The Republic of Dissent

Pour saluer Christopher Hitchens

 

I liked Christopher Hitchens even when I disagreed with him. He had the elegance to  resist  conventional wisdom, easy arguments and the temptation to be agreeable and blandly likable.

In short, Hitch was boldly relevant and  I will miss him because he was substantively and abrasively authentic!

Sex writing

My reaction to this sugary excerpt from Natalia Antonova is ah!:

Good fiction features a lot of bad sex writing for the same reason as porn actors (Sasha Grey immediately springs to mind) have a tough time crossing over into mainstream film – society's desperate need to compartmentalise sex.

Literature should be, well, literary, we reason – for stimulation of the brain, not other parts. The ghettoisation of eroticism is the reason why you'd be hard pressed to find a "serious" book review that praises an author's approach to sex scenes, no matter how difficult they may have been to write.(...)Good writers are hyper-aware, neurotic creatures, which is probably another reason why so many tend to fail miserably (or entertainingly) when writing about an activity that puts much of the brain on autopilot. (...)Good sex writers, like bad sex writers, explore the dark side of desire. But bad sex writing is often a tough guy act – an attempt to intimidate the reader with shocking detail – whereas good sex writers invite the reader to explore strange territory.

 

You are who you are truly in bed!

Sugary excerpt of the day from Norm Geras:

A psychiatrist once told me that you can get to know people's real natures in bed, and that our sexual personas were the truest manifestations of our actual natures. But we are often ashamed by our true natures, partly because they can conflict so horribly with the characters we present on the pavement or by the fireside. As a result, we do our best to keep our secret lives just that.

I want to agree with Geras. I cannot disagree for I know he is on to something, but I cannot agree either because I know that for too many, sex has become about performance or rather performing.  Ah la jouissance n'est plus ce qu'elle était parce qu'elle a été désinfectée par sa banalisation et une gourmandise niaise (There are advantages to learning/knowing French, one of the non-negligible ones is to fully get me).

French as the language of the infinitesimal

The sentence of the morning is from the greatest writer of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett writing to Georges Duthiut:

Never understood so clearly as when reading you, not even when reading Proust to what extent French is the language of the infinitesimal.

That explains why French is the best language for poetry!

The attractiveness of unattractiveness [in literature]

Sugary excerpt from Lionel Shriver, whose writing I find as sobering as a good cup of Kenyan coffee:

[...]do we always want to read about characters who conform to current political conventions – who don’t smoke, never say anything bigoted, and always recycle their yoghurt pots? Or who conform to our private code of behaviour – in which case, fiction writers might write for niche markets, their novels labelled “suitable for vegetarians” (no characters eat meat) or “does not contain nuts” (what a pity, a novel without nuts). Surely if fiction recorded the doings only of good campers who anguish about climate change and buy fair trade coffee, novels would be insufferably dull.(...)Goodness is not only boring but downright annoying. In fiction and reality both, multilingual, loftily-educated ponces on missions to save the rainforest are probably pains in the bum. Thus, however readily I might construct exemplars who pick up litter and volunteer at soup kitchens, this cheap courting of your approval might well backfire. Despite my heavy-handed stacking of the moral deck, you wouldn’t like them. Nick Hornby made exactly this point in his delightful novel How to Be Good, in which the main character’s determination to be virtuous – he gives away the family assets and invites homeless people to live in the house – is delectably repellent.

Mad men and race

Another munchable quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Mad Men, as I've said before, has taught me a lot about race -- even though there are virtually no black people on the show.

My smart-ass response is : may be it is because race is the best political fiction of all!

 

The real real thing

Sugary excerpt of the weekend from Elizabeth Lowry's review of Wendy Steiner's The Real Real Thing: The model in the mirror of art:

Today’s aesthetic controversies seem to turn specifically on the issues of truth-telling and the ethical treatment of the real in art. Oprah Winfrey’s indignation over authorial fraud can and often does make headlines – consider the furore when James Frey’s  account of his drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces (2003), and Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir, Angel at the Fence (2008), were revealed to have been less than scrupulously factual. “Readers demand their money back for memoirs that lie; publishers rush to withdraw unsold copies from bookstores; editors, denying collusion with their fraudulent authors, are nevertheless fired for their credulity.” The real thing is no longer enough – our touchstone now is the real real thing.

Race and American delusions

I have a problem with Bill Benzon's post on Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad at the Valve in which he compares them to Ike Turner and Sam Philips and finishes by suggesting that the solution is to get beyond the boundaries of language. Sugary excerpt:

The point of this exercise, no, this demonstration, is that language and its reasonings and arguments cannot, in principle, encompass everything. That life itself is greater than language goes without saying – or does it? What matters is how we conduct ourselves around and about, in the shadow of, language.

Because I believe as Eluard that les mots ne mentent pas, I have a problem with  what Benzon is demonstrating.  The attempt should never be to get beyond the boundaries of language, but to acknowledge them and to break them down. 

I know I promise to stop bashing constantly Obama (I believe that I'm doing it rationally and analytically), but I believe that his 2008 campaign showed that Benzon is wrong and that America's problem with race isn't about its people not being able to get along, but rather about their need to believe that race is all encompassing and that  it is about something grand, when it is about petty stuff and about that itch that Benzon seems to have to want Achebe and Conrad get along.  It is far too obvious that Achebe didn't want to get along with Conrad, but needed to punch him in the gut to affirm his own existence and to define in his own terms what it meant or rather didn't mean to be 'african' (my contention is that it doesn't mean anything for Achebe has much more in common with Joseph Conrad than he does with Ferdinand Oyono).

In short, my point to Benzon, to America, and to Americans  is get over it already! Race isn't about race and instead of obsessing about getting along or pretending that you want to or that you do get out your own way and stop being so self-involved!

