3quarksdaily

By Nightfall

Arifa Akbar in The Independent:

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror," claimed the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. With this ominous opening sentiment begins Michael Cunningham's contemporary New York novel about art, ageing and mid-life crisis. It deals with the changeable nature of beauty as that bright shiny thing that must be possessed, as well as being a signifier of transience and loss.  For Peter Harris, a forty-something gallerist whose stock in trade has been the pursuit of beauty, its ephemeral quality becomes synonymous with the emotional staleness that he feels has entered his once-vital marriage. His relationship is by no means dead, and Rebecca, his wife of two decades who was once the most sought-after girl in town has grown only a little less beautiful and no less dynamic, but she has changed over the years.

Cunningham won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1998 novel The Hours, which was delivered in a narrative stream-of-consciousness ensemble by three women. Here he chooses to tell the story from the single point of view of a jaded husband. The result is an intimate understanding of Peter as a flawed, not always likeable central character. In presenting Peter's fear of ageing, in an ageing marriage, Cunningham captures both the shallow vanities and the emotional depth of this anxiety. Peter "can't help noticing her [Rebecca's] sallowness, the wiry white-threaded unruliness of her morning hair. Die young. Stay pretty. Blondie, right?" he thinks, with an edge of disdain. At other times, his reflections are profound. Thinking back to the Rebecca of his (and her) youth, he realises "here is the Rebecca who no longer exists".

More here.

Unnatural Genes Used to Replace Missing DNA Keep Cells Alive

From Scientific American:

Synthetic biology garnered national headlines in May 2010 when a team led by J. Craig Venter announced it had created the world’s first “synthetic cell." The group used computers to copy an entire bacterial genome that, when inserted into a cell whose own genome had been removed, "booted up" the cell, which then passed the synthesized genome to its offspring.

This accomplishment was no small feat but the new genome, although man-made, was almost entirely a replication of one that already existed in nature. Now, a new study published January 4 in PLoS One has shown that DNA sequences designed in the laboratory and distinct from any found in nature can, when inserted into cells missing genes necessary for survival, "rescue" some of those cells.

More here.

Friday Poem

The Rites For Cousin Vit

Carried her unprotesting out the door
Kicked back the casket-stand. But it can’t hold her,
That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,
The lid’s contrition nor the bolts before.
Oh oh. Too much. Too much. Even now, surmise,
She rises in sunshine. There she goes
Back to the bars she knew and the repose
In love-rooms and the things in people’s eyes.
Too vital and too squeaking. Must emerge.
Even now, she does the snake-hips with a hiss,
Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks
Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks
In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge
Of happiness, haply hysterics. Is.                                                                    

by Gwendolyn Brooks
from Annie Allen, 1950 

Open Magazine vs. William Dalrymple. Again.

The fued between Open magazine and William Dalrymple which started with Hartosh Singh Bal's article and followups by Dalrymple and then Bal [disclosure: Hartosh Singh Bal is also a monthly columnist at 3QD] seems to be escalating on the eve of the Jaipur Literature Festival. This is Pramod Kumar, once again, in Open:

I have been reading with interest, and a growing sense of dismay, articles and rebuttals being issued by Mr William Dalrymple on the Jaipur Literature Festival, its origins and now finally on his version of how he thinks the festival is successfully executed. Most of this has been printed in Open and now in his latest interview to the Crest edition of the Times of India.

The time is perhaps right to set the record straight on the ‘post colonial’ whitewashing Mr Dalrymple seems to be indulging in. For the record, the festival was NOT conceived or co-directed by him—or Ms Namita Gokhale for that matter—when it started in 2006. That honour, if indeed you were to call it one, would rest solely on myself, as the first Director of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation and of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2006. The literature festival was conceived during discussions on a drive back to Jaipur from Delhi with Ms Faith Singh, the founder of the Jaipur Virasat Foundation, and Ms Di Robson, our then International Festival advisor.

Ms Gokhale, to her credit, has always acknowledged this, though for some reason it seems to be a rather uncomfortable truth for Mr Dalrymple to accept. This year it seems to be getting even more unpalatable for him as can be seen in his polemic ‘The piece you ran is blatantly racist’. Or perhaps it’s just an inconvenient truth that he would like to airbrush out of history, completely once and for all, when he repeatedly states that “I conceived, co-founded and co-direct the Jaipur Literature Festival…”

More here.

The 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2010

Ian Murphy in The Beast:

46) Carl Paladino

Charges: Old-school racist, homophobe, hypocrite and purveyor of small gubmint horse porn, the would-be NY Governor’s real estate wealth comes largely from government subsidy of distressed properties. The Tea Partier wanted to impose “eminent domain” to stop the “Ground Zero Mosque,” and called for welfare recipients to be housed in old prisons, taught hygiene and used as a source of cheap labor. Carl’s homophobia came across as all the more strange when he insisted to the New York Post’s Fred Dicker, “I’ll take you out, buddy!”

Aggravating factor: “And I don’t want [our children] to be brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid or successful option. It isn’t.”

Sentence: Buttsecks with James Dobson.

More here.

The Scholar and the Caliph

In 11th-century Egypt a man named Ibn al-Haytham became the stuff of science legend.

Jennifer Oulette in Physics World:

All the knowledge in the world was at his fingertips. Yet the wisdom of the Ancients could not help him to foresee the ill fortune about to befall him.

One day he received a summons from Cairo's reigning Caliph, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah – a tremendous honour for a humble scribe. The Scholar felt small and insignificant as he passed through the palace gates into a large courtyard ringed by stone archways; twin minarets cast their shadows over a reflecting pool. He was even more cowed by the majesty of the blue-domed throne room – its stucco walls dotted with bright mosaic tiles. Even the Caliph seemed dwarfed by the setting, despite his robes of state and jewelled turban.

The Caliph was most eager to find a man who could solve a perplexing problem, he explained, and the Scholar came highly recommended. Every year, the flooding of the Nile served as a harbinger for the end of summer, and an omen for that year's harvest. Too much flooding, and the crops would be destroyed; too little, and drought and famine would ravage the land. His people were utterly dependent on the fickle whims of the great river for their survival. Man's ingenuity had already produced watermills to grind grain, and water-raising machines. If men could control water in this way, could they not also build a dam to control the flooding and bend the Nile to the Caliph's will?

The Scholar was flattered by the Caliph's attentions, and tempted by the promise of riches and fame should he succeed. Silencing the doubt in his mind, he told al-Hakim "It can be done."

More here.

Contagious cancers switch their batteries

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

CTVT, or canine transmissible veneral tumour, is a cancer that has evolved into an independent global parasite. Most cancers (including those that affect humans) aren’t contagious. Although some infectious diseases can lead to cancer, you cannot actually catch a tumour from someone who has one. But CTVT is an exception – the cancer cells themselves can spread from dog to dog, through sex or close contact.

A Russian veterinarian called Mistislav Novinski first discovered the disease in the 1870s, but it took 130 years for others to discover its true nature. In 2006, Robin Weiss and Claudio Murgia from University College London compared CTVT samples from 40 dogs across the world. All of them carried distinctive genetic markers that set them apart from the cells of their host dogs. They all had a common ancestor – an ancient tumour that escaped from its original host and took the world by storm.

CTVT is one of two types of contagious cancer. The other plagues Tasmanian devils and might drive them to extinction. While this second type is confined to Tasmania, CTVT has become a global success story. Hopping across continents on the bodies of dogs, this cancer cell has become an immortal parasite. The ones that Novinski studied in the 1870s were probably largely identical to the ones that Weiss and Murgia looked at 130 years later.

But this immortality comes at a price. The contagious cancer sometimes gets a glitch in its power supply, and it has to swap to a new set of batteries. Claire Rebbeck from Imperial College London has found that as the cells spread, they can pick up small structures called mitochondria. These are the batteries that provide our cells with energy, and the tumours can replace their set by raiding their hosts.

More here.

