Reading
Hope Mirrlees is interested in what happens if the power of Fairyland cannot be wholly excluded.
Black leaders clap back at DeSantis Go ahead, Gov. Ron DeSantis. Use the N-word. You know you want to. It’s what his obsession with “woke” is about. It’s barely a dog whistle. Right-wing extremists have adopted woke as a synonym for Black. DeSantis, GOP officials, and conservative pundits also have weaponized woke as a four-letter word (conveniently) for branding white allies of Black Americans as “N-lovers.” The right means to turn back the clock to the pre-Brown 1950s that Donald Trump promised and failed to deliver for Republicans’ shrinking white base. Turning opponents strengths into weaknesses is classic Karl Rove. The right turned “liberal” into a smear. DeSantis and the right are doing the same with woke, left activist shorthand for being tuned into issues of racial justice. DeSantis trying to ban the teaching of Black history courses in Florida as part of that effort has generated blowback. Black activists have had enough. “I heard you say that Florida is the state where ‘woke’ comes to die….
Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and perhaps the next president of the United States, is waging war against something he and many others on the right identify as “woke communism.” DeSantis even persuaded the Florida legislature to pass a Victims of Communism law, mandating that every November 7th (the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia), all public schools in the state must devote 45 minutes of instruction to the evils of the red menace. You might reasonably ask: What menace? After all, the Soviet Union fell apart more than 30 years ago and, long before that, communist parties around the world had dwindled in numbers and lost their revolutionary zeal. The American Communist Party was buried alive nearly three-quarters... Read more
Dear Administrator of the Moms Group in Our Upper-Middle-Class Town,
I know I don’t fit all of your qualifications. Namely, the mom part.
However, I implore you to overlook the minor issue of my gender and peer into my soul. My exhausted, unappreciated, and lonesome stay-at-home father soul starved for communication beyond the incessant singing of Cocomelon.
Thank you so much for inviting my wife to your weekday morning get-togethers, but again, she can’t make it—she has work. And again, I can make it, as I’ve abandoned my career (note: not in childcare) to fetch organic gummy bunnies and anticipate the needs of two toddlers every second of every day for—wait for it—no compensation.
I understand and acknowledge that women deserve a safe space far from the male gaze. A wonderful dreamland where moms feel secure to recognize each other’s dedication to their kids and make passive-aggressive comments about the childrearing tactics of whichever mom didn’t show up that day. Sheer bliss.
All of us depend, in early age and often at the end of life, on the care of others. To think about care is to shuttle back and forth between social totality and the irreducible complexity of individual needs, from feeding or washing to dignity or meaningful attention. Because it concerns the state, care must be thought of in the aggregate – unit costs, labour time, population trends – but many carers worry that such categories miss everything significant about their work.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 5 (Friday 17 February 2023)
Palestinians understand that Israel is a democracy for Jews and an apartheid regime for non-Jews. But just like the Green Line, this is a false separation, since the Jewish democratic system itself is dependent on ethnic exclusion and demographic engineering. The liberals condemning the rise of fascism in Israeli politics are fighting for the rights of only part of the population.
Ming Smith often compares herself to a blues or jazz musician. ‘If people could feel what I feel when I hear a Billie Holiday song,’ she says, ‘that’s what I would want them to feel when they look at my work.’ There’s sometimes a melancholy in her photographs of Black life, but it’s offset by the same ironical awareness that infuses the blues.
Many maps have been offered over the years to assist the reader-quester, but if somebody gets a map out in one of Auden’s poems it’s usually because something has gone wrong. In one lyric a lover is advised to ‘Stand up and fold/Your map of desolation’. Auden country still feels unchartable, a space into which you are dropped, given a few co-ordinates and left to fend for yourself.
When Deng Xiaoping visited in 1979, images of everyday life in the US were broadcast on state television. Everyone had a car, a refrigerator, a TV. A society capable of producing so much for so many must have something figured out. Wang Huning wasn’t so sure. The America he saw was neither an imperialist paper tiger nor universally prosperous. He kept noticing its contradictions.
