girls beating boys

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It’s been a year since Harvard President Larry Summers uttered some unfortunate speculations about why so few women hold elite professorships in the sciences. During Summers’s speech, a biologist, overwhelmed by the injustice of it all, nearly collapsed with what George F. Will unkindly described as the vapors. Since that odd January day, Summers has been rebuked with a faculty no-confidence vote, untold talk-show hosts have weighed in, and 936 stories about the controversy have appeared in newspapers and magazines (according to LexisNexis). Impressive response, especially considering the modest number of these professorships available.

more from TNR here.

levin’s postcards

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Everybody’s a critic, but not everybody is a professional critic, and very few are professional art critics. One of the best of the few is now the subject of an unusual and unusually interesting exhibition at Ronald Feldman Gallery in SoHo.

She is Kim Levin, who has been writing smart, clear, stylish, spiritually generous and politically urgent art criticism for The Village Voice and other publications for more than 25 years. Organized with the assistance of John Salvest, an artist interested in systems of accumulation, “Notes and Itineraries, 1976-2004” is a kind of career retrospective seen through the lens not of Ms. Levin’s published writings but of the tools of her trade: exhibition announcements, press releases and handwritten lists and notes that she has saved over the years.

more from the NY Times here.

Digital Universe opens for public tryout

From MSNBC:

Tree_2 A couple of years ago, when dot-com millionaire Joe Firmage first floated his idea for an expert-based “Encyclopedia Galactica” that would knit together all realms of knowledge in a clickable online world, you might have wondered whether the whole idea was just a science-fiction gimmick. Then Wikipedia, the community-based online encyclopedia, blossomed on the Web. Google Earth, the search engine company’s map-based interface for global imagery, made a huge splash. Looking back, Firmage’s idea might have just been ahead of its time.

Firmage and his collaborators say the Encyclopedia Galactica vision is ready for a pilot tryout, if not for prime time. On Tuesday, they officially took the wraps off their software project, now known as the Digital Universe. Will it turn out to be a nonprofit “PBS of the Web,” as Firmage and his collaborators hope? Stay tuned: Even Firmage admits it might take years for the idea to catch on.

More here.

How do you apologize?

Trish Carney in Lens Culture:Apologize

The photographs are of animals found dead; the majority is of road-killed animals that I encountered on a two-mile stretch of road near where I used to live. The catalyst for this work came from a couple of things. One is my ongoing interest in how animals are thought about, how animals are looked at, and how we co-exist with animals. Another is reading a Barry Lopez essay called Apologia. In this essay Lopez explored the moral and emotional upheaval he experienced during a cross-country road trip where he frequently stopped and removed road-killed animals from the roadways.

So these photographs represent my technique of awareness, a gesture of respect toward the animals I encountered on the roads. Instead of averting my eyes in sadness or indifference I found that I wanted to look closer. I wanted to focus my attention toward the animals. I photographed them, not so much as a document of their passing but more as an acknowledgement of their existence, an acknowledgement that the lives and the remains of animals are very much a part of our landscape, a part of our day to day world.

More here.

agamben

Giorgio Agamben’s work has come to be widely read in American universities in the last ten years. The former Autonomia theorist Antonio Negri and the American academic Michael Hardt have enjoyed a more public success with their two books Empire and Multitude, where, with catch-all verve and unstable prose, they continued poststructuralist efforts to explain globalization and the contemporary international order. But Agamben’s work makes a different kind of claim to immediate political significance among recent attempts by “high theory” to deal with a globalized and post-9/11 world. He is more lucid than some colleagues, better able to summarize the insights of predecessor intellectuals without distortion, and, through a set of recent events, seemingly more prophetic about the governmental and juridical realities of the moment.