Philosophy can be literature

The sugary except on which I'm going to munch on to have a meaningful and productive weekend is from David Winters's review of Gary Gutting's on French philosophy, Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960:

It is perfectly possible to read works of philosophy as if they were works of literature. To read them without concern for their ‘truth content,’ attending instead to what leads them not to describe the world, but to create worlds, or to propose worlds at odds with our own. In the end, philosophy never really does succeed in describing anything. It tries to articulate what life is like, but it fails, at all times, in all places. This is the very thing that reveals and redeems it as literature.

Women, men, and writing about sex

Something about this passage by Monique Ruffey bugs me:

(...)sex is still riddled with social stigma and taboo. Church and state still patrol what is deemed OK, moral, loving and safe. Anyone who chooses to write about sex will attract stinging criticism from the moral right and so, relatively speaking, sexual memoirs are still rare. And they are mostly written by women.

Men, by and large, leave this subject alone. Somewhere it's a given that men don't have anything too reflective to say about sex, or they feel silenced by feminists. Where is the male Suzanne Portnoy, the male Melissa P? What men will write honestly about their highs and lows, their triumphs, their sexual sorrows? What man is brave enough to express himself freely about his desires? Few. My guess is that male sexuality has been so heavily associated with violence that men suffer an even stronger taboo than woman. Best keep quiet.

Really? I must be living  in a different planet than Roffey for it seems to me that the problem about sex or rather about your sex life is that you have to be able to view it about than a pornographic and a solely pleasurable/carnivorous experience, which makes it a challenge difficult for both sexes, but particularly for men. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

To stop reading fiction

The best sentences I read all weekend are from Philip Roth:

I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did. (...)I wised up ... ”

I find it difficult to stop reading Roth no matter how much he bugs me.

Feminism, ambition, and diversion

Another great point from Chris Dillow whose writing I find addictive (it is both a good and a bad thing):

So, far from applauding ambition we should, in most cases, oppose it.
Of course, everything I’ve said applies to men’s ambition as well as women’s. So why pick on feminism? In one big sense we shouldn’t. But there are two things that worry me.
One is that this particular form of feminism helps to legitimate ambition. And people are never more ruthless than when they believe they have right on their side.
The other is that feminism - in this sense - is a diversion. In encouraging women to climb up hierarchies, it deflects attention from the question: should our economic and political life be structured hierarchically at all?

Feminism is always a diversion because it has refused to evolve and to widen its perspectives on gender.

Shoot the Slut

I agree almost completely and for different reasons with Amanda Marcotte on this:

We’re in the throes of a cultural bout of misogyny, and its focus is on sex. And the people who pay the highest price are women whose access to abortion and contraception is threatened by this national game of “Shoot the Slut”. 

The word 'slut' is in need of a re/definition and an explanation of why being a slut is the worst thing that a woman can be.

Fury!

Sugary excerpt of the best article I read last weekend, Amy Kazmin's portrait in the Financial times of Arundhati Roy:

(...) her fiction writing has been on the backburner, while she has dedicated herself to political activism, travelling to remote corners of the country, attending political meetings and writing essays on topics from India’s dam-building to its judicial corruption and its abuses in the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir. “You get drawn into a world where people realise, here is somebody who is not frightened of saying something. All of the last 11 years has been unplanned. It’s been a process of deepening your understanding,” she says.
In her political writing, Roy has been scathing in her description of India’s two-decade old economic liberalisation programme – which is widely credited with bringing unprecedented opportunities to many – and seemingly contemptuous of the emerging middle class.
Her diatribes have made her something of a hate figure for many Indian nationalists. There is also a feeling among a number of liberals and left-leaning activists, who have a concern for social justice – and for many of the issues she raises – that her strident polemics are too extreme. “I know I alienate people, but there isn’t any possibility of writing about these things where everybody is going to agree with you,” she says. “I am not scared of alienating the middle class. I am saying what I think. I know the entire establishment obviously disagrees with it, and would like me to shut up, or soften it or be more tactical, but I am saying things in a space that no one says.”
“When I write something, I have to spend a few days filtering out the fury,” she adds. “I don’t do anything to be deliberately provocative.”
Certainly there is plenty in India to be angry – even outraged – about. I ask tentatively whether she really feels that economic reforms have brought no benefits at all. I am thinking of the remote villages, and impoverished slum dwellers, now connected to a wider world by mobile phones. After a moment’s reflection, she answers.
“It’s as though you had this churning,” she says, slowly. “You had a feudal and very unequal society. In this churning, this thin milk separates into a thick layer of cream, and a lot of water that can be just slop. The thick layer of middle class that has been created becomes a great market. Suddenly, there are so many people who need cars and A/Cs and TV, and that becomes a universe of itself. Of course it looks great. Then there is this unseen thing that’s just being drifted off.”

Winning

Sugary excerpt of the day is the beginning of David Hawkes must-read article in the Times Literary Supplement :

A Martian visiting the United States early in 2011 could have been forgiven for assuming that the most momentous event taking place was the public disintegration of the actor Charlie Sheen. The nation was captivated by Sheen’s YouTube broadcasts, in which he repeatedly insisted that, despite his manifest problems, he was nonetheless “winning”. This seemed to strike a chord in the popular mind. It was as if Sheen had happened upon a fundamental, but generally unstated, truth about our current condition. Where competition is the basis of social life, “winning” is an end in itself. If the purpose of life is success, then “winning” automatically brings redemption from any kind of turpitude or disgrace. The pejorative effects of megalomania or drug addiction are negated by the simple, irrefutable fact of “winning”

For some weird reasons, those sentences takes me back to a segment on last Sunday's 60 minutes about the war in Afghanistan in which Lara Logan asked a high ranking officer whether the US was winning the war. The question was odd, because the question isn't about winning and losing, but rather about justice and means. The point is that in America and increasingly in the rest of the world the focus placed on winning shortchanges the debate and encourages short-termism.

