Markmaking

The Art Instinct

The Art Instinct, by Denis Dutton

Reviews:

Anthony Gottlieb, NY Times

Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer

Damian Da Costa, New York Observer

Elizabeth Cline Q&A, Seed

James Panero, City Journal

John Derbyshire, New Criterion

Jonah Lehrer, Washington Post

Martin Kemp, New Scientist

Michael O'Donnell, Barnes and Noble

Robert Fulford, National Post

Rochelle Gurstein, Bookforum

Videos via The Valve

Art of Two Germanys

Art of Two Germanys at the L.A. County Museum.

LACMA: exhibition catalog timeline

Previews and Reviews:

Christopher Knight, Culture Monster (LAT)

Eduard Beaucamp, Art Newspaper

Hanno Rauterberg, Die Zeit

Jordan Mejias, FAZ

Jori Finkel, N.Y. Times

Kate Bowen interviews Stephanie Barron, Deutsche Welle

Kerstin Zilm, Deutschlandradio

Marlis Schaum, Deutsche Welle

Suzanne Muchnic, L.A. Times

Daniel Kehlmann on John Updike

Daniel Kehlmann zum Tode von John Updike: Seine Zeit und die Verlorenheit und das Glück - FAZ.NET

Er war womöglich der letzte fromme Erzähler von Rang, der die Welt für abgefallen von Gott hielt und der doch Gottes Angesicht in dessen Schöpfung suchte und deren Menschen und Dinge und Lichtstimmungen in einer Prosa von atemberaubender Zärtlichkeit nachformte. So trug er Prousts impressionistische Beschreibungskunst in die Welt der Autos und Malls, der Eisdielen und der Collegeabschlussbälle hinüber, in eine Neue Welt, die für ihn der Möglichkeit der Erlösung so fern gerückt war, dass sie sich dem Sex ergeben mußte.

Vor einigen Jahren hat David Foster Wallace ihm vorgeworfen, dass Sexualität kein Ausweg sei aus der existentiellen Verzweiflung, aber genau davon, dass sie es eben doch ist, lebte Updikes Kunst, und sein Leben scheint auch nicht darunter gelitten zu haben.

Patrick Bahners on Updike

Zum Tod John Updikes: Ein Klassiker ohne Nobelpreis - faz.net

Denn kein Schriftsteller unserer Zeit ist in so emphatischem Sinne ein amerikanischer Autor gewesen wie er. Alle Bücher dieses unerhört produktiven Wortarbeiters sind Beiträge zur Selbstauslegung und Selbstdarstellung Amerikas. In seinen Romanen und Kurzgeschichten geht er dabei aus von einem scheinbar anachronistischen, dem historischen Begriff Amerikas.

Seine Geschichte spielen auf dem Territorium der dreizehn ursprünglichen Kolonien, in einer überschaubaren Gesellschaft, deren Werte noch puritanisch oder durch die diversen Überwindungen und Umwertungen des Puritanismus geprägt sind. Updikes Ästhetik, seine atemberaubende Beschreibungskunst, ist die verführerisch schöne Außenseite einer Sündentheologie.

Ben Myers on Updike and theology

Faith and Theology: John Updike, 1932-2009: a glance at his theology.

Just think of the Lutheran pastor Fritz Kruppenbach in Rabbit, Run (1960), a deeply Barthian minister who utters this thunderous denouncement of pastoral work – in conversation with another minister, he asks: “Do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job…. I say you don’t know what your role is or you’d be home locked in prayer…. In running back and forth you run away from the duty given you by God, to make your faith powerful.... When on Sunday morning, then, when you go out before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. This is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do and say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that…. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is Devil’s work.”

Updike on Warhol

"Fast Art" (New Republic)

The Andy Warhol retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art is the perfect show for time-pressed Manhattanites. They can breeze through it at the clip of a fast walk, take it in through the corners of their eyes without ever breaking stride, and be able to talk about it afterward entirely in terms of what they got out of it. Indeed, you can honorably discuss the show without attending it at all, if you've ever seen a Brillo box, a Campbell's soup can, a photograph of Marilyn Monroe, and a silver balloon. Here they are again, the dear old Warhol icons, full of empty content, or contented emptiness. Their vacuity gains through muchness, since if you miss one wall of silkscreened cans or Marilyns or dollar bills, another wall will deliver the same massage, and we can absorb this art as we absorb reality-while trying to ignore it.