Actions and Objects

Over at Stanford University Press, the introduction of Jonathan Kramnick's Actions and Objects:

Things happen. Often we try to explain them. When Edmond Halley looked back on records of passing comets, he noticed that one seemed to appear every seventy-six years. He then thought hard about orbital velocity and gravity, drawing on what he knew about mathematics and physics. When a fashionable young man cut off a lock of hair belonging to a fashionable young woman, Alexander Pope wrote a poem. He thought hard about human actions, drawing on what he knew about motivation and desire. Halley and Pope both understood that neither comets nor cuttings come into the universe from nothing. Yet for Halley, the comet’s return didn’t have anything to do with beliefs or decisions. the comet didn’t choose to shoot by earth. Rather, its particular mass and distance from the sun put it on an unalterable ellipse. For Pope, the cutting of the lock had little to do with the properties of metal shears or strands of hair. The Baron chose to cut Belinda’s hair. Pope would  like to know why he did so:

Say what strange motive, Goddess! cou’d compel
A well-bred Lord t’assault a gentle Belle? 
Oh say what stranger cause, yet unexplor’d, 
Cou’d make a gentle Belle reject a Lord?

Past Master

Divya Kumar in The Hindu:

A book on Indian mythology, written in Italian in the 1990s by a leading scholar and publisher from Florence, translated to great acclaim into English, then into Hindi, Malayalam and now, Tamil.

That's “Ka” for you, a remarkable work of scholarship on the stories of the Vedas and the Puranas, that's been on a remarkable journey. Naturally, its author Roberto Calasso, who was in Chennai recently for the launch of the Tamil translation of “Ka”, turns out to be a pretty remarkable man himself.

“It started very early, really,” he says, referring to his love of Indian mythology, adding casually, “Just like one gets interested in Russian literature as an adolescent, I started reading these texts, and it went on from there.”

‘These texts' include everything from the Rig Veda (“the most difficult and mysterious by far,” he says) to the Brahmanas, which are the focus of his latest book, “L'ardore” (which refers to the act of tapas). He began by reading translations but has since learnt Sanskrit, just like he studied ancient Greek in order to be able to read those great old mythologies (“The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”, one of his earliest and most well-known works, is a retelling of Greek mythology).

“Myths are the original form of storytelling and a way of knowledge — certain things you can get only through stories,” he says, his passion evident. “A mythology is like a large tree of stories and it's essential to get inside its branches. It can be very illuminating, a way of giving an account of the vast net of elements that make up the world.”

Back To Full Employment

In the Boston Review, a forum on full employment, starting with a lead article by Robert Pollin and responses by Reihan Salam, James K. Galbraith, Ruy Teixeira, Eileen Appelbaum, Andrew P. Morriss & Roger E. Meiners, Lane Kenworthy, Jayati Ghosh, and Michael J. Piore. Pollin:

Employment conditions in the United States today, in the aftermath of the 2008–09 Wall Street collapse and worldwide Great Recession, remain disastrous—worse than at any time since the Depression of the 1930s.

Since Barack Obama entered office in January 2009, the official unemployment rate has averaged more than 9.5 percent, representing some fifteen million people in a labor force of about 154 million. By a broader definition, including people employed for fewer hours than they would like and those discouraged from looking for work, the unemployment rate has been far higher—16.5 percent, on average. Still worse, if we count people who have dropped out of the labor force, unemployment would rise to nearly 20 percent, or 30 million people, roughly twice the combined populations of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

The first major act of the Obama administration was the economic stimulus—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—which focused on fighting the recession and mass unemployment. This $787 billion program of tax cuts and government spending measures aimed to brace the economy’s rickety floor and thereby preserve existing jobs as well as generate new ones in both the public and private sectors. The stimulus program did succeed in preventing a full-scale 1930s-style depression. A Wall Street Journal survey found that 75 percent of economists agreed that the stimulus succeeded in reducing unemployment. A detailed study by Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Vice Chair, and Mark Zandi, Chief Economist at Moody’s Analytics and an advisor to John McCain’s Presidential campaign, found that unemployment would likely have risen to nearly 17 percent in the absence of the stimulus.

But the stimulus has clearly proven inadequate for fully reversing the effects of the Wall Street collapse.

Who’s Afraid of the Palestinians?

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in the NYRB:

During the last two years, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has suffered serious setbacks. Other than for a brief, fleeting moment, Israelis and Palestinians have had no direct political contact and there is little hope, for now at least, that this will change. Any faith Israelis and Palestinians may have in the possibility of an agreement is collapsing.

The US, sponsor of that process, has seen its credibility badly damaged. The Obama administration was repeatedly rebuffed—by Israel, from whom it had demanded a full halt in settlement construction; by Palestinians it pressed to engage in direct negotiations; by Arab states it hoped would take steps to normalize relations with Israel. An administration that never tires of saying it cannot want peace more than the parties routinely belies that claim by the desperation it exhibits in pursuing that goal. Today, there is little trust, no direct talks, no settlement freeze, and, one at times suspects, not much of a US policy.

Less visible but equally grievous is the growing loss of interest in negotiations on the part of Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Two years ago, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, was somewhat confident that, with a strong US push, Israel could be convinced to reach a historic deal. Since then, his confidence has been fading. Benjamin Netanyahu began his prime ministership in March 2009 with an ambivalent commitment and apparently little motivation to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians. During the period that followed, his commitment and motivation significantly diminished. For both leaders, facing publics more disenchanted than they are, it has become a political liability to project belief that negotiations can yield something. Without genuine engagement by the leaders, progress in the talks—direct, indirect, or otherwise—will be unattainable.

The current impasse has exposed a problem that runs deeper than misjudgments and missteps. Almost two decades after the peace process was launched, little remains of the foundational principle that each side has something of value to which the other aspires and thus something it can offer in exchange for what it wants. Israel holds a monopoly over all material assets. It controls Palestinian land, natural resources, and lives. Israel’s economy is flourishing, its security for now seemingly assured. Its occupation of Palestinian territories is subsidized by Western powers that purportedly seek its end. Although not as satisfactory as Israelis would like, the status quo is not as unpleasant as their adversaries would wish. Israel has become accustomed to the way things are.

growing the city

Are we looking at a future of edible balconies and backyard chickens and rooftop beekeepers? Most city livers (and we are now a majority) have felt to some degree or other that a life without occasional access to nature feels empty — or, not empty enough. We make our cities bigger and bigger, and still can’t fully shake the feeling that the things people build, the things that most remind us of our humanness, also rob us of an essential part of our humanity. We have come to think this absence can only be filled by being in an environment that has nothing to do with us, that is bigger than we are. An environment we can’t control, that allows us to relinquish control when we are inside it. A lack of access to the natural world, that world we fought so very hard to protect ourselves from, has always left us a little colder inside. What, then, is the urban dweller’s relationship to nature supposed to be? Nobody knows. But it’s an old dilemma. You can see the debate played out, for instance, in Plato’s dialogue the “Phaedrus.” In it, Phaedrus notes how totally weird it is that Socrates, a man of the city if there ever was one, feels compelled to leave the city walls to listen to a speech on love by Lysias. Socrates doesn’t even like long speeches, Phaedrus notes. Yet as soon as Socrates gets into nature, away from the rational orderliness of the city, he is overcome by a “madness,” a poetic eloquence that some read as another way of saying that Socrates can think more creatively in the quiet of nature than in the bustle of the city.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

pro cab

Few cinematic cameos have been more galvanizing than Cab Calloway’s in The Blues Brothers. In the 1980 film, he plays a janitor who suddenly dons white tie and tails, gets up on stage in front of an admiring group of long-haired rock and soul musicians, and proceeds to steal the show not only from its stars, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, but also from James Brown, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin, all of whom made cameo appearances of their own. How? By singing “Minnie the Moocher,” a swinging lament for an opium addict he had written a half-century earlier. Calloway, who was 73 years old in 1980, was little more than a name to the baby boomers who were seeing him for the first time. They had no idea how famous he had once been, or that the big band he led throughout the 30s and 40s was one of the most successful jazz groups of its day. Even those who were aware of Calloway’s triumphs as a bandleader had mostly been inclined to deprecate him. Only a limited number of his 78s had been transferred to LP by 1980, and it was common for jazz critics to dismiss him as a flamboyant clown, a zoot-suited purveyor of novelty tunes like “A Chicken Ain’t Nothin’ but a Bird.” It was conventional wisdom that Calloway’s “inane vocal antics” (in the phrase of the highbrow British jazz critic Max Harrison) served to obscure the playing of his sidemen, who included such world-class instrumentalists as the tenor saxophonist Chu Berry, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and the bassist Milt Hinton.

