April 30, 2008
Natalie Zemon Davis on Michel de Certeau
Natalie Zemon Davis, professor of history emeritus at Princeton and professor of medieval studies at the University of Toronto, has published a long consideration of Michel de Certeau's thought and life in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. She usefully contrasts Certeau with Michel Foucault and Joseph Ratzinger and, though the piece seems truncated at the end, it provides a good general-interest introduction to the French Jesuit scholar who is perhaps better known in the US for his book The Practice of Everyday Life than his writings on religion.
Especially important in the 1960s were the changes instituted by Vatican II. The once-proscribed Henri de Lubac was summoned by Pope John XXIII to have a leading part in the council; Joseph Ratzinger attended the sessions and wrote approvingly of the Church's new openness to the laity and even to "elements of sanctification" outside the Church itself (to quote the phrase from the council's text Lumen gentium). From Paris, Certeau responded more radically. For him the reforms endorsed by the council were a creative "rupture" with the unbending hierarchical patterns of the past. They called for "multiple languages of faith" to express people's experience instead of remote clerical language. In his view, Vatican II should lead the Church to immerse itself fully in all the issues of the modern world and to recognize how much it still had to learn about these issues—about war and violence, about birth control, and what went on in the city streets and in the press and television.
And:
Jesus Christ, Certeau argued, is the central figure, the Other, present but also absent; his coming and death founded Christianity, but the signifying event is not the crucifixion but the empty tomb; "the 'follow me' [of Jesus] comes from a voice which has been effaced, forever irrecoverable." Still the Christian wants to believe, Certeau said; wants to take the risk and follows a way to Christ; but the character of the Christian life must be understood according to historical circumstances. In the secularized world of the late twentieth century, with nonreligious structures dominating everywhere, Certeau argued, Church institutions alone could not be the site for Christian intervention in the world. In fact, Christian belief and practices could no longer be associated with a place, or even with a single social milieu like "the poor," but could be only an uncharted path, a wandering, without power: the person, armed with the "weakness of faith," tries always to make space for others and to open closed systems to difference and plurality. One printed version of his radio debate with Domenach quotes Certeau as exclaiming, "Christianity is something particular in the totality of history.... It cannot speak in the name of the entire universe."
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Visual Interlude: Peter Kayafas
Peter Kayafas, San Francisco, 2007, from an exhibition presented earlier this year at Sasha Wolf Gallery, New York
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Review of David Samuels's Only Love Can Break Your Heart
My review of David Samuels's new essay collection, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, has just been published in the Detroit Metro Times. Here's the opening paragraph:
David Samuels belongs to an increasingly rare species: journalists who can parachute into an unfamiliar corner of America, establish their bearings quickly and extract a compelling narrative at once universally recognizable and resonant with idiosyncratic particularities. Not only is the species endangered; if you follow media trend pieces, so is its habitat. The number of magazines willing to support writers, especially younger writers, who embark on odysseys in which days' or weeks' worth of experiences are chiseled into 10,000 to 15,000 illuminating words seems to decrease monthly. Samuels has benefited from writing for the best of those that remain — Harper's, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine — and his new essay collection, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, is a patchwork composition that yields surprising insights into American existence. It is a testament to the particular pleasures and value of long-format narrative journalism.
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
Rules for Harvard Freshmen, 1741
The blog Boston 1775 has posted Harvard's rules for incoming class of 1741.
In the 1700s, ordinary schooling for Boston boys ran from about age seven to age thirteen or fourteen, if they lasted through the whole course. Therefore, the few boys who went on to college were still truly boys, only in their early teens. Usually they graduated college at eighteen, still years away from their legal majority.
The fact that college students were the age of high-school students now, and away from their families in an nearly all-male environment, helps to explain such traditions as these rules for Harvard’s incoming class in 1741.
1. No Freshman shall wear his hat in the College yard, except it rains, hails, or snows, he be on horseback, or hath both hands full.
2. No Freshman shall pass by his Senior, without pulling his hat off.
3. No Freshman shall be saucy to his Senior, or speak to him with his hat on.
4. No Freshman shall laugh in his Senior’s face.
5. No Freshman shall ask his Senior any impertinent question.
6. No Freshman shall intrude into his Senior’s company.
7. Freshmen are to take notice that a Senior Sophister can take a Freshman from a Sophimore, a Master from a Senior Sophister, and a Fellow from a Master.
8. When a Freshman is sent of an errand, he shall not loiter by the way, but shall make haste, and give a direct answer if asked who he is going for.
To read the final thirteen rules, click here. (Link via Blog 4 History)
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
April 29, 2008
Marilynne Robinson, then and now
The contributors to Reading Room, the New York Times blog dedicated to discussing books in depth, are currently focusing their energies upon Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel Housekeeping. Click here for the moderator's introductory post.
Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Robinson at DePaul University in Chicago. She read two essays, one of which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. I typed up a portion of my notes and e-mailed them to Patrick Kurp, of the blog Anecdotal Evidence, and he excerpted them online in this post:
Underpinning the first paper she delivered was her assertion that nothing is as complex as the human mind, and that various deterministic theories (Freud, economic rationalism, selfish-gene theory, etc.) do harm to this fact. She doesn't understand "why human beings are so persistent in their attack on what is most distinctive about them." She then asserted that "if you do not believe in thought you cannot believe in faith" and, in a swipe at Christopher Hitchens and his ilk, that "those who attack faith devalue thought." Later on in the essay, she praised Calvin's assertion that "an encounter with the other is always an encounter with God," said that she tries to live by that understanding, and stressed that reverence is the proper way of relating to the "shining garment of reality" in which God reveals himself constantly.
Lastly, an excerpt of Robinson's 2007 commencement-day speech at Amherst has been published in the current issue of Harper's. The full text of the speech, titled "Waiting to Be Remembered," is available online at Amherst magazine.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
Peter Singer looks for signs of humanity's moral progress
In a column for Project Syndicate, Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, ponders whether humanity can be said to be making moral progress in the light of the succession of atrocities perpetrated in recent decades. "There is more to the question than extreme cases of moral breakdown. ... In response to the crimes committed during World War II, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sought to establish the principle that everyone is entitled to the same basic rights, irrespective of race, color, sex, language, religion, or other status. So, perhaps we can judge moral progress by asking how well we have done in combating racism and sexism. ... Recent polls by WorldPublicOpinion.org shed some indirect light on this question. ... Overall, it seems likely that these opinions reflect real changes, and thus are signs of moral progress toward a world in which people are not denied rights on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex."
(Via euro|topics)
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
April 28, 2008
David Kolb, Sprawling Places
My review of David Kolb's book Sprawling Places is now online at the New Haven Review. Click here to read it.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
April 27, 2008
Brahms's Double Concerto
Dear classical music lovers: If I'm a great fan of Brahms's Double Concerto in A Minor (Op. 102), in particular the LSO recording featuring Menuhin and Rostropovich, what else might I like? I'm open to all suggestions, preferably sent by e-mail. Thanks in advance.
Posted in Music. Found always via this permanent link.
April 26, 2008
Winslow on Benfey
Today's Chicago Tribune contains the first review I've seen of Christopher Benfey's A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade, a book I've been looking forward to for months (despite its off-putting, laborious subtitle). The reviewer, Art Winslow, states:
Setting his stage, Benfey notes that Todd and Heade, Dickinson and Higginson, Beecher and his novelist sister Stowe, "were fanatical about hummingbirds." They wrote poems and stories, and drew and painted hummingbirds, tamed live ones and collected stuffed ones—in short, represented an "informal cult of hummingbirds" with origins that hewed back to the Civil War. Why the obsession? Here is the branch on which Benfey's book balances:
"Americans during and after the Civil War gradually left behind a static view of existence, a trust in fixed arrangements and hierarchies. In science and in art, in religion and in love, they came to see a new dynamism and movement in their lives, a brave new world of instability and evanescence. This dynamism, in all aspects of life, found perfect expression in the hummingbird."
This is a handy unifying image-theme for a writer offering up cultural interpretation, and for the most part it proves utilitarian in linking the otherwise somewhat disparate parts of Benfey's story.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
April 24, 2008
Marshall Berman on New York in the 1970s
Last autumn, Dissent magazine published an edited version of Marshall Berman's introduction to New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg, an anthology he edited with Brian Berger. Here's an excerpt:
There will be more to say about rap as time goes by. I only want to say one thing now. “The Message” (1982), the first international rap hit, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, has a provocative quatrain that’s in tune with my overall theme. People often miss this quatrain, which seems to drop from the sky: They pushed a girl in front of a train, / Took her to the doctor, sewed her arm on again. / Stabbed a man right through the heart, / Gave him a transplant and a brand new start.
Hegel says that “spirit is a power only by looking the negative in the face and living with it.” “Living with it is the magical power that converts the negative into being.” Well, that’s the message. In New York in the 1970s, this meant that social disintegration and existential desperation could be sources of life and creative renewal. A whole generation of kids from America’s worst neighborhoods broke out of poverty, violence, and ghetto isolation, and became sophisticated New Yorkers with horizons as wide as the world. As the Clash in “London Calling” in 1979 affirmed that “London is drowning, I live by the river,” these kids from the Bronx could tell the world not only that “We come from ruins, but we are not ruined,” but that “We shall overcome.” Their voices became the voice of New York Calling. Their capacity for soul-making in the midst of horror gave the whole city a brand new aura.
New York feels like a very different place today.
The introduction is informal, personal in tone. The book contains over two hundred photographs and essays by Berman, Berger, Edmund Berrigan, Anthony Haden-Guest, Jim Knipfel, Margaret Morton, Tom Robbins, Luc Sante, Robert Sietsema, Brandon Stosuy, John Yau, and others.
Posted in Books. Found always via this permanent link.
"1968: Liberty or Its Illusion"?
In Prospect magazine, a symposium on the legacy of May 1968:
Many 68ers now feel ambivalent about their heritage. Was too much of value discarded? Were the hippies just carriers of a new strain of capitalism? What was the silent majority thinking?