The growing influence of the Italian philosopher’s work seems in many respects to depend on his remarkable sense of taste. Agamben allies himself with a line of intellectuals that goes back before World War II, and puts together figures who, though many had minor personal connections, seem antithetical. Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt regularly get historical rendezvous; so do Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojève. Heidegger stands on his own, usually arriving after the midpoint of books like mystic cavalry to illuminate and redeem them. The sense is that Agamben has an unusual, unforced sensitivity to the hidden affinities of early-20th-century thinkers—he’s arranging these assignations for the thinkers’ sakes, not his own. Beyond that are his many Talmudic, medieval, and ancient Roman anecdotes.

more from n+1 here.

richard long

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Is it obligatory to revere the work of Richard Long? To read what is written about him you might well believe it. For almost 40 years Long has been walking the world in the interests of art, leaving occasional traces in the landscape, bringing fragments back, evoking the experience in photographs and texts. In these he is as prone to bathos as any other rambler, noting what he ate, how far he traipsed, descending from stupendous nature to the dampness of his socks. Yet everything he makes seems to bring on a swoon: it is sublime, shamanistic, transcendent.

more from The Observer here.

calatrava

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Santiago Calatrava, a Spaniard born in 1951 who is the spiritual heir to Gaudí, has recently skyrocketed into the ranks of the “starchitects” (Gehry, Hadid, Koolhaas, Libeskind, et al.). Like Gaudí, he insists that his projects are inspired by and founded in nature’s underlying geometric structures, both simple and complex, and in its visible forms. Calatrava, also like Gaudí, and like some of his celebrated colleagues, makes architecture distinguished by its aggressive, photogenic iconicity. His buildings project striking images, and they make good logos. (An aerial view of several of Calatrava’s buildings graces the official Spanish tourist bureau’s promotional materials.) For this reason, Calatrava’s buildings and projects raise an urgent question. Is iconicity integral to good architecture? Can it, in some hands, be a deterrent to good architecture? These architects, practicing what marketing directors admiringly call “branding,” are logging a staggering number of airplane hours; and in the process, they are transforming architecture’s role in the international political economy by creating universal and instantly recognizable trademarks. In this newly organized professional context, imagery rules.

more from TNR here.

When Art and Science Collide, a Dorkbot Meeting Begins

From The New York Times:Dork

Founded five years ago by Douglas Repetto, the director of research at Columbia University’s computer music center, dorkbot is an informal club of artists, techies and geeks who do “strange things with electricity,” according to their motto. In five years, chapters of the club have sprung up in nearly 30 cities around the world, from Seattle to Rotterdam to Mumbai.

This month’s meeting was held on what may or may not have been Sir Isaac Newton’s 363rd birthday, but the fact that history is unclear on that matter did not dissuade Mr. Repetto, 35, from enlisting him as the evening’s mascot. Slides of Newton and Newton-related arcana flashed across a screen before the lectures began.

But what would Sir Isaac have made of Mikey Sklar? Mr. Sklar, a UNIX engineer presenting at dorkbot for the second time, demonstrated how he had a $2 chip surgically implanted into his left hand – and why he did it. The Radio Frequency Identification tag under his skin uses the same technology that the E-ZPass system employs to identify cars on toll roads. Mr. Sklar, 28, said his tag unlocks his computer and accesses news feeds as part of an art project.

More here.

Leptin fights depression

From Nature:

Leptin Leptin is famed for controlling our weight and appetite. But the hormone, which is released by fat cells and gives the brain a reading of our fat stores, is also thought to act in brain areas involved in emotion. To explore this link, Xin-Yun Lu and her colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio stressed rats by, for example, separating them from other animals. The rats’ leptin levels plunged at the same time that they showed behavioural changes such as losing interest in a sugary drink, the kind of apathy that is often associated with human depression.

The team found that injections of leptin into otherwise healthy animals were as good as at least one known treatment in a test widely used to screen for new antidepressants. Leptin shot to fame in the mid 1990s when scientists discovered that a strain of immensely fat mice that eat voraciously lack a working copy of the gene. They found that leptin injections could help the mice to shed weight, raising the prospect that the hormone might be a miraculous fat fighter for the obese. That hope was dealt a blow when leptin failed to fight flab for most people in clinical trials. Since then, scientists have realized that obese people often have high levels of leptin and seem to have become resistant to its effects.

More here.

