Intelligent Design Article

Suicide Bombers article by Damon LaBarbera



The Pinnacle by Joseph LaBarbera, PhD., Dept Psychiatry, Vanderbilt, 1969

Jankowski

The  Visual Arts Center last night had a photography exhibit opening.  Matty Jankowski had contributed a number of photographs.  Born in New York, Jankowski moved to Panama City about 10 years or so ago.

 A triptych of his work, located downstairs was interesting--good as might be expected, but also a progression from his previous works.

Parenthetically, Jankowski's photos are going inevitably to be priced above--about twice that--of most photos exhibited. But Jankowski's work is a compliment to a general contemporary art collection and will sustain value.

The photos were allusive in nature, satirical of bygone famed photographers. The first photograph is of the back of a local female model. The model looked a bit like Ultraviolet from the Warhol troupe, also Dali's girlfriend at the time.  There is a "Mapplethorpe" tone to the photo—contrast is high, either via the use of his shutter or paper or after working the photo.

Thematically there is, too, Mapplethorpe's subcultural urban eroticism (to coin a phrase) combined with a strong sense of the details of the actual body—the sinews and crevices of the back. Mapplethorpe did many backs, and  Jankowski emphasizes the spine with the woman's stringed corset. Jankowski was starting out in New York about the time that Mapplethorpe was, and was an observer of that doomed generation of gay men cavorting before the plague decimated them entirely. He was a taxi driver to the great artists of the time as they traveled to the clubs.  Its hard not to surmise that Jankowski is making a bit of an inside joke here.

The second photo, same model, has a Victorian quality, with its handcut oval frame, sepia tint,  and waif depiction of an Alice Liddel (the prototype of Alice in Wonderland) lookalike. The woman sits plaintively in a chair, hands on knees, dressed in a simple frock. The picture evokes Charles Dodson (see photo below). Again, it remindful of an earlier epoch of photography. Jankowski purposely blurs the face to mimic a superannuated camera.

 As in confirmation of the Charles Dodson (Lewis Carrol) reference the model in real life (she was at the exhibit and is named Stephanie) has a John Tenniel tattoo on her arm—Tenniel being of course the political cartoonist chosen to illustrate the original Alice in Wonderland.  His own drawings were themselves caricatures of political art--of Disraeli and the other prominent figures of the day.

 Jankowski tends to photograph beautiful models but creating a critical distance so that the eroticism is objectified or campy. Just a shade in one direction and they would seem prurient, a shade the other direction they would seem simply narcissistic model photographs. He achieves a balance. Like Warhol, another rather objectified observer of human nature, Jankowski is Polish in origin—the role of the outsider, looking at high and pop culture from a working class point of view, interested but also detached, at time humorous, other times cool.

Finally, the third photo is a fifties style tough guy photo, the tough guy being the same model, this time chomping a cigarette with a sternly rebellious look on her face.

Overall, Jankowski work is interesting to find in a local showing. He is not going to win prizes, and that may be good, the limited money or accolades going to beginning  artists building a resume. Its not realistic to be comparing his work to that of  new artists attempting to find some footing or learning the craft or developing technique.  Many of the other photographs were quite good, though, and this is not to dismiss genuinely competent photographs. However, at this point Jankowski is less interested in those endeavours and mostly interested in expanding the field and potentialities of photography, among other fine arts, and expanding the range of photographic expression  given the various tools and experiences he has developed over the years.

Below are representative photos of a particular photographer that  Jankowski slyly pays homage to, at least to me. In order, they are Maplethorpe, Jankowski, Dodson, Jankowski, photo of Welsh painter Augustus John, Jankowski doing a mug of Augustus John.  He seems to have aged himself in the last photo.




Maplethorpe

Jankowski

Dodson

Jankowski

Augustus John

Jankowski

Reading Diary

The book Claudius the God is Robert Graves' sequel to I ,Claudius which was written in the 'twenties. I first became aware of the book by seeing on TV the version by Masterpiece Theatre with a star studded cast. Crazy emperor Caligula stole the show.

 The book Claudius the God continues the saga after Claudious, now emperor, accedes to the Roman throne, a byproduct of his longevity because rivals think he is too inconsequential to kill. So, in a sense it is a sort of revenge novel.  The now powerful Claudius narrates, with hubris, his exploits in Britain, his military maneuverings, efforts at reform, and dealings with the colorful but  tricky King Herod-- and betrayals by wife Massalina.   Massalina.

His description of his conquest of Britain has a discussion of the Druids--a problematic group resisting Roman indoctrination.. They are not the gentle Wiccans we imagine today. Human sacrifice was involved, at least in Claudius's understanding, and about three quarters of the adherents to Druid priesthood died in the final stage of ordination, wherein they would be put in a coma by an alkaloid, experience visions and either awaken or not.

