Markmaking

Rajaa Alsanea: Girls of Riyadh

Via the Literary Saloon, Raja Alsanea takes us inside the most repressively misogynistic regime of the seventh, I mean the twenty-first century.

Daily Telegraph, "Sex and the Saudi":

To underline the headaches, Alsanea will later inform me that if I were a male journalist interviewing her in Riyadh, I would probably be pounced on by men with long beards and black robes from the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (the religious police), and led off to be interrogated for being out in public with a woman who is not family...

Lamees is popular, cool, clever and 'gym-toned', but not a pure-bred - her grandmother is Egyptian, so under Saudi's strict laws governing which class and tribe can marry each other, she also finds love treacherous terrain...

Boston Herald:

She won an overwhelming response from well-known Arab writers in 2005 after the original Arabic publication of "Girls of Riyadh" in Lebanon. Then 23, Alsanea also got death threats from critics who were outraged.
[Muslims, outraged? Death threats -- from outraged Muslims? You must be joking -ed.]

Marie Claire:

'all Saudi books that are controversial start in Lebanon, just because we have censorship for books in Saudi'

Paul Collier, "Bottom Billion," rev. by Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson reviews Paul Collier:

Three things increase the risk of conflict: a relatively high proportion of young, uneducated men; an imbalance between ethnic groups, with one tending to outnumber the rest; and a supply of natural resources like diamonds or oil, which simultaneously encourages and helps to finance rebellion...

Trade, too, is not a sufficient answer. The problem is that Asia has eaten Africa's lunch when it comes to exploiting low wage costs. Now, to stand any chance of survival, African manufacturers need some temporary protection from Asian competition. So long as rich countries retain tariffs to shelter their own manufacturers from cut-price Asian imports, they should exempt products from bottom billion countries.

This, however, is not the most heretical of Collier's prescriptions. Reflecting on the tendency of postconflict countries to lapse back into civil war, he argues trenchantly for occasional foreign interventions in failed states. What postconflict countries need, he says, is 10 years of peace enforced by an external military force. If that means infringing national sovereignty, so be it.

This is a vital insight. Collier concedes that his argument is bound to elicit accusations of neocolonialism from the usual suspects (not least Mugabe). Yet the case he makes for more rather than less intervention in chronically misgoverned poor countries is a powerful one. It is easy to forget, amid the ruins of Operation Iraqi Freedom, that effective intervention ended Sierra Leone's civil war, while nonintervention condemned Rwanda to genocide.

In Le Monde: Picasso, Guernica, Vasari, Franz Marc

Le Monde has a number of book reviews of art-historical interest:

Harry Bellet, in "The Continent Picasso," reviews Pierre Daix's Picasso and Dominique Dupuis-Labbé on the Demoiselles; Bellet also discusses Guernica.

Olivier Christin reviews Georges Didi-Huberman's L'Image Ouverte: Motifs de l'Incarnation dans les Arts Visuels; Dagen also reviews Vasari, Entretiens du Palazzo Vecchio.

Philippe Dagen reviews an edition of Franz Marc's writings and correspondence.

Peter Godwin, When a crocodile eats the sun

Peter Godwin's new book, When a crocodile eats the sun, is about his family and life under Mugabe.  Under Mugabe, 2,000 percent hyperinflation is still not enough to get the great heroes of the Third World and African solidarity to say a bad thing about him.

Togara Muzanenhamo reviews Godwin for the Guardian and, surprise, surprise, manages to avoid saying a single word against Mugabe. It's all just "change"!

More reviews: Michiko Kakutani, NYT; Wendy Kann, WaPo; Rory MacLean, Guardian; James Urquhart, Independent.

Peter Stanford interview; Boris Kachka Q&A, NYMag; first chapter, WaPo.

