Columbia University Press

The New Republic has posted an article by Cynthia Ozick on Lionel Trilling on its Web site. In the piece, Ozick explores the impact of Trilling as a critic, his reception as a novelist, and the first-time publication of The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel.

Over the past few years there has been a resurgence of interest in Trilling. New York Review Books reissued his only published novel The Middle of the Journey and critics and scholars are once again turning back to his critical works. In assessing his prominence and achievement as a critic, Ozick writes, “No present-day magazine writer or blogger or reviewer or critic can aspire to what Trilling as essayist encompassed: his aim was nothing less than to define, and refine, civilization. He meant not only to comment or discriminate or analyze or judge, but to ’stand for something.’”

Trilling’s status as a critic did not guarantee him success as a novelist. After the publication of his first novel The Middle Journey (1947), Trilling embarked on a second novel only to give up on it. However, while conducting in the archives at Columbia University, Geraldine Murphy discovered a portion of a second novel, now published as the The Journey Abandoned. Ozick writes, “[The Journey Abandoned], was left unfinished — cast out midway, after twenty-four chapters and 150 pages. News of it erupted like a secret exploding; yet all along it was hiding in plaine in Columbia’s Trilling archive…. Columbia University Press has now brought it out … with a valuable introduction by Geraldine Murphy, the scholar who uncovered it, and who serves as its impeccable editor.”

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Earlier this week, Keith Woods, coauthor of The Authentic Voice: The Best Reporting on Race and Ethnicity, appeared on the Newshour to discuss how the media has covered and talked about the issue of race in this year’s presidential race.

Woods appeared with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and Gerald Seib, executive Washington editor of the Wall Street Journal. All three criticized the media’s penchant for focusing on controversy rather than context and for simplifying racial issues and categories to the detriment of sustaining a fruitful discussion of race.

Here is an excerpt from Keith Woods:

And I think when you look at the — such phrases as “soccer mom,” “NASCAR dad,” so many of the euphemisms that we have produced, to talk about people by race or class, we’re still hiding behind something other than what we’re actually saying.

And, journalistically, I think our responsibility is not to reflect the society on those things, but to reflect the values of journalism, which suggests precision over euphemism, for example, and accuracy vs. obfuscation.

And I think we have been guilty more of imprecision and obfuscation than we have of accuracy on this front. When you look at the conversation around those euphemisms, one of the consequences is that we have reduced people, in many ways, to those categories, and allowed the public, essentially, to draw what I would imagine will always be a race-based conclusion about the group we’re talking about.

So, when we talk about the white working-class voter who does not vote for Barack Obama, guess what conclusion the other folks in this country are going to make about those voters? Now, we’re going to conclude that they are bigots. If — when we talk about black voters without distinguishing between one and the other, then we have a bunch of sheep running behind the black candidate because they’re black, and they’re not thinking, and they have no sophistication whatsoever.

That’s what the media allows. In fact, that’s what it abets when it talks about that race — race that way. And the fact of the matter is that we, as a country, talk about it that way, too. Journalism has to be better.

Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod are the editors of Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory.

Across the world, people are marking the sixtieth anniversary of the Palestinian’s “nakba” (catastrophe). The Palestine/ Israel conflict has occupied center stage in international affairs at least since the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Its macabre manifestations confront us on TV screens and newspapers’ pages daily. The efforts invested to solve it peacefully have so far failed. And despite apparently huge diplomatic efforts (genuine, self-serving, or cynical) doomed approaches continue, paradoxically, to prevail. These approaches most commonly—and with various degrees of sophistication—construct a political landscape that is dominated by elites who are described as either for or against peace. Leaders are classified in loaded and dichotomous terms: as moderate or radical; westernized or traditional; secular or fundamentalist. Very little, if anything at all, is said about those who construct these categories and their interests in doing so, let alone their role in perpetuating the conflict. Nothing is said about the morality of those who categorize. Most importantly, very little is said about ordinary Palestinians who have continued to endure the consequences of the catastrophe for more than six decades.

