Kerim's Triptych for Sunday, July 21st, 2024

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1️⃣ Art vs. Propaganda

Apart from this mention in The New Yorker, I've seen relatively little discussion of Benjamen Walker’s bombshell of a podcast about "left-wing intellectuals, the cultural Cold War, the C.I.A., mass culture, high culture, post-colonialism" and more. At its heart, the nine-part podcast series is a group biography

of the writers Dwight Macdonald, Kenneth Tynan, and Richard Wright, whose trajectories help to illuminate the shadowy maneuverings of the cultural Cold War between 1956 and 1960. . . All three men’s lives intersect with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a lavishly funded anti-Communist organization secretly set up by the C.I.A. and headquartered in Europe, which sponsored conferences, literary magazines, art exhibitions, and other projects.

Walker spent eight years researching and writing the series, speaking to artists, academics, family and associates of the central protagonists, and doing original archival research as well. All this work really pays off.

For fans of Walker's long-running "Theory of Everything" podcast, which Shashwati originally turned me on to years ago, it is a bit of a change of pace. The series often blurs the boundary between fact and fiction, but this series feels more like traditional radio journalism. Still, there is more than enough cold war era conspiracy for the listener's imagination to run wild.

2️⃣ Debunking the Mid-Atlantic Accent

In this YouTube video, Dr Geoff Lindsey debunks the many YouTube videos circulating which claim that people spoke differently in the golden age of Hollywood because the studios forced them to speak in a "fake" accent invented by a speech coach. Instead, Lindsey argues, they spoke largely the way people with the same demographic profile as those actors would have spoken at that time.

3️⃣ Mixed Metaphors for Translation

We are big fans of artist and translator Daisy Rockwell. She was nice enough to do the poster art for our film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!, and her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, for which they shared a Booker Prize, is fantastic. Today's link is a whimsical-yet-serious piece she wrote for The Paris Review titled "Five Mixed Metaphors for Translation." Here is a taste:

You give the child a Lego airport set

on a gift-giving occasion.

Thanks, Dad, says the child.

Shall we build it together, my child?

you ask.

Yes, Dad. But let us make a castle,

instead.

Endnote

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