We need to talk about French machismo and chauvinism

Sugary excerpt of the day from Isabelle Germain on l'affaire DSK:

(...) in France, the media reaction to the attempted rape charge confirms that when a rape or sexual assault is reported, the alleged perpetrator quickly morphs into victim – and vice versa.
The news of Strauss-Kahn's arrest for allegedly assaulting a housekeeper at the hotel where he was staying immediately prompted astonishment: how could this successful politician take the risk of committing an offence that could lead, in the US, to 30 years behind bars? Conversely, was this in fact a political conspiracy, contrived by his powerful enemies? Friends and allies were certainly quick to rush to his defence: Bernard-Henri Lévy has vouched for his good character and Robert Badinter, husband of prominent feminist Élisabeth, insisted on French radio that he had been unfairly and deliberately "destroyed before any trial". Either way, the spotlight focuses on the potentially ruined politician, and not his alleged victim.

Fast comment: when you listen to French media discussing l'affaire DSK, the US is described as a moralist and unrefined country too influenced by religious zealots and feminists and whose barbaric judicial system is in the middle ages!

One of the greatest French contradiction has always been that it wants both to stand apart and to set the norms for civilization. I can't even imagine what would be happening if the shoe wee in the other foot, no actually I can imagine with how pleasure the French press would be saying 'Hey this is France not America, get over it!'

That said my love for France is eternal! It is something greater and stronger than both of us!

Congo, Mobutu, Stendhal and authenticité

Sugar excerpt from VS Naipaul, which needs no commentary, although I have to say that it bugs me:

One day in Kinshasa I had the inspiration to leave the hotel and take a taxi to the university. They were very all very nice, very welcoming, although they had no idea who I was or what I did. And I thought then, here are all these very bright people, whose minds are going to be turned to lead very soon - this was in Mobutu's country, and they had to be turned to lead if they were to earn a living. And I wondered how this could be done. And I had a feeling that it was done through this old belief. And Mobutu gave to it a nice name, authenticité. There are these brilliant young people who would talk to you about Stendhal, something so far from their experience, and talking quite intelligently about it. And yet when you met them in their next incarnation as government officers, all that had gone away.

The convenient time for outrage

Sugary except of a good and worth-reading review (better than the silly and petty one by Adam Kirsch in the New Republic) of Stéphane Hessel's Indignez-vous (translated as Time for outrage in the UK) by Sudhir Hazareesingh:

At the same time, in its denunciation of the moral order and conformism of official French institutions, this pamphlet succinctly captures the French zeitgeist (in a truly sinister fashion, Hessel’s alma mater the École Normale banned a meeting he was due to address in January on the issue of Palestine, on the grounds that it might threaten public order). Yet Hessel’s outrage also reflects the despair of many French progressives at the vapid and fissiparous state of the Left. He does not address or seek to transcend this fragmentation; indeed it might be argued that his appeal remains rooted in a moralist individualism which inherently limits the scope for effective collective action. But Time for Outrage! compensates for this political deficiency by consummating the French rupture with the practices and values of Sarkozism: its hollowness and vulgarity, its obsession with demonizing immigrants and Islam, its failure to tackle France’s endemic social and economic problems, and its consistent pandering to the neo-Vichyist rhetoric of the Front National. The latter policy has boomeranged spectacularly: the French President’s popularity has plummeted in recent months, while support for the extreme Right has grown correspondingly. In early March 2011 an opinion poll on voting intentions for next year’s presidential elections placed the new Front National leader Marine Le Pen ahead of Nicolas Sarkozy (and all other candidates) – a trend which adds another element to Hessel’s list of causes for collective indignation, and makes his analogy with the French Resistance even more compelling than perhaps he might have imagined.

Shocking confession: In spite of myself, I got a copy of Hessel's pamphlet. I haven't read it. I'm waiting to see if it is going to stand the test of time. That said I'm going to steal Hazareesingh's expression, French zeitgeist, it will stand the test of time!

Reading and sympathy

Quote of the day from Stephen Abell from his must-read essay on J.M. Coetzee and what he calls the limits of sympathy:

Reading is a test of our sympathetic abilities, our capacity to connect with the thoughts and feelings of someone else, and so stands for our ability to exist in, and respond to, a wider community than ourselves.

The N word and cleanliness

I agree with Roger Ebert on this:

Anyone offended by the use of that word the way it is used in Huckleberry Finn cannot read and possibly cannot think.
The word is spoken by an illiterate 11-year-old runaway on the Mississippi River of the mid-19th Century. He has been schooled by his society to regard the runaway slave Jim as a Nigger and a thief. Jim's crime: Stealing himself from his owner. Huck reasons his way out of ignorant racism and into enlightenment and grace. He makes that journey far in advance of many of his "educated" contemporaries. Part of reading the novel is learning to be alert about how the N-Word is used in that process.

In an outbreak of mealy-minded Political Correctness, an edition of Huckleberry Finn has now been published which meticulously replaces the word nigger with the word slave. The argument is often put forward that a young reader might be traumatized by finding a word in a 19th century novel that he hears a hundred times a day. If I were that young reader, I would be more disturbed by the notion that I was incapable of learning how and why it was used.

One of my favorite Eluard's quotes is, 'les mots ne mentent pas' (words don't lie). Nowadays, people have this childish notion that words are the problem when it is quite obvious that they are not. I'm wondering how did the apparent consensus that cleaning up language was the way to cleansing a society started and why too many believe that cleanliness is the surest way to Godliness as if people had to stop being imperfect. Is accepting that people are bad and can have disgusting thoughts and beliefs about one another really that unacceptable nowadays ? The answer seems to be yes, and it is a further proof of intelligence or rather common sense as Thomas Paine would say has lost a lot of ground .

