You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.
Browse all our previous window view contests here.
This week’s story is a classic of feminist literature, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Its opening lines give the sense that something is amiss – but you’ll want to keep reading to find out what’s really going on:
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer.
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!
Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.
Else, why should it be let so cheaply? And why have stood so long untenanted?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and PERHAPS—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—PERHAPS that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
And what can one do?
If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?
Read the rest here. For more of her short fiction, check out The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories. Peruse previous SSFSs here.
The Economist praises Then She Fell, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that blurs boundaries between spectator and participant:
Staged in the creaking, intimate rooms of the Kingsland Ward at St John’s [in Brooklyn], “Then She Fell” provides the illusion of free-range exploration even as it carefully ushers and shepherds its explorers. All the elusiveness and illusiveness you would expect from the world of smoking caterpillars and rogue playing cards, but in a surprisingly cohesive package. Visitors variously find themselves perusing the contents of drawers and file cabinets, observing breakneck dance sequences, brushing Alice’s hair, gulping down watered-down alcoholic drinks and trying on headgear with a Mad Hatter, all the while piecing together the fragments of a story—sometimes literally, as with the scraps of a torn-up love letter. That story revolves around Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, and his child-friend Alice Liddell, the model for his story’s innocent heroine. Inspired by historical speculation and incriminating evidence—the Liddell family abruptly cut contact with Carroll and pages of his diaries were removed, for example—the production surmises that, for Carroll, Alice may not only have been a muse, but an unhealthy obsession.
“Then She Fell” does what the best retellings set out to do: it offers a new framework through which to contemplate a familiar story. It may be too much to say that after watching it you’ll never see “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” the same way again, but at last Carroll’s creations felt curiouser and curiouser once again.
In a review of the show last year, Tara Isabella Burton offered another glimpse into the experience:
Audience members are separated and ushered into different spaces (commanded, by an imperious looking nurse, not to open any closed doors), led in threes, twos, and finally solo into various, increasingly intimate, scenes with Carroll’s novels’ most famous denizens, and with the tormented Carroll himself. (Not all audience members are allowed to witness all scenes – as I realized with some disappointment, as I spotted the Hatter’s tea party taking place in a room I was not permitted to enter). Each audience member’s experience, [co-director and performer Zach] Morris tells me, is structured: though we each view scenes in different orders, in a non-linear fashion, our own emotional arc is tightly choreographed: as we, scene by scene, are invited to develop our own stories of nostalgia and loss. Thus did I follow one of the two Alices (one, a note in the Hatter’s room hints, for each side of the looking glass), into a room with an empty mirror frame, through which I served as her reflection. Thus did I follow the White Rabbit into a closet of of freshly-painted white roses, watching him perform a virtuosic – and unsettlingly close by – dance with a butcher’s knife. Thus – ultimately – did I piece together these fragments of the Kingsland Ward’s take on Wonderland, and invented for them – in the absence of linear narrative – my own story.
That, hints Morris, is precisely the point.
The show runs through December 28th in Brooklyn.
Wesley Hill laments that “intimate, vowed forms of Christian friendship” have been consigned to “the rubbish heap of history” – that friendship lacks the permanence and formal commitment of marriage::
In the ancient East up until today, a rite exists—adelphopoiesis, “brother-making”—in which friends make promises to each other and solidify their commitment by sharing in the Eucharist. (Although it was primarily men who exchanged these vows, the rite was open to women as well.) In the West, 12th-century English writer Aelred of Rievaulx upheld a similar ideal. Speaking primarily of friendships between monks, Aelred writes that we call such people friends “to whom we have no qualm about entrusting our heart and all its contents.” But he goes further: “See how far love between friends should extend; namely, that they be willing to die for one another,” unmistakably echoing Jesus. Dying for one’s friends is the apex of love.
We might want to write off Aelred’s vision of “spiritual friendship” as pious idealism. But his model of devoted friendship bore noticeable fruit. In the centuries following his death, pairs of Christian friends were buried together to signal their love. Looking forward to the bodily resurrection of the dead, the shared tombs ensured for each friend that “the first figure his awakened eyes will see will be [the other friend],” notes historian Alan Bray. With that belief, 19th-century Catholic John Henry Newman was buried next to fellow cleric Ambrose St. John. After St. John’s death, Newman lamented, “I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or a wife’s, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one’s sorrow greater, than mine.”
