The letters page from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 11 (Friday 19 May 2023)
Reading
The tone of commentary both internationally and within opposition circles in Turkey was badly affected by wishful thinking. The selection of a candidate who was clearly not a match for Erdoğan will come under examination, but the more serious problem was the absence of a good choice.
Table of contents from London Review of Books Vol. 45 No. 11 (Friday 19 May 2023)
Mária Bartuszová made around five hundred sculptures, her productivity aided by her preferred material, plaster. The great majority of her works are plaster casts – and not just any sort. Plaster has been used for millennia, but very few pieces have the purity and refinement of surface Bartuszová achieved.
A general rule about rules is that one rule breeds another rule developed to catch an exception to the first rule, and so (potentially) ad infinitum, until there are so many darn rules that nobody can be bothered to grasp or obey most of them.
‘Michael’ (Bradley) and ‘Field’ (Cooper) were distraught to be revealed as two people and, more specifically, as two women: ‘the report of lady-authorship,’ Bradley wrote, ‘will dwarf & enfeeble our work at every turn . . . And we have many things to say the world will not tolerate from a woman’s lips.’ But what did they want to say?
It was rather fun, being lost like this.The roofs our floor, the palms our ventilators.The stag’s antlers serving as a cloudrack.North was south, being lost like this.It was rather fun to...
In early modern Europe, talk mattered. Reputations were made and fortunes were destroyed by the spoken word; news and rumour could travel much faster between mouths and ears than via print, and be understood by far more than the minority who could read.
The story South Korea likes to tell about itself is ‘The Miracle on the Han River’, in which a country rises from the ashes of war and dictatorship to become a stylish economic success story. The story of hallyu fits with the nation-building narrative, but the reality of Korean culture’s international popularity is more complicated.
Derek Parfit’s approach isn’t designed to get us to appreciate the mysterious, awe-inspiring significance of procreation and death in human life; it is simply the springboard for a new puzzle in moral theory-building. For it places intolerable pressure on what might seem like an uncontroversial moral principle: that if something is wrong, it must harm some particular person or group of persons.
Brandon Som’s poems refuse to confine themselves or their forms to any one thing. All of them enfold and link multiple topics, injustice among them. He writes, as well, to honour people who endured, who made their own way.
Epictetus presents a version of Stoicism that often aligns with traditional Roman social norms, even if his expression of those ideals is often wonderfully vigorous. ‘I’ll cut off your head,’ a tyrant threatens. ‘Well,’ the insouciant Stoic replies, ‘have you ever heard me suggest that I’m unique in having a non-detachable head?’
Many white Southerners adopted their own equation of the era of the civil rights movement with Reconstruction, warning that federal civil rights legislation violated local freedom. Despite the courage of the mass protesters, Black political rights still depended on federal enforcement. And the more the national government intervened, the more whites associated it with a loss of freedom.
History was expunged from the national school curriculum more than a decade ago because, it was claimed, there was no interest in it. Evidently, the political establishment continues to fear that knowledge of their history might further empower young people, who are more interested in good governance than in the ethnic politics of elderly men reluctant to concede power.
‘paradoxical contrivances for intercrossing’ – Darwin Archilochus ColubrisFrom the red-light districtsof pomegranatescomes ruby-throated Archilochuswith his...
María Gainza’s idea is that absorption is only one kind of attention: becoming distracted in the course of looking at something might be a sign of meaningful engagement. It’s when María’s mind wanders in front of a painting – or back to a painting – that we learn something interesting about her character.
The revolution was significantly different in each country it visited. The fearsome events unfolding in Vienna can’t be understood without taking into account the simultaneous eruptions in Hungary. The explosion in Berlin was touched off by news of the February Revolution in Paris, but took a quite different course.
Lucian Freud’s etched portraits look at first like mangled bits of realism but are in fact stealthy works of cubism: many selves, many facets, many moments in one. They display two kinds of time: the time it took to make the work, and the person the portrait anticipates as a result of that long observation.
Miko Peled opines on the true nature of the Nakba, a tragedy still being imposed upon the Palestinian people by an emboldened Israeli state.
The post Unveiling a Dark History: Nakba’s Tragedy Continues Unabated after 75 Years appeared first on MintPress News.
by Gregory M. Mikkelson
In late summer of 2001 I moved from the USA to Canada, where my rose-colored glasses paradoxically made the grass look even greener. While President Bush had just reneged on the Kyoto Protocol, Prime Minister Chrétien stood by it, having been one of the first to sign. Two years later Chrétien withstood the pressure to join Bush’s disastrous war against Iraq.
The right-wing papers have trashed the country and they mean to go on doing so whoever wins the next election. We must stop them, writes Brian Cathcart
Plenty to go around Former law enforcement officer, Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana (R-of course). A Republican state representative from North Carolina: No wonder they are so desperate to change the subject: Dave knows his right-wing taxonomy:
Not so long ago, political analysts were speaking of the “G-2” — that is, of a potential working alliance between the United States and China aimed at managing global problems for their mutual benefit. Such a collaborative twosome was seen as potentially even more powerful than the G-7 group of leading Western economies. As former Undersecretary of the Treasury C. Fred Bergsten, who originally imagined such a partnership, wrote in 2008, “The basic idea would be to develop a G-2 between the United States and China to steer the global governance process.” That notion would become the basis for the Obama administration’s initial outreach to China, though it would lose its appeal in Washington as tensions with Beijing continued to... Read more
Virungas National Park, DRC. Photo: Henry Wismayer/Alamy
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