Innholdsfortegnelse for January 10, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn't be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It's not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives. Perhaps the first thing to say is that I experience at least…

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t by Nate Silver Penguin, 534 pp., $27.95 The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 286 pp., $27.00 Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Random House, 519 pp., $30.00 1. Nate Silver called every state correctly in the last presidential race, and was wrong about only one in 2008. In 2012 he predicted Obama’s total of the popular vote within one tenth of a percent of the actual figure. His powers of prediction seemed uncanny. In his early and sustained prediction of an Obama victory, he was ahead of most polling organizations and my fellow political scientists. But buyers of his book, The…

From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage by Michael J. Klarman Oxford University Press, 276 pp., $27.95 When Billie Holiday promised, “the difficult I’ll do right now, the impossible will take a little while,” she admitted that she was “crazy in love.” But that lyric might well serve as the anthem of the gay rights movement, which has achieved, more swiftly than any other individual rights movement in history, not merely the impossible, but the unthinkable. Those who have fought for what might be called the privileges of gay romance—the rights to marry and to have intimate sexual relations with the partner of one’s choosing, regardless of gender—were called crazy, and worse, by many. But with respect to both sodomy and marriage laws,…

Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, November 18, 2012–February 25, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Doryun Chong Museum of Modern Art, 216 pp., $55.00 Art Theater Guild and Japanese Underground Cinema, 1962–1984 a film series at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, December 6, 2012–February 10, 2013 1. Mishima Yukio’s suicide in 1970 was a messy affair. First he plunged a short sword into his stomach, then a handsome young man from his private militia tried to cut off his head with a samurai blade and botched it three times before another follower completed the job. One way of looking at this bloody event is as a piece of performance art. Mishima had made sure…

Geronimo by Robert M. Utley Yale University Press, 348 pp., $30.00 1. As a war cry, “Geronimo!” has certainly stood the test of time. Paratroopers in World War II yelled it as they hurled themselves into the void, and, more recently, our lethal team of killers were said to have uttered it when they surprised the bin Ladens in their compound in Pakistan. And yet the man who bore it, a Bedonkohe Apache whose tribal name was Goyahkla, was never a chief. When he finally surrendered, to General Nelson A. Miles on September 3, 1886, he had only fifteen men with him, and a few women and children. In his years of constant raiding he rarely led more than thirty men, many of them members of his extended family. At…

The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard edited by Ron Padgett, with an introduction by Paul Auster Library of America, 541 pp., $35.00 “If I’m as normal as I think I am,” Joe Brainard reflected in one of his “29 Mini-Essays” from the mid-Seventies, “we’re all a bunch of weirdos.” Painter, cartoonist, collagist extraordinaire, author of the brilliantly original I Remember, Brainard was also the master of the faux-naif aphorism, the seemingly goofy one-liner that sinks through the layers of the mind like a Zen koan, and embeds itself there. Often these invite us to ponder the sheer strangeness of things: “Feet: looking real hard at feet right now I am wondering ‘why toes?’” Others unobtrusively capture some peculiarity or paradox of modern life, like this pithy take on the information…

Sometimes There Is a Void: Memoirs of an Outsider by Zakes Mda Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 561 pp., $35.00 The first novel of South African writer Zakes Mda, Ways of Dying (1995), told the story of Toloki, a down-at-the-heels loner who witnesses the mindless violence that convulses a black community in the final days of apartheid. He becomes a professional mourner and wanders from funeral to funeral, varying the mourning ritual he performs to suit each occasion. For instance, he knows never to sit inside the house for the meal after the township funerals of the “better-off people”—he might not be welcome—but to line up and eat standing from a paper or plastic plate. He must also not mix with the “rabble,” who will be fed outside from communal basins.…

To the Editors: In her review of Philip Freeman’s translation of the electioneering pamphlet traditionally ascribed to Cicero’s brother Quintus [NYR, November 22, 2012], Mary Beard turns briefly aside to make a swipe at her fellow classicists, remarking that “the Roman nobility seem generally to have disapproved of the introduction of the secret ballot—an electoral reform unheard of in classical Athens, the supposed ‘cradle’ of Western democracy.” The reference to Athens is a surprising mistake. It’s true that Athenians in the Classical period did their voting in the Assembly by raising their arms, but in two other of their duties as voting citizens they made their choices known by ballots that were very secret indeed. Once each year, if the Assembly determined, by majority vote, that an ostrakismos should be…

Dejeuner sur l’Herbe Mary McCarthy “You can cut into The Naked Lunch at any intersection point,” says Burroughs, suiting the action to the word, in “an atrophied preface” he appends as a tail-piece. His book, he means, is like a neighborhood movie with continuous showings that you can drop into whenever you please—you don’t have to wait for the beginning of the feature picture. Or like a worm that you can chop up into sections each of which wriggles off as an independent worm. Or a nine-lived cat. Or a cancer. He is fond of the word “mosaic,” especially in its scientific sense of a plant-mottling caused by a virus, and his Muse (see etymology of “mosaic”) is interested in organic processes of multiplication and duplication. The literary notion of…