Matthew Lee Anderson hesitates at this, suggesting that friendship, as a form of love, is distinctive in transcending obligation and duty:
[I]t’s possible to think that friendships do not have or need vows because they are a lesser form of union, and that the lack of public recognition is tied to their weakness. It is also possible, though, that explicit vows and promises create obligations, and that friendship moves us into a realm beyond these. The high point of the Gospels, in my opinion, is the moment when Jesus tells his disciples that they are no longer disciples, but that they are now friends. I’m not prepared to speak of the obligations on God which exist because of the covenant established with man in creation: but it is clear that even if there were obligations, they could not possibly include that. Nor does it seem right to me that such a moment could generate obligations the ways that vows unquestionably do: what duty could bind Jesus’ friendship with us? What obligation might provide the shape to the unmerited gift of his grace? To be friends with God is to participate in a form of charity which is not incompatible with vows per se—lest we deny marriages any form of participation in it as well—but the vow-less, obligation-free character of friendship illuminates the unrestrained nature of charity in a way that a life mediated by vows and promises might not.
Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:
This week the Poetry Society of America and the Bryant Park Reading Room joined forces to sponsor a tribute to the poet Jean Valentine with readings, recitations, and remarks by Catherine Barnett, Mark Doty, and Timothy Liu, and a reading of poems by Valentine herself, from her recent (and absolutely extraordinary) book, Little Boat.
Valentine is a contemporary poet who—like John Ashbery and the late Lucille Clifton—continues to inspire successive generations of poets. In 1965, her debut volume Dream Barker was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Dudley Fitts, the selecting judge, described her in terms that still feel fresh and true today, praising her “quirky singular intelligence, a fusion of wit and tenderness, subserved by an unusual accuracy of pitch and rightness of tone.”
In 1969, Valentine published Pilgrims. Adrienne Rich’s moving words adorned the jacket, “Almost every poem is life lived at the edge, but lived by someone who is without cessation a poet.” Years and years later, after Jean had published many more volumes—and with her new book, Break the Glass, she is up to thirteen—Rich described Valentine’s poetry as one “of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn’t approach in any other way.”
Reading her delicate, tensile poems gives us steady access to the inward places, as Rich described, to what Emily Dickinson was indicating when she wrote of “internal difference,/Where the Meanings, are—“
This weekend, we’ll feature poems by Jean Valentine, starting with one from that early collection, Pilgrims, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1969 when (to give you a sense of the time) current volumes by John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Pablo Neruda, Edmund Wilson, and Derek Walcott were advertised on the back of the jacket. All these poems are available in Valentine’s Door in the Mountain: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2003.
“The River at Wolf” by Jean Valentine:
Coming east we left the animals
pelican beaver osprey muskrat and snake
their hair and skin and feathers
their eyes in the dark: red and green.
Your finger drawing my mouth.Blessed are they who remember
that what they now have they once longed for.A day a year ago last summer
God filled me with himself, like gold, inside,
deeper inside than marrow.This close to God this close to you:
walking into the river at Wolf with
the animals. The snake’s
green skin, lit from inside. Our second life.
(From Door in the Mountain: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2003 © 2004 by Jean Valentine. Used by permission of Wesleyan University Press)
In a defense of pieces about cultural appropriation, Linda Holmes muses on “little stories”:
Think about the way the rigor with which writers are understood to think about things conventionally expands as the distance (both literal and figurative) between the reader and the subject increases. Writing about international affairs is sometimes treated as more “serious” and higher in status than writing about national politics, which is more serious than writing about local politics. Foreign movies are more serious than Hollywood movies; inaccessible books are more serious than popular and accessible books. While it’s certainly not the only metric that affects all these status decisions, we do very often wind up assigning ascending levels of importance alongside ascending levels of remoteness.
You can see echoes of this in lots of places: go in for medical treatment, and the status of the doctor who may see you only briefly will often be more credited for the success of your care than nurses who actually touch you, who swab your skin and move your limbs and wrap and clip and stick things around you and to you, on top of the expertise they’re bringing. What feels close feels easier and simpler: I could take somebody’s blood pressure, I guess.
It’s sometimes the same in writing. When you write about appearance and beauty, it might seem like pure frivolity, and sometimes it is. But when you are touching on people’s bodies, on their hair and skin and shape, you are actually treading on something that’s powerful because of its intimacy. Writing about books or TV shows can be the same way: people are attached. It’s personal. It’s not a pass to take your eye off the ball. In a lot of ways, it’s the opposite.
https://twitter.com/SaeedKD/status/514798826537091072
Haleh Esfandiari mulls the mixed signals Rouhani sent this week while in New York:
In an interview with NBC’s Ann Curry, President Rouhani questioned U.S. motives in moving against ISIS; he called the U.S.-led coalition “ridiculous” and pooh-poohed the effectiveness of an air campaign. President Rouhani asserted that the U.S. is bringing together the very countries that had funded, supported and armed ISIS militants in the first place. He did not specifically endorse Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, but both he and Mr. Zarif have said that ISIS could not be defeated without the Syrian government’s cooperation, and both have described Mr. Assad’s opponents as terrorists. As to prospects for better Iranian-U.S. relations, Mr. Rouhani suggested that this might occur not on his watch but under his successor or his successor’s successor.
