The New York Review of Books

'What Is an Andy Warhol?': An Exchange

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Joel Wachs

A Great Jump to Disaster?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Tim Flannery

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
by James Lovelock

James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia
by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin

The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?
by Peter Ward

The idea that Earth is a living thing goes back at least as far as Plato, who according to Francis Bacon believed that the planet 'was one entire, perfect, living creature.' But it was James Lovelock and his colleague Lynn Margulis who, in the early 1970s, developed a testable scientific hypothesis aimed at investigating Earth's lifelike properties. Known as the Gaia hypothesis, it states that life on Earth works to keep conditions at the planet's surface favorable to life itself. In 2006 this led to Lovelock joining the likes of Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin in receiving geology's most prestigious prize--the Geological Society's Wollaston Medal. In presenting the award the society's president acknowledged that the Gaia hypothesis had 'opened up a whole new field of Earth Science study.'

Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By David Cole

Race, Incarceration, and American Values
by Glenn C. Loury, with Pamela S. Karlan, Tommie Shelby, and Loïc Wacquant

Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice
by Paul Butler

Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities: Reentry, Race, and Politics
by Anthony C. Thompson

With approximately 2.3 million people in prison or jail, the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world--by far. Our per capita rate is six times greater than Canada's, eight times greater than France's, and twelve times greater than Japan's. Here, at least, we are an undisputed world leader; we have a 40 percent lead on our closest competitors--Russia and Belarus.

Secret Love in the Lost City

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Pico Iyer

The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely

Istanbul, with its many signs of the time when it was the center of the world, becomes something of a museum in the work of Orhan Pamuk, a writer clearly in love with memory itself, and his hometown, and everything that's been lost there. In his 2003 memoir, Istanbul, the five-story Pamuk Apartments in which he spent nearly all his first five decades are described as a 'dark museum house,' cluttered with sugar bowls, snuffboxes, censers, pianos that are never played, and glass cabinets that are never opened. The people inside the rooms have something of a neglected and left-behind quality, too; they're devoutly attentive to the fashions and perceived habits of Europe, and yet they know (or at least their sharp-eyed chronicler does) that Europe is spending very little time thinking of them.

Breaking a Conspiracy of Silence

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Sue Halpern

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism
by Muhammad Yunus, with Karl Weber

This past July, a little over a year after the United Nations Security Council finally declared rape a crime of war, the parents of Taraneh Mousavi, a twenty-eight-year-old beautician from Tehran, received a call from an anonymous stranger. The young woman had been missing for weeks, ever since she'd attended a post-election rally at the Ghoba mosque; it was rumored that she was being held by Basiji militiamen. The caller said that Mousavi had had 'an accident,' and was in the hospital with 'tears in her womb and her anus.' Mousavi's parents rushed to the place where she was supposed to be, but she wasn't there. They still have not found her--or her body.

Napoleon's Eye

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Peter Brooks

Dominique-Vivant Denon: L'oeil de Napoléon
an exhibition at the Louvre, Paris, October 20, 1999–January 17, 2000

Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris
by Andrew McClellan

No Tomorrow
by Vivant Denon, translated from the French by Lydia Davis, and with an introduction by Peter Brooks

Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, pried off just under one half of the Parthenon frieze (some 247 feet) and added to it fifteen metopes and seventeen of the great sculptures from the east and west pediments, then shipped them to England, eventually to repose in the British Museum, where they remain as the clamor from the Greek government to return them to Athens grows ever more intense. Lord Elgin acquired a vast store of antiquities during his ambassadorship to the Sublime Porte--the Ottoman court in Constantinople--from 1799 to 1803, and after. He seems to have had some sort of a sales contract (now lost) with the Ottoman rulers of Greece (who had no interest in pagan monuments) that conferred some legitimacy on his removing sculptures from the world's most famous temple (then a storehouse) and giving them refuge in London, where they were certainly better preserved.

Dreams of Better Schools

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Andrew Delbanco

The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools
by E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us
by Mike Rose

When Mike Rose, who teaches in the Graduate School of Education at UCLA, made some positive remarks about public schools on a call-in radio show a few years ago, one listener phoned in with disbelief: he said he 'didn't know one seventeen-year-old who could make correct change.' Others followed with 'assaultive' anger that 'did not, in any way, invite engagement, or mutual analysis, or thinking through a problem together.'

Iraq on the Edge

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Joost R. Hiltermann

For the occasional visitor such as myself, various methods exist to measure America's standing in Iraq, Iraqi suspicions and aspirations, and progress in the transfer of power, but none prove as illuminating as the checkpoints into and throughout Baghdad's Green Zone, that diminishing symbol of the Bush administration's ambitions.

American Pastoral

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:00:00 -0800

By Jonathan Raban

Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
by Linda Gordon

Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field
by Anne Whiston Spirn

Published in 1935 in the middle of the Depression, William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral casts a hard modern light on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems about shepherds and shepherdesses with classical names like Corydon and Phyllida. Pastoral, Empson wrote, was a 'puzzling form' and a 'queer business' in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land. It implied 'a beautiful relation between the rich and poor' by making 'simple people express strong feelings...in learned and fashionable language.' From 1935 onward, no one would read Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar or follow Shakespeare's complicated double plots without being aware of the class tensions and ambiguities between the cultivated author and his low-born subjects.

From Egypt to Paris: An Artist Prized for His Travel Sketches

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:41:00 -0800

Peter Brooks

Dominique-Vivant Denon, the subject of my piece in the November 19, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books, is known above all as the first Director of the Louvre—which, under his guidance, became the first encyclopedic public museum. But he was also an artist prized for his travel sketches and engravings. Since I could only touch on this aspect of his career briefly in my piece, I offer here some further notes and selections from his work.

Denon sketching the ruins of Hierakonpolis (British Museum, London)

Denon settled in Venice on the eve of the French Revolution, with the intention of creating his own engraving studio, and marrying his adored mistress, Isabella Teotochi. The Revolution changed all that. He had to return to France, during the Reign of Terror (under the protection of the painter Jacques-Louis David, associate of the Jacobins), to prevent the expropriation of his property. Then he was enrolled in General Bonaparte’s Egyptian Campaign in 1798, as one of its “savants.”

The Egyptian expedition offered an opportunity to feed the cultivated public’s insatiable curiosity for visual travelogue (photography was still some thirty years in the future). Denon became a first-rate sketcher of Egyptian ruins (his work recalls Piranesi’s views of Roman ruins, from a few decades earlier) and antiquities. The sketches were done on the spot, in haste, by the artist as he arrived on horseback with the army—the contemporary equivalent of the hand-held camera, if you will. In one of these sketches (shown above), Denon includes himself, sketching the ruins of Hierakonpolis.

There is a fluid charm and grace to the drawing, which represents Denon in what he calls his “ruined” clothing, next to his horse, with the ruins in the distance—and that somewhat startlingly large camel to the right. One wonders how many European representations of the camel there had been before this?

These sketches were engraved, to figure in Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute-Egypte pendant les campagnes du général Bonaparte, the magnificent and thorough account that Denon both wrote and illustrated, published in two large volumes in 1802, to great acclaim.

From earlier, no doubt, is his Le Roman universel (“The Universal Novel”—or in a more apt translation, “The Same Old Story”), which with some of the worldliness of his masterful erotic novella No Tomorrow (Point de Lendemain) gives us, in a kind of comic strip (read it from left to right), the story of a liaison, from meeting to separation, with clear but gracefully rendered scenes of lovemaking in the middle.

The Universal Novel (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

We may be reminded of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, and Max Ophuls’ film adaptation—though Denon’s version seems somewhat less world-weary. For all his sophistication, he is not, one feels, a cynic.

It’s a sign of the tumult of the period Denon lived through that the mood of the next image should be so strikingly different. This pen-and-ink drawing irresistibly evokes David’s famous sketch of Marie-Antoinette, her hands tied behind her back, seated in a tumbrel on her way to the guillotine.

Condemned members of the Red Cap Section of the Revolutionary Committee (Musée Denon, Chalon-sur-Saône)

These members of the Revolutionary Committee of the “section” named Bonnet-Rouge (all Paris was for a time divided into revolutionary “sections”) have also been sentenced—but probably not to the guillotine. The drawing dates from November or December 1794, after Thermidor, the turning point in the French Revolution that put an end to the Reign of Terror. The guillotine had fallen out of favor for common crimes: the committee members seem to have been found guilty of corruption. It’s likely that these sometime revolutionaries are undergoing a shaming punishment, mounted on a platform under signs proclaiming their misdeeds—and shivering: the final weeks of 1794 were notoriously frigid. I sense a kind of dispassionate historical gaze in Denon’s work here—surely one of his most accomplished historical evocations.

Self-portrait of Denon sketching (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

It is something of a retreat, in time and in style, to look at one of Denon’s self-portraits done, as he put it, “in the Flemish manner.”

It probably comes from his pre-Revolutionary time in Venice, and he self-consciously evokes an archaic style, setting himself, amidst old vases and busts and books, in a kind of Ruysdael-like decor. It may most of all point to the enormous prestige of Rembrandt, especially in portraiture. Like most self-portraits, it’s done in a mirror—Denon was right-handed.

Finally, I find myself circling back to the Egyptian Campaign, and Denon’s remarkable visual (as well as his written) travelogue. “Remember that from the height of these pyramids forty centuries are looking down at you!” Napoleon supposedly told his troops on the eve of the Battle of the Pyramids. Denon found the pyramids a largely depressing monument to a despotic and priest-ridden society (he was a man of the Enlightenment). But the Egyptian temples grabbed his historical imagination.

View of Karnak (British Museum, London)

He found Karnak “sumptuous,” though lacking in finesse and artistically “barbarian.” Nonetheless, he judged the ancient Egyptians to be “giants”—and at moments, as in the outer gates of Karnak, “geniuses” as well. Denon’s transmission of Egyptian scenes would provoke a wave of Egyptomania in French decorative style—including a sumptuous set of dinnerware executed, under Denon’s direction, for the Emperor Napoleon at the Imperial Manufactory at Sèvres.

Dairy Queen and Barbed Wire: The New Reality of US Occupation

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:32:00 -0800

Charles Simic

US soldiers at an ice cream shop, Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, October 1, 2009 (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

Back in September, I read an article in The New York Times about an American base in Iraq that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. It describes a U.S. military installation in the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad that houses 28,000 American troops and has a busy airport, two power plants, two sewage plants, and two water treatment plants that can purify 1.9 million gallons of water a day for showers, swimming pools and golf courses, and eighty to hundred buses any given moment crisscrossing the area on fifteen bus routes.

