NWN13 Tab Dump

Making good on writing deadlines, but here's the tab dump:

Anarcho-punk legends Crass go to court.

Natalia Cecire calls attention to an Ann duCille article I should read.

Jill Lepore reviews a new Charlie Chan book that sounds kinda iffy on substance, but like it was fun to research.

Vinay Lal on why Canada is illegal.

"First, all my achievements came through sex work. It was my sole means of livelihood for many years. I cannot negate it." 

How to keep a rootcellar.

Oxford American's August booklist.

The fight to demonstrate the relevance of popular culture devolves into the stupid, trite, and obvious.  (Again.)

R. Solnit and M. Caron, A California Bestiary

I was duped. Somewhere I read that this book was in the tradition of medieval bestiaries but with some sort of contemporary take on nature and the state of California. In my head I imagined something engrossing, awe-inspiring, and possibly darkly comic (a la Edward Gorey’s Utter Zoo). Instead I got this compact cute gift book with prose my dad would describe as “hippie dippy” and, for once, he would be exactly right. The art is some cross of WPA and commonplace children's magazine illustrations.

NWN12 Tab Dump

Busy writing, so no reviews.  Only light academicky web grazing, brought to you in large chunky excerpts...

Having just finished writing a chapter that addresses, if only in passing, the crossed paths of antifascism and anticolonialism in the 1930s, this short piece in LRB on the career of Basil Davidson got me thinking about how the two related after the war:

This is Davidson, in a letter to the Times in 1973, protesting against a visit to Britain by Portugal’s head of state, Marcelo Caetano, after revelations of a massacre by the Portuguese army in Wiriyamu, Mozambique, the year before: ‘The known list of Portuguese massacres, large or small, is already a long one. The full list must be longer still.’ He goes on to cite an unreported atrocity in Guinea-Bissau, which took place ‘some 15 miles from the place where I was staying, in nationalist-held territory, last November’. In the same letter: ‘I would mention, if I may, that since 1967 I have made four visits to nationalist-controlled areas in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique … and have walked a total of some 600 miles there.’

In Davidson’s career, ground covered on foot signifies the slow assertion of the will, as real agency in the world: movement under pressure, off the beaten track, with comrades or like-minded people. But the will to what? The best answer, the defeat of Fascism, sounds a bit grand, but Davidson was a heartfelt anti-Fascist whose aptitude for this life-and-death struggle in Occupied Europe was then transposed to Africa, where white supremacist doctrines that struck a familiar chord had to be known and described. So he was off again, on foot, only now instead of bearing arms, he took notebooks: journeying with nationalist guerrillas and keeping the record were modest expressions of solidarity, in the struggle for decolonisation.

Edward Said on a 1979 meeting in Paris that seemed to involve big names and little ideas all tucked into  Foucault's spartan apartment, in an old LRB piece that Abbas Raza at 3quarks brought my attention to:

As the turgid and unrewarding discussions wore on, I found that I was too often reminding myself that I had come to France to listen to what Sartre had to say, not to people whose opinions I already knew and didn’t find specially gripping. I therefore brazenly interrupted the discussion early in the evening and insisted that we hear from Sartre forthwith. This caused consternation in the retinue. The seminar was adjourned while urgent consultations between them were held. I found the whole thing comic and pathetic at the same time, especially since Sartre himself had no apparent part in these deliberations. At last we were summoned back to the table by the visibly irritated Pierre Victor, who announced with the portentousness of a Roman senator: ‘Demain Sartre parlera.’ And so we retired in keen anticipation of the following morning’s proceedings.

Sure enough Sartre did have something for us: a prepared text of about two typed pages that – I write entirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory of the moment – praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most banal platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about the Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similar in many ways to French practice in Algeria. It was about as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by the egregious Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command, off the hook. I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual hero had succumbed in his later years to such a reactionary mentor, and that on the subject of Palestine the former warrior on behalf of the oppressed had nothing to offer beyond the most conventional, journalistic praise for an already well-celebrated Egyptian leader. For the rest of that day Sartre resumed his silence, and the proceedings continued as before. I recalled an apocryphal story in which twenty years earlier Sartre had travelled to Rome to meet Fanon (then dying of leukemia) and harangued him about the dramas of Algeria for (it was claimed) 16 non-stop hours, until Simone made him desist. Gone for ever was that Sartre.