more from Terry Teachout at Commentary here.

roland's most unusual work

Kate Briggs’s wonderful translation finally makes available in English a most unusual book by one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. The Preparation of the Novel comprises the notes of the third and last lecture course Roland Barthes delivered at the Collège de France, cut short in 1980 by his untimely death. Although the three lecture series were posthumously published in French in the order they were given, Columbia University Press have brought out the final course before the first one (How To Live Together, their translation of the second appeared in 2005) – an indication of just how intriguing a book this is. The uncertainty begins with the title. Is The Preparation of the Novel merely a course/class/series of lecture notes about the preparation of the novel, or is it also part of that preparation? From the outset, both interpretations are carefully invited: although Barthes denies, contrary to rumours circulating at the time, that he is writing a novel (and states that, if he were, he would not propose a course on its preparation), at the same time he acknowledges the deeply personal nature of the course’s origin and stresses that the “fantasy” it mobilizes is his own “Fantasy-of-the-Novel”. The ambiguity this creates about the book's genre never disappears, reinforced by the contradictory positions adopted at different moments.

more from Mairéad Hanrahan at the TLS here.

Seeing Dubai Through a Cell Phone Camera

From Smithsonian:

In his new book, iDubai, Sternfeld has published scores of these photographs: an opulent chrome sports car awaits its valet parker outside the Kempinski Hotel; a model of downtown Dubai features red “sold” flags poking from the skyscrapers. Others feature aisles of colorful packaged goods, shopping carts overflowing with toys, and tourists bent intently over their own smart phones, oblivious to the nearby stranger photographing them with his. And yet Sternfeld says he came to feel a certain affinity. Some of the malls were “imaginative, interesting places” with a “dreamlike quality.” More important, they served a vital social role as town centers, places for friends and family to gather. And he often noticed scenes of paternal love—men eating with children at the food court, or pushing a stroller into a glass elevator, or, as on the opposite page, contemplating the wonders of an indoor ski slope—an aspect of the Arabic male he felt was underrepresented in Western media.

The photographs in iDubai are deeply ambivalent. The perversity of modernity, from Sternfeld’s point of view, is that even these moments of familial togetherness take place within a culture that is ultimately unsustainable and destructive. He has emphasized that iDubai is a criticism of globalized, and not Arab, consumerism; what he hopes for is a greater appreciation of what he sees as our shaky future.

More here.

Thursday Poem

First Lesson

Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man’s float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

by Philip Booth
from Strong Measures: Contemporary
American Poetry in Traditional Forms
Harper Collins 1986

How much sex is enough?

From PhysOrg:

Dr Renée Firman at the Centre for Evolutionary Biology, University of Western Australia, has used house mice to show that sperm from rival males compete to fertilise females and that, over several generations, polygamy can select for mice who produce more sperm, with stronger motility, than monogamous males. After 12 generations of competitive selection (polygamous) or relaxed selection (monogamous) female mice were mated twice, in succession, with males from both groups. While 53% of the litters had mixed paternity, 33% of litters were fathered by the polygamous males compared to 14% by monogamous males. Polygamous males retained this advantage regardless of whether they were mated first or second, demonstrating that the increased fitness applies to both offensive and defensive competition. The selection procedure had no obvious effect on male size or behaviour, nor did it affect female fertility.

So in the age old debate about the merits of monogamy versus polygamy is seems that, for male mice at least, the more partners you have the more fertile your offspring will be.

More here.

steve jobs and the liver theft

Given his symptoms, in the absence of further information, the most likely reason is recurrence or complications of his cancer. If that's the case, then Jobs, having gamed the system to obtain a liver that could have saved somebody else, might soon take that liver to his grave. And he's had it less than two years. Is this what's now unfolding? We don't know, because Jobs won't tell us anything. "My family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy," he pleads. I hear you, Steve. We're all pulling for you. It's your life and your family. But that liver wasn't yours. Somebody died to make it available. And other people who aren't billionaires may have died on waiting lists so you could have it. What was your cancer situation when you got the transplant? Has the cancer returned? You owe us some answers.

more from William Saletan at Slate here.

the greatest New York novel

New York is, famously, the everything bagel of megalopolises—one of the world’s most diverse cities, defined by its churning mix of religions, ethnicities, social classes, attitudes, lifestyles, etc., ad infinitum. This makes it a perfect match for the novel, a genre that tends to share the same insatiable urge. In choosing the best New York novel, then, my first instinct was to pick something from the city’s proud tradition of megabooks—one of those encyclopedic ambition bombs that attempt to capture, New Yorkily, the full New Yorkiness of New York. Something like, to name just a quick armful or two, Manhattan Transfer, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Underworld, Invisible Man, Winter’s Tale, or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay—or possibly even one of the tradition’s more modest recent offspring, like Lush Life and Let the Great World Spin. In the end, however, I decided that the single greatest New York novel is the exact opposite of all of those: a relatively small book containing absolutely zero diversity. There are no black or Hispanic or Asian characters, no poor people, no rabble-rousers, no noodle throwers or lapsed Baha’i priests or transgender dominatrixes walking hobos on leashes through flocks of unfazed schoolchildren. Instead there are proper ladies behaving properly at the opera, and more proper ladies behaving properly at private balls, and a phlegmatic old Dutch patriarch dismayed by the decline of capital-S Society. The book’s plot hinges on a subtly tragic love triangle among effortlessly affluent lovers. It is 100 percent devoted to the narrow world of white upper-class Protestant heterosexuals. So how can Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence possibly be the greatest New York novel of all time?

more from Sam Anderson at New York Magazine here.

What makes a “picture”?

Amy Sillman and Tom McGrath are very different kinds of New York artists—Amy a modern-day action painter, Tom a new breed of realist—who share an ontological approach to the problem of pictorial staging: What is this thing I am making, they ask, and how can it be said to “represent” anything other than itself? Tom uses creamy, wet paint applied with directness and brio to depict more or less real places; Amy’s paintings, though populated with figures and figurative gestures, use the canvas as a workshop in which eccentrically shaped blocks of color are cobbled together in a kind of improvisational architecture, like memories of houses that you never actually lived in. Amy comes to us by way of abstraction, and over the past decade has been completely refurbishing the formal elements of painting: color, line, shape, and texture. Tom, a younger, cerebral artist, has established himself as an innovator by painting something that had not previously been considered a subject for art—the world viewed through the windshield of a car.

more from David Salle at Paris Review here.

"Spiritual Doorway in the Brain"

From Salon:

We've all heard about the bright white light at the end of the tunnel, but what's really going on in a "near-death experience"? That's what neurologist and medical doctor Kevin Nelson tries to uncover in his first book, "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist's Search for the God Experience." Dr. Nelson is one of the world's leading researchers in the biology of near-death and other mystical experiences, and his fascinating book takes the reader from investigations of MRI studies of the brain to historical anecdotes and philosophical inquiry. Three decades of research led Dr. Nelson to a unique and unexpected conclusion about near-death experiences -- rather than arising from parts of the brain that are unique to higher cognitive functions, they actually involve the oldest, most primitive parts of our brain, and might also relate to having dreams while still awake.

What happens near death, and what does it have to do with God?

More here.

Wednesday Poem

Tao’s a bottomless well
ever used, never drawn down
Call it eternal no thing ness;
an infinite no thing filled with all;
a void of countless possibilities.
Tao is in our face
under our nose.
What made Tao is older than God.
What made it, who knows?
                      -Lao-Tzu in The Tao Te Ching

There is Nothing False in Thee

There is nothing false in thee.
In thy heart the youngest body
Has warmth and light.
In thee the quills of the sun
Find adornment.

What does not die
Is with thee.

Thou art clothed in robes of music.
Thy voice awakens wings.

And still more with thee
Are the flowers of earth made bright.

Upon the deeps the fiery sails
of heaven glide.

