Plus: Pao Houa Her; Women’s Art; George Bernard Shaw
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Today in The New York Review of Books: Caitlin L. Chandler investigates the brutality of arbitrary sanctions; Jean Dykstra looks at the photographs of Pao Houa Her; Jillian Steinhauer looks at women’s art; and, from the archives, Denis Donoghue on George Bernard Shaw.
In 2017 a regional Yemeni governor found himself added to the UN’s al-Qaeda sanctions list on mysterious grounds. Then his world started to unravel.
The Hmong photographer Pao Houa Her documents landscapes and histories that may exist only in imagination.
A sweeping show in Warsaw took up the tradition of women-only exhibitions.
Free from the Archives
Today is George Bernard Shaw’s 170th birthday. In the Review’s February 3, 1966, issue, Denis Donoghue wrote about Shaw’s “collected letters” (“The letters are not, indeed, collected; the book is misnamed”) and the remarkable career of a “timid, painfully shy, heir to nothing” who lived to nearly one hundred and became one of the most popular and influential playwrights of a generation.
“There is a sense in which Shaw’s letters were his first ‘productions,’ trial balloons sent up with impeccable cheek at a time when publishers were rejecting his novels by return post. Even the famous handwriting was a kind of print. At this stage Shaw was ‘a young man doing his best to get on in the world.’ His background consisted of Ireland, a drunken father, a vaguely Bohemian mother, and a weird musician named Lee. Like Swift he demanded success, to be ‘used like a Lord.’ He would ennoble himself, then, by cheek, wit, and chaff: he would make himself a Lord by acquiring a lordly style.”
“Like the sack of unruly winds that Aeolus, the divine custodian of the winds, entrusts to Odysseus in book 10—only to have it opened by the hero’s suspicious crewmen, with disastrous results—it is in the end a mixed bag: at once a vehicle for the director’s virtues and…a case study of the weaknesses inherent in attempting to modernize a work many of whose values remain, for all its timelessness, stubbornly archaic.”
“For God’s sake, just look at the man—at his dispiriting attempts at humor, his weirdly off-putting outfits, his incessant posting of banalities and faux profundities and extreme-right disinformation on social media.… But the sad and somewhat degrading fact is that this man is unquestionably important. If we want to think in any kind of consequential way about the present and the future, we have no choice but to take Musk seriously.”
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