A Website of the Radical Imagination
Your editor realized it was dumb not to have put the vid of these Kenyan kids up top when I posted Charlie Keil’s poem (which they helped spark) so…
ted talks this morning one on laughter makes you smarter
another by 93-year old fitness freak got a few yucks
then I went to Drum & Dance Kenyan Children**
The nausea produced by Trump’s “alternative facts”—which are neither facts nor viable alternatives to facts, being merely lies–has led to a good deal of finger-pointing. Is the seeming legitimacy of such lies owed to advanced (post-modern, “post-truth”) literary theory? For, here, it’s said, readings for the truth of complex texts result in nothing more than a vertigo of indetermination. We have no decisive outcomes but only different hypotheses, having unfathomable degrees of validity, that vie for primacy with no end in sight. It’s not my remit to do a history of the concept of truth-skepticism, but we did not need Foucault and Derrida to introduce us to this great negation. There are paramount exemplars of such concerns in German thought, from at least the 18th century on: Doubts about the accessibility of truth abound, but they are not given equivalent status with lies. The polymath G. E. Lessing acknowledged “the diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process.”[1] We have a kind of modern radicalization in Kafka’s skepticism: “A certain [kind of] truth might be found only in the chorus … or choir (im Chor) (emphasis added).[2] Bottom line: we did not need to be vexed by literary theory to declare that “alternative facts” may not be turned into a chorus of part-truth viewpoints and opinions.
As we return finally to another anthropological order, we find the suggestion that criticizing Trump “for not being consistent, reliable, or rational is to misunderstand his leadership philosophy.” Is that true? I’d aver that he has no detectable “philosophy,” unless it’s to have none. By contrast, it’s tempting to invoke, as possibly redeeming, the mind of another ex-President: Barack Hussein Obama.
A mind so fine no idea could violate it? Midway through Tori et Lokita – the Dardenne Brother’s latest film – there’s a sequence that brings home the flaw in T.S. Eliot’s noble praise-line. The Dardennes crystallize an idea that’s suffused with feeling. What happens on screen isn’t a reduction or an abstraction or a violation. It’s an act of imagination.
Pogrom. That is the first word that came to mind when I heard about Huwwara. A rabid mob sowing violence, terror, fire and destruction, the terror magnified by the darkness, shops and houses and cars torched, with hundreds of injuries and – apparently by some miracle – just one death, of a man, Sameh Aqtash, who had just returned from volunteering help to victims of the earthquake in Turkey.
Horror and shame welled up close behind. This was a pogrom, but with the critical characters reversed. No longer were Jews the victims, in the classic, almost stereotypical role fixed by history and historiography for twenty-five centuries or more. Now Jews were “masters in their house”, as asserted by a minister in the new Israeli government, and determined to show it.[1]
Dear family and friends,As I write these words, the violent rule of gangs in Port au Prince in increasing, and reaching our neighborhood, which is also the neighborhood of US Embassy.
The Embassy is, during these very days, evacuating all non-emergency personnel.The effect on us is that our hospital now receives many warlike trauma and gunshot injuries, especially since the specialty hospital nearby that was managing them closed, precisely because of armed attack on their hospital.We cannot get surgeons to come to our area. It is a red zone. And like many hospitals in Port au Prince, we cannot even keep the competent people we already have, since many are fleeing Haiti to raise their families in a safer country.We are not capable of managing high level trauma. It means we stabilize the gunshot injured as best as we can and transfer them to a private surgery center at our expense, for which we have no budget but must act to save lives.We are facing the worse crisis we have ever faced in 34 years of dedicated mission here, and the consequences are not only the disintegration of a nation and all the institutions that constitute civilization, but the people are floundering in a tsunami of despair. The dangerous sickness of despair surrounds us like a violent sea in a hurricane.And yet amid all of this, there was Raphael.
David J. Wasserstein is professor of History and Jewish Studies at Vanderbilt University. Before coming to Vanderbilt he served as professor of Islamic history at Tel Aviv University. He’s provided the following short introduction to his poem which he’s translated from Hebrew into English.
After the pogrom in Huwwara, on 26-27 February, I was like many Jews and Israelis in shock. That shock eventually, a couple of days later, took shape in the text below. It is a cento, a work composed largely of quotations from other texts.
..A Verso article on the “downtown scene,” the fascist avant-garde, Yarvin and BAP, etc. I’ve been making “aesthetically alive art out of history’s flotsam” for years that takes in real brutality, not the overwrought racial/gendered disgust these people have at the symptoms of capitalism, but the mandarin left would rather talk about a bunch of liberal art school kids and failed models cosplaying fascism than look for anything genuinely new.