Joint Base Balad, as the place is called, is surrounded by towns and villages that lack working electricity, proper sanitation, and transportation. The Iraqis who live in them are not permitted to enter the base for security reasons, except in one designated area enclosed by barbed wire and blast walls, where they are free to sell pirated movies, discounted cigarettes, and electronics.

The fast food joints, the various stores, and three massage parlors are staffed by workers brought over from Uganda, Philippines, Bangladesh, India, and Kyrgyzstan, who are employed by private American security agencies. They live off base and are escorted to and back from work under guard. These neo-colonial, ethnically segregated little cities rose up all over Iraq while we supposedly sought to “win hearts and minds” of the local population. Their folly and their huge expense go unquestioned like so many other things about these wars; now we are building similar military cities in southern Afghanistan to house the thousands of new troops being sent there.

I know a bit about army bases having been stationed at one in Germany, and then in in Eastern France, almost fifty years ago. Except for the PX, with its inexpensive cigarettes and other American goodies which the locals craved, our living conditions were pretty modest. The Germans and the French, who worked on these bases, both as manual and office workers, could see for themselves how broke we usually were. Despite our open policy, the population in surrounding communities was not overly friendly. They at best tolerated us, because even former allies don’t like to see armed foreign soldiers on their soil.

Everybody on earth seems to understand that but us, convinced of our moral superiority and good intentions. Only such blindness could explain these bases in Iraq and now Afghanistan, which most certainly deeply antagonize the local populations. Can one imagine what it’s like for an ordinary Pashtun or Iraqi to pass by one of these monuments to our wealth and our arrogance? Even if we didn’t bomb, mistreat, arrest, or shoot anyone dear to them, I cannot imagine that they wish us well.

Podcast: Jerome Groopman on the Changing Medical Profession

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:50:41 -0800

Jerome Groopman speaks with Andrew Martin about how regulation of shift length, the struggle to control costs, and the rise of "evidence-based" medicine have changed the way doctors learn and practice. To read Dr. Groopman's article, "Diagnosis: What Doctors are Missing," please visit nybooks.com

Al-Qaeda: The Uzbek Branch in Pakistan

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:34:00 -0800

Christian Caryl

A poster created by the US military for Tahir Yuldashev, leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, who was killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan on August 27, 2009

Most of the reports about the Pakistani Army’s offensive in Waziristan have mentioned the Islamist extremists from Uzbekistan hiding out there—but they’ve often done so without really explaining what’s up. If you follow the coverage closely enough, you might learn that the Uzbek militants are tough fighters much feared by the Pakistani military, that they’re loyal auxiliaries of al-Qaeda who have displayed little inclination to negotiate, and that they’re being targeted by both the US and the government in Islamabad for these same reasons. The Uzbek Islamist leader, Tahir Yuldashev, was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Waziristan in August of this year—which says a lot about how seriously the Uzbeks are taken both by the US and the Pakistanis (who probably supplied the CIA with the information needed for the hit).

But how did they get there in the first place? It’s not an insignificant question: From Tashkent (Uzbekistan) to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad is roughly 700 miles—comparable to the distance from New York to Chicago.

The story begins in the Ferghana Valley, a remote but thickly populated part of Central Asia where three ex-Soviet republics (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan) overlap. I first ran across the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) during a reporting trip to Ferghana back in 1998. I was interviewing the families of Islamic activists whose sons and husbands had been rounded up by the government in response to a series of mysterious killings of local security officials. Credit for the attacks had been assumed by the IMU, a group claiming to be a new regional Islamist guerilla movement—apparently including some of the very same radicals who had openly defied Uzbekistan’s brutally secular dictator, the ironically named Islam Karimov, in public demonstrations in the Ferghana in the early 1990s.

These radicals had tried to establish sharia law in several Ferghana towns before being ousted by the Uzbek government. Some were arrested and sent to Uzbekistan’s concentration camps (set up to stamp out political opposition in the 1990s), but the ones who escaped soon found a new cause in neighboring Tajikistan, where they joined the country’s homegrown Islamists in a savage civil war against neo-communists (1992-1997). Then, in 1999 and 2000, the IMU made headlines by staging raids into Kyrgyzstan through the Tien Shan Mountains. They also took hostages—a group of Japanese geologists in 1999 and American tourists in 2000. At the time, the group’s military leader was a ruthless ex-paratrooper who found religion during his years fighting in the Red Army in Afghanistan. His nom de guerre was Juma Namangani.

In the meantime the IMU had also been casting its gaze farther afield. One of its major sources of income involved its control of some of the heroin-smuggling routes leading into Central Asia from Afghanistan. At some point the Pakistani military intelligence service, the notorious ISI, got wind of the IMU’s activities and realized that here was an ideal proxy in the region for Pakistan, which was at the time aligned with the newly-ascendant Taliban. By the late 1990s the Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud was barely hanging on in his struggle against the Taliban, and sponsoring the IMU provided a way for the ISI to put additional pressure on him from the north. By the beginning of this century some Uzbek militants had joined up with al-Qaeda in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where they gained a reputation as particularly fierce fighters.

In the period right after the September 11 attacks, many Uzbek guerillas in Afghanistan—including Namangani, who was killed in November 2001—were shredded by U.S. air attacks, and some ended up at Guantanamo. But others survived for years—including the IMU’s spiritual leader Tahir Yuldashev. Along with other remnants of the Qaeda coalitions, these fighters migrated into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where they remain today, notwithstanding the killing of Yuldadshev. (Interestingly, the Uzbeks do not have any particular ethnic connection to Pashtuns, the dominant group in the Taliban areas of southern Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. It’s more an ideological affinity: the Uzbek Islamists have been brutalized and hardened by their war with Karimov’s dictatorship, and that tends to make them favor a radical takfiri Islamist line, much like the jihadis in Pakistan and elsewhere.)

According to Ahmed Rashid, the number of Uzbek fighters in Pakistan has actually grown in the intervening years. He thinks they may now number in the low thousands, as more and more disaffected youths flee the poverty and religious persecution of the Central Asian republics for the dream of an Islamist oasis in Waziristan. In recent months there have also been ominous reports of scattered guerilla attacks across Central Asia that some observers have attributed to the IMU. The evidence of a comeback outside of Pakistan is still inconclusive. But if the Pakistanis asked the Americans to target Yuldashev for assassination in August, that suggests that the IMU is being taken quite seriously by the army leadership in Islamabad. We still don’t know how many Uzbeks are in Waziristan, how determined they are, or how well they fight. But we could soon find out.

Paris Ballet Follies

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:30:00 -0800

Robert Gottlieb

A scene from La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (Zipporah Films)

Your take on Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet—a two-and-a-half hour documentary opening on November 4th at New York’s Film Forum—will depend on your feelings about ballet, about Wiseman, and about the Paris Opera Ballet itself.

I start at a disadvantage. The more I see of the company over the years, the less I like it. These are meticulously trained dancers—strong, focused, assertive, implacably correct—but to me they’re almost uniformly inexpressive. They show us how redoubtable their technique is, but they tell us almost nothing about the music, the choreography, or themselves. It’s an approach to dance that must begin in the Opera school, and it’s very evident in the classes and rehearsals the film presents: response to the music, what we call phrasing, is almost never questioned or considered. Correctness is all.

And then there’s the matter of repertory. Paris hasn’t had a master choreographer in modern times, unless you consider Serge Lifar a master (I don’t), and his ballets are dead as dodos—or doornails, if you prefer. Nureyev revitalized the company’s dancing, but he was not a talented dance-maker, and none of the other post-Lifar artistic directors have had even his pretentions in this area.

Without a vital creative tradition, then, and with that distressing compulsion of the French to be trendy (which in ballet today almost inevitably means trashy), the repertory is dismal. Wiseman shows us extended sequences from seven ballets. One is Nureyev’s unfortunate version of The Nutcracker. One is Pierre Lacotte’s reconstruction of Paquita. The rest is contempo-European: Mats Ek’s House of Bernarda Alba; Wayne McGregor’s Genus; Sasha Waltz’s Romeo and Juliet; Angelin Preljocaj’s Medea; a snatch of Pina Bausch’s Orpheus and Eurydice. Everyone rolls around on the floor in either sexual overload or sexual frustration. Or is violent. Preljocaj’s Medea hauls a tin bucket of “blood” onto the stage and smears her children and herself with it. (Why didn’t Euripedes think of that?)

Wiseman, at least to my eyes, doesn’t seem very interested in ballet itself. He’s interested in showing how an artistic institution functions. He’s also interested in beautiful but distracting arty photography. For instance, half a dozen panoramic shots of Paris taken at different time of the day and night and taken from the top of the Garnier opera house don’t add to our understanding of dance and dancers; they just get in the way. Wiseman in his travelogue mode—we got even more of it fifteen years ago in his very similar film Ballet, about A.B.T (the moon over the Acropolis, roller-coasters in Copenhagen’s Tivoli gardens, the New York skyline)—is a direct throwback to the travelogue shorts that turned up on double-bills together with the newsreel and the cartoon back in the 30s and 40s. (Those were boring too.) And wasn’t there anyone to tell him that material like this can’t maintain our interest for more than two and a half hours? Has he forgotten that his first and, arguably, most famous film—Titicut Follies (1967)—lasted less than ninety minutes?

Nor can I see what people eager to learn about a dance company are going to get from countless walks down corridors or workmen freshening up the paint or the old bee-keeper on the roof working his apiary. (It’s in Ballet that we get to see a young dancer drinking from a water fountain.)

A more fundamental problem stems from Wiseman’s pretentious decision not to name anything or explain anything. Perhaps if you’re new to ballet you don’t care what ballet you’re looking at or which dancers you’re seeing (although I don’t really believe that), but if you’re relatively knowledgeable, it’s maddening. I guess Wiseman is reaching for universality, and indeed, A.B.T. in the older film and the Paris Opera in this one turn out to be practically interchangeable, except that the American dancers seem younger, less businesslike, freer.

If you’ve never watched ballet classes or rehearsals—if you’ve never been backstage or in a studio—either of the Wiseman dance films may be a welcome if over-long revelation. For the rest of us, the revelations lie more in the fascinating dynamics between management and dancer, and in Paris, among management, unions, and government. We get to see Brigitte Lefevre dealing on a one-to-one basis with an experienced dancer voicing her concerns—it’s like watching two hard-headed French businesswomen negotiating a deal. (I guess that’s what it actually is.) And we see the company gathered together to discuss pension plans. First things first at the Paris Opera.

