The New York Review of Books
>A life we can take pride in having lived
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Ronald Dworkin rethinks what it means to live a good life @ The New York Review of Books.
Plato and Aristotle treated morality as a genre of interpretation. They tried to show the true character of each of the main moral and political virtues (such as honor, civic responsibility, and justice), first by relating each to the others, and then to the broad ethical ideals their translators summarize as personal “happiness.” Here I use the terms “ethical” and “moral” in what might seem a special way. Moral standards prescribe how we ought to treat others; ethical standards, how we ought to live ourselves. The happiness that Plato and Aristotle evoked was to be achieved by living ethically; and this meant living according to independent moral principles.
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We can—many people do—use either “ethical” or “moral” or both in a broader sense that erases this distinction, so that morality includes what I call ethics, and vice versa. But we would then have to recognize the distinction I draw in some other form in order to ask whether our ethical desire to lead good lives for ourselves provides a justifying moral reason for our concern with what we owe to others. Any of these different forms of expression would allow us to pursue the interesting idea that moral principles should be interpreted so that being moral makes us happy in the sense Plato and Aristotle meant.
>Lives in the peripheries
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Orhan Pamuk on the fading dream of Europe @ The New York Review of Books.
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In the schoolbooks I read as a child in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe was a rosy land of legend. While forging his new republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, which had been crushed and fragmented in World War I, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk fought against the Greek army, but with the support of his own army he later introduced a slew of social and cultural modernization reforms that were not anti- but pro-Western. It was to legitimize these reforms, which helped to strengthen the new Turkish state’s new elites (and were the subject of continuous debate in Turkey over the next eighty years), that we were called upon to embrace and even imitate a rosy-pink—occidentalist—European dream.
The schoolbooks of my childhood were texts designed to teach us why a line was to be drawn between the state and religion, why it had been necessary to shut down the lodges of the dervishes, or why we’d had to abandon the Arab alphabet for the Latin. But they were also overflowing with questions that aimed to unlock the secret of Europe’s great power and success. “Describe the aims and outcomes of the Renaissance,” the middle school history teacher would ask in his exam. “If it turned out we were sitting on as much oil as the Arabs, would we then be as rich and modern as Europeans?” my more naive classmates at my lycée would say. In my first year at university, whenever my classmates came across such questions in class, they would fret over why “we never had an enlightenment.” The fourteenth-century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun said that civilizations in decline were able to keep from disintegrating by imitating their victors. Because Turks were never colonized by a world power, “worshiping Europe” or “imitating the West” has never carried the damning, humiliating overtones described by Franz Fanon, V.S. Naipaul, or Edward Said. To look to Europe has been seen as a historical imperative or even a technical question of adaptation.
>The Idea of Paris
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Luc Sante reviews two new books on the history of Paris @ The New York Review of Books.
Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? From the unfolding of its various aspects in temporal succession? From the compression of a centuries-long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour? And does the flâneur do anything different?
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You might momentarily think that Walter Benjamin’s suggestion could apply to any city, but in just about every other case the narrative would be too diffuse, in both the spatial and temporal sense. Paris is exceptional for having grown in a particularly concentrated and directed way, and for having maintained the vigor of districts even after fashion went elsewhere.Most cities spread like inkblots; a few, such as Manhattan, grew in linear increments. Paris expanded in concentric rings, approximately shown by the spiral numeration of its arrondissements. Its Neolithic center was fittingly located in what is now the First (leaking into the Fourth): the islands, the Louvre, Les Halles, the Hôtel de Ville. It then spread east to the Marais, north to the foot of Montmartre, west along the Seine, and tentatively south, across the river, to what would become St.-Germain-des-Prés. Its roughly circular form was maintained by a succession of walls, built under Philippe Auguste around the turn of the thirteenth century, Charles V in the fourteenth, the Farmers-General just before the Revolution, and Adolphe Thiers in the 1840s, that last one taken down beginning in 1919. But there is a wall even now, as Eric Hazan makes plain. The ring highway—the Périphérique—which was completed in 1973, is if anything even better at separating the city from the hinterlands than its predecessors were, and today that means keeping the immigrant masses at bay in their featureless housing project clusters, the vertical slums with rustic-sounding names that make up the banlieues.
