October 16th, 2017 — Criticism
From Russia with Grub = Salo from Ukraine
So after reading this review “Russian House Through the Eyes of a Russian Transplant in Austin,” (Austinot.com, September 19, 2017) by Yulia Dyukova (), I decided to check out this Russian House (Доме РоÑÑии).
I tried the salo, which looked like raw bacon, but was actually salted pork belly.
The homemade mustard and horseradish was probably the best I’ve ever had, best in Austin for sure.
I also randomly came across some “Revolutionary ceramics and textiles: USSR, 1919-1931,” this morning via TheCharnelHouse.org.
October 13th, 2017 — Criticism, Travel
Recent Thoughts on Russian Conservatism (with Literary Comparisons)
The structure of these regional directorates has remained largely unchanged for decades, which, when combined with the FSB’s system of personnel rotation, means that the fossilized provincial state security offices shape the FSB from within.
–Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, “Russia’s New Nobility: the Rise of the Security Services in Putin’s Kremlin,†Foreign Affairs, 89 (September–October 2010): 80–96 at 93.
*****
Russia has the third-largest gold and currency reserves in the world, but has become an international anti-model—a byword for non-modernization (and even de-modernization), uncompletitiveness, and chronic corruption….
One of the principle themes to emerge here is the Kremlin’s reluctance to graduate from its preoccupation with traditional security and geopolitical priorities to tackling a new global agenda.
–Bobo Lo, Russia and the New World Order, (London: Brookings Institution Press, 2015) 58, 72–73.
*****
Russian strategic theory today remains relatively unimaginative and highly dependent on the body of Soviet work with which Russia’s leaders are familiar.
–Maria Snegovaya, “Putin’s Information Warfare in Ukraine: Soviet Origins of Russia’s Hybrid Warfare,†(Institute for the Study of War: Washington, DC, September 2015) 7.
For comparative purposes only:
The generation’s insularity began to change in the mid-330s. For some members of this generation (most notably Praetextatus) the early 330s saw their initial foray into public life, a step that certainly increased their awareness of the age’s political developments. Others, like Ausonius, would have seen their awareness increase when they began studying law or pleading cases. As members of the final pagan generation moved into their midtwenties, their focus shifted from the classrooms and parties of intellectual centers like Athens and Bordeaux to the social and political life of members of the imperial elite. These young men began assuming the duties and responsibilities of mature citizens. As the next chapter will show, they did so with a mixture of seriousness and conservatism that would become characteristic of their approach to public life.
–Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2015) 58.
*****
“It was said [by Burke], that, as she [France] had speedily fallen, she might speedily rise again. He doubted this. That the fall from an height was with an accelerated velocity; but to lift a weight up to that height again was difficult, and opposed by the laws of physical and political gravitation.â€
–“Substance of the Speech in the Debate on the Army Estimates in the House of Commons,†Tuesday, February 9, 1790. From The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke – In Twelve Volumes.†Vol. III. John C. Nimmo, London. 1887.
*****
“What floods ideas are! How quickly they cover all that they are commissioned to destroy and bury, and how rapidly they create frightful abysses!â€
–Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), III, iii, § 3.
*****
Historical experience [in intelligence gathering], even if inadequate, is the most reliable guidance system in existence. It may have to be discarded on occasion, but it must never be disregarded. In this sense, then, conservatism is mandated by prudence.
–Walter Laqueur, A World of Secrets: the Uses and Limits of Intelligence. (New York, NY: Best Books, 1985) 283.
October 11th, 2017 — Books, reading
The Life of Books in 18th Century Autobiography
From the Autobiography (1795) of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794):
It is whimsical enough, that as soon as I left Magdalen College my taste for books began to revive; but it was the same blind and boyish taste for the pursuit of exotic history. Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved—to write a book.
From the Autobiography (1731?) of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744):
In a conversation which he had with Vico in a bookstore on the history of collections of canons, he asked him if he were married. And when Vico answered that he was not, he inquired if he wanted to become a Theatine. On Vico’s replying that he was not of noble birth, the father answered that that need be no obstacle, for he would obtain a dispensation from Rome. Then Vico, seeing himself obliged by the great honor the father paid him, came out with it that his parents were old and poor and he was their only hope. When the father pointed out that men of letters were rather a burden than a help to their families, Vico replied that perhaps it would not be so in his case. Then the father closed the conversation by saying: “That is not your vocation.â€
—The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, translated by Max Harold Fisch & Thomas Goddard Bergin, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1944) 134-35.
