From The Boston Globe:

In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called “What is the Good of Criticism?” This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, “passion . . . raises reason to new heights.” A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge”—a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire’s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us “to love wisely what we before loved well.”

By “pleasure” and “love” Baudelaire and Fuller didn’t mean that critics should write only about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that a critic’s emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, is the sine qua non of criticism, and it usually, therefore, determines the critic’s choice of subject. Who can doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literature—and that, to him, it simply mattered more than most other things in life? Who can doubt that Pauline Kael found the world most challenging, most meaningful—hell, most alive—when she sat in a dark movie theater, or that Kenneth Tynan felt the same way at a play? For these critics and others—those I would consider at the center of the modern tradition—cultivating this sense of lived experience was at the heart of writing good criticism. Randall Jarrell, certainly no anti-intellectual, wrote that “criticism demands of the critic a terrible nakedness . . . All he has to go by, finally, is his own response, the self that makes and is made up of such responses.” Alfred Kazin agreed; the critic’s skill, he argued, “begins by noticing his intuitive reactions and building up from them; he responds to the matter in hand with perception at the pitch of passion.”

More here.

From Time:

Having won over China, the league is now eyeing the huge, cricket-mad country with little hoops history. NBA commissioner David Stern has already executed a beautiful pivot move into China, where, thanks in part to Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, hoops is hotter than Sichuan cooking. There’s still work to be done in Europe, even though it is now a source of many NBA players, including seven Frenchmen and six Slovenes. Before the season, the Philadelphia 76ers and Phoenix Suns played exhibition games in Germany, a challenging NBA country, as part of a four-team, five-country full-court press of Europe —Italy, Spain, France and Russia were also hosts of training camps and games.

Expanding to the world’s second most populous market hardly seems loony. After all, no American sports league has exported its brand better than the NBA, which sells more than $750 million in merchandise overseas annually. Its games are broadcast in 215 countries. And India offers a growing, tech-savvy economy with a billion potential consumers — 60% of whom are below age 30 — who could sop up NBA merchandise and follow their favorite players on NBA.com.

More here.

Though it’s hard to imagine, Americans feared the deadly tomato more than did the British, reluctant to treat them even as ornamental. The earliest references to the plant in America come from a herbalist, in 1710, at a South Carolina plantation, who approached the tomato with the same trepidation that sushi eaters approach the blowfish: they might taste wonderful, but I am not dying to find out. He exhibited them on his property as a curiosity. According to the standard work, Andrew Smith’s The Tomato in America, attitudes did not really begin to change until 100 years later when the president himself, Thomas Jefferson, announced in 1809 that he had begun growing tomatoes on his own grounds and serving them at state dinners. By then, the British had had several centuries to get used to tomatoes, and were eating them in at least small amounts. But Americans remained wary. Jefferson was in the last year of his presidency, and who knows, perhaps he thought he had little to lose in recommending them.

more from Cabinet here.

Colombian artist Fernando Botero is famous for his depictions of blimpy figures that verge on the ludicrous. New Yorkers may recall the outdoor display of Botero’s bronze figures, many of them nude, in the central islands of Park Avenue in 1993. Their bodily proportions insured that their nakedness aroused little in the way of public indignation. They were about as sexy as the Macy’s balloons, and their seemingly inflated blandness lent them the cheerful and benign look one associates with upscale folk art. The sculptures were a shade less ingratiating, a shade more dangerous than one of Walt Disney’s creations, but in no way serious enough to call for critical scrutiny. Though transparently modern, Botero’s style is admired mainly by those outside the art world. Inside the art world, critic Rosalind Krauss spoke for many of us when she dismissed Botero as “pathetic.”… When it was announced not long ago that Botero had made a series of paintings and drawings inspired by the notorious photographs showing Iraqi captives, naked, degraded, tortured and humiliated by American soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, it was easy to feel skeptical–wouldn’t Botero’s signature style humorize and cheapen this horror?… As it turns out, his images of torture, now on view at the Marlborough Gallery in midtown Manhattan and compiled in the book Botero Abu Ghraib, are masterpieces of what I have called disturbatory art–art whose point and purpose is to make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts.

more from Danto at The Nation here.

