I’m thrilled to spend the next two days at WIDE’s annual meeting in Brussels, Belgium, attending panels on “Women’s Rights and Gender Equality Amidst the ‘Arab Springs,’ Challenges and Lessons Learnt Across the Region.”
Inshallah (God willing), I’ll post some conference highlights next week.
Images from the incredible Facebook Album Women of Egypt
Afghanistan and Lebanon are both volatile places, survivors of long civil wars with violent aftermaths and intransigent political crises. Yet, it doesn’t take much of a lull before tourists find Lebanon again. Afghanistan, in contrast, has been virtually absent from tourists’ maps for decades now, despite very real safe havens where we might go. (The analogy is an imperfect one – Afghanistan ranks 7th on the 2011 Failed States Index whereas Lebanon comes in at 43, though perhaps it’s most telling that both of them make the list.)
What if our refusal to tour, our suspicion that some places are simply doomed, has little to do with the big picture? What if – when it comes to Afghanistan and Lebanon, in particular – it has more to do with the stubborn resilience of a catchphrase in one instance versus its absence in another? Acquaintances of mine who know next to nothing about Beirut frequently call up one epithet as though from a distance: “Wait…it used to be ‘the Paris of the Middle East,’ right?”
Plug “Paris of the Middle East” into Google and Wikipedia entries for Beirut and Lebanon come up first. (Unless I’ve fallen victim to personalized search.)
It’s amazing, the effect of these five little words. Afghanistan is so rich in geographical beauty, culture and history, but it has nothing like this magic phrase, which undoubtedly played a role in boosting Lebanon’s tourism by 22 percent in 2010. If that’s not a testament to the power of marketing on our minds and world, then I don’t know what is.
Of course, you might ask: Why does it matter whether tourists go to Afghanistan right now? Doesn’t the country have way worse problems? It does, but it’s clear that people – by which I mean, voters and tax payers, not journalists, soldiers or spies – think about a country differently if it’s conceivable that they might someday visit it.
When it comes to just watching a documentary, it’s a subtle shift, yet it takes the viewer from static to dynamic. The continuing distress of a country, any country, for years or even decades, may be consequential but it’s not inevitable. In Afghanistan, in Lebanon, the future is open.
When she lectured in Berlin on “The Dance of the Future,” Isadora Duncan articulated ideas that would form the core of Modern Dance, the movement she played a key role in originating:
The dancer of the future will be one whose body and soul have grown so harmoniously together that the natural language of that soul will have become the movement of the body. The dancer will not belong to a nation but to all humanity.
She will dance not in the form of a nymph, nor fairy, nor coquette but in the form of a woman in its greatest and purest expression. She will realize the mission of woman’s body and the holiness of all its parts.
She will dance the changing life of nature, showing how each part is transformed into the other. From all parts of her body shall shine radiant intelligence, bringing to the world the message of the thoughts and aspirations of thousands of women. She shall dance the freedom of women …
For additional excerpts from her speech, click here.
Image: Isadora Duncan on the Lido in Venice, 1903 (Photographer: Raymond Duncan)
As the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth arrives tomorrow, we remember her as an author popular in her own age and ours; an interior and landscape designer; an “haute bourgeoisie” New Yorker; after 1911, an American expatriate in France; a self-described “rabid” supporter of French imperialism; and, since September 2010, at least, as a forerunner to the popular British soap opera Downton Abbey.
In 1920, Wharton became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence; the controversy surrounding this decision further sheds light on the society that Wharton famously exposed and subtly critiqued in her novels.
Before she moved permanently to Europe, Wharton traveled there frequently and her path, almost inevitably, intersected with that of Henry James. They didn’t become friends, however, until after he read one of her short stories and wrote to her in praise of it. From the letter:
. . . And I applaud, I mean I value, I egg you on in, your study of the American life that surrounds you. Let yourself go in it & at it – it’s an untouched field, really: the folk who try, over there, don’t come within miles of any civilized, however superficially, any “evolved” life. And use to the full your ironic and satiric gifts; they form a most valuable (I hold) & beneficent engine.
The friendship forged a connection that would lead to an unusual act of generosity undertaken by Wharton in 1912, toward the end of James’s life, an act that biographer Leon Edel, nonetheless, describes as “meddlesome”:
Edith Wharton…entered into a secret correspondence with her publisher in America – who was also Henry James’s. She and Charles Scribner agreed that $8,000 could safely be diverted from her royalties to the Master’s account without arousing suspicion. They could hardly falsify the earnings on the New York Edition. But James’s agent had told Scribner’s that the Master was working on a novel of American life – an allusion to The Ivory Tower, which he had sketched out just before his 1910 illness.
Charles Scribner accordingly wrote to James: “As the publishers of your definitive edition we want another great novel to balance The Golden Bowl and round off the series of books…” If James could begin the book soon, Scribner said, he was prepared to pay him an advance of $8,000 (£1,500). . . James had never received so handsome an offer. . . Mrs. Wharton’s initiative, while meddlesome and not required, helped to give James’s morale a lift at a crucial moment [just as he came down with a nasty case of shingles.]
Nineteen years younger and, by all accounts, more experienced than the celebrated, celibate James, not to mention more direct, Wharton wrote with genius about social class, sex and love, topical subjects in any time.
