3quarksdaily

Guy de Maupassant

From The Guardian:

"He is a better writer than you think," Malcolm Lowry once said of Guy de Maupassant. This comment, made to David Markson, indicates the conundrum Maupassant presents to readers. A hugely influential writer of short stories, the sheer mass of his extremely uneven body of work – 300 stories, 200 articles, six novels, two plays, and three travel books churned out between 1880 and 1891 – can obscure his genius like clouds around an alp. Yet while many of those 300 stories fail to rise beyond the anecdotal, nearly a quarter are very good, and within them stands a core of indisputable classics. It shouldn't be doubted that Maupassant is one of the most important short-story writers to have lived. It was to the detriment of Maupassant's work – although not his bank balance – that his career coincided with a demand from French newspapers for stories of around 1-2,000 words. Jostling with news and faits divers, these stories were by necessity laconic and attention-grabbing, and Maupassant, whose severe economy was a model for Hemingway, had a great facility for producing them. The irony, however, is that Maupassant's best works are much longer. The spareness, learned in his youth from the poet Louis Bouilhet, is still there – as in the opening of "Hautot & Son" (1889), where, as Sean O'Faolain writes, "the scene is brilliantly and swiftly painted, with three lines for the countryside and six for the sportsmen" – but the stories' scope helps avoid the glibness that can mar his shorter work. When Bouilhet died another family friend, Gustave Flaubert, took on Maupassant's literary education, counselling his impatient charge to hold off from publishing until he was ready (although from 1875 several stories crept into print under pseudonyms). The fruit of this long labour was "Boule de Suif", which Flaubert lived just long enough to read and proclaim a masterpiece.

...It's certainly difficult to find much meaning in Maupassant's final years, which were as lurid as any plot he ever concocted. By 1885 he was suffering memory lapses and eye problems, and would sometimes see his double sitting at his desk. These were early symptoms of the syphilis he most probably contracted during his hedonistic twenties (a period he recreates in an unusually touching story of 1890, "Mouche"). By late 1891 he was convinced his brain was pouring from his nose and mouth, and thought his urine was made of diamonds. "My mind", he told a friend, "is following dark valleys". He slit his throat in Cannes on New Year's Day, 1892, and spent the last 18 months of his life in a Parisian asylum. "M Maupassant is reverting to the animal", his doctor wrote a few days before his death, aged 42.

More here.

Faith Healing

Kathleen Norris in The New York Times:

This is a daring and urgent book, written after the author learned he had a rare, incurable and unpredictable cancer. But it is not a conventional memoir of illness and treatment. Beyond informing us that he received his dire news in a “curt voice mail message,” Christian Wiman says very little about his experience of the medical world. He is after bigger game. More than any other contemporary book I know, “My Bright Abyss” reveals what it can mean to experience St. Benedict’s admonition to keep death daily before your eyes.

...In reflecting on the meaning of Christ’s passion for his own life, Wiman finds that it reveals that “the absolutely solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion.” It is the resolutely incarnational nature of the religion that draws him in. “I am, such as I am, a Christian,” he writes, “because I can feel God only through physical existence, can feel his love only in the love of other people.” His love for his wife and children, he realizes, is both human and entirely sacred. And here the poet comes to the fore, insisting on the right to embrace contradiction without shame. “I believe in absolute truth and absolute contingency, at the same time. And I believe that Christ is the seam soldering together these wholes that our half vision — and our entire clock-bound, logic-locked way of life — shapes as polarities.” This pithy and passionate book is not easy, but it is rewarding. Wiman’s finely honed language can be vivid and engaging. He describes his childhood home as “a flat little sandblasted town in West Texas: pump jacks and pickup trucks, . . . a dying strip, a lively dump, and above it all a huge blue and boundless void” that he admits, with typical acuity, “I never really noticed until I left, when it began to expand alarmingly inside of me.” He exhibits a poet’s concern for precision, writing, for example, that “the sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone else’s suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self.” This is, above all, a book about experience, and about seeking a language that is adequate for both the fiery moments of inspiration and the “fireless life” in which we spend most of our days. It is a testament to the human ability to respond to grace, even at times of great suffering, and to resolve to live and love more fully even as death draws near.

More here.

REFLECTIONS ON WOOLWICH

Kenan Malik in Padaemonium:

1. It was a mad, barbarous attack, more akin to a particularly savage form of street violence than to a politically motivated act. What was striking about the incident was not just its depravity but the desire of the murderers for that depravity to be captured on film. This was narcissistic horror, an attempt to create a spectacle, enact a performance, and generate media frenzy. In that it succeeded. We should not provide the act with greater legitimacy by rationalizing it in political or religious terms. Even to call it a terrorist act is to give it too much credibility.

2. Brutal nihilism and narcissistic hatred are central threads of contemporary jihadism. This is as true of 9/11 and 7/7 and the Boston bombing as it is true of the Woolwich murder. But while 9/11 and 7/7 were degenerate acts, the Woolwich attack shows how much more degenerate such attacks have become over the past decade. This was jihadism as depraved street violence.

3. Such degenerate nihilism is not peculiar to jihadists. It drove the twisted, paranoid fantasies of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass killer, who wanted ‘to create a European version of al-Qaeda’. It underlay the mass shootings in America in Aurora and Sandy Hook. Such acts remain rare. But the inchoate, disengaged, misanthropic rage upon which they draw, and the hatred of people and the indifference to one’s actions that they express, has become typical of a very contemporary form of violence. The fact that Breivik claimed that he was waging a war in defence of Christendom, or that the Woolwich attackers shouted ‘Allahu Akhbar’ does not make them any less degenerate or nihilistic, or any more ‘political’, than the perpetrators of the Aurora or Sandy Hook killings.

More here.

A Commencement Address

On what would have been his 73rd birthday, my old teacher Joseph Alexandrovich Brodsky's commencement address to the 1984 graduating class of Williams College, in the NYRB:

Given its volume and intensity, given, especially, the fatigue of those who oppose it, Evil today may be regarded not as an ethical category but as a physical phenomenon no longer measured in particles but mapped geographically. Therefore the reason I am talking to you about all this has nothing to do with your being young, fresh, and facing a clean slate. No, the slate is dark with dirt and it’s hard to believe in either your ability or your will to clean it. The purpose of my talk is simply to suggest to you a mode of resistance which may come in handy to you one day; a mode that may help you to emerge from the encounter with Evil perhaps less soiled if not necessarily more triumphant than your precursors. What I have in mind, of course, is the famous business of turning the other cheek.

I assume that one way or another you have heard about the interpretations of this verse from the Sermon on the Mount by Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and many others. In other words, I assume that you are familiar with the concept of nonviolent, or passive, resistance, whose main principle is returning good for evil, that is, not responding in kind. The fact that the world today is what it is suggests, to say the least, that this concept is far from being cherished universally. The reasons for its unpopularity are twofold. First, what is required for this concept to be put into effect is a margin of democracy. This is precisely what 86 percent of the globe lacks. Second, the common sense that tells a victim that his only gain in turning the other cheek and not responding in kind yields, at best, a moral victory, i.e., quite immaterial. The natural reluctance to expose yet another part of your body to a blow is justified by a suspicion that this sort of conduct only agitates and enhances Evil; that moral victory can be mistaken by the adversary for his impunity.

There are other, graver reasons to be suspicious. If the first blow hasn’t knocked all the wits out of the victim’s head, he may realize that turning the other cheek amounts to manipulation of the offender’s sense of guilt, not to speak of his karma. The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and although incapable of loving another like ourselves, we nonetheless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another. (This is why you’ve been hit on your right cheek in the first place.) At best, therefore, what one can get from turning the other cheek to one’s enemy is the satisfaction of alerting the latter to the futility of his action. “Look,” the other cheek says, “what you are hitting is just flesh. It’s not me. You can’t crush my soul.” The trouble, of course, with this kind of attitude is that the enemy may just accept the challenge.

Twenty years ago the following scene took place in one of the numerous prison yards of northern Russia.

Jeremy Scahill & Noam Chomsky on Secret U.S. Dirty Wars From Yemen to Pakistan to Laos

S. Abbas Raza

Hannah Arendt, Guilty Pleasure

In Tablet, J. Hoberman reviews Margarethe von Trotta's biopic of Hannah Arendt, starring the wonderful Barbara Sukowa:

It’s not every week that you get to see a movie about an intellectual contretemps, let alone one that rocked the Jewish world. Indeed, in a way, Von Trotta and screenwriter Pamela Katz have attempted something far more difficult and potentially absurd than making a documentary, namely setting out to dramatize an upheaval in the life of the mind. The only filmmaker who has ever really turned the trick is Roberto Rossellini in his early-’70s telefilmsSocrates, Descartes, and Blaise Pascal. (Would that he had also essayed Spinoza!)

Von Trotta and Katz could not possibly do justice to the outrage—and outrageous abuse—that Arendt inspired, or to the breadth of her continents-spanning life and thought. A sprinkling of flashbacks notwithstanding, it’s Arendt in Jerusalem and on Eichmann that Von Trotta considers in her film.

Greatly simplified, Arendt’s three great sins were 1) suggesting that the “desk murderer” Eichmann was a mediocre opportunist rather than the devil incarnate (and thus all the more frightening); 2) publicly discussing and denouncing the role of Nazi-appointed Jewish Councils in the Final Solution; and 3) examining the judicial basis for the trial itself. Arendt, however subtle in her analysis, was not given to understatement; still, to a large degree the tumult she inspired was a case of blaming the messenger. (For a pithy, reasoned historical contextualization of the reaction to Arendt’s report, see Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life.)

As a film, Hannah Arendt is a sort of hybrid and not just because it is half in German. The movie is a didactic docu-drama, part old-school Soviet “publicist” film in its idealized, ideological representation of historical figures, and part Hollywood biopic in its entertainingly kitschy notion of how they might have interacted in real life.

The Faraway Nearby

Many stories are told about the T’ang dynasty artist Wu Daozi, sometimes named as one of the three great sages of China: that he ignored color and only painted in black ink, that he transgressively painted his own face on an image of the Buddha, that he painted a perfect halo in a single stroke without the aid of compasses, that he painted pictures of the dragons who cause rain so well that the paintings themselves exuded water, that the Emperor sent him to sketch a beautiful region and reprimanded him for coming back emptyhanded, after which he painted a 100-foot scroll that replicated all his travels in one continuous flow, that he made all his paintings boldly and without hesitation, painting like a whirlwind, so that people loved to watch the world emerge from under his brush. One story about him I read long ago I always remembered. While he was showing the Emperor the landscape he had painted on a wall of the Imperial Palace, he pointed out a grotto or cave, stepped into it, and vanished. Some say that the painting disappeared too. In the account I thought I remembered, he was a prisoner of the Emperor who escaped through his painting. When I was much younger I saw another version of this feat that impressed me equally.

more from Rebecca Solnit at Guernica here.

truth is harder than fiction

In recent years, African literature has broken free of what Wole Soyinka called the “orange ghetto” of the Heinemann African Writers Series, which in 1962 launched the series with the one African book that everyone seems to know: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Writers from around the continent—José Eduardo Agualusa, Doreen Baingana, Mia Couto, Emmanuel Dongala, Nuruddin Farah, Petina Gappah, Yasmina Khadra, Zakes Mda, Maaza Mengiste, Abdellah Taïa—continue to win awards and gain international recognition. From Nigeria alone, authors like Chris Abani, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Helon Habila, E.C. Osondu, and Helen Oyeyemi have joined the pantheon already occupied by Achebe, Ben Okri, Wole Soyinka, and Amos Tutuola. A steady stream of anthologies has introduced American readers to fresh voices from Africa. But something has been missing. These anthologies have focused almost exclusively on fiction, ignoring a wealth of extraordinary true-life narratives.

more from Geoff Wisner at The Quarterly Conversation here.

the sprite-like Reykjaviker

When Icelanders talk to Americans about Iceland, sooner or later talk is going to turn to fairies, or hidden people, or elves. And while it seems many Icelanders do truly believe in those things, often you’ll get a response like the novelist Sjón gave Leonard Lopate the other day: “If you actually lean on an Icelander, most of us will confess to believing that nature has the power to manifest itself in a form understandable to humans. So the hidden people, you know, we would say, ‘Well of course I don’t believe that there are actually cities inside our mountains, but it’s possible that nature has a way of manifesting itself in a human form to, you know, have an interaction with the humans.’” Similarly, when Americans talk about Iceland, sooner or later (probably sooner) we’re going to start talking about one specific fairy, or hidden person, or elf. And despite my not having any photos or videos to back it up, you’ll have to believe me that last week at Scandinavia House, the sprite-like Reykjaviker you’re thinking of did indeed manifest herself in a striking, stiff, white-and-purple dress for a ten-minute interaction with book-reading humans on behalf of her longtime friend and collaborator Sjón.

more from David Bukszpan at Paris Review here.

