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The Legacy of Russian Espionage

Some twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the topic of Russian spies in America has once again emerged at the forefront of American popular and historical discourse. Yesterday morning the NYTimes reported that 11 individuals had been accused by federal prosecutors of operating under false names, attempting to infiltrate "American policy making circles," and relaying information back to a Russian central intelligence.

The sheer amount of publicity that these spies have garnered, regardless of however serious a threat they actually pose to American security, warrants a re-examination of our country's long and troubled relationship with both the threat and the reality of Russian espionage. In 2009, the historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Khler published Spies, a monumental and authoritative work on the KGB's involvement in America. Based on KGB archives, specifically the research of former KGB operative and journalist Alexander Vassiliev, Spies is the definitive text on Russian espionage in America in the 20th century. "These official communications," the authors write in the preface, "are neither the conclusions nor guesses, sometimes inspired, sometimes incorrect, of counterespionage organizations dedicated to uncovering spies...Instead, they are the contemporaneous accounts of the successes and failures of the KGB by the KGB itself."

Spies was awarded ForWord Magazine's 2009 Book of the Year Award.

This morning the Wall Street Journal featured an op-ed by Haynes and Khler, in which the two authors situate the recent arrest in the context of the history of Russian espionage in America.

Tuesday Studio: Overexposure?

Although photography has been around since the late 1800s, its prevalence in today’s society has been a recent rise. With the advent of digital cameras and a more celebrity-oriented society, everyone can be paparazzi. Exposed, a collection of photographs by Sophie Calle, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Andy Warhol and many more, asks the question: when does exposure become overexposure? Sandra Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, provides essays and commentary about some of the more invasive aspects of photography, such as hidden cameras and questions the morality behind the voyeuristic background of cameras. For a budding photographer or just the occasional picture-snapper, this book provides artistic, political and even moral dilemmas behind many artists’ most famous works.

The Tate Modern will be showcasing some of these famous images from 5/28/10 –10/03/10, where viewers can judge for themselves whether these images are invasive or artistic—or perhaps both.

Can’t make it out to the Tate Museum? Check out this clip here where Sandra Phillips talks about the themes behind camera exposure, with images of the exhibit at the Tate in the background.

Philip Gefter at The Daily Beast also wrote a feature about the exhibit, with a gallery of images that you can peruse at your leisure. From Jackie Kennedy running from the camera, to a close up of Paris Hilton’s face inside a vehicle, events of all different natures have been captured on film.

Future exhibition dates will also include 10/30/10 – 4/17/11 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and 5/21/10 – 9/11/11 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Adina Hoffman's My Happiness Wins Jewish Quarterly's 2010 Wingate Prize

Earlier this month the UK publication Jewish Quarterly awarded Adina Hoffman with the Wingate Prize 2010 for her new book, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness. Given out annually to an author whose work “stimulates an interest in themes of Jewish concern while appealing to the general reader,” this year’s Wingate Prize marks an historic event for Jewish-Palestinian relations. My Happiness, the first biography of a Palestinian writer written in English, tracks the life of Palestinian poet Taha Mohammed Ali. Anne Karpf, the chair of the Wingate Prize’s judging panel, described Hoffman’s work as “eloquent and moving…ultimately an uplifting book, combining meticulous research with literary sensitivity and a deep humanity: a beautifully written portrait of lived resistance.”

A Celebration of Rock and Roll

This morning the NYTimes arts section had an article on Eric Clapton's Crossroads Guitar Festival, held in Chicago this past weekend. Celebrating the profound musicianship and influence of blues-based rockers from Buddy Guy to Derek Trucks, the festival underscored the importance of the guitar in in an age when the frontier of music steadily drifts more and more towards the electronic.

For another interpretation and celebration of the relevance of rock and roll to American culture, see Thomas Denenberg's 2009 Backstage Pass, which looks at the long and rich relationship between American photographers and musicians over the past 40 years.

Shakespearean Summer

For many, Shakespeare is synonymous with summer (or vice versa), with performances nationwide filling outdoor stages and parks for productions of his most popular plays. The Shakespeare Center in Los Angeles may have cancelled their summer show this year, but in New York, Central Park is the location of choice with The Winter’s Tale and The Merchant of Venice; Boston has Othello; Twelfth Night in DC; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing for Houston, to name a few.

One of the most mysterious literary figures in any language, Shakespeare, for his ambiguity, has for centuries received the praise and attention of many. Over the ages, he has been regarded as a “modern” visionary, with the plurality of his meanings reappropriated by general readers, critics, and scholars for various causes to promote their beliefs and reinforce his plays as being for all time. Naturally, different productions of each play have distinct interpretations of how to present Shakespeare’s characters and themes: whether by portraying Ariel from The Tempest as male or female, or casting Shylock as a black capitalist in The Merchant of Venice, modern audiences have the delight of seeing how Shakespeare’s work can be applied to contemporary social and political situations, even without changing a word from the lines.

Robert Brustein’s The Tainted Muse endeavors to capture Shakespeare in his own time, focusing Brustein’s acuminous lens on the cultural and social aspects of Shakespeare’s plays in the context of popular perception in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The six chapters cover Shakespeare’s misogyny; effemiphobia; machismo; class elitism; racialism; and intelligent design, in brilliant form that does not diminish what others have read in Shakespeare’s messages, but rather adds to the appreciation of his universality by closely inspecting its origins. Brustein’s invaluable contribution to Shakespearean discourse serves as a great reminder of how so much has (or has not) changed since the time of everyone’s favorite bard.  