In the 35 years since her death, Diane Arbus’ most famous photographs—the twin girls in identical outfits, the wild-eyed boy clutching a toy hand-grenade, the Jewish giant slouching in his parents’ Bronx living room—have become icons, indelibly etched in the modern imagination. And just as indelible is the popular myth of Arbus as an artist haunted by inner demons—a neurotic voyeur, a lover of freaks. Her tragic mystique is rooted not only in her unexplained suicide at age 48 but also in rumors of her sexual adventurousness, in her oracular reflections on art and life (“A photograph is a secret about a secret,” she wrote. “The more it tells you, the less you know”), and not least, in the audacious exoticism of her subject matter. When the Museum of Modern Art mounted the first Arbus retrospective in 1972, a year after her death, her startling images of dwarfs, transvestites, and nudists inspired criticism of the most visceral kind: It’s said that the MoMA staff had to wipe the spit off the photographs’ protective glass frames at the end of each day. The show, which traveled for three years after its New York debut, was a succès de scandale that cemented Arbus’ reputation as the Dark Lady of American photography.

more from Slate here.

I don’t need to labour the vilification of the man, who died 40 years ago this Christmas. No other artist’s signature appears on the products of an industry that is the cultural equivalent of Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, and to many people, buying a toy Pinocchio is as bad as feeding your child burgers. Marc Eliot’s 1993 biography branded Disney an FBI informant union-basher, and hints at worse. In a classic episode of The Simpsons broadcast shortly after Eliot’s book came out, Bart and Lisa watch a corporate propaganda film at Itchy and Scratchy Land that says animation pioneer Roger Meyers Sr “loved almost all the peoples of the world” – an apparent swipe at Disney’s alleged anti-semitism. Hating Disney has become a cliche. A few months ago, the over-rated guerrilla artist Banksy left a figure of a Guantanamo prisoner at Disneyland – where else? – as if Walt, who died in 1966, was directing the war on terror from his cryogenic vault.

When a long dead cartoonist and film-maker is reviled for the crimes of the present administration, something is out of whack. Walt Disney was one of the great American artists of the 20th century. This needs to be recognised. So here I am, Walt, coming to the rescue, aided by an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris that celebrates Disney’s films as visual art.

more from The Guardian here.

On the few occassions when I’m not feel revulsion and disgust at Sacha Baron Cohen’s targets, such as the one’s who happily sang along to “Throw the Jew Down the Well”, I find myself feeling very embarassed for them. It’s just odd to see people not simply make themselves look silly or stupid, but humiliate themselves as ethical beings. But this doesn’t seem to help the matter at all, in the BBC:

Two US students are suing a film studio claiming they were duped into appearing in spoof movie Borat starring Sacha Baron Cohen as a Kazakh journalist.

The unknown plaintiffs are seen making sexist and racist remarks in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Legal papers said the two men “engaged in behaviour that they otherwise would not have engaged in”.

Spokesman for 20th Century Fox Gregg Brilliant said the case “has no merit”.

The men are identified in the film as two fraternity members from a South Carolina university.

At Conversations with History, Harry Kreisler interviews the philosopher Martha Nussbaum on Women’s Rights, Religion and Liberal Education. (Both transcript and video are available.)

[Kreisler] This problem of the role of religion and the role of the state, their interactions and so on, is a problem that you are grappling with now. Is that correct? Tell us a little about your research about what it is to have freedom of religion and of religious practice.

[Nussbaum] This is a rare case where I’m focusing on the American tradition, and I did it because after the election of 2004 I felt I wanted to make an intervention into the public debate, because people are increasingly polarized around religious matters and they often misunderstand certain things about the tradition. Religious people think that the idea of separation of church and state is an idea that means that religion is being marginalized, it’s being trivialized, it’s being said to be unimportant. What I set out to show is that there is a long tradition — you could associate it particularly with Madison, although it goes back further to the seventeenth century and Roger Williams — that says no, the central issue is one of fairness. We want all to be citizens of equal standing in the public realm. We want not just adequate liberty but equal liberty. What that means is that any kind of religious establishment or religious orthodoxy in public life is a problem, because it jeopardizes that equal standing.

Madison was thinking about a law in Virginia, which seems very benign and it’s what lots of European countries have now, which is that there would be a tax for the benefit of the Anglican Church, but if you have some other church you could always choose instead to [benefit] your church. And he said no, by making the Anglican Church the central one, this makes a statement that our society is basically an Anglican society and other people don’t enter the polity, as he put it, on equal conditions…

I want people to think about that and what that implies. If we want to separate religion from the public realm it’s not because we hate religion or because we think that it doesn’t belong in human life, it’s because it just can’t be done in a way that’s fair to all and gives all equal liberty. That also means that we shouldn’t impose special burdens on religion…

That’s why separation is not a very helpful idea, but equality is a much more helpful idea.