La Danse has the virtues of inclusivity, tact, and curiosity, and it testifies to the very rigorous and unglamorous way that dancers and coaches and choreographers and rehearsal pianists (and stage hands, and electricians, and wig-makers, and administrators) go about their business. And Wiseman’s fluent camera and pictorial eye make for a very pretty film. But it’s also highly self-indulgent, which means that it’s also something of a drag—and that’s something ballet should never be.

One-Term President?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:00:00 -0800

Garry Wills

Barack Obama paying his respects as the bodies of eighteen American soldiers killed in Afghanistan were returned to the United States, Dover Air Force Base, October 29, 2009 (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux)

I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate.

These are the arguments that have kept us in losing efforts before. They are the ones that made presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon pass on to their successors in the presidency the draining and self-lacerating Vietnam War. They are the arguments that made President George W. Bush pass on two wars to his successor.

One of the strongest arguments for continued firing up of these wars is that none of these presidents wanted to serve only one term (even Lyndon Johnson, who chose not to run for a second full term). But what justification is there for buying a second presidential term with the lives of hundreds or thousands of young American men and women in the military?

I have great hopes for the Obama presidency, even in his first term, and especially if he could have two terms to realize the exciting new things he aspires to do in the White House. But I would rather see him a one-term president than have him pass on another unwinnable war to the person who will follow him in office.

I know how difficult it will be to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan. We go into these places, now, trailing baggage of a deadly sort. There are more hired American contractors in both nations than there are military personnel. What to do with these unaccountable and corrupt bands? We have farmed out so many of our national duties that the contractors, like our banks, have grown too big to be dealt with. Who is to guard our soldiers if not our mercenary bodyguards?

But we had a thousand soldiers wounded in the last three months—a quarter the number of wounded since 2001. These include many lives shattered forever. We sink deeper into blood, with no foreseeable end in sight. Qualified reporters and military officials foresee another ten years in Afghanistan—and their projections usually err on the short side.

The American people now oppose the war, and it is folly to keep up a war without support back home. We will hear predictions of dire consequences if we don’t carry out a commitment, and don’t yield to demands of the military to expand forces. We heard that for years about Vietnam. But when we did withdraw, the consequences were not as fatal as those we incurred during the years that saw the deaths of over 50,000 of our soldiers and many more Vietnamese. Some leader has to break the spell before costs mount further while our wars are passed from president to president. Among other things, this will give our military a needed chance to repair the wear and tear on men and equipment that the overstretched regular services and the National Guard have suffered, and to make them ready for other challenges.

It is unlikely that we will soon have another president with the moral and rhetorical force to talk us out of a foolish commitment that cannot be sustained without shame and defeat. If it costs him his presidency, what other achievement can match it?

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would rather be a one-term president than give up on his goals. Here is a goal no other president we can imagine would have a possibility of reaching. Presidents who just kick the can down the road are easy to come by. Lost lives and limbs are not.

How to Find the Best of Lange

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:22:00 -0800

Jonathan Raban

Hopi man, 1920s; photograph by Dorothea Lange (Oakland Museum of California)

Some visual footnotes to my piece on Dorothea Lange in the new issue of The New York Review. I wrote about her work for the Farm Security Administration and her famous photograph Migrant Mother, and also discussed other areas of her work that may be less well known to readers, including this portrait of a Hopi man, which appears in Linda Gordon’s new biography of Lange.

Two earlier stages of this striking death-mask-like portrait—which might as well have borne the title The Last of His Race, or, as Edward S. Curtis called one of his best-known photographs, The Vanishing Race—can be seen in the comprehensive online archive of Lange’s photographs at the Oakland Museum of California. A warning about the archive: each picture is a black-and-white transparency made by setting the original negative against a light source. To call the results of this process “low-def” is to flatter them, and anyone who explores the archive will find that a lot of patience is required to navigate from one image to the next.

That said, here are the different stages of the portrait: first, the head-and-shoulders version, showing a merry, necklaced fellow with whom Lange had evidently established some rapport; then a close-up of his face, heavily shadowed, but still full of expression; then the final print, pictured above.

Since half of twentieth-century photography seems to have consisted of men objectifying young women as sex symbols, it’s tempting to see this portrait as a counterexample: a female photographer objectifying a male subject as a race symbol, which is surely what the Hopi man has become.

In my essay, I also discussed Lange’s photographs of her Irish pastoral idyll, which she made on assignment for Life magazine in 1954. I relied on the Oakland Museum’s collection of nearly 2,500 images from that trip.

The photographs were published in the March 21, 1955, issue of Life, which has been digitized by Google Books. Lange’s photo-essay (note the scant acknowledgment of her role at the bottom of the first page) starts on page 135. One can skip directly to her piece by entering 135 in the page box and clicking Enter, though to scroll one’s way slowly through the magazine is to visit an enchanted world, where, among many other marvels, advertising revenue grows on trees.

Nearly four thousand of Lange’s photographs for the FSA, including Migrant Mother, are at the Library of Congress, whose archive can be searched here. See also Errol Morris’s recent discussion of Migrant Mother and other FSA photographs on his New York Times blog.

A Nazi at Harvard

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 10:06:00 -0800

Anthony Grafton

Ernst Hanfstaengl (center, with raised arm), who served as foreign press chief for the Nazi party, in the Harvard Class of 1909 parade, June, 1934, from Stephen Norwood’s The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Print Department

In 1934, the Harvard class of 1909 held its 25th reunion—then as now an occasion for members of the American elite to parade in public and celebrate their achievements. But this year the star attraction was a German: Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, the son of a Munich art dealer and publisher who had joined the Nazi movement and enjoyed personal access to Hitler (Hitler liked hearing him play the piano, as had his Harvard classmates, for whom he composed football fight songs). In the early 1930s he served as foreign press chief for the Nazi party.

When Hanfstaengl’s plan to attend the reunion became known, a scandal blew up. He declined to serve as an officer of his class, but he came, visited the estates of wealthy Harvard men around Boston, and took tea at the house of the current president, James Conant, who would later serve as American high commissioner, and still later ambassador, in postwar Germany.

Liberal journalists and politicians, especially in New York, denounced the Nazis and dwelled on Hanfstaengl’s support of their policies. A rabbi confronted him, two girls chained themselves to railings in Harvard Yard, and a few students from MIT protested and were arrested. But Harvard’s members, old and young, responded to such critics with striking solidarity. The Crimson denounced the demonstrators as “extremely childish.” Conant went ahead with plans to send the mathematics professor George Birkhoff, a staunch anti-Semite, as an official representative of the university to the 1936 anniversary celebration at the University of Heidelberg—an institution that, purged of its Jews, taught “German physics.”

Stephen Norwood, a distinguished American Jewish historian, tells these grim stories in a lucid, well-informed book: The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower. Many of the richest and oldest colleges and universities in the United States showed less understanding of Nazism than newspaper columnists like Heywood Broun (who, to be fair, also attended Harvard, where he met John Reed and Alan Seeger).

In some cases, university presidents did more than send greetings to the odd dictator. Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia went back and forth to Europe on German ships, sent representatives to the big German university festivals—and expelled students and fired professors who protested. Worse still, he allowed Columbia’s Italian Academy to become a center of Fascist propaganda. Meanwhile the Seven Sisters welcomed Nazi exchange students and sent their own young women off to witness the wonders of German prosperity and order at the University of Munich.

At times, Norwood offers an indictment—a justified indictment—rather than a history. In his first chapter, he argues at length that any sentient American should have known what the Nazis stood for. He has a point. But it’s one thing to show that Conant and Butler came late to the war against Fascism, as they surely did (in 1940, Conant was appointed Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, which oversaw the Manhattan project); quite another to explain why they were so blind and deaf.

The universities took their stand where they did for many reasons. Administrators believed in hierarchy, and they and many faculty disliked Jews. But many older professors and administrators—as Norwood nowhere indicates—had deeper reasons for viewing Germany through a haze of sympathy. American universities looked to the German ones as their models. Many scholars and scientists had actually begun their research careers in German libraries and labs. In Berlin, Butler saw that even Bismarck treated great professors with respect. Breaking those ties came hard.

Communism also played a big role in this ugly story. In the 1930s, the Party had cells and reading groups on all major campuses. They drew their members from the same anti-Fascists who opposed official visits by Nazis. The dignitaries who refused to help or listen to protestors often saw them as a threat in their own right to the republic. This fact can’t excuse their violations of student and faculty rights or their sympathy for the Nazi devil—but the historian can’t ignore it.

In some cases, Norwood fails to think his way outside the categories of modern American Judaism and into those of the 1930s. One of his minor characters is the long-term dean of Barnard College, Virginia Gildersleeve, who excused Nazi removal of Jews and women from German universities as a response to overcrowding. After the war, Norwood notes, Gildersleeve emerged as a passionate defender of the Palestinians and opponent of Zionism. The same anti-Semitism that inspired these activities presumably instilled her with warm feelings for the Nazis.

In fact, Gildersleeve was a complex character. A passionate believer in women’s rights and aspirations, she hired male professors to ensure Barnard’s high academic standing. Gildersleeve may well have wanted to cut the number of Jewish students in her college. But her opposition to the expulsion of Arabs from Palestine did not stem only from anti-Semitism. She shared her views with friends like Judah Magnes and called for the admission of 200,000 displaced Jews to the United States, even as she fought the founding of Israel. Yet somehow she also admired the early achievements of the Nazis (particularly for putting the male population back to work after the economic disasters of hyperinflation and slump), as she did the passion play at Oberammergau. No indictment can do justice to such complexities.

In the end, though, the complexities Norwood misses matter less than the central point he proves. It is a principle universally acknowledged that those in search of examples of civil courage waste their time if they look for them among university faculty members and administrators. That simple rule does much to explain why the denizens of great universities pretended not to see where the wind from the Rhine and the Tiber was blowing.

Stephen Norwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (Cambridge University Press, 2009)

China's Boom: The Dark Side in Photos

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:23:00 -0700

Orville Schell

A family of five children who emigrated to Inner Mongolia from the nearby Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region to find work in the Heilonggui Industrial District, April 10, 2005. The oldest child is nine years old; the youngest is less than two. Photographs by Lu Guang (courtesy of Contact Press Images).