>Indian food made me more English
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Tony Judt on gastronomic encounters in the London of his youth @ New York Review of Books.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Just because you grow up on bad food, it does not follow that you lack nostalgia for it. My own gastronomic youth was firmly bounded by everything that was least inspiring in traditional English cuisine, alleviated with hints of Continental cosmopolitanism occasionally introduced by my father’s fading memories of a Belgian youth, and interspersed with weekly reminders of another heritage altogether: Sabbath evening dinners at the home of my East European Jewish grandparents. This curious melange did little to sharpen my taste buds—it was not until I lived in France as a graduate student that I encountered good food on a regular basis—but it added further to the confusions of my youthful identity.
My mother was born in the least Jewish part of the old London East End: at the intersection of Burdett Road and the Commercial Road, a few blocks north of the London Docks. This topographical misfortune—she always felt a little tangential to her surroundings, lacking the intensely Jewish milieu of Stepney Green a few hundred yards to the north—played into many otherwise curious aspects of her personality. Unlike my father, for example, my mother had great respect for the King and the Queen, and was always half-tempted to stand up during the Queen’s speech on television in later years. She was discreet to the point of embarrassment about her Jewishness, in contrast to the overtly foreign and Yiddish quality of most of the rest of our extended family. And in an inverted tribute to her own mother’s indifference to Jewish traditions beyond those ordained by annual rituals (and the decidedly Cockney ambiance of the streets where she grew up), she had almost no knowledge of Jewish cuisine.
>Genocide and remorse in Cambodia
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Stéphanie Giry on the trail of the perfect war criminal @ The New York Review of Books.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The July conviction of Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch—the gaunt-faced, fever-eyed 68-year-old head of the Khmer Rouge’s leading torture center—by a special UN–Cambodian criminal court has been seen as a breakthrough in international justice. Years in the making, the trial was the first international criminal case brought against an official of the Pol Pot regime since a Vietnamese show trial in 1979. And despite mixed legal procedures, the conflicting approaches of Cambodian and international lawyers, hearings in three languages, budget shortages, corruption scandals, and political pressure, it was widely considered fair. Yet it is unclear how much the Duch case will have advanced the long-delayed efforts for justice against the Khmer Rouge, not least because Duch himself seems to have come out of the experience less repentant than he was when it began.
For his part in overseeing the torture and execution of at least 12,273 prisoners, Duch was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to a 35-year prison term, with 19 years left to serve. But after spending much of the 77 days of court hearings expressing remorse, he is now appealing the sentence and asking to be released, claiming that he was neither one of the regime’s leaders nor among those “most responsible” for the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities, the only people the special court in Phnom Penh is entitled to try. This request reflects a dramatic last-minute shift in the defense’s strategy, from cooperating with the court to disputing its authority to judge Duch. That Duch could undermine the trial and its outcome in this way highlights its central flaw: all along, he was allowed to dominate the telling, and so influence the judging, of his own crimes.
>I’ll be notorious
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Daniel Mendelsohn on Oscar Wilde before Oscar Wilde @ The New York Review of Books
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )When asked what he intended to do after finishing at Oxford, the young Oscar Wilde—who was already well known not only for his outré persona (“I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china,” etc.), but for his brilliant achievements as a classics scholar—made it clear in which direction his ambitions lay. “God knows,” the twenty-three-year-old told his great friend David Hunter Blair, who had asked Wilde about his postgraduate plans, and who later fondly recalled the conversation in his 1939 memoir, In Victorian Days. “I won’t be a dried-up Oxford don, anyhow. I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous, I’ll be notorious.”
As we know, his prediction would be spectacularly fulfilled: like a character in one of the Greek tragedies he was able to translate so fluently as a student, his short life followed a spectacular trajectory from fame to infamy, from the heady triumphs of his post-Oxford days, when he was already famous enough to be lampooned by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience, to the dreadful peripeteia of the trials and imprisonment. But to some of those who knew him at the time, Wilde’s emphatic rejection of the scholarly life must have come as something of a surprise.
