Back from the Mostly Dead

I’ve been out of it for a bit – I’m seeing a new doctor for the migraines and he wanted to take me off the painkillers I’ve been using, because they may be causing rebound headaches. He seems to have been right, to a point – I’ve been having fewer of the really, really bad days and smoothing out to a constant lower pain level, but withdrawal has been just a lovely process. The still here, though. I’m in the process of moving AGAIN – the boyfriend/fiance of the last 4 years and I are splitting up (totally amicable, we’re still going to be good friends; really, the last year or so that’s been where we both have been emotionally but driving each other nuts in living together and the stress of my health getting worse and worse, partly because I can’t really do much, so I’m pretty hermit-like, and partly because the financial side of things, since my salary was providing most of the rent/utilities/etc). So I’m moving across town, with my mom.  The crappy part of moving in with her (we get along fine), apart from just the basic fact of moving back in with a parent at 28, is that she’s allergic to cats, so I have to leave them with the ex until I can get my own place, whether with disability of some sort or getting better enough that I can start working again.

Oddly, or maybe not so, is that I’m almost afraid of the migraines getting better. They’ve dismantled so much of my life that I’ll have to put it back together from scratch. Realistically, now that I have some real world experience, I don’t think I’d be happy with anything but research, and that in the core design/neutronics/nuclear physics area. Ideally, I’d like to go back to space propulsion reactor design, but I don’t think there’s much happening there right now. And I learned my lesson with my master’s – I definitely don’t want to do anything with the radiological assessment/dosimetry/shielding area. And GT has, since I graduated, gotten some huge grants to work on core design, so that would help. But I’d still have to start from a) being out of academia for 3+ years, and b) restarting life, really, since I’d want to get my own place and get used to not living with someone, unless I got a roommate.

This is an article from the “Magazine” section of the NY Times, from 2010, but it showed up as a featured link recently for some reason. It’s titled “A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac” and talks about a new perspective on Vishniac’s photography based on looking at the full sets of negatives and some bits of his biography that didn’t quite match. For those who don’t know who he is (and I’d never heard of him, but I gather he’s more well known to previous generations, especially Jewish families that survived the Holocaust):

Roman Vishniac was born in Russia in 1897 to wealthy, secular Jewish parents…The family lived comfortably, especially in contrast to other Jews, many of whom roamed the city looking for work. “They had a special kind of face, those people, a special kind of whisper and a special kind of footstep,” Vishniac told a writer for The New Yorker in 1955. “They were like hunted animals.”

In 1918, prompted by post-revolution turmoil, Vishniac’s family decided to make their way west…In the 1930s, as Hitler’s anti-Semitic campaign began in earnest, Vishniac, armed with both a Leica and a Rolleiflex, set out east to document the world from which his people had fled…Vishniac later claimed that he took 16,000 photographs — many of them, he added, with a hidden camera used to elude the local police and Orthodox authorities who forbade photography as the creation of “graven images.” He said he was arrested multiple times.

“My friends assured me that Hitler’s talk was sheer bombast,” Vishniac said in 1955. “But I replied that he would not hesitate to exterminate those people when he got around to it. And who was there to defend them? I knew I could be of little help, but I decided that, as a Jew, it was my duty to my ancestors, who grew up among the very people who were being threatened, to preserve — in pictures, at least — a world that might soon cease to exist.”

But looking at his bio and the full set of pictures, a curator at the International Center of Photography (Maya Benton) realized that not only had he been paid to go take the pictures, it was unlikely that he used a hidden camera (based on the fact that cameras of the time would not have been easily hidden in a suitcase, as he claimed, and also that in some photos allegedly taken with the hidden camera, he and the camera are visible in reflections). Additionally, the narrative he creates in his books of photography (with choice of photos and the captions he gave) is skewed and sometimes just flat wrong.

Vishniac’s body of work has come to be thought of as the last photographic record of a universe on the cusp of being comprehensively and cataclysmically destroyed. His pictures were used in so many influential books about Jewish life before the Holocaust…and later serving as what Janusz Kaminski called the “guiding force” for his Oscar-winning cinematography of “Schindler’s List” — that Vishniac, who died in 1990, has virtually become, in the words of Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, “the official mortuary photographer of Eastern European Jewry.”