Friday Poem

Three Questions

How can it be
that the one sure thing
worth repeating
from a year that slips
between the hands
like kite string,
and is hauled into
the next like a
favorite kite,
is what I think is
a Japanese maple
from the far end
of November,
firing through half
a suburban block
with its not yet burnt-
through extravagance
of orange? Or that
that one tree on
that one block
seen on that one day
in the course of
this one short life
is enough, though clearly,
despite the lies
its leaves are, or
my need to trust
the impossible stories
hanging from its limbs,
it is enough? Or even
that the world, even
this one, can offer so little and
so much at once
and mean them both?
.
.
by Ralph Black
from Turning Over The Earth
Milkweed Editions

Race Is Not Biology

From The Atlantic:

During the past two weeks, much outrage has arisen over former Heritage Foundation staffer Jason Richwine's Harvard doctoral dissertation, which speculated that IQ differences between "Hispanic" and "non-Hispanic' populations were genetically rooted. The claims mirrored those of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's scurrilous The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which made similar claims about the intelligence of blacks. (Murray receives thanks in Richwine's dissertation acknowledgments and wrote recently in National Review Online in defense of Richwine.) The fury continues. In the past couple days, a group of scholars has circulated a petition excoriating Harvard for approving the dissertation and condoning scientific racism in the process. Their petition situates Richwine within an odious lineage stretching back to the era of eugenics and charges that his work rests on shoddy intellectual foundations. (These scholars are right: the late J. Phillipe Rushton, best known for claiming associations among race, brain size, and penis length, is cited by Richwine.) A group of 1,200 Harvard University students has also put together their own petition.

But the attacks on Richwine are missing something far more insidious than neo-eugenic claims about innately inferior intelligence between races. The backlash against Richwine and Murray, after all, gives some indication that their views are widely considered beyond the respectable pale in the post- Bell Curve era. Richwine and Murray are really extreme branches of a core assumption that is much more pervasive and dangerous because it isn't necessarily racist on the surface: the belief in biological "races." This first assumption is required to get to claims like Richwine's, which argue that between Race A and Race B, differences exist (in "intelligence" or whatever else) that are grounded in the biological characteristics of the races themselves. Public outcry always greets the second Richwine-Murray-esque claim. But the first assumption required to reach it is more common and based on as shaky an intellectual foundation, even as it continues to escape equal scorn. Even so, the critique of biologically innate race is hardly new. In 1972, the Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin famously observed more genetic variation within populations than between them, undercutting the case for fixed and timeless genetic boundaries that demarcated "races."

More here.

The Gut-Wrenching Science Behind the World’s Hottest Peppers

From Smithsonian:

17 tribes of Nagaland are united, historically, by an enthusiasm for heads. The Nagas: Hill Peoples of Northeast India—my reading matter on the two-hour drive from Dimapur to Kohima, in the state of Nagaland —contains dozens of references to head-taking but only one mention of the item that has brought me here: the Naga King Chili (a.k.a. Bhut Jolokia), often ranked the world’s hottest. “In the Chang village of Hakchang,” the anthropologist J. H. Hutton is quoted as saying in 1922, “...women whose blood relations on the male side have taken a head may cook the head, with chilies, to get the flesh off.” Hutton’s use of “cook” would seem to be a reference to Chang culinary practice. Only on rereading did I realize the Chang weren’t eating the chilies—or the flesh, for that matter—but using them to clean the skull.

Such is the perplexing contradiction of the genus Capsicum: condiment and industrial solvent, pleasure and pain. I’ve come to Nagaland to confront the conundrum on its home turf at the annual all-tribe get-together, the Hornbill Festival, which includes a Naga King Chili-Eating Competition. The last known head-taking raid occurred sometime in the last century. (The verb “taking” is preferred over hunting. You do not hunt heads. You hunt people and then take their heads.) Most Nagas are Baptists now. Nonetheless, they appear to have pride in their gruesome heritage. A crossbeam on the front of the Chang exhibit building on the festival grounds is decorated with a row of cephalic bas-reliefs; lest anyone mistake them for family portraiture, the neck stalks drip red. Men in loincloths stand outside on a break from rehearsing a warrior dance. I hold out a Bhut Jolokia I’ve been carrying in my jacket like a concealed weapon. I want to see who’s tough enough. Only one man steps closer. He points to the chili and uses an English word all Chang men know. “One of the enemy!”

It’s a sensible assessment. The chili pepper does not want to be your friend. It wants to hurt you so badly you turn it loose.

More here.

Daniel Dennett's seven tools for thinking

Daniel Dennett in The Observer:

RESPECT YOUR OPPONENT

Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticising the views of an opponent? If there are obvious contradictions in the opponent's case, then you should point them out, forcefully. If there are somewhat hidden contradictions, you should carefully expose them to view – and then dump on them. But the search for hidden contradictions often crosses the line into nitpicking, sea-lawyering and outright parody. The thrill of the chase and the conviction that your opponent has to be harbouring a confusion somewhere encourages uncharitable interpretation, which gives you an easy target to attack.

But such easy targets are typically irrelevant to the real issues at stake and simply waste everybody's time and patience, even if they give amusement to your supporters. The best antidote I know for this tendency to caricature one's opponent is a list of rules promulgated many years ago by social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport.

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."

2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.

4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

One immediate effect of following these rules is that your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism: you have already shown that you understand their positions as well as they do, and have demonstrated good judgment (you agree with them on some important matters and have even been persuaded by something they said). Following Rapoport's rules is always, for me, something of a struggle…

More here.

Physicists Create Quantum Link Between Photons That Don't Exist at the Same Time

Adrian Cho in Science:

Now they're just messing with us. Physicists have long known that quantum mechanics allows for a subtle connection between quantum particles called entanglement, in which measuring one particle can instantly set the otherwise uncertain condition, or "state," of another particle—even if it's light years away. Now, experimenters in Israel have shown that they can entangle two photons that don't even exist at the same time.

"It's really cool," says Jeremy O'Brien, an experimenter at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the work. Such time-separated entanglement is predicted by standard quantum theory, O'Brien says, "but it's certainly not widely appreciated, and I don't know if it's been clearly articulated before."

Entanglement is a kind of order that lurks within the uncertainty of quantum theory. Suppose you have a quantum particle of light, or photon. It can be polarized so that it wriggles either vertically or horizontally. The quantum realm is also hazed over with unavoidable uncertainty, and thanks to such quantum uncertainty, a photon can also be polarized vertically and horizontally at the same time. If you then measure the photon, however, you will find it either horizontally polarized or vertically polarized, as the two-ways-at-once state randomly "collapses" one way or the other.

More here.

"Everybody Hurts" by Sachal Studios, Lahore, Pakistan

[Thanks to Mujib M. K.]

Loneliness, isolation and desperate yearning

Even William Faulkner acknowledged his importance, calling him “the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on. He has never received his proper evaluation”. While Anderson’s prose can sometimes take on sonorous, biblical rhythms or echo the grandstanding rhetoric of county-fair oratory, his best short fiction manages to combine the folksiness of Mark Twain, the naturalist daring of Theodore Dreiser (to whom he dedicated his collection Horses and Men), and, more surprisingly, a linguistic freshness and simplicity he discovered in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and Three Lives. Above all, though, Anderson exhibits that distinctive tenderness for his characters, despite all their flaws and foibles, that we associate with Russian writers like Chekhov and Turgenev. He once called the latter’s Memoirs of a Sportsman “the sweetest thing in all literature”. If that’s true, Winesburg, Ohio must be one of the most quietly bittersweet. In a cycle of linked vignettes, what we might now describe as a mosaic novel, the book portrays the loneliness, isolation and desperate yearning of the citizens of an 1890s town in the middle of farm country.

more from Michael Dirda at the TLS here.

the height of printmaking

Rarely have life’s sweetness and bitterness been embraced with more evenhanded genius than in the work of Jacques Callot. The seventeenth-century French printmaker finds an ethics of vision—a way of grappling with whatever the world has to offer—in the indomitable force and lucidity of his line. Revered from his own day down to ours by those who see possibilities for transcendence in the printmaker’s technical know-how, Callot has nevertheless been a fairly minor figure in the art history books, no matter that some of his impressions of the horrors of war are as indelible as Goya’s and that his reflections on the pleasures of the theater and the fairground rival those of Rubens and Watteau. Within the frequently Lilliputian dimensions of his prints—some of the most famous ones are little more than two inches high—Callot represented beggars, gypsies, soldiers, actors, and the ladies and gentlemen of the court. He etched Biblical stories, royal festivals, hunts, battles, gardens, landscapes, and seascapes. “Princes & Paupers: The Art of Jacques Callot,” mounted at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, is a brave attempt to raise Callot’s profile. It has been many years since this country saw a major show with a catalogue devoted to an artist I would rank among the peerless image makers and storytellers of European art. Allow yourself to succumb to Callot’s work and you will experience a concentrated high.

On Pankaj Mishra

From the Ruins of Empire ends on a prolonged note of despair. “No convincingly universalist response exists today to Western ideas of politics and economy,” Mishra writes, “even though these seem increasingly febrile and dangerously unsuitable in large parts of the world.” He sees everywhere an ascendant Asia capable of challenging the West for resources, territory and market share. Where Mishra’s ur-generation of Asian intellectuals seemed to agree on the necessity of Western science, so their descendants seem to have settled on one-track Western-style economic development. “The Graduate Students Who Remade Asia” could be the subtitle for the yet-to-be-written history of those US- and UK-trained economists who undertook the market-centered reforms of the 1980s. For Mishra, “the revenge of the East” only means it will repeat the West’s mistakes on a larger scale. This already appears to be happening: in March, the BRICS announced the creation of a development fund meant to be their answer to the World Bank and the IMF. It is unlikely to be a gentler civilizer of nations.

more from Thomas Meaney at The Nation here.

A young Houston couple is planning to give away $4 billion—but only to projects that prove they are worth it. Can they redefine the world of philanthropy?

Brad Reagan in the Wall Street Journal:

Most billionaires tend to write checks to good causes they're part of, hospitals where they were treated or universities they attended. These are the so-called "grateful-recipient" donors. Or there are donors who make sizable gifts to meet an obvious need in a community, such as hunger or education. But at a time when charitable giving in the U.S. is still down from its peak in 2007, the Arnolds want to try something new and somewhat grander. John says the goal is to make "transformational" changes to society.