The symposium features contributions from Brian Appleyard, Geoff Dyer, Timothy Garton Ash, Anthony Giddens, Michael Ignatieff, Pico Iyer, PJ O'Rourke, Roger Scruton, Slavoj Zizek, and more than two dozen others.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 22, 2008
Against Argument
Five days ago, Stephen Burt, an associate professor of English at Harvard, published a brief post at the Columbia University Press blog titled "Against Argument." Here's the opening:
The academy thrives on argument, at least in the traditional humanities: arguments get us noticed. Travel guides and scientific discoveries may both sell books, but to get attention within the realms of the arts and the humanities now, one almost has to make an extended argument: to take issue with some dominant view, to explain why what we already knew was wrong, or (especially in literary studies) to demonstrate some big connection between features within some literature, and features of history or (more rarely) philosophy or natural science outside it.
There’s nothing wrong with making extended arguments, of course, and I spend much of my time (at least during the school year) teaching our students how to do just that. Yet our sustained interest in arguments might be making us keep at arm’s length, or under a cloud, the reasons why we care for the arts at all, the smaller-scale features that distinguish works of art from one another, the features which help us explain (if it can be explained—can it?) why we care for this one, not that one.
The post has been noticed widely around the literary blogosphere, and has generated a lengthy and interesting discussion at The Valve. I find that Burt's claim, being rooted in how academics get noticed, is related to the opinions advanced by Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters regarding the "publish or perish dictum" in academia. Quantity and differentiation now seem prerequisites for moving up the tenure-track ladder, yet both can be antithetical to genuine insight into the effects works of art have upon those who experience them.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
New Paris Review: Interview with Leonard Michaels
After dinner last night, I stopped by my favorite newsstand north of Chicago to purchase the new issue of Granta (see my Sunday evening post below). It hadn't arrived yet, however, so instead I bought the spring issue of the Paris Review. The issue contains a "lost" interview with Leonard Michaels, conducted in 1986 and published now for the first time. The magazine's website has a brief excerpt from the beginning of the discussion. I'll pick up where that passage leaves off:
Interviewer: In The Men's Club, did you find it difficult to get people out of the room? To turn from interior decoration, as Hemingway put it, to architecture?
Michaels: As I said, I found it too easy. My problem was less making a novel than in doing what I thought I'd achieved in short stories, so that my novel would have the virtues of a short story, just as a story should have the virtues of a poem. The density, the speed, and the sort of depth you can get in a short story, which I don't believe you see in most novels. The short story is less obligated to tell a great big lie about life.
Interviewer: A book is a big lie?
Michaels: I don't want to say that. I'm trying to get at something very particular. It's the idea that life is never apprehended with such fullness, and such consistency of feeling over a long period of time, as you typically find in novels. Maybe that's because novels want to tell you how to live, but people only live from one day to the next. They don't generally care about this great apprehension of the flow of things. They aren't so acquisitive of sheer being, so devouring. But that is what one tends to take away from a novel, this sort of accumulation, or experience of accumulation, that is not available in life itself. Dickens, for example, is a mighty genius. I'll praise him forever, but I prefer Kafka. He doesn't eat the world. How one lives is a matter of breeding, says Aristotle. Novels arrive too late for most of us.
I like pithy writers—collections of pensées—Kafka's diaries, Valéry's Analecta, La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, the reflections on art and life of Max J. Friedlander, many of Montaigne's essays, Leopardi's Zibaldone. There are two-page stories by Babel that are worth more than the complete works of other writers, just as there are a few poems by George Herbert worth more than all of Swinburne, not that I've read all of Swinburne or could, even with a gun to my head. On the other hand, The Sentimental Education, a long novel, is one of the best books I've ever read, and I'm also crazy about Clarissa and Wuthering Heights.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 21, 2008
Foreign Policy's Top 100 Public Intellectuals
In its May-June issue, Foreign Policy has teamed up with Prospect magazine to compile a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals. Here's a post from FP's wonderful blog, Passport, explaining how you can vote for your own top five; and here's a link to the list itself. The criteria is quite simple—the editors seem to have chosen subjectively, rather than attempt any algorithm for calculating public influence (as did Richard A. Posner, who made the FP list, in his 2001 book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline). Christopher Hitchens has written an essay "on the burdens and pleasures of making a living by ideas in our modern age," but it is only available to subscribers.
The editors' attempt to seek out those with public influence is ratified by my own experience as a reader: Despite the fact that many of these intellectuals specialize in fields in which I have little specific interest, in the past three years I've read articles, read books, or attended lectures by approximately two-thirds of those who made it.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Visual Interlude: Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer, The Rapids, Hudson River, Adirondacks, 1894. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago.
On Saturday, while on a prize jury for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I marveled at the block-long line snaking out the museum's front door. Chances are that the queue was waiting for tickets to see the museum's Edward Hopper exhibition. But I'm looking forward in particular to the exhibition "Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light," which is also on view at the museum until May 10.
Posted in Art. Found always via this permanent link.
