Over at the Economist's Democracy in America:

MIKE Konczal writes:

One of the more curious behavioral responses is that people hate unemployment. They hate not being part of their productive community, they hate not contributing, they hate the loss of identity that one gets as someone who works. To an economist that’s b-a-n-a-n-a-s. Unemployment should be a pleasant vacation! But, last time I checked, it wasn’t (is that consistent with the latest frontiers in happiness research?).

Mr Konczal is contributing to a discussion that's kicked up recently over a paper written by libertarian economists Bryan Caplan and Scott Beaulier, arguing that behavioural economics provides a basis for critiquing government welfare policies. Karl Smith highlighted Mr Caplan's paper as a serious challenge to his neo-classical economic belief structure; other commentors replied that the paper had no data and no mathematical models; Mr Smith responded that often simple, data-free models can be extremely helpful in posing problems and presenting complex ideas intuitively, and cited the example of Paul Krugman's famous essay on the babysitting co-op with its crystal-clear workaday picture of how a Keynesian liquidity trap works; Mr Krugman jumped in with his favourite simple, low-on-data papers, including David Hume's thought experiment “Of the Balance of Trade” and Evsey Domar's paper grounding slavery and serfdom in land surpluses and labour shortages. (I love this stuff. Blogs are the greatest thing to happen to intellectual life in the early 21st century; one day we'll look back on them as a latter-day Bloomsbury.)

Mr Caplan is taking up a problem for conservative critics of the welfare state who take a neo-classical economic perspective. From a neo-classical perspective, he says, giving people more choices (by giving them money, preference in university admissions, health care and so on) always makes them better off. So how can welfare hurt the poor? He thinks behavioural economics, which shows us how people often (usually, even) make decisions that are irrational from a classical economic perspective, can provide the answer:

A simple numerical example can illustrate the link between helping the poor and harming them. Suppose that in the absence of government assistance, the true net benefit of having a child out-of-wedlock is -$25,000, but a teenage girl with self-serving bias [unrealistically optimistic and overconfident] believes it is only -$5000. Since she still sees the net benefits as negative she chooses to wait. But suppose the government offers $10,000 in assistance to unwed mothers. Then the perceived benefits rise to $5000, the teenage girl opts to have the baby, and ex post experiences a net benefit of -$25,000 + $10,000 = -$15,000.

Mr Konczal responds that the fact that people are economically irrational shows us precisely why government safety-net programmes are necessary.

An excerpt from Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life in Slate [h/t: Zoe Pollock over at Andrew Sullivan]:

The scientific jury is still out on whether our species is unique among social mammals in being able to conceptualize mental states—other species, such as chimps, dogs, scrub jays and dolphins, may have some modest capacity in this regard. But there’s absolutely no question that we’re much better at it than the rest of the animal kingdom. We are natural psychologists, exquisitely attuned to the unseen psychological world. Reasoning about abstract mental states is as much a trademark of our species as walking upright on two legs, learning a language, and raising our offspring into their teens.

There is a scientific term for this way of thinking—”theory of mind.” It’s perhaps easiest to grasp the concept when considering how we struggle to make sense of someone else’s bizarre or unexpected behavior. If you’ve ever seen an unfortunate woman at the grocery store wearing a midriff-revealing top and packed into a pair of lavender tights like meat in a sausage wrapper, or a follicularly challenged man with a hairpiece two shades off and three centimeters adrift, and asked yourself what on Earth those people were thinking when they looked in the mirror before leaving the house, this is a good sign that your theory of mind (not to mention your fashion sense) is in working order. When others violate our expectations for normalcy or stump us with surprising behaviors, our tendency to mind-read goes into overdrive. We literally “theorize” about the minds that are causing ostensible behavior.

The evolutionary significance of this mind-reading system hinges on one gigantic question: Is this psychological capacity—this theory of mind, this seeing souls glimmering beneath the skin, spirits twinkling behind orbiting eyes, thoughts in the flurry of movement—is this the “one big thing” that could help us finally understand what it means to be human? Could it tell us something about how we find meaning in the universe?