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington in Dissent:

New Orleans has been challenging the limits of taste for over a century now. It is the city of Mardi Gras, of decadence, romance, stylish bohemianism, and, on Bourbon Street, unadulterated raunchiness. One might think that nothing could offend the residents of New Orleans. But many are offended by the spate of disaster tours currently available from local tour companies. You’ll find brochures for them in the lobbies of upscale motels in the French Quarter and the Central Business District. Alongside flyers for the ubiquitous jazz and voodoo tours, there are foldouts blazoned with such headings as “Katrina: America’s Worst Disaster.” Open one of these, and the ad copy invites you to reexperience the tragedy, to share the pain.

The very concept of a “disaster tour” is carnivalesque and slightly criminal; it may strike outsiders as capturing the peculiar charisma of New Orleans—a city of macabre dualities. “All you needed to live the good life in New Orleans was a lawn chair and a cooler,” recalls a former resident for whom New Orleans was a relatively inexpensive city that encouraged culture, provided neighborliness, and was tolerant of individualism and extravagance. New Orleans pre-Katrina was also a city of entrenched poverty and crime statistics so high that many residents remain scarred by memories of murders committed in their own backyards. Only in New Orleans could a tragedy responsible for over one thousand deaths in Louisiana become a vaudeville show; but in this case, the local residents aren’t laughing.

“Tours by Isabelle” promises to bring you “up close” to the disaster.

Havel at Columbia, a program at Columbia University which examines issues of art and citizenship, has an online audio and video recording of a discussion between Arthur Danto and Orhan Pamuk on “Literature and Citizenship”, the first event in the series. Havel at Columbia also has some other interesting events scheduled, including a discussion between President Clinton and President Havel on Challenges of New Democracies on November 15th (Columbia University only, I believe) and a lecture by Wole Soyinka (December 6th).

[Hat tip: Nadia Gessous]

From The Village Voice:

Just in time for the holidays comes a show about money. The brave German communist John Heartfield’s photomontages include a 1932 image of Hitler, his arm lifted in a Nazi salute as a corpulent businessman hands him cash; the deadpan caption is lifted from the führer-to-be’s own propaganda slogan: “Millions Stand Behind Me.” Another of these sepia-tinted images features a Christmas tree with the branches bent into swastikas. One of Peter Kennard’s Cold War–era images riffs on a James Bond–style tableau of jet-setters who crowd a casino table, using ICBMs for chips. Shirin Neshat’s color photograph is a symphony of contrasts: a woman in a flowing black burka walks past the white poured-concrete curves and geometric grids of a postmodern building. Particularly powerful is a 2002 print by Dennis Adams, in which the headline “PAYBACK” is discernible on a tabloid sheet tumbling through a cloudy sky. Flotsam from a hijacked plane? A burning tower? An American bomber?

More here.

From American Scientist:

However silent the twinkling stars seem in the clear night sky, Einstein’s theory of spacetime tells us that the real universe is a noisy place, alive with vibrating energy. Space and time, says Craig Hogan, carry a cacophony of vibrations with textures and timbres as rich and varied as the din of sounds in a tropical rain forest or the finale of a Wagnerian opera. A space-based antenna now being designed will complement terrestrial laser interferometers to allow astronomers  to listen to these rumblings—gravitational waves that depict the death dances of neutron stars or the collisions of massive black holes in distant galaxies. Hogan says the waves will map distant reaches of the universe, tell us much about spacetime itself—and possibly detect whispering evidence of cosmic strings.

So how would you feel if suddenly, as you quietly admired a dark and starry sky, you heard the stars making all kinds of crazy noises? After the initial shock of being jolted out of your poetic reverie, I think you would find that the universe felt much more immediate, present, real and alive. It is one thing to see flashes of lightning in the distance, quite another to be shaken by the sound of rolling thunder. Hearing the universe is more like touching than looking. Happily, astronomers are finding ways to do that—to feel as well as see the active universe around us.

More here.