Books to read

The Essential Gombrich
Global Capitalism, Jeffry Frieden
Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People, Jon Butler
The Democratization of American Christianity, Nathan Hatch
Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture
Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650; The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; Jonathan Edwards; The New England Mind: From Colony to Province
Maupassant
Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment; The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions
On History and Other Essays, Michael Oakeshott
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy
The Pan Am Buildling and the Shattering of Modernist Dream
David Christian, Maps of Time
Michael Cook, A Brief History of the Human Race
J. R. McNeill and William McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World History
Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Sie`cle Vienna: Politics and Culture
Richard Ben Cramer, How Israel Lost
Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription, Gerard Kilroy
The Price of Glory, Alistair Horne
With the Old Breed, E.B. Sledge
The Face of Battle, John Keegan
Stalingrad, Antony Beevor
The Fall of Fortresses, Elmer Bendiner
Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
Digby Baltzell, Protestant Establishment
Simon Blackburn, Think
Benedetto Croce
Giambattista Vico
Hippolyte Taine
Ugo Mulas, New York The New Art Scene
Lebensztejn, Zigzag
Gibbon
Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error
Howard Singerman
Roland Recht, Rhine Landscape
Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918–1937)
Laird Easton, The Red Count
Engell, The Creative Imagination
Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism;
Marshall Brown, The Shape of German Romanticism
Peter Uwe Hohendahl, History of German Literary Criticism
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute
Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities
Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature
Wolfgang Kayser
Emil Staiger
Elie Kedourie, The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies
The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His Work, di Giovanni
Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion by Peter Bauer
Crime and Human Behavior, Richard J. Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson
Edward Banfield, The Unheavenly City
Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions, A Conflict of Visions, Basic Economics, and Black Rednecks and White Liberals.
A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted: A Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).
Michael Cook, The Koran: A Very Short Introduction
Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years
Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History
Khalid Durán with Abdelwahab Hechiche, Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews
V. S. Naipaul, Among the Believers
Emmanuel Sivan, Radical Islam
Johannes J. G. Jansen, The Dual Nature of Islamic Fundamentalism
Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder
David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle
Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Islam and Human Rights: Traditions and Politics
Y. Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel
Fawaz Turki, Exile's Return: The Making of a Palestinian American
Yoav Gelber, Palestine 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem
Fouad Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey
Raymond Cohen, Culture and Conflict in Egyptian-Israeli Relations: A Dialogue of the Deaf.
Yoram Hazony, The Jewish State : The Struggle for Israel's Soul
Beloved, Toni Morrison
John Updike, Rabbit at Rest, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit Redux Rabbit, Run
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin
Jesus' Son
Independence Day
Sabbath's Theater
The Human Stain
The Plot Against America
The Adventures of Augie March

Pies

Harriet Beecher Stowe on pies.

The pie is an English institution, which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old traditional mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum pies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies pies with top crusts, and pies without, pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around, and otherwise varied, attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when once let loose in a given direction. … But who shall do justice to the dinner, and describe the turkey, and chickens, and chicken pies, with all that endless variety of vegetables which the American soil and climate have contributed to the table, and which, without regard to the French doctrine of courses, were all piled together in jovial abundance upon the smoking board? There was much carving and laughing and talking and eating, and all showed that cheerful ability to despatch the provisions which was the ruling spirit of the hour. After the meat came the plum-puddings, and then the endless array of pies, till human nature was actually bewildered and overpowered by the tempting variety; and even we children turned from the profusion offered to us, and wondered what was the matter that we could eat no more.

Medawar on Teilhard de Chardin

Via 3QD, Peter Medawar reviews Teilhard de Chardin, in one of the funniest book reviews of all time:

It is a book widely held to be of the utmost profundity and significance; it created something like a sensation upon its publication in France, and some reviewers hereabouts called it the Book of the Year --- one, the Book of the Century. Yet the greater part of it, I shall show, is nonsense, tricked out with a variety of metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself. The Phenomenon of Man cannot be read without a feeling of suffocation, a gasping and flailing around for sense. There is an argument in it, to be sure --- a feeble argument, abominably expressed --- and this I shall expound in due course; but consider first the style, because it is the style that creates the illusion of content, and which is a cause as well as merely a symptom of Teilhard's alarming apocalyptic seizures.