Poussin: Two writers, two ledes
A week or so ago, The New Republic published Jed Perl's review of the Nicolas Poussin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now T.J. Clark has written a review, for the London Review of Books, of that exhibition and the simultaneous Gustave Courbet retrospective. Both are worth reading, and both have rapturous ledes. Here's Perl:
"Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, takes us deeper into the inexhaustibly complex relationship between nature and culture than any other exhibition I have ever seen. When Nicolas Poussin sets men and women amid vast landscapes, he is reflecting on our experience of the natural world, and nobody has more beautifully woven together sensation and imagination, instinct and intelligence, freedom and design. There is a curiously pungent juxtaposition of naturalistic immediacy and pictorial artifice in Poussin's landscapes, whether he is representing a darkly luxuriant tree, a placid lake, a cloud-strewn sky, an elegantly designed city, or a handsome Ovidian hero. Somehow, the immediacy and the artifice reinforce each other. The paintings are finally about our struggles to understand what we feel, to objectify the subjectivity of our experience. Poussin's admirers will not be surprised to see this seventeenth-century artist who is often pigeonholed as a chilly classicist re-framed as something of a romantic. What most people are going to be unprepared for is the big-heartedness of his vision as it is revealed in this epochal show.
Here's Clark:
Once or twice in a lifetime, if you are lucky, the whole madness of painting seems to pass in front of your eyes. It felt that way to me in New York this spring, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where two great exhibitions – one exploring Nicolas Poussin’s role in the invention of the genre we call ‘landscape’, the other an endless, stupendous retrospective of Gustave Courbet – are happening a few corridors apart. I stumbled to and fro between them day after day, elated and disoriented. They sum up so much – too much – of what painting in Europe was capable of, and they embed that achievement so palpably in a certain history. Behind the glistening meadows and the huntsmen in the snow one catches the smell of autocracy and public burnings, of permanent warfare and bankers with impeccable taste.
Clark, of course, is the author of The Sight of Death, a book-length "experiment in art writing" about two paintings by Poussin. The Poussin exhibition remains on view until May 11, and the Courbet retrospective comes down May 18. For more information, click here.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
On the artist-gallery relationship
On Friday, the dealer and prolific blogger Ed Winkleman noted recently two published items, one in the New York Times and one on an artist's blog, that discuss the severing of artist-dealer relationship. He added his own commentary:
"Every dealer knows each of his/her artists personally, and the good ones do feel sorry when things don't work out and try to ease the transition as best they can. Every artist understands that leaving their gallery will be difficult for them (it will can cause the gallery to have very unhappy collectors who were on waiting lists and lots of unpleasant questions to answer all the way around), and the considerate artists do leave as gently as they can. Believe me, this is much more humane than the way such partings are handled in other businesses, and that fact that it is such a big deal (as evidenced by the two pieces noted above) reflects well on the way business is done in general in the art industry in my opinion."
The comments thread has now reached 100 posts. Click here to read it.
Posted in Around the web, Art. Found always via this permanent link.
April 20, 2008
New Granta, new website
This review in The Guardian tipped me off to the presence of the new issue of Granta, the first to be published under the direction of new editor Jason Cowley. "In his editor's letter, [Cowley] writes of broadening Granta's view - it will publish 'new writing in whichever form or genre it chooses'. It will be 'more internationalist', there will be more photography and more reportage." The magazine features a new design (by Graphic Thought Facility), and with it also comes a new website (by Apt). The latter is of particular interest, as it seems like it will publish a fair amount of online-only content. The next issue, due out this summer, is titled "The New Nature Writing." To return to the Guardian review of the current issue: "While there are failures - Granta should be strongest in new British fiction, so it seems odd that the offerings are all American, from Annie Proulx, Rick Moody and Joshua Ferris - Cowley has emerged from his trial with plenty to be proud of. He is offering a promising future for an important magazine."
Posted in Around the web, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Susan Jacoby op-ed in the Los Angeles Times
Susan Jacoby, author of the new book The Age of American Unreason, has published an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times titled "Talking to Ourselves": "Whether watching television news, consulting political blogs or (more rarely) reading books, Americans today have become a people in search of validation for opinions that they already hold. This absence of curiosity about other points of view is the essence of anti-intellectualism and represents a major departure from the nation's best cultural traditions." She goes on to cite Richard Hofstadter, whose 1963 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is the major precedent for her recent work; discuss the debasement of political discourse and the proliferation of news media in the US; and compare media coverage of General Petraeus's recent Congressional testimony to the Senate Watergate hearings. To read the full essay, click here.
UPDATE, 4/21: On a related topic, Alan Ehrenhalt reviews Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. Here is the lede:
The more diverse America becomes, the more homogeneous it becomes.
No, that's not a misprint; it is the thesis of "The Big Sort," Bill Bishop's rich and challenging book about the ways in which the citizens of this country have, in the past generation, rearranged themselves into discrete enclaves that have little to say to one another and little incentive to bother trying. "As Americans have moved over the past three decades," Mr. Bishop proclaims, "they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics."