The Arnolds want to see if they can use their money to solve some of the country's biggest problems through data analysis and science, with an unsentimental focus on results and an aversion to feel-good projects—the success of which can't be quantified. No topic is too ambitious: Along with obesity, the Arnolds plan to dig into criminal justice and pension reform, among others. Anne Milgram, the former New Jersey attorney general hired to tackle the criminal-justice issue, has a name for all this: She calls it the "Moneyball" approach to giving, a reference to the book and movie about how the Oakland A's used smart statistical analysis to upend some of baseball's conventional wisdom. And the Arnolds are in no hurry for answers. Indeed, they believe patience is a key resource behind their giving.

More here.

Thursday Poem

Djinn

Haunted, they say, believing
the soft, shifty
dunes are made up
of false promises.

Many believe
whatever happens
is the other half
of a conversation.

Many whisper
white lies
to the dead.

“The boys are doing really well.”

Some think
nothing is so
until it has been witnessed.

They believe
the bits are iffy;

the forces that bind them,
absolute.
.
.

by Rae Armantrout
from Poetry, Vol. 192, No. 3, June
publisher: Poetry, Chicago, 2008

A Mother, a Son and a Wife

From The Wall Street Journal:

Jim Brown knew he was in trouble before his mother finished asking the question. "Am I a better cook than your wife?" she asked, calmly stirring a pot on the stove in her kitchen. With his wife, Joy, standing next to him, Mr. Brown stammered and stuttered. He prayed—"for a trap door to appear," he says. Finally, he did the only thing he could think to do: Tell the truth. "I said that my wife is a better cook," the 50-year-old owner of a Duncanville, Texas, auto-repair shop says. The fallout? "Biblical," he says. "There was wailing. Gnashing of teeth." Even his wife got mad—telling him that he had been insensitive to his mother. Sadly, the scene wasn't new to the Browns, who had been married seven years. The strain between his wife and his mother—and his position, stuck in the middle—was taking a toll on all three relationships. His mom criticized his wife for her parenting style and for not getting a job. His wife cried and complained to him. He retreated from both women. "I am a guy and not that intuitive, and I didn't really understand either one," he says. "My inclination was to go mow the grass." Over the next couple years, the Browns kept trying to make the triangle work—until the conflict reached a crisis point and then took an unexpected turn.

Few family relationships are more fraught than the ones between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law, and the man caught between them. It has been fodder for comedy in movies and on TV forever, yet each generation seems to have to learn for itself how to make this triangle work.

More here.

The big fat truth

From Nature:

Late in the morning on 20 February, more than 200 people packed an auditorium at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. The purpose of the event, according to its organizers, was to explain why a new study about weight and death was absolutely wrong. The report, a meta-analysis of 97 studies including 2.88 million people, had been released on 2 January in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)¹. A team led by Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, reported that people deemed 'overweight' by international standards were 6% less likely to die than were those of 'normal' weight over the same time period. The result seemed to counter decades of advice to avoid even modest weight gain, provoking coverage in most major news outlets — and a hostile backlash from some public-health experts. “This study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it,” said Walter Willett, a leading nutrition and epidemiology researcher at the Harvard school, in a radio interview. Willett later organized the Harvard symposium — where speakers lined up to critique Flegal's study — to counteract that coverage and highlight what he and his colleagues saw as problems with the paper. “The Flegal paper was so flawed, so misleading and so confusing to so many people, we thought it really would be important to dig down more deeply,” Willett says.

But many researchers accept Flegal's results and see them as just the latest report illustrating what is known as the obesity paradox. Being overweight increases a person's risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer and many other chronic illnesses. But these studies suggest that for some people — particularly those who are middle-aged or older, or already sick — a bit of extra weight is not particularly harmful, and may even be helpful. (Being so overweight as to be classed obese, however, is almost always associated with poor health outcomes.)

More here.

Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

Maggie Koerth-Baker in the New York Times:

In the days following the bombings at the Boston Marathon, speculation online regarding the identity and motive of the unknown perpetrator or perpetrators was rampant. And once the Tsarnaev brothers were identified and the manhunt came to a close, the speculation didn’t cease. It took a new form. A sampling: Maybe the brothers Tsarnaev were just patsies, fall guys set up to take the heat for a mysterious Saudi with high-level connections; or maybe they were innocent, but instead of the Saudis, the actual bomber had acted on behalf of a rogue branch of our own government; or what if the Tsarnaevs were behind the attacks, but were secretly working for a larger organization?

Crazy as these theories are, those propagating them are not — they’re quite normal, in fact. But recent scientific research tells us this much: if you think one of the theories above is plausible, you probably feel the same way about the others, even though they contradict one another. And it’s very likely that this isn’t the only news story that makes you feel as if shadowy forces are behind major world events.

“The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories,” says Viren Swami, a psychology professor who studies conspiracy belief at the University of Westminster in England. Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview.

More here.

The Moral Status of Rocks

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

A student in rural Iceland, of sheep-farming stock, had her guard down, or didn't yet have a guard. She didn't know how to talk to foreigners, or perhaps felt there was something she had to get across to foreigners, or to this foreigner, who showed an interest in her country. She said, in the hope of conveying to me the whole ethical-spiritual outlook of her country in a single concrete example: In Iceland we are taught not to smash rocks.

In recent years something called 'environmental ethics' is moving into the mainstream, finding space alongside the Kantian, the utilitarian, and so on, which for their part suppose that an ethical relation can only be had toward an ethical subject, and that such subjects are found only among human or at most animal beings. Even environmental ethics tends to imagine the environment with a thick arboreal canopy, with lush grass, and lillypads covering seething green ponds. But in the Arctic and sub-Arctic the 'environment' is mostly a geological rather than a biological phenomenon, and it is not altogether surprising that in such a setting rocks come forward as phenomenally salient, as creatures, as others, more readily than in the Amazon. And still less do the rocks come forward as our petrous co-beings in the big cities of the world, where they only appear ground down and formed into angular artifacts of human ingenuity, which in turn you are not supposed to smash, since in the process of their transformation they have become 'property'.

More here.

The need for critical science journalism

Jalees Rehman in The Guardian:

The bulk of contemporary science journalism falls under the category of "infotainment". This expression describes science writing that informs a non-specialist target audience about new scientific discoveries in an entertaining fashion. The "informing" typically consists of giving the reader some historical background surrounding the scientific study, summarises key findings and then describes the significance and implications of the research. Analogies are used to convey complex scientific concepts so that a reader without a professional scientific background can grasp the ideas driving the research.

Direct quotes from the researchers also help illustrate the motivations, relevance, and emotional impact of the findings. The entertainment component varies widely, ranging from an enticing or witty style of writing to the choice of the subject matter. Freaky copulation techniques in the animal kingdom, discoveries that change our views about the beginnings of the universe or of life, heart-warming stories about ailing children that might be cured through new scientific breakthroughs, sci-fi robots, quirky anecdotes or heroic struggles of the scientists involved in the research – these are examples of topics that will capture the imagination of the intended audience.

However, infotainment science journalism rarely challenges the validity of the scientific research study or criticises its conclusions. Perfunctory comments, either by the journalist or in the form of quotes – such as "It is not clear whether these findings will also apply to humans" or "This is just a first step and more research is needed" are usually found at the end of such pieces – but it is rare to find an independent or detailed critical analysis.

More here.

The stories of two Palestinian villages: From Al-Araqib to Susiya

S. Abbas Raza

Why race as a biological construct matters

Razib Khan in Gene Expression:

My own inclination has been to not get bogged down in the latest race and IQ controversy because I don’t have that much time, and the core readership here is probably not going to get any new information from me, since this is not an area of hot novel research. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the world isn’t talking, and I think perhaps it might be useful for people if I stepped a bit into this discussion between Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nehisi Coates specifically. My primary concern is that here we have two literary intellectuals arguing about a complex topic which spans the humanities andthe sciences. Ta-Nehisi, as one who studies history, feels confident that he can dismiss the utility of racial population structure categorization because as he says, “no coherent, fixed definition of race actually exists.” I am actually more of a history guy than a math guy, not because I love history more than math, but because I am not very good at math. And I’ve even read books such as The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race and The History of White People (as well as biographies of older racial theorists, such as Madison Grant). So I am not entirely ignorant of Ta-Nehisi’s bailiwick, but, I think it would be prudent for the hoarders of old texts to become a touch more familiar with the crisp formalities of the natural sciences.

In his posts on this topic Ta-Nehisi repeatedly points to the real diversity in physical type and ancestry among African Americans, despite acknowledging implicitly the shared preponderant history. But today with genomic methods we have a rather better idea of the distribution of ancestry among African Americans. The above plot is from Characterizing the admixed African ancestry of African Americans, a 2009 paper with 94 Africans of diverse geographic origins, 136 African Americans, and 38 European Americans. They looked at 450,000 genetic variants (SNPs) per person (there are somewhat more than 10 million SNPs in the human genome). Obviously individuals and populations exhibit genetic relationships to each other contingent upon the patterns of the variation of base pairs (A, C, G, and T) across the genomes of individuals, but there’s no reasonable way to comprehend this “by eye” when you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of markers. The authors used two simple methods to infer clustering within the data set.

More here.

a pretty funny book

I would dearly love to be able to start this piece by saying that The Poor Mouth is the funniest book ever written. It’d be a real lapel-grabber, for one thing, an opening gambit the casual Millions reader would find it hard to walk away from. And for all I know, it might well be true to say such a thing. Because here’s how funny it is: It’s funnier than A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s funnier than Money or Lucky Jim. It’s funnier than any of the product that any of your modern literary LOL-traffickers (your Lipsytes, your Shteyngarts) have put on the street. It beats Shalom Auslander to a bloody, chuckling pulp with his own funny-bone. And it is, let me tell you, immeasurably funnier than however funny you insist on finding Fifty Shades of Grey. The reason I can’t confidently say that it’s the funniest book ever written is that I haven’t read every book ever written. What I can confidently say is that The Poor Mouth is the funniest book by Flann O’Brien (or Myles na gCopaleen, or any other joker in the shuffling deck of pseudonyms Brian O’Nolan wrote under). And if this makes it, by default, the funniest book ever written, then all well and good; but it is certainly the funniest book I’ve ever read.

more from Mark O'Connell at The Millions here.

Terrence Malick

As such, a number of temptations continue to arise when discussing Malick. Foremost among these is the tendency to perpetuate the go-to myths: that the famously media-shy filmmaker is also a recluse, or that he once disappeared from Hollywood for two decades for reasons unknown. Starting with the most basic of biographical details — or lack thereof — it’s easy to see why there are so many misconceptions: there isn’t even a consensus on where the man was born. The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and The Telegraph all list Malick’s birthplace as Ottawa, Illinois; The New York Times and USA Today cite Waco, Texas as the true site. (That none of these outlets place their own opinion in opposition to anyone else’s is either evidence of their confidence or a suggestion that they aren’t even aware there’s room for debate.) Malick has politely declined every single one of the countless interview requests he’s received since 1975 (by which point he had granted only a few), but mum has rarely, if ever, been the word on him. Critics, academics, and fans alike have made a habit of endlessly speculating about Malick’s habits and whereabouts for the entirety of his now four-decade career; he’s amassed something of a cult following for exhibiting what many would consider perfectly normal behavior and attempting to work in private.

more from Michael Nordine at the LA Review of Books here.

Kertész and auschwitz

Nobel laureate Imre Kertész is certainly no stranger to controversy. His radical reconceptualization of the term “Holocaust” — in whose “unscrupulous employment” he locates “a cowardly and unimaginative glibness” — to extend beyond the scope of the concentration camps and those who perished therein, rhetorically privileges the survivors over the dead: “the word [Holocaust] actually only relates to those who were incarcerated: the dead, but not the survivors… The survivor is an exception.” And his fictional portrayals of Auschwitz and its repercussions in autobiographical novels like Fatelessness, Kaddish for an Unborn Child and Fiasco have been misread as “betray[ing] the Holocaust” — in spite of Kertész having himself been held at Auschwitz, and later Buchenwald, from the age of fourteen — just as they critique the totalitarian dictatorships that ensued in his native Hungary after the end of the Second World War, regimes that Kertész believes were related to the Holocaust at the level of power: “after Auschwitz the virtuality of Auschwitz inheres in every dictatorship.”

more from K. Thomas Kahn at berfrois here.