Vidal, Updike, the New Yorker

Gore Vidal, looking down his nose at Updike: Rabbit's own burrow - Times Online.

Easily, it would appear, he became an all-round writer for the New Yorker "of the William Shawn era (195187) . . . a club of sorts, from within which the large rest of literary America . . . could be politely disdained . . . . While I can now almost glimpse something a bit too trusting in the serene sense of artistic well-being, of virtual invulnerability, that being published in The New Yorker gave me for over thirty years . . . ." During much of this time, he seemed unaware that the interesting, indeed major, writers of the period did not belong to his club, either because they were too disturbing for the mild Shawn or because they could not endure the radical editing and rewriting that the quintessential middlebrow magazine imposed on its writers. "I shook with anger", Perelman wrote in 1957, "at their august editorial decisions, their fussy little changes and pipsqueak variations on my copy." Nabokov, published at Edmund Wilson's insistence, needed all of Wilson's help in fighting off editorial attempts to make his prose conform to the proto-Ralph Lauren house impersonation of those who fit, socially, in the roomy top-drawer-but-one.

Updike, Psoriasis, New York, and the Beach

Profile: John Updike | Books | The Guardian

Since a bout of measles at the age of six, Updike has suffered from psoriasis, a dermatological condition that gives the victim "the sense of another presence co-occupying your body and singling you out from the happy herds of healthy, normal mankind". In a poem in his most recent collection, Americana (2001), he refers to himself as a "literary Mr Sunshine", a piquant description, since it refers not only to his evident good nature but to his annual effort, over many years, to obliterate his psoriasis by hammering it with ultraviolet rays, once the only known remedy. In summer months, Updike was indeed "Mr Sunshine", but with the onset of winter his psoriasis flourished again. He suggests that "having this disability, which was really quite shaming, forced me to be more adventurous and daring than I ordinarily would have been. I'm at heart a kind of cautious, conservative person, and without the skin ailment I might not have left New York, but just stayed and grown old in New Yorker harness. It was the need to get to the sun, get to the beach, that forced me to leave the city and my job, and of course to earn my living as a freelance writer."

Updike on Politics

John Updike | Books | The Guardian.

Updike stands apart from the ranks of contemporaries in leaning to the right in matters private and political. In 1966, in a symposium dedicated to writers' views on Vietnam, he found himself more or less isolated as a hawk. The New York Times pointed this out, without giving proper consideration to his ambivalence. In reaction, Updike wrote "On Not Being a Dove", a 50-page essay in which he attempted to chart the ins and outs of his resistance to the peace movement, and to explain the roots of the untrendy patriotism fortifying his position. "I was sort of embarrassed not to be a dove, since most writers are doves," he says. "It's not my nature to go against the grain. But it was arresting to someone raised in the depression to witness the hatred, venom, fury of those years. In general, I think that these men we elect should be left to do the job, and my guess is that they're doing about as well as they can do, given the problems they face. And I'd be willing to give the benefit of the doubt even to Richard Nixon... which maybe is eccentric of me. I find it very hard to believe that the government leaders are villainous, of our democracy or the British democracy. But maybe I've been brainwashed."

Updike on Karl Barth

David Lodge reviews Roger's Version (nyt).

The central character and narrator, pipe-smoking, 52-year-old Roger Lambert is a professor of divinity, a former Methodist minister who adopted an academic career after the scandalous breakup of his first marriage and his union with Esther, 14 years his junior. He teaches the history of the early Christian heresies at a large university in an unnamed Northeastern city that might be Boston. He is a somewhat dilettantish disciple of Karl Barth, the austere Swiss theologian who fiercely insisted on the utter separateness of the divine and the human, and the utter dependence of the latter on the former. Roger admits to insulating this ''hot Barthian nugget'' in ''layers of worldly cynicism and situation ethics.'' Mr. Updike is well able to evoke the ethos of an academic theology department, and to have sly fun with its professional rivalries, pretensions and jargon (this one has specialists in ''Ethics and Moral Logistics'' and ''holocaustics''). He has manifested an interest in religion and theology in previous books. If there was ever such a species as the Protestant novelist, comparable to that much discussed animal, the Catholic novelist, Mr. Updike may be its last surviving example.

Starched in Connecticut - New York Times

Starched in Connecticut: Dowd reviews Brookhiser (nyt)

It is not just indifference to food that makes WASP's antisensualists. Drinking is done only to get drunk and culture is a duty. Mistresses, the author points out, are as rare among WASP's as spice racks. "The real subject of 'The Joy of Sex,' as its National Lampoon parodists realized, was 'The Job of Sex,' " Mr. Brookhiser writes. He asserts that while the WASP writer John Updike may invent frisky characters, he "can't write an interesting sex scene." 

