shhh, peaceful

Workers pluck through debris May 16 after tornados swept through...

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:30:00 -0400

Workers pluck through debris May 16 after tornados swept through the town of Granbury, Texas. (Richard Rodriguez/Reuters)

Can’t stop staring at this picture. Impossible to tell what’s tree and what’s trash after the tornado’s done with everything.

Imre Kertész explains in his 2002 Nobel lecture how a commonplace moment during the Holocaust became...

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:57:00 -0400

Imre Kertész explains in his 2002 Nobel lecture how a commonplace moment during the Holocaust became warped in everyone’s memories—and how he managed to un-warp it:

I am speaking of the twenty minutes spent on the arrival platform of the Birkenau extermination camp—the time it took people clambering down from the train to reach the officer doing the selecting. I more or less remembered the twenty minutes, but the novel demanded that I distrust my memory.

No matter how many survivors’ accounts, reminiscences and confessions I had read, they all agreed that everything proceeded all too quickly and unnoticably. The doors of the railroad cars were flung open, they heard shouts, the barking of dogs, men and women were abruptly separated, and in the midst of the hubbub, they found themselves in front of an officer. He cast a fleeting glance at them, pointed to something with his outstretched arm, and before they knew it they were wearing prison clothes.

I remembered these twenty minutes differently. Turning to authentic sources, I first read Tadeusz Borowski’s stark, unsparing and self-tormenting narratives, among them the story entitled “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.” Later, I came upon a series of photographs of human cargo arriving at the Birkenau railroad platform—photographs taken by an SS soldier and found by American soldiers in a former SS barracks in the already liberated camp at Dachau.

I looked at these photographs in utter amazement. I saw lovely, smiling women and bright-eyed young men, all of them well-intentioned, eager to cooperate. Now I understood how and why those humiliating twenty minutes of idleness and helplessness faded from their memories. And when I thought how all this was repeated the same way for days, weeks, months and years on end, I gained an insight into the mechanism of horror; I learned how it became possible to turn human nature against one’s own life.

—Janka Nabay & the Bubu Gang, “Feba,” En...

Sat, 11 May 2013 20:39:00 -0400

—Janka Nabay & the Bubu Gang, “Feba,” En Yay Sah (2012)

It’s Bubu time:

Bubu music is traditional music played by the Temne people in Sierra Leone. The music was originally used in witchcraft ceremonies, but later it turned into a popular religious processional style played during Ramadan. In its folk form, the music is played by blowing on bamboo cane flutes and on metal pipes—often repurposed auto parts.

During the Sierra Leone Civil War, Ahmed Janka Nabay became the first musician to record Bubu music. He modernized the sound by adding electric studio instrumentation. With songs like “Sabanoh” (We Own Here), Nabay asserted what he established as the underlying message of Bubu—peace, good governance and the empowerment of women or “ponchus”. According to an NPR interview aired on August 22, 2012, Nabay’s music became popular across the war-torn nation in the 1990s, particularly among young rebels trying to overthrow the government, which forced Nabay to flee the country.

In 2010, Nabay released the first-ever international Bubu record, Bubu King on True Panther Records in New York City. He subsequently formed the first-ever international Bubu band, Janka Nabay & the Bubu Gang, with local musicians in Brooklyn.

Good anecdote from Fik Meijer’s history, The...

Fri, 03 May 2013 00:51:19 -0400

Good anecdote from Fik Meijer’s history, The Gladiators. Who knows? It might even be true:

Once, probably during a show put on by Augustus, something truly remarkable happened. Androclus, a condemned slave from Dacia, was placed in the middle of the arena. The gates were pulled up and a lion charged out. But instead of attacking the unfortunate slave it wagged its tail, lay down in front of him and licked his feet. The organiser of the games was maddened with rage and sent a leopard into the arena. The lion immediately turned on the leopard and killed it.

The organiser called the slave over to him. Androclus told him that he had run away from his callous master, the Governor of Africa, and hidden deep in the interior of the country in an abandoned cave. One day a lion appeared. Androclus thought his final hour had come, but the lion only moaned and showed him a wounded paw with a large thorn embedded in it that was causing an infection. He extracted the thorn and treated the paw. Out of gratitude the lion brought him meat every day.

He survived for some time that way, but eventually he was tracked down by the governor’s soldiers. His master sentenced him to death by wild animals and here in the arena in Rome he had come upon the very lion he once cared for. It too had been caught and brought to the Colosseum. The story ended with both Androclus and the lion being given their freedom.

If you have never driven over country roads it is useless for me to tell you about it; you...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:13:28 -0400

If you have never driven over country roads it is useless for me to tell you about it; you wouldn’t understand anyway. But if you have, I would rather not remind you of it. …

—Mikhail Bulgakov, A Country Doctor’s Notebook

Yao Lu, “Ancient Springtime Fey,” New Landscapes...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 21:23:00 -0400

Yao Lu, “Ancient Springtime Fey,” New Landscapes Part 1 (2006)

oh my what a lovely Chinese landsca— wait, nope, that’s a massive garbage dump.