Gender as a nonnegotiable gift

Sugary excerpt from the New York Times' portrait of Priscilla Shirer, a female woman evangelist in Baton Rouge:

Shirer and many conservative Christians believe that the Bible defines gender as a divinely ordained set of desires and duties inherent in each man and woman since the Garden of Eden. Gender is not an act or a choice, but a nonnegotiable gift. To these Christians, the story of Adam and Eve’s creation granted man authority over woman, and they understand the New Testament teachings of Paul and his comrades — in particular, that wives should submit to their husbands — not as cultural relics of the first century but as universal teachings that Christians apply today.

In an era when sexual liberation has saturated American culture, when women are climbing the corporate ladder and bearing fewer children, and mainline churches are ordaining women and homosexuals, conservative evangelicals are escalating their counteroffensive. Many call themselves complementarians, signaling their belief that God ordained complementary — not identical or flexible — roles for men and women.

Well, my reaction is only in America ! That isn't quite accurate only in America, Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. I know that  many Americans don't like to believe their fundamentalists can be identical or as disturbing and dangerous to the ones of other countries as if they were more sophisticated and superior because they were Americans and  America is after all a great nation (an opinion that I share), but that reluctance is solely based on foolish pride and snobbish chauvinism. In fact, one could make the argument that because America is as great as it is, its fundamentalists are worst, scarier than those of say a nation like Afghanistan (I'm not yet willing to go that far). What will happen to the US when/if its government and more importantly, its judiciary cannot ensure that there is an unconditional separation between church and state? The future doesn't look good.

Žižek's world

After reading Christian Lorentzen's account of a Žižek's signing in my village (Manhattan), I'm still wondering whether  he has become what he despises the most: a less posh version of BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy). The conclusion may be that one should solely read his work and shut down whatever else he does and says because it is meaningless theater. Sugary excerpt:

A long line of fans formed around the stage at Cooper Union to have Slavoj Zizek sign books. They rattled off their names for the philosopher's dedication.

"Ian," said one.

"Like the writer," said Mr. Zizek, "McEwan."

"Kelvin," said another.

"Like the stupid temperature."

"Austin," said a third.

"Like Texas."

"Anna," said a fourth, "with two n's. I'm from Denmark."

"Denmark," said Mr. Zizek. "I like Denmark because secretly I am a fascist. Keep the trains running on time. It's the only way to stop Hitler!"

"Gideon," said a fifth.

"He was a warrior. Paul Robeson, the greatest American leftist singer, has a song about him."

"Elias," said a sixth.

"Did you see the terrible movie Denzel Washington made about the Bible?" Mr. Zizek asked. "The Book of Eli?"

"Chris," said a seventh.

"Are you Christ without the t?"

The celebrity radical had just barreled through 90 minutes of his trademark political paradoxes, pulling his beard, wiping his brow and waving his fist in the air. "Today it is capitalism that is revolutionary. ... The impossible and the possible are exploding into excess. I am told that here in New York a man can have his penis cut in two. ... So you can do it with two women. You can achieve immortality. You can go into space. But maintaining a little bit of health care is impossible."

Serious-minded humanism

Norm Geras on humanism responding to Mary Midgley:

Any serious-minded humanist today ought to know enough about humanity's flaws to be protected against the temptations of a posture of worship. In addition, humanism can be, and for many humanists is, an entirely irreligious doctrine, or commitment, shorn of the trappings of religious observance. Equally, no humanist is bound to the belief that human beings are central to the cosmos; humanists can absorb what we know from research about the universe, which (as things stand) is that we are not at all central to it.

I have to admit that I have never taken humanism seriously even since munching, digesting, to integrate finally in my psyche that humanity is loved in general in order to have to love somebody in particular. In short, humanism is like veganism, even when it is serious; it remains incredibly self-centered and absorbed. Those aren't always flaws, but they are often limitations (which can be delicious in erudite people) difficult to overcome even with g.

Inside jokes

I agree with Helen Searls on this:

(...) conceitedly poking fun at the ignorance and stupidity of the right is all that excites liberals today. In the run-up to Tuesday’s congressional elections, there are no political causes to unite or inspire Democrats. There is nothing to stand up for. Democrats are as turned off from politics as everyone else in the country. But while the Tea Party folk try to make something vaguely political out of such disillusionment, many liberals seem to have given up. Inside jokes are all that remain.

The eternally Puritan nation

Suary excerpt of the early morning from Roger Ebert:

America has a historical Puritan streak, and is currently in the midst of another upheaval of zeal from radical religionists. They know what is bad for us. They would prefer to burn us at a metaphorical stake, but make do with bizarre imprecations about the dire consequences of our sin. Let me be clear: I am not speaking of sexual behavior that is obviously evil and deserves legal attention. But definitions differ. Much of their wrath is aimed at gays. I consider homosexuality an ancient, universal and irrefutable fact of human nature. Some radicals actually blamed it for 9/11. For them the ideal society must be Saudi Arabia's, which I consider pathologically sick.

I don't disagree with Ebert, I just believe that people like him (I am more like him than not) also want to tell peope whom they disagree with what kind of persons they ought to be (good people thinking good thoughts) and what what they ought to believe. It seems to me that the more you moralize your politics and your beliefs, the more likely you are to believe that they have to be absolute and that people  have to believe what you believe to be acceptable.  That's my reason for loving Eluard's quote Le bien et le mal doivent leur existence à l'abus de quelques erreurs.

