Tony Judt
>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.
>Fragmented Invidualism
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| Allegra’s Art Gallery |
Thomas Haschard @ The Millions reflects on the ideas of Tony Judt, Alain de Botton, and Alice Monroe to consider the limits of our individual lives.
I grew up in a house with a framed picture of Che Guevara on the wall and occasional talk of Marx at the dinner table, so it took me longer than most to realize that I had spent all but two years of my life in a world where, for the most part, those names had lost their credibility if not significance. I spent my high school years, the time when romantic ideals flourish unencumbered, thinking I was a Marxist, a fact which certainly lends credence to the idea that mine is a generation with a good sense of all that is wrong with the world but few to no new ideas of what to do about it. The late Tony Judt certainly believed such a problem was widespread, not only in my generation but the world in general, and his Ill Fares the Land is a reflective account of how we got to our present state from a time when the problem was not how the world was going to change, but when.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Judt’s book focuses on where we went wrong as much as what to do about it because the answers to the two reflect each other: when we forgot the benefits of social democracy, we turned toward a politics that emphasizes our worst traits as individuals precisely by accentuating our individuality; to get back on track, we must remember everything we gained from social democracy (an effective social safety net; remarkable drops in inequality) and return to its ideals. Judt outlines how many of the social policies that we take for granted today come from the early and mid 20th century’s great era of social democracy, and furthermore the ways that, once these policies became ingrained, the next generation began to focus on the costs rather than the benefits and so allowed them to be dismantled.
>What Remains
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| “Still Life with White Box” by Raimonds Staprans |
It is August in Paris, and my friend Alexander with usual irony sent me this piece from The New York Times about the very fashionable things to do in Paris this month. While these items are not on my calender, I am (somewhat) surprised at how the Times can turn even the slow days of summer into a must-do fashion alert. The pleasure of Paris in August is that there are no lists of things to do. The city feels extraordinarily empty, with so many stores and cafes shuttered for two or three weeks. On a warm day (which are few), when you wander in places beyond the tourist centers you have the feeling you are in some small town in the countryside or near the sea. Those who remain in Paris are the tourists, the poor immigrants, those whose jobs keep them in the city, and others, like myself, who enjoy the city in its half desolate state.
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| “The Empty Table with a Green Stripe” by Raimonds Staprans |
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| “Jars #3” by Raimonds Staprans |
And Morgan Meis at The Smart Set reports on the tensions between the Flemish and the Walloons and wonders what if Belgium didn’t exist, maybe it shouldn’t, and what would be left if it didn’t? : “It is not surprising that such ideas are strange and confusing to many. The idea, for instance, that the entity called Belgium could simply go away feels, initially, like a loss, a failure. Even for Belgians who don’t feel any great national pride, the loss of their nation is a potential source of trauma. This feeling is heightened by the petty resentments and chauvinism that gets thrown about in the feuds between Flanders and Wallonia.”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )>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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altimoniere 