February 17

If you think unemployment is bad here, check out what's going in Latin America:

http://ourlatinamerica.blogspot.com/2010/02/ilo-latam-youth-hit-hardest-by-bad.html

Ten years ago, French writer Viviane Forrester theorized that work was the regnant illusion of our age. Her book The Economic Horror would seem to be newly pertinent:

Our concepts of work, and thus of unemployment, around which politics revolve (or claim to revolve), have become illusory. Our struggles with them are as much of a hallucination as Don Quixote's tilting at the windmills....The unemployed today are no longer put aside temporarily or occasionally, and in only some sectors; they are up against a general implosion, a phenomenon resembling those tidal waves, cyclones or tornadoes that don't aim at anyone in particular but that no one can withstand. Yet the jobless are treated and judged by the same criteria as when jobs were abundant. They are, therefore, made to feel guilty for being jobless, at the same time as they are lulled by deceptive promises that an abundance of jobs will once again be available. So the vast and ever-growing number of job-seekers are made to feel incompatible with a society of which they happen to be the most natural product. They are led to consider themselves socially unworthy, and above all responsible for their own situation....They wonder what inadequacies, what aptitude for failure, what ill-will or errors can have led them there. They lose not just income but status, contacts, self-esteem and peace of mind. They feel shame. They undergo work experience and retraining only to realise more forcefully than ever that they have no real role. They come to realise that there is something worse than being exploited - and that is not even to be exploitable.

(I'm tempted to go on quoting and quoting, so just read the whole excerpt at the link!)

http://www.newstatesman.com/199905240019

OK, now for a much-needed Day Brightener: ancient animal sculpture! Two London galleries, one specializing in ancient art, the other in modern animal scultpture, are collaborating on a show. Love the crocodile:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36270

The congenial litblog stevereads shares my enthusiasm for the more obscure Penguin Classics, such as Marguerite of Navarre's Heptameron:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/02/penguins-on-parade-the-heptameron-of-marguerite-of-navarre/

Here is a very pleasant cross-cultural story of a dedicated Chinese translator of Australian literature:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/found-in-translation/story-e6frg78o-1225828280475

Critic Wyatt Mason appreciatively sums up the career of the late novelist Leonard Michaels, and Scott Esposito offers additional thoughts at the blog Conversational Reading. Michaels received a lot of attention early in his career, but after 1981 "hid in plain sight" by publishing mainly with smaller presses and literary journals; Mason argues that his later, unnoticed work is actually his best.

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_02_05.html

http://conversationalreading.com/published-off-the-record

Among notables born on this date are novelists Mori Ogai (Japan), Mo Yan (China), Sadeq Hedayat (Iran), and Fyodor Sologub (Russia), poets Jack Gilbert, Banjo Paterson (Australia), and Gustavo Becquer (Spain), crime novelists Ruth Rendell and Ronald Knox, science fiction novelist Andre Norton, explorers Nicolas Baudin and Isabelle Eberhardt, composers Arcangelo Corelli (Italy), Henri Vieuxtemps (France), and Leevi Madetoja (Finland), singer/songwriter Gene Pitney, composer/musicians Fred Frith and Karl Jenkins, and actors Arthur Kennedy, Brenda Fricker, Hal Holbrook, and Alan Bates. I always tend to think of Alan Bates and Albert Finney in tandem -- great stage actors, great film actors, born only two years apart. They were at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts together, and also made their film debuts together, as Laurence Olivier's sons in The Entertainer (1960). Playing Olivier's sons -- no symbolic pressure in that!