Monday Musing: Awareness of Mortality, Conservatism, and Local News

I’ve generally been dissatisfied with the idea that media outlets such as Fox TV and Sinclair are the drivers behind the rightward move in politics in recent decades. It’s not that I find the claims impossible. I certainly have come across enough people whose arguments for this or that right-wing view pretty much echo Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly, or, at better moments, Bill Kristol. I hear these arguments as well, and remain unconvinced. The smarter conservatives have heard opposite views as well, and they remain unconvinced. There is plenty of space for reasonable disagreement for the simple fact that we disagree about what factors are relevant, how they should be weighted, and that we have differing commitments as to what values should be prioritized. So, that doesn’t leave me surprised. But the trend has been a steady one, or had been a steady one. And while there are reasons we have for our positions, and while in some broad sense these reasons can and do act as causes for our political preferences, something else seemed to be at play, and the media seems as good a place as any—all the more so if reasons and the information they appeal to, matter.

Conservatives often point to how media and entertainment alter values by altering our attitudes and psychological stances on sex, violence, and authority. To the extent that political attitudes depend on psychology, on sentiment, their take that the media alter sentiments and thus political may be at least as true as the left-liberal claim that the media distorts information.

The appeal to the psychological basis of political preferences, and especially the patterning of political preferences is old. Studies of crowd psychology, mass movements, fascism, obedience to authority and the like have been steady, and the turn towards rational choice and strategic behavior, with its assumption that these turns are motivated by self-interest, has not managed to dislodge it.

I was thinking of politics and psychology this past holiday season when back in Houston for a visit. An increasing number of family members were becoming more and more conservative and they were becoming more and more fearful.

Recent studies in psychology suggests the people are effectively made more conservative when they’re made aware of mortality. This new approach, “terror management theory”:

holds that cultural worldviews or systems of meaning (e.g., religion) provide people with the means to transcend death, if only symbolically. The cornerstone of this position is that awareness of mortality, when combined with an instinct for self-preservation, creates in humans the capacity to be virtually paralyzed with fear. Fear of death, in turn, engenders a defense of one’s cultural worldview. Consequently, the theory predicts that if the salience of one’s mortality is raised, the worldview will be more heavily endorsed to buffer the resulting anxiety. Under conditions of heightened mortality salience, defense and justification of the worldview should be intensified, thereby decreasing tolerance of opposing views and social, cultural, and political alternatives.

The relevance of terror management theory to the psychology of conservatism should be apparent. When confronted with thoughts of their own mortality (Greenberg et al., 1990; Rosenblatt et al., 1989), people appear to behave more conservatively by shunning and even punishing outsiders and those who threaten the status of cherished worldviews. This perspective is especially consistent with the notion of conservatism as motivated social cognition; terror management theory holds that social intolerance is the consequence of worldview-enhancing cognitions motivated by the need to buffer anxiety-inducing thoughts.

The theory was founded by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, who point to considerable empirical support for their claims.

Empirical support for TMT has been obtained in over 200 experiments by researchers in 13 countries, primarily by demonstrating that reminders of death (mortality salience) in the form of open-ended questions, death-anxiety questionnaires, pictures of gory accidents, interviews in front of funeral parlors, and subliminal exposure to the words “death” or “dead,” instigate cultural worldview defense. For example, after mortality salience, people: 1) have more favorable evaluations of people with similar religious and political beliefs and more unfavorable evaluations of those who differ on these dimensions; 2) are more punitive toward moral transgressors and more benevolent to heroic individuals; 3) are more physically aggressive toward others with dissimilar political orientations; and 4) strive more vigorously to meet cultural standards of value. In addition, research has shown that mortality salience does not influence conscious affect or physiological arousal, and its effects are greatest following a delay, when death thought is highly accessible but outside of focal attention. Recent work has demonstrated that it is the potential for anxiety signaled by heightened death thought accessibility, which motivates worldview defense and self-esteem bolstering, which in turn reduces death thought accessibility to baseline levels. . .

President Bush’s popularity soared after the massive mortality salience induction produced by the attacks of 9/11; since then, Bush has emphasized the greatness of America and his commitment to triumphing over evil. . . Do reminders of mortality increase the appeal of such a leader? Studies published in the September 2004 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggest that they do. In Study 1, a mortality salience induction dramatically increased support for President Bush and his policies in Iraq. In Study 2, subliminal reminders of 9/11 or the World Trade Center increased the accessibility of implicit thoughts of death; for Americans then, even non-conscious intimations of the events of 9/11 arouse concerns about mortality. Accordingly, in Study 3 participants were asked to think about death, the events of 9/11, or a benign control topic; both mortality and 9/11 salience produced substantial increases in support for President Bush among liberal as well as conservative participants. Finally, in Study 4, whereas participants rated John Kerry more favorably than George Bush after thinking about being in intense pain, after a reminder of death, evaluations of Bush increased and Kerry decreased, such that Bush was more favorably evaluated than Kerry.