Lincoln a film directed by Steven Spielberg Abraham Lincoln’s reelection was in doubt through much of the summer and fall of 1864, but Union victories in Mobile Bay and Atlanta restored the popular faith in his leadership, and he won 55 percent of the vote. By December the end of the Civil War seemed close. As far back as late 1863, total abolition of slavery had been part of Lincoln’s understanding of how the war must end; and he had pressed already in June 1864 for the passage of a Thirteenth Amendment to ban slavery in the United States. He was turned back then by the vote in the House of Representatives, but now, with larger Republican numbers in Congress, he was sure of the two-thirds vote required for…

Late Raphael an exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, June 12–September 16, 2012, and the Musée du Louvre, Paris, October 8, 2012–January 14, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Tom Henry and Paul Joannides. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 382 pp., e35.00 (paper) In its normal setting on a wall of the Galleria Palatina in the Pitti Palace in Florence, The Vision of Ezekiel, partly by Raphael, partly by Giulio Romano, is one small painting in a multitude of paintings, most of them clamoring loudly for attention: Titian’s Bella and Raphael’s Donna Velata vie for the crown of voluptuous textures—velvets, silks, pearls, hair, living flesh. Nearby we see Raphael’s portrait of Tommaso Inghirami in wall-eyed rapture, the veins veritably pulsing beneath the surface of his skin, and the…

Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird by Tim Birkhead Walker, 265 pp,, $25.00 The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds with Common Birds by Julie Zickefoose Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 355 pp., $28.00 The Feathery Tribe: Robert Ridgway and the Modern Study of Birds by Daniel Lewis Yale University Press, 346 pp., $45.00 John James Audubon’s Journal of 1826: The Voyage to The Birds of America edited and with an introduction by Daniel Patterson University of Nebraska Press, 474 pp., $50.00 Like astronomy, ornithology is a science to which amateurs have made authentic contributions. Today, however, the divide between amateurs and professionals in ornithology appears to be deepening, as the professionals revolutionize our understanding of the ornithological family tree and of bird behavior by employing cellular biology and the chemistry…

On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines—and Future by Karen Elliott House Knopf, 308 pp., $28.95 Saudi Arabia on the Edge: The Uncertain Future of an American Ally by Thomas W. Lippman Potomac, 307 pp., $29.95 Saudi Arabia on the Edge: The Uncertain Future of an American Ally by Thomas W. Lippman Potomac, 307 pp., $29.95 Politics and Society in Saudi Arabia: The Crucial Years of Development, 1960–1982 by Sarah Yizraeli Columbia University Press, 336 pp., $50.00 1. On September 25, 2011, the aging ruler of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, gave a remarkable speech to the Majlis al-Shura, the formal advisory body to the Saudi monarchy in Riyadh. Beginning in 2013, the king said, women would be allowed to serve on the 150- member body; and beginning in…

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families by Colm Tóibín Scribner, 345 pp., $26.00 The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín Scribner, 81 pp., $19.99 Every so often, in his captivating new collection of essays, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín allows himself moments of general (and perhaps also personal) meditation and commentary. Here are two of the strangest. The first is the opening of a vivid, compassionate essay on Hart Crane: The second comes in a piece about Sebastian Barry, countering the charge that his play Hinterland exposed the lives of living Irish politicians: In these highly characteristic riffs, Tóibín has invented his own language for talking about the origins and sources of artworks. This is not exactly literary criticism; the terminology is vague,…

China’s Search for Security by Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell Columbia University Press, 406 pp., $32.95 In 1955, when I began my graduate studies of China and its language, one of my fellow students at Columbia asked our professor, Nathaniel Pfeffer, whether the United States would ever recognize Beijing instead of Taipei as the capital of China. Pfeffer memorably replied that it would take a vehement anti-Communist, because only such a person could escape being called a Communist. He then caused hilarity in the class by suggesting that then Vice President Nixon could be such a man. In October 1967, five years before his presidential trip to China, remembered for his observation that the Great Wall certainly was great, Nixon wrote: In their exceptionally interesting, articulate, and sometimes surprising…

The following statement was written during the Israeli bombing of the Gaza Strip in late November by Nomika Zion, a member of Migvan, an urban kibbutz in Sderot, the Israeli city about a mile from the Gaza Strip border that has been a primary target of rockets launched from Gaza since the second intifada started in 2000. In 2008, fifty rockets a day hit Sderot, and in late December 2008 Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, leading to three weeks of armed conflict in Gaza. The Migvan urban kibbutz was founded in 1987 by a relatively small group, most of whose members had been raised in the agricultural kibbutz movement. The first wave of residents of Sderot, which now has more than 24,000 people, came in the 1950s and was largely…

To the Editors: Geoffrey O’Brien’s question in relation to Thomas Adès’s opera The Tempest at the Met [NYR, December 6] is easily answered. “When was the last time the Met presented a contemporary opera with the composer conducting?” Not so long ago: in February 2011, when John Adams led the overdue company premiere of Nixon in China (Houston, 1987). Before that, Tan Dun conducted the December 2006 world premiere of his The First Emperor. But O’Brien’s point as to the rarity of such occasions remains valid: before this contemporary trio, the last composer to lead his own opera at the Metropolitan was Italo Montemezzi (1875–1952), who helmed his L’amore dei tre re (once thought a modernist triumph equal to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande) at the old opera house in February…

