Oscar Abello suggests fair-trade coffee might actually be bad for workers:
Fair-Trade certified coffee has become known as an easy way for coffee drinkers to make the world a better place for coffee growers, many of whom are among the world’s poorest people. But a study released in April 2014 seriously questions how much fair-trade certification really does for them. Limited to 12 research sites in Ethiopia and Uganda, the study found that non-fair-trade certified farms paid better wages and provided better working conditions than fair-trade certified farms. The study authors surveyed 1,700 farm workers, going beyond the usual farm owner or farming co-op member that has historically been the beneficiary at the heart of fair trade’s story. …
So why are farm workers finding a better deal on non-fair-trade certified farms? Scale could be one reason. Until recently, only small farms, loosely defined as 10 acres or less, have been eligible for fair-trade certification. The report says larger farms appeared to be in better financial position to offer higher pay, more annual days of work, and better working conditions. Regulatory requirements like paid maternity leave for agricultural workers may also apply only to larger farms, the study found.
Ethan Zuckerman, who helped invent the pop-up ad, expresses regret about where ads have taken the Internet:
I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technologically savvy, but hasn’t shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience.
Users have been so well trained to expect surveillance that even when widespread, clandestine government surveillance was revealed by a whistleblower, there has been little organized, public demand for reform and change.
Zuckerman encourages sites to “charge for services and protect users’ privacy.” Meanwhile, DJ Pangburn is skeptical users would cough up the cash for an internet without ads:
Paying for an ad-free internet would be cheaper than cable, but nearly zero people do so.
By dividing digital advertising spending in the UK in 2013 (£6.4 billion) by the total number of UK internet users (45 million), Ebuzzing found that an ad-free internet would cost around £140 ($232.24) a year. The survey also found that 98 percent of UK consumers would be unwilling to pay that amount of money for an ad-free internet.
Dan Piepenbring calls Cory Arcangel’s Working on My Novel“a brilliant litmus test—there are those who will read it as a paean to the fortitude of the creative spirit, and those who will read it as a confirmation of the novel’s increasing impotence”:
Arcangel suggests there’s something inherently ennobling in trying to write, but his book is an aggregate of delusion, narcissism, procrastination, boredom, self-congratulation, confusion—every stumbling block, in other words, between here and art. Working captures the worrisome extent to which creative writing has been synonymized with therapy; nearly everyone quoted in it pursues novel writing as a kind of exercise regimen. (“I love my mind,” writes one aspirant novelist, as if he’s just done fifty reps with it and is admiring it all engorged with blood.)
It’s also a comment on the peculiar primacy the novel continues to enjoy—not as an artistic mode but as a kind of elevated diary, a form of what we insidiously refer to as “self-expression,” as if anyone’s self is static enough to survive transmission to the page. Not for nothing do we have Working on My Novel instead of Working on My Screenplay or Working on My Scrimshaw, because the novel, with its rich intellectual-emotional tradition and its (very occasional) commercial viability, is still perceived as the ideal vehicle for saying something ambitious. Even as fewer people read novels, we’re made to feel that writing one is a worthy, rigorous enterprise for serious thinking people, a means of proving that we have reservoirs of mindfulness and discipline deeper than our peers’. And so we try to write fiction, though certainly we don’t need to, and, as this book attests, we often don’t especially want to, even if we greet the task steeled by a perfect cup of coffee, a glass of red wine and a hot bath, or an Eminem song.
Sam Leith ponders the British press’ vexed relationship with Martin Amis:
Has there in living memory been a writer whom we (by which I mean the papers, mostly) so assiduously seek out for comment – we task him to review tennis, terrorism, pornography, the state of the nation – and whom we are then so keen to denounce as worthless? In recent years his public interventions on everything from Islamist terror to population demographics have caused mini shitstorms; and critics seem to take a particular, giant-killing glee in slamming his fiction. Setting out to write a retrospective essay on his work and reputation, the implied title you find yourself reaching for is “in defence of … ” It’s as if, and in answer to some inchoate public need, we demand of Amis that he say things in public so we can all agree on what an ass he is.
Pivoting off of Leith’s essay, Emily Temple wonders why America has so few literary bomb-throwers:
As I read the article, I couldn’t help but be slightly jealous. It’s true that Amis is a singular fellow, but it seems like all of the real contemporary enfants terribles in the literary world come to us from overseas. Michel Houellebecq, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Will Self (just read this delightfully snooty Q&A), etc. Where oh where is the American Martin Amis? (The fact that Amis somewhat recently moved to Brooklyn is not relevant; he is not ours.) Is there a writer we love to hate? Or one who picks fights with equal glee?
