May 2012

Gauguin’s Chair, Vincent Van Gogh, 1888 From Jacobin: If you hang out with industrial designers, one thing you may have noticed is that they’re really into chairs. In fact, tastes are predictable enough that you can often tell a designer’s favorite chair maker from his or her shirt. Black...

Afghanistan is a land of paradox. The investment that has been poured into the country by the West in the last decade will be the largest in Afghanistan’s history, and yet a portion of its people are engaged in a protracted insurgency that squanders this golden opportunity.

The Library of Babel, Eric Desmazieres by Sheila Cavanagh It’s no secret that times are tough for scholars in the humanities. Jobs are scarce, resources are stretched, and institutions of tertiary education are facing untold challenges. Those of us fortunate enough to hold tenured positions at financially stable colleges...

by Justin E. H. Smith I don’t know why all these racists are worried about Caucasians being reduced to a minority in Georgia as a result of demographic shifts. In fact it’s logically certain that Caucasians will always be the majority in Georgia: if one is Georgian, ipso facto...

For over fifty years now, the (mostly) French phenomenon known as the Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’) has been baffling and enthralling readers everywhere with its array of opaque literary techniques. Founded in 1960 as a subcommittee of the even more enigmatic...

Facebook headquarters, California by Mike Malley Facebook are due to launch their own search engine in early 2013, according to a source at the Californian company. An official announcement is likely in the next 24 hours as Mark Zuckerberg seeks to ramp up the hype for their IPO on...

The Monkey Painter, Alexandre Gabriel Ducamps, 1833 by Michael Ruse I understand that a contributor to the New Republic has deemed Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, the worst book of 2011. This reaction is understandable. There is an irritating jauntiness about the work,...

Jonathan Lethem From The Believer: The Believer: When did you first start collecting books? Jonathan Lethem: It really begins with my walking into a shop, one that’s a big part of my life history: Brazen Head Books, on Atlantic Avenue. I was fourteen, and the place was a really...

The formula of the "99 percent" seems at once incredibly rhetorical and real. We are used to hyperbole; we are less used to an absurdly lopsided figure that is actually matched by a reality. Poetic figuration meets statistical validity.

Marianne Moore throwing a pitch, 1968 From Poetry: She has no heirs. She has several epigones but their detail-laden lacquered ships for me don’t float. She flares singular, exemplary, a diamond absolute the American East forged in a pressure chamber we have yet fully to excavate. It is said...

From the Roads to Arabia exhibition, Pergamon Museum, Berlin From Sign and Sight: Archaeological exhibitions at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum have had an unprecedentedly successful year. “Tell Halaf” attracted 750,000 visitors, “Pergamon” sold 250,000 tickets in just two months and “Roads of Arabia” opened on January 26th. The more confusing...

From Trainspotting, Miramax, 1996 by Julian Hanich In this essay I try to categorize the range of artistic options that filmmakers currently have at hand to evoke bodily disgust. Or, to reframe this approach in a slightly different manner: If we examine the variety of disgusting scenes...

Humiliation opens with a strip search; Harpo’s “fragile” rear (remember, in The Big Store, a sign saying “Fragile” finds itself on his buttocks) may not cause him shame (indeed, he seems humiliation-proof), but he travels within shame’s dirty circuit. He dives without embarrassment into situations and actions that would cause a...

The Land of Cockaigne, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1567 From New Left Review: The diagnosis first: To put it briefly . . . What will never again be built any more, cannot be built any more, is—a society, in the old sense of that word; to build such, everything...

Alleycat race in London. Photograph by Rakan From N+1: On his last day of work as a bicycle messenger, my brother organized a race. Messenger races, known as alleycats, usually consist of straightforward if anarchic runs across the city. A raggle-taggle peloton will gather at some anonymous starting point,...

There’s a cartoon character that all French children watched in the '70s and ‘80s, Calimero. He was a little black chick who, ever provoking trouble, always ended up defeated and complaining, “it’s really so unfair!” when in reality, he was usually the architect of his own misfortunes. At times,...

Student protest in Quebec, March 22, 2012. Photograph by Tina Mailhot-Roberge by Justin E. H. Smith On April 23, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lilian Radovac aptly described the past few months of upheaval across Quebec as “the biggest student uprising you’ve never heard of.” This movement,...

From The New York Review of Books: Like Hardy, Lawrence’s writing is extremely sensitive to issues of fear and courage. In Sons and Lovers the moral veto that Miriam places on sex before marriage is “unmasked” by her boyfriend Paul as merely fear finding an alibi in moral convention....

Towards the end of last year, as the Eurozone crisis was reaching (yet another) climax, a number of journalists in the German quality press alerted their readers to an aspect of the crisis which had received scant attention so far: the euro crisis marked not only the failure of...

The Reading Girl, Theodore Roussel, 1886 by Bill Benzon This post includes major sections from two posts I wrote in 2005 when I first began writing for The Valve: Learning to Read & the Need for Theory and Beyond Reading. The first generated extensive discussion that’s worth reading if...