Reviews and News:
Holocaust Museum launches Kickstarter to preserve diaries: "The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., launched a Kickstarter campaign to catalog, preserve, and digitize 200 diaries from victims and survivors of the Holocaust; three of them will also be transcribed and translated."
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Martin Luther and the avant-garde? "65 artists from five continents—big names include Ai Weiwei, Günther Uecker, Richard Jackson, Olafur Eliasson, Juergen Staack, Monica Bonvicini, Anselm Kiefer and Mat Collishaw—channel Luther's spirit to address 21st-century social issues. Which aberrations of our century would they like to reform?"
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Since Shakespeare-in-the-Park's Trumpian Julius Caesar will soon pass into oblivion, how about a story of an illustrated version of Shakespeare's works that only saw the light of day because the head wood graver narrowly escaped a fire at the (insured) publisher's buildings? "In the fall of 1845, the wood engraver and manager of the printing office at Spruce Street Nathaniel Orr wrote to his fiancé, 'Here I am, not dead but alive and kicking . . . I had a pretty narrow escape last night.... Every article in our office was entirely destroyed and when I think of my own narrow escape I can but attribute it to a most merciful providence . . . I passed three windows (four stories from the ground) on the outside that I might get in a position for jumping on a small outhouse, two stories from the window. Had I [fallen] there I should not only have been killed but burned to ashes in the ruin.' By mid-November, Nathaniel wrote to say 'the cloud that hung over me for a few days after my late exit from the third story window . . . has entirely disappeared, and I now find myself most delightfully situated in splendid rooms at 289 Broadway under the patronage of Hewet, or more properly, Harper and Brothers, for they have concluded to have all the plates that were destroyed at the late fire reengraved forthwith. It will probably take us eighteen or twenty months to complete the work. So, you see, Phoenix-like I rise again...'"
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The changing meaning of diaries—from accounts to God to a record of sneezes.
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Postmodernism never existed. What did exist were a bunch of ideas—mostly bad (and not very "post") but which could lead to some very clarifying questions—that mingled rather aimlessly under this meaningless banner. So it makes sense that Alison Gibson has some trouble answering the question of what will replace postmodernism after it "dies": "There are many terms for this new supplanting cultural logic, this shift in the ruling belief system: to name a few – altermodernism, cosmodernism, digimodernism, metamodernism, performatism, post-digital, post-humanism, and the clunky post-postmodernism. There are convergences and divergences between these conceptualizations; they complement each other as much as they compete. Even so, consistent across these formations is a legacy of modernist and postmodernist stylistic practice, and a rehabilitated ethical consciousness." Convergences and divergences, complementing and competing. What she means is that what comes after postmodernism will be the same as what came before it: Not a "ruling belief system" but life in all its ugliness and beauty—and ideas, stupid and wise.
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Lovecraft-inspired board games.
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Statesman, Shiraz Maher looks at the writings that inspired the small-scale terrorist attacks across Europe:
"Again. The attack on London Bridge and Borough Market on 3 June has claimed seven lives, with many more people still receiving intensive care for critical injuries. Within hours of the terrorist attack – the third within as many months in England – Islamic State released a statement claiming responsibility, as it did for the two outrages in the UK that immediately preceded it. At least one of the three attackers, Khuram Butt, had a long history of extremist activism and associations in Britain. He was a member of one of the Islamist networks that emerged during the 1990s and then proliferated after the al-Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001. Although most of the preachers who founded these groups – such as Omar Bakri Muhammad, in the case of Butt and al-Muhajiroun – are no longer in the country, their legacy endures.
"Bakri founded al-Muhajiroun (meaning "the emigrants") in 1996. Now outlawed, it was a radical group committed to the re-establishment of a caliphate. After Bakri was finally excluded from the UK in 2005 (he is now in prison in Lebanon), he was succeeded by Anjem Choudary, the well-known British jihadist who assumed leadership of the network. From its inception, al-Muhajiroun embraced ever greater extremism, declaring support for Osama Bin Laden, for the 9/11 attacks and for al-Qaeda. Scores of its members have been convicted of terrorist offences. Choudary was sentenced to five and a half years in prison in September 2016 for supporting IS.
"Several individuals from his network have travelled to Syria in recent years. Among them are Abu Rahin Aziz, originally from Luton, who became involved in active attack planning for IS operations against the West. He was killed in a US drone strike on Raqqa in 2015. Another prominent member of the group, Abu Rumaysah from London, moved his wife and five children to IS-held territory. Along with another British member of the group, Mohammad Ridha Alhak, Rumaysah is believed to have appeared in execution videos for IS.
"Those who have remained at home can be found on the edges of terrorist plots. Butt, a 27-year-old British national born in Pakistan, was featured in a recent Channel 4 documentary about British supporters of Islamic State. He glorified and revelled in the barbarism of IS.
"Butt will not be the last British jihadist to carry out a terrorist outrage in this country. The London Bridge attack may have seemed chaotic and amateurish but that is the jihadists' purpose. And behind even the most unsophisticated attack is a considered strategic theory of global jihad, the antecedents of which are long and extend from Afghanistan into Yemen and Syria."
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Photos: Lightning
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Poem: Leslie Monsour, "On Misreading a Wine Ad"
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