Whose Horn is that You're Tooting?

This post falls solidly into the self-promotion category. Last fall I wrote a review of recent books by critic Rebecca Solnit and photographer Richard Misrach for an online journal called Invisible Culture which is published by the smart, talented graduate students in the Rochester program in Visual and Cultural Studies. Well, the piece - initially entitled "Disasters, Political not Natural" - has just appeared; you can find it here.

And, for the nerdier among you, my paper "The Arithmetic of Compassion ~ Rethinking the Politics of Photography" is due out in the British Journal of Political Science in late spring/early summer. You can find the abstract here and, if you have access to CUP journals, can get the pre-publication version on line. The paper has been making the rounds of journal editorial processes for a number of years and finally has found a good home.

Weekend Reading Assignment

Boy & Dog in a Johnnypump (detail), 1982 © Jean Michel Basquiet.

In the past couple of weeks, two essays by Rebecca Solnit have appeared at The Nation; one on radicalism and revolution is here and one extending her work on disaster and politics to the recent events in Japan is here.

And in the April issue of Harper's John Berger has offered an appreciation of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Unfortunately, if understandably, Harper's maintains a pretty much impermeable pay-wall. Berger counsels perseverance when approaching the artist. His first sentence: "Before you get to him,you have to walk through a lot of hot air, because he became a local and then a global legend, and you have to ignore the screeches of the vultures who deal his work." I recommend that you persevere and track down a copy of the magazine.

Finally, I recommend this piece from The Washington Post a few weeks back on the issues underlying the Republican assault on unions. I neglected to mention it at the time. It is by two political scientists Paul Pierson and Jacob Hacker who are smart and insightful on American politics and power generally.

Preview: Infinite City

Right Wing of the Dove ~ The Bay Area as
Conservative/Military Brain Trust (Antonia Juhasz).

Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habitats and Queer Public Spaces.
Cartography by Ben Pease & Artwork by Mona Caron.

These are samples from a forthoming book by Rebecca Solnit and a slew of artists, map makers and designers. The collaborative undertaking is a push to get us to re-imagine San Francisco. And it is a push to get us to re-think the use of maps - away from exclusive concern with official locations and consumer opportunities and toward the more expansive, less well publicized, but terribly important culture and politics of a given place.

Regular readers will know that I think very highly of Solnit - indeed, she is perhaps our most acute and creative public intellectual, a wonderful writer with good politics who works on and with visual artists of various sorts. You can find some of my previous posts on she and her work here.

Lessons from Katrina

As we approach the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina destroying New Orleans, I am heading out to the annual APSA convention. Once again the conference is in Washington, DC - as it was on that weekend in 2005. Posts will be - at best - intermittent through Sunday.

But here are a set of essays by Rebecca Sonit on lessons for the post-Katrina world - from The Nation here, The L.A. Times here, and from Yes! here. Solnit points out, once again, that the dangers in NOLA in the immediate wake of the storm emerged more from ineptitude and malign neglect on the part of government, the misrepresentations of the media and the violence of mercenaries, police and white vigilantes - all animated largely by racist fear fear and animosity - than from the poor residents whom the storm displaced.

Reading Around

"If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have." ~ Tony Judt

That is an ironic observation for someone like me who is committed to the importance of photographic images as tools of communication. You can find the NYRB essay where Judt issues it here. And, for two examples of smart women masterfully using words to probe and decipher our political predicaments, you can find essays by Rebecca Solnit on Louisiana post-Deepwater Horizon here at the London Review of Books, and by Suzie Linfield on genocide and the agony of 'reconciliation' here in Guernica.

New Books ~ Invisible: Covert Operations & Classified Landscapes

This is a book that seems extremely promising. I have mentioned Trevor Paglen glancingly here and here. And with Rebecca Solnit, who writes revealingly about landscapes more generally, as a co-conspirator, this is one I will order post haste.

New Books ~ Solnit/Caron & Pollitt

My birthday was a couple of weeks ago. I won't divulge my age; we can simply say 'advancing.' In any case, today I accompanied Susan to a local pub to watch the opening match of the World Cup. I say "opening" in the most parochial possible sense - we went to watch England play the U.S., not South Africa versus Mexico. But the whole event is about parochial interests and identities after all, right?