To read the rest, click here.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 17, 2008
"Detectives On the Trail of Photography's Origins"
From today's New York Times:
The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precursor to the photograph.
“I got back to them and said, ‘Well, the first thing I would say is that this was not made by Talbot,’ ” the historian, Larry J. Schaaf, recalled in a recent interview.
“That was not what they were expecting to hear, to say the least.”
In the weeks since Dr. Schaaf’s surprising pronouncement was made public, “The Leaf,” originally thought to have been made around 1839 or later, has become the talk of the photo-historical world. The speculation about its origins became so intense that Sotheby’s and the print’s owners decided earlier this month to postpone its auction, so that researchers could begin delving into whether the image may be, in fact, one of the oldest photographic images in existence, dating to the 1790s.
Posted in Art, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 16, 2008
Wesley Yang on Seung-Hui Cho and David Samuels
Today is the one-year anniversary of the school shooting at Virginia Tech, during which Seung-Hui Cho killed thirty-two people and wounded others before committing suicide. Perhaps the most compelling piece of writing to yet emerge in response to that tragedy is Wesley Yang’s essay “The Face of Seung-Hui Cho,” published in n+1 issue six. An excerpt is available online; in the piece as a whole, Yang analyzes not only Cho’s actions but also, intriguingly, empathizes with the killer’s plight as an awkward, unloved Asian-American boy. It is a sober, balanced, and daring essay. I had wondered where I would next see Yang’s byline, and today encountered his review in the New York Sun of David Samuels’s The Runner.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 15, 2008
W.J.T. Mitchell on Errol Morris's new film
In its May issue, Harper's has published a long and thoughtful review by W.J.T. Mitchell of Errol Morris's new film, Standard Operating Procedure (the link is to the Sony Classics site for the film). An excerpt:
The unauthorized, illegal, and unsuccessfully suppressed amateur photos taken by G.I.'s in Abu Ghraib prison are what remain as the icons of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
This fact cannot be explained by forensic methods, a shortfall made clear by Morris's own research into the mystery of the Hooded Man, misidentified by the New York Times as Ali Shalal Qaissi—called "Clawman" by the G.I.'s—on March 11, 2006. Morris used his New York Times blog post, "Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up," of August 15, 2007, to clarify matters. In preparing to film Standard Operating Procedure, Morris had discovered (along with many other researchers) that the Hooded Man was actually Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, nicknamed "Gilligan." Morris derives a lesson about photography from this; namely, "the central role that photography itself played in the mistaken identification, and the way that photography lends itself to those errors and may even engender them." It is as if photographs, by virtue of the authority we grant them, compounded with our own prejudices and preconceptions, "attract false beliefs—as fly-paper attracts flies."
Morris's skeptical deconstruction drew seventy-four responses, most of them sympathetic. Dozens of hypotheses were tried out and debated by the puzzle-loving insomniac readers of the Times website over the next few weeks. As the discussion proceeded, however, this kind of search for the "deep truth" behind the photographs began to run into a wall of resistance. Respondents pointed out that the whole search for the truth behind the photograph was missing a much larger point: that the actual identity of the Hooded Man is irrelevant to the power of the image. In fact, one might put it even more strongly and insist that it is precisely the anonymity of the Hooded Man that is the key to the power of the image.
The referent of a photograph, the real object or event "captured" by it, is not the same as the meaning it my acquire as a cultural icon. This meaning can be understood only by looking carefully at the photograph as a formal and iconographic entity, and by tracing its reception among viewers. If the sole photograph of the Hooded Man were the one taken from the side by [Sabrina] Harman, it would not be one of the most famous images in the world today. It is the frontal perspective and the symmetry of the figure that provide the formal conditions for its power. The question, then, is not "Who is the Hooded Man?" but (to paraphrase James Agee on Walker Evans) Who are you who will study this photograph, and what is your responsibility for it, and what will you do about it?
Mitchell goes on to assert that "Morris's reconstruction of [the conditions that surrounded the production of the images] will ... launch a whole new set of more deeply informed reflections on the meaning of Abu Ghraib...." To read the whole article, click here (you may need to be a subscriber for full access).
UPDATE, 4/17: More on the film from Variety deputy editor Anne Thompson.
UPDATE, 4/21: A bevy of links to discussion of the film has been posted to GreenCine Daily.
Posted in Film, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 14, 2008
An interview with Tad Friend
MediaBistro's "So What Do You Do?" series occasionally snags interesting interview subjects, and this week's respondent is the New Yorker's Tad Friend. An excerpt:
How many people do you typically interview for a profile?
For a long piece, I probably have 60 to 100 conversations.
Are you serious? Wow. And a lot of that is just background -- people you're not even going to quote?
Yeah, a lot of it. I over-report so that I feel confident, when I sit down to write, that I know what I'm talking about. That confidence may be misplaced, of course, but I need to feel it. We have a bit of a luxury at The New Yorker in that you can take some time -- two to three months -- with certain kinds of stories and try to be authoritative.
How do you figure out who to talk to?