America, the problem state

Via Democracy in America, this interesting and pretentiously vacuous quote from Jonathan Franzen, which I need to find a way to read without hemorrhaging:

(....) America has emerged, even in its own estimation, as a problem state. That is, there are many criticisms one could make, as early as, well, our treatment of the Indians. It goes way back. And our long relationship with slavery—there have been some problems with the country at many points. And then the Cold War, we were certainly culpable. But the degree to which we are almost a rogue state, and causing enormous trouble around the world in our attempt to preserve our freedom to drive SUVs (...) It does make one wonder, what is it in the national character that is making us such a problem state? And I think a kind of mixed-up, childish notion of freedom—and perhaps, really, truly, who left Europe to go over there? It was all the malcontents, it was all the people who were not comfortable getting along with others.

Clearly, not all writers, whether or not they are good and thus given the presumption of intellectuality are great thinkers.  Nevertheless, it is disappointing to see evidence of their intellectual laziness.

Betraying the tradition of the Enlightenment

I agree with Brendan O'Neill on this:

(...)The great irony of the French government’s restrictions on the burqa in public places, and to a certain extent the Belgian government’s restrictions, is that they have been presented as being in the tradition of the Enlightenment. This is about liberating women from oppression, they say, and therefore it is a good, Enlightened, Voltairish thing to do.

In fact, banning a religious garment is counter to the spirit of the Enlightenment. What these authoritarians forget is that the Enlightenment sprang from a defence of religious liberty. The Enlightenment has its origins, not in any attempt to censor certain minority religious symbols, but in a belief that minority religions, even ones we consider ‘heretical’, should be protected from state intervention, censorship and oppression.

So in calling for the state to restrict a certain form of religious expression, these pseudo-Enlightened censors are doing something that the original men of the Enlightenment would have considered pretty outrageous.

Let the 'uneducated' have a hug

Sugary excerpt of Saturday is from Laurie Essig:

(...)there is no point in getting people the facts.  They won’t believe you anyway.  There was one hopeful piece of information from the Michigan study, however.  What people need is a hug, not facts.   The researchers found that the better people felt about themselves, the more likely they were to accept information that was inconsistent with their world views.  In other words, if you told the idiots screaming out that there’s no global warming that they were in fact “good people” and that you “care about them,” they might be more likely to listen to facts and not just “facts.”  So perhaps Anita Hill should just give Ginny Thomas a big hug and say “The very fact that you are still married to your husband, a real creep and I should know, means that you are loyal and dedicated.”  And perhaps the number of reasonable candidates running against Tea Party wing-nuts can just reach out and hug their opponents and say “You may be as ignorant of the U.S. Constitution as anyone on this earth, but you are not a bad person.”

Human rights in question

Sugary excerpt of the day from Andrew Brown's 'satire' on the existence of human rights :

We are told that the two qualities of human rights is that they are "self-evident" and "unassailable". This is like saying that the chief quality of porridge is its excellence as a material for building skyscrapers. The chief evidence for the existence of these unassailable and self-evident human rights is that we are told, by people who believe in them, that they are everywhere attacked and trampled. What difference does a right make if it doesn't change.(...)Everywhere that human rights have gone, terror and bloodshed have followed, from the French Revolution, which convulsed Europe in war for nearly thirty years, through to Stalin's Russia, where the constitution protected more rights than almost any other one has ever done, and now in the invasion of Iraq, where nearly people have died from our determination to impose rights and democracy. Of course the apologists will claim that these are perversions of the original idea. But why should we listen to the apologists, when they believe in something that doesn't even exist?

I have always found the term 'human rights' to be problematic because it was based on an assumption and because the word 'rights' cuts short an essential conservation about not its existence, its definition, and the problematic fact that it isn't accompanied by obligations. That said the fact that when reading Andrew Brown's piece, one questions its nature as a satire shows that 'human rights' have come to mean all things and nothing; they are solely a notion used to stop an uncomfortable and potentially dangerous dialogue on morality.

Cary Grant and Lady Gaga

The sentence of the day is from Michael Hinds's review of Morris Dickstein book's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression:

At least in the 1930s they had Cary Grant. We have Lady Gaga.

Is it reassuring or just solely depressing that pop art during depression is about flash, visually stimulating distractions from thought and analysis?

 

 

The illusory 'we'

Problematic words from Lindsay Johns to defend a worthy cause:

Parts of the black community, however, continue to rail against the whiteness of the canon and try to promote second or third tier black writers such as novelist
E Lynn Harris or poet James Weldon Johnson. They are abetted by trendy educationalists in the establishment who feel acute post-colonial guilt and wish to show their anti-racist credentials by stressing the “diversity” of works taught in schools.

As black people, we cannot change history, and should not try to reject knowledge because of its provenance. It would be far better to focus our attention on understanding the atrocities that have been committed in the name of the canon, or why the humanities have, on the evidence of history, so comprehensively failed to humanise.

We should accept the truth of history, which is that white men have dominated intellectual life in the west. Let’s not resist this; let’s run with it. It is western history that has indelibly shaped our consciousness. We live in Britain, not Timbuktu. We might hail from Africa or the Caribbean, but our lives, for better or for worse, are lived in the modern western world, and shaped by the traditions that have moulded it. If we acquaint ourselves with the grammars of the west, it will indubitably help us to understand it and then duly succeed here.

Hum, there isn't such a thing as a black people for experience. history, and the present show that race is only an artificial and  unifying force in societies where the message, because of the past or inculture, is that people's identities are shaped by the color of their skin and not by the reactions that people have to it thus conditioning or rather 'blackening' their experience. Blackness as whiteness is a blank slate where people put everything that they want not to have to justify their choices and to avoid the eternal burden that all human beings must bear the responsibility for their essence. It might be harsh to say it so bluntly but a writer who put  'race' before her/his art isn't a write for literature when it is about solely about color is denatured and is as artistic and sublime as junk food..