In contrast Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory suggests that a durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians must begin by tackling the moral foundation of the conflict. In 1948 the vast majority of the indigenous population, the more than 750,000 Arab Palestinians who resided on 77.8% of the land of their country—which later became Israel—were expelled. The will of the international community to allow their return, expressed in the UN resolution 194, has been ignored.

Nakba does not aim to recount the historical events that led to this calamity. There is no need. The gap between the contending Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives has significantly narrowed since the declassification of Israeli documents relating to the wartime events of 1948. It is now beyond doubt that Zionist leaders were from the start obsessed with the “transfer” of the Palestinians and that the Palestinian refugees lost their patrimony because they were forced out. Moreover, it is now common knowledge among specialists and scholars that many of the acts of expulsion were carried out under official orders and that such acts continued for more than eleven years after Israel’s independence. Those expelled included Palestinians who had become citizens of the State and carried Israeli identity cards.

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In a recent interview in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Herve This discusses such matters as the difference between molecular gastronomy and molecular cooking, the relative importance of having the right equipment in your kitchen, and some of the scientific principles of making stock. He also lists his 10 basic elements of kitchen knowledge:

1. Salt dissolves in water.

2. Salt does not dissolve in oil.

3. Oil does not dissolve in water.

4. Water boils at 100 C (212 F).

5. Generally foods contain mostly water (or another fluid).

6. Foods without water or fluid are tough.

7. Some proteins (in eggs, meat, fish) coagulate.

8. Collagen dissolves in water at temperatures higher than 55 C (131 F).

9. Dishes are dispersed systems (combinations of gas, liquid or solid ingredients transformed by cooking).

10. Some chemical processes - such as the Maillard Reaction (browning or caramelizing) - generate new flavors.

The text of this interview with Ch’oe Yun ran in Korean Culture. Many thanks to Korean Culture for their permission to use the text here.

Ch’oe Yun is the author of There a Petal Silently Falls: Three Stories. She will be speaking at the Korea Society with translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton on Friday May 9 at 6:30

Korean Culture: Some writers, like O Chong-hui and Ch’oe In-ho, begin writing early in life; others, like Pak Wan-so, begin relatively late. When did you begin thinking about creative writing?

Ch’oe: I began rather early myself. The first work I published, back in middle school, was supposed to be a short story. From then on I’ve written continually in just about every genre. I started out with critical essays and after putting in some more time studying literature and literary theory I felt quite comfortable settling on fiction.

Korean Culture: How do you see yourself as a writer? Do you have a message? Are you an ideological writer? An art-for-art’s-sake writer? An experimental writer? All of these?

Ch’oe: I guess critics like to make these distinctions, but it seems to me the true nature of creative writing is to be found outside such classification. To be sure, I have all of those tendencies you mention. A variety of them exist in all writers. If we really want to depict the infinite scope of reality, then we need to mobilize all of those tendencies. It’s precisely that infinity, shown to us by people and reality, that makes us write. The simplest fact that defines a writer as a writer is the expression of this infinity solely through language.

As far as a message is concerned, no work lacks one, no matter how neutral that work is. On the other hand, I am in no way an ideological writer. No matter how lofty-sounding a political ideology, I can’t help viewing it with suspicion. I can go along with the idea that ideologies are used to defend certain ways of life, but for me only the literary realm is broad enough to include all ideology.

At the same time, I’m one of those who believes, with Bakhtin, that even silence is a form of conversation, and so I could never be an art-for-art’s-sake writer.

The important thing for me is to depict reality through the most appropriate language and form. And because reality is always changing, it’s only natural that each of my works should be different in language and form. When I have a world-view I wish to present, my first task is to flesh it out in language and structure rather than in a message. And so when I hear occasionally that my works are experimental, my reaction is that there’s some misunderstanding. One needs a unique language and form to depict a changing world, and in this sense a work’s world-view creates its own form. I prefer to describe this process not as an experiment but as the pursuit of a different factuality. If you’re going to change the world, how are you going to do it through conventional methods and language?

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Menachem Klein is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and was a team member of the Geneva Initiative negotiations of 2003. He has advised both the Israeli government and the Israeli delegation for peace talks with the PLO (2000), and was a fellow at Oxford University and a visiting professor at MIT. Klein is most recently the author of A Possible Peace between Israel and Palestine: An Insider’s Account of the Geneva Initiative.