I have seen some woeful scenes of industrial apocalypse and pollution in my travels throughout China, but there are very few images that remain vividly in my mind. This is why the photographs of Lu Guang are so important. A fearless documentary photographer who lives in China’s southern province of Zhejiang and runs a photo studio and lab that funds his myriad trips around China, Lu photographs the dark consequences of China’s booming but environmentally destructive economic development in ways that stay with you. Evidently Chinese officials seem to agree, because they often try to censor his photography, forcing him to use an alias. On October 14, he was in New York to receive the W. Eugene Smith grant in humanistic photography, which recognizes photographers “who have demonstrated a deep commitment to documenting the human condition in the formidable tradition of compassionate dedication that W. Eugene Smith exhibited.”

Some of his arresting images show plumes of pitch black and garishly colored yellow and red smoke belching out of factory and power plant chimneys - almost all caused by the burning of soft coal. They are reminiscent of the eerie, unnatural images and colors that blink out of a television set when the tint controls are turned all the way to one side.

Tianjin Steel Plant, She County, Hebei Province, March 18, 2008

His pictures of open-pit coal mines that have been illegally gouged into the Mongolian steppe, and the attendant mountains of tailings that tower beside them, bespeak a landscape so despoiled that millions of years of restoration will not be enough to heal it.

Everything you see in Lu’s photographs—whether desolate mines, gritty plants spewing out toxic smoke, grimy miners, poisoned bodies of water or tundras of trash—grows out of China’s use of coal. In fact, 80 percent of China’s electricity comes from coal (in contrast to about 50 percent for the US). And electrical power has provided the Chinese economy with the energy it needs to maintain 10 percent growth rates for more than a decade.

In other words, coal has been China’s bounty and salvation, enabling tens of millions of people to rise up from grinding poverty, and allowing the government to build a whole new system of ports, highways, airports, railroads, bridges, buildings, and tunnels. It has also helped to create a prosperous middle class; and contributed to China’s emergence as a world power.

However, China’s reliance on coal has been polluting the country’s air and water, depleting its resource base and despoiling its landscape in ways that are difficult to imagine without actually visiting the Chinese countryside. Yet the photography of Lu Guang gives us a glimpse of this landscape, reminding us that these scenes of devastation are not isolated phenomena. They are ubiquitous. Above all, it also reminds us that there is a steep cost to such rapacious and high-speed development, something the Chinese government has started to understand and to try and remedy.

But, alas, there is an even darker side to this coal-fed miracle of growth that even Lu Guang’s gripping color images can’t convey. Last year China became the world’s largest emitter of heat trapping greenhouse gases, surpassing the US for the first time. Lu’s photos can do no more than hint at the unseeable, phantasmagoric, but even more menacing threat of climate change that is quietly and ineluctably stealing over the world.

Podcast: James Bamford on the National Security Agency

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:02:28 -0700

James Bamford talks to Nathan Thrall about the politics behind the Bush administration's evasion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the technology and scope of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. To read Bamford's article on the NSA in the November 5 issue of the Review, please visit nybooks.com

Iraq: A Bigger Threat Than Bombs

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:32:00 -0700

Joost R. Hiltermann

An Iraqi weeps as he walks away from the ministries of justice and labour following the suicide bombing on October 25, 2009 (Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)

The horrific twin bombings in Baghdad on October 25 that killed over 150 people, including children in two daycare centers, and injured many more, could easily be seen as supporting the increasingly common contention that Iraq remains profoundly unstable. That such an attack could take place in the center of the capital might demonstrate that security forces under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are incapable of providing security; and that the United States will leave chaos in its wake when combat troops depart ten months from now. But the attacks must be seen in the perspective of deeper problems, even if the claim about Iraq’s instability is valid.

The bombings at the Justice Ministry, the Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works and the Baghdad Provincial Council building are even bigger than the suicide car bomb attacks against the Foreign and Finance Ministries on August 19, in which at least one hundred people were killed and more than six hundred injured. They are large, spectacular assaults on key government institutions, causing significant casualties as well as severe damage to Maliki’s image as the man who brought relative peace to the country over the past year. They could undermine Maliki’s chances of regaining his post following the January 2010 parliamentary elections, especially if more bombings follow—as well they may. This could indeed have been the intent behind the bombings—if, that is, they weren’t simply an attempt by former-regime elements to disrupt the political process, the only workable strategy they have at their disposal under current circumstances.

But the problems in Iraq are much more profound, and much more threatening, than occasional bomb blasts, however powerful. The bombings distract from the sobering fact that politics remain so dysfunctional as to disable governance. Following a two-year lull in which security steadily improved but politicians made no progress on the principal constitutional issues dividing them—particularly on the questions of how to share or divide power and wealth, and how to settle territorial disputes—Baghdad has entered a season of crisis that may undo the relative peace that has been achieved.

In the council of representatives over the past two weeks, Iraqi politicians proved incapable of passing legislation that would enable the January elections to happen on time. They may have to be pushed back as a result. Negotiations are now being conducted by a leadership council that has no constitutional standing but that reflects where power really lies. Despite rumors of an imminent deal, compromise has been elusive. Two issues have held up the law: disagreement over the electoral system, and controversy over registering voters in the governorate of Kirkuk, an oil-rich territory that is claimed by both the Kurds and Maliki’s government.

The two issues, while very different, have become linked. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Kurdish parties prefer a closed-system election, in which voters cast their ballots not for an individual candidate but for a list of candidates pre-ranked by the party—much as voters do in the Netherlands, Italy, and Israel. They appear to be using the Kirkuk imbroglio to get their way over the objection of much of the electorate, which wants to press on with the elections and prefers an open-list election (in which voters in effect rank the candidates on a list).

The closed-list approach also runs counter to the wishes of the Shiites’ foremost religious leader, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has expressly called for an open-list election in order to encourage the ascendance of local leaders and technocrats over party hacks. As a parliamentarian who backs Muqtada al-Sadr told me during my visit to Baghdad in late September, “Shiite parties in government have no interest in an open-list system, but they have even less interest in publicly opposing the marja’iya,” i.e., Sistani.

So rather than openly disobeying a man who commands huge support among Shiites, the parties wanting closed-list elections are trying to stall negotiations about closed vs. open list elections by deflecting attention to a separate debate over the registration of voters in Kirkuk. They blame Kurdish leaders for insisting on a system of registering voters in Kirkuk that, in view of the Kurds’ numerical superiority, would advance the leaders’ quest to place Kirkuk under their control and, over time, inside the Kurdistan region. These Shiite parties hope that by encouraging deadlock over Kirkuk they can sufficiently delay negotiations over the elections law to convince everyone to agree to default to the old law that governed the previous elections in December 2005, based on a closed-list system. This, they expect, will ensure their continued hold on power, as it will keep all the party’s top cadres in their current seats in parliament.

Iraqi leaders are now working to hammer out a compromise on the Kirkuk voter registration that would unblock progress on the election law, following heavy pressure from US officials who fear that unanticipated election delays will jeopardize their timetable for troop withdrawal. The crisis will not cease, however, even if the law is passed and elections proceed more or less on time. The conflict over Kirkuk, which has bedevilled Baghdad politics for the past two years, is bound to also cast its shadow over the challenge that will follow the elections: the formation of a new government.

Kurdish leaders, who have a proven ability to mobilize their community for elections and thus remain indispensable political players—true kingmakers—in Baghdad, will demand concessions on Kirkuk in exchange for their participation in a future coalition government. We will have to see whether this means a firm date for a referendum on the status of Kirkuk, or a date for (previously delayed) provincial elections in Kirkuk —both of which the Kurds think they have the majority to win—or Baghdad’s consent to pay oil companies that signed contracts with the Kurdistan regional government. But since Kirkuk is the only issue that can unify the multitude of non-Kurdish parties, negotiations over a new government could go on for a very long time.

Will the security forces and state institutions hold up as politicians bicker and US troops pull out? This is the question that is rattling Iraq much more powerfully than the bombs last week.

The Serbian Charade

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:56:00 -0700

Charles Simic

Serbian rioters attacking the US Embassy in Belgrade to protest Kosovo’s declaration of independence, February 19, 2008 (AFP/Getty Images)

In late September, I went to hear the President of Serbia, Boris Tadic, speak to students and professors at Columbia University. He was in New York leading his country’s delegation to the UN General Assembly meeting. Tadic is a nice-looking, charming, and articulate man without a trace of Milosevic’s arrogance. He said many reassuring things about democracy in Serbia, maintaining peace in the region, and preserving the territorial integrity of Bosnia. But, when it came to Kosovo, he asserted that Serbia will “never, under any circumstances, implicitly or explicitly, recognize Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence.”

Tadic said that Serbia is looking forward to the decision of the International Court of Justice in The Hague (the case is set to open on December 1, and a decision is expected sometime in 2010); he appeared to be convinced that the court will support Serbia’s contention that the declaration broke international law. He added that he would remind the members of the UN General Assembly of the fundamental principles of the UN Charter that were broken by the member states that recognized Kosovo.

I know that Tadic has to mollify the nationalist lunatics at home, but to hear an intelligent man argue for such obviously idiotic and self-defeating policy was embarrassing. What he and almost all Serbian politicians will not admit is that a decision favorable to Serbia by The Hague court—which is not beyond the realm of possibility since international precedents and agreements were broken by recognizing the secessionist region—would be a calamity. Even if Kosovars agreed to be ruled once again by Serbs, which of course they never will, how would Serbia integrate politically and economically two million people who hate their guts? What’s more, given full political rights, their mortal enemies would become the dominant political party in the country and do what they please with that power.

Tadic speculated that after a favorable decision in The Hague, there could be fresh talks with Pristina on Kosovo’s status, during which, so he imagines, Kosovars would agree to some sort of autonomy within Serbia. But that too is a pipe dream.

More than once, while he talked, Tadic made me think of Obama and Afghanistan. In their hearts, both men surely must know the futility of continuing the charade, and yet, lacking resolve to confront the fools among them, they continue to be trapped in policies guaranteed to fail.

Beauty and the Brain: The Puzzle

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:27:00 -0700

Tim Parks

Isia Leviant: Enigma, 1981

What happens in the brain when we look at a painting, listen to music, read a book? This was the subject of Neuroesthetics: When Art and the Brain Collide, a workshop conference at IULM University Milan bringing together a mix of neurobiologists and art historians. The atmosphere was tense and expectant, the art folk anxious that they wouldn’t understand a word, the biologists concerned that their work would seem underwhelming and wrongheaded.