"Bush's family prompted Digby Baltzell, first scholarly arraigner of WASPs, wistfully to ask if it wouldn't be a good thing if more American boys married the first girls they kissed," Mr. Brookhiser writes.

Updike on the WASP-Irish feud

Richard Brookhiser, author of The Way of the WASP: 

"The nuances of the regional Irish-Yankee feud [in Boston] escaped Brad" Schaeffer, a character in an Updike story, "since to his Midwestern eyes the two inimical camps were very similar--thin-skinned, clubby men from damp green islands, fond of a nip and long malicious stories."

After Bitter Campus Battles, the `Great Books' Rise Again (nyt)

Not surprisingly, students of all backgrounds are more likely to read in an open-minded and non-racialist fashion than are grievance-mongering racially-obsessed faculty ideologues 

Defying small-minded multiculturalist critics, Great Books programs achieve success.

"If I wanted to learn more about black writers, Hispanic writers, minority writers, I'd take a course in Aztec culture or Mexican culture," said Oscar Martinez, a 23-year-old Mexican immigrant who studied Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" with Professor Gans last semester. "I'm here to make myself a more intellectual person, regardless of my race, regardless of my background."

...

One of Professor Gans's students, Keith Morgan, 31, who enrolled at Wright after he left the Army as a sergeant in 1996, said he had seen much of himself in the story of another returning veteran: Jay Gatsby. No matter that "The Great Gatsby" and its creator, F. Scott Fitzgerald, were white, and Mr. Morgan is black.

"I have a dream, just like Gatsby, to be successful," said Mr. Morgan, who hopes to become a guidance counselor and thinks a knowledge of the Western classics will help.

"To me, as a black man, you have to get past your color and just appreciate what's being written," Mr. Morgan continued. "Professor Gans chooses really good titles."

What Women Want - WSJ.com - review of Edin and Kefalas

Trapped by an unthinking, sheeplike fealty to the academic orthodoxy of strictly materialist explanation that totally excludes all questions of transcendental value, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas remain wilfully blind to the mountain of evidence they assemble about single motherhood in their book

What Women Want - WSJ.com.

Nice try, but it misses the mark. The explanation is at odds with what these women say: Men's antisocial behavior, not their modest earning power, is the main obstacle to matrimony. The complaints are not of insufficient potential income, but of drug use, criminality, financial irresponsibility, violence, poor work ethic, defiant attitudes and, above all, flagrant sexual infidelity. That most boyfriends had children by other women was a source of great mistrust. 

This is no different from other portraits of urban family life, such as Jason DeParles's "American Dream" and Adrian LeBlanc's "Random Family." The men in these books also openly reject sexual fidelity and flout the most basic standards of male responsibility towards their women and children. The women respond by seeing marriage as an impossible dream. These are not stories of rising expectations. Rather, these women want what women have always wanted: men who are steady, faithful, considerate, and industrious. What has changed is men's willingness to live up to these age-old standards. Indeed, Ms. Edin and Ms. Kefalas tacitly acknowledge this: They describe the one man who comes closest to displaying the traditional bourgeois virtues as "the neighborhood equivalent of a Rhodes Scholar." 

What can we learn from these tales of working-class city life and the demographic facts behind them? First, the decades-old demise of clear standards following the sexual revolution, at worst a mixed blessing for the well-off, has hit the less privileged hard. The disparities in family structure suggest that people are not equal in their ability to handle newfound sexual freedom. The well-heeled don't often defend the 1950s, but they haven't left them entirely behind. That behavior differs by social position should come as no surprise. Foresight and capacity for self-governance are qualities that make for economic success. They also make for orderly families. 

Second, marital and sexual behavior depend more on mores than money. Restraint and social norms, rather than economic circumstances, best account for class differences. As Christopher Jencks and David Ellwood at Harvard have noted, economic factors fail to explain why privileged women, who are best equipped to go the single-motherhood route, insist upon marriage before children. Work by sociologists indicates that men may be the key. What we know about why marriages endure suggests that better-off men more often honor monogamy and strive for sexual fidelity. In family life, as in education, degrees matter: The rare or hidden lapse is worlds apart from infidelity as a way of life. 

