irredenta

They do.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:22:05 -0500

They do.

In Nashville, TN for a friend’s wedding. Rehearsal dinner...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:21:44 -0500

In Nashville, TN for a friend’s wedding. Rehearsal dinner jam underway!

Clara Helma Sanders, Brahms, Germany/France/Belgium, German...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:54:40 -0500

Clara

Helma Sanders, Brahms, Germany/France/Belgium, German with subtitles, 2008, 109 mins

In this grand Romantic tale of passion, betrayal and redemption Clara Schumann is torn between loyalty and desire. To remain true to her husband Robert, during his darkest hour or surrender to temptation with his brilliant young protégé, Johannes Brahms.

With a stunning classical score by Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms.

An excellent post by James Fallows. I can’t believe this...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:54:24 -0500

An excellent post by James Fallows. I can’t believe this hasn’t been getting more attention on the blogs (especially in tumblria). I love that the White House is actually making available these performances on their website.

On Claude Lévi-Strauss

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:54:00 -0500

Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died last Saturday (Guardian), was a source of inspiration and intellectual energy for me. I remember in vivid detail the first time I read his classic travelogue, Tristes Tropiques, for my Introduction to Principles of Cultural Anthropology seminar. I was so taken by the sincerity of his prose and approach that I begged a fellow classmate who had been assigned to write on the book to let me write the first essay of the course instead. (The professor, needless to say, thought I was quite the abnormal obsessive)

Well, the other night I decided to remember him once again by going over my notes from his works and to glance at my essay on Tristes Tropiques again. Here’s how I ended my paper:

Given the overly-specialized nature of academic life and the almost ubiquitous desire for practical knowledge today, one could hardly be faulted for regarding at least some of Lévi-Strauss’ prescriptions as either no longer attainable or hopelessly utopian. While I acknowledge that his position can be seen as an idealist one, it is certainly a far distance away from being unattainable; for it is precisely against the background of such seemingly insurmountable pressures as increased standardization and greater emphasis on sterility that Lévi-Strauss set about his exilic pilgrimage in the first place. He has self-reflexively endeavored to draw our attention to problems of understanding and explanation, of representation, and of identity that bedevil the traveler and the anthropologist alike, and has done so with great ambivalence, creativity, and sense of irony. It is in this sense, therefore, that, as Walt Whitman so eloquently affirmed, he was large, he contained multitudes.

One-Term President?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:24:54 -0500

nybooks:

Garry Wills
Barack Obama paying his respects as the bodies of eighteen American soldiers killed in Afghanistan were returned to the United States, Dover Air Force Base, October 29, 2009 (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux)
I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.

These are the arguments that have kept us in losing efforts before. They are the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War. They are the arguments that made President George W. Bush pass on two wars to his successor.

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"Before no other country on the planet does the United States kneel and plead like this. In other..."

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:06:51 -0500

“

Before no other country on the planet does the United States kneel and plead like this. In other trouble spots, America takes a different tone. It bombs in Afghanistan, invades Iraq and threatens sanctions against Iran and North Korea. Did anyone in Washington consider begging Saddam Hussein to withdraw from occupied territory in Kuwait?

But Israel the occupier, the stubborn contrarian that continues to mock America and the world by building settlements and abusing the Palestinians, receives different treatment. Another massage to the national ego in one video, more embarrassing praise in another.

”

- Gideon Levy in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz.

This latest ridiculous plea by Clinton that the Palestinians just concede on the construction of 3,000 more housing units in occupied territories as a precondition for talks with Israelis is yet another example of how out of touch and timid the bipartisan non-commitment to a truly just and fair peace process is. What a sad, pathetic attempt at appeasing the Israelis on Iran. Shameful, really.