Yet in a breakfast with journalists in New York on Tuesday, President Rouhani seemed to adopt a different tone. He said that airstrikes against ISIS targets in Syria lacked “legal standing,“ but he did not press the point. (The Syrian government said that the U.S. had informed it of the intended airstrikes, making its official position more moderate than Iran’s.) President Rouhani also predicted that Iran-U.S. relations would change dramatically if a nuclear agreement is reached, and that things “will not go back to the past” even if an agreement is not reached.
Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, Rouhani said that a nuclear deal would “open the way for broader international collaboration” on ISIS. But Tom Rogan is pessimistic about Iran joining the fight against ISIS:
Some suggest that Iran could be enlisted in the fight against the Islamic State. Practically and in the short term, they’re right. But the underlying reality renders this idea absurd. Iran’s leaders have no interest in cooling the sectarian conflict that fuels the group’s jihad. Rather, Iran’s security forces seek to expand Ayatollah Khamenei’s power, a cause completely at odds with Sunni empowerment, let alone a functional Iraq.
Laura Rozen reports on the nuclear negotiations:
Limited progress has been made in narrowing differences towards reaching a final Iran nuclear accord, but significant gaps remain, a western diplomat said here Friday. Reaching a final deal by the November 24 deadline is “doable, but difficult,” he said. “On the core issues, we remain pretty far apart,” the western diplomat at the talks, speaking not for attribution to discuss the sensitive negotiations, told a small group of journalists Sept. 26 after eight days of talks here between Iran and six world powers. “On enrichment, we are not there yet,” the western diplomat. “There are significant gaps, but we are still expecting significant moves from the Iranian side,” he said. The diplomat’s comments came amid conflicting signals about whether Iran and the six world powers had begun to slightly narrow differences on the key issue of the size of Iran’s enrichment capacity in a final nuclear accord.
Bloomberg View’s editors remain hopeful:
Obviously the gap in expectations is vast. But it’s a mistake to focus so intently on the centrifuge numbers, turning them into destructive measures of victory or defeat, when “breakout” depends not only on producing fuel for a bomb, but also on assembling and testing the delivery mechanisms and warheads, as an excellent new paper from the Washington-based Arms Control Association explains. To prevent Iran from developing a clandestine program that could put together the whole package, the U.S. and its allies mainly need an intrusive inspection program.
A potential phased agreement that would satisfy both sides could, for example, give Iran some of the centrifuges it wants but require that it stockpile uranium in powder, rather than gas, form so as to expand the breakout period. Other creative solutions have been floated, too. Where the P5+1 should not compromise is in requiring on-demand access to Iranian facilities, including military ones, to conduct inspections.
Paul Richter’s dispatch doesn’t inspire confidence:
While officials insisted that the discussions have yielded some new ideas, there is less agreement now than there was in July on some issues, such as how Iran will limit output from the heavy-water nuclear facility at Arak. The two sides disagree not only on sticky political issues, but also on matters of basic nuclear physics, said one participant in the negotiations.
Alireza Nader argues that Iran’s leaders badly need a deal:
Iran’s unemployment rate keeps rising, despite reports of reduced inflation and greater investor confidence. Many Iranians are anxious for Rouhani to produce results, but will they blame the United States if Rouhani walks away from the negotiations? Despite his campaign promises to reduce repression, the human-rights situation in Iran is as bad as it was under Rouhani’s predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Washington Post’s correspondent in Iran, Jason Rezaian, has disappeared and is reported to be undergoing “interrogation,” though it is unclear why. The Rouhani government has demonstrated its inability to prevent increased government repression. Of course, Rouhani does not deserve all the blame, though he is the one who promised change. A failure in nuclear negotiations will not resolve Iran’s political division and could make the economy even worse than before.
At best, many Iranians could lose any sense of hope they felt when Rouhani was elected. And, as Iranian history has shown over and over again, the Iranian people tend to see civil disobedience, street protests and even violent insurrection as possible alternatives to fruitless participation in electoral politics.
Also, during his visit, Rouhani ducked questions about human rights abuses in Iran, including the arrest of several young people who appeared in an online tribute to Pharrell’s “Happy.” Ronald Bailey elaborates:
[Fareed] Zakaria asked Rouhani about the prosecution of six Iranian youths who put together a YouTube dance video to the tune of Pharrell William’s song “Happy” as part a fad sweeping the globe. The seven youths were initially sentenced to six months in prison and 91 lashes for their offense, but those punishments have been suspended on condition that they commit no more offenses in the next three years. Oddly, at the time of the arrest Rouhani’s twitter account noted, “Happiness is our people’s right. We shouldn’t be too hard on behaviors caused by joy.” Rouhani responded to Zakaria that Iran has an independent judiciary, and if what the youths did was legally not allowed in Iran, then they broke the law. “What happened, happened,” said Rouhani.