Left-leaning scholars adamantly resist this picture. They insist that family breakdown is all about economic opportunity. The problem is not that people are behaving badly or that -- heaven forbid -- one class is more prudent than another, but that our policies are inadequate. Material conditions, not moral commitments, are the source of domestic chaos. To change behavior, we must give the poor more resources. 

Decades of experience belie this view.

Gaza in Ruins: 'Who Has Won Here?' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International

How strange - the useful idiots among the chattering classes had given me the impression that Hamas was a movement with unimpeachable democratic credentials and that by failing to recognize their legitimate constitutional standing, the imperialist USA was undermining democracy in the region.

Gaza in Ruins: 'Who Has Won Here?' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International.

One of his neighbors weighs in: "Many people are now against Hamas but that won't change anything," he says. "Because anyone who stands up to them is killed." Since they took power Hamas has used brutal force against any dissenters in the Gaza Strip. There were news agency reports that during the war they allegedly executed suspected collaborators with Israel. The reign of terror will go on for some time, says the neighbor who doesn't want to give his name. "There will never be a rebellion against Hamas. It would be suicide."

Hamas tried to hijack ambulances during Gaza war

Given the utter moral idiocy of the international community, it bears repeating even ad infinitum: only one side in this conflict gives a flying fig about humanitarian concerns and the rules of war, and it's not the Islamist death cult.

Hamas tried to hijack ambulances during Gaza war.

Mr Shriteh said the more immediate threat was from Hamas, who would lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport fighters to safety. 

"After the first week, at night time, there was a call for a house in Jabaliya. I got to the house and there was lots of shooting and explosions all around," he said. 

Because of the urgency of the call, Mr Shriteh said there was no time to arrange his movements with the IDF. 

"I knew the Israelis were watching me because I could see the red laser beam in the ambulance and on me, on my body," he said. 

Getting out of the ambulance and entering the house, he saw there were three Hamas fighters taking cover inside. One half of the building had already been destroyed. 

"They were very scared, and very nervous … They dropped their weapons and ordered me to get them out, to put them in the ambulance and take them away. I refused, because if the IDF sees me doing this I am finished, I cannot pick up any more wounded people. 

"And then one of the fighters picked up a gun and held it to my head, to force me. I still refused, and then they allowed me to leave." 

Mr Shriteh says Hamas made several attempts to hijack the al-Quds Hospital's fleet of ambulances during the war. 

"You hear when they are coming. People ring to tell you. So we had to get in all the ambulances and make the illusion of an emergency and only come back when they had gone."

Isabelle Graw: The Grand Prize: Art Between Market and Celebrity Culture

Isabelle Graw, Der große Preis. Kunst zwischen Markt und Celebrity Culture.

Dumont (publisher); Perlentaucher

Reviews:

1. Elke Buhr, "Höchste Zeit für Ideologiekritik" (FR)

2. Jürgen Kaube, "Die Diktatur des Teuren" (artnet.de)

3. Anna Brenken (Suedwestrundfunk)

4. Hanno Rauterberg, "Schaudernde Begeisterung" (Die Zeit)

"I won't make a secret of it: The book about which I'm writing appears in a publishing house that belongs to me. I also own a few of the bookstores in which it's sold. Furthermore I've been the author's life partner for a long time, and naturally I review her books and she reviews mine. So is the world in the end, a great give and take.

You don't believe that? You think a reviewer couldn't be so corrupt? Good, you're right, I made that up. Or more precisely: I imagined that the literature world were like the art world..."

Ernst Wilhelm Nay at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt

Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968): late work on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt: "E. W. Nay: Bilder der 1960er Jahre."

Reviews: 

Volker Breidecker, Sueddeutsche

Sandra Danicke, FR

"Es sind Bilder von souveräner Schlichtheit und überwältigender Leuchtkraft, die es derzeit in der Schirn zu entdecken gilt."

Reference:

Yule Heibel, Reconstructing the Subject

100 Years of Greenberg

The art critic Clement Greenberg would have been 100 years old today.  Tellingly, if the web is any indication, very few people seem to care. Just a few scattered notices.

