NYRblog

Spying on Americans:
A Very Old Story

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:49:11 -0400

Much of the political surveillance of the 1960s and the 1970s consisted in efforts to identify organizations that were critical of government policies and gather information on their adherents. The surveillance practices of the NSA revealed in recent weeks are fundamentally different. They attempt to identify patterns of electronic behavior that arouse the government’s suspicion rather than individuals associated with certain organizations or causes. Yet these new forms of surveillance, over time, may lead in the same direction. Those who are targeted may be excluded from certain benefits or opportunities on the basis of having been identified for engaging in activities that are legitimate. If that were to happen, they are unlikely ever to find out that they have been blocked on such grounds.

'Jews Aren't Allowed to Use Phones': Berlin's Most Unsettling Memorial

Sat, 15 Jun 2013 09:37:29 -0400

Ian Johnson

Twenty years ago this month, Berlin-based artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock inaugurated their hugely controversial memorial for a former Jewish district of West Berlin known as the Bavarian Quarter. Today, Germany is filled with memorials and institutions dealing with aspects of the Holocaust, including Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Berlin’s central Holocaust memorial. But Stih and Schnock’s in-your-face signs about Nazi policies, integrated into the present-day life of a residential Berlin neighborhood, remain one of the most visceral and unsettling. I recently walked through the Bavarian Quarter—which is part of Berlin’s Schöneberg district—with the artists to discuss their work and its legacy.

What 'Maisie' Doesn't Know

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:02:14 -0400

Francine Prose

From the opening pages of his 1897 novel What Maisie Knew, Henry James merges the voice and the perspective of the author with that of his young protagonist, thus boldly circumventing any doubts about whether a child would use the word objurgation. Mixing dramatic scenes with long passages of narration, James is able to compress a great deal of information into a short space and to delve ever more deeply into Maisie’s psyche. Unable to convey the psychological depth and preternatural maturity that James gives his fictional heroine, McGehee and Siegel’s new film adaptation has turned Maisie into a wide-eyed, passive observer, watching the grown-ups misbehave.

Syria: Inventing a Religious War

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:02:25 -0400

Toby Matthiesen

Bashar al-Assad is head of an ostensibly secular Baathist regime and many Shia think his sect, the Alawites, are heretics. Why then is Hezbollah fighting for the regime, and is this conflict really rooted in religion? The answer to both these questions may lie in a suburb of Damascus called Sayyida Zainab, the site of an important Shia shrine and since the 1970s a haven for foreign Shia activists and migrants in Syria. Though the story of Sayyida Zainab is little known in the West, it may help explain why what began as a peaceful uprising against secular authoritarian rule in 2011 has increasingly become a war between Shia and Sunni that has engulfed much of the surrounding region.

Roberto Bolaño's Devotion

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 11:39:11 -0400

Roberto Bolaño

Toward the end of 1992 he was very sick
and had separated from his wife.
That was the goddamn truth:
he was alone and fucked
and he tended to think there was little time left.

Faking It in China

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:40:00 -0400

Ian Johnson

One of the most striking features about daily life in China is how much of what one encounters has been appropriated from elsewhere. It’s not just the fake iPhones or luxury watches—pirated consumer goods are common in many developing countries. Above all are the physical spaces. There are now not just individual buildings but entire streetscapes, with cobblestone alleys, faux churches (often used as concert halls), towers, and landscaping designed to reproduce the feel of European and North American cities. The city of Huizhou features a replica of the Austrian village of Hallstatt; while Hangzhou, a city famous for its own waterfront culture, now includes a “Venice Water Town” that has Italian-style buildings, canals, and gondolas. What drives this obsession with foreign styles?

Sylvia Plath: Rage and Laughter

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 15:44:14 -0400

April Bernard

One of my favorite items in the Sylvia Plath archive is a collage she made in 1960: the central image is President Eisenhower sitting at a desk; included in the collage is a cut-out of a woman in a bathing suit with a bomber plane aimed at her, and the caption “It’s His and Her Time All Over America.” Readers may look in vain for explicit political content in most of Plath’s poems. Her own training as a poet and literature student in the 1950s inclined her to avoid direct speech about such “low” topical matters as the Rosenbergs or, for that matter, fabric choices for the spring collections. Only in a few of the poems from the last years of her life do we see her break free from the constraints of her training to speak more directly about the political, material, and sexual culture around her.

Looking It in the Face

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:34:50 -0400

Charles Simic

Of course, I never really believed it would happen. Grow old, I mean. I knew it was coming, saw the evidence of it in my friends and relatives, but despite that, I acted as if aging had nothing to do with me. Even having people congratulate me on my seventy-fifth birthday doesn’t sound right to me. Either they or I must have screwed up the count somewhere along the way. Knowing the truth, of course, is better than fooling oneself, but who wants to look truth in the face every morning?