>Pirate Culture
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Jeffrey Gettleman reviews two new books about Somalia @ New York Review of Books.
Abshir Boyah is one of Somalia’s pirate chieftains. Last spring, he took me to lunch at a small restaurant directly across the street from the presidential palace of the Puntland semiautonomous regional government. Boyah has hijacked dozens of ships and is a member of a secretive council of pirates called “The Corporation.” He is six foot four, very thin, with a long, handsome face, brilliant white teeth, and a booming, supremely confident laugh.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The minute we walked into the restaurant, he was surrounded by admirers. Before we sat down at a plastic table for our meal of spaghetti and camel meat, Boyah must have shaken half a dozen hands. He seemed to have excellent relations with high-ranking officials in the Puntland “government”—a limited, clan-based authority in northern Somalia—including a police commander who sat next to him and called him “cousin.” Boyah joked that his eating with white men was like “the cat eating with the mice.” It was becoming clear that Boyah was not simply operating in the open. In this part of Somalia, he was a celebrity.
>Ukrainian Memories
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Timothy Snyder @ New York Review of Books reports on the struggles of historical research in the Ukraine.
On summer evenings, the people of the west Ukrainian city Lviv come to sing: under the statue of Taras Shevchenko, the great poet who prophesied Ukrainian independence in the nineteenth century, on the street that was renamed Liberty Boulevard when Ukraine emerged from Soviet rule in 1991. The songs tell of beautiful dark-eyed girls pining for brave soldiers. In one song, young men must leave their homes to fight for freedom as partisans; in the next, they are overwhelmed and killed by Soviet forces. One of the more bellicose songs ends “We’ll cry out ‘Glory, glory, glory’ until the earth shakes,” accompanied by the stamping of feet on the cobblestones. These passionate Ukrainian laments overlook the fact that Lviv was once Polish Lwów, and before that Habsburg Lemberg. Well into the twentieth century it was a Polish-Jewish city. During World War II the Germans killed the Jews and the Soviets expelled the Poles, leaving the city to be resettled by Ukrainians from the countryside as it was annexed to an expanded Soviet Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom played a part in the elimination of Jews or Poles, fought desperately and courageously against Soviet rule. The songs celebrating them forget the people who used to live in Lviv, and the part the Ukrainian nationalists played in their removal.
Tymofiy Havryliv discusses contemporary Ukrainian literature in dealing with the country’s recent past @ Eurozine.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In Ukraine, authors can write about everything. Twenty years ago, such a claim would have been seen as an unrealistic hope, despite perestroika. Not all that many years have gone by since then. If one was to take artistic freedom as a measure of democracy, one could say without qualification that democracy has successfully established itself in Ukraine, and what’s more, as a normal democracy, and not as a controlled one.
In reality, the freedom of art is the result of its social marginalization. Art has a jester’s license. In the 1990s, it increasingly became something of interest to a small circle of initiates. Its carnivalesque entry onto the scene immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union was short lived, and it found itself once again part of the underground. It returned there for a reason far more banal than persecution or dictatorship: there was no more money for art. The huge publishing houses of the Soviet era, which in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities had published in over 140 different languages, had become leviathans out of water, stranded and unwieldy. Like the concert halls and opera houses, they led a woeful existence, renting out their famous, often wonderful, but also notorious rooms, until losing them one by one in hopeless and unfair court cases. Not all, but many. Bookshops, that once represented an exemplary Soviet marketing network that included every large village, lost their profile in order to catch up with contemporary demand: cosmetics shops, hairdressers, film-developing studios, department stores, electronics retailers, toilet roll and newspaper kiosks, bureaux de changes, chemists, boutiques.