South Asians and the Shaping of Britain

Sarfraz Manzoor in The Telegraph:

Mahinder Singh Pujji, a 22-year-old Indian man, was queuing to see a film at his local cinema. The man in front of him saw his turban and uniform – Pujji was a member of the RAF – and said: “Sir, you don’t have to stand in the queue.” He ushered him to the front of the line. No one grumbled and the woman working in the ticket office, again seeing his turban and wings, refused to accept money for the ticket. This incident would be surprising and heart-warming if it occurred today; in fact, the film that Pujji was queuing to see was Gone with the Wind, and the year was 1940. What makes this story so powerful is that it challenges established narratives about south Asian migration to Britain: it shows us that years before Commonwealth immigration there had been migrants from the subcontinent; it questions the assumption that migrants were always treated poorly, and it reminds us of the contribution many made.

South Asians and the Shaping of Britain excavates the archives for letters, diaries, books and articles relating to this subject. Taking the year 1870 – the zenith of empire – as the starting point and traversing 80 years to 1950 – a period that witnessed two world wars, the decline of empire, the fight for Indian independence and Partition – the book demonstrates that Britain has a more complex multicultural heritage than is usually acknowledged.

I knew about the role Indians played during the two world wars, for example, but I had no idea that in the period covered here, 80 different south Asian authors published 180-plus books in Britain. This one builds on Rozina Visram’s landmark histories Ayahs, Lascars and Princes and Asians in Britain. But what makes reading it a more visceral experience is the first-hand accounts and documents: a book review by Oscar Wilde from 1890 of the Indian poet Manmohan Ghose, an extraordinary photograph of Sophia Duleep Singh – the mixed-race daughter of the deposed Maharajah of the Punjab – standing outside Hampton Court Palace in 1913 in a long dark coat and hat selling a copy of The Suffragette. Two years later Ludder Singh, an Indian soldier fighting in the trenches during the First World War, writes to his brother back home: “Bodies were lying on bodies like stones in heaps”; “When a man dies in the world I and you think it is a great event, but here in this war corpses are piled one upon another so that they cannot be counted.”

More here.

An Unheralded Breakthrough: The Rosetta Stone of Mathematics

From Scientific American:

There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, but in 2001 the Norwegian government established a million-dollar Abel Prize, which is widely considered as an equivalent of the Nobel for mathematicians. This year’s prize was awarded to Pierre Deligne, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Today, he is honored at a ceremony held in Oslo. Deligne’s most spectacular results are on the interface of two areas of mathematics: number theory and geometry. At first glance, the two subjects appear to be light-years apart. As the name suggests, number theory is the study of numbers, such as the familiar natural numbers (1, 2, 3, and so on) and fractions, or more exotic ones, such as the square root of two. Geometry, on the other hand, studies shapes, such as the sphere or the surface of a donut. But French mathematician André Weil had a penetrating insight that the two subjects are in fact closely related. In 1940, while Weil was imprisoned for refusing to serve in the army during World War II, he sent a letter to his sister Simone Weil, a noted philosopher, in which he articulated his vision of a mathematical Rosetta stone. Weil suggested that sentences written in the language of number theory could be translated into the language of geometry, and vice versa. “Nothing is more fertile than these illicit liaisons,” he wrote to his sister about the unexpected links he uncovered between the two subjects; “nothing gives more pleasure to the connoisseur.” And the key to his groundbreaking idea was something we encounter everyday when we look at the clock.

If we start working at 10:00 in the morning and work for eight hours, when do we finish? Well, 10 + 8 = 18, so a natural thing to say would be: “We finish at 18 o’clock.” This would be perfectly fine to say in France, where hours are recorded as numbers from zero to 24 (actually, not so fine, because a workday in France is usually limited to seven hours). But in the U.S. we say: “We finish at 6:00 pm.” How do we get six out of 18? We subtract 12: 18 – 12 = 6. Mathematicians call this “addition modulo 12.” Likewise, we can do addition modulo any whole number N. Just imagine a clock in which there are N hours instead of 12. For each N, we then obtain an esoteric-looking numerical system, in which we can do addition and multiplication, just like with ordinary numbers. For many years these systems looked, even to math practitioners, like something that would never have any real-world applications. In fact, English mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote, with defiance and pride, of the “uselessness” of number theory. But the joke was on him: these numerical systems are now ubiquitous in the encryption algorithms used in online banking. Every time we make a purchase online, arithmetic modulo N springs into action!

More here.

Why is Europe so Messed Up? An Illuminating History

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

When the Great Recession struck, U.S. policymakers did what mainstream textbooks recommend: they introduced monetary and fiscal-stimulus programs, which helped offset the retrenchments and job losses in the private sector. In Europe, austerity has been the order of the day, and it still is. Nearly five years after the financial crisis, governments are still trimming spending and cutting benefits in a vain attempt to bring down their budget deficits.

The big mystery isn’t why austerity has failed to work as advertised: anybody familiar with the concept of “aggregate demand” could explain that one. It is why an area with a population of more than three hundred million has stuck with a policy prescription that was discredited in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. The stock answer, which is that austerity is necessary to preserve the euro, doesn’t hold up. At this stage, austerity is the biggest threat to the euro. If the recession lasts for very much longer, political unrest is sure to mount, and the currency zone could well break up.

So why is this woebegone approach proving so sticky? Some of the answers can be found in a timely and suitably irreverent new book by Mark Blyth, a professor of political economy at Brown: “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.” Adopting a tone that is by turns bemused and outraged, Blyth traces the intellectual and political roots of austerity back to the Enlightenment, and the works of John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith. But he also provides a sharp analysis of Europe’s current predicament, explaining how an unholy alliance of financiers, central bankers, and German politicians foisted a draconian and unworkable policy on an unsuspecting populace.

Unknown Mathematician Proves Elusive Property of Prime Numbers

Erica Klarreich in Wired:

On April 17, a paper arrived in the inbox of Annals of Mathematics, one of the discipline’s preeminent journals. Written by a mathematician virtually unknown to the experts in his field — a 50-something lecturer at the University of New Hampshire named Yitang Zhang — the paper claimed to have taken a huge step forward in understanding one of mathematics’ oldest problems, the twin primes conjecture.

Editors of prominent mathematics journals are used to fielding grandiose claims from obscure authors, but this paper was different. Written with crystalline clarity and a total command of the topic’s current state of the art, it was evidently a serious piece of work, and the Annals editors decided to put it on the fast track.

Just three weeks later — a blink of an eye compared to the usual pace of mathematics journals — Zhang received the referee report on his paper.

“The main results are of the first rank,” one of the referees wrote. The author had proved “a landmark theorem in the distribution of prime numbers.”

Rumors swept through the mathematics community that a great advance had been made by a researcher no one seemed to know — someone whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate in 1992 that he had found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and even in a Subway sandwich shop.

More here.

Is the Brain No Different From a Light Switch? The Uncomfortable Ideas of the Philosopher Daniel Dennett

Jonathan Weiner in The Daily Beast:

For Daniel Dennett, philosophers are like blacksmiths: they make their own tools as they go along. Unlike carpenters, who have to buy their drills and saws at Sears, blacksmiths can use their own hammers, tongs, and anvils to pound out more hammers, tongs, and anvils. Dennett, whose famous white beard gives him the look of both a blacksmith and a philosopher, has been particularly industrious at the anvil. He has been working as a philosopher for 50 years, and in his new book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, he shares a few tricks to make the hard work easier. He is a master at inventing tools for thought—metaphysical jokes, fables, parables, puzzles, and zany Monty-Python-like sketches that can help thinkers feel their way forward. Dennett calls them hand tools and power tools for the mind, and he’s built dozens and dozens of them over the years.

“Thinking is hard,” he writes. “Thinking about some problems is so hard that it can make your head ache just thinking about thinking about them.” Thinking tools help philosophers work on the really deep, hard questions about life, the universe, and everything. They facilitate what another philosopher has called Jootsing, which stands for Jumping Out Of the System—the goal is to pop out of the goldfish bowl of commonplace ideas without drowning in thin air. Think of Plato’s Cave, for instance. That little story has helped philosophers puzzle about the nature of reality for more than 23 centuries and counting.

Dennett’s own inventions include “Swampman Meets a Cow-Shark,” “Zombies and Zimboes,” and many other thought experiments that illuminate great questions in philosophy. He focuses on problems of free will, evolution, and consciousness. His ideas about consciousness are rather shocking; he can make you feel that the human brain itself is just a collection of tongs, hammers, and intuition pumps. (More about that in a moment.) Dennett has written more than a dozen books about those deep topics.

More here.

No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka

No Fire Zone - Trailer from Zoe Sale on Vimeo.

[Thanks to Wolf Böwig.]

Mohsin Hamid: 'Islam is not a monolith'

Mohsin Hamid in The Guardian:

In 2007, six years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, I was travelling through Europe and North America. I had just published a novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and as I travelled I was struck by the large number of interviewers and of audience members at Q&As who spoke of Islam as a monolithic thing, as if Islam referred to a self-contained and clearly defined world, a sort of Microsoft Windows, obviously different from, and considerably incompatible with, the Apple OS X-like operating system of "the west".

I recall one reading in Germany in particular. Again and again, people posed queries relating to how "we Europeans" see things, in contrast to how "you Muslims" do. Eventually I was so exasperated that I pulled my British passport out of my jacket and started waving it around my head. "While it's true the UK hasn't yet joined the eurozone," I said, " I hope we can all agree the country is in fact in Europe."

Six years on, a film inspired by the novel is in the process of appearing on screens around the world, and I am pleased to report that those sorts of questions are a little rarer now than they were in 2007. This represents progress. But it is modest progress, for the sense of Islam as a monolith lingers, in places both expected and unexpected.

More here.

germ houses

Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford, suggests that we would do well to begin regarding the human body as “an elaborate vessel optimized for the growth and spread of our microbial inhabitants.” This humbling new way of thinking about the self has large implications for human and microbial health, which turn out to be inextricably linked. Disorders in our internal ecosystem — a loss of diversity, say, or a proliferation of the “wrong” kind of microbes — may predispose us to obesity and a whole range of chronic diseases, as well as some infections. “Fecal transplants,” which involve installing a healthy person’s microbiota into a sick person’s gut, have been shown to effectively treat an antibiotic-resistant intestinal pathogen named C. difficile, which kills 14,000 Americans each year. (Researchers use the word “microbiota” to refer to all the microbes in a community and “microbiome” to refer to their collective genes.) We’ve known for a few years that obese mice transplanted with the intestinal community of lean mice lose weight and vice versa. (We don’t know why.) A similar experiment was performed recently on humans by researchers in the Netherlands: when the contents of a lean donor’s microbiota were transferred to the guts of male patients with metabolic syndrome, the researchers found striking improvements in the recipients’ sensitivity to insulin, an important marker for metabolic health. Somehow, the gut microbes were influencing the patients’ metabolisms.

more from Michael Pollan at the NY Times Magazine here.

the culture animal

According to genetics, there is not much that makes us human; depending on how you count, we share 98.5 per cent of our genes with chimpanzees. Perhaps this is not such a significant matter, given that we also share about 60 per cent of our genes with tomatoes. As this shows, human beings are fully part of nature, and the elements that make us make not just the rest of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but the rocks beneath our feet and the stars in the sky above us. So what does make us human? It is not that we live in social groups: ants, antelopes and sparrows do the same. It is not that we have nuanced emotional lives: so do dogs and baboons. It is not even that we have language, for other things – including trees, as it happens – have communication systems, too, and it might be that some of those systems are quite complex, as appears to be the case with dolphins, for example. But in the human case the system of communication – language – is particularly complex and flexible, with great expressive power, and this makes possible the phenomenon of culture. If I were to pick one thing that separates humanity from the rest of the living world, culture is it.

more from AC Grayling at The New Statesman here.