Star speaker Semir Zeki, professor of neuroesthetics at University College London, set the ball rolling with an extraordinarily defensive performance. Art critics accused him of being reductive but hard science could only proceed step by step on the basis of demonstrable proof. He quoted and rubbished a sentence from Gille Deleuze on Francis Bacon:

The figure … acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head, and acts through the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone.

How could one take seriously anyone who used terms so loosely? “The brain is part of the nervous system!”

What Zeki was trying to demonstrate was the brain’s response to ambiguity, a major element in most aesthetic experience. He showed slides of the Rubin vase, the Kanizsa cube and triangle, and Isia Leviant’s “Enigma.” In the case of the vase and the cube, the brain could see only one of the two alternatives at a time, but it could never shake off the other and would keep switching back and forth, without resolving the issue, a characteristic that Salvador Dali had exploited in his “paranoiac critical” paintings. He went on to show slides of which parts of the brain were activated when responding to such stimuli.

“If you tell me,” responded Ron Chrisley, “which circuits of a computer are active when its chess program moves knight to queen’s bishop three, you haven’t told me much, have you?”

It was that kind of conference.

Various speakers wondered whether robots could be endowed with an aesthetic sense. An experiment was described in which neurons from a rat’s brain in a lab in Australia were connected via the Internet to digital cameras in remote parts of the world, one week New York, the next Paris. When a camera focused on a face the neuron response triggered an artificial arm that drew on paper for as long as the stimulus continued. The results were not impressive. In one case the artificial arm ripped up the paper. Someone suggested that perhaps the aesthetic experience here was watching the machine at work, not contemplating the images it produced.

What was most disturbing was the rather crude notion of “aesthetic experience” that the scientists seemed to entertain. The word “beauty” was used as if we knew what it meant. Zeki spoke of art constituting a form of knowledge that would refine our ability to act and hence increase our chances of reproduction. There was no discussion of the fact that an art critic might have a more complex response to, say, Mondrian than someone who had little experience of painting.

Above all, there was no awareness of the positioning of each aesthetic experience within the accumulating history of viewer, listener or reader. When I remarked in the closing discussion that none of the speaker’s experiments had tackled the word, the poem, the novel, or more generally the aesthetic of narrative, a voice behind me cried out, “Thank God!”

The high points, for those eager to follow these things up, were Ron Chrisley’s paper “How Aesthetics Might Assist a Neuroscience of Sensory Experience” and Riccardo Manzotti’s “Art, Brain and the World: A Physical Unity.” Describing the coining of the word “neuroesthetics” and the claim to say much about aesthetic experience as largely a PR coup by the Zeki camp, Chrisley concentrated on the specific task of describing how a robot might represent space to itself and navigate through it, while Manzotti rejected the very idea of consciousness as representation, insisting rather on the constant physical interaction of mind and environment through sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.

Reassuringly, all differences dissolved when we tasted dinner, during which there was much discussion of the problem of raising funding.

Hopkins: The Odd Man Out

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:45:00 -0700

Colm Tóibín

A scene from ‘No Worst There Is None’ at the Dublin Theater Festival

One of the strangest and most beautiful shows in the Dublin Theatre Festival, which ran during the first week of October, was entitled “No Worst There Is None” and concerned the life of the English poet and Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins. It was performed for an audience of twenty-five who followed the actors around the rooms of Newman House on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. This eighteenth century building, which is owned by University College Dublin, has a plaque outside commemorating three disparate figures who spent time in its lofty halls—Cardinal Newman, the first head of the National University of Ireland; James Joyce, who was a student here; and poor, depressed Hopkins, who, sent to Dublin by his order, spent the last five years of his life in the building and wrote what are called his “terrible sonnets.”

Hopkins disliked Ireland - in one poem he wrote: “I am in Ireland now; now I am at a third/Remove” —and it is possible that part of his despair arose not merely from his doubts about God, or his general malaise, but his feelings about being stuck in a country he had no sympathy for. Towards the end of the one-hour show, we were led to the very upper rooms of the building, the rooms where Hopkins must have slept and where he woke “to feel the fell of dark not day.”

Somehow, the low ceilings and the more cramped spaces conjured up a gloom all of their own; this gloom was not dispelled by the dwindling light in the city outside, the slow sense of winter coming with all its dampness, or the pervading news of the Irish economy which is in ruins. As we watched the poet in the bed, the twenty-five of us, who had bonded somewhat as we moved from room to room contemplating the precise spaces where Hopkins had felt his dark despair, had reason to join him in believing that “no worst, there is none” and asking, as he did, someone to send our roots rain.

How Václav Klaus Blocks European Union

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:56:00 -0700

Timothy Snyder

Václav Klaus (supportvaclavklaus.wordpress.com)

The Czech Republic is a country where everything seems to work, except for the political system. I once lived here, but hadn’t returned for eleven years. Almost everything looks better than it did in 1998, and almost everything looked better in 1998 than it did in 1989, the year of the Velvet Revolution. The Czech Republic joined the European Union in 2004, culminating a remarkable transformation from one-party Communist rule to liberal democracy. Yet despite all of this, the Czech Republic has been suspended these past few days in a bizarre political crisis.

The crisis concerns not only its ten million citizens, but quite possibly all five hundred million citizens of the European Union. The Czech president, Václav Klaus, has threatened not to sign the Lisbon Treaty of the European Union.

From the outside, it may take some work to see the drama of this. The Lisbon Treaty is something like an ersatz constitution for Europe. It has to be ratified by all twenty-seven member states of the EU, and as I write all except the Czech Republic have done so. The Czech government has signed the treaty, and both houses of parliament have approved it. The high court has already ruled once that the treaty does not violate Czech law, and will almost certainly rule the same way on October 27 in response to another challenge by seventeen Czech senators. Thus all that really remains for the Lisbon Treaty to become the law of Europe is the signature of one man, President Václav Klaus. In the first half of October, as the Irish approved the Lisbon Treaty and the Polish president signed it, Klaus stood alone in refusing to sign it, claiming that it interferes with Czech sovereignty. Declining calls from European leaders, he flew off to Moscow for a visit with his Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev and to promote his new book that denies global warming. (The Russian edition was published with the help of the Russian oil giant Lukoil.)

Václav Klaus is a strange and interesting man. An economist, he made his name as a politician in the early 1990s by claiming to be a technocrat who could deliver Czechs from the confusion of the communist inheritance. As an economist he is less than distinguished, but as a political tactician he has no local rival. He has been either prime minister or president of the country for much of its existence—and as president has extended the limited powers of that office with some success—from the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993 until today. When the Czech Republic joined the EU in 2004, he did not celebrate. Instead he hiked the mountain associated with the legend of a saint who would rescue the nation in its time of peril, a saint who as it happens bears the name Václav.

Now, if many Westerners had to pick the political saint among the Czechs, they would choose a different Václav: Havel, the playwright, dissident, and the previous president, rather than Klaus, who has been far more important in shaping the political institutions and culture of the Republic. Klaus knows this, and to all appearances resents it very much. On the main geopolitical question of the twenty-first century, though, Havel was wrong and Klaus was right: Klaus opposed the invasion of Iraq, which Havel enthusiastically supported.

But Klaus was right, as people can be, for the wrong reasons. He opposed the invasion of Iraq because he holds a very simple view of state sovereignty. The world is divided into nations, those nations have states, those states have governments, and those governments have sovereignty: regardless of how unjust or tyrannical those governments might be (Klaus being of a rather authoritarian disposition himself).

This obsession with state sovereignty exemplifies a new political problem in Europe: precisely because small European states have so little true sovereignty and their leaders so little true power, they are tempted to resort to empty and indeed absurd nationalist gestures. The Lisbon Treaty is perhaps the solution to this problem. National populism is on the rise in Europe because of the “democratic deficit” of the EU. The EU does have a great deal of authority in the world, but it is not democratic. National governments are democratic, but in most cases have little clout. Once the Lisbon Treaty goes into effect, European citizens will have greater say in Brussels.

This, however, is the essence of Klaus’s objection. He simply does not accept the legal existence of the EU. He believes that only the traditional sovereign state is real, or can be real, in international law. (History tells another story. In the millennium of Czech history, from the Bohemian kingdoms through the Habsburg monarchy through the twentieth century, there was a sovereign Czech nation-state in this traditional sense for only eleven years, from 1993 through 2004.)

So before signing the Lisbon Treaty, Klaus wants the EU to assure him, in a binding document, that the large number of Germans expelled from the Czech Republic after World War II will not be able to appeal to European law to reclaim their property. Few things in European political life are more sensitive than the question of forced population displacement during or after the war. Under the Benes decrees, Czechoslovakia did indeed expel (with the support of the Americans, British, and Soviets) some three million Germans, nearly a quarter of its own population. Their property was then taken by Czechoslovak citizens. The Germans who were expelled generally found themselves in a democratic and prosperous West Germany, while the Czechs who took their houses lived under Communism for decades.

Very few Czechs or Germans could say much about the details of the Lisbon Treaty, but almost all would have an opinion about the Beneš Decrees. However we might evaluate them today, they are part of the legal basis for the property rights of a significant portion of the Czech population. Meanwhile, Germans today do indeed try to get their property back: not generally “theirs,” but rather that of parents or grandparents. The Christian Social Union of Bavaria keeps this issue alive in German politics; claiming that Germans suffered far more in these expulsions than was in fact the case. If property claims of the children and grandchildren were honored today, a significant proportion of the Czech population would lose their homes, and a large number of Germans would get summer houses in northern and western Bohemia.

As usual, Klaus chose his political target well. He can say, with some justice, that no one knows how future European courts will adjudicate these issues. Best to get a guarantee now. If Czechs have to choose between Europe and no Europe, they choose Europe. If they have to choose between Europe and Europe plus property assurances, they choose the latter. So here is what will likely happen: Klaus’s highly demagogic and legally dubious maneuver will have to become the negotiating position of the Czech government. The Czech Republic will ask the EU to include in the next major treaty (probably the accession treaty for Croatia expected some time in 2010) a provision affirming the property rights of Czechs. The EU will accept this proposition at its quarterly summit on October 29, the Czech high court will affirm the legal validity of the Lisbon Treaty, and Klaus will sign it by the end of October. He will have made his point, and will be able to claim victory.