One of my loveliest and most beloved friends, Miriam Hansen, died peacefully at Northwestern University Hospital yesterday after a twelve year battle with multiple cancers. She was a noble soul besides being one of the wisest individuals I have known. Picture on the right shows her with me (center) and Seema (right) standing in the balcony of her beautiful apartment in Chicago. This is what her husband and my dear friend Michael said about her last moments:

“Her death came suddenly, but she passed away gently, more gently than you would ever consider imaginable. In one of her last lucid moments on Friday morning she said twice, the first time more determinate and the second time more resigned: “Ich sterbe”; and this is what she proceeded to do. In life and death she was Miriam.”

From Film studies for free:

Miriam Hansen was Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she also taught in the Department of English and the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies. Her publications include a book on Ezra Pound’s early poetics (1979) and Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991). She was completing a study entitled The Other Frankfurt School: Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno on Cinema, Mass Culture, and Modernity. Her next project was to be a book on the notion of cinema as vernacular modernism.

Inspired by her lifelong study of the Frankfurt School, Hansen's work rethought cinema as a part of the public and counterpublic spheres, situating it within a larger discourse of popular culture, and thus opening up the essential study of such 'periphery texts' as fan magazines, gossip columns, movie reviews, and so on. But her development of the concept of vernacular modernism also completely set the scene for the field of world or transnational cinema studies; and her historical work on cinematic spectatorship and her highly original addressing of the sensual experiences of film and new media are likewise in the process of revolutionizing their field of study (as W.J. T. Mitchell argues in relation to 'Miriam Hansen’s urging that cinema and other media be regarded as a vernacular modernism in which new theoretical propositions might be articulated while the senses are being reeducated').

It is hard to think, then, of anyone who has made a more significant contribution to Film Studies (and, latterly, new media studies), in the context of the Humanities as a whole, than she did.

Film Studies For Free hopes that Hansen knew just how grateful we are for her research — how changed we are by it — as well as for her inspiring work as a teacher. Here is a link to a warm and touching tribute by one of Hansen's former students.

More here.

In Basho's House

by Peter Skyzynecki
from Old/New World: New & Selected Poems
University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2007

Basho

Noam Chomsky in The Guardian:

A common refrain among pundits is that fear of radical Islam requires (reluctant) opposition to democracy on pragmatic grounds. While not without some merit, the formulation is misleading. The general threat has always been independence. The US and its allies have regularly supported radical Islamists, sometimes to prevent the threat of secular nationalism.

A familiar example is Saudi Arabia, the ideological centre of radical Islam (and of Islamic terror). Another in a long list is Zia ul-Haq, the most brutal of Pakistan's dictators and President Reagan's favorite, who carried out a programme of radical Islamisation (with Saudi funding).

“The traditional argument put forward in and out of the Arab world is that there is nothing wrong, everything is under control,” says Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian official and now director of Middle East research for the Carnegie Endowment. “With this line of thinking, entrenched forces argue that opponents and outsiders calling for reform are exaggerating the conditions on the ground.”

Therefore the public can be dismissed. The doctrine traces far back and generalises worldwide, to US home territory as well. In the event of unrest, tactical shifts may be necessary, but always with an eye to reasserting control.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog:

Let's see, how should I spend my Sunday? Should I keep reading Herwig Wolfram's magisterial History of the Goths? Should I perhaps go a-hunting online for some whimsical new videos of cats doing unexpected things? Or should I check to see if there are any noteworthy athletic spectacles on television?

There has been a dull din, growing louder over the past few weeks, that suggests to me that some big sports event is in the offing. Distant memories from childhood cause me to associate this din, in this particular season, with football. These associations, in turn, conjure up others still: of Ronald Reagan, of high-school meatheads in letter jackets telling me not to stand too close to their girlfriends, of ROTC, of PromiseKeepers, of words like 'buddy', of a model of American masculinity that quite literally spit me out as indigestible.

And now, here I am, back in the belly of the beast, steeling myself for yet another Superbowl. (The last Superbowl I can remember, in early 1994, I spent locked in a closet reading Anna Akhmatova as my parents hosted a wide-screen-TV Superbowl fiesta, complete with trays of bean dip made up with various ingredients to resemble a football field: sour cream for the yard lines, a goal post out of avocado, etc.)

More here.

Georgie Day in The Browser:

What does travel mean for you?