Art Blog by Bob, "Mountain Range"

Fugitive Ink, "One hundred years of Clement Greenberg"

Ulf Poschardt, "Der wichtigste Kunstkritiker des 20. Jahrhunderts"

The art history department at Harvard is organizing a conference in April (PDF CFP)

On related notes:

David Carrier, "Why Art Critics Don't Matter Anymore"
Martha Schwendener, "What Crisis? Some Promising Futures for Art Criticism"

Roberta Smith review of "Beyond the Canon: Small Scale American Abstraction" at Robert Miller
Allan M. Jalon, "The Prescience of a Cranky Critic"

Reviews of Caroline Jones, Eyesight Alone:
John O'Brian, Art Bulletin; Barry Schwabsky, The Nation; Daniel A. Siedell, CAA.Reviews; Robert Slifkin, Oxford Art Journal; Sophie Berrebi, Journal of Visual Culture

Reviews of Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Czar:
James Panero, WSJ; Charles Reeve, LRB; Joscelyn Jurich, Brooklyn Rail; John Russell, New Criterion; Joseph Phelan, Washington Times

Andrew Anthony on the Rushdie fatwa

In the Observer, Andrew Anthony on the Rushdie fatwa and its disgraceful fallout among spineless and self-abasing Westerners:

Iqbal Sacranie, the future head of the Muslim Council of Britain famously opined that "death, perhaps, is a bit too easy" for Rushdie. He was later knighted for services to community relations...

Ramin Gray, associate director of the Royal Court Theatre, recently admitted that he would be reluctant to stage a play that was critical of Islam. "You would think twice," he said. "You'd have to take the play on its merits but given the time we're in, it's very hard because you'd worry that if you cause offence then the whole enterprise would become buried in a sea of controversy. It does make you tread carefully."...

Almost any criticism of Islam or any of its adherents is likely to trigger accusations of Islamophobia. For example, in 2007 the Channel 4 documentary Undercover Mosque exposed various preachers making hateful and violent statements regarding women, Jews, homosexuals and infidels. By any journalistic measure it was a compelling and revelatory documentary. But in the media storm that followed it was not the inflammatory preachers but the programme-makers who found themselves subject to an inquisition....

Even a critic of The Satanic Verses, the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who felt the book was insulting to Islam, signed a petition stating that "no blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer". Five years later Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck by Islamic extremists...

Inayat Bunglawala, spokesperson for the Jamaat-i-Islami-influenced Muslim Council of Britain, probably the most-often cited Islamic organisation in the country, passed both tests with flying colours. He was, in his own words, "elated" when Khomeini delivered the fatwa. "It was a very welcome reminder that British Muslims did not have to regard themselves just as a small, vulnerable minority; they were part of a truly global and powerful movement."...

Respecting culture has come to mean restricting debate. Malik quotes the sociologist Tariq Modood on this issue: "If people are to occupy the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit the extent to which they subject each other's fundamental beliefs to criticism."...

Three years ago we came within a single parliamentary vote of being saddled with a law (the Religious Hatred Act) that meant you or I could be imprisoned for seven years for using insulting language, even if the insult was unintentional and referred to an established truth...

Jimmy Carter US president, 1977-81: "Rushdie's book is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated ... The death sentence proclaimed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, however, was an abhorrent response. It is our duty to condemn the threat of murder [but] we should be sensitive to the concern and anger that prevails even among the more moderate Muslims."

Germaine Greer writer and academic: "I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles."

Gaza Tactics and Strategy

Nothing illustrates the nauseating moral idiocy of the "international community" more than the way that when one side arranges for the maximal endangerment of its own civilians, the other side attracts the lion's share of opprobrium.

A Gaza War Full of Traps and Trickery

Weapons are hidden in mosques, schoolyards and civilian houses, and the leadership’s war room is a bunker beneath Gaza’s largest hospital...

A new Israeli weapon, meanwhile, is tailored to the Hamas tactic of asking civilians to stand on the roofs of buildings so Israeli pilots will not bomb...

Hamas rocket and weapons caches, including rocket launchers, have been discovered in and under mosques, schools and civilian homes, the army says...

Poe in Germany

What do the Germans have to say about the 200-year-old Edgar Allan Poe?

At Die Zeit: Peter Kuemmel: Mann im Abgrund. * Sherko Fatah, Poes Einfluss: Expedition ins Imaginäre. * Jens Jessen: Umweg zum Ruhm. * Ein Gespräch mit Roger Corman über seine Poe-Filme. * * * At Perlentaucher: Hans-Dieter Gelfert, Edgar Allan Poe: Am Rande des Malstroms. * Wolfgang Martynkewicz, Edgar Allan Poe. * Die Maske des roten Todes: Erzählungen. * * * CDs: Im Wirbel des Malstroms. * Der Bericht des Arthur Gordon Pym. * Umständlicher Bericht des Arthur Gordon Pym aus Nantucket (Rolf Michaelis review). * * * At the NZZ: Ulrike Brunotte, Die Innenschau der Obsessionen: Edgar Allan Poe – ein Pionier in den Abgründen der menschlichen Seele. * * * At the HU: Renate Hof, Edgar Allan Poe.

