Culture

In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years earlier. Initially largely uncontested — thanks both to Emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to a hearty dose of Quislingism from his leading nobles — when ‘war’ eventually did break out it was so one-sided that Ethiopian women were gathering spent bullet casings for reuse while Italian planes (the older Ethiopians believing these were dragons) dropped poison gas on them. Selassie, meanwhile, fled to England.

Way back in 1996 Norman E. Sjoman published a book called The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, in which he contested that much of what we now (in the West) consider to be yoga — a practice apparently steeped in millennia of ancient Indian tradition — is actually a veritable hotchpotch of disparate influences, some of which are surprisingly modern. In 2010 Mark Singleton’s controversial Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice consolidated Sjoman’s argument, and Yoga International (through somewhat gritted teeth, no doubt) claimed it represented ‘a watershed moment in the history of global asana culture’.

In the world of classic cars, barn-finds sometimes do occur. An old Mercedes Gullwing might be discovered under tarps and hay on a farm somewhere in Florida, say, or an E-type Jag exhumed from out-buildings in Norfolk. Such discoveries are relatively rare, yet news of them reaches far beyond specialist magazines and websites for one simple reason: people love classic cars. We all invent stories about their history and fate based on the model, where it was found and who found it. Musical instruments have nowhere near the same traction in our imagination. For a barn-find fiddle to garner international attention it would have to be a valuable violin, or its provenance would need to be mired in the murk and criminality of Nazi Germany.

Ismail Kadare is a kind of lapidary artist who carves meaning and pattern into the rocky mysteries of his native Albania. Born, like his frenemy the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha, amid the blank-faced mansions and feuding clans of the ‘stone city’ of Gjirokaster, the novelist has always framed the terror, secrecy and confusion of the regime as a family affair. The usual comparisons with Kafka and Orwell underplay the sheer, gut-twisting intimacy of politics and power in his work. It baffles outsiders who want to label Kadare either a brave dissident or a complicit stooge. Ideology be damned: this is, and always was, strictly personal. The Doll even wonders whether ‘tyranny is a real thing or something one projects oneself. The same goes for enslavement.

Negativity has a power over us. You know how it is. One bad thing can ruin your whole day, even if the day has been otherwise full of good or non-bad things. Infants react more quickly to an image of a snake than a frog, or unhappy or angry faces than happy ones. Then again, I reacted more strongly to Roy E. Baumeister’s face on the back flap of the book than I did to John Tierney’s, because Baumeister has a beard and a broad grin that suggests high self-esteem. And why not? He’s written or co-written more than a dozen books (first title, Meanings of Life) while Tierney has written only three. The aim of the book is to get us to compensate for the brain’s natural reaction to see the worst in everything.

Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian major-general blown up by the US over the New Year, will have seen himself arrested by Saudi troops in a computer-animated film of the ‘liberation’ of Iran from Ayatollah rule. Saudi Deterrent Force was a six-minute fantasy released online by anonymous video-makers in Saudi Arabia in 2017. It was viewed over 750,000 times before Iranian animators struck back with Battle of the Persian Gulf II, in which the Great Satan and perceived Saudi lackey Donald Trump is humiliated in an imagined Gulf battle led by Soleimani. Now that Soleimani is, in Pentagon-speak, a ‘vaporised non-person’, Saudi Deterrent Force acquires added interest for us as propaganda.