There is also a nightmare scenario. If the EU agrees to add a formal protocol on Czech property rights, it will be placing a formal limit on something called the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is now an integral part of the Lisbon Treaty. But when the Czech high court approves the Lisbon Treaty, it will be approving the treaty as it now stands: that is, without those limitations that Klaus himself is insisting upon. Klaus may then say that he still cannot sign the treaty, because the Czech high court has not approved the changes he demands.

This (or some similarly cynical maneuver) would require enormous bad faith on Klaus’s part, but not more than he has already mustered. Klaus cannot stop the process of European integration; he can only damage his country’s position within Europe. Czechs were not well served by barbed wire under communism, and they would not be well served by walling themselves off from the European Union now. (Note to Americans who think that the EU means the welfare state means socialism means communism: the only party that supports Klaus’s anti-Europe stand is the local Communist Party.)

Related links:

How They Convinced Karzai

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:15:00 -0700

Ahmed Rashid

Hamid Karzai (drawing by John Springs)

Everything that could possibly go wrong in Afghanistan has gone wrong over the past two months. The industrial-level rigging and manipulation of the August 20 election—largely by the government of President Hamid Karzai—could have dealt a death blow to international involvement in Afghanistan, as it entered its ninth year. Worse, it occurred just as the Taliban were ramping up their insurgency and Afghans were becoming even more disillusioned with their government than usual. So how did the US and its allies manage to convince Karzai this week to agree to a run-off election?

Last month the Independent Election Commission—an Afghan body appointed by Karzai himself—gave him 54.6 percent of the vote and his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, only 27.7 percent. But in view of widespread reports of fraud, Abdullah, Afghans, and the entire international community refused to accept this result until a UN appointed complaints body called the Electoral Complaints Commission had done a recount.

Despite open hostility and threats from Karzai’s supporters, the ECC threw out more than one million votes cast for Karzai after recounting some 10 percent of suspicious ballot boxes, investigating 600 allegations of fraud, and discounting some 600 stuffed ballot boxes. Karzai’s Commission fought back until the last moment.

Finally Karzai was awarded 49.7 percent of the vote—less than 50 percent. So according to the Afghan constitution a run-off with Abdullah, who now has 31 percent, will take place on November 7. The hope is that it will be conducted more fairly than the August poll. The second round is going to be extremely difficult to undertake given the strength of the Taliban insurgency, fears of additional rigging, and ethnic tensions between Pashtuns supporting Karzai and non-Pashtuns supporting Abdullah.

For the international community and in particular the US, the main issues were how to create legitimacy out of a flawed poll, move forward with a new Afghan government in place that will fight corruption, and use that progress to convince voters back home to back sending still more Western troops to Afghanistan. Half of the top district officials (two hundred out of 380) who organized the fraud have now been fired and will be replaced in the next two weeks.

The final key to this temporary resolution is owed perhaps to the efforts of three dogged Americans. On the ground in Kabul, US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a six-foot former general and stalwart of the Afghan wars since 2001, and Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spent twenty hours over four days trying to convince Karzai to agree to a re-run.

In Washington there was White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: every time he opened his mouth (so Karzai had been assured), his words were coming directly from Obama. What perhaps finally brought Karzai into the real world was Emanuel going public with a statement on October 18—which Kerry had been privately drumming into Karzai for days—that Obama would not commit to sending any more US troops to Afghanistan until there was a “legitimate” and “new” government in Kabul.

The underlying message was that if Karzai still refused to listen he could be held responsible for allowing Afghanistan to go down the tubes or be taken over by the Taliban. Even though Karzai has a gigantic ego and was still in a state of denial, he could not get around that one.

Kerry, Eikenberry, and Emanuel had one thing going for them that others working the Afghan shift in the White House—Richard Holbrooke, Joe Biden, James Jones, General David Petraeus, and even Obama himself—did not have. These three had never criticized Karzai in public before. Karzai intensely dislikes the other White House players because they have hurt his ego by dishonoring him and criticizing him in public. Over such knowledge and niceties does the world turn and turn again.

Iran’s Harshest Sentence for an Innocent Scholar

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:06:00 -0700

Haleh Esfandiari

Kian Tajbakhsh speaking in August at a trial of dozens of opposition protesters in Tehran (Houshang Hadi/Iranian Labor News Agency/AP Images)

For me Iran’s sentencing this week of Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh to at least twelve years in prison—the harshest sentence so far passed down by the revolutionary court—is particularly fraught. In 2007, he and I were fellow prisoners in Tehran’s Evin Prison. He was held in the men’s section and I in the women’s section of Ward 209, reserved for political prisoners held by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry. We had been arrested within a day of each other, and we shared, in separate interrogation rooms, the same interrogators. He began to send me books; thanks to him I was able to escape the confines of my prison cell by reading the novels of Dostoevsky and Graham Greene.

Now, on October 20, Kian has been convicted, on the kind of fantastical charges beloved of Iran’s revolutionary courts—everything from plotting a “velvet revolution” in Iran to espionage and undermining the credibility of the Islamic Republic. He was even charged with endangering the security of the state by belonging to a public email list, Gulf2000 (which posts news and commentary on the Middle East), run by Columbia University professor Gary Sick, who is falsely identified in the indictment as a CIA operative.

Kian was one of over one hundred Iranians placed in the dock in a mass show trial in Tehran following the demonstrations that brought a million protesters into the streets following June’s contested and almost certainly rigged presidential election.

The accusations we are hearing against the accused today are remarkably similar to those against both Kian and me back in 2007: plotting with the US or unnamed “foreigners” to bring about a “velvet revolution” in Iran—I as the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, (I was in Iran visiting my mother when I was arrested) and he as a Tehran-based consultant to the Soros Foundation on public health projects. The Intelligence Ministry, I discovered, is obsessed with the activities of George Soros. As my interrogators often reminded me, Soros is a Jew and responsible, they firmly believed, for the velvet revolutions that overthrew regimes in Georgia, Ukraine, Tajikistan and other republics of the former Soviet empire. Soros and the American government, they insisted, were plotting a similar “velvet revolution” for Iran using me and Kian as their witting or unwitting instruments.

I was released in August 2007 after nearly four months in solitary confinement, and Kian was released the following month. I returned to my work at the Wilson Center. Kian, however, chose to remain in the Iran he loves. During the last two years, he has been careful to keep a low profile, devoting himself to his scholarly research, writing and books. He played no part in the post-election protests that led to a brutal crackdown and the arrest of many protesters and leaders of the opposition. Yet on July 9, intelligence agents showed up at Kian’s house, as they had done two years earlier, and arrested him once again, in front of his wife and his two-year-old daughter. He remained in solitary confinement, with almost no contact with his family, until he appeared at the mass trial that got underway in August.

The trial has been a travesty of justice. The initial indictment was directed against everyone at once. There were only three sessions. Some of the accused were paraded before television cameras to make coerced confessions. (Kian made a statement too; he said that the US and Europe desired to bring about change in Iran, but that he had no knowledge of a plot). Kian did not even get to choose his own lawyer and had to make do with a government-appointed one, who said he will appeal.

The trial is further evidence that some of the most hard-line elements in the Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards are now setting domestic policy. They have used the trial to attempt, yet again, to persuade an ever-skeptical Iranian public that the Islamic Republic is indeed in grave danger of a “soft overthrow” plotted by England and America, to settle scores with their political adversaries, and to rid themselves, once and for all, of the reformers and moderates in their midst. The irony is that Kian was within two weeks of leaving for the US to take up a long-standing invitation to teach at Columbia University. He was in no hurry to leave. In his usual, trusting way, he thought the Intelligence Ministry people had stopped harassing him. He little realized that once they have you in their gun sights, these men are never done with you.

Haleh Esfandiari is Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and author of the book My Prison, My Home, just published last month.

Obama's Bad Bargain with Beijing

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:06:00 -0700

Perry Link

Obama for the masses (Shizuo Kambayashi/AP Images)

As the echoes of China’s spectacular military parade on October 1 were subsiding, officials in the Obama administration, in quieter settings in Washington, D.C., were telling representatives of the Dalai Lama that the president was not going to meet with him. This would mark the first time since 1991 that the Dalai Lama was invited to Washington—he was here to receive a human rights award from the US Congress—without at least some visit, however short and informal, with the president. It also goes against Obama’s own pledge to the Tibetan leader during his 2008 campaign to “continue to support you and the rights of the Tibetans.”

In The Washington Post, John Pomfret reported that the decision “appears to be part of a strategy to improve ties with China that also includes soft-pedaling criticism of China’s human rights.” (Administration officials had said it would be better to postpone the meeting with the Dalai Lama until after the president’s trip to Beijing in November to meet Chinese Premier Hu Jintao.)

Indeed, Hillary Clinton, on her first trip to Beijing as U.S. Secretary of State in February this year, stated explicitly that human rights must not “interfere with the global economic crisis…and the security crises.” This contrasts sharply with what she told Russian students just a few days ago, on October 14, in an address at Moscow State University In Russia, she said, “people must…know they are safe to challenge abuses of authority. That’s why attacks on journalists and human rights defenders here in Russia is such a great concern: because it is a threat to progress.”

Why the “great concern” for this issue in Russia, but not in China or Tibet?

U.S. government strategy in China has long been based on a notion of good-faith barter: we concede X to you, and you help us with Y. But the record of relations between the two governments, ever since the early 1970s when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger re-established ties, shows that the barter strategy does not work. In June 1989, when people throughout the world were seething in anger about the Chinese regime’s massacre of protesters in Beijing, a main argument of the George H.W. Bush administration for sending envoys to meet with Beijing officials to reassure them of underlying “friendship,” was that the U.S. needed China’s help on issues like nuclear weapons in North Korea. Today, twenty years later, the North Korean nuclear problem is only worse, and we are still granting concessions to Beijing. That China appears to be able to help has had lasting benefits for China’s rulers. But so has the North Korean problem itself: if it were actually solved, China would lose some of its leverage over the US.

The essence of “barter” is the notion that one side gives to the other something that it otherwise would not have given. China’s rulers do not barter in this sense. They can agree to join George W. Bush’s “war on terror” but then use the consensus to call for Bush’s support as they repress their own “terrorist” Uighurs. On the other major issues between the two governments—Iran, Taiwan, currency rates, trade—one looks in vain for anything that unilateral concessions on the part of the U.S. have achieved. (Over the past few months, as much of the world has been condemning Iran’s fraudulent elections and fretting about its nuclear ambitions, China has invested tens of billions of dollars in Iran’s oil industry.)