And the mechanism seems to be a fairly straightforward, in-group out-group dynamics. I recalled these studies which I had come across not too long ago when I was in Houston, because a fear and stigmatization of refugees from New Orleans was not simply palpable but open. More importantly it was on the local news all the time.

I stopped watching local news a long time ago mostly because of headlines like “Potholes, what you don’t know might kill you.” (That’s not a made up headline.) The alleged crimes associated with refugees from New Orleans were particular instances of the sensationalist fear mongering that is a staple of local news. If there’s anything to this research, then Fox News and Sinclair may be products rather than sources of the changes in political preferences, and the sources themselves may be from seemingly innocuous media.

Critical Digressions: Beyond Winter in Karachi (or the Argumentative Pakistani)

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,

Recently in town for the British tour, cricket reporter Andrew Miller observes,

“One of the first things you notice about Karachi, so long as you’re not being hot-boxed in a rickshaw as the morning traffic crawls to a halt, is the improbable clarity of the air. Despite being home to 14 million intensely active inhabitants, there’s none of the oppressive smog that lingers over Lahore like a caggy blanket. As the sea breezes work their magic and dissipate the city’s exhaust fumes, it’s possible too to see through some of the thick layers of misconception that abound about the place.”

Karachibynight During winter in Karachi, the sunlight is soft and milky during the day and after dusk the air becomes cool and wafts firewood and the sea. The billboards down Shahrah-e-Faisal flash and buzz and the wedding halls in and around the wide boulevards of Nazimabad and Hyderi are lit like carnivals. Winter is wedding season, Jinnah’s birthday, Christmas time, new year. In Saddar, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, garlanded by Christmas lights, glows something like a medieval structure in downtown Prague. At Clifton beach, floodlights animate the swelling gray sea and the silhouettes of families skipping on the silt. On New Year, tens of thousands of Karachites flood the beachfront on the backs of motorbikes, chanting, waving flags, celebrating themselves and the city. 

This year, however, a shadow has fallen over the city’s winter pageantry. A few months ago the earth opened up in the north and swallowed up mountains, roads, schools, villages, people. The earthquake in Kashmir is a catastrophe of epic proportion: a hundred thousand dead, three million displaced. The numbers bewilder; and grow: the severe northern winter is now claiming thousands every day. (We urge you to contribute generously, immediately.)

DisplacedchildrenAlthough far away, the tremors of the earthquake have reached Karachi: not only does the city host a large Kashmiri population but possesses the requisite infrastructure to provide relief. From the city’s efficient political machinery – notably the MQM and the Jamaat – to the remarkable civic organizations – the Edhi Welfare Trust and the Citizens Foundation – all have been involved in the relief and present reconstruction effort. Moreover, students from high-schools and colleges, some who have never left Karachi, are volunteering in far-flung Muzaffarabad and Balakot.

Fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, Mahnaz Isphahani notes that “an August 2000 study by the Agha Khan Development Network rated Pakistan as one of the most charitable countries,” a remarkable statistic for a developing country. “It shows. The private sector, non governmental organizations, political parties and thousands of volunteers led the relief efforts. The earthquake has driven a unique mobilization of Pakistan’s civil society.” Rugged individualists, Pakistanis don’t come together often. But when they do, they seem to move mountains.