Cary Cooper praises Virgin’s new vacation policy:
Richard Branson has introduced a radical new policy for Virgin employees, offering his personal staff unlimited holiday rather than a fixed number of days in a given year. … The policy, or indeed non-policy, is a modern solution to a modern problem – our jobs are infringing on our personal lives more than ever and the nine-to-five life is becoming a thing of the past. We talk constantly of how our devices bring work into our homes but few meaningful solutions are forthcoming. If staff are expected to be flexible with their time, why should they expect any less in return?
It is good to see an employer signalling to his employees that he values them so highly he is prepared to offer them such a generous benefit. Branson says he has taken his inspiration from online video subscription service Netflix but other than these two companies, such a policy is relatively unheard of.
Others are more skeptical. Anne Perkins notes a tension in this plan:
According to Branson, [when to take vacation days] would be simply a matter of personal judgment. The only constraint would be if the employee entertained the faintest doubt that he or she was “up to date on every project and that their absence will not in any way damage the business”. Or, as he put it with that legendary twinkle, their careers.
That should be enough to keep most workers chained to their desks for ever. If the first condition for taking time off is deciding you wouldn’t be missed, it sounds scarily like an invitation to the boss to make it permanent.
Simon Kelner spots a double-standard:
It’s all right for Branson. It’s his business, and he can slip off to Necker Island any time he wants. He’s got a squadron of underlings to take up the slack, and in any case no one is going to question his right to take a break. For his employees, however, it’s a slightly more complicated and nuanced equation. In theory, it’s modern working practice, redolent of a new-age dot-com business, but in reality it leaves too much within the realms of uncertainty, placing an added burden on the individual worker.
Choice means anxiety. How much holiday is too much? Eight weeks? Ten weeks? Twelve? There are no guidelines, other than what we imagine our colleagues will think of us if we’re consistently absent from our workstations.
Leonid Bershidsky puts the policy in international perspective:
Although this policy sounds attractive, it is also quintessentially American. The U.S. is the world’s only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee people a paid vacation. Netflix workers may well end up taking none if they want to keep their jobs. Disappearing for a month would definitely undermine an employee’s ability to be effective.
Under employer rules that envisage a certain amount of time off each year, many people don’t use it all. The average U.S. employee only uses 51 percent of allotted vacation time. Asked why, most people say nobody else can do their work or they’re afraid of getting behind. But 17 percent admit they’re fearful of not meeting goals or getting fired, and another 13 percent say they want to outperform colleagues.
About 500 Shiite volunteers from Tal Afar attend a combat training session at a military camp in the Shiite shrine city of Karbala in central Iraq to join the fight against jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group, which led a sweeping offensive in June that overran much of the country’s Sunni Arab heartland. The militant organisation has taken control of important cities including Mosul, Saddam Hussein’s hometown Tikrit and Tal Afar in northern Iraq, as well as Fallujah and part of Ramadi in the west. By Mohammed Sawaf/AFP/Getty Images.
Rachel Williamson contextualizes a “brawl” in Cairo between police and black-market vendors:
[Nasr] Eissa and his competitors are archetypical of Egypt’s black market economy: opportunistic entrepreneurs who’ll sell you a flag during a national celebration and be back to hocking Batman t-shirts the next day. They’re regular targets of police and bureaucratic shakedowns for bribes, and represent a small fraction of an underground economy. It includes non-taxpaying companies, allegedly up to $360 billion of unregistered real estate assets, and provides up to 40 percent of the country’s GDP, according to research from the Peruvian think tank Institute of Liberty and Democracy (ILD).
These entrepreneurs are also the targets of a brand new government initiative seeking to formalize the informal economy. It’s an idea that’s been tried before in Egypt, but this time, the directives are coming from the very top.
Williamson provides the cases for and against this informal economy:
The sheer size of the informal sector — a genuine parallel economy — creates a structural risk. Diwany says the usual tools for managing an economy are unusable when a sizable chunk of the country’s assets and production are hidden in the black market. For example, last year Youm7 newspaper discovered that unregulated “backdoor” cheese factories were adding formaldehyde to their products to extend shelf lives. …
But not everyone agrees that the existence of the informal economy is bad for Egypt, nor that Sisi’s government can heal decades of distrust in state institutions. Angus Blair, founder of the think tank Signet Institute, points out that the sheer size of the informal sector is what got Egypt through the tough economic times of the last three years. He says it provides a huge amount of liquidity, and that Egypt’s real GDP might not be growing at the 2.3 percent it is now (as projected by the International Monetary Fund) if all that extra, unaccounted-for cash wasn’t floating around.
The Dish 