Men Not Good Novel Readers

British research suggests that men are worse readers of novels than women. I note that British professor Lisa Jardine, making semi-justifiable disparaging remarks about male literary aptitude, gets a respectful hearing in the ultra-PC Guardian, while American professor Larry Summers, making semi-justifiable disparaging remarks about female scientific aptitude, gets run out of town on a rail.

Artforum and the 1980s

The 1980s are still rather foreign territory for art history. (Not for long, I know.) But Artforum makes a great contribution with their special issues. Peter Halley, interviewed by Dan Cameron:

It's interesting, because the '8os were really three different periods: 1980 to 1983 was dominated by the recession and by the emergence of new European painting and neo-expressionism. Then you had the mid-'80s, in which the robust economic recovery spurred the emergence of neo-Conceptualism--which included artists who were showing for the first time, Koons, myself, et cetera, but also marked the first widespread acceptance of artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, who were first shown around 1980. Then you had the end of the '80s. After about '88, the economy was less good, the AIDS crisis emerged, and a more direct form of Conceptualism emerged, which defined itself in terms of a critical opposition.

Yve-Alain Bois in a roundtable on the idea of the death of painting:

The odd thing is that very few people read my essay as a plea for painting-or, at least, as an affirmation that it was at best naive to bury it, since it was not yet a corpse. Some readers saw it as a defense of the artists in the show, such as Halley or Taaffe, even though I called them "manic mourners," a pathological condition that is not particularly enviable (at least in the sense given to it by Melanie Klein). Others thought that I, too, was claiming that "painting was dead." Basically, the argument I was making is very similar to that of Thierry: The death of painting has been on order since Manet, and the task of every modern artist is to try to achieve it. That is what modernism as I know it is all about. This might, actually, bring in another issue, which is not the death but the abortion of so-called postmodernism: Not a single argument has ever convinced me that such a thing actually exists.

Scott Rothkopf on Thomas Lawson (along with architects, poets and Robert Pincus-Witten):

Spurned by the critical camps to both his left and right, Lawson's shrewd position lost ground as the '80s progressed, and his insights are now largely overlooked or remembered as an isolated anomaly rather than as evidence of a sophisticated and pervasive aesthetic theory. Yet in light of recent explorations of the photographic image in the paintings of Luc Tuymans, Thomas Eggerer, and Ulrich Lamsfuss (not to mention the belated recognition of an antecedent such as Gerhard Richter), it's high time for a reappraisal. Today Lawson's writing of the early '80s burns with a kind of urgency no doubt fueled by the friction between his will to paint and his acute sensitivity to the pitfalls inherent in that practice.

Literary Wilsonianism

In the TLS, Dickstein reviews Dabney's Edmund Wilson bio, citing his multigenerational influence on critics of all sorts:

Several generations of American intellectuals not only cared what he thought about literature and politics but used his career as a model. They admired his restless curiosity, omnivorous reading, sharp literary judgement, and grasp of culture as a living entity. They envied the unforced clarity of his style. Wilson was hardly more than a decade older than the writers who founded Partisan Review in the mid-1930s, and his deep-dyed American background was different from their immigrant roots, yet, as Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin testified, they looked to him as their difficult-to-please mentor. Other sources of inspiration for the Partisan Review circle were distant figures, but Wilson actually married into the family when he took Mary McCarthy, their scarlet princess, as his third wife.
The same chemistry of warm admiration and crusty independence can be observed in his relations with writers and editors in the 1950s, especially Roger Straus and Jason Epstein, who encouraged Wilson to collect his early journalism and reissued his books as upmarket paperbacks. Not long afterwards, the more literate radicals of the 1960s rediscovered To the Finland Station (1940), his galvanizing history of Revolutionary ideas and personalities, and were cheered by his critique of the Cold War, which he saw as a by-product of America’s imperial designs. In “The Metropolitan Critic”, published anonymously in the TLS shortly before Wilson’s death in 1972, the young Clive James took the measure of his whole career, singling out literary chronicles such as The Shores of Light (1952) as keystones of the critic’s trade, and paid tribute to the range of his insight and his deceptively plain style. Finally, a generation of public intellectuals who emerged in the 1980s, including the historian Sean Wilentz, the cultural critics Andrew Delbanco and Louis Menand, the political essayist Paul Berman and the art critic Jed Perl, were drawn to Wilson’s example as a counter to specialized academic work, with its restricted language and limited audience, particularly in the social sciences and literary theory.