Is there an alternative to the daily bloodshed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority? Is this conflict unsolvable? The answer to the first question is yes, while to the second one it is no.

My book—A Possible Peace between Israel and Palestine—shows what a final peace treaty can look like. The Geneva Initiative which the book describes and analyzes is a model developed by former Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, army generals, and politicians. They brought their previous experience as peace makers to the Geneva Initiative, which contains detailed provisions resolving all outstanding issues between Israel and the Palestinian people, including drawing a border between Israel and Palestine, dividing Jerusalem, and determining the status of the Palestinian refugees.

The Geneva Initiative provides a comprehensive alternative to the current escalating conflict. President Bush’s road map has not succeeded in gaining momentum because it does not lead in any clear direction. It has been primarily a guide for interim arrangements, and for containment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a framework that has been extremely foggy with regard to a final agreement and the end of the conflict. The Geneva Initiative stands out as an alternative to the poverty of current policy. The key question is whether the Israeli and American governments will have sufficient energy and political courage to change direction. Another open question is whether the two sides can renew negotiations given their current lack of faith in each other. Attempts to achieve a partial final status agreement, in keeping with the Road Map, have failed. Once again, the Geneva Initiative is relevant as a model for a final Israeli-Palestinian agreement, and as a possible basis for renewal of negotiations.

I had the privilege to be part of the negotiating team a fact which is reflected in the book’s subtitle: An Insiders’ Account of the Geneva Initiative. My academic studies of Israeli-Palestinian relations and the history, society and politics of each of them, as well as my experience as an advisor to the Israeli peace negotiating team, provided me both an insider’s perspective and an impartial analysis of the diplomatic efforts behind the Geneva compromise. Although the Geneva Initiative was not endorsed by the governments of either side, it became a fundamental frame of reference for solving the Middle East conflict alongside UN Security Council resolutions and President Clinton’s parameters. My aim in writing the book was to bring the reader into the discussion room and behind closed doors. Consequently, the reader can imagine what future Israeli–Palestinian peace talks will look like, how they will manage tough debates, and how they can find a compromise.

In Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language John Hamilton investigates the way literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation and create a crisis of language. Hamilton traces the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, Kleist, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. John T. Hamilton is professor of comparative literature and Germanic languages and literature at New York University.

Join John Hamilton as he discussed Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language tonight at 7pm at Book Culture in New York City. He will be joined by Professor Avital Ronell also of NYU.

This Sunday’s New York Times Book Review featured Francine Prose’s glowing review of Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai.

In the review Prose writes, “Wang Anyi’s complex and penetrating portrayal of her heroine … best displays her gifts as a novelist. Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan’s graceful translation … helps us understand why Wang Anyi is one of the most critically acclaimed writers in the Chinese-speaking world.”

Read an excerpt from The Song of Everlasting Sorrow. (pdf)

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow has also been selected as one of the titles for Reading the World 2008.

Last Sunday, the New York Times Book Review weighed in on the new Olivier Roy book, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East. Reviewed alongside Noah Feldman’s new book, the Times declares, “At only 167 pages, Roy’s book provides a concise and penetrating summation of the current scene; it’s a fine primer for anyone trying to get a sense of just how chaotic the Middle East is.”

You can read other reviews of the work here. And the first chapter of the book here.

Olivier Roy is also the author of Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah , Secularism Confronts Islam, and the coauthor of Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection.

Ed Grimm is the author of Riverside Park: The Splendid Sliver.

It’s not as if Riverside Park hibernates all winter. The hardiest of the joggers and cyclists are out on its paths, children continue to flock to its 15 playgrounds, and when snow mantles the park, there are sledding and spirited snowball fights. Spring turns the page on all that and brings to the park not only a new season but a time of planning and preparation and plain hard work.

The hundred-year-old limestone Volunteer House at 107th Street in the park is the hub of that effort. Each year, volunteers contribute tens of thousands of hours to keep the park looking its best. Debbie Sheintoch oversees those efforts. These weeks she and her small army are busy pruning back shrubbery, planting trees, spreading wood chips, removing invasive plants and cleaning up the coastal areas down by the river. Several times this spring, their numbers will be reinforced by volunteer groups from schools and business organizations.

