Raymond Carver

I really admire what the Giants have done this season. It isn’t often you see a team struggle early, eke out a series of road wins, and still manage to peak at the perfect moment. It’s a rare occurrence, I’ll say that much.

On the other side, you’ve got football’s version of Goliath. Experts tell me the Patriots are the strongest team in NFL history. From the moment they beat the Colts, they’ve been earmarked as Super Bowl Champions. It’s tough to pick against an undefeated record.

All that being said, I’ve been so impressed with Eli Manning’s development these last four weeks that I’m willing to take the underdog. What can I say? I believe in the New York Giants.

Prediction: Giants 31, Patriots 28

Raymond Carver, edited by Gordon Lish

It isn’t a thing you see often, I’ll say that much.

They tell me this is Goliath.

I believe in Giants.

Prediction: G.

more from McSweeney’s here.

New cameras don’t just capture photons; they compute pictures.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

The digital camera has brought a revolutionary shift in the nature of photography, sweeping aside more than 150 years of technology based on the weird and wonderful photochemistry of silver halide crystals. Curiously, though, the camera itself has come through this transformation with remarkably little change. A digital camera has a silicon sensor where the film used to go, and there’s a new display screen on the back, but the lens and shutter and the rest of the optical system work just as they always have, and so do most of the controls. The images that come out of the camera also look much the same—at least until you examine them microscopically.

But further changes in the art and science of photography may be coming soon. Imaging laboratories are experimenting with cameras that don’t merely digitize an image but also perform extensive computations on the image data.

More here.  [The photo below is a more “painterly” image rendered by a digital camera.]

Researchers are revealing hidden complexities behind the simple act of kissing, which relays powerful messages to your brain, body and partner.

Chip Walter in Scientific American:

A kiss triggers a cascade of neural messages and chemicals that transmit tactile sensations, sexual excitement, feelings of closeness, motivation and even euphoria.

Kisses can convey important information about the status and future of a relationship. At the extreme, a bad first kiss can abruptly curtail a couple’s future.

Kissing may have evolved from primate mothers’ practice of chewing food for their young and then feeding them mouth-to-mouth. Some scientists theorize that kissing is crucial to the evolutionary process of mate selection.

More here.

..
Preface to a Twenty-volume Suicide Note
Amiri Baraka

Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus…

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter’s room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there…
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands

..

A black woman refused to give up her seat on a bus. She was brutally attacked and thrown off…and she took the case to court. Rosa Parks? No. Her name was Elizabeth Jennings.

Here’s how the New York Tribune reported the Jennings incident in a February 1855 article: “She got upon one of the Company’s cars last summer, on the Sabbath, to ride to church. The conductor undertook to get her off, first alleging the car was full; when that was shown to be false, he pretended the other passengers were displeased at her presence; but (when) she insisted on her rights, he took hold of her by force to expel her. She resisted. The conductor got her down on the platform, jammed her bonnet, soiled her dress and injured her person. Quite a crowd gathered, but she effectually resisted. Finally, after the car had gone on further, with the aid of a policeman they succeeded in removing her.”

The African American community was outraged, and the following day there was a rally at Jennings’ church. A letter she had written telling her account of the incident was read aloud: “Sarah E. Adams & myself walked down to the corner of Pearl & Chatham Sts. to take the 3rd Ave cars,” she wrote. She described how the conductor, thought to be one Edwin Moss, and the driver had attacked her. “I told him [Moss] I was a respectable person, born and raised in this city, that I did not know where he was from and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church.”

“Then,” Jennings continued, “the (police) officer without listening to anything I had to say thrust me out and tauntingly told me to get redress if I could. I would have come up [to the rally] myself but I’m quite sore & stiff from the treatment I received from those monsters.”

Jennings sued the company, the driver, and the conductor. Messrs. Culver, Parker, and Arthur represented her. Arthur was Chester A. Arthur, then a novice 21-year-old lawyer and future President of the United States. This law firm was hired because it had demonstrated some talent in the area of civil rights the year before.

Jennings was well off and well connected. Her father, Thomas Jennings, was an important businessman and community leader who had associations with Abyssinian and St. Phillips, two major African American churches. As a tailor, he held a patent on a method for renovating garments and maintained a shop on Church Street.

He and others who had been involved in the fight to end transit discrimination helped raise money for Jennings’ lawsuit. News of the trial reached all the way to San Francisco, where an African American group called the Young Men’s Association passed a resolution condemning Jennings’ treatment.