Help the New Orleans Public Library

[Send books UPS, as the Postal Service is not reliable right now and not taking most packages.]

Seeking Book Donations
The New Orleans Public Library
(New Orleans LA)

The New Orleans Public Library is asking for any and all hardcover
and paperback books for people of all ages in an effort to restock
the shelves after Katrina. The staff will assess which titles will
be designated for its collections. The rest will be distributed to
destitute families or sold for library fundraising. Please send your
books to:

Rica A. Trigs, Public Relations
New Orleans Public Library
219 Loyola Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70112

If you tell the post office that they are for the library in New
Orleans, they will give you the library rate which is slightly less
than the book rate.

Book reviews

Henning Ritter reviews Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas in the FAZ; Perlentaucher page. Diary of the Warburg Library: SZ review by Helmut Faerber; Perlentaucher.

Hans Belting on the Germans and their art: Perlentaucher.

Georges Didi-Hubermann, Devant l'image, German edition: Perlentaucher, SZ review by Guenter Metken.

Andreas Platthaus on a new edition of the Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry (FAZ).

Rolf-Peter Horstmann (SZ) on Hegel's 1826 lectures on aesthetics (Suhrkamp).

Christian Kruse, Why People Paint: Andreas Beyer, FAZ; Andreas Toennesmann, SZ.

Jörg Probst on the sketchbooks of Menzel (FAZ).

Wilfried Wiegand (FAZ) on Panofsky's essays in German.

Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht (FAZ) on Erika Fischer-Lichte's aesthetic of the performative (Suhrkamp).

Franz-Joachim Verspohl and Michelangelo's Moses: Andreas Toennesmann (SZ) and Kurt Flasch (FAZ).

Martin Warnke's history of German art, volume 2: Perlentaucher, Werner Schade, FAZ.

Barbara Wittmann, Manet and the poetics of the portrait (Steffen Siegel, FAZ).

Language: science and history

On the topic of language, two books that go very well together are Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World. The two offer a case study of how historical and scientific approaches to a single subject can complement each other. Despite the comprehensive ambition of each book, there is very little overlap between the two.

Pinker shows what every speaker of a human language has in common, and Ostler considers how and why some languages happen to spread as far as they do. In neither case are the answers as simple as might be naively expected.

Ostler shows why Spanish Jesuits in South America and English Protestants in India had such different linguistic effects, why British Islanders did not end up speaking a Romance language after the fall of the Roman Empire, why English in India and Dutch in Southeast Asia had such different fates, not to mention the parallels between Akkadian and Aramaic, and between Egyptian and Chinese, the Cossacks' conquering of Siberia, and the significance of the Rice Belt.

Pinker summarizes a vast number of scientific studies on how humans process language, including how we can listen and distinguish phonemes at frighteningly fast speeds, how toddlers easily understand features of language that stump any computer program, and various tests of the idea that features of language can be mapped onto features of the mind. Howard Gardner:

Pinker begins by citing a number of common-sense ideas, all of which he promises to demolish in the ensuing chapters. These include the notions that different languages construe reality in different ways; that children learn to talk by imitating others; that grammatical expertise is in steady decline in our society; and that English spelling is uniquely illogical.

There are specific, testable, and built-in syntactical procedures that explain why we say /Darwinian/ and even /Darwinianisms/ but why we would never say /Darwinismian/, why baseball batters "/flied out/" rather than "/flew out/," why we listen to "/Walkmans/" rather than to "/Walkmen/," why hockey players are called "/Maple Leafs/" rather than "/Maple Leaves/," and why even three-year-olds know that a monster who likes to eat mice is a "/mice-eater/" but a monster who likes to eat rats is a "/rat-eater/" not a "/rats-eater/."