To read up on your favorite plays before seeing them on stage, check out the Yale Annotated Shakespeare series, each volume edited by Burton Raffel with a critical essay from Harold Bloom. 

 

Tuesday Studio: Art For All

This summer, the Yale Center for British Art is presenting the exhibition Art for All: British Posters for Transport.  The show is based around Henry S. Hacker’s collection of promotional posters designed in the primarily 1930s for the London Underground and British Railway system.  The works are exceptional examples both of poster design and of a successful and culturally significant promotional campaign.

 

    Along with the exhibition, the Center is showing a variety of films connected to the British rail and Underground.  They range from shorts from the 1930s to a 1970s horror film.  One film, Night Mail, documents the night mail train between London and Glasgow, with narration written by the poet W.H. Auden.  Here’s the clip from the film with the reading of W.H. Auden’s poem “Night Mail:”

 

To see more of the posters that spark this interest in the British rail system, check out the accompanying catalogue, edited by Teri J. Edelstein.

 

On Broadway (and the Tonys)

Last Sunday, theater lovers tuned into the Tony Awards, Broadway’s famous awards show.  Many of the plays and musicals we regard today as classics have won Tony awards, and many of the theater professionals involved in their creation have had storied careers.

Two of these artists are the composer and lyricist duo Kander & Ebb.  They wrote the lyrics and music to a number of musicals on and off Broadway, and have been nominated for a number of Tony awards.  Interestingly, one of their most popular musicals—Chicago—did not earn any awards (out of eleven nominations) on its first Broadway run, later winning six Tony awards for the 1997 revival.  In 1993, their musical Kiss of the Spider Woman won the Tony for Best Score—but tied with the musical The Who’s Tommy, a relatively unusual event in Tony Award history.

To learn more about the rich career of Kander & Ebb, James Leve’s book—one of those in the Yale Broadway Masters Series—offers an examination of their careers, collaboration, and works.  If you were interested in reading up on more Tony Award trivia, there are more fun facts along with these at the Tony Awards website.

Sigmar Polke, German Pop Artist, dies at 69

The German artist Sigmar Polke, celebrated as an "early and astute adopter of American Pop art," died last Thursday in Cologne, Germany. He was 69. A refugee from East Germany, Mr. Polke grew up in Dusseldorf, where he began his career as an artist in the early 1960s. Sharply critical of communism and capitalism alike, Polke used a range of media, from painting to photography to watercolor, to parody both systems of politics and economics.

For more on the art and life of Sigmar Polke, see Sigmar Polke: History of Everything, Paintings and Drawings, 1998-2003, edited by John R. Lane and Charles Wylie.

Obituaries for Mr. Polke ran in the NYTimes and The Guardian, among other print and electronic publications

Lost Without Translation

For the past few summers, the literary world appears to have been seized by a storm: literature translated from different languages. This summer’s huge hit was a Swedish thriller called The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third in author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, and the result was readers coming in by the droves seeking more books of a similar nature. The New York Times even commented on this new phenomenon, for famous Scandinavian bestsellers are only just now being translated into English because of the Millennium trilogy’s success.

For every success, though, there are thousands more of books in every language that lay untranslated. Three Percent, a website founded three summers ago, was named thusly because only about 3% of all books published in the United States are translated ones – and only 0.7% are poetry and literary fiction.

Also in 2007, Yale first launched The Margellos World Republic of Letters series, which translates previously overlooked works from cultures worldwide into English. There are many excellent books in this series, such as poetry from Italy and Syria, novels from Croatia and China – the list goes on.

Since the current fascination for translated literature leans towards the Scandinavian, readers should know that Swedish authors have more than just crime and mystery novels to offer. Göran Sonnevi’s book of poems, Mozart’s Third Brain, is a collection of his thoughts and surroundings, which are masterfully woven together in a way that makes them come to life with loose, fracture and radiating intensity. 

Sonnevi was winner of the 2006 Nordic Council’s Literature prize, and Mozart’s Third Brain, his thirteenth work of poetry, is beautifully rendered in English by award-winning translator Rika Lesser. From politics and current events to mathematics, philosophy, love, ethics and nature, there is little Sonnevi does not address in his long-form poem.

It may seem that we have reached new heights in translating literature, but the storm is still far from reaching its peak. As Edith Grossman, author of Why Translation Matters, puts so aptly, “Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar,” we hope that literature in translation is a trend that stays.

 

David Crystal's Little Book of Language on NPR and Newsweek

Yesterday proved to be a big day for David Crystal's popular new work, A Little Book of Language. Crystal spent the afternoon speaking with radio journalist Neal Conan on NPR's Talk of the Nation. Fielding questions from Conan and listeners alike, Crystal discussed at length how languages develop, how they go extinct, and, most importantly, how they can be saved. The entire interview as well as an excerpt from Crystal's book are currently available on Talk of the Nation's website.

Later in the day Crystal's book received more great press in a review by Malcolm Jones on Newsweek's Arts/Culture blog. Jones calls the work "concise, lucid and humorous" and "a pleasure for readers of any age."