Travel is both a physical and a mental exercise – it is about immersing yourself in another culture. Travelling is the process of letting go of yourself and immersing yourself into different ways of knowing and seeing. If you cannot do this, you haven’t travelled. It’s certainly not a holiday – travelling is not staying in five-star hotels.

Tell us about your first book recommendation, The Travels of Ibn Battutah.

Ibn Battutah, whose name can be translated as Son of a Duck, is my hero and is regarded as ‘the traveller of Islam’. He left his native city of Tangier in 1325 at the age of 21 with the intention of performing the pilgrimage to Mecca. But he continued beyond Mecca. Travelling by horse, mule, ox wagon, junk, dhow and on foot, he covered over 75,000 miles and visited over 40 countries. Wherever he went, he found it easy to get employment as a jurist, or a courtier or an ambassador. His journeys involve swashbuckling adventures and chases with concubines in tow. He is a riveting read. The interesting thing with Ibn Battutah is that travel for him was not just going from one place to another; it was living in a place. Wherever he went, he made his home. He had a house, he married and he got a job. This allowed him to learn about the place by living as a part of it. Then he would move on. It wasn’t until he returned to Morocco in his ripe old age, that he wrote down all his adventure. It’s got a wonderful title in full, The Precious Gift for Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travels.

More here.

Sanjay Gupta interviews Bill Gates at CNN:

Gupta: There has been a lot of scrutiny of vaccines recently — specifically childhood vaccines. There has been a lot of news about is there a connection with autism, for example. What do you make of all that? Dr. [Andrew] Wakefield wrote a paper about this [in The Lancet in 1998] saying he thought there was a connection. And there were lower vaccination rates over a period of time as a result in Britain, then the United States. What are your thoughts?

Gates: Well, Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children. It's a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.

More here.

Patrick French in Outlook India:

I write as someone who has long admired Pankaj Mishra’s literary aspirations. I first met him in 1996, when he asked me to lunch at the Gaylord restaurant in Connaught Place so as to give me a copy of his Bill Bryson-style travel book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana. It was funny and entertaining, and remains his best book. His journalism has been interesting: no fellow writer could fail to be impressed by his rendition of the story of Ngodup, a Tibetan man who died in a protest in Delhi. It is a pity Pankaj did not pursue his burgeoning career as a novelist, or produce the promised short history of modern India. Instead, he has ranged widely, sitting on eminent literary prize committees, popping up as a visiting fellow at assorted foreign universities and jetting about denouncing “business-class lounges” and their elite inhabitants. It is not clear whether Pankaj—travelling the globe for high-paying western publications, while busily condemning “late capitalist society”—ever uses these lounges himself, or whether he prefers to take a downgrade to cattle class. For a long time I have appreciated his chutzpah most of all, though he remains a writer of promise. He has been successful in imparting his “authentic” take on India to the West, and one American intellectual even adjudged our reviewer to be “the young Siddhartha Gautama himself: a scholar-sophisticate” after meeting him at “the lower Manhattan holiday party of a stylish magazine”.

Pankaj has obviously been on a long journey from his self-described origins—in what he calls a “new, very poor and relatively inchoate Asian society”—to his present position at the heart of the British establishment, married to a cousin of the prime minister David Cameron. But he seems oddly resentful of the idea of social mobility for other Indians.

More here.

Gilbert Achcar and Farooq Sulehria in ZNet [h/t: Adam Shatz]:

The Western media are hinting at the fact that democracy in the Middle East would lead to an Islamic fundamentalist takeover. We have seen the triumphal return of Rached Ghannouchi to Tunisia after long years in exile. The Muslim Brotherhood is likely to win fair elections in Egypt. What is your comment on that?

I would turn the whole question around. I would say that it is the lack of democracy that led religious fundamentalist forces to occupy such a space. Repression and the lack of political freedoms reduced considerably the possibility for left-wing, working-class and feminist movements to develop in an environment of worsening social injustice and economic degradation. In such conditions, the easiest venue for the expression of mass protest turns out to be the one that uses the most readily and openly available channels. That's how the opposition got dominated by forces adhering to religious ideologies and programmes.