Pakistan routinely makes headlines for being a “frontline state” on the “War on Terror,” a function of its geography which is defined by a collection of tribal fiefdoms in north, Muslim fundamentalist Iran to the West, and until recently, Hindu fundamentalist India in the East. Consequently other developments escape discourse. Save a piece or two, there has been no coverage of the remarkable summoning of national resources toward relief and reconstruction. Indeed the earthquake has often been essentialized in mainstream media as a matter of five or six Indian army helicopters that were not accepted by the government. As usual, many dimensions have escaped scrutiny.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, however, political commentator Husain Haqqani picks up on an interesting development:

“So much for the popularly peddled view that anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is so pervasive and deep-rooted it might take generations to alter. A new poll from Pakistan, a critical front-line in the war on terror, paints a very different picture – by revealing a sea-change in public opinion in recent months…Pakistanis now hold a more favorable opinion of the U.S. than at any time since 9/11…The direct cause for this dramatic shift in Muslim opinion is clear: American humanitarian assistance for Pakistani victims of the Oct. 8 earthquake that killed 87,000. The U.S. pledged $510 million for earthquake relief in Pakistan and American soldiers are playing a prominent role in rescuing victims from remote mountainous villages.”

There are other seismic developments in the north that have escaped attention. A few months ago, the Hasbah bill made headlines everywhere. The procrustean legislation, passed by provincial assembly in Peshawar (the capital of NWFP, the province bordering Afghanistan), would have created a moral police. In December, however, the Supreme Court definitively struck it down. This, of course, did not make the news anywhere. (We urge you do do a google search on the issue). Furthermore, the sponsors of the bill, the MMA, the Islamist party that won some seats after the second Afghan campaign, has been unable to subsequently pursue it. Sirajul Haq, a senior provincial minister in the MMA, claims in the Herald that “some people in Islamabad are allergic to the word Islam.” Indeed, Musharraf’s administration came down like a ton of bricks on the mullahs.

Abdullahshah Of course, Haq’s Islam is not Pakistani Islam; the personality of Pakistani Islam is inherently accommodative. Whenever we return home, for instance, we visit the shrines of Sufi saints in and around Karachi, from Mayvah Shah deep in a necropolis featuring a Jewish cemetery to perhaps one of the most intriguing tombs in all of South Asia, Udero Lal (or Duryah Shah). Here, people congregate on Thursday nights, singing, dancing, smoking chars. The weekly festival features fortune-tellers, wrestling competitions, food stalls. Near the beach, at Abdullah Shah Ghazi, we pay homage to the saint who is said to have saved Karachi from the sea. In the limestone cave behind the tomb there is talk of other miracles. This time around we visited a couple of Hindu temples, including Shree Ratneswar Mahdevi, a five minute saunter from Abdullah Shah. There, we were taken to a limestone cave underneath and briefed about miracles. No doubt, the two caves are connected. Whether you talk about the Barelvi Punjabi countryside or the Maulai Sindhi interior, the weddings rituals or notions of hygiene, the infrastructure of Pakistan’s Islam rests on a syncretistic heritage. And Islam got more civilized the further it moved away from Arabs and Arabia (and arguably is most accommodative in the Far East).

Theboysfrompeshawar Another exciting development in the north is the emergence of Sajid and Zeeshan, a solidly middle class, Peshawar-based, electronic pop duo. Their thoughtful but finger-snapping, hip-shaking singles “King of Self” and “Freestyle Dive” (that we urge you dowload from their website) have topped the charts and if marketed successfully, their upcoming album can take dancefloors worldwide by storm. The latter’s animated video – featuring a bank robber who suffers a pang of conscience – was nominated for best video at the Indus Music Awards (held, by the way, with great pomp on the lawns of the Karachi Parsi Institute on December 24th.) Sajid and Zeeshan are the face of contemporary Pakistan, resolute members of the Media Generation, heterodox rockers who unlike mullahs don’t worry about what Pakistan should be, about silly notions of authenticity, but are confident that what they do is by definition, Pakistani.

Indeed, the Media Generation is redefining notions of self and sovereignty in a way that no prior generation has before, a phenomenon we have covered in this column earlier. This winter, the Media Generation is responsible for the superb Kara Film Festival and for bringing Bryan Adams to Karachi later this month for a benefit concert (where some twenty thousand are expected to attend). It was also responsible for local channels broadcasting Christmas programming on Christmas eve: not only was there a Christmas address by the Prime Minister to the a large gathering on PTV but Christmas carols on TV1, and on GEO (the most watched entertainment channel), a serial on prime-time featuring Pakistani Christian family, a first. This is the stuff that changes sensibilities. For instance, at Nasra School, one the largest private urban school networks for lower-middle and middle class students, the topic for the annual middle school debates this year (reminescent of the program “50 Minutes” on GEO) was, “Should Pakistan develop relations with Israel?”