At the end of an interview, I always say, "Who else should I talk to?" And then they tell you two people and then those people tell you two people, and at a certain point everyone's telling you the same people you've already talked to and you think, "OK, I've kind of got it." Or everyone's telling you things you already know, which is comforting. You could probably write a profile that's three-quarters as good about two weeks in, but I like the feeling of knowing more, of giving myself more choices and collecting the little nuance-y details that encourage the reader to relax and trust you as a guide and companion. There is also the possibility that I'm just neurotic.
(Link via Emdashes)
Posted in Around the web, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 10, 2008
Interview with Thomas Bender about American Higher Education Transformed
Inside Higher Ed publishes a brief interview with the historian Thomas Bender, whose essay collection Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals In the United States (Johns Hopkins, 1992) impressed me greatly when I first read it several months ago. Now he has edited, with Wilson Smith, a collection of documents relating to American higher education (one of his academic specialties). The interview's introduction:
The history of American higher education since 1940 is full of dramatic changes — the growth of the modern scientific enterprise, desegregation, the impact of the GI bill, the campus unrest of the 60s, and so forth. Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender set out to tell that story with documents — from both establishment figures and their critics — in American Higher Education Transformed, 1940-2005, just published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The book is a sequel to earlier work by Smith and Richard Hofstadter examining earlier periods in the history of American higher education. The new volume includes the Supreme Court decisions that upheld affirmative action and that dealt blows to faculty and graduate student unions; essays by Adrienne Rich and Lani Guinier; the Port Huron Statement; Allan Bloom and his critics; and the presidential report that led to the growth of community colleges.
And one of the questions:
Q: How did the tone of documents change during the period you studied?
A: This is an interesting question. I would say that there was a sense of anticipation at the beginning, looking forward to new challenges related to the position of the U.S. after the war. Their sense was that higher education would (and should) be moving to the center of American society. Hence it must be modernized, democratized, and expanded to meet that challenge. This is clear in both the curricular documents (“The Red Book”) and in the President’s Commission on Higher Education, which was concerned about exclusion based on race and class, or Vannevar Bush’s vision for science. Midway the complexity and tensions, contests and constraints produced a very different tone. There is little self-confidence toward the end of the story, the result of a sense of being displaced from the center.
(Link via Cliopatria)
Posted in Around the web, Books. Found always via this permanent link.
April 9, 2008
New York Sun; Howe on McDougall
The New York Sun, the six-year-old weekday paper, has fantastic arts coverage, in particular its book reviews, which are published throughout the week but arrive in bulk each Wednesday. I visit the site every Wednesday morning. Critics Adam Kirsch, Eric Ormbsy, Benjamin Lytal, Hua Hsu, and Otto Penzler consistently publish insightful, well-written, well-informed reviews of books that are occasionally esoteric but never uninteresting. While the newspaper has recently re-designed its website and is still porting its archives and fixing bugs (like author bios occasionally appearing in the midst of the review text), now seems like an appropriate time to mention it because the editors have roped in a 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, Daniel Walker Howe, to write a review. His piece is about Walter A. McDougal’s Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era:
Although political history is the strong skeleton of his account, Mr. McDougall fleshes it out with social, economic, and intellectual history. His descriptions of the important consequences of public literacy and numeracy in facilitating the industrial revolution are excellent. He accords the German immigrants the importance they deserve and seldom receive from historians. His treatment of the military history of the Civil War imparts new interest even to a subject one thought was familiar.
Howe received the Pulitzer Prize for What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, part of the Oxford History of the United States. Click here for a piece Howe posted to the Oxford University Press blog.
Posted in Books, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Why it's difficult to leave New York, despite frustrations
Today alone, the street artist Swoon speaks at Parsons, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips speaks at Columbia, short-story master Tobias Wolff reads at 192 Books, artist Dara Friedman lectures as part of the Public Art Fund's series at the New School, artist Rachel Harrison lectures at Hunter College, a panel discussion on writing and the environment will be held at the New School, and the bands No Kids and Dirty Projectors play at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. I won't attend any of this, though, because I'm going instead to the opening of Sergej Jensen's new exhibition at Anton Kern gallery. Keywords for this post: "New York," "bounty."
Posted in Miscellaneous. Found always via this permanent link.
April 8, 2008
Scientists Unveil High-Res Map of US Carbon Footprint
From Wired online:
A team of scientists has completed a carbon dioxide emissions inventory of the United States plotted down to 100-square-kilometer chunks.
That means that the NASA- and Department of Energy-funded scientists can detail emissions across all 9 million square kilometers that compose the United States. For a full explanation, check out the video that Purdue's Kevin Gurney put together, which features a number of other excellent CO2 visualizations. Andy Revkin, the New York Times' environment-beat writer, put a memorable headline on a post about the video, calling it, "Breath of a Nation."
The work, known as The Vulcan Project, has already yielded a significant discovery: Previous CO2 estimates that used population as a proxy for emissions overestimated the Northeast's greenhouse-gas generation, while underestimating the coal-heavy Southeast's contribution.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
April 7, 2008
This week's reason why I won't let my New Yorker subscription lapse
What other publication caters to my both of my esoteric interests—contemporary art and early American history—in a single issue? This week's New Yorker features Peter Schjeldahl on Takashi Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum and Jill Lepore on the founders' attitude toward religion.