Evolved taste and snobbery

Sugary excerpt of the day from Roger Ebert whose blog is a must-read:

I ruffled some feathers after "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" was released in 2009. It was so stupid it was almost criminal. Noting that some of its fans considered it one of the greatest films ever made, I suggested perhaps they were not "sufficiently evolved." Oh, did that make people angry. What snobbery! Who did I think I was?

I was indeed a snob, if you agree with this definition: "A person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people." I do believe that. Not superior to all other people, but to some, most probably including those who think "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is a great film. That is not simply ego on my part. It is a faith that after writing and teaching about films for more than 40 years, my tastes are more evolved than those of a fanboy. It is quite possible to devise a defense of "T2RF," as its fans affectionately call it. One persuasive critic likened it to pop art. Well, okay. He had an argument, he had his reasons, he considered it in a particular context. But to argue I am a snob for not liking T2RF as much as "everybody does" devalues thought and experience.

What am I getting at here? The way to know more about anything is to deepen your experience of it.

Populism and liberalism

Fascinating stuff from William Hogeland:

(...) history suggests that American populists’ rejection of liberalism is a matter of principle, not of interest. Liberalism has long defined itself from a position of expertise and wisdom that it justifies as meritocracy, and for which it keeps reflexively congratulating itself. Whether lampooning populist farmers as rank yokels, or giving way to a thrilling panic about coast-to-coast violence, or patronizing millions of people’s supposed misguided tropisms, or even, like Lepore, subjecting right-wing enthusiasms to the reflective, nuanced consideration identical with today’s high-quality journalism, liberal claims to a monopoly on knowledge may be even more undemocratic than conservatives’ policies for distributing wealth upward. In America the deadlock between liberalism and populism may be unbreakable.

Arousing literature

Mary Elisabeth Williams poses the question of the day:

Is it entirely possible that someone out there reading a fictional account of a rape could become aroused?

Is it just me, but doesn't that sound like a limited question, one that makes two gross assumptions, the first being that sexual pleasure is always pornographic and  the second that the only trouble with rape is the lack of jouissance or just enjoyment?

I have to say that I'm not convinced that a novel can be pornographic and artistic or that if it makes rape pornographic, it is ought to be placed in the cemetery of forbidden books.

Obama, blood, origins and symbols of change

Self-indulgent fluff from A.Jay Adler which proves that America is stuck in the cesspool of identity politics and culturalism:

The Untied States, as now a long-time great power, is not aligned in the world political mind, or in the conservative mind, with one-time colonies, but with the civilization of their colonizers that it leads – and (here, now, is the point) their European, Western culture. However independently American culture may have developed from its European origins – so that Europeans themselves love to hate it and hate to love it – there are its origins nonetheless.

But we know that the nation is changing, if not in its origins – which cannot literally, and should never in its ideas and cultural foundation, be altered (we are always unalterably, in part, what we have been) – in its current and developing character. As much as the Right would seek, in its unceasing reactionary nature, to stave off modernity, the waters of the world flow and mix with ever diminishing impediment, to form new seas and spring new rivers, and nothing in the geopolitics of the earth, or the Untied States, will stop it.

Nothing represents the change more visibly than the election of the first Black president, a president whose father was born in Africa, not emigrant Europe, and whose place of birth was colonized in the post-Columbian era, not a colonizer in it. That is profound change. This president – this son of a man born in the colony when it was still a colony – takes office and (ah, you were wondering what Churchill had to do with any of this) returns to Britain a bust of Winston Churchill that had been lent to George W. Bush, as a symbol, after 9/11.

At some point, can we get over the fact that the artificial categories in our minds created by prejudices and received ideas that make us believe that change is about race, culture, and whatever are subliminal and nonexistent? When I read that Obama represents change because of his absent Kenyan father, the ways he looks and due to the fact the United States are changing because its 'racial' makeup is changing, I laugh  and shake my head in despair. I understand that some still have to understand that people aren't no their 'origins,' their 'race' or their gender, that culture isn't about genetics, and that people 'are'  being for themselves because of their blood unless of course, they stop thinking.

Mean writers

The sentence of the day:

The irony is that writers are generally meaner to other writers than critics are.

I would say that Tahar Ben Jelloun's criticism of Michel Houellebecq's recent 'novel' La Carte et le Territoire proves the veracity of this sentence. I will add also that it is possible to be ferociously mean and to be on point and pertinent.

'Africa' and Vile psychologization

I found the following sugary excerpt from Brendan O'Neill vile :

It isn’t because they have been brainwashed that many Africans choose not to wear condoms. It could be because, in a continent where there are still high levels of infant mortality, they want to have as many children as possible, since children are frequently needed to work on the farm, earn money and care for older generations. Or it could be because they want to express their love for each other in the most intimate way possible, without a sheath. Or – and I know this will be hard for the Home Counties humanists to comprehend – it could be because in countries where life is short and expectations low, people have different attitudes to risk than we in the West do. There are many reasons why Africans – both Catholic and non-Catholic – might choose not to wear a condom, and they are not irrational. And, of course, there’s the very basic fact that in very poor countries with little medical infrastructure, diseases spread faster and have worse consequences than they do in the developed West, with or without papish propaganda.

First, I don't know who O'Neil is talking about when he talks about 'Africans.' Second, I wonder why the behavior of some people from the african continent is analyzed as the norm for all, as something that all those people  do because they are from there. In short, in an attempt to make a fair point, Brendan O'Neill took a shortcut, which led him to the middle of nowhere for after reading him, he succeeds in doing only one thing, which is forcing people who come from the same geographical location the same who act a certain way, by implying that the action in question is conditioned mysteriously in part by that strange place, where nothing is the same, that isn't part of history, where gravity doesn't function, where people are particular, a place that is the Babylonia of culturalists and of tribalists: Africa.

