Letter from Berlin: Hope Springs… Momentarily

Berlin — I suppose we’ll get used to it after awhile: an American president goes to Europe and does just about everything right. Thoughtful policy presentation, absence of imperial bullying, and a sure-handed human touch. President Barack Obama’s first official European trip, which began at a mid-week G-20 conference in London, followed by stops in Strasbourg and Baden-Baden, wrapped up on Sunday in Prague, with a policy speech in flower-bedecked Castle Square before thousands of people,... 
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Intimate Sources

Polaroids: Attila Richard Lukacs and Michael Morris (exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta; Edmonton, Alberta, until May 18, 2009). 1. The first piece of “visual art” I saw, or perhaps the first that I actually looked at, upon arriving in Berlin, Germany in spring 1990 — at the apartment of Canadian artist Michael Morris — was a set of 20 Polaroid photos, placed in a single frame, of a nude young male, perhaps 19 or 20 years old, taken by Attila Richard Lukacs, a then 27-year-old... 
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Indelible

1. Philip Roth is quick to remind us, right near the beginning of The Human Stain (2000), that Western literature begins with a bitter argument, one that takes place in the midst of a bogged-down war. If “all of European literature springs from a fight,” so does, not so coincidentally, Roth’s pugnacious novel, set in the midst of America’s “culture wars” at the very end of the twentieth century. Coleman Silk, the book’s protagonist, is a former professor of classics,... 
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Exit Strategies

1. It’s fitting, I suppose, that I’m only belatedly getting around to Edward Said’s posthumously-published On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (2006). The multi-talented Said, who died in 2003 of leukemia, at age 67, was a long-time Columbia University literature professor; a cultural critic, the author of the groundbreaking if tendentious Orientalism as well as Culture and Imperialism; a Palestinian political activist; the subtle memoirist of Out of Place; and a non-professional... 
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