Former TASPer Scott McLemee served up the new bio of Ernest Gellner with a huge scoop of ambivalence (though it's hard to tell how much SM intended that), also via 3 quarks:

One begins to see why Gellner, despite his range of reference and his intellectual energy, did not become a guru throwing a long shadow after he was gone. For these are not ideas that project either a clash of civilisations or the vision of some peaceful global civil society. He was anti-ideological but not post-ideological; there is a strong presumption in his work that conflict, healthy and otherwise, is built into the circuits of modernity. “A genuine commitment to rationality,” he wrote, “means that one must admit that it is poorly grounded, making it necessary to live without complacency.”

Beyond the world-historical drama shaping the circumstances of his first 20 years, Gellner led a life largely free of incident, apart from the occasional public controversy in the Times Literary Supplement. His biographer has had access to his papers and interviewed many colleagues and members of Gellner’s family, creating a portrait of someone far more genial in person than his writings might suggest. Critics who regard his work on nationalism as too detached from the phenomenon’s emotional core will need to square that judgment with the revelation that Gellner was prone to singing old Czech folk songs with gusto and considerable schmaltz.

Hall devotes a few chapters to the painstaking reconstruction of Gellner’s thinking on particular topics in philosophy and social theory. This is a necessary task given how little secondary literature there is trying to synthesise his work, though it often feels as if a set of monographs had been stitched onto the biographical frame, rather than integrated into it. But the cumulative effect is monumental – and a monument does seem overdue.

NYTimes reviewed Bruce Cumings' new book on the Korean War, reminding me to put it in my Amazon queue for when I have time and money.

Vinay Lal, whose writing I usually like, did a pretty bad job reading Indian American outrage over Joel Stein's stupid column on Edison, NJ:

In India, some writers and media broadcasters have not fully understood the emotions that are understandably aroused when Joel, adverting to the fact that townsfolk started referring to the Indians as “dot heads”, adds by way of trying to be ironical:  “In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if ‘dot heads’ was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose.”  Caricatures of a religion never go down too well with its adherents; moreover, there is a lasting memory, especially in New Jersey, of a previous chapter of racial history when the “dot busters” went around assaulting Indians and even killing a couple of them.

Indian Americans, on the other hand, give every appearance of being a trifle too sensitive. They have accepted the designation of ‘model minority’ with gratitude, scarcely realizing that the term was less a recognition of their achievements and more an admonition to African Americans and Hispanic Americans to shape up; consequently, they feel all the more slighted by Joel’s apparent characterization of them as undesirable. If an ‘over-achieving’ community could be so easily slighted, what hope is there for immigrant communities or ethnic groups that are less affluent or less characterized by high educational achievements? This is a reasonable enough claim, except that Indian Americans have never been keen on expressing their solidarity with less affluent or otherwise stigmatized communities. Moreover, much of the anxiety stemming from Joel Stein’s unimaginative attempt at humour owes its origins to the widespread perception that Indian Americans are an ‘invisible minority’, whose decency and relative distance from the mainstream of American politics has rendered them susceptible to onslaughts and humiliations that would never otherwise be imposed on a community otherwise distinguished by its affluence, attainments, and general reputation.

I have a number of problems, but here's the short of it: (1) criticizing touchy Indian Americans as a whole but not citing or quoting any of them in particular is bad practice; (2) none of the anger I read--and there is no doubt a bias in what desi sources I do and don't bother with--was couched in the language of religious offense; (3) I think Lal badly underestimates the legacy and the reality of anti-Asian violence and the "even killing a couple of them" line is bitter, heartless, and stupid (and I wish he'd take it back); (4) the overly broad strokes here sweep under the rug entire complex histories and lineages of Indian American politics and culture; (5) this reminded of the feeling--since forgotten--I had when I read Lal's The Other Indians: "This is written as if the entire field of Asian American Studies never existed."

HTMLGIANT brings us a 1987 student evaluation by David Foster Wallace:

I'm left with two thoughts: (1) MFA student evaluations would make great material for a study of the politics of literature; (2) if I had been the student who received this evaluation I would have immediately written a bright, burning, entirely simplistic, judgmental, and cruel fictional portrait of DFW in response.  Just to get it out of my system.

Also noted:

NYT reviews Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade and Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy.

I enjoyed this line when I reread CLR James's review of E. Wilson's To the Finland Station: "Some day when a materialist history of history is written, it will be a marvelous verification of the Marxist approach and one of the most comic books ever published."


Now back to interpreting a little known text written in Mexico in the winter of 1919...

NWN11 Tab Dump

I Write Like is all over the internet, and, yeah, I tried it. Rough drafts of my dissertation chapters are like David Foster Wallace. Revised drafts like H.P. Lovecraft. Make of it what you will.