Ourboys_1 The sports channels are commemorating another event: Pakistan walloping England in cricket. For years, Pakistan had been in the wilderness, a team with few stars, little direction, no guts. Things began turning in 2005 with Pakistan’s resounding defeat of India in India. England, on the other hand, was coming off an historic victory over Australia, the best team in the world, and was favored to win. But as with India, the Pakistan boys made chapli kebab out of them. Under the squinty, watchful gaze of Inzi, “The Big Easy,” their towering Punjabi captain who has finally come into his own, Danesh Kaneria, the Hindu leg spinner, took wicket after wicket after wicket as Shahid Afridi, the blue eyed Pathan from Karachi, transformed from a streaky opener to the most explosive batsman in cricket today, swatting pitches as if he were playing street cricket with a tape ball. Cricket reporter Kamran Abbasi avers, “There is a Pakistani way in cricket, abundant talent abundantly flawed, that leaves you holding your breath in anticipation of the next act and staring in disbelief if it comes off.” We see things somewhat differently. The cricket team can be thought as a proxy for nation: rugged individualists with varied styles and backgrounds who against all odds somehow come together at critical junctures to come out on top.

Other Critical Digressions:

Dispatch from Karachi

The Media Generation and Nazia Hassan

The Naipaulian Imperative and the Phenomenon of the Post-National

Literary Pugilists and Underground Men

Gangbanging and Notions of the Self

Dispatch from Cambridge (or Notes on Deconstructing Chicken)

Poetry of the Real: Six Feet Over

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

You quite often see poetry used in contemporary culture in interesting and creative ways. For example, just last week I heard some Emily Dickinson used in the Kneehigh Theatre’s production of Tristan & Yseult at the Sydney Festival, and I’m pretty sure I heard a line from Larkin in Jerry Springer The Opera which was shown here recently. What is a lot less common, I think, is to find what one might call the poetic, or the poetry of the real, in actual television shows. Some would say that all television is poetic in the sense that it heightens the aesthetic experience in ways that can intensify viewing and listening pleasure. The mordant satire of The Simpsons or the social comedy of Frasier or Seinfeld is television of a very sophisticated and pleasurable kind. However, programs that get through to the wound of living and are equal to the realities of how we know our lives to be are much rarer.

Six Feet Under is surely one of the most effective television series from this viewpoint. Here is the poetry of the real, written and produced to entertain, but getting very close to the place where poetry lives. True, the poetry is often near to incomprehension, pain and disillusionment. There are no one-liners to relieve the cataclysms in the heart. From the very opening shots, with their intimations of Poe’s ‘Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore’’ (or is it Macbeth?), and the necessary death we witness at the commencement of each episode, we are put in the way of the strangeness and unpredictability of death, and therefore of the strangeness and unpredicability of our lives.

It is a very important creative achievement to bring about this kind of intensification for five seasons of programming. Here, I feel, there are characters who could walk out of the screen and I would recognise them as of my own kind and time. They speak truly, and their silences are true too. And I like the way the characters change our perceptions of them, how our reactions to them vary. Brenda Chenowith, for example, can seem liberated and perceptive, and then self-obsessed and narcissistic—not quite the same thing. Claire’s adolescent wilfulness can be irritating until we remember we were just like that not so very long ago. But Claire is also strong enough to resist the commodifications that want to turn her generation into mindless consumers. Just as David Fisher’s forbearance is of the kind we know is needed to get through, so too you sometimes want to shout at the screen for him to tell Keith where to get off. The southern Californian skies may not be our milieu, and we may not take as many hard substances as the Fisher family and their friends do, but all the same, these people are like us with their desire and hope, their frailty and strength. There are no saints here, just people getting through the rhythm of their days, aiming for good, and often falling short. Alan Ball and his production team have done the most effective job in conveying the wing of their joys and discontents. The program has to be packaged as entertainment, but it is entertainment of the first order where there has been no compromise to get ratings points.

