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…
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.
Stefan Collini from The Times Literary Supplement:
“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…