Thou art the radiance and the joy.
Thou heart shall only fail
When all else has fallen.

What does not perish
lives in thee.

by Kenneth Patchen
from Kenneth Patchen Selected Poems
Modern Library, 1937-1957

Single Worm Neurons Remotely Controlled with Lasers

From Scientific American:

Scientists have come a step closer to gaining complete control over a mind, even if that mind belongs to a creature the size of a grain of sand. A team at Harvard University has built a computerized system to manipulate worms—making them start and stop, giving them the sensation of being touched, and even prompting them to lay eggs, as seen in the video above—by stimulating their neurons individually with laser light, all while the worms swim freely in a petri dish. The technology may help neuroscientists for the first time gain a complete understanding of the workings of an animal's nervous system.

More here.

Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks

Slavoj Žižek in the London Review of Books:

In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s organiser, a real-life counterpart to the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight? In the film, the district attorney, Harvey Dent, an obsessive vigilante who is corrupted and himself commits murders, is killed by Batman. Batman and his friend police commissioner Gordon realise that the city’s morale would suffer if Dent’s murders were made public, so plot to preserve his image by holding Batman responsible for the killings. The film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us. No wonder the only figure of truth in the film is the Joker, its supreme villain. He makes it clear that his attacks on Gotham City will stop when Batman takes off his mask and reveals his true identity; to prevent this disclosure and protect Batman, Dent tells the press that he is Batman – another lie. In order to entrap the Joker, Gordon fakes his own death – yet another lie.

The Joker wants to disclose the truth beneath the mask, convinced that this will destroy the social order. What shall we call him? A terrorist? The Dark Knight is effectively a new version of those classic westerns Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show that, in order to civilise the Wild West, the lie has to be elevated into truth: civilisation, in other words, must be grounded on a lie. The film has been extraordinarily popular. The question is why, at this precise moment, is there this renewed need for a lie to maintain the social system?

More here.

A new Supreme Court of Assholedom

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

I want to create a new Supreme Court of Assholedom. Structured much like the actual U.S. Supreme Court, it will employ nine justices, whose job it will be to regularly preside over important cases of national social consequence -- to wit, to decide a) whether or not a certain person is an asshole, and b) if he or she is, how much of an asshole.

The court will consider cases of all types. They will have titles ranging from things like United States v. Sarah Palin after the Tucson Shooting, to Taibbi v. Fat Guy in the Next Seat Who Monopolized the Whole Armrest on a Flight to Denver, to Humanity v. Anyone Who Has Ever Generated and/or Sent a Spam Message.

The court will focus particularly on establishing case law in those areas where existing laws don't apply. For instance, it's not against the law to be the highly-compensated attorney representing the Gigantic International Megabank that recently foreclosed on an old lady in suburban New Jersey because she entered one number incorrectly on one check for one monthly mortgage payment (there actually is such a case). That's not illegal, but if that's how you make your living -- if you paid for your S-Class Mercedes helping Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein throw old ladies out of their houses -- I'm pretty sure you're an asshole.

But how much of an asshole? That's an interesting question, and another one of the court's mandates. My idea is to create a points scale of 1 to 10,000, with one point meaning less of, to not at all of, an asshole and ten thousand points of course being a total asshole. Here we have a graph showing points A (100 points), B (5,000 points), and C (10,000 points) that will serve as the basic guideline for the court's deliberations...

More here.

Molecular Visualizations of DNA

Literature and Exile

A speech delivered by Roberto Bolaño in 2000 in Vienna. From The Nation:

I've been invited to talk about exile. The invitation I received was in English, and I don't speak English. There was a time when I did or thought I did, or at least there was a time, in my adolescence, when I thought I could read English almost as well, or as poorly, as Spanish. Sadly, that time has passed. I can't read English. By what I could gather from the letter, I think I was supposed to talk about exile. Literature and exile. But it's very possible that I'm completely mistaken, which, thinking about it, would actually be an advantage, since I don't believe in exile, especially not when the word sits next to the word "literature."

It's a pleasure for me, I should say right away, to be with you here in the celebrated city of Vienna. For me Vienna is strongly associated with literature and with the lives of some people very near to me who understood exile in the way I sometimes understand it myself, which is to say, as life or as an attitude toward life. In 1978, or maybe 1979, the Mexican poet Mario Santiago spent a few days here on his way back to Israel. As he told it, one day the police arrested him and then he was expelled. In the deportation order, he was instructed not to return to Austria before 1984, a date that struck Mario as significant and funny and that today strikes me the same way.

More here.

europe hits the wall?

Samuel Abrahám: Multiculturalism was originally an affirmative term indicating the diversity of the "melting pot". Today, however, it has come to be associated with ethnic ghettoes. Rather than celebrating difference and creating respect for pluralism, multiculturalism has brought new conflicts. Kenan Malik, what went wrong?

Kenan Malik: It seems to me that part of the problem is confusion over what we mean by multiculturalism. It can mean one of two things. First: diversity as lived experience. Second: multiculturalism as a political process. To talk of diversity as lived experience is to talk of the experience of living in a society that, through mass immigration, has become more open, more vibrant and more cosmopolitan. In that sense, the mass immigration of the past 50 years has been of great benefit, it seems to me. But multiculturalism as a political process has come to mean something very different, namely the process of managing that diversity by putting people into ethnic boxes. It's a process through which cultural differences are institutionalized, publicly affirmed, recognized and institutionalized; through which political policy is predicated on the ethnic box to which one belongs. That seems to me deeply problematic.

more from Kenan Malik and Fero Sebej at Eurozine here.

 

don't criticize it...

Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs — from marijuana to heroin — but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking. The goal: easing the burden on the nation’s criminal justice system and improving the people’s overall health by treating addiction as an illness, not a crime. As the sweeping reforms went into effect nine years ago, some in Portugal prepared themselves for the worst. They worried that the country would become a junkie nirvana, that many neighborhoods would soon resemble Casal Ventoso, and that tourists would come to Portugal for one reason only: to get high. “We promise sun, beaches, and any drug you like,” complained one fearful politician at the time. But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved.

more from Keith O'Brien at the Boston Globe here.

Tuesday Poem

Son From Dukathole

From Katlehong I come
by train not by taxi –
a taxi to Dukathole stops
anytime, anywhere, anyhow.
A train to Dukathole.

I’m an alien;
beings are made of dust,
smoke, noise here.

Planet Dukathole has an ear
of sound. Ghetto-blasters
compete with one another
blaring smoky hits,
blaring away poverty.
All is kwaito.
No kwasa-kwasa,
no mbaqanga,
no reggae and no
jazz.

I’m an alien,
children here have a group soul
and compound eyes.

They see all
at once – the alien,
dusty games,
smoky dances,
passers-by,
gangsters’ cars
zipping along.

Where is the house . . . ?
Even Phillip Tobias, cannot
dirt-read us.

I’m an alien here,
I can’t ask anyone.

“Eita Blazah!”
Their greetings
followed by whistles.

I don’t look back.

“For Reclamation, Blazah?”

Dusty footsteps; white noises.


by Angifi Dladla
from We Are All Rivers
Chakida Publishing, Katlehong, 2010

Friends connect on a genetic level

From Nature:

Groups of friends show patterns of genetic similarity, according to a study published today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹. The findings are based on patterns of variation in two out of six genes sampled among friends and strangers. But the claim is a hard sell for some geneticists, who say that the researchers have not analysed enough genes to rule out alternative explanations. The team, led by James Fowler, a social scientist at the University of California, San Diego, looked at the available data on six genes from roughly 5,000 individuals enrolled in unrelated studies, and recorded the variation at one specific point, or single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), in each gene, and compared this between friends and non-friends.

After controlling for genetic likeness due to sex, age, race or common ancestry, friends still tended to have the same SNP at one position in a gene encoding the dopamine D2 receptor, DRD2. Friends also showed more variation at one position in a cytochrome gene, CYP2A6, than non-friends. An 'opposites attract' phenomenon may account for the variation in CYP2A6 among friends, say the authors. This result indicates that genetic patterns aren't always the result of friends who connect through similar activities, such as running marathons or playing musical instruments.