There is one aspect of this program that wouldn’t necessarily strike the average viewer the same way it would an independent writer like myself: the fact that Fisher & Sons is an independent business, trying to survive against the onslaught of Kroehner Service International and the shark-toothed Mitzi who is always waiting to devour the Fisher family in her maw. I have often felt every sympathy for Ruth Fisher and for the ghost of Nathanial Fisher who makes unpredictable sorties in the psyche, especially of elder son Nate. They held onto an independent family business for all their working lives, and it has often looked like the business was going to be swallowed up in some capitalist conglomeration. The poet Joseph Brodsky once wrote that some poets store up malice as a kind of life insurance. They have little to give except their bile, and rampant verse offerings. The equivalent of Kroehner Service International is well and truly alive in the arts. David and Nate have to fight off attempts to take over their business at every turn, and so far they have succeeded. Federico, their brilliant mortician who gets people looking as good in death as they ever did in life, also wants in on the action, and he is properly put out when, earlier in the series, the Fishers don’t seem to have any time left over for his ambitions. I think this solidarity against the predatory and levelling tendencies of capitalism in its late phase partly-explains the appeal of Six Feet Under to so many different kinds of viewers, just as each of the characters summons up some aspects of our own lives which can be as inspiring as Ruth’s willingness to shed her old skins or as strange as Brenda’s psychiatrist parents’ shenanigans.

To me, this series attains what is very close to a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, where all the contributory factors—the writing, the music, the acting, the sets, the editing—go to make the cathartic whole. SFU is one of those productions against which subsequent series which aim at dramatic credibility will be judged. One can’t, and shouldn’t, go around all the time with your head in aesthetic clouds. A series like Six Feet Under brings you down to earth with a thump, but the kind of thump where poetry can be real for you, and the words spoken and the feelings experienced transcend the passing moment, and you, as viewer, go through to another level of acceptance or recognition; you are somewhere beyond the crassness that some contemporary culture insists is your due. And you are over, at least six feet over, all that detritus and failure.

                                                                      *

        Poem Of The Real

Child soldiers of sex slaves
Cut off lips with razors.
Time for some aesthetics.

Ocean rears from bad dreaming,
Swallowing your family whole.
What about hermaneutics?

Poem of the real is this world
Spun in violent fractals.
Insoluble acrostic.

Written 2005

I have a dream

It is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America. This is the full text of MLK’s heroic and devastatingly moving speech delivered on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.  I strongly urge you to read it again, if you haven’t done so in a while, and I defy you to remain unmoved by it. An audio version is available here.

MlkihaveadreamgogoI am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest — quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.

With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day — this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:

My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.

Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,

From every mountainside, let freedom ring!

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.

And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.

                Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

                Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of
                Pennsylvania.

                Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.

                Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

                But not only that:

                Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

                Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

                Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

                Free at last! Free at last!

                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

[This post was inspired, at least partly, by my brilliant niece Sheherzad Preisler who memorized the whole speech at age five.]

1968: The year that rocked the world

Stewart Home reviews the book by Mark Kurlanski, at Nth Position:

Si_riot2Treating a single year as better, worse or more significant than those around it is tricky. Mark Kurlansky understands this, writing in the final chapter: “In history it is always imprecise to attribute fundamental shifts to one exact moment. There was 1967 and 1969 and all the earlier years that made 1968 what it was. But 1968 was the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our postmodern media-driven world. That is why the popular music of the time, the dominant expression of popular culture in the period, has remained relevant to successive generations of youth.” That said, while Kurlansky is writing popular history, his coverage of political events carry as much weight as what he has to say about youth culture.