SCATTERED AROUND THE GARDEN of Gabriel Orozco’s house in Mexico City are a number of soccer balls in various states of dereliction. Dirty, worn, frayed, and more or less deflated, they lie about the place as if they had grown there. Left in the open air, they slowly weather and decay, deflating imperceptibly over time. Occasionally Orozco picks one out and changes its ecology by cutting into it, say, or peeling away precise circular patterns from its outer skin to reveal a fabric lining. Then he may draw over its surface with small constellations of points and lines. Despite their look of material degradation and abandonment, then, the soccer balls are in fact in the process of being reclaimed. A simple cut can reverse the logic of their decomposition, giving them an uncanny life. Photographing them is part of this recycling process. After all, the balls have for all intents and purposes been returned to nature like cultural compost, and then retrieved and put back into circulation in a world of images and things. So, we are invited to ask, are they organic or inorganic? Living or dying? If Orozco is growing soccer balls in his garden, what happens when they circulate in the world and in potentially endless combinations with his other work? Here we might draw connections to his consistent preoccupation with games (billiards, Ping-Pong), or, for that matter, to any number of spherical objects, whether mechanical or natural, that he has made or used.

more from Artforum here.

What Leonard Woolf really liked, he had said in an essay in 1927, was “diaries and letters and memoirs,” in which “one gets the most vivid and important vision of a pageant of history.” His own history books come alive when they are anecdotal and digressive and at their least systematic—when “they pulled Lord North out of his barouche,” or when, in “Principia Politica” (1953), he describes his own typically bourgeois household of the eighteen-nineties. Friends and reviewers said of that book’s long discussion of Hitler, Stalin, and authoritarianism that what they liked best was the passage about his methods of training animals. After nearly thirty years of trying to enforce reason on the chaos of history, Woolf threw it over, and began to write his autobiography. “I write this looking out of a window upon a garden in Sussex,” he said on one of the first pages. “I feel that my roots are here and in the Greece of Herodotus.”

more from The New Yorker here.

Contemporary history is useless unless it allows emotion to be recollected in tranquillity. Probably no episode in 20th-century history generated a more intense burst of feeling in the Western world than the Hungarian uprising of 1956. Although it lasted less than two weeks, it was both a classic instance of the narrative of justified popular insurrection against oppressive government, familiar since the fall of the Bastille, and of David’s in this case doomed victory against Goliath.

For the Western side in the Cold War, then at its height, it dramatised the desire of enslaved peoples for liberty and, after a brief intermission that allowed some 200,000 Hungarians to escape, its ruthless repression by arms and terror. For Communists outside the Soviet empire, especially intellectuals, the spectacle of Soviet tanks advancing on a people’s government headed by Communist reformers was a lacerating experience, the climax of a crisis that, starting with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, pierced the core of their faith and hope. It cost the Italian Communist Party something like 200,000 members, and most Western Parties the bulk of their intellectuals. And it was literally a spectacle. Hungary 1956 was the first insurrection brought directly into Western homes by journalists, broadcasters and cameramen, who flooded across the briefly breached Iron Curtain from Austria.

more from the LRB here.

Lisa Yuskavage’s new color-infused paintings of naked sloe-eyed girls with melon-like breasts, erect nipples, and contorted bodies have the presence of lap dances. While they’re alluring and taboo, they are also self-conscious, extremely calculated, and repetitive. Women who work in strip clubs tell themselves they’re “turning the tables on men” and that they “have the power”; the men meanwhile pretend the lap dance is a chaste way of “not having sex with that woman.” As one lap dancer recently put it in The Guardian, “There’s no intimacy. One person is there because they’re being paid; the other is paying for sexual kicks.”

This is happening with Yuskavage’s recent work. Not only is it becoming repetitious, but Yuskavage is using women as bait. This is fine; all is fair in love and war and art. The problem is her viewers aren’t taking away anything other than momentary kicks.

more from the Village Voice here.

And with these posts on Pakistan and Eqbal Ahmad and Auden’s centenary, this seems appropriate.

Partition by W. H. Auden

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,

Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition

Between two peoples fanatically at odds,

With their different diets and incompatible gods.

“Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It’s too late

For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:

The only solution now lies in separation.

The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,

That the less you are seen in his company the better,

So we’ve arranged to provide you with other accommodation.

In ZNet, Pervez Hoodbhoy looks at Pakistan, 7 years after Musharraf’s coup.

Some had feared – while others had hoped – that General Pervez Musharraf’s coup of October 12, 1999, would bring the revolution of Kemal Ataturk to a Pakistan and wrest the country from the iron grip of mullahs. But years later a definitive truth has emerged. Like the other insecure governments before it, both military and civilian, the present regime also has a single point agenda – to stay in power at all costs. It therefore does whatever it must and Pakistan falls further from any prospect of acquiring modern values, and of building and strengthening democratic institutions.