Medieval Christians understood themselves to be interconnected to an extent that would surprise many people today, at least in Western cultures. Their minds and hearts were legible to other people as well as to God and the devil, and they saw themselves as vulnerable to interference from human and supernatural forces, to both good and bad ends.
There is a tendency to linger on the physical vulnerability and discomfort evoked by Veronica Ryan’s pieces, part of a series called Infection which includes plaster casts of yellowing orthopaedic pillows, but it would be a mistake to project Ryan’s slow path to professional recognition onto the work itself. This isn’t outsider art.
The majority of women artists who exhibited at the Salon in the revolutionary period had never before shown their work in public. During the 1790s and early 1800s, several of them submitted self-portraits or portraits of other women artists, presenting, implicitly, an idea of the female painter as both a subject for portraiture and a professional in her own right.
To find her guilty, the lawyer says, would be to decide that Laurence is a monster – ‘It is more convenient to see her as a monster’ – and such a decision would be a verdict but would not be justice (‘un arrêt, mais pas la justice’). She talks of mothers and children, born and unborn, exchanging cells that scientists call ‘chimerical’. ‘We women are all monsters, but terribly human monsters.’
As Jessica Marglin argues, the Shamama case offers an ‘insight into the way legal belonging was proved – not only in the Shamama lawsuit but in countless cases both before and since: as a narrative’. Scholars of European nationalism have long understood that citizenship and nationality cannot be readily equated, and that legal and ethnocultural belonging are not the same thing, but there is nonetheless a benefit in viewing these issues through the eyes of a Tunisian Jew.
While Blacks were fighting for the Double V – victory over fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home – the federal government’s recruitment posters promoted the idea that military success would restore the prewar world, grounded in traditions of work, family and, implicitly, segregation. (Senator James Eastland of Mississippi was quite candid about this: on the Senate floor he declared that white soldiers were ‘fighting to maintain white supremacy’.)
Calling something a festival is no guarantee it will actually become festive in the deep sense. Some Sundays, like some festivals, are exercises in niche connoisseurship more than genuine enthusiasm. Others are doomed gesticulations to a half-empty tent.
It might be easy to conclude that 17th-century Europeans dismissed any natural limits to progress, or were oblivious to its impact on the environment. But the modern project of autonomy and abundance if anything made it easier to attribute ecological change to human agency. Far from rendering the environment invisible, the Enlightenment turned it into a subject of political and economic debate.
It is an infernal riddle of digital culture that ‘authenticity’ is constantly breeding its opposite: the ‘spontaneous’ event that proves to be no such thing, the ‘surprise’ that turns out to be staged, the emotional outburst that has been practised. Any culture that lavishes praise on ‘authenticity’ to the extent that ours does will be beset by worries regarding ‘fakery’.
Siblings is like a book from a lost civilisation. It comes with four pages of endnotes, which these days is unheard of in fiction. This bespeaks the arcaneness of the so-called Dreibuchstabenstaat, ‘three-letter state’, the DDR (or GDR); the utter pertinacity, specialisation and goneness of its circumstances.
Bad DreamsAs I ease the blade from my father’s chesthe looks surprised – as though opening the curtainsto snow. Remember the Emperor who beheadeda soldier for dreaming of the...
When I returned last year, the garbage was piled so high on the pavements that pedestrians had to compete with lunatic drivers for right of way. The private electricity generators were mostly quiet – few can afford the fuel needed to run them. The Ponzi scheme that the Lebanese central bank had been running for years caused the private banks to collapse in 2019.
George Sand found the tall, slim Musset, with his fashionably dishevelled blond hair, more agreeable than she had expected. He wrote poems for her and sent her sketches. There was no talk of love. On the contrary: when it comes to love, he wrote, there’s a whole Baltic Sea between us. This was written on 24 July. In one of the century’s finest volte-faces, the very next day he wrote: ‘My dear Georges, I have something stupid and ridiculous to tell you . . . I’m in love with you.’
The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 5 (Friday 17 February 2023)