First, Schjeldahl:
My favorite part of “©Murakami,” a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of the juggernautish Japanese artist-entrepreneur Takashi Murakami, was the most controversial element in the show when it originated, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, last October: a functioning Louis Vuitton outlet, smack in the middle of things, selling aggressively pricey handbags and other bibelots, all Murakami-designed. (Vuitton has reportedly done hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of business in Murakamiana since its deal with the artist began, in 2003.) The shop is lovely. Shelving units in chrome and white enamel, with recessed fluorescent lighting that sets brass fittings on the merchandise aglint, caress the eye. They provide a haven from the strident grotesquerie of what might be termed Murakami’s fine-art product lines: paintings, sculpture, and wallpapered environments that play off the charms of Japanese traditional and popular arts with close to no charm of their own. But, then, retail swank is an aesthetic lingua franca today, and equations of art and commerce, pioneered by Andy Warhol and colonized by Jeff Koons, among others, are, at least, familiar. The show’s less cozy aspects remind me that I have never been to Japan. I don’t like Murakami’s work, but my dislike, being moody, feels out of scale with the artist’s terrific energy and ambition. For the second time in a couple of months—the first being at the Guggenheim retrospective of the meteoric Chinese festivalist Cai Guo-Qiang—New Yorkers have a chance to absorb our new geo-spiritual fate, as provincials in a world of creative paradigms that no longer entreat our favor. That has to be good for us.
Now, Lepore:
On the subject of religious liberty in America, there are four indispensable, foundational texts: Jefferson’s 1786 statute (“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry”); Madison’s 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” (“The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man”); Article VI of the Constitution (“No religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”); and the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). These are at once statements of political philosophy and legal documents; philosophers argue about them within a specific intellectual tradition, and legal scholars read them to trace precedent. Martha Nussbaum takes both of these approaches in “Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality” (Basic; $28.95). But because these documents long ago rose to the status of American scripture, another way to read them is to conduct an exegesis, which is more or less what Garry Wills does in “Head and Heart: American Christianities” (Penguin; $29.95). Politicians tend to use them genealogically, naming their authors as forebears or, as the case may be, glaringly omitting them. (“My faith is the faith of my fathers,” Mitt Romney declared in a speech last December, skipping over Jefferson and Madison in favor of Brigham Young, John and Samuel Adams, and the seventeenth-century Puritan dissenter Roger Williams.) The legal, the exegetical, the genealogical—each centers on the Founding Fathers: What did they intend? What did they mean? What would they make of us?
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Stanley Fish, "French Theory In America"
On the acceptance of the term deconstruction in mainstream American intellectual discourse:
It turned out, of course, that my conclusion was hasty and premature, for it was in the early ’90s that the culture wars went into high gear and the chief target of the neo-conservative side was this [French] theory that I thought had run its course. It became clear that it had a second life, or a second run, as the villain of a cultural melodrama produced and starred in by Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball and other denizens of the right, even as its influence was declining in the academic precincts this crew relentlessly attacked.
It’s a great story, full of twists and turns, and now it has been told in extraordinary detail in a book to be published next month: “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States” (University of Minnesota Press).
The book’s author is Francois Cusset, who sets himself the tasks of explaining, first, what all the fuss was about, second, why the specter of French theory made strong men tremble, and third, why there was never really anything to worry about.
There's a whole lot more in "Think Again," Fish's New York Times blog.
UPDATE, 4/20: Scott McLemee discusses Francois Cusset's book in his weekly column, "Intellectual Affairs."
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
Michael Robertson, "Reading Whitman Religiously"
Michael Robertson, author of the just-published Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples, has an essay in the current issue of The Chronicle Review on the nineteenth-century readers who considered Whitman a religious prophet as well as a poet:
Starting in the 1860s, Whitman attracted a diverse group of adherents who regarded him less as a great poet, an American successor to Wordsworth, than as a great spiritual leader, a successor to the Buddha and Jesus. John Burroughs, the 19th century's most popular nature writer, published two books and dozens of essays on Whitman, all with one central message: Whitman's "Leaves of Grass is primarily a gospel and is only secondarily a poem." Burroughs scoffed at the notion of classing Whitman with "minstrels and edifiers"; he belonged among the "prophets and saviours." Leaves of Grass offers "a religion to live by and to die by," according to Thomas Biggs Harned, a prominent attorney and one of Whitman's literary executors. "I can never think of Whitman as a mere literary man. He is a mighty spiritual force."
Those responses to Whitman may sound strange to 21st-century ears, trained by decades of aesthetically oriented criticism to ignore poetry's religious dimensions. However, in the 19th century, many readers were receptive to the concept of the poet-prophet.
Robertson discusses such figures as Anne Gilchrist, Richard Bucke, John Addington Symons, and J. W. Wallace.