Only a few months before admiration for Wharton’s story moved James to write to her, he himself had predicted that young women writers would cast off the tight-lipped reserve of the Victorian age, that “the female elbow itself, kept in increasing activity by the play of the pen, [will] smash with final resonance the window all this time most superstitiously closed.”
Happy 150th Birthday, Edith Wharton!
Streep delivered this thoughtful, moving commencement address at Barnard in 2010, and she spoke with Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross this week.
Here’s an excerpt from Monday’s interview in which Streep discusses her experience filming The Iron Lady and the need for minimal yet transformative makeup:
It’s not about the audience. It’s all about fooling the other actors into believing that you are who you say you are. Because that’s hard, when you walk on set and it’s a big makeup job. And it makes it hard for them. And I take my entire performance from them, so if they don’t look at me and hate me appropriately or love me the way they’re supposed to or find, you know, an old face but see the young one underneath which is Jim Broadbent’s task as Dennis Thatcher, then I’m lost, I don’t have anything to go on because I can read that immediately in their eyes, you know?
Listen to the rest
In this 100th blog post, I’m pleased to find a timely reference to my own past. Acrobatics runs in my family and I did gymnastics as a child, though never quite like the above.
The New York Times marks the passing of the last World War I veteran, a 110-year-old woman who served on the home front.
The Guardian takes a closer look at high suspense, that is, Hollywood’s love affair with the skyscraper, and asks whatever happened to the American blockbuster?
If I were passing through London between now and April 15th, I’d definitely go check out the British Museum’s exhibition on the Hajj. The Guardian finds it brilliant. The Telegraph less so.
The New York Times Magazine, meanwhile, gives credit where credit is due to the omnipresent highlighter.
And if you’re wondering just what the world was up to in the year before the debut of the highlighter – come on, I know you are – then click through to More Intelligent Life and read all about 1962.
In a three-minute video on the World Press Photo website, Aidan Sullivan, chair of the photo contest jury, discusses the criteria behind the choice. He describes the “long process” by which the jury selected one winner, “the image that is going to sum up the events of the year,” from about 108,000 initial photos. He explains that this image ultimately won the jury’s allegiance because:
It was a very tender moment, a very quiet moment compared to all the turbulence that had come before it and after it. It just seemed to say to everybody: This is what it’s about, it’s about the people.
I’ve written about the World Press Photo contest before and look forward to seeing each year’s selections. What reason is there to doubt Sullivan’s sincerity, or that of any jury member, or that of the photographer who captured this image? It’s hard to quibble, also, with the rationale expressed. And yet.
And yet, I find myself dissatisfied with this choice. In a year that produced so many extraordinary and diverse images of Arabs, the contest winners are disappointingly conventional: Covered women (above and again here), a man crouching by a flag, men yelling, and, oh, more men fighting and running.
The photos themselves are all significant, graceful, even mesmerizing, but perhaps it is too much to ask any one image to be both exceptional and representative, prototypical but not at all stereotypical. It’s not as if there aren’t plenty of women wearing hijab, niqab, burqa etc. in the region; I’ve photographed them myself (here, here, here and here); they’re everywhere though not everyone. Nor is it the fault of these photographers that none of the winning images challenge common perceptions about Arabs, but in a year when Arabs themselves have triumphed over and despite those perceptions, it is a serious lapse on the part of the jurors.
If they’d wanted to choose an image infused with the miraculous courage of the Arab Spring; an image that is exceptional but that does not claim to be and, indeed, is not representative of Arabs per se; an image that – precisely because it depicts the vanguard and not the masses – captures the longing for freedom, the possibility of transformation and the very real risk that the varied uprisings evoke; then one image, in particular, comes to mind, an image that I must admit would not have been eligible for the contest as currently defined because it is a self-portrait by an amateur – though it is roughly similar in composition to another winner.
Photographers record the moment but the winning photograph of such a prestigious competition must capture a mood and a mentality. This image (by Magda Alia al-Mahdi) surprises, provokes, even offends. This image, like the Arab Spring itself, poses a simple question that, nonetheless, crackles with urgency, a question that in itself may signal a seismic shift in the questioner and one that demands ongoing conversation much more than an answer:
Who are the Arabs?
What role has Lebanon played in the Arab uprisings? Why did revolution break out in Tunisia? Libya?
For some answers, browse the the Arab Spring-themed issue of MainGate and read my latest work, including a feature on feminism in Lebanon, a profile of a Tunisian doctor who’s taken the pulse of the revolution and a Q&A with Libyan-American professor and dissident Mansour El-Kikhia.
Not good enough, Epic Records CEO. Not epic at all. Totally inadequate in fact.
For those of us not lucky enough to see the little Apple in concert this month and presumably playing new music, there is plenty of old music to go around, some of it previously undiscovered (by me, anyway), including this fabulous playlist of covers put together by TwentyFourBit, from which comes the above video of Apple singing Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” on the Watkins Family Hour.
Tell it like it is, Bare Naked Ladies: “These a-pples are de-li-cious! ‘As a matter of fact they are,’ she said. Can all this fruit be free-ee-ee?”
March Madness: Sigmund Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.