I am dust and ashes and full of sin

In the summer of 1494, soon after his engagement, Albrecht Dürer made a startlingly intimate drawing of his fiancée Agnes Frey. One might have expected a twenty-three-year-old to depict his betrothed as a source of love, or comfort or well-being, all the more since her substantial dowry would soon launch his independent career. Instead, Albrecht showed Agnes twisted up in a knot of anxious introversion. She looks withdrawn and preoccupied, and the circles under her heavy-lidded eyes may even make one think she has been crying. In its frank portrayal of an informal moment of unguarded emotion, there had never been a drawing quite like this before. Typically portraiture was honorific and meant to represent the exemplary virtues of the person shown; Dürer instead often sought to capture the idiosyncratic and psychological characteristics of the people he portrayed. He was fascinated with the close scrutiny of dark and brooding emotion. This is especially evident in his self-portraits, many of which show him in states of melancholy, doubt, or disease.

more from Andrew Butterfield at the NYRB here.

Tuesday Poem

Jerusalem
.

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon Englands mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.
.

by William Blake

Aftermath: Pakistan Elections 2013

by Omar Ali

The May 11th elections in Pakistan represented the first time that a civilian regime completed its term in office and held elections in which power will be transferred democratically to a new civilian regime. In a country where the security establishment has a long history of throwing out elected regimes and manipulating results, this in itself was an important landmark. For this (and for very little else, unfortunately) we can thank President Zardari and his coalition building skills and stubborn determination.

For my pre-election predictions, see here. For immediate post-result thoughts, see here.

In the short election campaign the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) of Imran Khan captured the imagination of the newly educated and elite classes but it did not have the time (and/or the ability) to catch up with the pre-poll favorite, the PMLN. The superior and far more detailed groundwork done by the PMLN while it ruled Punjab for 5 years, its stronger slate of candidates, its relatively energetic performance in the Punjab government, and Mian Nawaz Sharif’s improved reputation, (along with a PPP collapse) led to a PMLN landslide in Punjab. This has practically given the PMLN a simple majority in the national assembly in spite of having only a handful of seats outside Punjab. The newcomer PTI will form a coalition government in KP; PPP, with or without MQM, will rule again in Sindh; and Balochistan remains a unique case, completely outside the national mainstream.

With daily bombings by the Taliban keeping a check on the ANP, PPP and (to some extent) the MQM, and with an insurgency and its frequently vicious suppression going on in Balochistan, traditional campaigning was mostly confined to Punjab. There, an almost millenarian excitement took hold of the middle class in the course of the PTI campaign; This phenomenon was most visible on social media and in the better neighborhoods of urban centers. Meeting each other at coffee spots and snack bars and pushing “like” buttons on each other’s facebook pages, the newly energized middle class supporters of Imran Khan managed to convince themselves that a complete root and branch renovation of Pakistan under brand new leadership was on the cards.

Never mind that Imran Khan’s had not told anyone how the great 90 day transformation would be carried out in terms of actual mechanics and workable solutions. Or that Imran Khan’s actual candidates (in a parliamentary system, constituency politics matters) were a motley collection of turncoats, inexperienced youngsters, Islamists (a good number made their bones in the Islami Jamiat Tulaba, student wing of the Jamat Islami and not known for handling opponents with kidgloves),

NGO stars and not-so-clean real estate manipulators was ignored. Unaware that this excitement had not really reached all voters, these newly politicized young people were taken aback when results did not match expectations and loudly complained about electoral rigging. But there is no indication that there was any nation-wide systematic manipulation by the establishemnt of the sort that has happened regularly in past elections. Small-scale local rigging did take place (and possibly some late-night administrative shenanigans did take place in Punjab once trends became clear) but compared to most past elections, this one was relatively clean in Punjab. Since most PTI voters were not involved in past elections, they don’t have any benchmark with which to compare this election and remain convinced that they were robbed. But given the fact that PMLN has probably won fair and square on most seats and even PTI enthusiasts have little concrete proof of extensive rigging, these protests will fade soon in Punjab.

The same cannot be said of Karachi; there, the MQM has been accused of extrensive ballot-stuffing and other irregularities. While PTI did not make any serious campaign effort in the MQM strongholds, they did put up a strong campaign in NA250, where a lot of the super-elite lives. When the election commission failed to conduct a fair election even in that seat the PTI broke a longstanding Karachi taboo and openly protested against the MQM. MQM chief Altaf Hussain made a threatening speech from London in response and on Saturday a prominent member of the PTI women’s wing was shot dead in an apparent target killing.

While no one has claimed responsibility and the police (as usual) have no leads, Imran Khan made the unusual move of publicly holding Altaf Hussain responsible for this murder. The resulting confrontation between the PTI and the MQM has raised the hopes of all those in the country who think the MQM needs to be cut down to size and its mafia-like hold on Karachi has to be defanged. But that may be easier said than done. More on this later. .

In terms of government formation, the post-election landscape seems more or less clear. PMLN will form governments in Punjab and at the center. PTI will form an islamist-leaning coalition in KP and will get a chance to show what their promises of radical change mean in practice. There will be a weak coalition of doubtful legitimacy in Balochistan, where the army will continue to call the shots. In Sindh, the PPP will form the government and most likely will take MQM along for the sake of peace. But what happens after that? A few guesses from a distant observer:

The rigging allegations in Punjab will come to nothing. PMLN will rule unchallenged for now. Barring any sudden deterioration in the security situation, they will push ahead with many development projects. They also need to improve law and order and to avoid administrative high-handedness, but given their record, may not do as well in these areas. The inevitable result will be that even if they are able to retain the loyalty of most voters, there will be resentments and complaints that will create openings for opposition parties. PTI and PPP will now have to struggle to define one of them as the main opposition. PTI may look like it has the advantage right now, but PPP is not without strengths. IF it recasts itself as a left-of-center social democratic party and does some creative politicking on behalf of poor people (instead of having Manzoor Wattoo hunt for “electables”) it will not face real competition for that space from the Paknationalist-middle class focus of the PTI. Whether it can actually do so under current leadership is an open question. PTI may settle into the role of main opposition (and therefore have a reasonable chance in the next election) but their problem is their broad but shallow coalition and its millenarian tendencies. While this kind of vague and image-heavy nationalist and religious revivalism can be an advantage in a one-time go for broke effort, this quasi-religious mission is not the best formula for long term electoral success. We will have to wait and see if PTI matures into a real party or remains a one-hit wonder.
Imran Khan’s provincial government in KP will face the Taliban problem from day one and will be unable to solve it. Some people think the security establishment wanted this regime in KP so that they can better manage their dealings with "good" and "bad" Taliban as the American effort in Afghanistan winds down. But even if they did make such plans, it doesnt mean their plans will lead where they want. They will be unable to control the bad taliban and will be unable to decisively separate the good taliban from them. And if the plan for Afghanistan is for "our taliban" to take over smoothly once the Americans leave, then that too is not going to happen. In the end, the security services will have to fight both the good and the bad taliban on behalf of the Pakistani elite. They may not want to do so, but they will not have a choice in this matter. There may be relative peace for a few months as negotiations proceed, but war will inevitably follow. The Jihadist project is not compatible with globalized capitalist economy and when push comes to shove, the Pakistani elite will pick global capitalism over Jihad. The days when both were on offer from the same American shop are over.
While the PTI regime in KP will not be able to deliver on its promise of peace, they still have the chance to show some improvement in governance and corruption. That will require Imran Khan to appoint good people (like he did in Shaukat Khanum hospital) and then let them work unencumbered by various crackpot ideas about jirgas, Scandinavian Islam and elected police officials. And it will require smooth cooperation between the Jamat Islami and PTI without accepting all of Jamat’s own collection of crackpot Islamist ideas. These are big challenges, but if PTI can stay away from some of their own impractical or dangerous talking points (they dont have to abandon them in public, just ignore them in practice), then they may deliver improved administration and become a real party with a long-term future.
Karachi is a migraine for all concerned. First of all, we should be clear that there is no question of PTI “taking on” the MQM in Karachi on its own. PTI has no armed operatives and no mafia-skills. They can collect everyone’s sympathy and still get nowhere. The only way this confrontation tilts towards PTI is if the state is willing to fight MQM on their behalf. But that has issues of its own. The police and judiciary in Karachi is currently politicized, corrupt and ineffective. They will not be able to do this job on their own. This means that if there is a confrontation between the state and MQM, the army and its intelligence agencies will be involved or MQM will win. And the "agency" way of “getting it done” in Pakistan usually involves causing a split in the targeted party (e.g. by engineering a revolt in the party or maybe even getting Altaf Hussain arrested in London in connection with the killing of Imran Farooq ), setting off a turf-war on the streets, and then using extra-judicial executions and disappearances to manage the resulting violence. They have no other script. But these are inherently risky operations and the intelligence agencies have such a long and convoluted history of meddling in Karachi that by now even they dont know who will fight who on whose behalf. Since neither the PMLN nor the army, can afford a risky operation in Karachi while busy fighting Taliban, its probalby not going to happen in the near future. Even if they do try it, it will not be the quick restoration of law and order so desired by many who are currently sick of the MQM. It will be chaotic, it will be violent, and it will not end soon. And given rumors of links with British intelligence and the "international community", Altaf Hussain may not have run out of options yet. So the more likely scenario is that PTI’s more elite followers will be permitted to openly challenge the MQM in some areas (a big change in itself) but there will be no grand operation and no sudden restoration of rule of law in Karachi. IF Nawaz Sharif and the army prove to be miracles of far-sightedness and maturity, then maybe in a few more years MQM will be pushed towards either becoming a more normal political party, or be defanged by careful use of improved law-enforcement in Karachi. All that without alienating Mohajirs as a community or carrying out extensive kill-and-dump operations and crudely executed gang-on-gang manipulations. One can always hope, but there is no quick fix.
PMLN will try to get off to a smooth start with the army. They are not suicidal and they have matured enough to avoid hasty confrontations. But at the same time, they know they have to get the army under civilian control in the long run. And the army knows that too. IF leadership on both sides is very mature, they can learn to share power as well as real-estate and mining profits. It would be a miracle, but why not pray for miracles? This one is needed more than most in Pakistan. Given the past records of both parties, there are grounds for being pessimistic, but after minimal deliberation, I am going to make an optimistic prediction: I predict that Nawaz Sharif will not face another military coup. There will be strains and stresses, but the civilian government will remain in place and will slowly increase its control over the armed forces.
Relations with India will improve under Nawaz Sharif. There will be no grand deal to solve all problems but trade and travel (and "optics") will be normalized quickly. Nawaz Sharif understands the economic benefits of normalization and the army is starting to realize that in this war of a thousand cuts with India, we have mostly cut ourselves. There will be resistance and setbacks but progress will continue. People believe the army will re-energize the Kashmir Jihad or launch a new Mumbai-style attack, but I dont think the great powers (including China) are in any such mood. Without their tacit approval, the risks are too high. The PTI, led by chief spokesperson Shireen Mazari, may parrot the traditional paknationalist line on this issue, but as long as Nawaz Sharif is delivering better governance and economic performance, the public will remain unimpressed with “betrayal of Kashmir” and other slogans of the "defense of Pakistan council".
Nothing much will change in Balochistan. This is sad and undesirable, but that does seem the most likely scenario. The Baloch separatists are too few to actually pull the province out of Pakistani hands by force (unless assisted in a big way by NATO, which doesn’t seem likely to me). At the same time, the army and its agencies operate almost exclusively on the kill-and-dump frequency, with no sign of finesse or any desire to compromise. Transitioning to full civilian rule seems very difficult and will be a Nawaz Sharif miracle if it happens. It probably wont.
ANP has been mauled in KP, but this does not have to be the end. As the Taliban continue their violent ways and the "play both sides" strategy falls apart, there will be an opening again for a Pakhtoon nationalist progressive voice. Of course, if the Talibs win (which cannot happen unless the Pakistani state has allowed it to happen) this will have to be movement led from abroad for a while, but even in that case, public support for the ANP will only increase with time. They will need to be available to take advantage of that.