We aspire to a society where such forces are free to defend their views, but in an open and democratic ideological competition between all political currents. In order for Middle Eastern societies to get back on the track of political secularisation, back to the popular critical distrust of the political exploitation of religion that prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s, they need to acquire the kind of political education that can be achieved only through a long-term practise of democracy.

Having said this, the role of religious parties is different in different countries. True, Rached Ghannouchi has been welcomed by a few thousand people on his arrival at Tunis airport. But his Nahda movement has much less influence in Tunisia than the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Of course, this is in part because Al-Nahda suffered from harsh repression since the 1990s. But it is also because the Tunisian society is less prone than the Egyptian to religious fundamentalist ideas, due to its higher degree of Westernisation and education, and the country's history.

But there is no doubt that Islamic parties have become the major forces in the opposition to existing regimes over the whole region. It will take a protracted democratic experience to change the direction of winds from that which has been prevailing for more than three decades.

Among Western policymakers, it seems Suleiman remains a popular choice to replace Mubarak, as the candidate uniquely suited to maintaining Egypt’s current foreign policy, while also addressing domestic grievances expressed by protesters. That remains a distant prospect, given the unlikelihood that the Egyptian opposition would abandon its call to determine the nation’s role in regional affairs. But it also demonstrates that, unlike Tunisia, Egypt is far too critical to US objectives in the Middle East to be left to its own devices. Whatever the outcome in Egypt, it is clear that the recent revelations will have a dramatic impact on the settlement of the Palestinian question. Already weakened by the scandal of the Palestine Papers, Erekat may now have to do without the support of an Egyptian regime he termed, “our ally, our backbone”. In his first interview as vice-president, Suleiman decried as “unacceptable” what he called “foreign interference” in Egypt’s current turmoil. Coming from a regime whose ability to endure through the decades is owed largely to foreign interference, the irony of those words will not be lost on the Egyptian people.

more from Abdullah Al-Arian at Al Jazeera here.

A subterranean museum hewn from a sandstone cliff on an Australian island, founded by a maverick gambling millionaire, sounds like a far-fetched art world fantasy. Fill the gallery with some of the most provocative and striking art works of the 21st century, from a faeces-making machine by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye to Stephen Shanabrook’s mutilated body of a suicide bomber sculpted in chocolate, along with Egyptian mummies and modernist Australian pieces, and the saga sounds even more implausible. But such a place exists: the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), which opened outside the Tasmanian capital of Hobart late last month, houses the collection of 49-year-old David Walsh, mathematician, vineyard owner and professional gambler. At 6,000 square metres, it is Australia’s largest private art gallery. Walsh is quite unlike your typical art collector. Raised in the Hobart suburb of Glenorchy, the algorithms virtuoso says he was a “misfit kid”, a typical computer nerd. But the geek cleaned up, dropping out of the University of Tasmania in the late 1970s to fine-tune gaming systems, hitting on a formula that meant blackjack croupiers dreaded dealing him a hand (mastering card techniques was “easy”, he says, but finding a way to win on the horses took him most of the early 1990s).

more from Gareth Harris at the FT here.

Review here of a brilliant novel by a friend of ours here at 3QD, Rana Dasgupta. Truly an original work…

Most people die before they can witness the historical consequences of their actions. Ulrich, the 100-year-old Bulgarian man at the center of Rana Dasgupta’s new novel, “Solo,” is an exception: he is so ancient he lives in a state of perpetual, dazed aftermath. Once the manager of a chemical factory for the Communists, he watches as Bulgaria’s rivers start oozing familiar poisons: “Like all his compatriots, Ulrich had become chemical himself, his blood a solution of cadmium, lead, zinc and copper.” Soon after, Communism falls, multiplying the pointlessness of Ulrich’s life. The first half of “Solo” is a swift retelling of Bulgarian history through Ulrich’s many failures. When this story ends, we are abruptly introduced to Ulrich’s “Daydreams” — his “private fictions” that “have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense.” But these so-called dreams are in fact the ultramodern and well-researched tales of three young Eastern European characters trying to make it big in New York in the 2000s. They are only glancingly fabulist and tenuously linked to Ulrich’s experiences. “Solo” bills itself as a novel, but it is really two distinct novellas held together by the author’s interest in Bulgaria and Georgia.

more from Karan Mahajan at the NYT here.