An Expert's Utopia

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:28:45 -0500

I just finished reading (well, skimming really) Vali Nasr’s new book, Forces of Fortune, which I purchased in a bundle along with the great Iranian poet, writer, and feminist, Simin Behbahani’s book of selected poems, A Cup of Sin. Behbahani’s book sits on my desk as a daily companion, consulted whenever I run out of inspiration or get frustrated. I must admit that I knew well ahead of actually receiving the bundle in the mail that I was only going to be pleased with one of these books; regardless, dissertation duty obliged me to mine for myself and see.

I suppose it’s a consequence of public fame for certain professionals to publish every droplet of speculative thought, be they actually thoughtful or not, while their star is still lit and their professional utility still very much in demand (how else could one explain the proliferation of mini-essays masquerading as books - font size 22 with 3 inch margins - on virtually every subject in the humanities and social sciences?). That’s where we find Nasr these days: having won notoriety and praise the world over after publishing the best-seller, The Shia Revival, he is now a much sought-after man, serving as senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke’s Af-Pak portfolio and serenading would-be government players at the Council on Foreign Relations. Some gig for a once obscure academic studying once obscure Pakistani extremists. But Nasr is a “renowned Middle East expert” (CFR) now and “expert” advice on the Middle East he must dispense. Ordinarily, I would have no problem with this designation, and I more often than I like seek out and read up on advice by Middle East experts whose obsessions with this-or-that aspect of Islamist ideology, civil society, demography, resources, etc. are sometimes very enlightening and thoughtful indeed. But I’m absolutely appalled when these same experts feel compelled to revert to dogmatism and ready-made formulas in attempting to “shed light” on an issue. The result more often than not is the familiar parade of “counter-intuitive” wishes disguised as facts.

Alas, such is the case with Nasr’s latest book, in which he sets out to reveal the hidden driver for change in the Muslim world: the “upwardly mobile middle class of entrepreneurs, investors, professionals, and avid consumers.” It’s the middle class, stupid! Oh yes, that familiar perversion of Max Weber’s thesis! To Nasr, “The road to human rights, social freedoms, and democracy runs through business growth and economic progress.” This is especially so in the case of Iran, where the “strong interests of the West are in seeing [it] line up with, not against, the logic of economic change; to yield to a rising business sector and a new middle class that would change politics and religion and then amplify the same trend in the Arab world.” If any of this sounds familiar it’s because it was “amplified” the world over by a fringe group of ex-CFRers in the early 90s after the fall of the Soviet Union: with the “end of history” mostly in sight, it’s time to let free markets do their magic, and then just kick back and hear freedom ring from Bucharest to Tashkent. We all know how that went and continues to go. So does Nasr, that once obscure yet brilliant scholar, really mean to tell us that the multiple, intersecting national, religious, ethnic, civil, ideological (one can go on) histories of Muslim societies will simply wither in the face of commercial and economic imperatives? From our (i.e. Western) perspective, yes: the real battle for the “soul” of the Muslim world is neither cultural nor ideological but commercial.

That this view is misbegotten for the way it betrays a sense of history or familiarity with the major trends in the region is obvious enough. But that it is ~~articulated~~ pontificated by a once respected scholar of the region for reasons having more to do with ingratiation and flattery than anything remotely resembling serious scholarship is downright shameful. The book begins with that devilish assumption (commonly and credulously accepted by most Western observers) that “Muslims” (Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Afghans, Pakistanis, …) are a fundamentally troubled lot - they need to be liberated from themselves. But whereas the blunt orientalist of yesteryear used to ask “How shall I discipline and bring to submission this wretched Neanderthal?,” today’s compassionate expert wonders “How must we help them to help themselves?” Nasr is actually more blunt:

“Commerce, as David Hume and the other great minds of the Scottish Enlightenment liked to point out, softens manners and makes a politics based on reason and deliberation, rather than fighting and romanticism, far more imaginable.”

