http://www.lrb.co.uk/ Literary review publishing essay-length book reviews and topical articles on politics, literature, history, philosophy, science and the arts by leading writers and thinkers en-gb LRB (London) Ltd. Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 GMT 20160 ben@lrb.co.uk (Ben Campbell) registrar@lrb.co.uk (Ben Campbell) http://www.lrb.co.uk/assets/images/lrb_160_w_on_b.gif http://www.lrb.co.uk/ London Review of Books logo http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/ande01_.html history 'The greatest single truth to declare itself in the wake of 1989,' J.G.A. Pocock wrote two years afterwards,is that the frontiers of 'Europe' towards the east are everywhere open and indeterminate. 'Europe', it can now be seen, is not a continent - as in the ancient geographers' dream - but a subcontinent: a peninsula of the Eurasian landmass, like India in being inhabited by a highly distinctive chain of interacting cultures, but unlike it in lacking a clearly marked geophysical frontier. Instead of Afghanistan and the Himalayas, there are vast level areas through which conventional 'Europe' shades into conventional 'Asia', and few would recognise the Ural mountains if they ever reached them.But, he went on, empires - of which in its fashion the European Union must be accounted one - had always needed to determine the space in which they exercised their power, fixing the borders of fear or attraction around them. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/mcki01_.html politics In 1964, Harold Wilson described the record of the (outgoing) Conservative government as '13 wasted years'. If the present Parliament lasts its full term - as seems likely - the electorate will be asked to pass judgment on 13 years of Labour rule. Voters today seem to have the same view of Labour as Wilson had of the Tories all those years ago. Many who once wished Labour well are now wondering whether they can vote Labour at all, or whether they should stop voting tactically. This is an important decision: the Labour majorities in the last three elections have been much enlarged by people choosing to vote for the candidate thought most likely to defeat the Tory - a spontaneous alternative vote. Since the country's politicians have refused to reform the country's medieval system of voting, the electorate has reformed it for itself. But it is a reform without any statutory basis: people can choose to practise it or not. Labour thus faces a double threat. Not merely that people will no longer vote Labour, but that they will vote as they really want to - Lib Dem, for example - whatever the consequences. And they will do so because they no longer believe keeping the Tories out is the main object of politics. Labour's position, though not irrecoverable, is therefore serious, approaching desperate. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/wood03_.html current affairs The conflict in South Ossetia has produced a cloud of rhetoric that seems to have grown in inverse proportion to the intensity of fighting on the ground. Once the outcome became clear - a crushing Russian military victory - Cold War imagery flooded the Western press. Far more than the status of a tiny mountainous enclave in the South Caucasus was said to be at stake: not only was Georgia's territorial integrity imperilled by Russian tyranny, but the future of democracy was under threat. In the Washington Post of 11 August, Robert Kagan asserted that the conflict will be seen as 'a turning point no less significant' than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Given this 'much bigger drama', 'the details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important.' http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/turn03_.html fiction Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace talked about why, in much of his work, narrative is split into body-text and footnotes:There's a way, it seems to me, that reality's fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about . . . writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it's very unified, and . . . I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren't totally disorienting - I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that's nicely fractured, but nobody's gonna read it.Last year, Helen DeWitt posted this passage on paperpools, her blog: it 'says everything I might have wanted to say about life, the universe, postmodernism and Your Name Here.' Your Name Here is a 120,000-word novel; DeWitt is one of its authors, the category of authorship itself having been split. (At this point, it might have been appropriate to spin off into a footnote about its other author, Ilya Gridneff, an Australian journalist of Russian origin, born in Sydney in 1979 and currently working in Papua New Guinea for the Australian Associated Press, except that the DeWitt/Gridneff partnership doesn't do much fracturing with footnotes. Epistolary structure and multiple avatars, yes, scans of original documents, including contracts, because 'without the contractual details any book is just fogbound Jamesian kitsch,' but not really footnotes: perhaps because, since it's an authorship made up of two people, the challenge is to discover how, like Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, they might ever be brought together at all.) http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/wood01_.html film http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/lanc01_.html