Althouse

Said one underground artist, quoted in "To see Russia’s secret antiwar art: Meet at a bus stop. At dark. Phones off." (WaPo).

"We were afraid if we had an exhibition the police would come and arrest us, so we decided to be underground. It’s like turning the lock back to the Soviet years."

I'd like to understand more about "this Russian complex of being a small person." Is it mainly the opposite of individualism? 

This isn't something that is easy to google. Wikipedia has an article "Little Russian identity," which is something else. And I found many articles about the physical smallness of Vladimir Putin, such as "Vladimir Putin and the rise of the 'short kings'/Critics suggest Russian leader has 'Napoleon complex' but numerous world leaders match his stature" (The Week) and, from 2018, "Putin, a Little Man Still Trying to Prove His Bigness" (The New Yorker)("'He walks like someone who thinks, How do I walk like a cool guy?' a seasoned Russia expert told me...).

Originally displayed in Germany, the image was declared "degenerate art" by Adolf Hitler in 1933 and sold by the Nazi Party to an art dealer in 1939, whence it made its way to New York.... 

The picture depicts a group of birds, largely line drawings; all save the first are shackled on a wire or, according to The Washington Post, a "sine-wave branch" over a blue and purple background which the MoMA equates with the "misty cool blue of night giving way to the pink flow of dawn." Each of the birds is open-beaked, with a jagged or rounded shape emerging from its mouth, widely interpreted as its protruding tongue. The end of the perch dips into a crank.... 

"Perhaps no other artist of the 20th century matched Klee's subtlety as he deftly created a world of ambiguity and understatement that draws each viewer into finding a unique interpretation of the work."... 

Sometimes, the image is perceived as quite dark. MoMA suggests that, while evocative of an "abbreviated pastoral", the painting inspires "an uneasy sensation of looming menace" as the birds themselves "appear closer to deformations of nature". 

They speculate that the "twittering machine" may in fact be a music box that produces a "fiendish cacophony" as it "lure[s] victims to the pit over which the machine hovers". 

Kay Larson of New York magazine (1987), too, found menace in the image, which she describes as "a fierce parable of the artist's life among the philistines": "Like Charles Chaplin caught in the gears of Modern Times, they [the birds] whir helplessly, their heads flopping in exhaustion and pathos. One bird's tongue flies up out of its beak, an exclamation point punctuating its grim fate—to chirp under compulsion." 

Arthur Danto, who does not see the birds as deformed mechanical creatures but instead as separate living elements, speculates in Encounters & Reflections (1997) that "Klee is making some kind of point about the futility of machines, almost humanizing machines into things from which nothing great is to be hoped or feared, and the futility in this case is underscored by the silly project of bringing forth by mechanical means what nature in any case provides in abundance."... 

Since a characteristic of chirping birds is that their racket resumes as soon as it seems to be ending, the bird in the center droops with lolling tongue, while another begins to falter in song; both birds will come up again full blast as soon as the machine's crank is turned.

"The most uncanny and sober of fever dreams. What the fuck are these books? Why did I chew through them – as if they were the most compelling of murder mysteries – yet nothing ever happens and I can’t remember a thing after putting them down? Dissociative perambulations but written with such urgency. These books cast a spell on me. Maybe Rachel Cusk is a witch." 

If you're wondering whether I'm having the feeling that the person I know in real life said I would have, the answer is no. But sometimes I hit sentences that amuse me to imagine being the person who wrote them and to wonder about this person I know who thinks this is just the sort of thing I'd come up with:

I remembered then an evening I’d spent in a bar a few years ago, with a group of people that included a married couple I didn’t know. The woman kept identifying attractive girls and drawing her husband’s attention to them; they sat there and discussed the attributes of the various girls, and were it not for the grimace of utter desperation I glimpsed on the woman’s face when she thought no one was looking, I would have believed this was an activity both of them enjoyed.

It sounds like "White Lotus"!  

Said a statement from Ellen Watters, the chair of the Hamline University’s board of trustees, and Fayneese S. Miller, the university's president.

"Like all organizations, sometimes we misstep. In the interest of hearing from and supporting our Muslim students, language was used that does not reflect our sentiments on academic freedom. Based on all that we have learned, we have determined that our usage of the term ‘Islamophobic’ was therefore flawed."

Quoted in "After Lecturer Sues, Hamline University Walks Back Its ‘Islamophobic’ Comments/In an about-face, the school said that using the term was 'flawed' and that respect for Muslim students should not have superseded academic freedom" (NYT).

The lawsuit [asserts] that Hamline treated Dr. López Prater negatively because “she is not Muslim, because she did not conform her conduct to the specific beliefs of a Muslim sect, and because she did not conform her conduct to the religion-based preferences of Hamline that images of Muhammad not be shown to any Hamline student.”

ADDED: Watters and Miller fail to state clearly that López Prater was not Islamophobic. They don't admit that it was wrong. They say, "Based on all that we have learned, we have determined that our usage of the term ‘Islamophobic’ was therefore flawed." Why was the "usage" "flawed"? In context, it looks as though they're asserting a belief in academic freedom, and that's something they are under pressure to do in response to the lawsuit. They haven't withdrawn the opinion that López Prater was Islamophobic, but merely acknowledged that out of respect for López Prater's academic freedom, they should not use the term. And I don't even see them as confessing that the term shouldn't have been used at the time. It's only now that they "have learned" more about the controversy, the use of the term is "flawed." They've left room to argue that when the controversy was new and the desire to "support[] our Muslim students" was strong, it was acceptable not to perceive the flaw in the use of the term.