http://www.lrb.co.uk/contents Contents of the latest issue of the London Review of Books en-gb LRB (London) Ltd. Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 GMT 20160 registrar@lrb.co.uk (Ben Campbell) registrar@lrb.co.uk (Ben Campbell) http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_ad.gif http://www.lrb.co.uk/contents London Review of Books logo http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/john01_.html current affairs The sequence of events that produced the current deadlock in Zimbabwe began on 11 March last year when Morgan Tsvangirai and a number of other members of the Movement for Democratic Change were arrested, tortured and beaten. Robert Mugabe had banned all MDC meetings and rallies in the hope of suppressing the MDC completely before this year's elections. The local churches entered the fray and organised a prayer meeting in Highfield, a suburb of Harare. Tsvangirai drove to the meeting, but found that the area had been cordoned off by riot police and the meeting closed down on presidential orders. Informed a little later that a large number of civic leaders and MDC activists had been arrested and were being held at Machipisa police station in Highfield, he drove there straightaway. As soon as he arrived, he was pulled from his car and his head repeatedly slammed against the wall by police. Inside, the police used rifle butts, army belts, whips and sjamboks. 'They were mostly targeting my head and my face,' Tsvangirai recalled. He passed out three times and was revived with buckets of cold water so that the beatings could continue, the most determined assailant being a woman with an army belt. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/letters.html letters from Bill McIntosh, Stefan Collini, George Schlesinger, Russell Bennetts, Bill Barker, Michael Houstoun, Jean Elliott http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/holm01_.html current affairs The anti-globalisation movement suffered a dizzying setback on 9/11. Symbolic gatecrashing into the well-guarded meeting places of the super-rich suddenly seemed a much more sinister activity than before. Busting up branches of Starbucks and other Seattle-style antics became anathema in an atmosphere of injured and vindictive patriotism. But Naomi Klein, the combative theorist and publicist of anti-globalisation, was not about to accept such guilt by association. Her reply, The Shock Doctrine, deals with the corporate acquisitiveness that she sees as ravaging the planet and reformulates the ideas of the anti-globalisation and anti-corporate movements for a post-9/11 world. Klein believes she has found the answer to a question that has perplexed many on the left: if every modern American government has been a tool of powerful business interests, what, if anything, makes the Bush administration uniquely odious? http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/curn02_.html poems [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/dobs01_.html biography What with all those Henrys being succeeded by all those other Henrys in the histories, and all those worryingly ghostly patriarchs looming over the tragedies - Julius Caesar, Old Hamlet, Banquo - you never get very far from paternity in the Shakespeare canon. Nor is fatherhood presented solely as a matter between father and son, in the manner highlighted to the point of overdetermination in the battle scene near York in Act II of Henry VI Part 2, when the stage is simultaneously occupied by a nameless father bearing the corpse of the son he has just killed, and a nameless son bearing the corpse of the father he has just killed, both of them watched by a king who, having inherited the crown from his never-to-be-equalled father, has now disinherited his own son, thereby occasioning the battle. Outside the obsessively patrilineal English histories, trouble between fathers and daughters seems just as common, whether the daughter is getting married, as in the comedies and the romances, or is married and then killed, as in several of the tragedies. The play now usually regarded as Shakespeare's masterpiece, King Lear, is one to which the father-daughter problem is absolutely central, and in which the repudiation and the dismissal into marriage of a doomed, hitherto beloved daughter happen in almost the same breath. [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/ever01_.html literature, theory and criticism If we speak of 'Shakespeare's Sonnets', we mean a collection with this name first published in 1609, when Shakespeare was 45 and most of his plays had been staged; he died only seven years later. The 1609 text is the only authentic source for all the editions of Shakespeare's Sonnets published since. So much is problematic about this first edition that it is best to start off with simplicities. The book contains 154 poems, all except two made up of 14 lines; with the exception of one poem, each of these lines has ten syllables and five iambic feet. With the exception of two, each of the poems has three quatrains, each containing two rhymes, followed by a rhyming couplet. There are only two major sonnet forms in English, and this is one of them, the Shakespearean. The other, the Petrarchan, is more