kriticulture

Inflexions

Lightning streaks across the sky as lava flows from the volcano on Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull glacier. Time Photo of the Week

Nero’s Fiddle, Gaddafi’s Fiction by Ross Perlin - Roundtable | Lapham’s Quarterly Legislators are more often the unacknowledged poets of the world than vice versa. The Victorian literary world turned up its nose at Disraeli’s youthful romance novels (perhaps with good reason). The Athenian politician Solon, when he wasn’t laying the basis for the Western democratic tradition, tried his clumsy hand at martial hexameter, exhorting Athenians to “sentence hubris to obscurity and make the flowers of mischief wither.” The psalms of King David have outlasted his bloody conquests. The last of the Mughal emperors, Bahadur Shah II (pen name Zafar), lamented the collapse of his authority in well-formed Urdu ghazals.

The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee by Michelle Legro - Roundtable | Lapham’s Quarterly from Lapham's Quarterly Honoré de Balzac had a notorious coffee addiction. He would consume up to fifty cups a day while working on his series of novels La Comédie Humaine, and when desperate, would chew on the beans themselves. Before he died from the effects of caffeine poisoning at 51, Balzac wrote the essay "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee" to explain the methodology to his madness. Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring. Think about it: although more grocery stores in Paris are staying open until midnight, few writers are actually becoming more spiritual. But as Brillat-Savarin has correctly observed, coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes,...

By Badri Raina As for you, in slick lines Of slippery oil, You have rogue writ all over Your mercenary mug. With a kidnap and cocain conviction Under your nonchalant belt, Your goat eyes cap A world of coiled perfidies. Your swagger with ruthless jaw And calculating computer head, Your plastic venture smile Says to the glamour world How money breeds between your Greasy fingers, how you are A quintessential neo-liberal file That accumulates near and far. Unlike the boy Tharoor, You gloat in the knowledge Of how many salivating souls In high places Are prisoner to your lure. Or that should you be brought To book, the traces Could well burn a whole fat lot. We simply say “ why not”?

By Badri Raina There is a fling to your hair, And a mouthful of accent To your words— All redolent of a boyish Amour propre. Charming assets to a cloistered World. Or to Tory English politics. Here, in this land of subtle And immemorial guile, The merely smart are soon found out. And those that float on sporty self-love Brought down with a thud. Thus, O Tharoor, swim not In seas whose density you know But scantily, as in some bright School text book, But return to your alma mater, namely, A close-circuit Bloomsbury life, Laced with wine, women, and converse. Write those poems that you can, Watch those high-falutin films, Play golf, ride horses, try out a sports car, And end your day at an English bar. Then stretch your patrician legs, And smile at politics from afar.

From London Review of Books It has become a commonplace to say, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, that ‘we are all Keynesians now.’ If this is so, then Keynes’s great biographer, Robert Skidelsky, should have much to say about the recession, its causes and the appropriate cures. And so indeed he does. I share with Skidelsky the view that, while most of the blame for the crisis should reside with those in the financial markets, who did such a poor job both in allocating capital and in managing risk (their key responsibilities), a considerable portion of it lies with the economics profession. The notion economists pushed – that markets are efficient and self-adjusting – gave comfort to regulators like Alan Greenspan, who didn’t believe in regulation in the first place. They provided support for the movement which stripped away the regulations that had provided the basis of financial stability in the decades after the Great Depression; and they gave justification to th...

I wanted to address what I feel is a real problem that we have in the last century, actually, or even before. And that is that things can be so horrible that people lose the ability to talk about them. And I had this happen when I was in college, actually, when I learned that the King of Belgium had decided that if the Africans in the Belgian Congo could not fulfill their rubber quota that he had imposed on them, he could order their hands to be chopped off. This was so appalling to me as a student, as an eighteen- and nineteen-year-old, that I couldn’t speak about it. I just—I put it somewhere that I left for many years. And I think this has happened over and over to people, that they encounter these brutalities, these atrocities, and they literally can’t talk about them, and so we don’t speak. But if we don’t speak, then there’s more of it, and more people suffer. So it’s a call to overcoming speechlessness. Alice Walker on "Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encount...

"Dearest Georg": Love, Literature and Power in Dark Times: The Letters of Elias, Veza, and Georges Canetti, 1933-1948 edited by Karen Lauer and Kristian Wachinger Other Press, 436 pp., $24.95 In The Human Province , a volume of fragmentary reflections, Elias Canetti writes that “one needs friends mainly in order to become more impudent, that is, more oneself.” With our intimates, Canetti believed, we are free to boast and lie and exaggerate, though we will come into our own only if we are moved to be indiscreet, to hold nothing back, to show the several faces we are inclined, as the spirit moves us, to put on. In this hefty volume of letters exchanged by Canetti, his wife Veza and his brother Georg between 1933 and 1948, we see at once how three remarkable people became “more” themselves by revealing to one another pretty much everything they thought and felt. Of course we have known a good deal about Elias Canetti for some time, as he was one of the great memo...

By Badri Raina From Badri Raina's ZSpace Page, Friday, April 09, 2010 (Link: http://www.zcommunications.org/destitution-by-badri-raina ) I The Hindustan Times is a leading herald of the developmental path that the current Indian government vows to carry forward in the main. Namely, the route that goes through free-market fundamentalism, fiscal prudence, and greater and greater transfer of wealth into private entrepreneurship. Which includes disinvesting public equity in what it sees as inefficient, corrupt and retarding Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs). Never mind that precisely the PSUs prepared the ground over some four decades of Independent India for the industrial and technological prowess that corporate India never fails to flaunt. For example, by making such core inputs as coal, oil, and steel available to a nascent national bourgeoisie at subsidized rates! No problem with subsidies then. So when you notice that this Daily has been running an admirably laudab...

From The New York Times “Where literature exists, translation exists. Joined at the hip, they are absolutely inseparable, and, in the long run, what happens to one happens to the other. Despite all the difficulties the two have faced, sometimes separately, usually together, they need and nurture each other, and their long-term relationship, often problematic but always illuminating, will surely continue for as long as they both shall live.” Book Review - Why Translation Matters - By Edith Grossman - Review - NYTimes.com

Rajesh Kumar Sharma The seventy six men who were killed in Dantewada are the kind of people for whom, ironically, such violence is carried out and explained away. Ordinary Indian people who needed honest work, and who found it in the paramilitary forces. They could have been, in a different situation, on the other side of the see-saw of violence! When ideas and opinions screen the faces -and bodies- of living human beings, a cycle of bloody violence is waiting to be let loose. Whether you speak of the "savage nature" of some people or of the state, there is a risk that the real living people, each with a family and friends, will be erased from consciousness. You will take aim not at a person but at an idea. Ideas do not die, because they do not have a life. Real, living people die. Buddha and Gandhi are needed today to hold our finger and show to us the faces of people who live and die. And who deserve to live longer -and to die natural human deaths. In democratic civilizatio...

By M. L. Raina Because I know that time is only time And place is always and only place… I rejoice that things are as they are. (T. S. Eliot) Nostalgia is a luxury few of us can afford. And I am grateful because I can. To me Srinagar is not a geographical location, but a mood, a veritable see-saw of my mental and physical growth. It is a school in which I grew up learning the ironies behind pious intentions and failures behind firm resolutions. To evoke one's past or to reach for roots is like touching a wonky tooth: it hurts but is satisfying nevertheless. Whenever I think of my home town I do not see what the picture post cards sell, not the mountains or the lakes or the valleys, but a jumble of crooked lanes and knobbly backyards. On the dug-up pavements of the city I recall the familiar sights and smells, such as the fetid reek of makeshi...