This pattern in fact dates from the origins of US-PRC relations. In 1971 the U.S. was stuck in Vietnam and fearful of Moscow. Nixon and Kissinger saw Mao as a source for help with both problems. Nixon traveled to Beijing (giving Mao great face; in Chinese culture, the one who travels has lower status) while Kissinger handed out concessions on Taiwan. This earned, in response, no concrete help from Mao in dealing with either Moscow or Hanoi.

In 1967, when I was fresh from college and living in Hong Kong, a Chinese journalist who had fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution told me, “You foreigners interpret what Beijing says as if it were a government; you would do better to think of it as a person.” I pressed him: “A person?” “Yes,” he said, “a small-minded person who watches closely.”

There is wisdom in that comment, and I thought of it again when I learned a few days ago that a well-known Chinese dissident, who is on a year-long fellowship overseas, has decided suddenly to rush home to China. Why? Because of news reports that another Chinese writer, Li Jianhong, a member of Independent Chinese PEN, was barred on October 15 from entering China on returning home from Sweden.

The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights prohibits member nations from denying entry to their own citizens, and China of course is a leading member of the United Nations. But no matter. Chinese who are critical of their government have long grown accustomed to the regime’s use of the national border as a thought-test. You criticize us? All right, if you are inside the country, we might not let you out. If you are outside the country, we might not let you in.

My friend, the well-known dissident, thought about this and decided to rush home. He had recently made some frank statements overseas, feared that they had been noticed, and, if he was going to be trapped, would rather be trapped inside China than outside. He hoped, although it was only a hope, that his chances would be better before Obama’s visit in November. “Is he dealing with a government,” I thought to myself, “or a small-minded person?”

In any case, that government, or small-minded person, or whatever it is, is now America’s largest creditor and has, as Henry Kissinger wrote recently in the International Herald Tribune, “a degree of economic leverage unprecedented in the American experience.” For Kissinger this is one of several reasons why the U.S. and Chinese elites should “make common cause.”

A better way out would be for U.S. officials to speak more often as Clinton did in Moscow—that is, at least part of the time, past China’s rulers and to the vast and dynamic society of which the rulers claim, jealously but implausibly, to be the sole representatives. On her trip in February Clinton spoke of “the human rights issue” as if it were only a humanitarian matter about a list of jailed dissidents—and not, as in fact it is, a systemic issue that affects the nature of China and that can have huge consequences both inside China and abroad.

Podcast: Frederick Seidel Reads Selected Poems

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:20:37 -0700

Frederick Seidel reads selections from his work, drawing on poems originally published in the New York Review and those collected in his recent volume, Poems 1959-2009. To read more of his poetry, as well as a piece by Dan Chiasson about Seidel's work, please visit nybooks.com. For a blog post by Charles Simic about the challenges Seidel's work poses for critics and readers, go to the NYR Blog at blogs.nybooks.com

"That Domineering Creature Called the 'I'"

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:15:00 -0700

Charles Simic

Update: Listen to Frederick Seidel read from his work in the Review’s podcast.

Frederick Seidel (Mark Mahaney)

No recent book of poetry has been reviewed as widely and as favorably as Frederick Seidel’s Poems 1959-2009. It seems as if every major newspaper and literary magazine on both sides of the Atlantic has already published an admiring piece on the poet and we can expect more accolades to come. “Thank God for Fred Seidel,” Michael Hofmann concludes a review of the book in September issue of Poetry. Adam Kirsch agrees, calling Seidel perhaps the best American poet alive. Even the critics who have expressed a few reservations about his poetry agree that he’s never boring. Like Lowell, Plath and Sexton—and even Ginsberg—Seidel specializes in saying things one is ordinarily reluctant to say aloud even to oneself. His hatreds, his lusts, his wealth and his vanity are all on display. The poems are shocking and often annoying, but that’s not the whole story. They can also be genuinely moving and compassionate.

BROADWAY MELODY

A naked woman my age is a total nightmare.
A woman my age naked is a nightmare.
It doesn’t matter. One doesn’t care.
One doesn’t say it out loud because it’s rare
For anyone to be willing to say it,
Because it’s the equivalent of buying billboard space to display it,

Display how horrible life after death is,
How horrible to draw your last breath is,
When you go on living.
I hate the old couples on their walkers giving
Off odors of love, and in City Diner eating a ray
Of hope, and paying and trembling back out on Broadway,

Drumming and dancing, chanting something nearly unbearable,
Spreading their wings in order to be more beautiful and more terrible.

This is an original and very powerful poem, as far as I’m concerned, but I find it impossible to persuade my friends that Seidel is worth reading. He is a showoff, they complain, endlessly bragging about the company of the rich and famous he keeps or his custom-made English suits and Italian motorcycles. They don’t like to spend time with someone who is convinced of his own exceptionality and who never ceases to remind them of that, though they admit that Seidel does have some striking images and metaphors in his poems.

I’ve encountered this problem before. Most of my students at the University of New Hampshire, where I taught for many years, never really got to like Lowell, Plath and Sexton, no matter how hard I tried to persuade them of the value of their poems. Coming from modest, hard-working small town New England families, they found the endless whining of these well-to-do Bostonians self-indulgent and insufferable. Although they would not admit it, a lot of their discomfort had to do with class. Who cares if some rich man or woman is unhappy, they were implying.

It surprised me. I had always believed that a good poem can stand on its own, that it made no difference if some creep you’d never want to meet in your life wrote it; but, obviously, that’s not how it is with many readers. For them, what Thomas Moore said in a prayer almost five centuries ago is still the definition of a good poem.

Grant me a soul to which dullness is naught,
knowing no complaint, grumble or sigh,
and do not permit me to give too much thought
to that domineering creature called the “I.”

The Mighty Penn

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:47:00 -0700

Martin Filler

‘Cuzco Children,’ Cuzco, Peru, 1948; photograph by Irving Penn (Condé Nast Publications, Inc.)

Irving Penn was assured a high place in the canon of photography well before his death, on October 7 at the age of ninety-two. Yet for those of us who came of age during the 1960s, he seemed the Apollonian counterpart of his Dionysian contemporary and principal competitor, the younger and groovier Richard Avedon, who died five years before Penn almost to the day. They were the twin gods who ruled high-fashion photography after the postwar resurrection of the Paris haute couture, when they brought unprecedented formal power and graphic impact to what had been dismissed as an intractably insipid genre—“visions of loveliness,” in the sneering phrase of Penn’s mentor and tormentor, Alexander Liberman, longtime editorial director of Condé Nast Publications.

Paradoxically, although Penn and Avedon elevated fashion photography to an art form, they were plagued by neurotic unease about how they earned their daily bread. Their fabulously successful careers—replete with critical acclaim, museum exhibitions, scholarly studies, prestigious awards, blue-chip dealers, and record-breaking prices—would have been much harder had they not been subsidized by lucrative associations with mid-century America’s top two fashion magazines: Penn at Condé Nast’s Vogue and Avedon at Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar. Those sizable incomes were further supplemented by their advertising photography (uncredited at both men’s insistence) for cosmetics and clothing manufacturers.

All the while Penn and Avedon sought recognition as “serious” artists through effortfully unbeautiful subject matter they thought more consequential than glorifying the rag trade. By day Penn orchestrated ravishingly stylized fantasias of sleek goddesses in billowing Balenciagas. By night he shot an antithetical 1949-1950 series of ample, sagging female nudes, cut off at the neck and printed in harsh bleached-out tones, which he withheld from public view for three decades. His shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1975 and 1977 respectively, featured large platinum prints (an obsolescent technique he single-handedly revived) of cigarette butts and other trash scavenged from city streets. Nonetheless, those grungy still lifes were less memorable than Penn’s Vogue food illustrations, among them a Brancusian pile-up of a black olive atop a tomato atop a ball of mozzarella.

Avedon’s finest fashion photos, as seen in a recent retrospective at New York’s International Center of Photography, exude a contagious joie de vivre rarely found in his archrival’s faultless but often chilly compositions. But the frost melted in Penn’s electrifying depictions of his adored wife and perpetual muse, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, who had been a leading mannequin in pre-war Paris. They met in 1947, at his shoot for a Vogue tableau, “Twelve of the Most Photographed Models of the Period.” As Penn recalled to me for a 1990 Vanity Fair profile, “When Lisa came in, I saw her and my heart beat fast and there was never any doubt that this was it.”

Fonssagrives, six years older than the photographer, was touched by his ardor, which gave her career a renewed burst of energy as she approached forty. They married in 1950 and remained devoted to each other until her death, forty-two years later. Penn’s collaborations with his wife hint at a conspiratorial complicity not wholly dependent on one’s knowledge of their private relationship, which suffuses her exquisite features with what can best be described as the look of love. In the late 1960s, he created color images of cut flowers in advanced stages of decay, set against white backgrounds like herbarium specimens, a sequence some interpreted as his meditation on Fonssagrives-Penn’s fading but still arresting beauty.

During more than six decades with Condé Nast, Penn shot a veritable pantheon of cultural giants, including Picasso, Stravinsky, and Balanchine. Early on, he posed his subjects within the acute-angled confines of a studio prop he devised to induce uncomfortable expressions that suggested creative anxiety. Later he settled into a kinder formula that seldom varied: evenly lit heads in tight close-up against a shallow, neutral backdrop. Many saw this repetitive format as innately conservative. But Maria Morris Hambourg, the Metropolitan’s first photography curator, convincingly likened Penn’s portraits to ancient Egyptian bas-reliefs in their monumental presence, smoothness of surface, sharpness of outline, and absence of spatial depth.

However, no Penn portrait surpasses his masterpiece, Cuzco Children (1948). Taken in an antiquated photographer’s studio he borrowed during a working trip to Peru, this black-and-white image of a diminutive Indian boy and girl—barefoot, hatted, and hands clasped atop a Victorian tripod table—could easily have descended into heart-tugging bathos, a Save the Children fund-raising poster. Instead, Penn treats his solemn-faced subjects with as much respect and dignity as Mathew Brady did when he immortalized Abraham Lincoln, and the same tenderness and affection with which Velázquez portrayed the Spanish infanta and her mastiff in Las Meninas. If anyone ever wonders whether Penn—obsessive technician, yeoman artist, and perfectionist nonpareil—had a heart, this picture provides irrefutable proof positive.