Lucchino Visconti

Lucchino Visconti * Wiki * BFI * * * White Nights (1957) * Rocco and His Brothers (1960) * The Leopard (1963) * * * Henry Bacon, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay: Cambridge * Google * Target * * * Schirmer and Schneider, Visconti: Schriften, Filme, Stars und Stills * Peter Michalzik: Regisseur Luchino Visconti: Die Welt des Barocken * "Visconti's Cinema of Twilight," by Maximilian Le Cain * "Visconti Revisited Take 2: Luchino Visconti by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith"

(Third edition, London: BFI, 2003) by Benjamin Halligan * "The Incompossible Language of Natural Aristocracy: Deleuze's Misreading of Visconti's The Leopard" by Lucio Angelo Privitello * Alberto Zambenedetti, "Senso - A Palimpsest" * Paola Bonifazio, '"Gramsci's Ashes" - The Representation of the 1960's "Lumpen-Proletariat" in Visconti's Rocco and his brother and Pasolini's Accattone' * Lisa Rosen, "Sound and Temporality: Voice - over in Visconti's La Terra Trema"

Iron Man

Iron Man's Heavy Metal Rise * * * What if Oscar Wilde were a superhero? * * * Why Iron Man is like Steve Jobs. * * * Bis der Kaiser den Daumen senkt. * * * Splitter kreisen am Herzen: Ein Don Quijote der Technozeit * * * Stan Lee is a Ladies' Man in Iron Man Cameo * * * Downey, in contrast, is blessed with the most nimble articulation of any American actor since James Woods. * * * Is there any actor alive who takes more obvious delight in his line readings than Robert Downey Jr.? * * * Robert Downey Jr. unleashes America's id. * * * An iron fist in a velvet glove: Iron Man, the latest Marvel superhero story to get a big-screen outing, captures the crisis and contradictions in ‘humanitarian militarism’. * * * Iron Man Versus the Imperialists: What's missing in the movie is what has sustained the comic book series for most of its history. Iron Man is actually a scathing critique of American imperialism. * * * 8.0 * 79 * 92%

Esther Duflo in Paris

Esther Duflo to lecture at the College de France

Son ami Thomas Piketty, de l'Ecole d'économie de Paris, en rêve à voix haute. Il voit l'entrée de la jeune professeure du Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) au Collège de France, comme "un bon signe" pour les chercheurs de leur génération. Et il espère que cela poussera sa consoeur et vieille copine - ils se connaissent depuis quinze ans - à revenir pour de bon.

"Cela fait un demi-siècle qu'on dépense de l'argent dans les pays en développement, sans jamais vraiment se donner les moyens de vérifier si ça marche ou pas, comment et pourquoi", souligne Esther Duflo.

Inger Christensen 1935-2009

Jutlandish poetess Inger Christensen has passed away. She had been struck by Chomsky's ideas about the language instinct and generative grammar.

Obits: Perlentaucher roundup; 

Harald Hartung, "Das Recht zu dichten, so, wie der Baum Blätter treibt" FAZ

Ina Hartwig, "Die Schmetterlingsfrau" FR

Beatrice von Matt, "Grosse Sprachmusik -- seriell und organisch" NZZ

Tobias Lehmkuhl, "Im Schmetterlingstal: Das Alphabet der Poesie" SZ

Butterfly Valley: A Requiem, trans. Susanna Neid

Up they soar, the planet's butterflies,
pigments from the warm body of the earth,
cinnabar, ochre, phosphor yellow, gold
a swarm of basic elements aloft.

trans. Hanns Groessel

Sie steigen auf, die Schmetterlinge des Planeten, 
wie Farbenstaub vom warmen Körper der Erde, 
Zinnober, Ocker, Gold und Phosphorgelb, 
ein Schwarm von chemischem Grundstoff hochgehoben.

Closing with the lines,

„Es ist der Tod, der dich mit eigenen Augen / vom Schmetterlingsflügel aus anblickt."  Death looks out at you with its own eyes from butterfly wings.