Ostler reviews: The Guardian; National Review; ABC Radio; California Literary Review; New Statesman; The Age.

Pinker review: New York Review of Books

Wood reviews Belting

Christopher S. Wood reviews Hans Belting's book Bild-Anthropologie.

Visual culture, for Belting, is generated by combinations of the three elemental terms image, body, and medium, which serve as the overall rubric of the research project at Karlsruhe (Bild-Korper-Medium)...

The boldest idea of the book, developed over several chapters, is that the true vanishing point of every picture is the death image, the Todesbild...

Belting's model of the image as existential exchange is intelligible only as a desired destination, some sort of escape from the coils of representation and illusion. He perceives correctly but deplores the essential negativity of art. He sees that art amounts to nothing more than the repression of desire through desire's figural restaging, nothing other than a swerve from the real, a "masking of the blow" (in Whitney Davis's phrase (15)), a deferral of plenitude, a disruption of mimesis, a fall into error. Belting expects from his preart or postart image nothing less than a reversal of all that, a negation of the negation...

The Apocalyptic Satirist

Edward Timms comes out with several volumes of his book on Karl Kraus, the "apocalyptic satirist" of fin-y-première-de-la-siècle Vienna. On Kraus and Timms: George Steiner, TLS; D. J. Enright, New York Review; Yale UP; TheAbsolute.net; Kirjasto.Sci.Fi.  

Lords of the Harvest

Reviews of Daniel Charles, Lords of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money, and the Future of Food: Washington Times;   Washington Post; Scientific American; American Scientist; New Scientist; Technology and Culture; Technology and Society; Foreign Affairs; Sojourners. 

Human Universals (A-C)

Are there universal characteristics of people? Yes, argues Donald E. Brown in his book, Human Universals and an article in Daedalus. A full list, excerpted below, is listed online, reproduced from Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

Reviews of Pinker: Louis Menand, The New Yorker; The Nation; New York Review of Books (with Pinker's reply); The Guardian; The Economist; American Scientist; Kenan Malik.

abstraction in speech & thought

actions under self-control distinguished from those not under control

aesthetics

affection expressed and felt

age grades

age statuses

age terms

ambivalence

anthropomorphization

anticipation

antonyms

attachment

baby talk

belief in supernatural/religion

beliefs, false

beliefs about death

beliefs about disease

beliefs about fortune and misfortune

binary cognitive distinctions

biological mother and social mother normally the same person

black (color term)

body adornment

childbirth customs

childcare

childhood fears

childhood fear of loud noises

childhood fear of strangers

choice making (choosing alternatives)

classification

classification of age

classification of behavioral propensities

classification of body parts

classification of colors

classification of fauna

classification of flora

classification of inner states

classification of kin

classification of sex

classification of space

classification of tools

classification of weather conditions

coalitions

collective identities

conflict

conflict, consultation to deal with

conflict, means of dealing with

conflict, mediation of

conjectural reasoning

containers

continua (ordering as cognitive pattern)

contrasting marked and nonmarked sememes (meaningful elements in language)

cooking

cooperation

cooperative labor

copulation normally conducted in privacy

corporate (perpetual) statuses

coyness display

critical learning periods

crying

cultural variability

culture

culture/nature distinction

New Books and Catalogs

A number of interesting new books and catalogs:

• George Brecht: Events: A Heterospective (exhibition Cologne et al.; Julia Robinson essay, Alfred Fischer ed.) Kunstbuchhandlung
  
  
• Dickerman et al., Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris (exhibition Paris et al.) Amazon
  
  
• Part Object Part Sculpture (Wexner; Molesworth, ed.) Penn State U. Press
  
• Nouveau Realisme (Susanne Neuburger ed., Vienna) Kunstbuchhandlung Amazon
  
• Zardini, ed., Sense of the City (Canadian Centre for Architecture) Artbook.com Kunstbuchhandlung Archiseek

And:

Julia Robinson, "The sculpture of indeterminacy: Alison Knowles's beans and variations," Art Journal winter 2004

The word on Amartya Sen

Reviews of Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian.