Chavismo: The Crack Up?

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 18:40:17 -0400

Alma Guillermoprieto

Sometime in the three months since Hugo Chávez was pronounced dead, his favorite television mouthpiece, a broadcaster called Mario Silva, delivered himself of his sorrow regarding Venezuela in the course of a highly private conversation. It was a riveting aria: fifty-three minutes in which Silva told of coup plots, death threats, power struggles within the heart of chavismo. Astonishingly, Mario Silva’s complaint was sung not to a friend or colleague, not to a Venezuelan official or source but to Aramis Palacios, a lieutenant colonel of Cuba’s G2 intelligence directorate, and we know what was said because someone—a spy for the opposition? secret agent Palacios himself?—has made an audio recording of this conversation available to the Venezuelan opposition.

Playing Moscow's Game

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 10:14:54 -0400

Amy Knight

As usual, the Russian government is playing a tough game with the US and its Western allies over Syria, with the revelations in late May that it plans to deliver advanced S300 anti-aircraft missiles and other military aid to the Assad regime. Yet while voicing criticism of these deals, the Obama administration has been welcoming a series of senior Russian officials to Washington, and Britain has actually softened its relations with the Russian government. Why is the Kremlin getting away with this? One reason is that US officials—and their European counterparts—are loath to upset ties with the Russians in the run-up to the Syrian peace conference, which the Obama administration is trying to convene this summer with Russian support. But just as telling may be Washington’s newly-declared cooperation with Moscow in fighting terrorism, prompted by the April bombings in Boston.

The Cemetery Dream

Thu, 30 May 2013 14:52:57 -0400

Daniel Mendelsohn

For a period of two or three years during the late 1980s or early 1990s—it’s difficult, now, to recall exactly when, but I know it was while I was a graduate student—I repeatedly dreamt the same terrifying dream. Once a week sometimes, sometimes every other week, sometimes twice a week or more, it would (as I then thought) be waiting for me as soon as I dropped off, identical each time in every detail: the open gate, the familiar headstones, the sudden sunset, the missing graves, the dead I knew so well but who didn’t seem to know me any more, chasing me, the gun, the embarrassing horror-movie detail of the silver bullets.

Under Sri Lanka's Big Roof

Wed, 29 May 2013 17:16:25 -0400

Martin Filler

From 1958 to 1966 the Danish architect Ulrik Plesner was the chief architectural partner of Geoffrey Bawa, the Sri Lankan master builder. Plesner’s absorbing new account, In Situ: An Architectural Memoir from Sri Lanka, depicts Bawa’s Ceylon as a prelapsarian architectural paradise where one barely had to think about creating something before it materialized into being. When Bawa and Plesner began their collaboration, however, the influence of Le Corbusier’s International Style was pervasive in the developing world and the inherent advantages of regional building methods were not immediately obvious.

Echoes from the Gloom

Tue, 28 May 2013 15:56:59 -0400

Tim Parks

How does Leopardi’s cosmic pessimism, as it’s sometimes called, affect my translation? As one reads the Zibaldone one can’t help feeling that one has heard its voice elsewhere. Either he has had more influence than I knew about, or others since have arrived at similar combinations of gloomy content and emphatic style. An Italian can’t help thinking of Giorgio Manganelli and Carlo Emilio Gadda. But the voices that for me are most constantly present, or nascent, in long sections of the Zibaldone, are Samuel Beckett’s (the novels), Emil Cioran’s, and, above all—indeed overwhelmingly, especially in the wilder riffs on the scandals of human behavior—Thomas Bernhard’s.

Obama's Long Road to Peace

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:46:57 -0400

David Cole

President Barack Obama’s speech Thursday at the National Defense University may turn out to be the most significant of his tenure. After four years of failing to make much progress toward closing Guantánamo, while increasingly relying on a drone war whose legality has often been questioned, Obama might have chosen to speak more cautiously in his NDU speech. Instead, he went much further, outlining a way out of this “perpetual war,” saying that “our democracy demands it.” Whether he can make good on this promise will very likely define his legacy. If he succeeds in doing so, the Nobel Peace Prize committee will be seen not as naïve, but as remarkably prescient, in its awarding of the Peace Prize to Obama in 2009.

The Unanswerable Question

Thu, 23 May 2013 13:03:11 -0400

Alberto Manguel

One day in 1842, the thirty-eight-year old Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his notebook: “To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its eccentricities and aimlessness—with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.” Indeed. From the first dream of Gilgamesh four thousand years ago on to our time, Hawthorne’s observation proves to be right. Something in the retelling of a dream, however haunting and however true, lacks the peculiar verisimilitude of dreams, their unique vocabulary and texture, their singular identity.