What is most disturbing and distressing is that it never occurs to O'Neill that the 'Africans' he is talking about are just people like him and their behavior have nothing to do with a supposed and nonexistent Africanness, but their own individuality. I mean why and where guys would get the idea that having children and sleeping with a lot of women without protection is a sign of manliness as Harvey Mansfield would say?  Eh oui, a lot of people from the heart of darkness are just Harvey Mansfield's disciples  and believe selfishly, in a manly manner, that they are such masterpieces of nature that they need to breed as much as possible to create 'little thems' to make the world a better place. The foolishness of unapologetic and deified manliness are universal.

Cultural imperialism within America

I agree with Pankaj Mishra on this:

Edmund Wilson once warned against "the sometimes all too conscious American literary self-glorification which is a part of our American imperialism". But there is more reason to be wary of the cultural imperialism within America that, ignoring the country's lively diversity of artists and genres, erects singular monuments to American "greatness".

I only wonder the dictatorship of taste in America and elsewhere isn't due to the fact that the term culture has lost its meaning. My point isn't yet another one deploring elitism, but rather that elitism precisely is as intolerant of different and of peculiarities as what it despises the most, that is the commercial and the popular.

American parents and Sex ed

Thought-provoking:

American parents approach their children’s sexual initiation with fear and loathing; while Dutch parents treat sexuality like any other realm of life that a child must learn to manage.  Accordingly, most American teenagers hide their virginity loss from their parents, furtively popping the cherry in risky situations, often without protection against pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections (STIs).  In contrast, most Dutch teenagers lose their virginity in their own bedrooms with their parents approval… and condoms.

T'es nul !

Quote of the day is from Peter Gumbel deploring the inflexibility and the demeaning nature of what he considers to be 'French education culture':

Why is France the only country in the world that discourages children because of what they cannot do, rather than encouraging them to do what they can? (...) I believe France is missing a key element of what's wrong with the school system, an element that is immediately apparent to any foreigner who comes into contact with it: the harshness of the classroom culture. (...)It's a culture you can sum up as T'es nul (You're worthless). You hear these words all the time in France.

Naipaul and writing about 'Africa'

Excerpt of Aminatta Forna's review of V.S. Naipaul's latest The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African belief in the Guardian:

It is a quest through the continent for the spirit of African belief, the belief systems that preceded the arrival of Christianity and Islam – which is very much in keeping with the legacy of Joseph Conrad, who is referenced several times in the book. Already this feels cliched and tiresome; one yearns for the day when an author from outside can approach Africa without invoking the "heart of darkness" mythology. In 1975, Chinua Achebe published an essay attacking Conrad's best-known work as racist and already the novelist Robert Harris has described The Masque of Africa as "toxic".

This review makes me feel uncomfortable for two reasons. The first reason is that again, it is assumed that there is a such a thing as an "Africa" populated by Africans, with a particular identity and beliefs, which make them atypical or rather which explain why their continent is conventionally believed to be unmodern or in the back of the train of civilization. The second reason is that it seems that too writer who wants to write about the African continent like to make it feel as if it is an unique undertaking that must be judge by different standards and that their work must be judge with compassion and while having a forgiving consideration that they are doing something too difficult by going to the barbarians. The trouble is that reviewers and critiques enable them more often than not and judge their work as if it is different, out of the margins of literature because the subject matter is particular and so dark and foreign.

Since having my book published, I have realized that in France, in particular, it assumed that Africa and Africans are so different and atypical that their writings have to be belittled or graded with a curve and that more importantly, they are only entitled to talk about darkness, africanity, colonialism, and post-colonialism. The trouble comes when you refuse to fit that mold...I have wondered whether Conrad's The Heart of Darkness would be such as classic if it had been written by one of the 'savages.' Culturalism is destroying literature.

A place that lets you breathe

Sugary excerpt is from  Harry Eyres on Artistic inspiration:

Artists, and others, are reluctant nowadays to talk about inspiration. It sounds highfalutin and vague, like some mysterious essence which floats above the earth. But inspiration in its deepest sense, far from being vague or abstract, is very intimate, physical and personal. There is nothing more intimate, physical and personal than breathing, or breathing in, which is the literal meaning of inspiration. An inspiring place is one that lets you breathe.

Paris lets me breathe, especially because it is the place where you can find the only person that marries perfection and chaos.

The allusory and illusory African World Cup

Interesting and informative words from Sanza Tshabalala (first quote) and Ann Berstein (second) on the South African World Cup, the obsession with race and the horrendously stupid and anti-intellectual notion that it was the African World Cup:

The more the African teams were going down, the more I started getting worried about our race relations. I thought, we [Africans] are not doing well otherwise and I thought we would do well in football and it would maybe do something with our pride.
I’m obsessed with race issues. South Africans should be behind African teams. Then I went to see the Argentina-Nigeria game, at Ellis Park. And I see young Indian professionals, white people, all dressed up in Lionel Messi jerseys, and the few of us [who] are supporting Nigeria – probably 2 per cent of the stadium. I sat there thinking, ‘What’s this society going to?’ Because we’re meant to be supporting an African team, aren’t we?

---

Why? Why should we support an African team? There isn’t a black view, nor is there a white view. What’s striking to me, going to a Soccer City game, was that you were seeing very large numbers of this emerging black lower middle class. They could afford to come to the game, they had all the right clothes and they were there. Class is more important now.