October 9th, 2017 — reading
Spending Sundays with Susan Sontag
Rebecca Chace’s “Regarding the Pain of Trump” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, September 30, 2017, has several nods and references to Susan Sontag. And I was reading some Sontag these last two weeks: Where the Stress Falls (2001) and At the Same Time (2007), and came across this observation in the latter book:
The writer in me distrusts the god citizen, the “intellectual ambassador,†the human rights activist—those roles which are mentioned in the citation for this prize, much as I am committed to them. The writer is more skeptical, more self-doubting, than the person who tries to do (and to support the right thing).  –“Literature is Freedomâ€
October 7th, 2017 — reading
A Pair of Thoughts on Empty Rooms
Upton House (Joseph Lister/Wikicommons)
First from the Irish writer James Stephens (1880-1950):
At last the room was as bare as a desert and almost as uninhabitable. A room without furniture is a ghostly place. Sounds made therein are uncanny, even the voice puts off its humanity and rings back with a bleak and hollow note, an empty resonance tinged with the frost of-winter. There is no other sound so deadly, so barren and dispiriting as the echoes of an empty room. The gaunt woman in the bed seemed less gaunt than her residence, and there was nothing more to be sent to the pawnbroker or the secondhand dealer.
–The Charwoman’s Daughter, (London: Macmillan & Co., 1912) “Ch. XVI,” 100.
Next, 102 years later, from Wilfred M. McClay of the University of Oklahoma:
An ordinary but disquieting phenomenon: the translation of place into space—the transformation of a setting that had once been charged with human meaning into one from which the meaning has departed, something empty and inert, a mere space. We all have experienced this, some of us many times. Think of the strange emotion we feel when we are moving out of the place where we have been living, and we finish clearing all our belongings out of the apartment or the house or the dorm room—and we look back at it one last time, to see a space that used to be the center of our world, reduced to nothing but bare walls and bare floors. Even when there are a few remaining signs of our time there—fading walls pockmarked with nail holes, scuffs in the floor, spots on the carpet—they serve only to render the moment more poignant, since we know that these small injuries to the property will soon be painted over and tided up, so that in the fullness of time there will be no trace left of us in that spot.
–“Introduction: Why Place Matters.†Why Place Matters,
Edited by McClay and Ted V. McAllister, (New York, NY: New Atlantis Books, 2014) 4.
September 29th, 2017 — reading
Recently in Russia: four links
I guess (readingwise) we’re going to Russia this weekend. Here are four interesting reads today:
- “Israel Trade with Russia Leaps by 25%,” by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The Forward, September 29, 2017.
- “Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder takes seat on Rosneft board,” and “The Rosneft seat and Gerhard Schröder’s Kremlin credentials,” by editors at Deutsche Welle, September 29, 2017.
- “Cooking with Gogol,” by Valerie Stivers, The Paris Review, September 29, 2017.
- UPDATED: Here’s one more:
September 26th, 2017 — reading
The Religious Diplomacy of Joseph P. Kennedy
Religion is opinions and actions, determined and restricted with stipulations and prescribed for a community by their first ruler, who seeks to obtain through their practicing it a specific purpose with respect to them or by means of them.
––Al-Farabi (872–951 AD), The Book of Religion[1]
Al Smith’s presidential loss in 1928 and Jack Kennedy’s Houston speech in 1960 concerning religion and government have both been run through the ringer aplenty. There are shelfs and stacks of books that compare and contrast (and exhaust) those two events, and I’m honestly not very interested in reading more about them.
But after reading Robert Dalleck’s A Life Unfinished: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (2001), I was struck that the most interesting character was Kennedy’s father Joseph Patrick Kennedy.
So soon enough I began reading David Nasaw’s The Patriarch: the Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (2012), and soon enough, I came upon these two quite remarkable passages:
Opposing or remaining neutral to Jack’s candidacy, as the church leaders now appeared to be doing, was, Kennedy believed, a betrayal not only of him, his son, and his family, but of the millions of American Catholics who stood to benefit from the election of one of their own to the presidency of the United States. For perhaps the first time in his life, certainly for the first time since the death of Joe Jr., Joseph P. Kennedy was forced to reconsider, to reevaluate, the ties that bound him to his church. “My relationship with the Church will never be the same,†he confessed to Galeazzi in an April 17 letter,†and certainly, never the same with the hierarchy. But that will not make any difference to them, I am sure, and I can assure you that it will not make any difference to me. For the last few years which I have left, I will indulge myself at least in continuing to believe that friends are friends when you need them. Please do not be upset yourself about my attitude. I would not want anything to annoy you.†[2]
And:
[Billy] Graham, on arriving at the Palm Beach house in mid-January, was greeted by the president-elect. “My father’s out by the pool. He wants to talk to you.†At poolside, the two shook hands, then Kennedy, Graham recalled in his autobiography, “came straight to the point: ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ †Kennedy told the evangelist (and Nixon supporter) that he and Father Cavanaugh had been in Stuttgart, Germany, when Graham lectured through an interpreter to an audience of sixty thousand. “When we visited the pope three days later, we told him about it. He said he wished he had a dozen such evangelists in our church. When Jack was elected, I told him that one of the first things he should do was to get acquainted with you. I told him you could be a great asset to the country, helping heal the division over the religious problem in the campaign.’†[3]
So what’s happening to Joseph Patrick Kennedy (1888–1969) in these two instances? If we apply Al-farabi’s formulation to these two instances, the first thing to consider is what we interpret Al-farabi to mean by “first ruler.†A literal interpretation would mean George Washington, and one could elaborate and discuss Washington’s deism and any sense of “civil religion†stemming from that which might’ve later been prescribed to the country’s citizenry. A contextual interpretation would mean John Kennedy, and one could elaborate and discuss Jack’s Catholicism and any sense of “civil religion.â€
In the first instance, Kennedy has lost tremendous faith in the administrators of American Catholicism following the election of his son to the presidency.