(more here.)

Edward Jay Epstein describes Vladimir Nabokov’s literature class at Cornell circa 1954. Among...

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 20:31:00 -0400

Edward Jay Epstein describes Vladimir Nabokov’s literature class at Cornell circa 1954. Among other things, he got paid $10 a week to be Nabokov’s “auxiliary course assistant”:

Every Wednesday, the movies changed at the four theaters in downtown Ithaca, called by Nabokov “the near near,” “the near far,” “the far near,” and “the far far.” My task, which used up most of my weekly payment, was to see all four new movies on Wednesday and Thursday, and then brief him on them on Friday morning. He said that since he had time to see only one movie, this briefing would help him decide which one of them, if any, to see.

Sadly, their relationship soon curdles:

My undoing came just after he had lectured on Gogol’s Dead Souls.

The day before I had seen The Queen of Spades, a 1949 British film based on Alexander Pushkin’s 1833 short story. It concerned a Russian officer who, in his desperation to win at cards, murdered an elderly Russian countess while trying to learn her secret method of picking cards in the game of faro. He seemed uninterested in having me recount the plot, which he must have known well, but his head shot up when I said in conclusion that it reminded me of Dead Souls. Vera also turned around and stared directly at me. Peering intently at me, he asked, “Why do you think that?”

I instantly realized I had made a remark that apparently connected with a view he had, or was developing, concerning these two Russian writers. At that point, I should have left the office, making some excuse about needing to give the question more thought. Instead, I said pathetically, “They are both Russian.”

His face dropped, and Vera turned back to face him. While my gig continued for several more weeks, it was never the same.

—Jimmie Dale Gilmore, “Mack the Knife,” One...

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 19:10:00 -0400

—Jimmie Dale Gilmore, “Mack the Knife,” One Endless Night (2000)

oh the shark has / pretty teeth, dear.

Lawyers, guns, and yakuza

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 21:25:00 -0400

There’s an intriguing theory in Misha Glenny’s McMafia on why the yakuza took on such a prominent role in Japanese life after World War II. It was all thanks to strict licensing quotas for lawyers:

“Traditionally, of course, the yakuza has always been involved in prostitution and gambling. Everyone more or less accepted this state of affairs, and that accounted for the bulk of its income,” says Yukio Yamanouchi. “But in the 1960s, it started getting involved in civilian affairs, and this soon became one of its greatest revenue sources.” …

This “move into civilian affairs” (i.e., resolving disputes) in the 1960s came about because of a law passed in 1949. In order to discourage the use of litigation, which was felt to be divisive and contrary to the spirit of wa (harmony) that underpins Japanese society, the postwar government ruled that only 5,000 lawyers would be permitted to graduate from the Legal Research and Training Institute in Tokyo each year. The great majority registered in Tokyo and Osaka and sought comfortable and lucrative positions working on behalf of one of the zaibatsu. Few were interested in representing members of the public, and before long the entire judicial system was clogged up with civil cases that made the deliberations in Dickens’s Bleak House reasoned and swift by comparison.

“It was only a short step before people realized that they could use the yakuza for resolving a host of things—they have since developed a close involvement with all manner of transactions in the property business of course; but they also act as bankruptcy assessors; in anything, really, where the courts out to be responsible, such as insurance claims after car accidents,” outlined Yamanouchi.

The numbers are pretty striking: In the late 1990s, Japan had one lawyer for every 5,995 people. The United States has one lawyer for every 285 people. A few years ago, the Japanese government decided to expand the quotas, but the resulting mini-deluge of lawyers (an extra 1,000 or so per year) caused officials to quickly reconsider.

—Kawase Hasui, “Evening at Soemoncho in...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 21:09:41 -0400

—Kawase Hasui, “Evening at Soemoncho in Osaka,” from Nihon Fukeishu II Kansaihen (1933)

—Kawase Hasui, “Kasuga Shrine in Nara in the...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 21:08:32 -0400

—Kawase Hasui, “Kasuga Shrine in Nara in the rain,” from Nihon Fukeishu II Kansaihen (1933)

This guy’s woodblock prints of Japan in the rain are my favorite thing in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. No idea where this particular oban print is from, though—it was auctioned off a few years ago.

Anne Carson explains how she met her husband: They don’t even agree on how they met. In...

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 20:50:00 -0400

Anne Carson explains how she met her husband:

They don’t even agree on how they met. In Currie’s version, he was working the book table at one of Carson’s readings in Ann Arbor when, during the reception—while everyone else was enjoying the feast (it featured a shrimp volcano)—Carson brought him a plate of food.

“I have no memory of this,” Carson said.

In her version, Currie was suddenly just hanging around. “There you were, and then you were there more.”