From EmersonKent.com:

…Well, I am one who doesn't believe in deluding myself. I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American. Being born here in America doesn't make you an American. Why, if birth made you American, you wouldn't need any legislation; you wouldn't need any amendments to the Constitution; you wouldn't be faced with civil-rights filibustering in Washington, D.C., right now. They don't have to pass civil-rights legislation to make a Polack an American.

No, I'm not an American. I'm one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I'm not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I. I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare. These 22 million victims are waking up. Their eyes are coming open. They're beginning to see what they used to only look at. They're becoming politically mature. They are realizing that there are new political trends from coast to coast. As they see these new political trends, it's possible for them to see that every time there's an election the races are so close that they have to have a recount. They had to recount in Massachusetts to see who was going to be governor, it was so close. It was the same way in Rhode Island, in Minnesota, and in many other parts of the country. And the same with Kennedy and Nixon when they ran for president. It was so close they had to count all over again. Well, what does this mean? It means that when white people are evenly divided, and black people have a bloc of votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who's going to sit in the White House and who's going to be in the dog house.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Two centuries ago last month, a traveler making his way by boat down the Mississippi toward New Orleans would have come upon a ghastly sight: a severed human head rotting on the end of a pole. And no sooner would it vanish around a bend than another appeared along the levee. Then another, and another — and so on without respite for 40 long miles down to the city. What must it have been like to experience this? Did the horror build and build with each successive glimpse of those dreadful trophies? Or how many apparitions did it take — 10, 20, 100? — before they began to seem familiar milestones on the journey, ordinary features of the passing landscape? In a sense, those heads were totems of an all-too-commonplace aspect of the American scene: the landscape of slavery and white supremacy. Each one had been cut from the corpse of a black man killed for fighting to be free.

Early in January 1811, along the same riverbank, a small army of Louisiana slaves had briefly faced a small army of slaveholders. It was, as described in “American Uprising,” Daniel Rasmussen’s chilling and suspenseful account, the culmination of a signal episode in the history of American race relations. On a night just at the beginning of carnival season, black workers belonging to a planter named Manuel Andry broke into their master’s house armed with axes, machetes and sugar-cane knives. For Andry, surprised in his bedroom, it must have been the realization of every slaveholder’s worst fears. He managed to flee, but not before seeing his son Gilbert being hacked to pieces.

More here.

Protesters throughout the Middle East are using famous poetry as subversive chants against the government. Josh Dzieza on countries where verse still has power—and the Pete Seeger of Egypt.

To The Tyrant

Imperious despot, insolent in strife,
Lover of ruin, enemy of life!
You mock the anguish of an impotent land
Whose people’s blood has stained your tyrant hand,
And desecrate the magic of this earth,
sowing your thorns, to bring despair to birth,

Patience! Let not the Spring delude you now,
The morning light, the skies’ unclouded brow;
Fear gathers in the broad horizon’s murk
Where winds are rising, and deep thunders lurk;
When the weak weeps, receive him not with scorn—
Who soweth thorns, shall not his flesh be torn?

Wait! Where you thought to reap the lives of men,
The flowers of hope, never to bloom again,
Where you have soaked the furrows’ heart with blood,
Drenched them with tears, until they overflowed,
A gale of flame shall suddenly consume,
A bloody torrent sweep you to your doom!

by Abu ‘l-Qasim al-Shabbi
from Arabic Literature (in English)

Mujahid Kamran in The Express Tribune:

Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate Abdus Salam was born in Santok Das, District Sahiwal, on January 29, 1926 a little over 85 years ago. He shared the 1979 physics Nobel Prize with Steven Weinberg and Sheldon Glashow for the historic unification of the weak nuclear force with the electromagnetic force.

Salam had already become famous in British India as a very young record-breaking student from Jhang, where he grew up, when he arrived at Government College, Lahore in 1942 as a bachelor’s student. At Government College, too, he continued his record-breaking streak in every major exam and passed out with a Master’s in mathematics in 1946.

