To the Editors: I write to clear up misconceptions about the Constitution, the law, and my book in the review of The Case for Impeachment. The reviewers’ most serious error, with profound implications for current debates, is their claim that impeachment is inapplicable to offenses occurring prior to the presidency. The reviewers cite no authorities for this proposition and ignore the lack of any such limitation in the Constitution.
Books
Thoreau In Translation
To the Editors: I was surprised at Robert Pogue Harrison’s assertion in “The True American” that “Thoreau hardly makes it onto the list of notable American authors outside his home country,” and that “his peculiar brand of American nativism has little international appeal.” In fact, Thoreau’s international reception is both broad and deep at this summer’s mark of his bicentennial.
Referendums: Yes or No?
Behind referendums and plebiscites lies the idea of popular sovereignty. The key factor in referendums is who has the right to call them. Formally, the Kurdish and Catalan referendums were both illegal because neither the Iraqi nor the Spanish government licensed them. Some places—California and Switzerland among them—have for many years granted a specified minimum of petitioners the right to hold a referendum. But now, globalized social media are transforming the whole ballot initiative question.
Master Class
For Elizabeth Hardwick, literary criticism had to be up there with its subjects; real literature should elicit criticism worthy of the achievement in question. We got that from her straight off. The kind of modern literary criticism she was talking about—Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, R.P. Blackmur, John Berryman, F.W. Dupee, Mary McCarthy—was as stimulating as the work it was exploring. Then, too, she wanted us to take seriously the essay as a form. The American essay—Thoreau, Emerson—was an important part of American history.
Agnès Varda’s Double Portrait
Faces Places is an unexpected—and perhaps final—gift from the visionary eighty-nine-year-old director Agnès Varda. As a collaboration with her youthful co-director, JR, an artist famous for his monumental installations of black-and-white photo portraits, the film is a double portrait. It also has a double subject: the unexpected delights and discoveries of documenting the lives of the people they encounter in corners of France, and of the bittersweet, and inevitably transitory, friendship making this film creates between the two artists, travelers in different centuries, looking at the world together and experiencing each other.
The Chinese World Order
Ten years ago the journalist James Mann published a book called The China Fantasy, in which he criticized American policymakers for using something he called “the Soothing Scenario” to justify the policy of diplomatic and economic engagement with China. According to this view, China’s exposure to the benefits of globalization would lead the country to […]
Myanmar: The Invention of Rohingya Extremists
The demonization of the Sunni Muslim Rohingya minority as “extremists” or “terrorists” has proved effective for nationalist politicians with Myanmar’s Buddhist majority. But this othering of the Rohingya now risks dangerous secondary effects. Chiefly, that the government’s conjuring of the specter of a jihadist insurgency may prove self-fulfilling, with an embittered, radicalized Rohingya diaspora forced over the border at bayonet point into Bangladesh, where a coterie of Islamist groups like Hizb-ut-Tahrir are using the Rohingya cause to whip up popular sentiment for their own political purposes.
Moses in Mexico
It is good to see Cristobal de Villalpando’s huge altarpiece at the Met placed at the very center of the Robert Lehman wing, where it can be admired from two levels, top-lit by daylight. At just over twenty-eight feet high by fourteen feet wide, it benefits from isolation, both from the objects in the Lehman collection and from the small selection of lesser works by Villalpando exhibited in their own gallery nearby. The lower half of the crowded composition depicts Moses raising the Brazen Serpent; the upper, the Transfiguration of Jesus. What we are not shown is the way it is displayed in its permanent Mexican home (for which it was painted) in Puebla cathedral.
Kinds of Blue Black
The exhibition that I ended up curating at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation this year, “Blue Black,” explores the space between Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Black and Louis Armstrong’s “Black and Blue,” using them as bookends for an inquiry into how these two colors have been employed within a wide range of artistic practices. The selected works hew flexibly to the theme. It is by no means a comprehensive survey of the subject.
This Empty House
One may wind up concluding that by far the most terrifying thing about Mother! is that Darren Aronofsky seems to be Hollywood’s idea of an intellectual, our own brainy, home-grown auteur. Aronofsky isn’t much interested in these people’s complexity or humanity, but purely in his own big concepts. Of course, it’s possible to have characters and ideas; it’s a great gift of narrative art.
Sig Nordal 