Here are some great reads I’ve come across over the past week:

An article by Dan Bilefsky in the Wall Street Journal details how Antwerp’s Hassidic Jews are being displaced by Jain Indians as the city’s predominant diamond traders. This came as a complete surprise to me — I’ve obviously been out of the country too long — but I suspect most Belgians are not aware of this shift either; the Hassidic diamond cutters remain an iconic presence in the institutional memory of the city.

It makes sense that an industry so dependent on trust would be dominated by people bound by strict moral codes. With uncut diamonds so easily pilfered by employees, western-style companies don’t stand a chance in this market. The Jain, however, are more than just incorruptible: they’ve managed to coopt the forces of globalization, cutting their diamonds much more cheaply in India, while Antwerp’s Jews are still debating whether they should open shop on the Sabbath.

A few weeks ago, the New York Review of Book had a landmark appraisal of the animal rights movement at age 30 by Peter Singer, the renowned philosopher who popularized the movement. This article continues the NYRB tradition of camouflaging suasive essays as impartial book reviews, but it makes for fascinating reading. Unlike much that is written by and about animal rights advocates, Singer avoids emotional appeals, restricting himself to the philosophical arguments, knowing full well they have the best chance of leaving an impact.

Singer charts the movement’s success in curbing animal testing, but points to the relative lack of animal welfare concerns on US factory farms, especially when contrasted with conditions in Europe. As if to prove his point, one of Sweden’s largest supermarkets is presently phasing out the selling of factory-farmed eggs. Their advertising prop: A narrow human-sized cage [Swedish] at Slussen, a busy commuting point in Stockholm, inviting you and 6 friends to climb in and experience factory farming from the chicken’s perspective.

In 1992, Norman Rush wrote Mating, one of my favorite novels. He’s just come out with Mortals, set in Botswana a few years after Mating, and it promises to be as good a read, perhaps even better.

Until I get my hands on itUpdate (2003/06/03): Found it at Hedengrens! I snatched the (only?/last?) copy. I’m reading it now., I’ll have to content myself with this excerpt. But what an appetite whetter it is! Novelists can only appeal to experiences held in common by the readership; what Rush excels at is finding emotional states to articulate which otherwise seem so peculiar and private that we internalize them. Here is an example:

But I’m fine, he thought, trying not to relive a moment from the walk home that had made him feel fragile. Near the school was a rundown property whose occupants kept a goat. The goat had run up purposively to the fence as Ray came by and for an instant Ray had thought something monstrous was happening, because the goat’s tongue seemed to be a foot long. He’d been frightened until he’d realized that it was only a goat eating a kneesock. Iris could be asleep. He would look for her, softly.

That second of near-panic because the brain has formed a preliminary conclusion from visual data that jars strongly with everything you know as normal — it’s a state I’ve felt before. I vividly remember one such episode: I was 11, we lived on 66th and 3rd in New York in one of those twenty-something story white-brick buildings built in the 60s, and our penthouse had a terrace that ran all around the exterior of the apartment. One night, while I was studying at my desk facing my window, I looked up and noticed the reflection of my dad standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. I turned around, but he was not there. The second it took to figure out he was standing outside on the terrace, looking in, was terrifying. I thought I had seen a ghost.

John Updike somewhat sniffily reviews the novel in The New Yorker, with a faux neutrality betrayed by a tone of regret, words that are slightly sharpAccusing Rush of logomania is rich coming from a man who wrote the famously prolix Rabbit books., and this question left rudely unanswered:

Are C.I.A. novels literature? I haven’t read many, but Rush seems to have the lingo down pretty well, and the little subterfugal tricks.

One wishes he would just come out and say that he did not like the novel.

The piece on Slavoj Zizek by Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker is a much more interesting critique, but only if I am right in my suspicions that it is sublimely ironical, in the sense that it purports to be a friendly portrait of the man when instead it aims to lay bare the banality of much that he espouses.

And I don’t just mean all that uncritical fawning over Lacan, “the French Freud“, famously defrocked Thomas Nagel’s hilarious essay on Sokal’s exploit: “It is not always easy to tell how much is due to invincible stupidity and how much to the desire to cow the audience with fraudulent displays of theoretical sophistication. Lacan and Baudrillard come across as complete charlatans, Irigaray as an idiot, Kristeva and Deleuze as a mixture of the two. But these are delicate judgments.”as a French Fraud by Sokal in his 1996 hoax in Social Text. To me, the sign that a reading between the lines is in order is a retelling by Mead, a New Yorker, of Zizek’s elevator riff in a fashion completely devoid of sarcasm:

[Zizek] has also noted that the “close door” button in an elevator does nothing to hasten the door closing but merely gives the presser a false sense of effective activity. Like many of Zizek’s observations, this is the kind of insight that forever changes one’s experience, in this case of elevator riding …

With apologies to Zizek, noticing that the “close door” button does not work is something every New Yorker living above the 5th floor figured out by the time they were seven. In fact, you can spot out-of-towners in an instant if they reach for the “close door” button. Slovenia obviously has few high-rise buildings. And when Mead comments that “he may appear to be a serious leftist intellectual, but is it not the case that he is in fact a comedian?”, I think what we are seeing is a backhanded compliment: philosophers of the absurd are just comedians who take themselves way too seriously.