More here.

How fences could save the planet

Mark Stevenson in the New Statesman:

Nobody would blame you for being pessimistic about the future. After all, if you listen to the media (and, it seems, anybody over 25) we're all going to hell in the proverbial handcart, as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - economic meltdown, climate change, terrorism and, who else, Simon Cowell - bear down on us.

But I have news. Some people are rather fed up of this narrative and are quietly getting on with solving the grand challenges our planet faces, using both new technologies and forgotten wisdom. Their mantra? "Cheer up, it might just happen." I've spent the past 18 months researching a book about these people.

One of them is Tony Lovell, an accountant from Australia, where farming has become synonymous with drought. A decade of low rainfall, heatwaves and wildfires has scorched much of the land. Australians call it "the Big Dry" and it means that when the rains come - as they are doing now on the eastern seaboard - water runs over the parched surface, resulting in devastating floods. Many farms survive on "drought assistance" handed out by the government. Rural suicide is depressingly common.

Lovell thinks he has the answer. At a climate-change conference in Manchester, I find him talking about a new method of farming. "This is a typical ranch in Mexico," he explains, showing an image of a terracotta dust bowl with bare, compacted soil. Then he puts up a second image of lush green vegetation. "This is the ranch next door. Same soil, same rainfall. These pictures were taken on the same day."

More here.

Marital Deafness

Scott Adams in his blog:

Being married is a lot like being deaf. If you hear the same person talking day-after-day, you literally lose the ability to hear what that person is saying. I will give you two examples from my own life. Both are true. This one happened last week:

Shelly: Do you want some carrot cake?

Me: Hurricane? What hurricane?

In that particular case, we eventually got to the bottom of it, but only because Shelly needed an answer. I estimate that half of the time she says lamp, I hear doorknob, and it doesn't really matter so we go on with our lives. I might spend a few seconds confused about the larger point, but I shake it off.

Within a day of the carrot cake incident, I made an offhand comment to Shelly to the effect that she might enjoy a certain sport. That conversation went like this:

Me: That's your new game, honey.

Shelly: What did you call me?

Me: (slower and louder) I SAID, "THAT'S YOUR NEW GAME, HONEY."

Shelly: Oh. I thought you called me Jimmy Bean

Me:  Why would I call you Jimmy Dean

Shelly: Not Dean, Bean. Jimmy Bean.

Me: Why would I call you Jimmy Bean?

Shelly: That's what I wondered too.

Me: No, I said, "That's your new game, honey."

Shelly: What's my new game?

Me: I forget.

As I'm sure you've learned,  it's impossible to speak to a spouse if he or she is near running water, or using power equipment, or concentrating on something else, or eating something crunchy, or wondering if the squeak in the distance is the cat dying, or there is a child within a hundred yards. Amazingly, that covers 90% of every conversation you might attempt at home.

Recently I discovered that spouses, like computers, must be booted up before they can hear what you say.

More here.

Archaic Greek in a modern world

An endangered Greek dialect which is spoken in north-eastern Turkey has been identified by researchers as a "linguistic goldmine" because of its startling closeness to the ancient language, as Cambridge researcher Dr Ioanna Sitaridou explains.

Darkness on the Edge of the Universe

Brian Greene in the New York Times:

The pinpoints of starlight we see with the naked eye are photons that have been streaming toward us for a few years or a few thousand. The light from more distant objects, captured by powerful telescopes, has been traveling toward us far longer than that, sometimes for billions of years. When we look at such ancient light, we are seeing — literally — ancient times.

During the past decade, as observations of such ancient starlight have provided deep insight into the universe’s past, they have also, surprisingly, provided deep insight into the nature of the future. And the future that the data suggest is particularly disquieting — because of something called dark energy.

This story of discovery begins a century ago with Albert Einstein, who realized that space is not an immutable stage on which events play out, as Isaac Newton had envisioned. Instead, through his general theory of relativity, Einstein found that space, and time too, can bend, twist and warp, responding much as a trampoline does to a jumping child. In fact, so malleable is space that, according to the math, the size of the universe necessarily changes over time: the fabric of space must expand or contract — it can’t stay put.

More here.

When Self-Knowledge Is Only the Beginning

Richard Freidman in The New York Times:

It is practically an article of faith among many therapists that self-understanding is a prerequisite for a happy life. Insight, the thinking goes, will free you from your psychological hang-ups and promote well-being. Perhaps, but recent experience makes me wonder whether insight is all it’s cracked up to be. Not long ago, I saw a young man in his early 30s who was sad and anxious after being dumped by his girlfriend for the second time in three years. It was clear that his symptoms were a reaction to the loss of a relationship and that he was not clinically depressed.

“I’ve been over this many times in therapy,” he said. He had trouble tolerating any separation from his girlfriends. Whether they were gone for a weekend or he was traveling for work, the result was always the same: a painful state of dysphoria and anxiety. He could even trace this feeling back to a separation from his mother, who had been hospitalized for several months for cancer treatment when he was 4. In short, he had gained plenty of insight in therapy into the nature and origin of his anxiety, but he felt no better. What therapy had given this young man was a coherent narrative of his life; it had demystified his feelings, but had done little to change them.

Was this because his self-knowledge was flawed or incomplete? Or is insight itself, no matter how deep, of limited value?

More here.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather

By Alyssa Pelish

 

I. What We Talk About

“It would seem that the variability of the weather was purposely devised to furnish mankind with unfailing material for conversation.” –Emily Post, Etiquette 

It can’t be a difficult thing to compile a commonplace book on that most commonplace of topics, the weather.  (In fact, a quick search at Amazon reveals at least six such efforts, including three variations of a Webster’s book of quotations, an illustrated book of Yankee weather proverbs, and a significant portion of the Pooh Book of Quotations.)  As a fact of life, it’s inescapable (Wallace Stevens: “What is there here but weather…?”), as a conversation topic it’s failsafe (see Emily Post’s sincere advice, above), and as a failsafe conversation topic it is and has been poked and poked fun at by linguists, anthropologists, and the generally sardonic (Samuel Johnson: “It is uncommonly observed, that when two Englishman meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.”).   But despite its completely talked-out status, the banality of talking about it and of talking about talking about it (or maybe because of it?), I can’t stop thinking about how we talk about the weather.

For a number of years, I wanted to believe that there were hidden depths to our talk about the weather.  Of course, such small talk does contain an accepted subtext: phatic communion is what it’s called, coined by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski while living with the Melanesian tribes of Eastern New Guinea, where he equitably observed how “a mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among savage tribes as in a European drawing room, fulfils a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant.  Enquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things – all such are exchanged…not in order to express any thought.”  He finally concluded that “each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment other.”  So yes, small talk is a social gesture; it is connective tissue, not content – and weather comprises a substantial part of it.  But still it seemed to me that passing talk of sunlight and snowfall and heat and humidity was different from other small talk.  Or, at least, I needed to believe it.

Generations of parent-child relationships subsist on phatic communion: there may be real family feeling there, but inconsequential speech is the major mode of communication.  With my father, it was always the weather.  I was contemptuous of this in college, where I made a show of searching for profound conversation, while my father unfailingly tagged a report of the local weather to the documents he forwarded me, or inquired about the temperature where I was, three hours south.  And I was amused by it in my mid-twenties, when he fondly informed me that, first thing every morning, he checked the forecast in the distant cities where my brother and I lived.  But finally, when I was going through a depressive period and, consequently, checked the predicted hours of sunlight each day the way a diabetic monitors her blood sugar, I began to wonder about this consistent exchange of local forecasts that still largely comprised our regular if brief phone conversations.