• Shashi Tharoor, Washington Post:

There is only one problem with his rich and instructive book: He constructs his essays with such meticulous reasoning and expresses his point of view in so courteous a tone that this Indian found it difficult to pick an argument with him. A future edition will need a less contentious title.

• John Walsh, Asian Review of Books:

When Mao and the Communists ascended to power, universal healthcare improved many vital indicators of public health in China and vaulted that country above India. However, with the opening of the Chinese economy, inequalities in society have hugely increased while public health indicators show declines, so that India has again taken the lead. There are complex lessons to be drawn from the totality of this analysis.

• Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian:

Sen does not say much about how the argumentative tradition is faring in India in the age of globalisation. The one "quintessential argumentative Indian" he names, the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, is little known in India. And even if he had named others, it would still have to be asked, if only for the sake of argument, whether they can be heard above the din of a media increasingly influenced by the Murdoch model, and preoccupied with stock markets, information technology tycoons, beauty queens, Bollywood starlets, fashion models and other celebrities. "Silence is a powerful enemy of social justice," Sen writes. But so are the celebratory shrieks of minorities empowered by globalisation.

Acutely sensitive to class in his analysis of economic inequality, Sen rarely considers it in his political commentary, which often has a certain abstract quality: "The enthusiasts for religious politics in India ... have worked mainly through generating societal frictions in which the demographic correlates of religion have been used to separate out the communities for selective roguery." The human agents that appear absent in this slightly mechanical view are the members of the new Indian middle class, who form the support base of the Hindu nationalists and who murdered Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 in between carting off DVD players from looted shops. Sen deplores the xenophobia and megalomania of the Hindu nationalists, while approving their "outward-looking economic programme" for globalisation. But are these cultural and economic projects really so far apart? As the Bush-voting American middle class most recently proved, ultranationalism, religious fundamentalism and a belief in free markets are not only fully compatible but can feed off each other.

• Soumya Bhattacharya, The Guardian:

One of the book's many triumphs is its tone. Sen does not indulge in triumphalism about his country's past; nor does he spare Western influences (like James Mill's History of British India) that have oversimplified and distorted the Indian reality.

• Pavan K. Varma, Independent Online:

The problem with Sen's thesis is that it relies too heavily on one aspect of Hinduism. To be fair, he accepts that this may not be "the only reasonable way of thinking about the history or culture or politics of India". It is true that some Hindu texts have laudable examples of dissent and debate, but the practice of Hinduism has even more dramatic examples of the absence of tolerance and heterodoxy. Arjuna's questions to Krishna in the Bhagwada Gita is indeed a good example of the argumentative tradition, but the Manusmriti, for instance, advocates that a Shudra's (untouchable's) tongue should be cut off if he even chants a Sanskrit shloka, and hot oil should be poured into his ears if he deigns to hear the sacred literature.

There must have been a time when the freedom to interrogate was an intrinsic part of our tradition, but in real life it has congealed for much too long into unquestioning acceptance of orthodoxy and uncritical genuflection before hierarchy. The enquiring spirit did lead to remarkable achievements in science and mathematics, as in the pioneering work of Aryabhata in the fifth, Varahamihira in the sixth, and Brahmagupta in the seventh centuries. But honest observers are appalled at the lack of such a spirit in the bulk of Indian universities today, where most students learn by rote, and teachers rarely encourage the right to disagree.

....

The violence and bigotry traditionally inflicted by high-caste Hindus on members of their own faith, the low-caste Shudras, has no parallel in any other religion. Nor is Hinduism particularly welcoming to outside influences. We need only recall that until recently Hindus considered all foreigners to be mleccha, inherently unclean, and regarded those who ventured to foreign lands - as Mahatma Gandhi famously did when he left for England to study law in 1888 - as having polluted themselves.