While the big news re: India in the Western press is a Facebook skin lightening application, Tariq Ali writes about the deafening silence on the recent state-sponsored murders in Kashmir:

When it comes to reporting crimes committed by states considered friendly to the West, atrocity fatigue rapidly kicks in. A few facts have begun to percolate through, but they are likely to be read in Europe and the US as just another example of Muslims causing trouble, with the Indian security forces merely doing their duty, if in a high-handed fashion. The failure to report on the deaths in Kashmir contrasts strangely with the overheated coverage of even the most minor unrest in Tibet, leave alone Tehran. On 11 June this year, the Indian paramilitaries known as the Central Reserve Police Force fired tear-gas canisters at demonstrators, who were themselves protesting about earlier killings. One of the canisters hit 17-year-old Tufail Ahmad Mattoo on the head. It blew out his brains.  (Via.)

In a grad seminar, way back in 1999, I remember commenting that I thought Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind was very compelling but it ultimately tells us a lot more about anticommunist liberal intellectuals than it does about communist intellectuals.  A decade later--and in grad school again/still--I stand by the analysis, especially after reading Tony Judt's recent blustery reflections in NYRB.

US Intellectual History, the blog, refers us to Thomas Bender's scribbling on the need for engaged history that offers important big picture narratives to the public:

In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives. Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship.

Three small objections.  First, when you have to note that "[t]his was obviously a good thing," just who is your imagined audience?  Second, I think this thumbnail sketch of the "cultural turn" commits a few sins: conflating movements for ethnic studies and women's studies with the cultural turn; ignoring the theoretical underpinnings of many cultural historians and their various understandings of the relationship of state, society, and the market; and missing the point.  Third, it's not a good look when you make this point in a short essay with sixteen footnotes referring us to twenty-three sources and everyone you cite--as far as I can tell--is white.  Oh, sorry.  Is that identity politics?

Ludic Despair gives a history of the sentient vehicle genre that actually ends up explaining a lot about the gendered underpinnings of popular sci-fi as a whole:

I was particularly duped by the blurb that appears on the top left [of the book cover]: “What happens to a man when a woman is the boss—even in the 21st Century?” This is a wonderfully ambiguous statement, and one that requires us to assume the place of a teenage boy buying this book back in 1965. Does this statement mean: after 2000 years of bossing men around, what if women are still in control EVEN in the 21st Century? Or does it mean: what if EVEN in the future masculine techno-utopia of the 21st century, women somehow find a way to take over and become “the boss?” Either way, it’s a great example of the hilariously unexamined sexism that modern men like to pretend they don’t find funny anymore. As almost all sci-fi is about dreams of male autonomy, the blurb should probably read: What happens to YOU when teachers, moms, and girlfriends still get to boss guys around even after high school? (Via.)

Which brings us to the best cultural critic of our day:

Treme, Season One

I’ve sat on this review for a few weeks now to try to get past the reaction I had every week the show aired, most especially after the season finale: “The Wire, it ain’t.” The problem is that I still feel that way and I don’t think it’s just that Treme was not The Wire, but rather that the series had some major flaws.

There was the excessive sentimentality, the terribly slow pacing, and the weak story lines—traits that were only accentuated by drawn out pedantic musical interludes that felt less like sonic celebrations, more like the painful hours of my fifth grade teacher forcing us to listen to Mozart. (The exclusion of hip hop other than a couple of Mystikal moments was emblematic here, not that I have any love for those No Limit kids.) The acting was fine, though most of characters read as types, with the exception of Clarke Peters' memorable portrayal of Big Chief.

In the Queue at Yiddish-Speaking Secular Jew Heaven

Two amazing ones.

Tuli:

Harvey:

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

There is a certain kind of movie that makes me want to say something.

That something is very unfair and probably even misdirected.

But movies of this certain type drive me to feel this something coming up out of my throat, no matter how inappropriate.

This is that kind of movie, so here goes.

I hate white people.

NWN10 Tab Dump

I wish every town would have this kind of interactive map to get to know its neighborhoods and whatnots.  Thanks, LA.

I'm tempted by this book of photographs of classified military sites, despite the participation of Rebecca Solnit.  (Via.)

Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel was already on my list, but it just climbed up to the top due to this interview in Bookslut.

While the glut of books on folk music generally doesn't interest me, Wm. Roy's new book on folk, race, and social movements seems tempting, in part because I have some general level of trust in Princeton U. Press.  We'll see.

