Transition 102

Transition may take a while to arrive in your mailbox, but it’s worth the wait.

A little over a year ago I blogged about the landmark 100th issue for Words Without Borders.

Now issue 102 is out. It’s dated 2009, and the full-page ad asking readers to mark their calendars for the 18th Pan African Film and Arts Festival on February 10 to 15 is not much use.

Still, where else can you find a table of contents like this? Issue 102 features a thoughtful interview with actor Harry Lennix (obviously written rather than spoken) in which he talks about the experience of working with August Wilson on plays like Radio Golf, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

There’s a collaborative collage of prose, photographs, and drawings about life in Kinshasa after dark, and about the homeless boys who live in the Kitambo cemetery. There’s a self-revealing piece by Lowell Brower, who was welcomed as he recorded folk tales in Zanzibar and elsewhere in Tanzania—until he reached the isolated island of Kojoani. And there’s a short story by Matthew Quinn Martin, about a break dancer who performs in the New York City subways, that comes to a jaw-dropping conclusion.

You may not enjoy everything here—the piece on East African literature was interesting to me, but would generally appeal to specialists—but if you’re interested in African (and world) culture you’re bound to like a lot.

Subscriptions to Transition are $36 a year (for print only)—a lot of money if you think of it as three magazines, but not much if you think of it as three edgy, surprising anthologies.

Paul Krugman on Ireland

A recent column by Paul Krugman sheds light on the financial crisis in the US by comparing it to the situation in Ireland. In short: It’s the regulation, stupid.

Here is the argument in a nutshell.

[T]he shape of Ireland’s crisis was very similar: a huge real estate bubble — prices rose more in Dublin than in Los Angeles or Miami — followed by a severe banking bust that was contained only via an expensive bailout.

Ireland had none of the American right’s favorite villains: there was no Community Reinvestment Act, no Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. More surprising, perhaps, was the unimportance of exotic finance: Ireland’s bust wasn’t a tale of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps; it was an old-fashioned, plain-vanilla case of excess, in which banks made big loans to questionable borrowers, and taxpayers ended up holding the bag.

So what did we have in common? The authors of the new study [by three Irish economists] suggest four “ ‘deep’ causal factors.”

First, there was irrational exuberance…

Second, there was a huge inflow of cheap money…

Third, key players had an incentive to take big risks, because it was heads they win, tails someone else loses....

But the most striking similarity between Ireland and America was “regulatory imprudence”: the people charged with keeping banks safe didn’t do their jobs. In Ireland, regulators looked the other way in part because the country was trying to attract foreign business, in part because of cronyism: bankers and property developers had close ties to the ruling party.

A very serious post about advertising

Since I started blogging two years ago, I’ve been pretty careful to keep the silliness out. No piano-playing cats. No dance routines at weddings. But since I do write about marketing and advertising, and since this is an unusually good (and funny) collection of examples of how context is everything, I’m making an exception and bringing you the Top 15 Wrongly Placed Ads. (The photo shown here is one of the more harmless ones.)

Padlocks on the Brooklyn Bridge

On my morning walks over the Brooklyn Bridge, I’ve noticed a fairly recent phenomenon: People have been clipping padlocks (and sometimes combination locks) to the railings, or to brackets attached to the stone towers, especially the one on the Manhattan end of the bridge. Some are engraved with the names of couples, some are inscribed with a Sharpie, and some are plain.

Meanwhile, having just read and enjoyed I Do Not Come to You by Chance, I was pleased to see that the author has won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa. I heard about it from African Literature News and Review, a lively and useful blog by Nigerian author and professor Chielo Zona Eze.

Dark Thoreau

Those of us who are readers and admirers of Thoreau have to find ways to come to terms with the less likable aspects of his life and work. For me, those aspects include the stilted, bookish passages in the early Journal, most of the poetry, and much of what Thoreau wrote about the Irish, about the need for purity, and about friendship, for which (though he did have good friends) he maintained impossibly high standards.

Some of these matters are taken up in the 1982 book Dark Thoreau by Richard Bridgman, who has read Thoreau closely and often intelligently. But along with Thoreau’s genuine shortcomings, Bridgman sets up a number of hoary old straw men and proceeds to beat them vigorously.

It is generally accepted, he writes in his preface, “that Thoreau is the rhetorically powerful advocate both of the supreme value of the individual and of the benign glory of nature ... but to verify these ideas in Thoreau one must read him very selectively.”

True enough. But the clever placement of the words “supreme” and “benign” gives Bridgman free rein to attack Thoreau whenever he suggests that the individual is not supreme, or that nature is not benign. Dark Thoreau reads not so much like an attempt to add shading and dimension to our understanding of a great writer, but an attempt to blast him from his pedestal. Bridgman has a gimlet eye for every contradiction, or apparent contradiction, in Thoreau’s work. He fails to understand, or professes not to understand, a couple of basic points:

1. Thoreau is grappling with some of the most complicated questions of how we should live and how we should relate to nature and society. He is quite deliberately examining these issues from a variety of points of view. To demand simple, consistent positions is, to say the least, unreasonable. Thoreau could defend himself in the same words that Whitman did: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

2. Many of Thoreau’s more high-flown statements, especially in Walden, are aspirational. They do not reflect Thoreau’s sober assessment of himself, nor do I imagine he ever thought anyone would claim that they did.

As I have argued myself, Bridgman finds that Thoreau often writes better in his Journal than when he reworks entries as tiles in the mosaic of a larger work: “In his revisions, Thoreau tended not to rewrite much ... but to change a word here and there, not necessarily for the better, and to eliminate phrases and sentences until his original version was weakened or beclouded.”

But in other ways, Bridgman is jaw-droppingly wrong. He greatly overemphasizes Thoreau’s desire for solitude (though Thoreau concentrated in his Journal on observations of nature, there are still enough encounters with neighbors to fill the book Men of Concord). And he writes, “Winter was especially attractive to Thoreau,” a statement belied by many passages on the bleakness of the season, and an almost-obsessive hunt for hints that spring might come at last.

Bridgman does, though, come up with a unified explanation for a number of the subjects that made Thoreau (and continue to make his readers) a little uneasy.

My argument here has been that much of Thoreau’s twisting obscurity was due to his inability to come to terms with the quite powerful feelings that were tormenting him; that he tended to associate the soft, wet, and messy with moralists, slaughtered animals, and women, and to experience revulsion when confronting them; and that although Thoreau’s suppressed and confused sexual feelings sometimes discovered an outlet, more often they did not, whereupon they turned to animus; and finally that Thoreau’s inability to reconcile these feelings in turn bore on his conception of the world, producing aggressiveness sometimes, sometimes melancholy.