It, reviewed by Milton L. Welch at The Believer

Fibonacci- and alphabet-based Alphabet, trans. Susanna Neid, reviewed at the Complete Review

cicadas exist; chicory, chromium, 
citrus trees; cicadas exist; 
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

and

bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries; 

bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

Reviews of "Das Schmetterlingstal" CD read by Inger and Hanna Schygulla

"Wie selten ist ein perfekter Tag! Aber noch geringer ist die Anzahl der perfekten Lyrik-Hörbücher.... „Das Schmetterlingstal” von Inger Christensen aber ist ein perfektes Hörbuch."

Review of 2 CDs: "Alfabet" and "Das Schmetterlingstal" 

Ljus av Ljus - Light from Light - early work with religious themes.

„Stehe ich / alleine im schnee / wird klar / daß ich eine uhr bin // wie sollte die ewigkeit sich / sonst zurechtfinden”

„Ich öffne das fenster meiner liebe / und atme den geruch von erde ein / der qualm und vergängliche hoffnung ist / Dennoch hoffen wir.”

At Die Zeit: "Ich hab immer geglaubt"

I have always believed reality / to be something that one becomes / when one grows up.

Puccini at 150

Puccini is 150 years old as of December 23. What does the academy think of this?

1) Alexandra Wilson

Puccini's reception must be viewed in the context of Italian nationalism. After the unification of Italy in 1861, the politician Massimo d' Azeglio supposedly said, "we have made Italy; now we must make Italians." Since the Roman Empire, at any rate, Italy was never really a country, but a geographic proximity of regions.

Torrefranca vs. Puccini: Puccini reception lay at the heart of a crisis of national identity that gripped Italy between the turn of the century and the First World War. For Puccini's detractors his works were an emblem of decadence; for his supporters they provided a means for regeneration. In his vitriolic monograph, Giacomo Puccini e l'opera internazionale (1912), Fausto Torrefranca associated Puccini with dangerous 'others' - women, homosexuals and Jews - in order to instil fear about the 'feminisation' of Italian culture. The reception of his book shows that Torrefranca's 'extreme' views were widely shared.

2) Helen Greenwald

Recent Puccini Research

I propose that certain 'Japanese' elements of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" have cultural analogues that support a reading of the opera as more profoundly authentic than has usually been argued. 

3) Michele Girardi's book reviewed by Helen Greenwald and Alessandra Campana

Max Hastings, Retribution [Nemesis]: The Battle for Japan

Ian Buruma

[Manila] At night, Americans on the line were bemused to hear sounds of chanting and singing, shouts and laughter, as Japanese conducted final carouses. These were sometimes succeeded by grenade explosions, as soldiers killed either themselves or hapless Filipinos.... Twelve members of one family, the Rocha Beeches, were bayoneted and then burned alive, along with their nursemaid. A fifteen-year-old was raped in the street amid gunfire and screaming people. The Japanese responsible then rose and used his bayonet to open her body from groin to chest.

Peter R. Kann

The Japanese had started the war, he reminds us; they had prosecuted it cruelly and had refused to concede defeat when all rational hope was lost. Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war party in Japan opposed surrender. Emperor Hirohito dithered until finally, in a radio address, he acknowledged that the war had evolved "not necessarily to Japan's advantage."

The revisionists who argue that Japan was ready to surrender before Hiroshima, Mr. Hastings writes, "are peddlers of fantasies." 

Evan Thomas

Sadism by the Japanese was not occasional but institutional. Prisoners of war and civilian internees were starved, bayoneted, beheaded, raped and, in some cases, vivisected.

The Japanese were careless even with the lives of their own troops. The Japanese Navy, unlike the American Navy, had no search and rescue for downed fliers, and so lost hundreds of experienced aviators. Militarists twisted the ancient samurai code of Bushido into a sick cult of death. The Japanese were supposed to wish for death over surrender, and as the war went on, the Americans accommodated them. After Japanese prisoners tried to sabotage American submarines, the subs stopped picking them up, and soon most United States ships refused to rescue Japanese in the water, except to pick up an occasional “intelligence sample.”

Andrew Roberts

With the majority of Japan's losses of two million dead crammed into the last few months of the war, Hastings believes that 'If the conflict had continued for even a few weeks longer, more people of all nations – especially Japan – would have lost their lives than perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.'

Without the atomic bombs there can be no doubt that the conflict would have continued for many more weeks and months.

Dan van der Vat

They were dropped, in ignorance of the effects of radiation, not only to avoid huge casualties in an invasion of Japan but also to forestall Soviet intervention in the Far East - which might not have happened had the Japanese surrendered after the first bomb. But they gave in a week too late, enabling Stalin to make his territorial grab.