Bret Easton Ellis reflects on writing American Psycho over at Da Guardian.  Some of it is interesting, but there's also a remarkable tango of disavowal and disassociation in BEE's literary ethics/politics:

Writing is an emotional process. When I'm figuring things out in the early days of the novel, the narrator's voice and sensibility and mindset seem to take over. I'm often surprised at the choices they make and the way they want to tell their story; even though I'm in control as the technician, they are still the heart of the book and I follow their lead. I didn't expect American Psycho to become as violent as it ultimately did, but the more time I spent with Bateman the more I realised what roads he was going to be going down and it made sense to me. The violent passages were difficult to write and I concentrated on them in the two-week period after I had finished the bulk of the book, using criminology text books to help me with some of the more graphic descriptions. They were upsetting to write, but this is what happens when you form a partnership with the person whose story you are telling together. (Emphasis added.)

 Umm, okay, but who "they," kemosabe?

Please contrast with Liz Phair's description of her new whackadoodle album:

You were never supposed to hear these songs. These songs lost me my management, my record deal and a lot of nights of sleep.

Yes, I rapped one of them. Im as surprised as you are. But here is the thing you need to know about these songs and the ones coming next: These are all me. Love them, or hate them, but dont mistake them for anything other than an entirely personal, un-tethered-from-the-machine, free for all view of the world, refracted through my own crazy lens.

This is my journey. Ill keep sending you postcards.

 What's that sound like you wonder?

S. Calle, Exquisite Pain

Perhaps it speaks more to the particular hybrid household I grew out of--a delicate admixture of vestigial Victorian values inculcated in late colonial India with Midwestern immigrant yeoman reserve--than to the qualities of this book/project, but all I thought while reading this work was: "Why do the broken-hearted feel entitled to the endless indulgence of people they hardly know?" 

Sophie Calle got dumped, and hard, and then put together an artsy examination of people at their most traumatized.  In addition to her own break-up story, she sprinkles in the painful memories of friends and acquaintances.  The composition, the editing, the images--they are all evocative and, as the title indicates, exquisitely rendered.  But ultimately, I agreed with this respondent to Calle's poll of pain:

Even if I had some fresh flesh of unhappiness I wouldn't give it to you.  A few things happened in the past but decency forbids that I tell you.  It would be overdoing it to turn them into a story. (233)

J. Starr, The Chill

Oh, creepy dude author.  Why does the female serial killer have to be a seductress who lures in unsuspecting foolish knuckleheads only to fuck them to death?  Was it just an excuse to show some tits and ass?  Residual pubescent gynophobia?  Total lack of imagination?

NWN9 Tab Dump

Busy writing, no time for posting, but here's the tab dump:

Sam McPheeters finds the punk hook in news of Robert Byrd's death via that old empty sleeve:

Byrd's death also makes senator Daniel Inouye the president pro tempore of the United States. This means that the father of a Dischord Records artist (Kenny Inouye, Marginal Man) is now third in line to the presidency. So consider this an official heads up; don't come whimpering to me when the guy from Iron Cross is in charge of your oat rations.

Madonna's 13-year old daughter Lourdes Maria Ciccone (right)--who angloed up her name to Lola--just started her own blog to support 'Material Girl,' a fashion line with her mum.  Sample prose:

I am totally obsessivo about 80’s shorts… You know the kind that makes your butt look kinda big, with a grunge-looking shirt tucked in. It’s kinda nerdy but I love it. And the 80’s are another huge obsession of mine, which is totally amazingly awesome because Material Girl…HELLO! It’s like 80’s themed, which pretty much rocks, so yeah.

Run, Lola, run and desperately seek out your own generation!

Diet Coke turned 28 this weekend and someone bothered with a quick history of the drink.

Legendary music critic Robert Christgau is finally killing his monthly consumer's guide.  I used to thumb through these picks, but I'll admit that I thought it was already dead.  Oops.

Artist Isao Hashimoto does up an animated map of nuclear explosions, 1945-1998.  It runs a little slow for my taste, but I like the use of sound and image to transcend language barriers.  I also think it would be improved if the blast sites remained glowing after the explosion to give viewers a sense of the accumulated history. (Via.)

A reason to splurge on HBO this fall (AKA, the fabulous return of Omar!; AAKA, Steve Buscemi and Omar get down?!):

KTown Cowboys concludes:

NWN8 Tab Dump

Everytime I drive out to Trader Joe's to pick up gyoza, wasabi peas, and mango chunks, I go past this little old storefront amidst the abundance of newer strip mall installations.

"Clock Shop International" reads the signage, at least a half-century old. Friends, your industry lost a great one this week with the passing of Nicolas Hayek, founder of Swatch, makers of the best watches known to (pre)teens of 1980s.

In other news, mistreated Indian metalworkers who came to work in the Gulf after Katrina  have won a small victory: the granting of visas reserved for victims of human trafficking.

Glenn Greenwald on criticisms of Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings.