In the second, we see that, despite that loss of faith, Kennedy still wants what (he sees) as best for American Catholicism, and the best he could see for that Catholicism in 1960 was for it to attempt to reconcile, understand, and begin a dialogue with American Protestantism.
Nearly sixty years later, it is easy to say––particularly with the rise and fall of the Religious Right––that that reconciliation was never absolute. There seem to be more significant divisions within the American Protestantism of 2017 and within the American Catholicism of 2017 than the divisions between the two.
[1] Alfarabi, The Political Writings, Translated by Charles E. Butterworth. (Cornell UP, Ithaca, NY), “Book of Religion†p. 93, § 1.
[2] Nasaw, David. The Patriarch: the Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy, (New York, NY: Penguin, 2012) 724.
[3] Nasaw 757.
September 19th, 2017 — reading
Howdy from Saudi: Two Recent Pieces on the Kingdom
One long:
“The Saudi Trillions” by Malise Ruthven, London Review of Books, September 2017.
One short:
“Saudi Arabia wasn’t always this repressive. Now it’s unbearable” by Jamal Khashoggi, Washington Post, September 18, 2017.
Update:
“Saudi Columnist in Exceptional Commentary on Saudi Regime’s Efforts to Silence ‘September 15 Movement’: It’s a Mistake to Restrict Citizens’ Freedom of Thought” by editors of MEMRI [Middle East Media Research Institute], September 19, 2017.
September 11th, 2017 — reading
Things Read Over the Weekend
“Famous Viking warrior burial revealed to be that of a woman,” by Jamie Seidel, News.com.au, September 10, 2107.
***
“How guest Hans Christian Andersen destroyed his friendship with Dickens,” by Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian, September 9, 2017.
***
“Girls and Men: On Svetlana Alexievich’s ‘The Unwomanly Face of War‘,” by Oksana Maksymchuk, Max Rosochinsky, Los Angeles Review of Books, September 8, 2017.
***
“Traveler Restaurant: this small-town Connecticut restaurant gives each diner a free book from its vast library,” Atlasobscura.com.
September 8th, 2017 — Criticism
The Rhetoric of Data in the Writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates
I don’t have much to disagree with after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest piece for the October 2017 issue of The Atlantic, which is an excerpt from his next book. The excerpt is titled: “The First White President: the foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.”
I do think Coates’ rhetorical framing of the voting statistics he cites is quite misleading, but I’m will to grant that Coates’s misleadership as a writer in this particular case was unintentional.
When Coates quotes the data-crunchers at Edison Research–
 Trump’s white support was not determined by income. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites making $50,000 to $99,999 by 28 points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 points. This shows that Trump assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascardads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant.
–I must assume all the above numbers are accurate. But so are other numbers and contexts: like “Voter turnout at 20-year low in 2016” as CNN’s Gregory Wallace reported at the end of last November. Â Only “about 55% of voting age citizens cast ballots this year.”
So after all of the rhetoric and emotion and hard number-crunching logic behind the citations Coates gives, he has yet to consider the 45% of American voters who abstained from voting for anybody for any reason.
When Coates writes “Trump’s performance among whites was dominant,” that’s was only among  those who bothered to leave their house. Nearly half stayed home, no matter their creed or color.
Not to mention that data by the American National Election Studies “suggest that about 8.4 million 2012 Obama voters backed Trump in 2016 and 2.5 million Romney voters supported Clinton,” for whom Coates (at least in the excerpt in The Atlantic) says nothing of these voters who switched from 2012 to 2016.