The requirements for survival of the present regime are clear: on the one hand the Army leadership knows that its critical dependence upon the West requires that it be perceived abroad as a liberal regime pitted against radical Islamists. But, on the other hand, in actual fact, to preserve and extend its grip on power, it must preserve the status quo.

The staged conflicts between General Musharraf and the mullahs are therefore a regular part of Pakistani politics. This September, nearly seven years later, the religious parties needed no demonstration of muscle power for winning two major victories in less than a fortnight; just a few noisy threats sufficed. From experience they knew that the Pakistan Army and its sagacious leader – of “enlightened moderation” fame – would stick to their predictable pattern of dealing with Islamists. In a nutshell: provoke a fight, get the excitement going, let diplomatic missions in Islamabad prepare their briefs and CNN and BBC get their clips – and then beat a retreat. At the end of it all the mullahs would get what they want, but so would the General.

And see also this piece by him on related issues.

[A]t the heart of Pakistan’s problems lies a truth – one etched in stone – that when a state proclaims a religious identity and mission, it is bound to privilege those who organize religious life and interpret religious text. Since there are many models and interpretations within every religion, there is bound to be conflict between religious forces over whose model shall prevail. There is also the larger confrontation between religious principles and practices and what we now consider to be ‘modern’ ideas of society, which have emerged over the past several hundred years. This truth, for all its simplicity, escaped the attention of several generations of soldiers, politicians, and citizens of Pakistan. It is true that there has been some learning – Musharraf’s call for “enlightened moderation” is a tacit (and welcome) admission that a theocratic Pakistan cannot work. But his call conflicts with his other, more important, responsibility as chief of the Pakistan Army.

In The Nation, Amitava Kumar reviews the The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad [my late friend and mentor] by Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo and Yogesh Chandrani.

One senses that Ahmad was deeply sensitive to the waning influence of radical secular politics in the Muslim world, where Islamists increasingly led the opposition to military regimes that had betrayed the dream of independence from colonialism. It may well have been this concern that led him to return, shortly before his death in 1999, to Pakistan, where he hoped to build a university that would teach the humanities. It was to be called Khaldunia University, after the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), whom UN General Secretary Kofi Annan described as “a globalist long before the age of globalization.” (When Annan said that, he was delivering the first Eqbal Ahmad lecture at Hampshire College. Annan was no doubt also thinking of Ahmad when he reminded his audience that Khaldun had “argued that civilizations decline when they lose their capacity to comprehend and absorb change, and that ‘the greatest of scholars err when they ignore the environment in which history unfolds.'”) Alas, Khaldunia University was never built; according to The Economist’s obituary of Ahmad, he “died before a rupee was raised for it.”

Even if his dream had come to fruition, it is hard to imagine Ahmad running a university. He was too much the congenital outsider. Ahmad’s independence from institutions and political parties allowed him to deliver criticism to those least inclined to listen, and it might have been the reason why he earned the trust of statesmen and revolutionaries throughout the Third World. A critic of power rather than an intellectual seeking power, he turned his weakness into a source of strength.

From The Atlantic Monthly:

The verdict which public opinion has pronounced, or, rather, is from time to time pronouncing, on the writings of George Eliot is certainly a very complicated one. That she is an acute delineator of character, a subtle humorist, a master of English, a universal observer and a comprehensive student, a profound moralist, — all this is part of her established reputation. That she is, besides this, a poet of great force and originality would, if we took as the test the most widely published criticism, be also established. That she has also succeeded, — in an age in which the public has been satiated with novels, and critics have begun even to doubt whether novel-writing were not a thing of the past, — if not in founding a new school of novel-writing, at least in proving that this literary form could be adapted, in skilful hands, to purposes which her predecessors had never dreamed of. Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Disraeli, — between them and George Eliot there is no relationship; and yet George Eliot, in the hold which she maintains upon the public interest, is certainly their successor. But is this all? Does not everyone who reads generalizations like these involuntarily say to himself, this is nothing? To say of an author like George Eliot that she is distinguishable by this or that abstract quality is very much like trying to revive the effect produced upon our imaginations by a broad and majestic river by describing the general direction of a body of flowing water, the height of the banks between which it flows, the measurements of its soundings taken by the latest hydrographical survey. When we think of all the immense variety of her books, from the Scenes of Clerical Life to Middlemarch, of the range of feeling and thought that they cover, and the wonderful manner in which the work has been done, one is tempted to give up the task of studying this student, of observing this author who has devoted her life to observation, or of analyzing this professor of analysis.

More here.