 Not only has Graves  a masterful grasp of Roman history but he manages to endow a character with the personality, speech inflections, and distortions characteristic of any autobiographer.


The book is reminiscent of  Gore Vidal's historical novels in that they capture a remoter time. THey give life to individuals hitherto unknown to the reader, as well as a style of thinking unfamiliar to todays reader. One is met with surprising oddities of Roman thought. While, for example, Claudius is describing his progressive measures, his wise handling of administrative duties, and an even handed approach to various troublesome characters, he also mentions that he is considering dooming a few hundred captured soldiers to the gladiatorial amphitheater.

A first rate book--entertaining, historically complex, well written, the book succeeds on many many levels.

One of the very interesting aspects of the book is the description of Herod's belief that he is the fulfillment of the prophesy for a messiah. Meanwhile, Claudius describes a former claimant to that honor. Some fellow from Galilee, a troublemaker put to death who now has a loyal but misguided group of adherents believing him to have been a god and participating in odd rites such as drinking .


Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
Tyrants Destroyed


These are short stories by Valdimir Nabokov most of them while he was an emigre in Europe in the thirties and forties. One was composed while teaching at Cornell.  The first story "Tyrants Destroyed" is a at times whimsical, but really terrifying memories of a tyrant. The tyrant is not exactly Stalin, not exactly Hitler, or anyone else so definable. But the narrator describes his acquaintance and memories of a now reigning politician, and his growing loathing.     He follows the ascent of this brutish man and the follies of his countryman as they embrace his image, his values, his habits, and the cult like incarnation of his publicists. A murder to eliminate the tyrant is devised, but obviated as the narrator realizes he has killed the character literarily by rendering him ridiculous on paper.

Other stories are self-reflective and involve various characters Nabokov encounters in his émigré days--kindly people who take the narrator in during periods of derangement, duplicitous and brilliantly mysterious poets,  characters who turn out later in the story to be simply elements  of Nabokov's compositional imagination as he composes a story based on incidents he sees, and manqué lovers and their sorrowful influence on him--lovers later admitted in the story to probably have been misremembered, rendering our sympathetic pathos at the story ridiculous.

Stories from the master--they do not have the comprehensive brilliance and scope of his later novels but are readable, clever, tricky, demonstrative of his literary sleight of hand, and provide some insight into émigré society of pre-war Europe. Some of the stories were translated by his son.

Reading Journal

Those interested in literature and journalism might enjoy the classic book, The Flower and the Leaf by Malcolm Cowley. After having lost my original copy,   I chanced across it in a used bookstore. There are a number of essays regarding literature and the intellectual climate from WWII to about the eighties.

Some describe Cowley's life of letters. In one essay Cowley  discusses teaching writing students at the cusp of the war, describing them as somewhat self-involved and without political impetus. Another  essay describes small town life during the second world war, and the changes, privations, and experiences of the townsfolk as they experience rationing, changes in the economy, instructions from Washington on civic projects to promote the war effort, and news from oversees. I was surprised at the lackadaisical mood of the townsfolk as the war progressed, with local news competing with events from the Soloman's. Cowley also, in this book, includes an essay of how French literature helped shape the resistance. France, at that time, sounds like America today, riven by infighting and internal selfishness.

Cowley also has a good essay on writer Theodore Dreiser, and the unschooled nature of that genius--a brilliant and compelling world view but with a lack of  literary ability or style. Cowley also discusses some later published manuscripts about the French Quarter written during the twenties, and some of the lesser known writers during that time--writers with talent and energy and vision but without much ability to profit from instruction, unaccomplished writing styles despite great vigor and talent, or unpalatable personality traits that interfered with publication and acceptance.

An essay on Gertrude Stein on her experience in France during the war interested me. Generally, Cowley is dismissive of Stein as a writer, regarding her as inchoherant, inconsequential, without much intellectual center, but notes that her day to day interactions during the occupation with the townspeople give a vivid experience of that time--for him her greatest work by far.

His most famous essay, one which I have been trying to find for years after losing my original copy of the book, is called The Middle American Prose Style. He analyzes that flat middle western prose style that characterized Hemingway,  Stein, Lardner, and others, how it was formed and the variety of affects that make a paragraph of this style of writing discernibly different from a similar paragraph written by an English writer or American writer of another era.

Cowley also writes of his own literary experiences, and observations of communism as a form of religion, and the reactions of his contemporaries to such dispiriting events as the non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia. A critique of Leslie Fiedler, a psychoanalytically oriented, but somewhat dogmatic critic, is deft and convincing and there is a delightful  essay on philosopher Kenneth Burke, the iconoclastic,  original thinker. And finally a wonderful essay about the difficulties of  European intellectuals in the thirties and forties--dispossessed, sometimes exiled if not jailed, rent of their political convictions and betrayed by the Russian German pact, often coming to the US but too exhausted to make a second life here.