All in all, the elections are a step forward. People voted in large numbers, proving once again that the Taliban propaganda against this “heathen system of government” is not getting much traction. The Zardari regime, for all its faults, managed to get Pakistan to this point and deserves appreciation for this achievement. The rigging allegations and various administrative irregularities have dented the image of this election but a more energetic and forceful elections commissioner next time can repair credibility in the heartland without a big problem. Miracles of various sizes (see above) may be needed in Karachi and Balochistan. Miracles will also be needed to bring the war with the Taliban and the war with India to simultaneous closure. If the PMLN can deliver a more capable regime and restore the economy (doable) and some of the miracles happen, we may be in a much happier place by 2018. If not, we may still hope for more of the same. The one thing we cannot afford is a revolution (Islamic, PTI-Paknationalist or Marxist-Leninist..the last is not on the cards but comrades are still around and appreciate the plug). We dodged a bullet this time and with luck we may get away next time as well.

Digging Up Bones or, The Labyrinths beneath Our Feet

by Tom Jacobs

There is a story that I want to tell you. It's about a man who lives alone at the edge of town. In a small house without much to recommend it. He finds that there is little for him to do other than to look out the window. Which is something that he does. A lot. Most every day and for most of each of those days. He looks out this window, examining the microscopy of the world outside his window, paying close attention. This is what he does. It provides a certain amount of pleasure to him.

Some begin to worry that he's losing his mind. He begins to think that he is approaching some kind of revelation. Who is to say which is which? Maybe it can be both.

He begins a project. He begins to examine the surfaces of his home, convinced that there is something beneath or behind. The floors, the walls, the ceilings. Eventually he finds himself in the basement, palpating a crack that runs through the middle of his foundation. He becomes convinced that there is something shouldering itself into the floor of his basement from below. So he begins to excavate. As he digs he finds what he believes to be a labyrinth. He excavates this labyrinth like an archaeologist over the course of many years. As he unearths the whole intricate thing he becomes convinced that there is some great secret there, some infinite thing of happiness and hope. He continues to excavate and explore the labyrinth but can never find his way through. Knowing in his heart that that he's uncovered something important, he goes out into the street to tell someone about it. This is the first time he's left his house for as long as he can remember.

The first person he finds is a man who lives down the block and happens to be passing by. He tells him about what he's found. The man is skeptical but intrigued.

Together they go back to his house so that he might show him his labyrinth. They explore the labyrinth. The man on the street had read somewhere that if you keep your hand on the wall, you will eventually find your way in (or out). Eventually they find the center of the labyrinth. At the center there is a door in the floor. They open the door and, holding hands, they walk together, through. And then they disappear and are never heard from again.

***

I told this story late at night the other day while I was making cocktails for friends, and I didn't think much about what it was about or what it meant or where it was headed. I just told it. But I can now see some kind of pattern, some kind of meaning in the bare fabric of the thing. A warped reflection of what's been passing through my mind lately. There's something there about what happens when we excavate and examine the past. It can as easily induce insanity as it can generate revelation. To some extent it's about how we regard it, about how we comport ourselves in the presence of history. We can choose to hold it close or to cast it away. It can engulf us or it can reignite something that's been lost or forgotten. Either way, the excavation will lead us to seeing and maybe even understanding something new and strange.

There are labyrinths beneath our feet all the time. Beneath our apartments, our homes, our towns and cities. They are there.

***

I remember reading that when they were moving a fountain in Washington Square a few years ago, the construction people were instructed not to dig lower than three feet. But of course they did. And what did they find as soon as began scraping the surface? Skeletons. Lots of them. 20,000 of them, actually. An entire graveyard that had been mostly forgotten.

That's one labyrinth. But there are others.

***

Ever since I was very little I have always been obsessed by the notion that there is something out there, beyond the end of things. Something that defied the already incomprehensible idea of the infinite. Like everyone, I suppose, I was fascinated by what the "end" of something meant. The end of the universe. The end of love. The end of life. How can any of these things properly end? Don't they just go on forever and ever? How can they not? Infinity will always defy our ability to understand it. It's an idea that seduces and ridicules. This is the way things go with all of the crucial things, the things that are fundamental to our baseline understanding of the world but that ultimately don't really make sense (e.g., life, loss, experience, love, death...etc., etc.).

I am no scholar of Greek, but there are two old Greek words that have been haunting me, nibbling at the edges of my mind lately. One is Hôrâ. The other is telos.

Hôrâ, as I understand it, refers to the moment when the time is right, to the right moment in the right place, the seasonal time, the beautiful time, the time when things are perfectly ripe. It's the time when everything comes together.

Telos refers to the notion that everything has some kind of purpose or goal or end that it bends towards, a direction towards which it inexorably moves. Telos implies teleology, which means that there is a point to things, a true narrative rainbow that everything, while it is exists, and whether it knows it or not, follows according to its particular spinning essence. A turtle moves towards becoming an exemplary turtle, and humans exemplary humans, and life hurtles towards some mysterious culmination that implies some mysterious fulfillment. Everything has an end, a purpose towards which it can't not but careen..

I suspect that this is all bullshit, that there is no Hôrâ or telos or essence, that these are merely ideas and names for some of our deepest and most profound desires of what might or could be. But it's impossible to walk through one's everyday life without absorbing and performing these concepts. Even if they are mere inventions that help us cut through the vapor and fog, they are helpful and useful.

***

When I was younger, Hôrâ was something I felt quite distinctly, and I felt it almost all the time. The time was always ripe.

Back then a friend of mine had occasional access to his father's old Cadillac. It was an enormous, yellow vehicle, and five or six friends of mine bought a case of beer drove out into the thick remoteness of a hot summer Nebraska night. Someone had the idea to put the Caddy in low gear and then each of us climbed out onto the car as it sauntered up and down the gently rolling hills while someone held their foot on the steering wheel. We sprawled out on the hood and the trunk, rolled down the windows and sat on the unbewindowed doors, idly drinking beers and talking about whatever seemed relevant at the time as we glided past cornfield after cornfield beneath Nebraska's milky way.

Mostly we talked about girls.

At one point the car reached the top of a hill and each of us looked out over a glimmering field of wheat that stretched out in the darkness. The field was teeming with thousands of fireflies, swimming about and flashing in night as they do for only a week or two, marking the very height of summer. Each of us was struck dumb and breathless for a few moments, gaping at this strange and unexpected sight. I think we all felt a kind of intense communion—with each other, with the world, with the stars—but only for a moment. And then it passed.

The car rolled down the hill and we picked up our conversations about girls again, but something had fundamentally changed…each of us was changed, however subtly, by the vision of that field of glimmering lights, cutting through the drift of that directionless night.

It was a perfect moment. I felt an insane fullness of being and sense of fraternity that is not sustainable but that is real and pressing, if only for a coupla seconds. I've had maybe five or six of those in my life, and each one has become a kind of guidepost. They help me find my way through the fog and to remember that it's not all darkness, that there are fields of light that pulse and throb, even in the blackest of nights. Some small sense of grace emerges, makes itself felt, and then disappears. It reminds me in a way that is both soothing and irritating that we, each of us, can be better than we are.

***

Somewhere Raymond Chandler wrote that "The first kiss is magic. The second is intimate. The third is routine." This is a problem and it's true. Things emerge into our life and then they recede and fade and disappear. That's just how it is. Kisses can't incandesce forever. The habits and routines that form the armature around which our lives are wrapped become a source of repugnance. We want strangeness. It might also be true that we are most truly alive when we cast our gaze inwards with excessive intensity, when we examine our motives and the patterns we've left in the dust. All of this is unpleasant, but completely necessary. And the dusty riddles that each of us trail make for damned interesting reading.

(and now I've moved from "me" to "we"... This is not a homily, even if it sounds a bit like one, and I can only assume that what I assume, you assume, and that, even if it's on the lower frequencies, I speak for you...)

***

We want both everything all at once and to feel that we are doing no harm. We are all caught between wanting to be simply happy and wanting to make a difference. Or at least most of us do. I think we've not learned to inhabit the space that might be carved out between the two, between the infinite obligation we feel towards ourselves to be happy, and the infinite obligation we feel towards others…to make things a little less difficult and awful for those who have it worse.

Clearly there is much work to be done. We long for immediate happiness—that's why we buy silly things to wear and exhibit—but we also want to feel that our presence on the planet isn't hurting others. On both counts, though, we probably are. People are suffering and we are, in all likelihood, perpetuating all of this.

Figuring all of this out requires a peculiar kind of commitment; it requires the focus of your whole being and has nothing to do with academic braininess. It requires a willingness to enter the labyrinth, which is scary. There are minotaurs and long periods of lostness.

***

Here's something that Joseph Campbell once said about the relation of labyrinths to life…it should give you chills…:

We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us - the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The very things that we fear might destroy us have the capacity to transform and redeem. And I think that's true. As long as we allow for a little bit of grace and luck.

There is a kind of rough despondency that inevitably descends in every life. That just happens, and at those moments there is just no way to get a proper handle on things, on one's self, on one's very being. The darkness is sometimes wildly visible. Cribbing from William Styron, who cribbed from Milton, there is this passage that ramifies and reverberates in too many directions and dimensions to pursue. It's a pretty good description of what it's like to be depressed, but Milton is actually talking about his vision of Hell:

A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv'd onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all; but torture without end
Still urges, and a fiery Deluge, fed
With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd:
Such place Eternal Justice had prepar'd]
For those rebellious, here thir Prison ordain'd
In utter darkness, and thir portion set
As far remov'd from God and light of Heav'n
As from the Center thrice to th' utmost Pole.

It's so strange to think that the dark flames of whatever it might be that consume or warp us are occasionally made visible. I kind of like that contradiction, that darkness can make itself as perceptible as sunlight. And if you've ever read the opening of "Paradise Lost," it is clear that Satan is a completely fascinating dude. One can't but understand that the deities that provide the possibility of redemption are invariably less interesting than the forces that drive us towards malaise and madness.

As William Blake once noted, we are, each of us, bound by mind forged manacles. We need only to invent and then find the keys that might liberate us from our prisons and wake us from our waking sleep. There are labyrinths to be explored, that must be explored, and they are just beneath our feet. And one must assume that at the center of each of our labyrinths, just there, where the dark visibility makes things most clear and coherent, there might just be a door. If we get that far it will be worth pausing on the threshold, looking back at the world we once knew and thinking hard about what it is that we want.

It's as lovely to emerge as it is to disappear .

New Air In A Fast City

by Mara Jebsen

Should poetry be whispered in the dark? Should it be a communion with the dead, transacted silently through the media of paper and lamplight? Ought it to roll out of the whale-mouths of men on stages (maybe grumpy orators in black fedoras?) Should it arrive from the mouths of girls in sequins and combat boots—or from the mouths of boys in sequins and combat boots—whose whiskey-voices crackle in the backs of bars? Should teachers with elbow patches pass it out in stacks? Does it die in the air if badly read?