Sports and American empire: Adam Golub on baseball and Iraq (skip to the fourth paragraph to avoid the plot summary of what sounds like a dreadfully boring book); zunguzungu goes a little crazy with his analysis of Americans and the World Cup.

Daniel Alarcon summarizes the strategy that makes Brazil the team you love to hate:

When the whistle blows and the match begins, jog around the pitch slowly, laconically, grinning the entire time. Your body language should express an indifference to the game itself. In fact, let your opponent control the pace, let them have possession, let them think they’re in charge. When you do get the ball, pass it around a little, just to see how it feels. Isn’t the stadium pretty under the lights? Smile. Mostly, though, wait. Be patient. Don’t run hard unless it’s absolutely necessary. Just for fun, let the other side have a few shots on goal, so they get their blood flowing. Then, after twenty minutes without a single scoring opportunity, manufacture one out of thin air—a broken play in the midfield, a counter-attack, a foul and a quick restart—and once in front of the rival’s net, be merciless.

Aleksandar Hemon captures why I'm rooting for the Huns, aside from the petty perverse pleasure of imagining thousands of dead Nazis twisting in their graves as their national side is led by Lukas Podolski, Miroslav Klose, Mesut Ozil, and Sami Khedira:

Ozil, Muller, and Schweinsteiger ran rampant at a speed that was quite literally incomprehensible to the English midfield. Upson and Terry were embarrassing, Rooney did not complete a single pass and Barry had the kind of performance that normally ends international careers. The way that Ozil left him in his wake for the fourth goal exemplifies a difference in class, showing not only that Barry is overrated beyond words and would not last for a week playing for Wolfsburg, never mind Bayern, but that England simply does not have the players who can compete at this level. The way Klose brushed off Upson for the first goal, the way Khedira and the German defense won most of 50:50 balls, the speed and quick thinking of Schweinsteiger and Muller and Ozil—all that was far, far beyond the reach of the overpaid, overrated English players. Barry, Lampard, Gerrard, Milner ought to be punished by watching the footage of the German midfield taking them apart. 

This book on Melville Herskovits has been on my to-read list for a few years now, but Michael Barker's review on Swans is pretty much good enough that I can put it off until I need some citations for an article down the line that has to deal with MH's first book.

This reminds me that the film Herskovits at the Heart of Darkness is available for free preview from California Newsreel this month and I should try to squeeze in watching it while I can.

Tenured Radical harshes on Judith Butler's refusal of some totally homo award im MesutOzilland as celebrity posturing.  Okay, but it's a fuck of a lot better than Slavoj Zizek's bullshit.

Angry Asian Man directs us to Beijing, CA, a play in SF that may be terrible or great; perhaps it'll have a revival or migrate down to LA in time for us to see it this fall.

Amitava Kumar brings our attention to a nice little exhibit up at MassMOCA that I would drive up to if it weren't for the beast that must be tamed.

P. Kuper, Oaxaca Diary

I couldn't be bothered to finish this one. Based on his past and politics, I want to like Peter Kuper. And this book seemed like a winner: a lefty artist vacations in Oaxaca just as a popular uprising erupts. I imagined the result as something akin to Insurgent Mexico or Ten Days That Shook the World. What I got was Kuper reflecting on fatherhood, entomology, the natural beauty of touristy Oaxaca, and occasionally reporting on the events in the city as something a little beyond his grasp, not that he seemed too invested in getting a grip on them anyway.

NWN7 Tab Dump

Light week:

Glenn Greenwald asks how many Americans are targeted for assassination by the US government.

Before Rolling Stone aired McChrystal's blathering about the clusterfuck in Afghanistan, Tariq Ali quietly gave an insightful primer on the war from a lefty perspective.

This Atlantic Food article on cocktail history makes me want to have a drink while reading about drinking. I always did think "gin rickey" was a funny name for a drink.

I'm tempted to skim this book on nail salons.

A.O. Scott pulls no punches in his review of Knight and Day.

And there's a nice video & article on the Rikers Island NYPL "branch."

Y. Tatsumi, Black Blizzard

Adrian Tomine has done American comix lovers a great service by pushing for the translation and republication of the works of gekiga master Yoshihiro Tatsumi. The power and economy of the collected stories in The Push Man, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye are a testament to the form's compatibility with savvy plots and convincing human characters. Black Blizzard, an early effort from Tatsumi, evinces neither of these traits. Rather, it is a demonstration of the obvious problems of fanboy publishing. This quick-and-easy, dashed-off tale--to Tomine's credit the book is self-consciously so--can only be of interest to the Tatsumi completist, as there is little to merit its purchase otherwise.