But he picked photos that gave the impression that all Jews then were living deeply religious lives in poverty, adding dramatic captions. However…

Jewish life in Eastern Europe, especially in the interwar years, was roiling and diverse. All kinds of people — secular and religious, urban and rural, wealthy and poor — consorted freely with one another …a lively and contentious political culture, a theater scene that rivaled those of most major European cities, a literary tradition comprising not only Yiddish and Hebrew work but also European fiction and a thriving economic trade that successfully linked cities and countrysides (one of Vishniac’s unpublished pictures shows a store in a tiny Eastern European town selling oranges imported from Palestine). Even Hasidic life, so easily caricatured as provincial and isolated, was nothing of the sort: yeshivas, like today’s universities, often attracted students from all over Eastern and Central Europe. The concentration of poverty and piety in Vishniac’s pictures in “Polish Jews” created a distinct impression of timelessness, an unchanging, “authentic society” captured in amber.

I realize that he was trying to create a more poetic narrative and appeal to nostalgia when he created the books, but the problem is that he represented it as representative and his photos are used so much with no others to offset his bias. He should absolutely be recognized as a brilliant photographer – apparently some of his best photos were never seen because they didn’t fit his narrative – but I’m glad the historic context is being corrected. The crappy thing is that they’ve already created THE image of Jewish/shtetl life. It’s going to take a lot of work and time to change it.

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And here’s a just weird story – PETA has been successful in eliminating a New Year’s Eve possum drop. Apparently there’s a town in North Carolina that puts a live opossum in a glass box and lower it for the countdown, like the Times Square ball or the Atlanta peach. For the icing on the story, the ruling from the judge preventing the permit for the possum drop reads, in part: “Hunters must afford wild animals the same right Patrick Henry yearned for: ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!'”

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There are a few good editorials about the Petraeus mess. From Maureen Dowd of the NY Times, titled “Reputation, Reputation, Reputation“:

As a West Point cadet, David Petraeus clambered up the social ladder by winning the superintendent’s daughter; now he has been brought down by his camp followers clambering up the social ladder.

Even when he was the C.I.A. director, Petraeus’s ego was…wrapped up in being a shiny military idol…

…

It is disturbing that an ethically sketchy, politically motivated F.B.I. agent could spark an incendiary federal investigation tunneling into private lives to help a woman he liked and later blow it up to hurt a president he didn’t like.

It’s also worrisome that the nation’s spymaster — who had presided in a military where adultery could result in court-martial — could not have found a more clandestine manner of talking naughty to his biographer babe than a Gmail drop box, a semiprivate file-sharing system used by terrorists, teenagers and authors.

…

The scandal is a good reminder that…these guys are human beings working under extremely stressful circumstances, and their judgments are not beyond reproach.

Petraeus’s Icarus flight began when he set himself above President Obama.

…Petraeus did not accept the new president’s desire to head for the nearest exit ramp on Afghanistan in 2009. The general began lobbying for a surge in private sessions with reporters and undercutting the president, who was trying to make a searingly hard call.

Petraeus rolled the younger commander in chief into going ahead with a bound-to-fail surge in Afghanistan, just as…the C.I.A. had rolled Jack Kennedy into going ahead with the bound-to-fail Bay of Pigs scheme. Both missions defied logic, but the untested presidents put aside their own doubts and instincts, caving to experience.

Once in Afghanistan, Petraeus welcomed prominent conservative hawks from Washington think tanks…”They provided advice to field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the commanders were getting from their immediate bosses.”

So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal.

From Frank Bruni, also of the NY Times, “The Siren and the Spook“:

There were remarks galore about her unusually toned arms and the way she dressed to show them off…even spotted a comment about how much of her armpits one of her outfits revealed, as if underarm exhibitionism were some sort of sexual sorcery, some aphrodisiac, the key to it all.

What else could explain his transgression? Why else would a man of such outward discipline and outsize achievement risk so much? The temptress must have been devious. The temptation must have been epic.

That was the tired tone of some of the initial coverage of, and reaction to, the affair between David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell…

There are bigger issues here. There are questions of real consequence, such as why the F.B.I. got so thoroughly involved in what has been vaguely described as a case of e-mail harassment, whether the bureau waited too long to tell lawmakers and White House officials about the investigation, and how much classified information Broadwell, by dint of her relationship with Petraeus, was privy to. The answers matter.