No. You know who we’ve got? Franzen. Whiny, whiny Jonathan Franzen. Our hatred of him is there, but it’s utterly joyless. We don’t love to hate him. He just kind of pisses everyone off. And unlike their reactions to Amis, which are frequently ambivalent and all over the map, the critics pretty much universally enjoy Franzen’s writing – which leaves us arguing about whether or not he’s right about Twitter.
Teju Cole experiences a sense of communion while rereading James Baldwin’s 1955 essay “Stranger in the Village” in the tiny Swiss hamlet in which it was written:
I took a room at the Hotel Mercure Bristol the night I arrived. I opened the windows to a dark view, but I knew that in the darkness loomed the Daubenhorn mountain. I ran a hot bath and lay neck-deep in the water with my old paperback copy of “Notes of a Native Son.” The tinny sound from my laptop was Bessie Smith singing “I’m Wild About That Thing,” a filthy blues number and a masterpiece of plausible deniability: “Don’t hold it baby when I cry / Give me every bit of it, else I’d die / I’m wild about that thing.” She could be singing about a trombone.
And it was there in the bath, with his words and her voice, that I had my body-double moment: here I was in Leukerbad, with Bessie Smith singing across the years from 1929; and I am black like him; and I am slender; and have a gap in my front teeth; and am not especially tall (no, write it: short); and am cool on the page and animated in person, except when it is the other way around; and I was once a fervid teen-age preacher (Baldwin: “Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, ‘the Word’ – when the church and I were one”); and I, too, left the church; and I call New York home even when not living there; and feel myself in all places, from New York City to rural Switzerland, the custodian of a black body, and have to find the language for all of what that means to me and to the people who look at me. The ancestor had briefly taken possession of the descendant. It was a moment of identification, and in the days that followed that moment was a guide.
Rachel Shteir, who calls (NYT) writing “daily frustration, not to mention humiliation,” mulls writers’ failures:
I remember the first time I felt like a bona fide failure as a writer. This feeling of nausea washed over me, but it was confusing because it appeared at the exact moment when I was supposed to be feeling success. It was when I finished my first book and realized there were some things in it that I hated, things that were made all the more hideous to me whenever people said, “You must have such a sense of accomplishment.” I asked a more experienced writer if she ever got over this nauseated feeling. She didn’t reassure me. “Oh, that never goes away.”
Every writer has subjects that are our “Moby-Dicks,” the ones we imagine will transform us, more than the others, catapulting us to some other more pleasant climate.
Instead, they sink us. Help, help, we cry, as we drift out to sea on a leaky lifeboat. Doomed.
Academic philosophers in the English speaking world still regard philosophy as Locke defined it in the 17th century, as “the handmaiden of the sciences”: it doesn’t explore the world beyond science but the limits of science, with the result that philosophy doesn’t really intrude into the public world. In the early 20th century were were caught up by the movement to form analytical philosophy, based in the study of logic, the foundations of mathematics, the syntax of ordinary language, the validity of arguments, something very formal. So when people have a big question, especially now since the decline of the orthodox religions, they don’t turn to philosophy for the answer but try to formulate it in whatever technical words have been bequeathed to them, and when a scientist comes along and says “I have the answer,” or even “there is no question,” they think “this guy knows what he’s talking about, I’d better lean on him.”
I realized pit bulls were always portrayed in very urban, gritty photographs. The imagery associated with these dogs is often harsh, very contrasted, conveying the idea of them being tough. In my opinion, this feeds the myth that these dogs are dormant psychopaths. So I decided to take the other route and portray them like hippies, soft fairy-tale-inspired characters, feminine and dreamy. The idea of Flower Power blossomed.
I made flower headpieces and approached three rescue groups in New York City: Sean Casey Animal Rescue, Second Chance Rescue and Animal Haven. All three welcomed my project with enthusiasm. I set up a studio in both boarding facilities and photographed some of the pit bulls who were up for adoption (July and August 2014).
Two of the dogs have already been adopted. As the Dish is a proud member of Club Tripod, we’ve featured Lucy above, who is currently a sling-walking bipod while she recovers from a spinal cord injury. Head here for adoption information. Sophie will also be selling prints and calendars from the series with proceeds going to the three shelters she worked with. You can follow the project’s progress on Twitter.
Davar Ardalan pays tribute to the great Iranian poet Simin Behbahani, who died this week at the age of 87:
For millions of Iranians all over the world, Behbahani represented the invincible power of the Iranian psyche. Her words were piercing and fierce, lamenting on the lack of freedom of expression through the ages. For six decades, many Iranians found refuge in her poetry as a way to nurture their hunger for dialogue, peace, human rights and equality.
Farzaneh Milani, who teaches Persian literature and women’s studies at the University of Virginia, has been translating Behbahani’s work for decades. She has said that much of Iran’s history can be studied through Behbahani’s poems, as her words stir the mind and quench the thirst of those who can only whisper their laments away from the public eye.