My son Douglas drove cross town to meet us. After the match (let's just say Susan was rightly disappointed with the outcome) Doug took the opportunity to give me two books he'd bought me as birthday presents. Thanks buddy! The books are new and were written by two politically astute, terrifically smart, and talented women. If you stop by the blog much you won't be surprised that these made it onto my birthday list. Here are s a couple of teasers.

~~~~~~~~~~

“The Bestiaries, or books of beasts, of almost a thousand years ago contained much that we no long believe. There is no stone in the heads of toads that neutralizes poison and there are no unicorns at all, so the ability of their horns to likewise undo poison is not particularly helpful either. Those old books were compendiums of known and imagined animals, of eagles and dragons and elephants, with lore about their powers, lives and meanings, often moral and religious meanings, They were also compendiums of sheer wonder, but the sense of wonder that emerges from scientific knowledge is at least as great, whether its about Belding’s ground squirrel of the Sierra Nevada that hibernates about eight months a year or the elephant seal that not only can hold its breath underwater for an hour but often does so for twenty minutes or more at a time while sleeping on the shore. Or the blue whale, whose heart is bigger than an American bison and beats about six times a minute, a tenth the speed of ours, or the hummingbird in flight, whose tiny heart beats a thousand times a minute.”*

~~~~~~~~~~

From a Notebook
Katha Pollitt**

The final vanity, to think
you're not your life, that even today
as\t the last possible moment
you can walk away; as out of cheap hotel,
leaving ten dollars under the key on the bureau.
Why bother to lock the door? The fuzzy TV,
the footsole-colored bedspread,
the quart of milk souring on the windowsill,
you always new they had nothing to do with you
although you were used to them
and even grateful,
alone as you were, in a strange city.

_____________
* From: Rebecca Solnit & Mona Caron. A California Bestiary. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2009, pages 5-6.
** From: Katha Pollitt. The Mind-Body Problem. New York: Random House, 2009, page 50 .

Dangerous Clichés at The Times

Situation getting out of control in Chile’s second largest city. Photo credit.

In a reflection on media coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, Rebecca Solnit remarks:

"Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences.

I’m talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I’m talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol."

Yesterday, as if to punctuate her observation, The New York Times ran this Op-Ed by Donald McNeil, one of the paper's staff writers. The essays apparently was prompted by reports of widespread looting following the even more recent earthquake in Chile:

"Nonetheless, a pattern that now is a cliché of disaster journalism broke out there as well: Early reports of people raiding markets for food and diapers were quickly followed by pictures of people carrying TVs and dishwashers off into a city with no electricity. Intact stores were broken into. A department store in Concepción was set ablaze. In a few places, roving bands robbed anyone they could. Residents who formed self-defense posses were quoted saying that the “human earthquake” was worse than the geological one.

[. . .]

By midweek, with thousands of troops deployed, the pictures began shifting: young men spread-eagled on the ground with gun muzzles pressed behind their ears.

All in all, it sounded a lot like Haiti. Or like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Or like Dayton, Ohio, after the 1913 flood. Or like Rome in 410.

It is hard to name a single disruption in the social order, natural or man-made, that has not triggered looting somewhere. [. . .] Though looting starts spontaneously, how quickly it stops appears to depend on how rapid and severe a response it meets. That, in brief, is the argument for using force decisively."

That what McNeil reports is "a cliché of disaster journalism" seems lost on he and the editorial page crew at The Times. Does he question the cliché? Or, does he presume that journalists and their enabling editors and publishers, who nicely conform to the stereotype that Solnit identifies, are getting the story "right"? Professional courtesy, I suppose.

As a start toward thinking rather than regurgitating clichés, McNeil might have read this report from his own paper which suggests that in "New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina" what he calls "the argument for using force decisively" appears, simply put, to have been little more than a rationale for murder and cover-up. The alleged perpetrators are not "looters" but the officers from NOLA police department. Moreover, as these reports [1] [2] from The Nation suggest, the police were hardly the only ones who may have acted murderously. By peddling clichés, The Times is directly perpetuating the distorted ideas that elites use to rationalize violence and panic.

Rebecca Solnit on "the Eeyore chorus"

I'll admit to being susceptible to the sort of over-privileged cynicism at which Solnit takes aim in this essay over at The Nation. Among the reasons I most like Solnit is that her writings provide a strong antidote.

Expansive and Up-Close, Photographic Environmentalism

I recently confessed to being the owner of an Apple laptop. I therefore found this report on the newly established relationship between Apple and photographer Richard Misrach pretty interesting. Apple has made one of Misrach's remarkable images the default wall paper for their new iPad device. You can find the image here. I guess this makes Misrach's work the visual equivalent of Muzak?

More seriously, Misrach is an environmentalist. Rebecca Solnit has typically smart things to say about the politics of his work in her recent Storming the Gates of Paradise where she suggests of his beautifully expansive landscapes that they "challenged us to feel the conflicts of being fully present in a complicated world." I think she is right in that assessment. The irony, I suppose, is to imagine Ed Burtynsky or Chris Jordan making one of their disconcertingly tightly focused close-ups of discarded high-tech devices only this time using defunct iPads.