science and technology http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n16/raba01_.html current affairs As Barack Obama never tires of saying, America is a country where 'ordinary people can do extraordinary things.' In January 2006, Neil Entwistle, a seemingly ordinary 27-year-old Englishman with an honours degree from the University of York, who had been living in the US for barely four months, shot dead his American wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter, Lillian, with a long-barrelled Colt .22 revolver borrowed from his father-in-law's gun collection. By the time the bodies were discovered in their house in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, huddled together beneath a rumpled duvet in the brand-new four-poster bed bought by the couple just ten days before, Entwistle was home in England, living with his parents in Worksop, as if what had happened in America was a violent dream from which he'd woken to reality in his old back bedroom at 27 Coleridge Road. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n16/hard01_.html current affairs At the time of the parliamentary elections in Serbia earlier this summer, the possibility that Radovan Karadzic, once the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, might be handed over to stand trial at The Hague seemed remote. The acquittal of the former KLA leader Ramush Haradinaj in April had stunned opinion in Serbia and added to the sense that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was a Serb-grinding machine which spat out Bosnians, Kosovo Albanians and Croats intact. The idea of any more Serbs going on trial was not popular: even someone like Karadzic, born in Montenegro, long resident in Sarajevo and regarded by many as a ludicrous figure. His arrest late last month illustrates how rapidly things are changing in Serbia, and how keen the new pro-European leadership is to drive its policies forward. The process of EU accession has long been conditional on the delivery of the big three: Karadzic, Goran Hadzic, a Croatian Serb wanted for the massacre of Croats in Vukovar in 1991, and Ratko Mladic, the hands-on commander at Srebrenica. But the capture of Dr Karadzic - psychiatrist, poet, New Age healer, telegenic bigot and mass murderer - is the greater public relations coup. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n16/klar01_.html current affairs Unlike the oil 'shocks' of the 1970s, the current energy crisis is almost certain to be long-lasting. None of the quick fixes proposed by pundits and politicians - drilling in protected wilderness and maritime areas, curbs on commodity speculators, pressure on members of Opec to increase output - is likely to have much impact. In 1973-74 and again in 1979-80, events in the Middle East led to a sharp reduction in the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, causing a contraction in global supplies and a rise in energy prices, and thus sparking a global recession. But when equilibrium of a sort was restored to the region, the oil began to flow again and the crisis passed. Now, however, the imbalance between supply and demand is largely due to factors inherent in oil commerce itself - and so is less easily solved. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n16/clar05_.html art Henri Matisse's portrait of his wife, Amélie Parayre, was first shown at the Salon d'Automne in 1905. The catalogue called it simply La Femme au chapeau. Journalists soon decided (or pretended) that Matisse's painting was scandalous, and the public turned up in droves to make fun of it. So far so predictable: the script was forty years old. But on 15 November something unusual happened. Two paragraphs of real and vehement criticism appeared in the Symbolist journal L'Hermitage, signed by the painter-critic Maurice Denis. Ever since, they have haunted our picture of 20th-century art: What one finds above all, particularly in Matisse, is artificiality; not literary artificiality, which follows from the search to give expression to ideas; nor decorative artificiality, as the makers of Turkish and Persian carpets conceived it; no, something more abstract still; painting beyond every contingency, painting in itself, the pure act of painting . . . What you are doing, Matisse, is dialectic: you begin from the multiple and individual, and by definition, as the neo-Platonists would say, that is, by abstraction and generalisation, you arrive at ideas, at pure Forms of paintings [des noumènes de tableaux]. You are only happy when all the elements of your work are intelligible to you. Nothing must remain of the conditional and accidental in your universe: you strip it of everything that does not correspond to the possibilities of expression provided by reason . . . You should resign yourself to the fact that everything cannot be intelligible. Give up the idea of rebuilding a new art by means of reason alone. Put your trust in sensibility, in instinct. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n16/soar01_.html science and technology http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n16/wood01a.html film http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/letters.html Correspondence The letters page from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 17 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/contents.html Table of contents Table of contents from London Review of Books Volume 30 issue 17