Salam arrived at Cambridge as a student of Tripos mathematics in September, 1946 with a three-year scholarship. He completed his mathematics Tripos in two years with a first class. His teacher, Fred Hoyle, one of the most renowned astrophysicists of the 20th century, advised him to do the two-year physics Tripos in one year “as a challenge”. A few others had achieved this feat, after having done a math Tripos in first class. The list included two Nobel laureates — Sir GP Thomson, the grandfather of the present British High commissioner to Pakistan, and Sir Nevil Mott. However, both had secured a second class in the physics Tripos. The challenge was to secure a double first class. Salam was, to the utter surprise of some of his teachers, able to secure a first class in the physics Tripos as well, while completing it in one year. This was a most unusual achievement.

Alan Posener in signandsight:

The French writer Pascal Bruckner wants to forbid a word. Which sounds more like a typically German obsession. But for Bruckner, “Islamophobia” is one of “those expressions which we dearly need to banish from our vocabulary”. One asks oneself with some trepidation which other words we “dearly need” to get rid of: Right-wing populism? Racism? Relativism?But let that ride. Bruckner's essay has the advantage of stating the case against “Islamophobia” clearly and concisely and thus allowing those who – like myself – propose to hang on to the word until a better one comes along to answer in a similar clear and concise way.

Let me present Bruckner's arguments in his own words:

“Iranian fundamentalists invented the word Islamophobia, formed in analogy to 'xenophobia', in the late seventies. The aim of this word is to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist.”

The argument that Islamists coined the phrase in order to portray any and all criticism of Islam as a symptom of illness (a phobia being an irrational fear), may be right or wrong. It is, however, irrelevant. Remember that the word “Antisemitism” was also coined by reactionaries who wanted to give their hatred of the Jews, inspired by Christian Antijudaism, a “scientific” gloss. In point of fact, the “Antisemites” never had anything against any other Semites (for instance Arabs), and their hatred was reserved for a people which (pace Thilo Sarrazin) was and is one of the world's most ethnically diverse. And yet we still use the expression today, and not only to characterize the ideology developed by its European inventors. For instance, few people today would hesitate to call Martin Luther an Antisemite, just because he knew nothing about race and genetics and therefore didn't call on pseudoscience to justify his murderous hatred of the Jews.

Leon Aron review's Lev Loseff's Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life in the Wall Street Journal:

The euphony of Brodsky's verse is irresistible in its ease and naturalness, and one finds oneself remembering lines and stanzas after no more than a couple of readings. “From the very beginning, as soon as it starts,” Isaiah Berlin wrote of Brodsky's poetry, “you are in the presence of genius. And that is a unique sort of feeling—being in the presence of genius.”

Alas, a reader without Russian has to take Berlin's word for it: Not even Brodsky himself managed to endow the English translations of his verses with the beauty and power of the originals (although he tried again and again, and the reader's indulgence of my translations above is begged). Without a fixed word order, auxiliary verbs such as “is” or “are” or articles, Russian offers little to impede the lyrical poet, and Brodsky rejoiced in this paradigmatically inflected language. Rich shades of emotions and meanings are conveyed by prefixes and suffixes. Myriad rhymes are generated almost spontaneously as the mostly polysyllabic nouns, verbs, adjectives and participles conjugate (that is, change their endings) in accordance with six cases and three genders. English, with its rigid order, shorter words and precious little change in word endings, is hardly a happy counterpart. “There is nothing odder,” Brodsky admitted, “than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon; for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.” The largely correct but hardly sparkling translation of Loseff's book and the Brodsky poems in translation that Loseff cites in his text prove this assertion right—yet again.

So non-Russian readers must settle for the next best thing: Brodsky's prose. The “English essayist” wrote widely about literature (Dante, Dostoevsky, Hardy, Horace, Mandelstam, Akhmatova). He meditated on exile and boredom; Rio and Venice; the muse and the beloved; memory as the closest substitute for love—among dozens of other matters. He managed to speak about all of this without a scintilla of pontification or superiority. Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor. (“In the country where I spent thirty-two years, adultery and moviegoing are the only forms of free enterprise.”) Paradoxes are tossed out with a Wilde-like elegance along with allusions, similes and metaphors galore—many stunningly unexpected and all completely and satisfyingly accurate. One constantly reaches for a pencil to mark particularly fetching sentences…