…the anecdotes and chatter that implicitly or explicitly wonder at the spidery wiles she must have used to throw the mighty man off his path are laughably ignorant of history, which suggests that mighty men are all too ready to tumble, loins first. Wiles factor less into the equation than proximity.

…either become accustomed to or outright sought a kind of adulation in the public arena that probably isn’t mirrored in [his marriage]. A spouse is unlikely to provide it. A spouse knows you too well for that, and gives you something deeper, truer and so much less electric.

…

…didn’t just choose [a mistress], by all appearances…chose fonts of gushing reverence. That’s at least as deliberate and damnable as any signals the alleged [temptress] put out.

…

And yet it’s the women in these situations who are often subjected to a more vigorous public shaming — and assigned greater responsibility.

…an unnamed former colleague of Petraeus’s who knew Broadwell and characterized her as “a shameless self-promoting prom queen.” The colleague all but exonerated Petraeus by saying: “You’re a 60-year-old man and an attractive woman almost half your age makes herself available to you — that would be a test for anyone.”

…

[the Washington Post story] goes on to say that Broadwell was “willing to take full advantage of her special access” to him.

An article in Slate asked “how could he — this acclaimed leader and figure of rectitude —allow such a thing to a happen?” The italics are mine, because the verb is a telling one….“She may have made herself irresistible.”

Such adamant women, such pregnable men. We’ve been stuck on this since Eve, Adam and the Garden of Eden. And it’s true: Eve shouldn’t have been so pushy with the apple.

But Adam could have had a V8.

And, finally, a couple of articles from the Onion that needs no quote beyond their titles: “Nation Horrified to Learn About War in Afghanistan While Reading Up On Petraeus Sex Scandal” and “Sources: Petraeus Knew About Affair for More Than a Year“.

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And finally, an NY Times editorial from Yang Jisheng, “China’s Great Shame“:

THIRTY-SIX million people in China, including my uncle, who raised me like a father, starved to death between 1958 and 1962, during the man-made calamity known as the Great Famine. In thousands of cases, desperately hungry people resorted to cannibalism.

The toll was more than twice the number of fallen in World War I, and about six times the number of Ukrainians starved by Stalin in 1932-33 or the number of Jews murdered by Hitler during World War II.

After 50 years, the famine still cannot be freely discussed in the place where it happened. My book “Tombstone” could be published only in Hong Kong, Japan and the West. It remains banned in mainland China, where historical amnesia looms large and government control of information and expression has tightened during the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress, which began last week and will conclude with a once-in-a-decade leadership transition.

…

…The rural population was brought under control by a thorough collectivization of agriculture. The state could then manage grain production, requisitioning and distributing it by decree. Those who tilled the earth were locked in place by a nationwide system of household registration, and food coupons issued to city dwellers supplanted the market….

The Great Leap Forward that Mao began in 1958 set ambitious goals without the means to meet them. A vicious cycle ensued; exaggerated production reports from below emboldened the higher-ups to set even loftier targets. Newspaper headlines boasted of rice farms yielding 800,000 pounds per acre. When the reported abundance could not actually be delivered, the government accused peasants of hoarding grain. House-to-house searches followed, and any resistance was put down with violence.

Meanwhile, …rapid industrialization, even peasants’ cooking implements were melted down in the hope of making steel in backyard furnaces, and families were forced into large communal kitchens. They were told that they could eat their fill. But when food ran short, no aid came from the state. Local party cadres held the rice ladles, a power they often abused, saving themselves and their families at the expense of others. Famished peasants had nowhere to turn.

…

By the end of 1960, China’s total population was 10 million less than in the previous year. Astonishingly, many state granaries held ample grain that was mostly reserved for hard currency-earning exports or donated as foreign aid; these granaries remained locked to the hungry peasants. “Our masses are so good,” one party official said at the time. “They would rather die by the roadside than break into the granary.”

I definitely want to read his book. I didn’t know about this, even having studied the Chinese revolutions and rise of communism in my high school IB history class. But this is important and these people shouldn’t be forgotten. I have a lot of respect for this author, having decided it was important for this to be known and recorded, despite being unable to directly research it and being unable to publish his book in the very country it discusses and where it should be remembered to make sure it doesn’t happen again.