From playing fields to tennis courts, from dog runs to monument sites, Riverside Park is being readied for its hundreds of thousands of annual visitors. The work is intense, but so is the gratification. “The park inspires extraordinary devotion,” says Jim Dowell, president of the Riverside Park Fund.

It’s difficult to think of a more devoted group than The Garden People, who are breaking out planting and watering equipment for their 27th season. The gardens, which run from 90th to 91st Street on the promenade level, are cultivated and maintained by some 40 volunteers.

Terry Cohen has her own agenda. This year, it focuses on the “my neighborhood” curriculum of local schools. Each year, 1,500 schoolchildren visit the park for Terry’s introduction to the abundance and variety of nature in a city setting. This spring, four first-grade classes that visited the park in the fall for tree science studies are returning to study the park as a community resource. There’ll also be a May family program on the lawn near the tennis courts and a nature walk in June.

And then there is Jeff Nulle, who is preparing again to take a binocular-bedecked group on a springtime walk through the bird sanctuary from 116th to 124th Street. They’ll have their work cut out for them. More than 100 species touch down at the park each year.

In a very interesting post yesterday, Salon asked a panel of political and cultural experts, including Houston Baker and Todd Gitlin, to weigh in on the debates surrounding Rev. Wright’s remarks and what Obama should respond.

Todd Gitlin defended Obama offering the following advice:

“Obama should say that he no more associates himself with Wright’s remarks than John McCain (by his own say-so) agrees with John Hagee about Satanic Catholics or righteous Armageddon. He should remind his interlocutors that McCain went looking for Hagee’s endorsement while he, Obama, did not do the same with Wright. He should also repeat that he’s running for president, and that therefore he wants to talk about the awful Iraq war, the awful economy, the awful Bush years and the danger of extending them with McCain. He should say all this with a smile and his customary grace.”

Offering a different and more critical (of Obama) perspective, Houston Baker, writes:

Sen. Obama was concise enough about Wright when the problem first arose: “Get off the bus, Gus!” However, not long after—and, to my best knowledge, after calls from African-American pastors across America—Obama piously said he had often been in Trinity’s congregation when Rev. Wright verbally assaulted the United States under the guise of black “liberation theology.” Yet, he still claimed he found his pastor’s more militant views unacceptable, wished to distance himself from them. Then, in political footwork faster than Ali’s jabs, he said he could not disavow his intimate, familiar connection with Rev. Wright. It was him throwing Wright under the tires again. Sen. Obama’s “race speech” at the National Constitution Center, draped in American flags, was reminiscent of the Parthenon concluding scene of Robert Altman’s “Nashville”: a bizarre moment of mimicry, aping Martin Luther King Jr., while even further distancing himself from the real, economic, religious and political issues so courageously articulated by King from a Birmingham jail. In brief, Obama’s speech was a pandering disaster that threw, once again, his pastor under the bus…. There is now very little of a corrective nature that the racially elusive senator from Illinois can say to get rid of his pastor.

In the posting Loaders, Lumpers and the Smell of Fish the New York Times blog the “City Room” writes about South Street by Barbara Mensch. The post coincides with a new exhibition of Barbara Mensch’s photographs of the Fulton Fish Market at the South Street Seaport Museum.

The Times has also posted a slideshow of images from the book and the exhibition detailing life at the Fulton Fish Market during the late 1970s and early 80s—the years right before gentrification started to take hold and the mob influence was swept away by then New York district attorney, Rudolph Giuliani. Now that the fish market has moved to Hunts Points section of the Bronx, Mensch’s photographs offer an extraordinary portrait of a New York City that is rapidly disappearing. “City Room” writes:

Ms. Mensch is fascinated—and saddened—by what she views as the “profound change in the urban landscape of New York,” a change that is sweeping away so much of the city’s past. Yet, she insisted, “It’s not about nostalgia. It’s about what do we replace all these things we’re destroying with? Where are we going as a culture — as a civilization - when we walk around and everything looks like interchangeable?”

