Some things I’ve been reading when I should’ve been grading papers or doing other work:
- A Tough Patron and an Old Ideology Give Women a Lift in Bulgarian Politics, by Dan Bilefsky, The New York Times: What’s most interesting in this article about how Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko M. Borisov has been appointing women to political offices are the explanations people give for why he is doing so and why women are needed in politics. Boiko says, for example, “Women are more diligent than men, and they don’t take long lunches or got to the bar,” and also, “Women have stronger characters than men because when they say no they mean no, and they are less corruptible.” Others suggest that women are less corruptible because they have more to lose, and others talk about the fact that while Bulgaria “never had a feminist movement” but that during “Communism women in Bulgaria were represented in almost every walk of life, from plant managers to medicine.”
- An interesting piece in The Lede about the politics behind Iran’s capture and the televised confession of Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of Jundallah, a militant group that claims to be defending Sunni Muslims in Iran’s southeast and has killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians since 2003. For some related articles in the news try here, here and here.
- In I Was the One Reading Andrew Marvell. You Were …, also in the Times, Alan Feuer turns some of the “Missed Connections” postings on newyork.craigslist.org into found poems.
- I appreciated “Thoughts on the ‘hookup culture,’ or what I learned from my high school diary, a guest post on Feministe by Nona Willis Aronowitz. One of my favorite bits: “We need to admit as a culture that teens are sexual beings, and that more often than not, sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity.”
- Before I became a translator, I was working on what might have become a book exploring male heterosexuality and pornography, of course, was one of the things I was researching. At the time, I was very disappointed at the narrowness and often impoverished nature of the discourse I found not only about the representation of men in heterosexual video pornography (which was what I was looking at) but also in pornography that was touted as progressive and even feminist. Perhaps one day I will return to that project, but in the mean time I have been enjoying Male Submission Art, the mission of which is to “showcase beautiful imagery where men and other male-identified people are submissive subjects. We aim to challenge stereotypes of the ‘pathetic’ submissive man.” The images are often very cool, and what I like about the analysis is that its core tenet seems to be that for a man to “submit” (whatever that word might mean in any given context) is not, by definition, for him to unman himself or to be unmanned by the one he is submitting to (whatever to “unman” might mean in any given context). Leaving aside the question of whether the particular sexuality expressed by the site is one’s cup of tea or not, it is – for me, anyway – a new, interesting and interestingly subversive way of trying to transform what we mean when we say the words “manhood” or “masculinity.”
- It’s odd, and maybe a bit arrogant sounding, to include something that I’ve written in this list, but I’ve recently been putting together my application for promotion to full professor, which involved going through the two books of translations that I’ve published. As I did so, I was reminded of how wonderful a poet Saadi was. (One of these days I have to add my work to the Wikipdedia entry on him.) So these words may be mine, but they are someone else’s work. It’s from Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan:
The best thing for an ignorant man is to be silent, and if he understands that, and practices it, he will no longer be ignorant.
If the learning you possess is less than perfect,
keep your tongue tucked safely in your mouth.
Empty words disgrace the one who speaks them,
like serving a walnut shell without a nut.
A fool was trying hard to teach his ass
to talk. A wise man watching him observed,
“Aren’t you afraid of what they’ll say
when they find out what you’re doing? This beast
will never learn the trick of human speech.
Better you should learn the gift of silence.“
A man who does not think before he speaks
will almost always use the words foolishly.
If you will not take the time a wise man takes
to speak wisely, practice an animal’s silence.
- The Year of the Drone: A blog with an interactive map and analysis of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
- Ethics and Aesthetics: An brief, interesting post by Malachi Black on The Best American Poetry.