More here.

ecstasy

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Another remarkable new work by Tomaselli, 2005’s Organism, shows a man with transparent skin plunging headless into a crystal chaos of stars, spiderwebs, and fractured mandalas. The piece seems to literally embody the difficult human transition between meat and mental ecstasy, but its full resonance only becomes clear when compared to the similarly semitransparent bodies in the work of Alex Grey, another Brooklyn artist and one of the most dominant painters in the largely marginalized world of contemporary psychedelic art. Though Grey’s art graces rave fliers and New Age calendars, he is no naïf—the declarative intensity of his strongest paintings depends in part on his sly appropriation of textbook medical imagery, whose hyperreal rhetoric paradoxically lends an air of actuality to his visionary bodies. But Grey is too much of a mystic literalist for his work to ever make it to the walls of MoCA; transcendence, even if it is just a trick of immanence, is still taboo. Whereas Grey’s transformed figures confidently ascend into rainbow mind-lattices, Tomaselli’s organism plunges into the fractured rag-and-bone shop of the head, delivering the more assimilable message that ecstasy is rarely far from the abject.

more from Artforum here.

literary theory

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What is needed is something quite different. The sceptical challenge to the idea of literary value cannot be brushed aside with reference to an existing “body of knowledge” about literature. It has to be shown that the knowledge in such a body of knowledge actually is knowledge. Thinking about literature cannot but be philosophical. There is no reason why laxer standards should be permissible. This anthology sometimes seems to imply that philosophy is to be defined as that which happens to come out of the mouth of a person currently in the pay of a Department of Philosophy. But for such persons to be of use to an account of literary value, they need also to be able to match the erudition and judgement of the best literary critics. All the humanities are philosophical through and through. They cannot simply ask some other department to do their thinking for them and then plonk it on top of their own material. The philosophy of literary “form”, however, is still in its infancy – so much so that it is even unclear whether “form” is the right word for what is to be discussed. An admission of the difficulty of addressing this subject may, strangely, be of more assistance in capturing the imagination of future readers, scholars and critics, than an assurance that the “science of literature” would be given back entire to us could we only delete the fashionable nonsense with which it is supposed currently to be encumbered.

Simon Jarvis reviewing a new anthology of lit. theory, “Theory’s Empire” in the TLS.

Portrait of the Artist as a Paint-Splattered Googler

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THE only thing I really like is that brain,” said the painter Dana Schutz, sitting on a stool in her Brooklyn studio and pointing to her detailed study of a strangely shaped human brain in gangrenous shades of green and gray. Ms. Schutz, 29, has been widely praised for her ecstatically expressive figurative paintings, recognizable by their thick, lush surfaces and flamboyant palette of hot pinks, leafy greens and eggy yellows. But after churning out a dozen vibrant new works for a fall show in Berlin, she found herself in a restlessly experimental frame of mind, casting about for new ideas.

more from the NY Times here.

Insight into mystery of antlers

From BBC News:

Deer The deer is unique among mammals in being able to regenerate a complete body part – in this case a set of bone antlers covered in velvety skin. Antlers are large structures made from bone that annually grow, die, are shed and then regenerate. They grow in three to four months, making them one of the fastest growing living tissues. After the antlers have reached their maximum size, the bone hardens and the velvety outer covering of skin peels off. Once the velvet is gone, only the bare bone remains – a formidable weapon for fighting.

At the end of the mating season, the deer sheds its antlers to conserve energy. Next spring, a new pair grows out of a bony protuberance of tissue at the front of the animal’s head. The research suggests that stem cells – the master cells of the body, with the ability to develop into many specialised cell types – underpin this process.

More here.

Why Chelsea clinton visited rajasthan

From despardes.com:Chelseajaipur011206200

Chelsea, 25, is dating the son of “disgraced ex-congressman” Ed Mezvinsky, who is currently serving a nearly seven-year jail stint for fraud. According to the magazine, Chelsea’s beau wanted her to visit his dad at the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama, but Hillary was having none of it. Her dash to Rajasthan with Mark, boyfriend, was a killing-two-birds-with-one-stone “political” strategy. Chelsea, who arrived in Rajasthan four days ago on a week-long private visit, avoided media glare to such an extent that not a single picture of hers and her boyfriend Mark have appeared in local newspapers despite the fact that they deployed an army of photographers and reporters in the pursuit.

Preferring to remain incognito, Chelsea arrived in the Lake City of Udaipur, in Rajasthan, where she spent four days at luxury Udaivilas hotel of the Oberois. During her Udaipur visit, Chelsea did boating, shopping and little sightseeing. The former US president’s daughter also tried some local delicacies and spent some time in hotel gymnasium and bar. In the hotel she was served traditional Mewari cuisine, which included makkai ki roti, bread made of maize flour.

More here.