Kushner/Benjamin/Keane/SherlockHolmes

Today I read the next fifty pages of Rachel Kushner’s 2008 debut novel, Telex From Cuba. The part of the plot involving the cabaret dancer Rachel K continues to get more and more melodramatic. Not only is she involved with de La Mazière the gun-runner, but also with the Castro brothers and their ongoing attempts to overthrow Batista. As if this were not enough, she is also in touch with former President Prio, and acts as a kind of go-between for links between all these powerful men. And yet, for all these connections and this influence, she remains something of a cipher or, to put it less generously, an underdeveloped character. Meanwhile, Kushner’s portrayal of the expatriate American community in Cuba is becoming more and more acerbic, especially when she focuses on the pettiness and backbiting of the executives’ wives, who are portrayed collectively as pathetically insecure, trivial, and out of place.

I also finished Medea Benjamin’s Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control. Benjamin concludes the book in a rather understated manner by arguing for the need for diplomacy rather than military solutions. While I don’t disagree with this point of view, it does involve Benjamin expressing a degree of support for the US State Department (as opposed to the Defense Department) that is rather staggering. Granted, the State Department has been sidelined by the progressive militarization of all aspects of American foreign policy under Obama, but I still have difficulty in believing that part of the solution is going back to a past supposedly defined by active diplomacy. More modestly still, but perhaps more persuasively, Benjamin argues for the kind of cautious optimism that believes, contrary to all available evidence, that something can still be done to reverse the spread of drone warfare across the globe. I feel like Fox Mulder when I say that I want to believe in this possibility!

I also began John Keane’s 1996 book Reflections on Violence. Keane’s main target in this book is the field of political theory, and in particular its relative silence on the subject of violence, a silence that Kean finds extremely puzzling given the various ways in which the twentieth century was dominated and characterized by acts of violence big and small. Keane explains this silence, in part, by focusing on the vogue the concept of ‘civil society’ has enjoyed in recent years, concentrating in particular on the sense that civil society is assumed to have an antinomic relation to violence. Keane challenges this assumption both by emphasizing that violence still takes place within so-called civil societies, and by exploring the concept of uncivility, culminating in what he calls uncivil society.

Sometimes you expect that a film will be so bad that when you actually watch the film it can’t possibly be as bad as you assumed. Here’s a case in point: I loathe Guy Ritchie, Robert Downey, Jr., and Jude Law. Moreover, I’m very fussy about Sherlock Holmes adaptations, not because I necessarily insist on fidelity (for example, I love the Benedict Cumberbatch updated version of Holmes) but because some changes just don’t feel right. For all these reasons, I expected to hate Ritchie’s 2009 movie Sherlock Holmes but it actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Don’t get me wrong: I hate the idea of turning Holmes into an action hero (the fight scenes were painful to watch) and I hate the way that Downey turns every role he plays into a version of himself, but the supporting cast and the set decoration were good enough to make the 2+ hours pass relatively painlessly. Is that an endorsement? Of course not, but it’s as close as you’ll get from this Holmes devotee.