The questions are both important and silly. Asking them is like comparing ways of worship. I can’t say that it is better to shout and clap your devotion than it is to believe one must preserve a holy silence. The question is always: how do you honor a text?

On a bright May Wednesday evening in New York, I left the writing class I teach in a dark movie-viewing room in the basement of the NYU’s Tisch building. I stopped in the hall to nervously apply red lipstick, and then I boarded the subway on a secret mission.

I met my co-conspirators beside a fountain in Bryant Park. It was one of those first Spring days in the city—when the late light is white-wine colored and everything feels about to explode. Two journalists with camera and microphone arrived to record our experiment, and their presence was both unnerving and comforting. The camera seemed to legitimize our odd project. But part of the project’s ethos is that it doesn’t need legitimizing.

This was my first time. Members of PUP (Poets in Unexpected Places) have been performing poems on ferries, in laundromats and in subways around NYC for a while. I’ve known a number of its members for as long as ten years and asked to join the group months ago. But at the last minute I’d always chicken out.

On this particular Wednesday, someone said something to someone, and then rather magically we strode in separate streams towards Time Square. I had a pain in my stomach that I understood to be excitement and camaraderie. When I was nineteen, I used to compete in poetry slams and I’d get a similar stomachache—but without the feeling of camaraderie. I don't speak loudly or do "slam" poems. I think that I ‘stage’ them, which is to say that like an actor or musician, I memorize the work beforehand—mine, or someone else’s—and consider my body a sort of prop that’s part of what I’m doing. But though I learned a lot about performance from that world, it didn't suit me. The system made me feel fiercely competitive, defensive about my quiet style, and somewhat creatively hamstrung.

Slams happen mostly in poetry bars. This Wednesday, we poets are doing something very different. We're caught in a specific sort of theatre. It is the space in Times Square where Tom Cruise stood, circling, in Vanilla Sky. We have the sense of being airily trapped in a glass bottleneck. Brightly dressed people slip past like hard candies poured out of a jar. The sun’s about to go down, which dresses the billboards in a delicate grey haze. Their neons, built to burn through daylight, to dazzle you half blind in the dark, visibly brighten every second like stop-motion flowers.

One of our guys—a slender brown-haired man, dapper in turquoise pants, puts one hand on his stomach, leans back, and starts us off by singing. We feign surprise; we set the tone by being warm. People move away, then naturally form a circle, and their phones come out. When he’s done, a scary hush seems to fall because no one knows what happens next. Then one of our girls rushes into the circle, talking feverishly and gloriously, working the circle, her energy enormous.

When I chose to go in, it was that way, too. There was no microphone, and the din of ever-yellower rushing taxis all around seemed like bees in my skull. I felt two hands reach down in my lungs, gather up air, and launch fistfuls of it outward. Also, I think the top of my head was smoking. I’ve never felt anything quite like it. The strangers and the strangeness of the moment seemed to make a sort of demand and the piece seemed to change as I offered it.

American poets sometimes feel wistful toward countries that have a different relationship to the form. I’ve heard of places where poems get dropped out of helicopters on holidays, and of places where poets become political representatives. My American arts students mostly think of a poem as a thing you dissect in English class, with the help of someone who may or may not like the genre. Incidentally, I don’t teach poetry. I teach a class on art in public spaces, which asks a person to consider what happens to an art object when you remove it from its customary frame.

We, as a public, even as a literary public, are not always in a state of preparation, so frames matter. One cannot always be ready to be moved. Its true that soldiers have been known to keep poems in their breastpockets. Captives have been known to feed off of memorized poems for survival. So we know that a work will live anywhere, anyhow, if it is so sorely needed. But most of us, who do not live so clearly on the edge, need a little help if a poem is to find its way into our daily business.

When I hear a good, but complicated piece, read off of paper in a dull voice under fluorescent lights to rows of folks feeling virtuously literary in their folding chairs, I do get mad for the sake of the form. What I call “thick” works—delicious works that can’t be grasped in one hearing, or works so sensually delicate they should be allowed to escape the rigorous application of logical analysis, can be destroyed by bad reading or blunt teaching.

Ultimately, one must build or find a good home for a poem. The PUP folks run the risk of getting all of this wrong. They run the risk of disturbing the commuter on his daily business or foisting their arts onto unprepared souls. But they really seem to get it right. People gather. They join in. They hear a Derek Walcott piece recited by a woman whose long red dress flutters in the middle of Times Square. The taxis stream by and the air feels different.

Perceptions

El Anatsui. Earth's Skin, 2007.

Hanging made of aluminium bottle caps from a distillery in Nsukka, Nigeria.

More here and here.

NORTH KOREA’S NERVE WAR

by James McGirk

The Moranbong Band is best imagined as a North Korean version of Celtic Woman: an all-female ensemble band swaddled in fetching formalwear, blasting highly produced, energetic nationalist kitsch. Of course, no matter how much vigorous fiddling Chloe, Lisa, Susan and Mairead can manage, Celtic Woman is unlikely to attract as much scrutiny from intelligence agencies as the Moranbong Band’s cover of Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now”, which is perhaps better known as the theme from Rocky, and was performed – complete with a video backdrop featuring cuts of Sylvester Stallone working out – for none other than Kim Jong-un, the number one of the sinister and secretive Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Peculiar things have been crossing North Korea watchers’ desks lately. Witness The Sun’s revelation that Kim Jong-un’s father liked to nosh on hippo meat, spider and snake sushi. Or how in March, Kim Jong-un took time away from playing nuclear chicken to host flamboyant former NBA player Dennis Rodman. (Rodman says he’s been invited back for another visit in August.)

Decadent as this behavior might seem for the rulers of one of the world’s poorest countries, Kim Jong-un’s oddball behavior suggests a media-savvy spin on a classic diplomatic game. George Freidman, leading analyst and CEO of the geopolitical analysis firm STRATFOR, describes North Korea’s decades-old strategy of prying subsidies from its neighbors as “fearsome, weak and crazy.”

Fearsome is easy to understand. The South Korean capital, Seoul, is within howitzer-range of the DPRK’s enormous Cold War-vintage army. A sneak attack could kill hundreds of thousands of people and rip apart one of the world’s most important manufacturing centers. And that’s assuming the DPRK confines itself to conventional munitions: North Korea tested an atomic weapon in 2009 and probably has cheap, nasty weapons of mass destruction (germs and gas) stockpiled and ready to go. North Korea’s population is even scarier. They’re kept on the brink of starvation and forbidden from any contact with the outside world. Children are raised ready for war and taught to adore their leaders and obey without question. This is a frightful enemy, but it’s also a weak one. Despite its formidable arsenal, North Korea is exceedingly vulnerable. If it weren’t for an historic alliance with China, the country would have been invaded and its leaders tossed out long ago. The North doesn’t have the infrastructure to support a war. It hasn’t the petrol to sustain a prolonged engagement and might even run out of ammunition. South Korea has better airplanes, better tanks, better radar, and tens of thousands of American troops backstopping it. “Kinetic” action would inflict massive casualties on the South but it would be suicidal for the North. And that goes double for a nuclear exchange. But North Korea can’t just ignore its neighbors. The country is so economically backward it needs foreign aid to survive, and that is where the crazy comes in.

If North Korea’s leadership seemed sane, no one would ever believe they might provoke an unwinnable war, and their fearsome reputation would dissipate. That’s half of it. The other is a strategy that every rich ne’er-do well knows: by provoking mini-crises, the North Koreans are creating opportunities to ask for money. After all, even a rogue state needs a compelling reason why it needs more money.

For decades, the strategy worked. China wanted a buffer between South Korea and its American bases, and was willing to underwrite the North Korean threat and ignore whatever atrocities were occurring with in its borders. Unfortunately for Kim Jong-un, however, the volume of trade between China and its former enemies—the United States, Japan and South Korea—is growing rapidly, and the more it does, the more the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea becomes a nuisance to China. Not to mention, there is always a chance that North Korea’s brinksmanship might inadvertently trigger a nuclear war.

Kim Jong-un is a young man. He’s thought to be around thirty. His grip on the country is slipping. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea turned a blind eye to the low-level black market that popped up after the mass starvation in early 1990s, which meant it conceded one of its most powerful methods of controlling the population. History hasn’t been kind to weak autocrats. Kim Jong-un needs to refresh his strategy for shaking down his neighbors or else he will have to open up his economy up for reform, and let even more power slip away.

Jang Jin-Sung, a former poet laureate and psychological warfare officer who defected from North Korea in 2004, describes her duties in an opinion column in The New York Times: “All of us at the United Front Department — also known as “the window into and out of North Korea” — learned three tenets of diplomacy by heart: 1. Pay no attention to South Korea. 2. Exploit Japan’s emotions. 3. Ply the United States with lies, but make sure they are logical ones.”

Perhaps a variation on the third tenet might explain the presence of Dennis Rodman and the Moranbong Band. The North Koreans have long been fighting a war of nerves against the U.S. using a mixture of public relations and propaganda in an attempt to bewilder governments, and sway the Western public in their favor. Celebrity basketball players and viral videos may well be a new way of waging it. They have had success in the past. As unlikely as it may seem there is now a growing “support North Korea” movement in Europe and the United States.

In 2000, after years of petitioning the North Korean government, a Spanish IT professional named Alejandro Cao de Benós de Les y Pérez was appointed into office as “special delegate of the People’s Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.” He started an organization, called the Korean Friendship Association, which is now 15,000-strong (or so they claim) that pickets embassies and occasionally tours the North Korea.

Cao de Benós works for free (although The Independent reports that he “clips the ticket” of any deal he arranges between a foreign corporation and North Korea). He has no formal training in public relations and seems to work mostly on his own. Attendance at his events has been embarrassingly lackluster, but that doesn’t mean reaching out to the Western public directly couldn’t work. In fact, it might be Kim Jong-un’s best chance at staying in control of his country.

Wikistrat, which bills itself as the “world’s first massively multiplayer online consultancy” (disclosure: the author contributes work as an analyst there) recently concluded a simulation exploring scenarios for “distinct crisis pathways in the Korean peninsula.” Among the scenarios considered was what would happen if the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea launched a massive public relations campaign to tilt the international community in their favor and deflect attention away from their flagrant human rights violations.

They imagined the DPRK launching a “smart, subtle, sophisticated and ubiquitous campaign” that “wasn’t focused on hagiographies of North Korea’s leaders—[but instead] focused on the hard-working, clean-living people of North Korea. ” At the very climax of this fictitious campaign they release a major motion picture, a “ Zhivago-esque love story, played out against a backdrop of the hardships of post-WWII North Korea, framing the North Korean people as being real, human, and deserving of sympathy and support. This softens attitudes toward the DPRK and its leadership and begins a dialogue at many different levels.”

The public is easily distracted. With Syria using weapons of mass destruction in its civil war and the possibility that the United States could get drawn into another conflict, the real issue for American policymakers—North Korea’s weapons proliferation—is fading from view. Already Kim Jong-un has quietly moved two missiles from their launch pads and is likely letting this most recent quarrel dissipate. At this point, being perceived as a reformer could be relatively easy to achieve: allowing a few families to reconcile with their South Korean cousins, inviting in a few multinational corporations, a couple of media victories, and within a generation diplomatic relations between North Korea and the United States could be normalized.

It’s been done before. Vietnam remains a socialist country and, like the North Koreans, depended on Soviet subsidies in the 1970s and 1980s. Recognizing subsidies were coming to an end, the Vietnamese responded to American efforts to reach out to them. Vietnam let families search for Missing-in-Action (MIAs) soldiers and accepted U.S. aid. These few concessions were enough to normalize relations. By 1994, the U.S. economic embargo on Vietnam was lifted and in 1997 an ambassador was posted there. Vietnam’s economy is thriving today, yet its leaders have never faced much scrutiny for their murky record on human rights.