As national poetry month comes to a close and the Pen World Voices Festival set to begin we are fortunate to have a posting from David R. McCann a translator and scholar of Korean poetry. McCann is also the Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature at Harvard University and most recently the translator of Azaleas: A Book of Poems by Kim Sowôl.

Kim Sowôl (1902-1934) remains one of Korea’s favorite twentieth-century poets, even though he published just one book, Azaleas. The title poem is his best known, and it continues to draw readers, admirers, and other fans through such reincarnations as the singer Maya’s song version on her CD Born to Do It in 2006. The first of Sowôl’s poems that I read, memorized, and began to try to translate, though, is a short one titled “The Cricket,” Kuiddurami. I first encountered it in a book of Sowôl’s selected poems translated by Kim Dong Sung, back when I first went to Korea in 1966, as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I suppose one of the things that appealed to me about the poem was its shortness: I was able to memorize it quickly, and would recite it, or write it on paper table covers when the teachers and I went somewhere for an evening of food and makkôlli rice wine, songs and stories.

Sound of mountain winds,
sound of cold rains falling.
On a night you talk of life’s changes,
the fire at the country tavern dies down, a cricket cries.

I later came to realize that the poem might have been an experiment with the traditional vernacular verse form known as the sijo. The standard sijo is three lines, each line in four phrases, with a syllable count of 3 4 3 (or 4) 4 for the first and second lines, then 3 5 4 3 in the final line. That final line also has a bit of a twist at the beginning, a turn in a different direction, rhetorically, or toward a new image. What Sowôl did was to take the three-line form and break the first into two parts, one below the other on the printed page, and then in the original, step inside that country tavern for the twist. English grammar didn’t let me do it that way when I translated it, but the poem still has a sijo feel to it.

What’s curious is that only after translating this modern sijo in the collection Azaleas, as well as a number of others in the anthology Early Korean Literature: Selections and Introductions, did I begin to try writing sijo in English. I’ve been doing nothing but sijo for the past six or seven months, now, and have come to like its spare qualities, the refreshing demand that I get it down in three lines, when I’ve revised some poems to fit the sijo form, or just to see where it goes, when I write sijo from the very start.

I’ve even started to discover found sijo, like this one from a story last month about the Red Sox and their visit to Tokyo, which I read while I was in Seoul.

Found in the News

I had a peanut butter sandwich
for Easter and something I wasn’t sure
what it was. We’re in a different city,
but it could just as well be San Francisco.
Doesn’t matter. I come to the ballpark,
I wake up, I go to the ballpark.

(Terry Francona, Manager of the Boston Red Sox, in Tokyo. Jungang Daily. March 24, 2008)

Join Wallflower Press and Columbia University Press for a party to celebrate the official North American launch of the TCM International Film Guide 2008 and Film & Festivals magazine during the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday, April 29th.

Frances Ford Coppola writes, “[The International Film Guide] remains invaluable as a guide to world cinema,” and Gilles Jacob, president of the Cannes Film Festival calls it, “An indispensable manual for everyone who loves and frequents the gamut of world cinema.”

We will be officially presenting the Film Guide to fans of international cinema as well as all industry delegates and members of the international press attending the festival.

Where: Bar 13 at 35 East 13th Street, Second Floor Lounge and Roof Deck (private entrance on University Place)

When: Tuesday April 29th, 6:00pm-9:00pm. Open bar to 7:30pm.

Drinks and snacks will be on offer and Wallflower’s editorial director, Yoram Allon, will be in attendance to present the publication. We hope you’ll be able to make it along!

In a recent post titled “China’s story: putting the PR into the PRC” on opendemocracy.net, James Millward, author of Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang lays out six public relations ideas on how China can repair its image with the outside world:

▪ Remember that what you say to a Chinese audience is heard by the world audience
▪ Consider how your statements sound in English
▪ Don’t employ ancient or strained historical arguments about territorial questions
▪ Do consider more recent and more realistic historical precedents
▪ Don’t deny that China has problems; instead, see how they resemble those of other countries
▪ Let reporters report: transparency engenders credibility

To read the entire post.