One wonders where Nasr (and his editors at Simon & Schuster) were during this past summer’s post-election drama (a saga that still continues, by the way) in Iran. Were/are the millions of opposition protesters pouring onto the streets actually a pack of once overly “romatic,” sentimental, or backward brutes who had been “softened” into “reason” through commerce? Or were/are they actually an amalgam of concerned citizens of different socioeconomic, cultural, religious, and educational backgrounds who were/are fed up with their unrepresentative government. They resolved to participate in the elections in the interest of “reason and deliberation,” and they were violently confronted by a military-industrial-religious complex headed by charlatan businessmen of Iran’s underground economy. The road to democracy, contrary to the neoliberal/neoconservative wet-dream of its so-called experts runs through power relations in society, not commerce. In a democracy it is the citizens who control the levers of power through their active participation in civil society. That someone like Nasr should be so clumsy with the history of ideas that lurk behind this much-contested ideal is perhaps a sign of how even a most distinguished, independent scholar can succumb to the forces of fame and fortune.

Contrast this sorry state of affairs in experts-world with the lifetime of authentic grace and proven independence of mind as exemplified by Simin Behbahani. There is much that I can and will write about her service to literature and the arts inside and outside of Iran, but for now, since this post is getting rather long, I thought I would relay her poem entitled “Inheritance”, which I think serves as a nice antidote to the kinds of wisdom emanating from Washington and New York City think tanks. The first three lines could have been written directly to someone like Nasr.

(1956)

Calm down, my child, calm down.

End this childish gaiety and boundless oblivion to pain.

Look at my body withering in pain.

Calm down, my child, calm down.

My heart is heavy. I am restless, bewildered, mad.

Mourning the death of true friends.*

…

O dear child, on such a day

the pages were ripped from the book of love

and thrown in a fire of hatred and rage.

O dear child, on such a day

so many blossoms of love and hope withered,

so many were carried by the wind to an unmarked grave.

On this sad, sad day

not even a cloud sheds a tear on their graves,

not even a breeze carries their fragrance.

You don’t know, dear child,

how hard it is to bear this pain:

it is killing me and I can’t moan.

My lips are sewn. What else can I do?

The hate you see in my eyes,

take it for safekeeping in your heart.

Of my worldly possessions this is your inheritance. Guard it well!

*The time the poem refers to is that of the execution of the first group of twelve officers after the 1953 coup.

Perhaps you ought to purchase the same bundle and decide for yourself which of these two Iranian minds explains more about the past, present and future of Iran. It’s a no contest for me, and I intend to “guard it well”.

The Worst Column of the Year

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:48:29 -0400

The Worst Column of the Year

LRB @ 30 Special Issue

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:14:00 -0400

CONTENTS:

In a major essay, Jacqueline Rose investigates the history and practice of ‘honour killing’ in its many contexts - religious, cultural, linguistic.

Hilary Mantel diagnoses nine types of hypochondria.

Julian Barnes goes sailing with Maupassant.

Troubled by the campaign for the release of Roman Polanski, Jenny Diski recalls being raped as a teenager.

Jeremy Harding looks into what will happen to the detainees when Guantánamo Bay is closed, and the real reasons they were put there in the first place.

Julian Bell reads Van Gogh’s letters.

Alan Bennett on writing and rehearsing his new play, The Habit of Art.

Colm Tóibín on John Cheever: his family, his sexuality, his hatred of the suburbs, his drinking - and his stories.

Thomas Nagel analyses the idea of the self.

John Lanchester exhumes Lehman Brothers.

Jonathan Raban remembers learning to read: first from his mother, later from Empson.

Andrew O’Hagan: ‘Please don’t tell my mum.’

Frank Kermode on the unacknowledged greatness of William Golding.

Daniel Soar points out some surprising similarities between the work of Sebastian Faulks and Paradise Lost.

Short Cuts: Thomas Jones on Bio Insecurity

At the Movies: Michael Wood on Agnès Varda

At the British Museum: Peter Campbell on Moctezuma

Poems by John Ashbery and Charles Simic

David Ignatius’s Helicopter Journalism

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:59:33 -0400

In case you missed Michael Massing’s excellent observation in the CJR of David Ignatius’s “above-it-all” journalism. That most journalists are either too timid or incompetent to cover Iraq properly is not that surprising, but what is bewildering is how the generals (and the biggest titan of them all, Patraeus, no less) on the ground whose status as oracles of the battle-tested are supposed to give us a realistic picture of events at the local level seem to so “above-it-all”! Ignatius should go back to writing spy novels for all I care - he ceased being even remotely interesting long, long time ago.

