison with the hopeless incompleteness of the second.” More than any great writer of his century, Nabokov was exacting about the presentation of his words and works, from his painstaking translations to his routine destruction, by fire, of preliminary drafts once his novels were complete. When he died in 1977 Nabokov left behind many things. Among these were a loving family, international fame, and a last request: the destruction, by fire, of the notes for his final work in progress. All expectations to the contrary, these have now been published as The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments.
Less than a year before his death, Nabokov told The New York Times that he was at work on a new novel and that in idle, albeit feverish, moments in the hospital, he read it aloud to “a small dream audience in a walled garden.” “My audience,” he told the Times, “consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long-dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.” This doctor is finer than anything found in the Novel in Fragments, but that does not mean that there are not fine things therein. More…
The literary journal is dead. Long live the literary journal.
“The first function of a literary magazine is to introduce the work of new or little-known writers of talent.” There is an appealing modesty about this brisk declaration, even a kind of impersonality in subordinating editorial ego to the larger good; it seems likely to provoke a murmur of agreement, not least from new or little-known writers. But this is not, of course, the only way in which the function of such publications may be conceived. The editor of one of the many new literary periodicals established in the 1920s announced a no less definite sense of purpose in quite other terms: “I shall make its aim the maintenance of critical standards and the concentration of intelligent critical opinion”. The goals expressed in these two quotations are not necessarily in conflict: editors might, it is true, maintain “critical standards” in a practical way by identifying new literary talent. But the tendency is for the pursuit of these two purposes to result in periodicals of rather different types. One, often thought of as the classic “little magazine”, largely carries new poetry and fiction, mostly by as yet unrecognized writers, often exemplifying a style of writing that is self-consciously, even determinedly, insurgent and unfashionable. The other, committed to upholding the critical or reviewing function, is largely filled with essays and book reviews, taking in the literature of both the past and the present, as well as taking in more than literature; it aspires to shape intelligent opinion and to combat the slackness and puffery of mainstream literary journalism. More…
A piece from TheNational:
For centuries Germans united around the tale of Hermann, a chieftain who rallied his fellow tribesmen to defeat the Roman army. But this founding national myth, cherished by Romantic poets and Nazi ideologues, was banished from memory in the postwar era. As Hermann-mania returns to a wary Germany 2000 years after his victory, Clay Risen considers the search for national identity in a post-national age.
Atop a forested hill a few kilometres outside the sleepy west German town of Detmold stands a 19-metre high statue of Hermann, the Germanic chief whose forces annihilated nearly 20,000 Roman legionnaires at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD. Gazing toward the French border, the copper statue, wearing a jaunty winged helmet, holds an upraised sword, whose blade bears the inscription “German Unity is my strength, and my strength is Germany’s power”. More…
Liesl Schillinger at The New York Times:
In the 1920s, a disaffected Soviet encyclopedia editor named Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky — a man haunted by Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” and by Communist realities — began writing a series of philosophical, allegorical, fantastical short stories. Seven of them appear in “Memories of the Future,” a selection of his fiction that takes its title from the book’s longest entry — the tale of a brusque monomaniac who builds a “timecutter” to eject himself from 1920s Moscow. None of these stories were published in Krzhizhanovsky’s lifetime. This was not because the work had been rejected or because it was, well, a little weird. Krzhizhanovsky, it seems, was too proud, too shy or (more likely) too frightened to show them around — given that he was spinning his dystopic fictions at about the same time that Stalin was collectivizing the Soviet countryside. More…
An essay by Damion Searls from The Quarterly Conversation:
Modest in aim, New Aestheticist art does not want to change the world—to bear witness, deconstruct, problematize. It does not batten onto greater social goals, the kind responsibly fundable with tax dollars. It wants merely to be beautiful.
It differs from the old Aestheticism, “art for art’s sake,” in that it no longer believes in Art as a sake either, as a holy cause. New Aestheticism is art for people’s sakes. It is not antisocial; it aims to please. It is elitist but not discriminatory, for it is open to any and all who care to love it.
MFA programs teach the craft of plot or of poetic epiphany, and a pared-down, smooth style that seems embarrassed of beauty. The dictum to show not tell has led downward to darkness, from, say, Madame Bovary and The Sun Also Rises to a prose that is all shown, that walks on ice in socks: all surface and no depth, like TV at its worst. Quote examples here. But I cannot bring myself to write an ode to dejection.
Nor can writers today draw their aesthetic calling from the visual arts, as Barbara Guest did from Matisse, Frank O’Hara from de Kooning, Rilke from Rodin, . . . Museums have turned away from beauty toward a misdirected populism whose logic Proust refuted 90 years ago already (the people, not the elite, he argues, are the only ones intelligent enough to appreciate so-called-elitist high art; in terms of content, it is plumbers who want to read about princesses, just as much as princesses want to read about plumbers). In truth museumgoers go, when they go, for art, not for pandering and exhibits of billionaires’ speedboats. More…
David Stork, Stanford University, Stanford, USA
www.Humanities-Conference.com
Dr. David G. Stork is Chief Scientist of Ricoh Innovations and Consulting Professor of Statistics at Stanford University. He is a graduate in physics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Maryland at College Park; he also studied art history at Wellesley College and was Artist-in-Residence through the New York State Council of the Arts. More…
From Shilo Brooks at The New Atlantis…
How does the character of the scientist differ from that of the humanist? The past century has seen an acceleration in the “scientization” of the humanities. The roots of this trend, as other contributors to this symposium have noted, are entwined with those of modernity itself. And while the tale of this turn has been told broadly before — the story of entire disciplines adopting the name, the method, and the underlying assumptions of modern science — little has been said of the change in the educators themselves. It is not just the method of inquiry and the substance of instruction that distinguishes these new scientists of man from the philosophical humanists who preceded them. The character of these new scholars is shaped by, and in turn shapes, what and how they learn and think and teach. More…