Any civilisation as ancient, accomplished and diverse as India's will have instances of argument, dissent and debate. This is something to be proud of. But to make such instances the principal contributing factor for the success of the democratic experiment in India, or for the triumph of secularism, is, I believe, to oversimplify things.

The real reason why the erstwhile "untouchables" or the poorest of the poor have the freedom to argue today is that the working of democracy - with all its inadequacies - has created a real shift in power to the deprived and dispossessed.

Bredekamp, Leibniz & Bildwissenschaft

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), known for fundamental contributions to math, physics, and philosophy, organized all his thoughts into one big system, much like a computer -- a rationalist metaphysics. Also like a computer programmer, he posited the 'monad,' a metaphysical entity, as the fundamental building block of what is.

He described the monad as 'windowless,' or not interacting with others. And yet, Leibniz, who was interested in theater, laboratories, gardens, menageries, machines, and grottos along with chambers of art and wonders, produced ideas that are of use to the project of Bildwissenschaft (the historical study of images/pictures, as against 'art history') -- so argues Horst Bredekamp in The Window of the Monad: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz' Theater of Nature and Art.

1. Horst Bredekamp, Die Fenster der Monade: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz' Theater der Natur und Kunst (2004) reviewed by Isabella Woldt (H-ArtHist, 08.05); Christian Geyer (FAZ, 02.05); Gottfried Boehm (Sueddeutsche, 06.04)
2. "Kunstgeschichte im 'Iconic Turn,'" interview with Bredekamp (Kritische Berichte, 1998)
3. "A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft" (excerpt; Critical Inquiry, 2003)
4. "Im Königsbett der Kunstgeschichte," interview with Bredekamp (Die Zeit, 04.05)

Canon: Victor Hanson

Q. Could you give a short list of books you think everyone should read before leaving High School?

A. 1. A play of Sophocles

2. Iliad or Odyssey

3. Inferno or Don Quixote

4. A short treatise of either Aristotle or Cicero

5. Plato’s Apology

6. Two or three plays of Shakespeare

7. A long chapter of Gibbon

8. One or two of the Federalist Papers

9. Les Miserables

10. A novel by Conrad. Mark Twain, or Balzac

11. Selections from Keats, Shelly, Wordsworth, Byron

12. Some poems by Kipling, T.S. Eliot

13. Selections from Churchill’s history of WWII

14. A few action books like Runciman, Siege of Constantinople, Bernal Diaz, Conquest of New Spain, Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory

15. A novel by Steinbeck, Faulkner, Wolfe, or Hemingway

16. Two or three essays by George Orwell

Harry Potter and the Roster of Critics

• Wendy Doniger, "Spot the Source: Harry Potter Explained," London Review of Books/Guardian, 10.02.00 (edited version: "Never Snitch: The Mythology of Harry Potter," uchicago.edu)
• Harold Bloom, "Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes," Wall Street Journal, 11.07.00 (and Bloom, "The Dumbing Down of American Readers," Boston Globe, 24.09.03)
• Stephen King, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," New York Times, 23.07.00

Canon/Top10/Tips

Esteemed colleagues,

If you were to recommend three to ten books that ought to unquestionably be read by generally educated people who wish to understand the world, which would they be?

Art Since 1900

Reviews and discussions of Art Since 1900 (Thames and Hudson):

• Claire Bishop, artforum.com
• Matthew Collings, Guardian
• Martin Gayford, arts.telegraph
• Eric Gibson, OpinionJournal
• Dan Hopewell, Iconoduel
• Mark Liberman, Language Log
• Miguel Sánchez, Modern Kicks
• Frank Whitford, TimesOnline

The politically eclectic but strictly anti-theory website, Arts and Letters Daily, linked two two separate reviews of Art Since 1900 in conservative newspapers: Eric Gibson's in the Wall Street Journal, and Martin Gayford's in the Telegraph. Both reviews make the same complaint, a familiar one, against academics who traffic in theories of the subject, the sign, and the object. The complaint is that the book's theoretical discussions detract from its visual obligations to its art objects.