Roger Ebert’s review of Robert Bresson’s...

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:04:00 -0500

Roger Ebert’s review of Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket” is really wonderful:

Shoplifters and pickpockets operate in different emotional weather than more brazen thieves. They do not use strength, but stealth. Their thefts are intimate violations of the property of others; to succeed, they must either remain invisible or inspire trust. There is something sexual about it.

Plus this bit about Bresson’s directorial style:

Bresson, one of the most thoughtful and philosophical of directors, was fearful of “performances” by his actors. He famously forced the star of “A Man Escaped” (1956) to repeat the same scene some 50 times, until it was stripped of all emotion and inflection. All Bresson wanted was physical movement. No emotion, no style, no striving for effect. What we see in the pickpocket’s face is what we bring to it. Instead of asking his actors to “show fear,” Bresson asks them to show nothing, and depends on his story and images to supply the fear.

—Kurt Vile, “Wakin on a Pretty Day,” Wakin on...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 22:33:32 -0500

—Kurt Vile, “Wakin on a Pretty Day,” Wakin on a Pretty Daze (2013)

I accidentally left this song on repeat for an hour and didn’t even notice. Is that praise or not? I can’t tell.

A short history of the asterisk—and why they’re now used to mask computer...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:27:09 -0500

A short history of the asterisk—and why they’re now used to mask computer passwords:

[T]his ubiquitous critical sign, named from the Greek for “small star,” originated in Ptolemaic Alexandria, where the great textual scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium and his student Aristarchus of Samothrace used them to mark repeated lines in the Iliad and Odyssey.

Several centuries later the prolific (and self-mutilated) Christian theologian Origen began to employ asterisks in a different way, to signal the omission of certain passages in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. This usage gradually spread as a sign of something missing, and hence—at the end of a complex trail that winds through classical editions, Bibles, pornography—when you type your password on the computer, the letters and numbers often show up as a string of asterisks.

One of the largest concrete structures in the world, the Grand...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:26:00 -0500

One of the largest concrete structures in the world, the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington took just nine years in the 1930s to build. Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert explains how they managed to finish it so quickly:

The astonishing thing about Grand Coulee—about the whole era—was that people just went out and built it, built anything, without knowing exactly how to do it or whether it could even be done. There were no task forces, no special commissions, no proposed possible preliminary outlines of conceivable tentative recommendations. Tremendous environmental impacts, but no environmental impact statements.

When Chuck Weil applied for a job on Grand Coulee, he didn’t know the first thing about concrete; before long, he was inspecting more concrete than anyone in history. Phil Nalder was trained as an electrical engineer; he started as a tracer (one rung below draftsmen) and, later on, was put in charge of the whole project.

Once, well into construction, a mudslide the size of a small mountain came off one side of the canyon and threatened to cover the foundation of the dam. To stabilize it, the Bureau [of Reclamation] ran around the Northwest looking for the biggest refrigeration units it could find; then it ran supercooled brine through the slide and froze it while construction continued. No one had ever tried it before, but it worked. When one of the cofferdams sprang a huge leak, it was plugged with old mattresses.

Obviously nothing that massive could get built so quickly today. So many rules, so many lawsuits. Then again, 77 construction workers died while building the Grand Coulee so maybe a little more caution was warranted. (Although then again, electricity from the dam ended up producing about one-third of the aluminum used in U.S. aircraft during World War II, so maybe the rush was warranted after all.)

One of the greatest joys in the world, it seems to me, is to be able to share with someone...

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 21:59:35 -0500

One of the greatest joys in the world, it seems to me, is to be able to share with someone one’s ideas, one’s feelings, one’s impressions… Hmm! This thought is presented in a work translated from German. The title escapes me.

—Nikolai Gogol, Diary of a Madman

Some of the sights in Richmond, VA. (Photo: Nastya Bevza.)

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 21:49:00 -0500

Some of the sights in Richmond, VA.

(Photo: Nastya Bevza.)

From the annals of post-Soviet customer service: When McDonald’s opened its first restaurant...

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 17:53:54 -0500

From the annals of post-Soviet customer service:

When McDonald’s opened its first restaurant in the Soviet Union in 1990 near Moscow’s Pushkin Square… it went through an extensive training program for the new workers. Of course, customer service, which was a brand new concept for the Soviets, was extensively emphasized for the new McDonald’s

After several days of training about customer service at McDonald’s, a young Soviet teenager asked the McDonald’s trainer a very serious question: “Why do we have to be so nice to the customers? After all, WE have the hamburgers, and they don’t!”

Via this odd-but-valiant defense of communist waiters.

Detail from a painting in some temple (?) in Kyoto depicting the...

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:59:20 -0500

Detail from a painting in some temple (?) in Kyoto depicting the nine stages of corpse decay. Stage five involves being eaten by crows and adorable foxes.