Cowley's observations are shoc

king,  sweeping, refreshing and encouraging and remind one of the possibilities of thought and circumspection in a world that, today, seems imbued with shallowness and illiteracy.  Cowley was editor of New Republic and President of the American Academy of Arts and Lettres.

Two Interesting Books


Two very challenging books about foreign affairs caught my attention recently.

The first book is On China, by Henry Kissinger, about his assignments to China, starting with the monumental Nixon initiative .  I found it a readable and intelligent book even though not having much background except popular news accounts over the  years.  There is also a certain thrill of reading Henry Kissinger. He is, after all, supposed to be one of the greatest statesmen ever. So there is a sort of literary placebo effect here, too.The writing is from the horse's mouth.

What is nice is how well, how abstractly, how intimately in terms of attitude and nuance, Kissinger understood Mao. Indeed,  he admires Mao-- which gives a sort of odd undertow of feeling to the book, knowing that Mao changed China, I guess for the better, who knows, and was one of the greatest political leaders ever, but also practiced, nearly, genocide.

Many facts are new to me. Randomly speaking, I was  completely unaware of the relationship between China and Vietnam during the Vietnam war, and afterward, when China invaded Vietnam, with considerable loss, or really about most things happening in Asia during the seventies and eighties.  Its a bit  humbling to realize that gap.

Also interesting is that the diplomatic initiative to China took so long to develop. It probably could have occurred mid sixties had not the Johnson administration official misread some vital messages, and taken them to indicate potentially aggressive support of smaller communist states, such as Vietnam. Really, China really had small desire or ability to subsidize revolution away from home. If others wanted to revolt, fine, but they had to do it themselves. And Mao was not even averse to Americans stationed for the long run in Vietnam. Better that than have Vietnam a Soviet satellite to close to its borders.

 One of the nice things about the book is the way Kissinger gives overall reasons and rationales for the Chairman's thinking over a range of issues. For example, there was Mao's "ideological" side, but this was often countervened by his sense of immediate strategy, the need to exist in a hostile world. So, while Taiwan had great symbolic value, Mao was able to joke near the end of his life that Taiwan was better off independent, as an American ally.  Maybe in a hundred years it should belong to China, he said to Kissinger. In other words, there are more practical things to worry about at the moment.


The most satisfying component of On China is experiencing seeing Kissinger's mind in action. Kissinger's ability to examine the subtleties of language, communique, documents, and announcements--being able to read the nuances of communication in such a complex way truly impressed.

II

The second book is Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragi-Anglo American Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue.  The book describes the Persian statesman Muhammad Mossadegh, whose governmental position was usurped by the American and British coup in the early fifties, which placed the Shah in leadership. Mossadegh has an interesting Gandhi like appeal and simplicity, even though he did, at one point, probably sanction the death of a rival.  He is an interesting combination of progressivism, stubbornness, idealism, traditional values and, guessing from the description of his life, hypochondriasis or some phantom medical illness that caused repeated fainting spells.

He had devoted much of his later political career to nationalizing the Persian oil industry, though not overtly hostile to the west. Meanwhile, Britain wanted the oil money--reeling from the debts,  loss of influence, and drop in prestige after the second world war.  In addition to wanting the oil money, the British and American governments needed to shore up fear of independence seekers in other countries, and also suspected  that Mossadegh might be dallying with communism.

The coup of 1953, which subjected Iran to decades of rule by the imposed Shah, helps put in context Iran's attitudes towards the United States today.  Or at least, that is the cautionary tale many readers seem to take away from this book. One does not necessarily have to regard the events  as a cautionary tale, but rather in and of itself an interesting chapter of international relations in the early cold war. Who knows what Iran would be like if Mossadegh might have remained in power--impossible to predict. No doubt, though, the book does indicate that the coup was ill conceived, and the urbane Shah not a person Iranians could warm up to--and very punitive to those in the government his replaced.

Mossodegh was an interesting character. Born to an influential family, he was popular with his countrymen,  and very principled in his own particular beliefs, which, in my view, are not very easily translatable to a Western reader. We can admire him, though, as a nationalist who opposed domination or usurpation by other countries, as well as an individual who cultivated and tolerated his own eccentricities, such as holding briefings from his bed, or meeting with journalists behind a table with many vials of pills.

 The author seems to have good familiarity with the subject, the writing is interesting, and the material new and intriguing for someone interested in learning about   Iranian history in a book that is more challenging than most of what the casual reader gets to see very often.