In a piece Samuel Johnson wrote for the Idler – the one whose first line everybody who writes anything about the weather quotes—he castigates the idea that one’s mood – indeed, one’s very constitution – could be affected or determined by the weather.  “Surely nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason,” he very scathingly writes, “than to resign its powers to the influence of the air, and live in dependence on the weather and the wind.”  He dismisses such convictions as if they were so much astrology.[1]

Continue reading "What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather"

The Incantatory City: Kuru-Kuru Svaha

by Gautam Pemmaraju

I was once arrested, detained for a few hours, and then let off with a malevolent bubblegum pop song stuck in my head. The very first time I had the occasion to visit an after hours club in Bombay, in mid 1997, having ventured out but a few times with work colleagues, the place was raided by the very same cop who had asked us beforehand if we wished to enter. As the hundred odd people there were being let out one-by-one, under the watchful gaze of two male cops and the lone policewoman clad in a khaki sari, a small group of ten men, including yours truly, was detained and led to Vile Parle police station. At that hour, 3 AM, I was too bemused, bleary-eyed and somewhat tipsy to grasp the situation; it was only later I surmised that my appearance, a poor advocate of my peaceable nature, proved to be my undoing and, unsurprisingly, my turpitude. Consequently, I found myself amidst a bunch of pimps, social outcasts, suspect criminal types and baleful degenerates. After a few hours of erratic verbal abuse, nothing too harsh I must concede, a few slaps directed at a defiant detainee, an inqilaabi 1in my mind, we were corralled into the Sub-Inspector’s room to be personally questioned (and abused) by him for a bit, and thereupon lined-up outside the little courtyard-facing cubicle where the dastardly arresting officer was seated to note down our contact details. Abdul, the only other ‘media type’ in the group and a true Bombay chaava, a filmic fast-talking, smooth hustler, who had characteristically skipped ahead, emerged with a raffish smirk and ushered me in. I respectfully furnished the sparse details of my recent Bombay residency. As I exited the room, expectant friends in the courtyard watching on, the cop, a mere step behind, proceeded to sing the hook and chorus of the hit single by the Danish-Norwegian group Aqua, I’m A Barbie Girl,2 to me.

In many more ways than I can articulate here, Bombay/Mumbai is incantatory in tone and spirit. Its emanations, at once surreal, primordial and metronomic, cast many a curious spell on its residents. The perceptual city3, with its countless sensorial attributes, is richly textured, particularly to those who seek to ‘imagine’ it. I posed this proposition to a few people and several descriptions came forth – transient, multiple interlinked realities, portal, hypnotic city, fast-paced, dark clouds, drum, percussive, bubbling cauldron, organic entity, fickle friend, tempestuous lover, etc. One friend said she and the city conversed. Another described it as a city of ‘practical magic’ wherein its residents conduct and receive discrete, accumulative acts of magic - from its many temples, churches, mosques, dargahs, to its cricket pitches, empty mills4 (no longer one might add), quarter-system bars, financial markets, race track, gambling joints, and entertainment industry. The promise of lucre is invoked alongside cautionary chants – mayanagari, the illusory city, is to then be negotiated by propitiating the appropriate ‘gods’ and the consequential fortune if any, it is advised, is to be put to good use. Mumbadevi, the patron goddess of the city (and its original residents, the koli fisherfolk) and mythical tamer of the marauding demon Mumbaraka, steadfastly keeps her divine glance upon the city – the money made here must remain here, it is often proverbially chanted. At a recent book launch, when one of the panelists declared to the audience that ‘Bombay smells of sex and money’, it begged the protest of other formidable claimants: what about the smell of rotting fish and public defecation?

The incantations, inward and voiced, speculative and substantive, imagined and real, visual, aural and olfactory alike, constitute a literary construct of the city: the very city itself as an incantation. The city as a chant.

A fabulously imagined example of this construct, irradiated with sharp original thought, slick irony and deft technique is Kuru-Kuru Svaha, Hindi writer/journalist/screenwriter, Manohar Shyam Joshi’s uttaradhunik, post-modernist masterpiece5.  

The idea is held within the book’s very title - a common concluding phrase to many Vedic mantras, particularly used in Tantrik ritual, and often found in certain forms of spells known as Vashikaran Mantra which are cast in order to wrest control over a person, lovers and enemies alike.

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Grasping for the Lunatic Fringe

by Akim Reinhardt

It wasn’t so very long ago that some Americans held people as slaves, other human beings as their own private property, as if that person were a horse or a chair, to do with, to use, abuse, exploit, beat, and rape as they pleased.  What’s more, until the late 1840s most Americans thought that slavery was acceptable.  The great majority found themselves somewhere along a spectrum that at one end actually exalted slavery as a positive thing, a benefit to black people they deemed radically inferior, and at the other end said, Well, it’s a real shame, and I certainly don’t condone it or want it where I live, but what’s done is done, and I guess it isn’t the worst thing in the world, and anyway there’s nothing we can do about it now, so that’s that.  And in between those two ends of the spectrum rested any number of justifications and rationalizations that people used to explain, excuse, praise, rationalize, or simply accept the reality of human bondage in their nation.

Black slaves had been owned and held in every English colony prior to the Revolution and in every U.S. state after it, the practice only ending for good in the North during the early 19th century.  Indeed, before the sectional crisis that began to emerge in the 1840s, the acceptance of slavery was so widespread that there was even a small number of black slaveholders, free blacks who themselves had purchased a slave or two.

Yet here we are, in our post-civil rights world, and we find the idea of slavery to be repugnant, horrific, and wretched.  How could our ancestors have found this acceptable on any level, much less have engaged in it (Obviously I’m speaking as white person here.)?  So it is left to us, as future generations, to try to make sense of it and, inevitably, to judge it.  To cast our squinty gaze upon them and say: What the fuck.  How on earth could you have been so incredibly fucked up?  I just don’t get it.  You people were fucking monsters.

Or there’s the whole process of murdering Indians and stealing their lands.  Let’s judge that one.  Pretty easy from this distance, huh?

What about the Holocaust?  Care to take a whack at whether that was really, really wrong?  Go ahead.  My money says you’ll agree with us.

I study the past.  It’s what I do for a living.  Like any historian, I strive to understand the past in a historical context and on its own terms.  But as a human being, I inevitably use my own presentist sense of morality and ethics when passing judgment on it.  And here’s the thing.  Slavery and genocides, those are easy for us now.  Yeah, super wrong, we get it.  But who would you have been back then, in the moment?  We all want to believe that we would have been the person working to free slaves through the underground railroad, or living peaceably with Indians, or smuggling Jews out of Europe.  But guess what?  You wouldn’t have.  Or at least, it’s not very likely.  No, odds are, you would’ve been some douche bag who justified it with mealy mouthed excuses, or laid low and avoided talking about such unpleasantness.  Why?  I’ll tell you why.
                                   
Because when crazy shit is the norm, the lunatic fringe are the ones who embrace the right choice.  If crazy is normal, then the right answer seems crazy.  I’ll say it again.  If crazy is the norm, then opposing it seems crazy.

Are you crazy?  Are you on the fringe?  I mean really on the fringe.

You know who the abolitionists were?  Not to paint with too broad of a brush here, but a lot of them were religious fanatics.  They were the crazies, the radicals, the ones that everyone else pointed to and said: Hey, you’re really nuts.  What the hell’s wrong with you?  Knock it off already.  Abolitionists were the ones who regular people mocked, jeered, and cursed.  They were the outsiders of their day, the lunatic fringe of the early 19th century.  Slavery was normal, so a society that largely accepted slavery labeled them as crazy.

Continue reading "Grasping for the Lunatic Fringe"

perceptions

Vivian Maier. Steps.

Recently discovered NYC and Chicago street photographer of the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

More here, here and interview with the accidental discoverer here.

Thanks to Anjuli Raza Kolb for the pointer.

Telling Tales

Although, these days, my children would normally prefer to read to themselves than to have me read them a bedtime story, they both love it when I tell them stories of my family. Both my parents died before my daughters were born and so their only connection to their grandparents is through the people I conjure up with my stories. I tell them the stories my mother told me; sitting on my bed when I was home sick, she would tell me about her fights with her brother, about the family vacations to Butlins, a somewhat cheesy English vacation resort, and other stories that I would make her repeat over and over. And now my children ask me to tell them these stories, even though they can repeat them almost word for word.