Feeling very impotent in the face of the gradual transformation of the country I joined precisely because of its struggle for democracy and socialism, I returned to my childhood companion, Thoreau. He’s the one who knows about civil disobedience…
I’m in thrall to chaud bonheur – hot happiness? – a phrase I just learned from Stanley Corngold (who uses it near the end of his post in this batch). The burn flashed me back to my twenties when I locked on promesse de bonheur from Stendhal’s passionate NO to Kant’s el blando Germanic aesthetic: “That is beautiful which pleases without interesting.” Oh, please, please, please…
The rag you’re reading has always hoped to cultivate instincts for happiness. (When I recall my crew’s gone good times in the 80s and 90s, it seems sadly apparent to me that First has served as a sort of substitute for all yesterday’s parties.) First’s fun had never been tuned to disengagement. In our time your editor has invoked C.L.R. James’ “struggle for happiness” and Arendt’s “public happiness.” You can trace the stages of First’s happiness in the About section of this website where there’s an archive of mission statements. What you’re reading here may end up there since I’ve found myself looking backward in this summer of our 25th year in the game.
It’s Playboi Carti’s “Sky” that’s put me in retrospective mode. Carti repurposes a melodic line from a hip hop track by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony that gave First of the Month its name.
At the risk of confirming the vicious aperçu of the Viennese senator in Karl-Lueger times who defined “Kultur” as “one Jew copying from another,” I will copy the words of Daniel Mendelsohn in his obituary paean to the editor Robert Gottlieb. Referring to the South Korean TV series Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Gottlieb found it, citing Mendelsohn, full of “honest intentions and stylistic conviction.”[i] I find them there too, and can do so because, again citing Mendelsohn, “he (Gottlieb) was trying furiously to persuade me to watch [it] when he fell ill,” and I’ve borrowed his persuasion.
“Oh! Al-Azhar! Inshallah” exclaims our taxi driver. This cabbie has realized he has no ordinary passenger, but a student of Egypt’s and Sunni Islam’s premier university. “Sheikh Adam” enunciates the driver, bestowing an honorific upon the rider and bringing home Al-Azhar University’s prestige to viewers of Tarik Saleh’s film Boy from Heaven. Our boy hero, Adam, has a common first day experience—crammed move-in, first brush with the library (where he floats through aisles, grazing precious covers softly), first bunk bed night. We catch an inkling of a smile as Adam lays himself down, tired body soon to rest. Beneath the minarets and shady arches, though, Al-Azhar is in flux. The institution’s presiding Grand Imam, a quasi-Pope figure in the Sunni world, dies—setting off a succession crisis between extremist Islamists and a more moderate, pro-secular government contingent.
Dear friends and family,
We found the five of them under a Mango tree last night, to which we had been led by bandits after a release deal was cut by their families.
We were the “guarantors” that the ransom given by their families would achieve their freedom. (This is, in fact, almost never the case, until multiple ransoms are paid.)
It was a dark 10pm, made up of many kinds of darkness.
At first the weather was fine and still. The thrushes were calling, and in the swamps close by something alive droned pitifully with a sound like blowing into an empty bottle. A snipe flew by, and the shot aimed at it rang out with a gay, resounding note in the spring air. But when it began to get dark in the forest a cold, penetrating wind blew inappropriately from the east, and everything sank into silence. Needles of ice stretched across the pools, and it felt cheerless, remote, and lonely in the forest. There was a whiff of winter.
Ivan Velikopolsky, the son of a sacristan, and a student of the clerical academy, returning home from shooting, kept walking on the path by the water-logged meadows. His fingers were numb and his face was burning with the wind. It seemed to him that the cold that had suddenly come on had destroyed the order and harmony of things, that nature itself felt ill at ease, and that was why the evening darkness was falling more rapidly than usual. All around it was deserted and peculiarly gloomy. The only light was one gleaming in the widows’ gardens near the river; the village, over three miles away, and everything in the distance all round was plunged in the cold evening mist. The student remembered that, as he had left the house, his mother was sitting barefoot on the floor in the entryway, cleaning the samovar, while his father lay on the stove coughing; as it was Good Friday nothing had been cooked, and the student was terribly hungry. And now, shrinking from the cold, he thought that just such a wind had blown in the days of Rurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter, and in their time there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression — all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better. And he did not want to go home.
From Simon Ley’s “Marginalia,” an essay included in his posthumous collection, The hall of uselessness (2013)...
Chekhov wrote some 250 stories — among all of them he singled out “The Student” as his favorite.
In his novel To Asmara, Thomas Keneally — the author best known for Schindler’s List — offered a compelling portrait of Eritrean caregivers amid an agonizing armed struggle for independence. I flashed on his fiction as I watched the short film (below) made by Times reporters embedded in a Ukrainian medical unit close to the front lines. The film is less romantic than To Asmara. Unlike the Eritrean heroes of Keneally’s novel, the Ukrainian doctors are not paragons. When they must care for a Russian prisoner of war, they do the job but…well, you’ll see. For now, let’s just stipulate the Ukrainians are not saints like Keneally’s fighters and healers. (Or, saying it another way that might speak to longtime First readers, there’s nobody like Fr. Frechette in this unit.)