Click here for the rest of the article, or here for the introduction to Robertson's book, which expands upon the subject.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 6, 2008
Taylor Branch, "The Last Wish of Martin Luther King"
A quote from the civil-rights scholar Taylor Branch, in an New York Times:
Dr. King showed most profoundly that in an interdependent world, lasting power grows against the grain of violence, not with it. Both the cold war and South African apartheid ended to the strains of “We Shall Overcome,” defying all preparations for Armageddon. The civil rights movement remains a model for new democracy, sadly neglected in its own birthplace. In Iraq today, we are stuck on the Vietnam model instead. There is no more salient or neglected field of study than the relationship between power and violence.
We recoil from nonviolence at our peril. Dr. King rightly saw it at the heart of democracy. Our nation is a great cathedral of votes — votes not only for Congress and for president, but also votes on Supreme Court decisions and on countless juries. Votes govern the boards of great corporations and tiny charities alike. Visibly and invisibly, everything runs on votes. And every vote is nothing but a piece of nonviolence.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 3, 2008
Herzog & Morris
The March/April issue of The Believer contains the transcription of a conversation between filmmakers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris conducted last autumn at Brandeis University. Click here to read it.
Posted in Film, Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 2, 2008
Lindsay Waters's "call for slow writing"
In an article published three weeks ago at Inside Higher Ed, Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, discusses the relationship between books and essays in humanistic scholarship, and makes a claim for the latter:
Books are the standard now, and for me to ask you to think that the future will feature the renaissance of journals and the replacement of the book by the essay might seem crazy. (You should know that it does not seem crazy to many of the leading university press publishers.) My suggestion is not crazy; it’s utopian. We don’t live in that world I am asking you to imagine, the world in which essays are the norm, but if we were to imagine that world could exist even for a second, how might seeing things that way cause us to change what we are doing?
We need to slow down, and remember that the essay has been the main form for humanistic discourse. The book is an outlier. Many of the writings that changed the direction a scholarly community was marching toward were essays. Think of Edward Said’s “Abecedarium Culturae” or Paul de Man’s “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” to stay in recent history and not begin, as I easily could, an epic catalog from Montaigne’s “De l’amitie” onwards. Some of the most important books are collections of essays, sometimes assembled with no pretence to forging a unity of them, such as John Freccero’s Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. One could give many examples.
There is no good reason why the essay should not replace the book, and a lot of good reasons why it should.
The rest of the essay is worth a look, as is Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship, a spirited little pamphlet Waters published a few years ago with Prickly Paradigm Press.
Posted in . Found always via this permanent link.
Visual Interlude: House in Sendai-Kasumi by Kiyonobu Nakagame
A house designed by Kiyonobu Nakagame, located on a hill above Sendai, Japan. Photograph by K. Torimura. More information, and many more photographs, at the design blog Dezeen.
Posted in Architecture & Design. Found always via this permanent link.
Artspeak
On his blog, Time magazine critic Richard Lacayo bemoans the state of curatorial writing about visual art:
Why is so much curatorial writing so dreadful? Why is it so clogged with the decrepit formulations of academic artspeak? Why does so much of it sound like it was written by an anxious schoolkid delivering a labored term paper?
My first assumption is that there's a generation of curators who went to college and grad school in the 1980s and '90s, when the congested language of Deconstruction, Critical Studies and so on still seemed important, intrepid and even a little glamorous. I get the impression that even if a budding art writer wasn't commited to those lines of inquiry, the turgid writing those produced infected the academy in all directions.
But the industrial-strength bad writing so common now in the artworld is also, I suspect, a defense against anxiety by curators and catalogue writers afraid simply to say out loud and in plain English what they suppose the work might be getting at
Click through to read the rest, including the five words Lacayo would ban from museum catalogues.
Posted in Around the web. Found always via this permanent link.
A survey of magazines
This week's New York Observer contains an overview of the state of magazines. As an employee of one publication and a subscriber to nearly two dozen others, I can't help but be interested. The profile of David Samuels is nice enough; the article full of anonymous quotes from young freelancers about the difficulty of their lives seems somewhat true to my own experience; the survey of magazine honchos about the future of the medium is pretty pathetic, and littered with exclamation marks. What is worth reading, however, is Choire Sicha's caustic portrait of Annie Leibovitz. Perhaps writing such a piece today is like shooting fish in a barrel, but at least he doesn't waste bullets.
Posted in Papers & Periodicals. Found always via this permanent link.
April 1, 2008
"The Varieties of Intellectual Experience"
In a post published last week at the U.S. Intellectual History blog, Tim Lacy writes:
Most past works of U.S. intellectual history have focused on public and private figures, institutions, and books that could in some sense be considered "canonical." I refuse to dismiss all the historians who did that work, in blanket fashion, as caring only about the elites of U.S. history. Rather, I submit to you that those historians explored, in a considered conservative fashion, what they believed others could not question as topics of inquiry. This is not to deny that race, class, and gender did not factor into those choices, but rather that definitions of what constituted regular intellectual activity affected their work. It seems to me, then, that too much consistency has been sought from historical intellectual agents by intellectual historians.
The essay continues at some length, eventually calling for an "event-based intellectual history," and is worth reading.