Stories are important. They help us frame who we are, personally, culturally, professionally, morally. When we call up a friend and tell our latest love woes, we're telling a story; when we go for a job interview, we tell the story of our career so far. There are many types of stories, but one kind is a story that creates and shares a vision of the future, aiming to inspire people to follow the storyteller. As Steve Denning quotes in his book, The Leader's Guide to Storytelling, "Winning leaders create and use future stories to help people break away from the familiar present and venture boldly ahead to create a better future…they help others understand why and what they must do to get there." Denning gives examples of some of the most powerful uses of future storytelling, Martin Luther King's, "I have a dream" speech and Winston Churchill's, "We shall fight them on the beaches."

I listened to President Obama's speech on Wednesday night in Arizona; it was inspiring, moving, and heartfelt as he wove the victims' stories into a compelling narrative. He told the story of the 9-year old victim, Christine Taylor Green,  urging the American people to envision a different kind of future, a future where "…our democracy is as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as she imagined it." It was a powerful speech that, while seeming to sidestep partisan politics, instead urging all sides to abandon "the usual plane of point scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle", extremely effectively scored huge political points - of course. Obama was presidential, an inspirational leader.

This speech was a vivid reminder of why people voted for him in 2008. Yet, what really struck me was this thought: clearly, this man knows how to use storytelling to inspire and lead, so why didn't he do a better job of this selling healthcare and TARP (amongst other, wildly unpopular policies). Don't get me wrong, I know he tried, but somehow he seemed to never manage to strike the same notes that he did the other day. And he should have been able to.

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Where it hurts

When most people think of back problems they think of "slipped disks" or muscle pain. That's not what has caused my stepbrother Mark's troubles. His official diagnosis is degenerative disk disease. That means exactly what it sounds like—the disks between his vertebrae that are supposed to protect the nerves and bones are slowly deteriorating. The MRI of the area makes it look like he has a broken back: it's full of jagged discontinuities; the bones in his back are pushing straight into his nerves.

This is what has led to his disability. He has trouble walking, sitting, sleeping, doing almost any activity for any length of time—not to mention living with excruciating pain. In addition, he has arthritis in his feet that has become increasingly burdensome and painful in its own right. As I mentioned in my last column, he's finally receiving some disability payments from the government, but they are barely enough to survive on. Still, the Social Security Administration requires regular visits to a doctor to confirm that the disabling condition persists. A recurring feature of Mark's doctor visits is a urine test. There's nothing about the treatment of his back problems or arthritis that actually requires a urine sample; the test is for drugs. No, Mark's not some kind of recovering drug addict. His doctor is obligated by the government to make sure he's taking his pain medication and not selling it for profit.

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My Botfly, Myself

When I was in my mid-twenties, I visited Costa Rica as an ecotourist. One of the more memorable field experiences was watching a small snake consume a large toad over a period of several hours. I photographed the progression of this feast at a cost of just a few mosquito bites on my head,... or so I thought. As it turned out, the snake and mosquitoes were not the only ones dining that night.

Two weeks after my return home some of the mosquito bites had not gone away. Then one morning, I felt a small movement in the bite on my right temple. Weird. Maybe I imagined it. A while later, more movement. Definitely not my imagination. I looked closely in a mirror. At the center of the bite was a small opening with a snorkel periodically emerging from it! I had read about bot flies but never imagined becoming a host.

Bot flies have an interesting life cycle. The offspring must be deposited on living mammals or birds, but the adults, being large, noisy fliers, chase down quiet-flying mosquitoes and lay their eggs on them to avoid getting swatted. When the mosquitoes get a blood meal, the eggs, in response to the host's body heat, hatch and drop onto the host. Then they burrow into a hair follicle or sweat gland, where they begin feeding. The maggots or “bots” traverse their new home with alternating contractions of rows of hooks that encircle their bodies. As parasites go, they are usually pretty good guests despite dining on your flesh. They are careful to eliminate their waste outside their burrow, which they keep antiseptic. After a few weeks of feeding, they crawl out, drop off their host, and pupate in the soil. Some time later, an adult fly emerges to mate and repeat the cycle.

My thoughts alternated between excitement and revulsion. Fearing a highly visible scar, I squeezed the “bite” and the tiny maggot popped out like a zit. So much for that.

The next day, I noticed a now familiar movement in the upper, right rear portion of my head. This area was well concealed by hair and I thought even if this things takes a big hunk of flesh, no one will see it unless I become extraordinarily bald (so far this prognostication has held, if only just barely,...). Could I nurture my guest to pupation? As a male I thought this is probably the only opportunity I will ever have for another organism nourish itself on my living flesh. I imagined the movements of the maggot in my head were analogous to the kicking that pregnant women feel from their developing fetuses. It was thrilling, humbling, and a little alarming to suddenly be a link in the food chain rather than its terminal end.

For the next week or so, I proudly showed off my offspring to anyone who was interested. Most people were horrified but a few understood my motivation. Unfortunately, as the maggot grew it became much more active and painful. An occasional nibble could make my eyes water. Eventually it began waking me if I rolled over on it in my sleep. At that point I decided to end my experiment as a host.

Luckily, one of my housemates was from Brasil where botflies are fairly common and their removal is routine.  There they hold a piece of meat over the fly's breathing hole until it begins suffocating and backs out into the meat. Alternatively, they cover the hole with Vaseline and sieze the maggot as it backs out. We tried this latter technique, and as the maggot emerged, my other housemate grabbed its snorkel with tweezers and pulled. It reflexively withdrew deeper into my scalp. A tug of war ensued and the rows of hooks dug into my flesh and felt like a hot poker. The inch long maggot, slowly stretched to over four inches before finally letting go. Note: I got lucky, because if the larva tears apart, whatever remains behind can lead to a nasty infection. As a single drop of blood oozed from my scalp, I preserved the bot in vodka.

As a result of my experience, I became much more interested in parasitology as a discipline within biology, and also began to think a bit more about humanity's place in the world.  For several years afterwards, I would occasionally get tingling feelings where the botfly had once dined: A reminder that, to much of life on the planet, we are merely food.

Douglas Adams and the "Grand" Reflection

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

A Short History of DNA

Douglas Noel Adams was a best-selling British writer, born in 1952. (As you may have noticed, he had the distinct pleasure of having “DNA” as his initials.) He studied literature at Cambridge, UK, after being extended an invite on the basis of his essay writing. It appears he wanted to be part of the great university to join the the Footlights, an exclusive comedy club that was the springboard for many British comedians. There were various incredible opportunities that flew into Adams’ life, such as: being noticed by Python, Graham Chapman; being one of two non-Pythons to get a writing credit in Monty Python; performing with the likes of Pink Floyd (my favourite band) because he was friends with the incredible David Gilmour; and so on. More importantly, for us, was a radio-series he pitched to BBC Radio 4 in 1977, called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

His Hitchhiker series was not constrained to only one medium, of course. It began as this radio-show, then leaked into other mediums: a television series, a stage show, a three part DC Comics series, a computer game, and a major film. More importantly it became a series of books. Being bored easily by sounds, the written-version (and computer game) is my favourite medium of Adams’ universal message of weirdness, brilliance and the overall irony of existence in an uncaring universe.

The overarching story in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (now shortened to H2G2) is about Arthur Dent who is a dreary British Earthman (a tautology to many). Dent is friends with Ford Prefect - who is not in fact from Guildford, as he claims but “a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.” In the beginning of the story, Earth is destroyed by horrible aliens called Vogons - who appear to be based on any Home Affairs Department anywhere in the world. They are making way for a “hyperspace bypass”; an event that mirrors Dent’s troubles in the beginning of the books where his own house is about to be destroyed to make way for a bypass. (The idea of mirroring houses and planets will return later in this essay.)

From there, Dent finds himself transported all over the universe experiencing adventures that involve: hunting couches, the true nature of humanity, the bored and postmodernist ruler of the Universe (not god), god’s Final Message to his Creation, the evils of making tea, time-travel, and, famously, a cynical bowl of petunias and the first and final thoughts of a sperm whale.

 

We discover fascinating details about humans in the series. For example, the Guide tells us something rather interesting about human arrogance: “on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."

Yet, what makes these books and the whole series so important is the reflection that is thrust upon us as a species. Adams manages to deflate the petty worries and doubts of everyday human concerns by juxtaposing it to the movements and thoughts of greater, more intelligent alien-life forms: Beings who can create planets, talk to the controller of the universe, go to different dimensions and times, and so on. But throughout, he still manages to compact everyday human concerns but mock them at the same time.