Anthony Shadid, though… now there’s a journalist.

China's Boom: The Dark Side in Photos

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:04:43 -0400

nybooks:

Orville Schell
A family of five children who emigrated to Inner Mongolia from the nearby Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region to find work in the Heilonggui Industrial District, April 10, 2005. The oldest child is nine years old; the youngest is less than two. Photographs by Lu Guang (courtesy of Contact Press Images).
I have seen some woeful scenes of industrial apocalypse and pollution in my travels throughout China, but there are very few images that remain vividly in my mind. This is why the photographs of Lu Guang are so important. A fearless documentary photographer who lives in China’s southern province of Zhejiang and runs a photo studio and lab that funds his myriad trips around China, Lu photographs the dark consequences of China’s booming but environmentally destructive economic development in ways that stay with you.

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susheela: THE UNIVERSALITY OF GRIEF This extraordinary and...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 18:50:30 -0400

susheela:

THE UNIVERSALITY OF GRIEF

This extraordinary and heartbreaking photo taken at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Centre in eastern Cameroon shows a family of grief-stricken chimpanzees mourning the death of a fellow ape named Dorothy. (Photo: Monica Szczupider / Solent via the Telegraph)

(via nerdgasms:inothernews)

"Well, yes. She is a muse for me in the sense that a muse is someone who makes you better than you..."

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:12:00 -0400

“Well, yes. She is a muse for me in the sense that a muse is someone who makes you better than you are. I think I am a better director with her, because she believes that I am better than I am, and that blind faith gives me a lot of strength.”

- Penélope Cruz and Pedro Almodóvar - Cinematic Soulmates

Great piece.

From Lapham’s Quarterly.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:59:00 -0400

From Lapham’s Quarterly.

James Bamford talks to Nathan Thrall about the politics behind...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 18:39:21 -0400

James Bamford talks to Nathan Thrall about the politics behind the Bush administration’s evasion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the technology and scope of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program.

LRB @ 30

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:26:00 -0400

My favorite publication in the universe, London Review of Books, marks its 30th year: A salute to the writers and editors who created “the house magazine of the intellectual elite”. An interview with Mary-Kay Wilmers, the grande dame of the LRB, on her controversial views and her family links to spies and psychoanalyst (and more).

Human Rights Watch Reporting on Israel

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:13:24 -0400

Human Rights Watch Reporting on Israel:

garysick:

As some may know, I have a long association with Human Rights Watch. Recently HRW has come under attack for its reporting on Israel. Below is the text of a letter from the Executive Director of HRW, Ken Roth, which was published in Haaretz newspaper, replying to these charges:

Critics of Human Rights Watch’s work on Israel raise three main points. First, they say we disproportionately focus on Israel, and neglect other countries in the Middle East. Second, they claim our research methodology is flawed - relying on witnesses with an agenda. Third, as recently expressed by our founding chairman Robert Bernstein, they argue that we should focus on “closed” countries such as China rather than “open” societies like Israel.

I reject all three claims.

Human Rights Watch currently works on seventeen countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Iran, Egypt, Libya and Saudi Arabia. Israel accounts for about 15 percent of our published output on the region. The Middle East and North Africa division is one of 16 research programs at Human Rights Watch and receives 5 percent of our total budget. Israel is a small fraction of what we do.

Our war coverage in the region has documented violations by all sides. No international human rights organization has done more to highlight the war crimes of Hezbollah and Hamas, challenging their leaders and the Arab public to think critically about the unlawful conduct of these groups. Our Civilian Protection Initiative, launched five years ago, has sought the support of Arab civil society leaders to discredit terrorist attacks.