Those words also made her a perpetual target of Iran’s regimes. Soraya Nadia McDonald details the one such harassment:
In 2010, Iranian officials stopped [Behbahani] at the airport in Tehran. The 82-year-old poet, nearly blind due to macular degeneration, was on her way to Paris to speak at an International Women’s Day event. Somehow, she was a threat. Authorities confiscated her passport, interrogated her all night and told Behbahani if she wanted her passport back, she would have to retrieve it from Iran’s Revolutionary Court. Behbahani, by then a recipient of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom and a two-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in literature, had developed quite the reputation for speaking out against tyranny. Behbahani wrote about social issues with a populist bent. She wasn’t afraid to draw attention to the problems faced by prostitutes in Tehran or bring context to the Islamic revolution of 1979 by including Iranian history in her accounts.
Soraya Lennie puts Behbahani’s life and work in context:
She came from a different generation – often referred to by Iranians as the “best generation” – which rediscovered the freedom of critical thinking in a society controlled by absolute monarchy, and refused to be silenced after the Islamic revolution that replaced it. Much like [her contemporaries, the late Forough Foroukhzad and Ahmad Shamlou], she had been a critic and a poet long before the revolution in 1979. She learned censorship and self-censorship. But never silence. It was her words that revolutionaries used to inspire their opposition to the monarchy, and the very same words their children now use against the Islamic Republic.
Regarding Behbahani’s feminism, she rejected the notion that a woman’s poetry should ever be held in a different light than a man’s. Douglas Martin explains how that ethos drove her writing as well:
Ms. Behbahani wrote more than 600 poems, collected in 20 books, on subjects including earthquakes, revolution, war, poverty, prostitution, freedom of speech and her own plastic surgery. … One of her first literary innovations was to experiment with the ghazal, a sonnetlike Persian poetic form. Traditionally, the ghazal had been written from the perspective of a male lover admiring a woman, but Ms. Behbahani made the woman the sexual protagonist. Her skill at writing about love and sex led her to compose lyrics for many popular songs. She later used the ghazal format to write about all manner of subjects, including the Iran-Iraq war.
More on the ghazal form and her contributions to it here. In a 2011 interview with Shiva Rahbaran, Behbahani remarked on what it was like to write knowing that censors awaited the result:
Despite my age, I can almost say that I have never put pen to paper without worrying about censorship. The nightmare of censorship has always cast a shadow over my thoughts. Both under the previous state and under the Islamic state, I have said again and again that, when there is an apparatus for censorship that filters all writing, an apparatus comes into being in every writer’s mind that says: “Don’t write this, they won’t allow it to be published.” But the true writer must ignore these murmurings. The true writer must write. In the end, it will be published one day, on the condition that the writer writes the truth and does not dissemble. Of course, whenever censorship is stringent, most writers resort to metaphor and figurative and symbolic language. And this can help stimulate the imagination. But taking comfort from this fact doesn’t lessen the writer’s dream of attaining freedom.
She also discussed the power and responsibility of being a poet:
Our literature has always been a reflection of contemporary events. The Shāhnāmeh is the greatest epic in history. It is a treasure trove of ideas, wisdom, advice, help, guidance, and rites. With this immense work, Ferdowsi revived the spirit of serenity, magnanimity, and pride in the Iranian nation, which had lost itself under the weight of the Arab conquest of Iran. It empowered divided Iranian peoples to unite. Most of our poets, even those who worked as tyrannical kings’ eulogists, have used their poems to remind rulers of the right way to run the state, practice justice, and uphold the welfare of the people. At the time of the Mongol invasion of Iran and the horrific massacres, writers and poets belonging to the mystical school of thought set out to soothe the people’s pain and sorrow, to teach them to be patient and ascetic, because there was no other alternative at the time. In any age, writers have produced works which were in keeping with their society’s needs and which helped and guided the nation.
When Neda Agha-Soltan was murdered by the regime during the 2009 Green Movement protests, Behbahani was one of the Iranians who spoke out. And with respect to her influence, even President Obama chose Behbahani to quote at the end of his 2011 Norouz address. Stepping back, Azadeh Moaveni mourns, but is also grateful:
She stayed in Iran when many of her literary compatriots, novelists and poets alike, transplanted themselves to Europe or North America, prizing a fierce national loyalty over personal freedom. For many Iranians, she was nothing less than the country’s literary conscience, a figure whose poetry refracted all the anger, disappointment and displaced beauty of the modern Iranian experience. …
The lioness of Tehran’s literary scene, the hiking partner of [Nobel Peace Prize winner] Shirin Ebadi, the poet who refused to leave and refused to be forced into silence, I can hardly begin to describe the force Behbahani has exerted on Iran, carving out a literary realm and inviting everyone to take refuge alongside her verse.
An English-language collection of Behbahani’s poetry can be found here.
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