By ORHAN PAMUK [The New York Review of Books ] – In the schoolbooks I read as a child in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe was a rosy land of legend. While forging his new republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, which had been crushed and fragmented in World War I, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk fought against the Greek army, but with the support of his own army he later introduced a slew of social and cultural modernization reforms that were not anti- but pro-Western. It was to legitimize these reforms, which helped to strengthen the new Turkish state’s new elites (and were the subject of continuous debate in Turkey over the next eighty years), that we were called upon to embrace and even imitate a rosy-pink—occidentalist—European dream.
Continue reading “The ‘rose-colored dream of Europe has now faded’ for the Turks, too.” »
Saturday, January 29, 2011
By ROGER SCRUTON [New Atlantis] – In its normal occurrence, the Facebook encounter is still an encounter — however attenuated — between real people. But increasingly, the screen is taking over — ceasing to be a medium of communication between real people who exist elsewhere, and becoming the place where people finally achieve reality, the only place where they relate in any coherent way to others. This next stage is evident in the “avatar’ phenomenon, in which people create virtual characters in virtual worlds as proxies for themselves, so enabling their controllers to live in complete self-complacency behind the screen, exposed to no danger and yet enjoying a kind of substitute affection through the adventures of their cyber-ego.
Continue reading “Have your avatar tweet my avatar and we’ll do a virtual lunch.” »
Saturday, January 29, 2011
By RHYS TRANTER [A Piece of Monologue] – As its consumer base continues to grow, online mail-order companies have become big business. Since 1995, the Amazon founder has been featured on the cover of Time Magazine and sells everything from light fixtures to baby clothes. A UK-based online bookstore, The Book Depository, offers browsers the opportunity to see consumer orders as they are being made, via an interactive online map. Even the traditional bookstore, from Waterstones to Oxfam, holds a strong online presence – with many deeming to provide computer terminals in-store for browsing customers. Up until recently, the only thing that has remained static is the books themselves – but perhaps not for long.
Continue reading “What’s a ‘book’? Look it up on your Kindle.” »
By KATE MERKEL-HESS [TLS] – It was in Hollywood that Chan became an American icon. Huang makes the case that Chan’s idiosyncratic language and “Chinese” mannerisms can be seen as charming traits akin to those of Agatha Christie’s finicky Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who is both ridiculous himself and a mirror for the ridiculous in British society. But on film, Chan was also enmeshed in what Huang calls “racial parables”. With sidekicks like Stepin Fetchit, Chan appealed to an America fixated on racial distinctions at home but determined to stay aloof as Europe and Asia spiralled into wars ideologically predicated on the desire to enshrine such distinctions.
Continue reading “Charlie Chan: Number one Swede in yellowface.” »
Thursday, January 27, 2011
By CLAY RISEN [Bookforum] – We desperately need alternative models to our country’s failing public-education system. But to game designer Jane McGonigal, the author of Reality Is Broken, Quest to Learn [charter schools in New York] represents not just an alternative but the very future of secondary education. “Their ideal school is a game,” she writes, which would mirror the immersive online worlds in which millions of children—and adults—spend their free time.
Continue reading “The secret treasure in gamification’s future.” »
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
By DANIEL BELL [The Public Interest] – What I am arguing is that a stable social order, within a modern Western society, can only be maintained through a principle of liberalism, one that seeks to emphasize the diversity of individual and group beliefs, one that balances the particularism of the constituent groups and the universalism of common rules.
Continue reading “Daniel Bell, an eloquent defender of modernity, dies at 91.” »
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
By Michelene Wandor.
LONDON – DEREK WALCOTT HAS won this year’s T. S. Eliot prize (£15,000 and great prestige) with his collection, White Egrets (North American readers here). It is hugely deserved. Walcott is a major international literary figure. From the West Indies, via a literary education steeped in the literature of Greek myths and Shakespeare, his poetry has always resonated with free-form majestic rhythms, weighty imagery and the savours of his birthplace, helping to lay the foundations of later generations of Caribbean and post-Caribbean poets. One of these, Bernardine Evaristo, was on the panel of judges for the awards, and Walcott’s poetry is likely to have resonated powerfully with her.
Continue reading “Derek Walcott: The TS Eliot (and not a consolation) prize.” »
By RADIOGIRL [from Comments to Stephen Hough’s blog post on Liszt, Daily Telegraph] – Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has now in place guidelines with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), that any qualified public broadcasting station that wishes to broadcast sound recordings over the Internet must not only register for agreement for those rights but must comply with the new rules. (BTW, this does not apply to commercial webcasters such as WQXR nor does it apply to recordings of live performances made for broadcast purposes.)
Some adjustments can be made but the major stumbling point is this: There is now a limit on the number of selections from the same recording that can be played in a three hour period. For a single sound recording no more than three selections may be played and only two may be played consecutively. This poses a significant difficulty for a programming philosophy which has always centered on the belief that a composer’s work should be heard as it was intended to be enjoyed: as a complete piece of music.