Continue reading "Douglas Adams and the "Grand" Reflection "

The Spooky Silence Of Sarah Palin -- Why, For Four Long Days After The Giffords Shooting, She STFU

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

So some crazy young man (they're always men) shoots a Congresswoman pointblank through the head and sprays thirty more bullets from a gun clip he bought at Walmart, killing a 9-year-old girl and five others in Arizona, "the mecca for prejudice and bigotry" according to the sheriff of Tucson ... and for four long days, the biggest mouth in American politics was as MIA as an atheist in a foxhole.

How come?

Let me tell you why.

The only thing Sarah Palin could've said that would've really pricked the nation's ears was this: "I wish I hadn't put out that map with the cross-hairs, with one of them targeting the district represented by Gabby Giffords. And I wish I hadn't talked about 'don't retreat, reload' in a political context. Gun talk and threats around guns don't belong in politics. We can agree to disagree, angrily if we wish, but we shouldn't be threatening each other. I'm sorry I added to the gun talk." 

Unfortunately Sarah Palin can't do this. Because if she did, she would lose face with her constituency. They're ALL about guns and gun talk, and they think only wuzzes apologize. She can't disappoint them. Mama Grizzlies don't apologize. They attack.

Sarah Palin is screwed by her own persona. She's boxed in by her own political posture. With no mea in her culpa, her pitbull persona has lipstick but no grace. So she has nothing worthwhile to say. Gun talk is what she is all about. How can she walk away from what she is, and what people who like her are all about?

The Tea Party extremists that Sarah Palin represents are all about threats.  All about taking guns to political rallies. All about watering the tree of liberty with blood. All about taking up arms against our tyrannical government. All about "Second Amendment remedies," i.e. using the Constitutional right to bear arms to get what they want. All about “we came unarmed -- this time.” All about war and macho frontier posturing. 

Sarah Palin stands for something all right: the victory of right-wing dumbfuckery in America. We're dysfunctional because we have more influential idiots in our nation than any other industrialized nation has in theirs. You have to ask yourself what kind of a nation elevates dumb-brunette loons like Michele Bachmann into our government and raging moonbats like Glenn Beck into our punditry and considers a celebrity airhead like Sarah Palin a viable presidential candidate. Anywhere else they'd be laughed out of public life, but here they're heroes. It's like the Attack of the Zombies, or the Rule of White Trash. Half the nation is not embarrassed by these blithering lunatics, and the other half puts them on TV.

Continue reading "The Spooky Silence Of Sarah Palin -- Why, For Four Long Days After The Giffords Shooting, She STFU"

The Intellectual at Play in the Wider World

Pankaj Mishra in the New York Times Book Review:

I don’t think of myself as a literary critic. I write about novels and short stories. But I am reluctant to describe what I do as “literary criticism,” as I like to move quickly beyond the literariness of a text — whether narrative techniques or quality of prose — and its aesthetic pleasures, to engage with the author’s worldview, implied or otherwise, and his or her location in history (of nation-states and empires, as well as of literary forms).

This kind of reading came naturally to me in the new, very poor and relatively inchoate Asian society in which I grew up. When I first began to read literary fiction I could assume neither a clear backdrop of political and social stability, nor a confident knowledge of the world and assumptions of national power. Everything had to be figured out, and literature was the primary means of clarifying a bewilderingly large universe of meanings and contexts.

Much of my self-education was assisted by American writers like Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, F. W. Dupee and Irving Howe. Some of these were literary critics, but they were, above all, public intellectuals (a species whose irrelevance and powerlessness Alfred Kazin seems to be mourning — rather more than the demise of a critical genre — when he writes, “We are rushing into our future so fast that no one can say who is making it, or what is being made; all we know is that we are not making it, and there is no one, no matter what his age is, who does not in his heart feel that events have been taken out of his hands”).

Coming of age during and after the progressive era, when intellectual argument and political activism promised to reshape America’s future, these critics took it for granted that literature was among the main signs of the times, and subject to the inquiring gaze of history and politics.

In this presumption, they were supported not so much by the Marxian ideologues of the 1930s as by the great realist novelists, from Stendhal to Tolstoy and Mann, who could not have written their most mature works without grappling with the political and moral challenges of their day.

More here.

Have women evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault?

Jesse Bering in Slate:

Thornhill and Palmer, Malamuth, and the many other investigators studying rape through an evolutionary lens, take great pains to point out that "adaptive" does not mean "justifiable," but rather only mechanistically viable. Yet dilettante followers may still be inclined to detect a misogyny in these investigations that simply is not there. As University of Michigan psychologist William McKibbin and his colleagues write in a 2008 piece for the Review of General Psychology, "No sensible person would argue that a scientist researching the causes of cancer is thereby justifying or promoting cancer. Yet some people argue that investigating rape from an evolutionary perspective justifies or legitimizes rape."

The unfortunate demonization of this brand of inquiry is rooted in the fallacy of biological determinism (according to which men are programmed by their genes to rape and have no free will to do otherwise) and the naturalistic fallacy (that because rape is natural it must be acceptable). These are resoundingly false assumptions that reveal a profound ignorance of evolutionary biology. Yet the purpose of the remaining article is not to belabor that tired ideological dispute, but to look at things from the female genetic point of view. We've heard the argument that men may have evolved to sexually assault women. Have women evolved to protect themselves from men?

More here.

Kenneth Tong: The Interview (or Portrait of a Sociopath)

Johann Hari in his blog (was also published in the London Evening Standard):

Women should “get thin or die trying,” and you can “never start too young.” It is better for a girl to “risk [her] life dieting than be sub-par by being a plus-size.” Remember: “Hunger hurts but starving works.” When an ultra-wealthy but forgotten former British reality show Big Brother contestant called Kenneth Tong started Tweeting these sentiments – and worse – a fortnight ago, a Twitter-storm broke. Everyone from Rhianna to Gordon Ramsay told their followers he was a dangerous fool, but Tong gathered tens of thousands of young girls who followed him. He became the most discussed subject on Twitter in the world for three days. His message? “The words lunch, breakfast, and dinner should now mean nothing to you, you have eaten enough for a lifetime. Stop. You are disgusting.”

Then Tong claimed it was all a hoax – just an hour after I interviewed him. In our long discussion he passionately defended every word he had said, but when I told him that his arguments could kill young girls and expose him to serious legal liability, he visibly began to panic. When I spoke to him on the phone later in the day, after his ‘revelation’, he said “it was dangerous ground we were treading on, I can see that now” and begged me not to publish his comments. So I don’t believe it was a hoax at all – but that he was finally scared off by the legal implications of what he was saying and doing. You can judge for yourself.

I meet Tong at a dingy restaurant in Chinatown in London. He is a short man in a gray suit who manages to look both baby-faced and wizened at the same time. He is lined with great wodges of bling: a sparkling silver necklace hangs from his neck and gold flashes from his wrists. He hurries up to me and smirks: “I am the most hated man in Britain!”

More here.

Izzeldin Abuelaish: I Shall Not Hate

Rachel Cooke in The Observer:

For the duration of the war, the Israeli government allowed no journalists to enter Gaza; they could only gather on the border, and listen to the shelling. But Abuelaish knew plenty of Israelis – thanks to his work as an infertility specialist, he had worked in several Israeli hospitals – and among his many friends on the other side was Shlomi Eldar, a reporter for Israel's Channel 10. Eldar began calling Abuelaish late every afternoon to ask what had happened during the course of the day. Live on air, his friend would then describe the scene – from the vantage point of his living room window, he could see entire neighbourhoods being obliterated – for the benefit of viewers of the evening news show. Abuelaish knew that his audience was not likely to be particularly sympathetic to his point of view. Most Israelis believed the Gazans had brought this crisis on themselves. He also knew that there was a chance that someone on his own side would take against his addressing Israel, and that this might involve reprisals against his family, but he kept taking the calls. "With my voice in their ears, the Israelis couldn't entirely ignore the cost to the Palestinians of their military action."

More here.

the men who wear my clothes