Herta Müller’s Nobel

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:44:00 -0700

Norman Manea and Hugh Eakin

Nobel Laureate Herta Müller outside a Paris bookstore in 1987, shortly after her emigration from Romania. (Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis)

The Swedish Academy’s selection of Romanian-German writer Herta Müller for this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature occasioned surprise in the United States, where Müller is little known. But in Romania, reactions have been strong—and ambivalent.

Born into the country’s German minority, Müller first gained notoriety in the 1980s for her dark vision of life under the Communist regime; she was forced to flee to Germany, where she has lived ever since. In its announcement, the Swedish Academy praised Müller for her poetical “frankness” in depicting what it called “the landscape of the dispossessed.”

Hugh Eakin, an editor at the New York Review of Books, spoke with Norman Manea, one of Romania’s most prominent writers and himself an exile from the Communist regime, about Herta Müller and her complicated relationship to her native country. Following are excerpts from the interview, which is also available as a podcast at nybooks.com/podcasts.

Hugh Eakin: A lot of Herta Müller’s books seem to deal with the late phase of the Ceauşescu dictatorship.

Norman Manea: I would say her entire work. It is her obsession – almost her unique obsession.

HE: I take it the first book that she published, the story collection Nadirs (1982), got her into trouble.

NM: It was a description, very realistic, sharp and brutal, about life in the rural areas of Rumania, which were totally decayed, isolated, and uncivilized. And of course, unbearable to the system, she published the book in West Germany— it was a big shock, and a huge benefit to the anti-Communists there. So the book was considered an insult to the Romanian state and to the Communist Party.

They started a very persistent campaign in Romania, and outside Romania among the Romanian-German émigrés in West Germany, to compromise her, to spread rumors that she was a West German spy. The secret police were everywhere – of course they infiltrated all the minority communities, as they infiltrated all the institutions.

HE: When you were growing up in Romania, what was the status of the Germany minority?

NM: It was a combination of indifference and respect – for the efficiency of the Germany community, for their so-called honesty and hard work. A Romanian literary critic of the same generation as Herta Müller wrote that he hoped that her Nobel would start a debate about the persecution of minorities and about their status. And he also added that this is easier because she is a Romanian German; it would have been much more difficult if she had been a Romanian Hungarian or a Romanian Jew.

There is still an ethnocentric vision [in Romania] with a very passionate sense of belonging to the nation, and of being suspicious of foreigners, even if the foreigners [in question] have lived there for hundreds of years.

HE: One of Herta Müller’s big themes is the continuity of the security state in Romania.

NM: She was extremely fierce in her criticism after 1989. This transition in Romania of civil society was and still is extremely ambiguous. Four million Communists became, the day after the dictator was killed, fierce anti-Communists. All of them claimed that they were victims – some of them really were. But a lot of people who worked in the former secret police became the nouveaux riches and now had another kind of power. And some of them are still in the shadows. And she spoke openly and insistently about this, which was not very easy to swallow, even for the post-Communist generation.

HE: She recently wrote an essay in which she describes trying to get her secret police file. We have heard so much about the process in Germany of going through Stasi files. But in Romania, it’s far more complicated.

NM: In Romania, it was totally chaotic. A lot of files disappeared, a lot of files were changed, and a lot of files were sold – to the newspapers and others. And it’s still going on – less now, because there is now an institution under state control that deals with these files. But that was established only two or three years ago, twenty years after the fall of the dictatorship: a lot of time for a byzantine country where everything is under the table. So these files were manipulated for political reasons— for current political reasons, for example to compromise an adversary.

I asked at one point for my secret police files, and after a long time I received some 200 pages, but also a letter in which I was told that this was not the entire file. And that they cannot give me more, because they need approval from the Minister of Internal Affairs. So this means in practice that you cannot see your files – only selected files.

HE: What did you find in the files that you did receive?

NM: The main period, when I was followed and had a lot of trouble there, was missing. Tough things that I expected to see, I didn’t. But there were some interesting things. For instance, when I came back from the Nazi camps in 1945 with my family, I was nine years old. And we went through a medical evaluation by the Red Cross. We never were given any medical certificate, or proof of what they saw. But I found in these files, the record of my medical evaluation at nine years old. I was not yet a dissident or a Communist or anything else. And I never knew it existed.

HE: So there was an attempt to collect every bit of information about you?

NM: Every bit. Everything they could use to blackmail you or intimidate you or find a kind of clue for their own psychological portrait of the person who they were following: I don’t know, I’m not in this profession. But the fact that this medical record was there was amusing, but also frightening.

Podcast: Norman Manea on Herta Müller

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:59:36 -0700

Norman Manea speaks with Hugh Eakin about Romanian-born German writer Herta Müller, the 2009 Nobel laureate in literature. To read a transcript of this podcast, please read Manea's latest post to the NYRBlog, at blogs.nybooks.com

The Wood God in Valencia

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:12:00 -0700

Edmund White

Vicente Molina Foix (center) with the stars of his forthcoming film, El Dios de Madera, from his blog

Vicente Molina Foix is one of those cultured Spaniards who seems more French than Iberian. A distinguished novelist, he knows everything about everything though he’s jokey and not at all pedantic and has the exquisite manners of an old-fashioned French aristocrat (come to think of it during the late Middle Ages there were French Counts of Foix in an independent fiefdom in the Pyranees just north of Aragon). He has written poetry, translated Shakespeare, taught for three years at Oxford, worked as a film critic and published a score of novels; his best known work is El Abrecartas, an epistolary novel that covers the twentieth century in Spain and includes among its many characters the Nobel prizewinning poet Vicente Aleixandre (who late in life was a friend to Molina Foix). There are also letters back and forth from Aleixandre and Lorca.

Molina Foix, whom I met last June through Colm Toibin, invited me and a friend down to Valencia, where he is making his second film, The Wood God (El Dios de Madera), based on his own short story, “Satsuma,” named after the small mandarin fruit that one of the characters buys as a gift for another. (It will be released in Spain next year).

We took the four-hour train trip from Madrid through the nearly empty desert of La Mancha to the beautiful old coastal city of Valencia, the home of paella, La Lonja (one of Europe’s most important Gothic civic buildings), a lovely art nouveau train station and covered food market, a spectacular new opera house—and miles and miles of parks and cafes and chic new restaurants.

In the old Spain everything was named after saints but in the new Spain it’s all artists. Our address joined painting, poetry and music—we were staying in the Plaza Picasso on the calle Gongora off the Avenida Maestro Rodrigo (the composer from Valencia of the Concierto de Aranjuez for the guitar, one of the most popular compositions of the 20th century). I even saw a little street named after Jose Iturbi, the Valencia-born pianist in so many Hollywood movies of the 1940s.

We arrived on a Friday evening rather late—but it’s never too late for dinner in Spain, so at midnight we toddled out to Turangalila, a drag restaurant whose name in Sanscrit means something like “joy” and “love.” The place, which could have been in Vegas, had gilt life-size statues of hermaphrodites in the wall niches with all the equipment to prove it, and the “waitresses” were sober showgirls who would appear later lip-synching in spangles. At one-thirty we skipped out before the show since we had already consumed our share of foie gras mousse and ox en croute. Most of the guests were women at bridal showers or office parties. I think we were the only gay people.

The next morning we took a taxi to the Puente Del Real, a 16th century bridge spanning the Turia Gardens. Until the disastrous floods of 1967 this was the riverbed of the Turia River, which divided the historic center of the city from the modern addition, but now the Turia has been diverted and the riverbed is a series of gardens and athletic spaces—one of the most beautiful parts of the town. We arrived while the crew of some 25 members was setting up the next shot. The young black star of the film, Madi Diocou from Senegal, would be crossing the bridge some time after his character’s successful illegal immigration into Spain under the chassis of a truck. Molina Foix had discovered Madi selling bits of jewelry and other small items on the street in Madrid, but he’s a natural actor and seemed completely unfazed as a dozen technicians backed up while he walked toward them and a sun reflector was held over his head like a royal canopy and a microphone was aimed at his feet. The cameraman was harnessed into a Steadicam, the heavy camera that does not register small body movements but gives a smooth, flowing, continual look to the shot (Kubrick made the Steadicam famous in his 1980 The Shining with those long shots of the little boy on his tricycle in the endless hotel corridors).

The people of Valencia seem terribly sporty and everyone was jogging or cycling past as we settled into the next shot. Now we were down in the Turia Gardens amongst what looked like Roman ruins (broken columns and capitals without columns). We were introduced to the leading lady of the movie, Marisa Paredes, one of the icons of the Spanish cinema who appeared in Almodovar’s All About My Mother as the chain-smoking actress Huma Rojo. She’s been in more than 75 films over the years and draws a look and a smile from every passing jogger. In Molina Foix’s movie she plays a lonely woman who falls in love with the Senegalese illegal immigrant. Her son is played by an 18-year-old Catalan stage actor , Nao Albet, who was spotted in a Barcelona production of Alan Bennett’s History Boys. Just to make things really international the fourth leading actor is a Moroccan named Soufiane Ouaarab.

In the little shot we were looking at, Marisa invites her son out for an ice cream in the Roman ruins and pretends to meet Madi for the first time, though he is already her lover. She introduces the two young men to each other. The ice cream they are eating is the best in the world, made from a local drink called Horchata, derived from the tubers of the Chufa plant, sugar, cinnamon and water…

We were sitting quite far from the action looking into the combo, which relays the image from the camera. Little tracks had been laid down so that the camera could dolly in slowly through the ruins for the Horchata scene. Molina Foix was able to talk to the actors through an electronic speaker system. It all felt very big-time and exciting.

For more than a century novelists have wanted to direct their own films but they almost never get the chance, especially not in America where every movie is big-budget and risky and nothing is spontaneous. Molina Foix told me that off the top of his head he could think of a dozen Spanish writers who’ve directed commercial films; I’m sure a real American cinephile could come up with a few names of American writer-directors, but only a few came to this mind: Susan Sontag, Paul Auster, Stephen King.

Podcast: Lawrence Weschler on David Hockney

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:16:22 -0700

Lawrence Weschler talks about David Hockney's relationship to technology, his upcoming show at PaceWildenstein in New York City, and about the work the artist has been doing since relocating from California to Bridlington, England. To read Weschler's article on David Hockney's recent series of sketches done on the iPhone, and to see a slide show of those images, please visit nybooks.com