Continue reading “This unwanted interruption is brought to you by the RIAA.” »
By JEFFREY H. MATSUURA [Archipelago] – Thomas Jefferson possessed an unusually comprehensive perspective on the connections linking intellectual property rights, invention/innovation, economic development, and democratic values.
Jefferson was a well-known scientist of his time. His interests spanned a wide range of sciences and engineering. His scientific interests and accomplishments were substantial enough to lead to his election as president of the American Philosophical Society, one of the leading scientific organizations in the United States during Jefferson’s time. Perhaps most important, Jefferson viewed himself as a scientist. In an 1809 letter to Pierre Samuel DuPont de Nemours, Jefferson wrote: “Nature intended for me the tranquil pursuits of science by rendering them my supreme delight.”
Continue reading “Thomas Jefferson and the science of practicality.” »
Saturday, January 22, 2011
By ROGER KIMBALL [The New Criterion] – The nineteenth century had been the British century. The twentieth century belonged to America. The twenty-first, [James] Bennett argued, might well be a third, more capacious Anglo century. “If the English-speaking nations grasp the opportunity,” he wrote at the end of his book, “the twenty-first century will be the Anglosphere century.”
“If.” A tiny word that prompts large questions. What were those opportunities that needed grasping? How sure was our grip? And who, by the way, were “we”? What was this Anglosphere that Bennett apostrophized?
Continue reading “As Thomas Paine knew, it’s the language of common sense.” »
By JOHN GROSS [Wall Street Journal] – In the 19th century, anonymous reviewing was still the general rule, although signed reviews became more common as the century wore on. Inevitably there were abuses, even at the highest level. Mr. Mullan’s prize exhibit is an anonymous review by George Eliot of the biography of Goethe by her lover, George Henry Lewes, a book she had helped him to write. (Admittedly, the praise she bestows sounds fairly restrained.)
This doesn’t mean that the best 19th-century reviewing wasn’t very good indeed and that anonymity may not have lent it some of its strength. In the age of celebrity culture, it is hard not to look back fondly on the sober charms of Anon. But we shouldn’t allow nostalgia to mislead us. In the end, anonymity does more harm than good. It allows the worst critics, Mr. Puff and Mr. Sneer, to sound like impersonal oracles.
Continue reading “John Gross introduced us, by Jove.” »
The Royal Institute of Philosophy‘s series of lectures on philosophy and the arts continues Friday evening, 21 January 2011, at 5:45 pm with Paisley Livingston at the JZ Young Lecture Theatre, Gower Street. His talk is called “Cinematic Genius”.
Continue reading “Events: ‘Cinematic Genius’ and ‘Artistic Truth’ in the London Series.” »
Thursday, January 20, 2011
By LAWRENCE VENUTI [Exchanges] – Especially in the United States, where relatively few translations are published, even fewer are reviewed as translations, and only an infinitesimal receive any recognition as literary works in their own right. When readers give any thought to translation, they tend to imagine it as mechanical, something that a computer might do, given the right software. Or they view it as esoteric, trafficking in a knowledge they don’t possess (namely a foreign language), uncertain whether to apply the term “art” or “craft,” honorifics that, in any case, fail to illuminate. Translation occupies a unique place in our culture: it is a kind of writing where, as a rule, misunderstanding meets neglect.
Continue reading “The translator’s loyalty to the text: transformation or treachery?” »
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
By JOHN WILLIAMS [The Second Pass] – At 78, with his best work virtually unknown to readers of my generation, Wilfrid Sheed inarguably deserves a renaissance. I luckily discovered him last year when I came across an appreciative blog post by Allen Barra, who wrote, “No other critic approaches [Sheed’s] ability to synthesize the vast literature on a subject or to illuminate a writer’s oeuvre in a short starburst of words.” It’s those starbursts that led fellow critic Jonathan Yardley to call him “irresistibly quotable.” Barra’s tribute was almost entirely a list of “Sheedisms,” and I can’t blame him. It’s almost impossible to write about Sheed without simply offering a buffet of his epigrammatic genius:
Continue reading “Wilfrid Sheed: An ‘irresistibly quotable’ writer due for a revival.” »
Philosophy and public impact.
By Anthony O’Hear
Anthony O'Hear.
IN A TIME WHEN governments are seeking to rein back public expenditure, those receiving government funding can expect to be called to account. In Britain (excluding Scotland) block funding for teaching in universities in the arts and social sciences is to be replaced by students having (eventually) to pay fees for it themselves, which may concentrate minds somewhat. With research it is a rather different matter. There will still be government research councils (even in Scotland), but the assessment of the potential ‘economic and societal impact’ of the research is now a major element in the making of funding decisions.
Academics applying for research grants will henceforth have to include in their submissions a statement about ‘the demonstrable contribution’ that their work will make to ‘society and the economy’. They ‘will need to consider the wider potential of your research in relation to industry, the public sector, government policy, the third sector, the general public and the wider user base’.
Continue reading “Philosophy and public impact.” »