I grew up in Belle Harbor, on the western part of that fragile leg of New York City’s coastland called the Rockaways, and witnessed many spectacular storms there as a boy. In September 1960, when I was six years old, Hurricane Donna inundated the streets from Jamaica Bay to the Atlantic, the entire width of the peninsula, a distance of no more than a quarter of a mile. “Bay and ocean joined,” declared our rabbi when the flooded synagogue reopened. It was the opposite of Moses’ feat of parting the Red Sea. The storm tide crested at eleven feet and during the days that followed my brothers and I floated ecstatically through the neighborhood on ruined wooden furniture that we turned into rafts. Weeks of no school and muted adult…

Dear Life by Alice Munro Knopf, 319 pp., $26.95 Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have. Her stories are open, overflowing with life, unlike the curt and obscure minimalist stories so fashionable in the Seventies and Eighties. But no one could accuse her of being traditional, either. With all their fullness of narrative and character, her stories are elegant and sharp, pared down—sometimes shockingly so. Her new collection, Dear Life, is as rich and astonishing as anything she has done before. Munro’s stories, in this book as in her earlier work, tend to be geographically…

Selected Letters of William Styron edited by Rose Styron with R. Blakeslee Gilpin Random House, 672 pp., $40.00 The hundreds of letters written by William Styron, nearly sixty years of them, many quite long, are about such matters as the public apology of Robert McNamara regarding the Vietnam War, capital punishment, the crassness of American culture, politicians, publishers, the books of friends and less-known writers, the ignorance of critics. There are letters of considered opinion and those of a good old boy, the vulgarities included. In them are marvelous images: William Burroughs, met in Paris, Styron, during his long and distinguished career as a writer, produced four novels, or five counting the novella The Long March (1956). He wrote slowly in longhand on yellow pads, usually in the afternoon, not…

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German and with an introduction by Mark Harman Harvard University Press, 94 pp., $15.95 For Rainer Maria Rilke the year 1903 did not begin auspiciously. He and his wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, were living in Paris, where the poet had come in order to write a monograph on Auguste Rodin. The Rilkes were not exactly dazzled by the City of Light. In a letter to his friend the artist Otto Modersohn, dated New Year’s Eve 1902, the poet spoke of Paris as a “difficult, difficult, anxious city” whose beauty could not compensate “for what one must suffer from the cruelty and confusion of the streets and the monstrosity of the gardens, people and things.” A few lines…

The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War by Halik Kochanski Harvard University Press, 734 pp., $35.00 Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 by Anne Applebaum Doubleday, 566 pp., $35.00 In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe by Adam Michnik, translated from the Polish by Roman S. Czarny University of California Press, 224 pp., $35.00 Henry Kissinger used to complain that no one could give him a number on which to ring Europe. Nowadays, the high representative for foreign affairs in Brussels does have a number. If you ring it, they say, an automated voice advises: “Press one for Germany, two for France, three for Britain.” And so on for twenty-seven EU members. Historians have similar problems. Europe’s fragmentation puts the wider…

Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist by Christof Koch MIT Press, 181 pp., $24.95 1. The problem of consciousness remains with us. What exactly is it and why is it still with us? The single most important question is: How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause human and animal consciousness? Related problems are: How exactly is consciousness realized in the brain? That is, where is it and how does it exist in the brain? Also, how does it function causally in our behavior? To answer these questions we have to ask: What is it? Without attempting an elaborate definition, we can say the central feature of consciousness is that for any conscious state there is something that it feels like to be in that state, some qualitative character…

To the Editors: While written in a spirit of generosity, Richard Lewontin misreads The Genealogical Science in his recent review [“Is There a Jewish Gene?,” NYR, December 6, 2012]. I am not a “biological determinist” who believes that genetic data tell us something fundamental about our authentic historical selves. Quite the opposite: the book critically explores how and why that assumption has become scientifically and socially felicitous today and it does so from the perspective of past and present practices of biological self-definition among Jewish communities. The book provides a detailed analysis of the relationships among this contemporary biological imaginary and those of biological sciences of decades past. In the here and now, I argue, genetic history’s specific style of reasoning permits us to attribute a historical truth to biological…

To the Editors: The problem with Alvin Plantinga’s defense of theism is a simple but wholly vitiating one [Where the Conflict Really Lies, reviewed by Thomas Nagel in “A Philosopher Defends Religion,” NYR, September 27, 2012]. It is that it rests on the fallacy of informal logic known as petitio principii. Plantinga wishes to claim that we can know there is a deity because the deity has provided us with a cognitive modality, which Plantinga calls “a sensus divinitatis,” or sense of the divine, by which we detect its existence. So, we know there is a god because that god arranges matters so that we know there is a god. The circularity is perfect, and perfectly fallacious. I can claim with equal cogency that I know there are goblins in…