This World Cup confirmed my belief  that Africanity/Africanness  is a concept created by those who refuse to acknowledge the complexities and the diversity of the African continent either because it challenges their prejudices and received ideas or because it is more convenient for them to believe that the populations of the African continent, as Conrad's cannibals, are the same and therefore have the same views, the same needs, and the same identity. It would be too inconvenient for Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, the football international governing body, to accept the idea that the South African World Cup was solely the one of a country not of a continent because it would mean taking the risk to have another country on the same continent host the World Cup sooner than in a decade or two. In short, africanity/africanness is about anything but reality for it is an attempt to take short cuts to avoid acknowledging unsettling realities and to be content with bienfaisant paternalism or simply paternalistic humanism.

The bad side of fluff

Sugary excerpt of the best review I have read of Sex and the City 2 written by Lynne Miles  (h/t), which I hope convinces the right people to stop beating a dead and decomposed horse:

(...) it hasn’t gone unnoticed that SATC has never been great on race issues. Women of colour have been noticeably absent from the series, something which the first film tried to correct with the inclusion of Jennifer Hudson (not especially well). But SATC2 is breathtaking in its attitude towards the Middle East, and to Muslim women in general. The treatment of Abu Dhabi as a kind of Arabian-nights style theme park raises an eyebrow. The cultural appropriation is cringe-worthy. The portrayal of anyone brown there as either Qu’ran-wielding fundamentalist, cowering wife, or a some sort of ‘poor but wise’ character to allow Carrie to demonstrate her benevolence made me wince. By the time the four Manhattanites are staring at a Muslim women wearing a niquab, first slack-jawed then openly sniggering as she eats a plate of fries, I had my head in my hands with mortification.

Barbie girls

Quote of the day from Lori Rotskoff:

In the early 1970s, when role models for girls in male-dominated professions were sorely lacking, proponents of gender equality successfully lobbied toy makers and educational publishers to design products depicting diverse career options for girls. They strongly believed that early play experiences would make a difference in kids’ future aspirations.  So they worked actively to shape the material culture of childhood.
Back then, Barbie was so anathema to feminists that it would never have occurred to them to collaborate with Mattel. But times have changed. Over the past three decades, commercial toymakers have perfected their absorption and co-optation of liberal feminist ideals; Barbie’s latest career makeover is just one recent example. So today, many women’s groups are apt to adopt the strategy: “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” We can interpret these Barbie dolls as “compromise formations” (to use an old grad-school phrase) because they represent an uneasy combination of traditionally feminine beauty standards with forward-thinking advocacy to enhance women’s economic and professional status.

Absolute hysteria and child-rearing

Quote of the morning from Jennifer Howze:

If ever you started to wonder that maybe your counterculture attitude toward child-rearing was just a little too laid-back - that perhaps you should spend more time worrying about sex maniacs on the school run and that your every action (whatever it  may be) ruining your child's life - along comes an announcement that reaffirms the absolute hysteria that surrounds children these days.

Robin Hood as an anti-tax Reaganite

Interesting take from Alex Massie on Robin Hood:

Robin really is an anti-tax warrior inspired by oppressive levels of taxation that have enslaved and impoverished the people, leaving them with barely enough for themselves.
He doesn't "steal" from the rich, he confiscates money from the state (and its officers) to return it to the taxpayers. In other words, philosophically and instinctively, he's a Reaganite and, frankly, one would not be surprised to see Robin explain, over a haunch of venison, that if only the state listened to reason it might appreciate that the levels of taxation it imposes upon the peasantry are at Laffer Curve* levels and that productivity, revenues and happiness might all increase if taxes were lowered to a more reasonable, justifiable level.

I'm willing to buy Massie's assertion. I have never thought of Robin Hood as a socialist or a fervent believer in social justice, but rather as someone who believe fanatically that government wasn't entitled to take the people's money, that is to tax them.

Thus, in a weird way, Robin Hood has more in common with Ron Paul than with Dennis Kucinich or Ralph Nader.

Men as the best representatives of the artistic idea of women

The quote of the morning is from Ian Buruma's review of  William T. Vollman on Japanese Noh Theater, Kissng the Mask:

Adornment is everything; what leads men on in their never-ending chase after female beauty is less a matter of biology than of art and performance. And no performance of femininity is more stylized, more artificial than Noh. (...)Some believe, in defense of the great art of men playing women in Noh, Kabuki, or in pre-Communist days the Chinese opera, that men can represent the allure of female beauty better than women can. For the idea is not to mimic reality but, as in a Chinese painting, to express an idea of reality, an abstraction almost. Men can represent the idea of women better, because they can take a distance from the real thing and reinvent it as art.

Black and White cultures

Problematic assertion from Bill Benzon:

Through assimilation of black expressive culture, music especially, white American culture has changed and grown.

I have no idea what Benzon means by assimilation or by culture and that makes his statement problematic. He assumes that what he means is obvious when it isn't especially since assimilation has a negative connotation and culture is a political instrument, but a meaningless and misleading concept.

In short, I find both appalling and distressing the idea that there are such things as a black and a white cultures.

Treme, New Orleans, Culture, and the authenticity fallacy

John McWhorter on the new HBO Treme and its implicit assertion of the superiority of the so-called New Orleans culture:

How, precisely, do people in Minneapolis have “less culture” than people in New Orleans? To a tribesman from New Guinea, Minnesotans would appear to have a “culture” indeed, and I’m not sure they would process New Orleans as “more cultural.” (Maybe more fun, but that’s different, isn’t it?) Why are the drinks and culinary traditions of Baltimore less “cultural” than the ones in New Orleans?

The idea here is that 'culture' is about a subtle form of primitiveness or rather to put things in more political correct fashion that it is about indigenousity untouched by modernity as if that wasn't a contradiction for the New Orleans of today isn't the one of Yesterday  and will not be the one of tomorrow and its inhabitants will change. Of course, the fact of the matter that questions of authenticity linked to 'culture' are more about politics and dogmatism than anything