>Captivities and Escapes
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In N+1 Magazine, Benjamin Kunkel reflects on the state of U.S. literature since 2000 for the Norwegian literary magazine Bokvennen. As Kunkel points out, the works that have emerged in the last decade are confined to an aesthetic of pleasurable realism, absent perhaps any real truth: “It doesn’t necessarily condemn, any more than it vindicates, the renovated realism of the past decade to notice that it has more often been defended in terms of pleasure than of reality; but it seems worth observing that this has been the case.”
http://www.altimoniere.it/grgphoto/books2.php
“London, 2010” by Greg Salvatori @ grgphoto.com
In a similar vain, but with more precise incisions into the current state of Anglo-American creative writing, Zadia Smith maps out two paths in The New York Review of Books, noting that “A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked.” Smith continues: “In this version of our literary history, the last man standing is the Balzac-Flaubert model, on the evidence of its extraordinary persistence. But the critiques persist, too. Is it really the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most.”
An Australian publisher Barry Scott recounts in Overland his explorations into the small and independent publishing industry in the US, looking for a way to nurture a diversity of books within a confining corporate culture that values sameness: “What I saw didn’t dispel my fears regarding the economic viability of independent presses: consumers are ultimately going to want what they have heard about repeatedly, something that comes more easily with a large marketing budget. Yet I was reassured by the initiatives of small publishers to nurture a vibrant culture of writing and reading.”
The state of literary publishing in the US may be a symptom of an increasing professionalizing of creative writing, turning the craft of writing into status motivated labor. This is suggested by writer Alex Kuo at Mascara in his discussion of MFA programs in the U.S. and their development in China: “Today, writers are joiners and networkers who go to conferences, our professional identity socially and academically stapled to tenure, promotion and bureaucracy. This international organization now has more than 500 member colleges and programs. Its services include publications such as the program directors handbook. Oddly enough, such a how-to manual does not exist for any other academic field, physics, law or history.“
And so perhaps we need to cross borders and look beyond the deadening effects of “factory” creativity to find new perspectives on the relationships of creative work and culture. Brian T. Edwards writes a beautiful essay in A Public Space on the new generation of Egyptian writers: “During the past decade, a generation of young writers who are breaking lots of rules—of what writing in Arabic is supposed to look like, of what young Egyptians can express about the world around them and how they might do so, and of what a new cohort of men and women might say about life in a city layered with centuries, even millennia, of intertwined cultural forms—has marked a significant shift in contemporary Egyptian literature.”
Feeling the need to escape into the captivities of the past, Doug Bruns meditates on imprisonment and reading and the pleasures of both at The Millions: “Henry David Thoreau too, famously, went into a loose-knit confined self-exile. . . Like Montaigne, Thoreau was a reader of classic literature, preferring, the original Greek or Latin. He recorded that at Walden he had a copy of The Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu story of Lord Krishna, a selection perhaps not unusual for the quintessential American Transcendentalist. He warned against relying too much on literature as a means of transcendence and found the common literature of the day annoyingly unsophisticated.”
But what if our “cabin in the woods” was made out of books? What if our captivity and our escape were intertwined? Slovakian artists Matej Kren creates massive and dense structures completely from books. They have a haunting feel in our age of digital publishing. The work is currently on display at Museo d’Arte di Moderna di Bologna.
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from “Scanners” by Matej Kren @ Museo d’Arte di Moderna di Bologna
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>Elusive Words
>Tony Judt, suffering from a neurological disorder and is “fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them,” writes in The New York Review of Books on his love of words and longs for the lost art of articulate, crafted writing: “Today “natural” expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better. (“True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.” —Essay on Criticism, 1711) For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference.”
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| “Apollo and the Artist” by Cy Twomby |
At The Millions, Deanna Fei details the haunting voice of her grandmother in her struggles to write fiction: “I was aware that Chinese censorship is real and crushing. But I’d never expected it to manifest itself in the voice of my own grandmother—who, if she chose, could certainly tell her own negative tales about China.”
And when is writing a crime? At The Morning News, Micheal Erard returns to confront a former student who plagiarized and essay and rethinks the ways writing is policed. “Then it was my turn: I told Haley a bit about how her plagiarism had affected me. How I took it personally, and trusted students a little less; I made sure that assignments were plagiarism-proof. But what she couldn’t know was how I became more confident in spotting an opportunity to instruct, and less interested in policing boundaries—which were, after all, mine to teach.”
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