North Korea watchers like to draw parallels between Kim Jong-un and Psy, the South Korean mega-star who is roughly the same age as Kim and seems to simmer with contempt for the United States (although he’s since recanted). Psy’s music radiates irony, while in comparison the Moranbong Band seems cartoonishly sincere. Same with Kim Jong-un’s professed affection for American basketball players. Yet the theme from Rocky is so laced with ’80s Cold War nostalgia, and Dennis Rodman is such a confoundingly self-aware embodiment of the worst of post-industrial culture—how can these brilliant, multi-layered appropriations not be intentional?

No one knows how much control Kim Jong-un wields over his government, nor if his recent experiments with pop culture are tactical or merely decadent. Perhaps if Kim Jong-un were to choose James Franco as the star of his major motion picture we would know for sure. Or would we? When it comes to diplomatic relations with North Korea, the “human factor” has always been a mystery.

POETRY IN TRANSLATION: CORDOBA

(Written in 1932 on Spanish soil,
mainly in the Mosque of Cordoba)

BY MOHAMMED IQBAL

I
Chain of day and night
Fashioner of events
Basis of life and death
Two tone silken thread
Fiber of attributes
Pitch of prospects
Chain of day and night
Sitting in judgment
Setting a value on us
When we're lacking
Death is your destiny
Death is my destiny
What else is reality
The flow of one age
Neither day nor night
All crafts vanish
Black and white fade
Annihilation the end

II
But in this form
Hues of eternal life
Splendor of man's love
Love is life's base
Death has no claim on love
Love itself the tide
Stemming the torrent
Love is unnamed eras
Love is Gabriel's breath
Love is the Prophet of God
Love is the Word of God
Love is the radiant rose
Love is raw wine
Love the goblet of kings
Love draws life's music
Love is passion for life
Love is fire of life

III
O Mosque of Cordoba
Born of love with no past
Color or stone or brick
Harp or song or speech
Man's passionate creation
A drop of blood turns
Even stone into hearts
The heart's voice is joy
Burning and melody
You illuminate the heart
My song burns the breast
You draw man's heart
To the presence of God
But the passion of love
For God is man's alone
I spark man's passion
Though his sight is finite
His heart is wider than the sky
So what if God has rights
He doesn't earn the pain
I am an Indian infidel
Witness my fervor
In my heart prayers
On lips blessings
Love is my flute
Love is my song
In my every bone
"God is God"

IV
Witness of man's worth
Your glory mirrors his soul
Firm columns soar
Palms in Syrian sands
Sinai's light gleams roof
Gabriel crowns the minaret
A Muslim can never despair
Standing where the Prophets stood
His horizon infinite
Tigris Danube Nile flood his veins
Cup-bearer and horseman
In love a warrior
A sword's shadow his armor
"There is no god but God"

V
You reveal man's secret
Ardor of his days
Dissolution of his nights
His submission
As is God's hand
So is the believer's
Man prospers on deeds
He is clay and fire
Divine within
Free of both worlds
His ambition small
His purpose large
Pure-hearted in war or peace
God's compass revolves
Around man's faith
And the world is illusion
Man of God is reason's horizon
The harvest of love
Fire of the gathering
Heaven's passion

VI
Art lover's Mecca
Faith's grandeur
You made Andalusia holy
Only Muslims mirror your grandeur
O those Arab horsemen
Pledged to truth
Revealed this new secret
People who embrace Faith
Renounce the material
They enlightened the West
Yemen's scent persists
Even today Arabia's music
Lingers in Andalusia's breeze

VII
Alas for centuries
No Calls to Prayer
Echo the minaret
In which valley
At which destination
Is love's caravan inducing frenzy
As all Europe swept away the old order
Repainted the face of the West
So today those torrents stir Muslims
A divine prophecy seals my lips
But let us watch secrets surface
From the ocean's depth
Watch the sky change hue

VIII
A cloud drenched in twilight
The sun scatters rubies
A peasant's daughter sings
Youth sails on heart's boat
On the Guadalquivir
Someone dreams of another age
New order still veiled by fate
Another dawn is approaching
In my mind's eye
If I unveil my thoughts
Fan the flames of my song
Europe couldn't endure
Life without revolution is death
As man's creations are soulless
Without passionate belief
So my song

Translated, from the Urdu, by Rafiq Kathwari.

The Bystander Effect in Medical Care. Why Do I Have So Many Doctors Not Taking Care of Me?

by Carol A Westbrook

In a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine1, Drs. Stavert and Lott used the tem, "The Bystander Effect," to describe a new health care phenomenon, in which multiple physicians participate in the care of a patient, while none acknowledges primary responsibility for managing it. In their example, a patient was hospitalized with an undiagnosed, complicated illness, and over 40 physicians were involved in his care, yet none stepped forward to take charge.

The term "Bystander Effect" was coined after the 1964 stabbing murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City, which was witnessed by 38 people, none of whom intervened or called for help. The term refers to the tendency of people to be less likely to offer help in emergency situations when other people are present. In other words, it's not my problem, someone else can take charge.

Stavert and Lott argued that the Bystander Effect is becoming prevalent because of the way our system of hospital care has evolved. But I have noticed it is beginning to appear in the outpatient setting as well, where it is eroding the quality of medical care while increasing its expense.

Consider Mr. Miller, a fictional patient referred to me for anemia. I ordered blood tests, referred him for a colonoscopy, and scheduled a return visit in 2 weeks. During those two weeks, he also saw his cardiologist (heart), his orthopedist (joints), his urologist (prostate), his internist (blood pressure), his primary care physician (cholesterol). Mr. Miller is elderly and retired. When I asked him what he does with his leisure time, and he replied, "What free time? My wife and I spend most of our day in the doctor's office." From my perspective, Mr. Miller received the expert attention of 7 highly trained medical specialists, and the best possible medical care in the world. From his perspective, he has to deal with two more doctors, more prescription medications to use up his limited income, and no assurance that any of this will make him feel better or live longer.

It is disheartening to see an elderly couple who measure out their days by the number of doctors' visits in a week. It is frustrating for their caregivers, who try their best to attend these multiple clinic visits. And it is dangerous, as multiple physicians may give contradictory recommendations, prescribe medications that interact, and overlook test results ordered by another doctor.

Mr. Miller is definitely getting more medical care than he would have received, say, 10 years ago. But is he getting better care? For that matter, is he even getting care?

Think back to a simpler time when a patient had one doctor whom he knew personally and trusted, and who provided him with care, one human being to another. Today it takes many more doctors to provide the same amount of care.

There are several reasons that our health care system has evolved in this direction. The major reason is economic. There is a limit to how much Medicare or insurance will pay for a clinic visit, but there is no limit to the number of clinic visits. Thus, the economic imperative tends toward increasing the number of doctor visits rather than the quality of the visits. Today's doctor may have a quota of 15 to 25 patients per day if he wants to keep his job. Consequently, he does not have much time between appointments to make calls or send emails, and has little opportunity to get to know his patients as human beings. Care suffers. Physicians become bystanders.

Another force leading to fragmentation is specialization. Treating a relatively healthy patient who has a single problem--such as a sore throat--is straightforward. The patient is examined, boxes are ticked in the electronic chart, and the prescription is electronically sent to the pharmacy. But when a patient has health issues that cross the boundaries of many specialties, such as Mr. Miller, it is easier to reduce him to a collection of unrelated diagnoses, each of which will be managed by a different specialist with more expertise than the primary care physician.   This is the very situation that turns doctors into bystanders.

Care fragmentation is one of the most serious flaws in our health are system today. We need to find a way to improve a patient's medical care without having to sentence him to a never-ending succession of clinic visits.

This should be easy in this day of electronic charts and digital communication--in theory, charts can be shared among specialists, opinions can be obtained, and care can be provided via email or phone. But economic forces work against these activities since they are not reimbursed. Insurance will only pay for a doctor's opinion within the context of a clinic visit which includes a history and physical exam.   And if a complex clinic patient requires more than the Medicare-allotted time, there is no way to charge for it. Spending more time with one patient means there is less time for another, so the doctor's quota will not be met.

Medical economists are looking at ways to reduce fragmentation. One solution has been proposed by Dr. David Meltzer, a physician and Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Meltzer is piloting a program for primary care physicians to manage patients with complex medical conditions who are frequently hospitalized. In his program, such a patient will have a single physician who will take primary responsibility for him, coordinating care among specialists and supervising both his hospital stays and outpatient visits. This labor-intensive practice is possible because each physician is only expected to follow a maximum of 100 patients. (For comparison, I add about 100 new patients to my practice in just 2-3 months!)

What is innovative about Meltzer's program is that it is not innovative; in many ways it goes back to the way we used to practice medicine! Although we recognize that this "Marcus Welby" practice is not feasible under our current insurance system, there are good economic reasons to consider it, since it will decrease medical spending by decreasing the number of clinic visits, reducing hospitalizations, and better coordinating specialists' input. What we hope to learn from Meltzer's project is the value of such care, and how it might be reimbursed.

And there is no doubt that we are going to have to restructure the way we pay for health care if we want to improve its quality.   I cannot predict how this will sort out over the next few years as the mandates of The Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) begin to be implemented. But merely pouring more insurance dollars into our medical system without restructuring reimbursement is not going to prevent fragmentation of health care, since that is what caused it in the first place. We need to find a way to pay for and deliver health care that is more personalized, so doctors will again be participants instead of bystanders.

1. RR Stavert and JP Lott. The Bystander Effect in Medical Care.   New England Journal of Medicine, Vol 368, No. 1, January 2013.

The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employer, Geisinger Health Systems.

Clinical trial supports use of Kava to treat anxiety

From Kurzweil AI:

A world-first completed clinical study by an Australian team has found Kava, a medicinal South Pacific plant, significantly reduced the symptoms of people suffering anxiety. The study, led by the University of Melbourne, revealed Kava could be an alternative to pharmaceutical products for the hundreds of thousands of Australians who suffer from generalized anxiety disorders (GAD) “In this study we’ve been able to show that Kava offers a potential natural alternative for the treatment of chronic clinical anxiety; unlike some other options, it has less risk of dependency and less potential for side effects,” said lead researcher, Dr Jerome Sarris from Department of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne. The study also found that people’s genetic differences (polymorphisms) of certain neurobiological mechanisms called GABA transporters may modify their response to Kava. “If this finding is replicated, it may pave the way for simple genetic tests to determine which people may be likely to have a beneficial anxiety-reducing effect from taking Kava,” Sarris said.

An additional novel finding of the study, recently published in Phytotherapy Research, was that Kava increased women’s sex drive compared to those in the placebo group, believed to be due to the reduction of anxiety, rather than any aphrodisiac effect. Future studies confirming the genetic relationship to therapeutic response, and any libido-improving effects from Kava is now required. Dr Sarris said these significant findings are of importance to sufferers of anxiety and to the South Pacific region, which relies on Kava as a major export.

More here.

SNL's Ben Affleck Episode: 5 Best Scenes

From The Atlantic:

The season finale marked the last regular SNL appearance of Seth Meyers (slated to succeed Jimmy Fallon as host of NBC's Late Night), Fred Armisen, and Bill Hader. (Jason Sudeikis's return remains uncertain.) The show sent them off with a mostly strong episode and some fitting farewell moments. Host Ben Affleck was joined by his wife, Jennifer Garner, during the monologue. Amy Poehler joined Seth Meyers for Weekend Update. Musical guest Kanye West performed "Black Skinhead" and "New Slaves."

Picture: Seth Meyers beats out Anderson Cooper for Stefon's hand in marriage.

More here.