Laurence Rees

It will be interesting to see the reaction to this book in Japan; especially since I have met a number of intellectuals there who insist that “Hiroshima was a war crime just like Auschwitz”. How will they respond to Hastings’s belief that “when America stood on the brink of absolute victory over a nation which had brought untold grief and misery upon Asia, why should not the enemy bear the burden of acknowledging his condition, and indeed his guilt”?

Jon Latimer

Of the invasion of Okinawa, Hastings notes that the Japanese reasoned that if the US could be made to pay dearly enough for winning a single offshore island, America's leaders would be put off attacking the main ones. "They were correct in their analysis, but utterly deluded about its implications."

Fleet Foxes

The Fleet Foxes are the band of the year. What imagery and metaphors does their music evoke amongst criticdom? 

PS. Are Pitchfork and PopMatters the only publications that run record reviews longer than one paragraph?

Stephen M. Deusner (Pitchfork):

The band didn't leave town to record Fleet Foxes, yet it sounds like it could have been recorded anywhere in the United States-- Austin, Minneapolis, Chicago, Brooklyn, Louisville, or more likely some clearing in the woods. That placelessness constitutes an active effacement

Cole Stryker (PopMatters):

sounds as though it begins in Appalachia with a front porch family hymn, and makes its way west, trundling across the Midwest on a steam train, getting lost in Utah’s barren gorges, and finally settling in some Laurel Canyon pop oasis

Pete Paphides:

“Fleet Foxes Are Not Hippies,” ran the recent headline of a feature in a Seattle arts paper, just above a smaller headline that read: “Don’t Let the Floppy Hats, Jesus Beards and Five-Part Vocal Harmonies About Rivers, Trees and Sunshine Throw You.”

Will Hermes:

Indie rock is undergoing a folk renaissance, which has spawned some great harmony singing. Case in point: Fleet Foxes' debut opens with a woozy a cappella that's part sacred-harp-choral tradition, part Beach Boys, and it resolves into a Celtic-flavored march with a searing Richard Thompson-style guitar line.

Heather Phares:

mountains, birds, family, death

Sean O'Neal:

amber-hued melodies, guitar lines snaking upward like flames from a campfire, and cumulus clouds of strings, bells, and rolling tom-toms

Dave Simpson:

English folk, late 60s west-coast music (particularly the Beach Boys and Love) - this is the sound of late-night forests, skipping animals, music made by people as old as the hills they dwell in.

LaRue Cook:

sun-soaked mountains (the spacious ''Sun It Rises'') and the serene Pacific (the jangly ''White Winter Hymnal'')

Doug Freeman:

delicate, wood-smoked harmonies of Crosby, Stills & Nash and rustic reverbed vision of My Morning Jacket's Tennessee Fire

Amanda Petrusich:

warm and cathartic, with all the hopefulness of a balmy summer night

Eli Wald: Jews and the Law

Not the Torah, the other law...

The Rise and Fall of the WASP and Jewish Law Firms

the large WASP law firm, despite its ostensibly a-religious organizational structure, had a deeply rooted religious and cultural identity. Its commitments to Protestant values and white-shoe ethos help explain its rise at the turn of the nineteenth century, its successful campaign for elite professional status within the ranks of the legal profession, and its dominance until 1945. Moreover, the religious and cultural identity of the large WASP firm also explains the rise and success of its main competitor after 1945 - the Jewish law firm. Exploring the consequences of the WASP firm's commitments to Protestant values and white-shoe culture, this Article identifies unique reasons for the remarkable success story of the Jewish firm, whose growth rate far exceeded that of the WASP firm. Finally, the Article chronicles the disintegration of the religious identity of the large firm, WASP and, as a result, Jewish alike.

The Rise of the Jewish Law Firm or is the Jewish Law Firm Generic?

As late as 1950, there was not a single large Jewish law firm in town. By the mid 1960s, six of the largest twenty law firms were Jewish, and by 1980, four of the largest ten law firms were Jewish firms....

...First, white-shoe ethos caused large WASP firms to stay out of undignified practice areas and effectively created pockets of Jewish practice areas, where the Jewish firms encountered little competition for their services. Second, hiring and promotion discriminatory practices by the large WASP firms helped create a large pool of talented Jewish lawyers from which the Jewish firms could easily recruit. Finally, the Jewish firms benefited from a flip side of bias phenomenon, that is, they benefited from the positive consequences of stereotyping.