Given the vehemence and inaccuracy of these journalistic reactions, they deserve to be called phobic. The object of the phobia is theory. But theory shouldn't be identified with the particular ideas of any given writer (such as Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes). Theory in general is a way of organizing objects through concepts. If, like Art Since 1900, a book takes a theoretical approach, that just means that it offers a critical consideration of the concepts that it uses as well as the objects it discusses.  If a book does not take a theoretical approach, that means that it takes for granted certain ideas -- for instance the meanings of the terms art, artist, artwork, painting, sculpture, beautiful, sublime -- and doesn't consider them necessary to discuss.

Antitheoretical reviews, like these two, worry that the theory concepts get in the way of enjoying the art objects. They are against the idea that we all use concepts to get to objects, and that the concepts themselves can demand attention or scrutiny. In their view, if concepts get in the way of objects, the concepts should be jettisoned. Ultimately, they are against the need, the desire, the impulse, to think along with looking.

The alternative, as exemplified by Art Since 1900, is that thinking -- theorizing -- offers the possibility of making deeper connections between art objects and the worlds they inhabit, ranging from the time of their making to the time of our viewing. For Art Since 1900, thinking is not the enemy of looking but rather its dance partner.

[Update, 17 June: Yve-Alain Bois defends the authors against some of the reviews' more ridiculous charges, in a lively thread at Iconoduel; Dan Hopewell's comment on the thread.]

Bernhard Siegert, Relays

Reviews of Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System: Kurzbeschreibung; Richard John / duplicate; Daniel Punday.

Angle of Repose: Grass Valley

The narrator, Lyman Ward, admires hard work and accomplishment. He admires his grandmother, Susan Burling, for her achievements, and thinks less of the women he hires to help with his book, because they aren't very good at their work. This makes me wonder what kind of attitude he wants us readers to have about the relation between hard work and happiness.

That is, how tightly connected are Susan Burling's hard work, her desire for something better, her being a "cultural snob" (p. 24), and any lack of happiness in her marriage and overall situation? To what extent was she unhappy and/or highly accomplished because she didn't accept things as they were?

I think her love for my grandfather, however real, was always somewhat unwilling. She must unconsciously have agreed with his judgment that she was higher and finer than he. I wonder if there was some moment when she fully comprehended and appreciated him? (p. 25)

The Lord of the Rings

What sets The Lord of the Rings apart from typical fantasy literature? In "Reasons for Liking Tolkien,"  Jenny Turner has many excellent answers to this question. Particularly relevant to academics:

Studying and researching - the everyday activities of the scholar - are deeply pleasurable. They're fun and they're more than fun. All sorts of visceral needs and desires are involved, with all the obvious psychosexual analogues: controlling the material; penetrating appearances; consuming the primary sources, and so on. Tolkien, I think, felt all these things acutely, whether or not he was aware of it. And so, in his fiction, he created a machine for the evocation of scholarly frisson. The thrills are the thrills of knowledge hidden, knowledge uncovered, knowledge that slips away.

However:

Here is a list of some of the things you learn about when you read Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: LA punk, Jacobean revenge tragedy, early computers, radical politics of the 1960s, the Pony Express. Out your mind darts, searching the world for information. In it comes again, digging back with its goodies into the text. Here are some of the things you learn about while reading The Lord of the Rings: hobbit-lore, the two branches of Elvish, the annals of the Númenórean kings. Spot the difference? That's right: the second lot is entirely fictional, and doesn't involve even the shortest trip from your chair. The lore is self-referential, centripetal, an occult system. As astrology is to physics or conspiracy theory to history, so Middle Earth is to literature and learning. It's a closed space, finite and self-supporting, fixated on its own nostalgia, quietly running down.

Reading The Lord of the Rings provokes for me, among other things, nostalgia for the moment when I first got a clue, only a faint clue, of what scholarship was about.

Angle of Repose

Reading Angle of Repose, a Generation X reader has some sympathy with the Greatest Generation narrator in bemoaning the ignorant self-righteousness of the flower children.