coherent aesthetically, having only two rhymes in the octave (the first eight lines) and two more in the sestet (the last six), but it is much harder to write in English than in Italian, because English has fewer rhymes. With its series of stanzas, the Shakespearean form will always seem more a speaking than a singing poem, more reflective, meant for thinking or arguing in. But Shakespeare is no less 'poetic' than Petrarch. The Sonnets vary a lot, in quality as in substance. At their best they have an extraordinarily rich, dense and delicate verbal texture: they form an inimitable network of ideas, images, echoes and ambiguities, a world that is real yet always in process of change and evolution. [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/hard01_.html history About half a million anxious people left Paris in September 1939 after the declaration of war. Then a workaday calm reclaimed the city, as French propaganda continued playing in the key of imminent victory: the government, headed by the right-leaning Radical Edouard Daladier, convinced most of France that the Allies would be more than a match for the Wehrmacht. No doubt there were still Parisians who imagined they'd have to pack their bags and head out eventually - which they did, when the Phoney War ended in May 1940. In the meantime foreboding was blunted by a fatal propensity to look on the bright sight. [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/lade01_.html biography The heroic image of Proust in his cork-lined room, valiantly racing against death to finish his masterpiece, is now so ingrained that it eclipses that of the spoiled 30-year-old who left messages for his mother complaining about noise made by the servants; bullied her into throwing dinner parties for people who sneered at the family; and, later, challenged the father of a young man he had flirted with to a duel because the son had failed to respond with sufficient indignation to rumours about Proust's sexual tendencies. [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/soar01_.html current affairs The trial of eight men charged with conspiracy to murder and 'conspiracy to commit an act of violence likely to endanger the safety of an aircraft' is underway at Woolwich Crown Court, an enclave of Belmarsh prison in South-East London. You remember the scenario: the components of liquid bombs to be carried in shampoo containers or contact lens solution or drinks cans or bottles of baby milk, to be assembled onboard in the loos and detonated with laptops, mobiles, camera flashes, iPods; there would be three exploding airliners, or six, or nine, or 12; they would be blown up mid-Atlantic, or over Miami, San Francisco, Chicago, New York. On successive days in the summer of 2006 newspaper billboards blared out how close we were to disaster: the attacks were set for 16 August; no, 22 August; no, the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Back then, you could take your pick. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/gree03_.html classical civilisation No one reading James Davidson's enormous and impassioned book, which barely acknowledges the existence, much less the vast numerical superiority, of Greek heterosexual society, would get the impression that Greek homoeroticism was anything less than the central principle determining the varied cultural patterns of all those obstinately independent and idiosyncratic city-states. To take one random example: the eros that inspired and bound together, in life and death, the three hundred lovers of Thebes' elite fighting regiment, the Sacred Band, was indeed a powerful and socially significant force; but there is something fundamentally unreal (and in the end comic) about treating it as the only kind of eros that counted. [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/wood01_.html film American films about the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby's Coming Home and Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn't going to get told. John Wayne's film The Green Berets (1968) told another story, but it didn't tell that one. The cluster of new films about the Iraq War is different in both respects. The war is still going on - indeed has no visible end, in spite of what everyone wants and politicians like to promise - and although terrible damage is still done almost exclusively to Americans in these movies, even worse harm is inflicted on America, on the country's best idea of itself. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/mack01_.html economics Last November, I spent several days in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf, in banks' headquarters in the City and in the pale wood and glass of a hedge fund's St James's office trying to understand the credit crisis that had erupted over the previous four months. I became intrigued by an oddity that I came to think of as the end-of-the-world trade. The trade is the purchase of insurance against what would in effect be the failure of the modern capitalist system. It would take a cataclysm - around a third of the leading investment-grade corporations in Europe or half those in North America going bankrupt and defaulting on their debt - for the insurance to be paid out. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/burr01_.html fiction Even serious and persistent readers often say they can't finish Salman Rushdie's novels. His unfinishability has some obvious causes. Wearyingly encrusted description is the natural mode of the earlier fiction. In Midnight's Children the central character's dog dies, but dogs can't just die in Rushdie: they have to be abandoned on the other side of town, they have to be cursed, they have to be superhumanly loyal, they have to run after their owner's car for miles. Even then they can't just keel over with exhaustion. They have to have their guts explode: 'she burst an artery as she ran and died spouting blood from her mouth and her behind, under the gaze of a hungry cow.' That is an exemplary Rushdie sentence, right down to the presence of the detached observer, the cow who is interested in the dog's death for all the wrong reasons. [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/holl05_.html poems [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/scot01_.html fiction Thirty years ago, the campus novels of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury mythologised a setting that expressed, better than any other, the cultural and ideological chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. The main characters were rarely students, but all the energy in these comedies of social transition flowed from the young: it was their politics and their sexuality that the generations above them were forced to flatter or fight, exploit or succumb to. Lodge's middle-aged professors were shaken out of their rut by the impressive oddness of the young. But the demographic centre of gravity has moved the other way since then; most students I know already act middle-aged, while society finds itself gazing at old age with the fascinated uncertainty that was formerly reserved for the young. By next year, apparently, there will be more pensioners than children in the UK. Not long after that it will become practically impossible to die. We shall have decades in which to watch ourselves rot. [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/whea01_.html poems [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/wood03_.html literature, theory and criticism An old woman leans out of her window and, 'because of her excessive curiosity', leans too far: she falls to the ground and shatters to pieces. A second old woman leans out of her window to see what has happened to the first - and also leans too far, tumbling to the same fate. More women follow suit (a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth), a chain that ends only because the narrator of this story, 'sick of watching them', breaks off to go to the market. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/camp01_.html art The work in The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock is from the British Museum's own holdings. One of the four Edward Hopper etchings is Evening Wind. A naked girl kneeling on a bed looks out through an open window. Curtains billow inwards. Her head, turned from you, is hidden by long hair which is pushed about by the wind. In East Side Interior another young woman sits at a sewing machine by another open window. Night on the El Train shows a couple at the end of an empty carriage. She is twisted away from you, towards her companion and the window behind them. He has a straw boater on his knee. The etchings were done when Hopper was still making a living as an illustrator of magazine stories and advertisements. He loathed the job, but his etchings, like his illustrations, drop you into stories. You can hardly see the faces but these are nonetheless characters. The rooms and the carriage (established by heavy, hatched shadows), as much as the people, make you wonder what will happen next. Although the overt narrative proper to illustration will eventually be replaced by more enigmatic evocations of place, Hopper would go on making you wonder what has happened - or will happen. They are among the best prints made in the 20th century. [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n09/thap01_.html current affairs In Kathmandu, the conventional wisdom has it that you show up early on voting day: the lines at the booth may be longer, but the chances are that no one else will yet have voted in your name. And trouble, if it comes, comes in the afternoon. On 10 April, I joined the women's line outside the voting booth at Sano Gauchar, in Baneshwor. Conversation mainly had to do with the electronic voting machines that were being tested for the first time in Nepal, courtesy of the Indian government, and whether it might be possible, if no one minded, to jump the queue. (Everybody minded.) The Nepali Congress Party's candidate ambled by at one point, offering the women polite namastes, and the men hearty handshakes. Hot on his trail came a huddle of irate Maoists: 'He's not allowed to canvass! If he wants to come to the booth, he has to sit to one side!' The offending candidate had left by then; so it was the Maoists who sat to one side, glowering. [ The full text of this article is only available to subscribers to the print edition of the London Review of Books ]