The research methodology employed in these wars is the same we use around the world: in-depth private interviews with multiple witnesses. We corroborate their accounts with field visits, ballistics evidence, medical records and other means. Unfortunately, since late 2008, the Israel Defense Forces have refused to meet with us or answer any of our detailed written questions.

The problem of witness intimidation is not new, and we take it into account.

Contrary to the claims of some critics, in Gaza we found there were Palestinians who would speak about violations by Hamas. Palestinian victims and witnesses of abuse were the primary source for a report we published on Hamas torture and executions - a report cited publicly by the Israeli government.

We apply the same international human rights standards to all countries, open and closed. We work extensively on China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Iran, but we also investigate abuses in the American criminal justice system, police killings in India, “disappearances” in Sri Lanka, and migrants’ rights in Europe. All governments, regardless of their political system, are obliged to uphold the same international norms.

At the heart of our critics’ arguments lies the view that we should hold Israel to lower standards. There is no dispute that the country was founded on the ashes of genocide and is surrounded by hostile states and armed groups. But some believe that these circumstances give Israel’s democratic government the right to take whatever steps it deems necessary to keep the country safe.

A country’s conditions do not remove its obligations under international law, though. Whether a state is an aggressor or acting in self-defense, whether it faces a regular army or insurgents that commit abuses, the laws of war apply, imposing a duty to minimize civilian harm.

And being a democratic country prevents Israel from committing wartime abuses no more than it stopped the United States from torture and unlawful detentions at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

The serious Israeli abuses we documented also put the country at greater risk. By failing to hold those responsible to account, Israel increases anger and resentment among the Palestinian population and in the wider Arab world, and undercuts moderates who wish to pursue peace.

Our critics have every right to challenge the substance of our findings on Israel or any other country, though they rarely find errors. But if they want to challenge repressive regimes and combat armed groups that terrorize civilians, they will not serve that cause by trying to exempt Israel from human rights laws that are the best defense against such abuse. Nor does it help to attack those organizations that are working to uphold those laws around the world.

The writer is executive director of Human Rights Watch.

Iraq: A Bigger Threat Than Bombs

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:40:00 -0400

nybooks:

Joost R. Hiltermann

An Iraqi weeps as he walks away from the ministries of justice and labour following the suicide bombing on October 25, 2009 (Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)

The horrific twin bombings in Baghdad on October 25 that killed over 150 people, including children in two daycare centers, and injured many more, could easily be seen as supporting the increasingly common contention that Iraq remains profoundly unstable. That such an attack could take place in the center of the capital might demonstrate that security forces under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are incapable of providing security; and that the United States will leave chaos in its wake when combat troops depart ten months from now. But the attacks must be seen in the perspective of deeper problems, even if the claim about Iraq’s instability is valid.

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Joost is someone I know and respect deeply, so to hear him sound the alarm bells on Iraq makes me very concerned about what’s happening on the ground. Will Iraq descent into chaos once again?

J Street II

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:36:55 -0400

Philip Weiss writes:

“It only seems appropriate to me to begin my posts post-J Street in a celebratory spirit. The ways the organization falls short I will come to, but I must tip my cap to a new Jewish group that filled a hall in Washington with 1500 people, including many congressmen and senators, and these people did not boo Zbig Brzezinski, even as his name was mentioned again and again, and did not cheer sanctions for Iran, and broke into applause whenever Palestinian human rights were mentioned. In the realms of Jewish history and American power politics, this was a huge development. It is little wonder that I ran into Dan Fleshler looking stunned and starry-eyed, marveling that such a day had finally come to pass. Or that I saw Jonathan Chait of the New Republic glowering as if he had just been forced to dine on porcupine. The institutions that Chait is engaged with, the New Republic and AIPAC, had just taken a giant hit. Celebration. The status quo Israel lobby is under assault from within the Jewish community, the battle has begun in earnest. Whether it will have any effect on Palestinian freedom is yet to be determined.”