In 1855, Judge Rockwell of the Brooklyn Circuit Court ruled in Jennings’ favor, stating that: “Colored persons if sober, well behaved and free from disease, had the same rights as others and could neither be excluded by any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence.”

Elizabeth Jennings claimed $500 worth of damage. The majority of the jury wanted to give her the full amount, but, as the Tribune put it, “Some jury members had peculiar notions as to colored people’s rights.” They eventually agreed to give her $225, and the court added 10 percent plus her expenses.

Within a month of the Jennings decision, an African American named Peter Porter was barred from an Eighth Avenue rail car. He too sued and the company settled out of court. From then on, African Americans were allowed to ride on rail cars on an equal basis.

From Scientific American:

Study analyzing more than 200 years of data finds that couples consisting of third cousins have the highest reproductive success. It is not quite incest. And though it will increase your chances of birthing a healthy baby, it is a bit unorthodox, to say the least. Still, scientists at Icelandic biotechnology company deCODE genetics say that when third and fourth cousins procreate, they generally have scads of kids and grandkids (relative to everyone else).

It has long been wondered exactly how kinship influences reproductive success. Previous studies have uncovered positive correlations, but the biological data has been clouded by socioeconomic factors (such as average marrying age and family size) in those populations in which consanguineous marriage is commonplace, such as in India, Pakistan and the Middle East. The new study, however, was able to shed light on the biological reason for the earlier findings.

More here.

This has been getting a lot of press.  The full text of the archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ lecture on shar’ia and secular law.

[I]n contrast to what is sometimes assumed, we do not simply have a standoff between two rival legal systems when we discuss Islamic and British law.  On the one hand, sharia depends for its legitimacy not on any human decision, not on votes or preferences, but on the conviction that it represents the mind of God; on the other, it is to some extent unfinished business so far as codified and precise provisions are concerned.  To recognise sharia is to recognise a method of jurisprudence governed by revealed texts rather than a single system.  In a discussion based on a paper from Mona Siddiqui at a conference last year at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, the point was made by one or two Muslim scholars that an excessively narrow understanding sharia as simply codified rules can have the effect of actually undermining the universal claims of the Qur’an. 

But while such universal claims are not open for renegotiation, they also assume the voluntary consent or submission of the believer, the free decision to be and to continue a member of the ummaSharia is not, in that sense, intrinsically to do with any demand for Muslim dominance over non-Muslims.  Both historically and in the contemporary context, Muslim states have acknowledged that membership of the umma is not coterminous with membership in a particular political society: in modern times, the clearest articulation of this was in the foundation of the Pakistani state under Jinnah; but other examples (Morocco, Jordan) could be cited of societies where there is a concept of citizenship that is not identical with belonging to the umma. Such societies, while not compromising or weakening the possibility of unqualified belief in the authority and universality of sharia, or even the privileged status of Islam in a nation, recognise that there can be no guarantee that the state is religiously homogeneous and that the relationships in which the individual stands and which define him or her are not exclusively with other Muslims.  There has therefore to be some concept of common good that is not prescribed solely in terms of revealed Law, however provisional or imperfect such a situation is thought to be.  And this implies in turn that the Muslim, even in a predominantly Muslim state, has something of a dual identity, as citizen and as believer within the community of the faithful.

New York has always been a gangster’s paradise. That’s part of its romance and its lore. From groups like the 19th century Plug Uglies, immortalized in Herbert Asbury’s 1928 “The Gangs of New York,” to their 20th century counterpart, the Mafia, the city has a peculiar fascination with its least repentant miscreants, the ones who flaunt their lives outside the law.

Twenty years ago, John Gotti ruled the tabloids, and before him Joey Gallo, Joe Colombo, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano — the list goes on and on.

As to why this is . . . well, Jimmy Breslin has an opinion. “I can barely handle legitimate people,” he writes in the opening pages of “The Good Rat: A True Story.” “They all proclaim immaculate honesty, but each day they commit the most serious of all felonies, being a bore.”

more from the LA Times here.

it’s a surely astonishing fact that no European war has been fought for more than 60 years, at least outside the ruins of Yugoslavia. Western Europe has become politically and socially demilitarized to a degree once unimaginable; after so many centuries of bloody conflict, Europeans don’t want to study war no more. In his scintillating tour d’horizon — and de force — Sheehan suggests that such obsolescence of war is specifically “the product of Europe’s distinctive history in the 20th century,” and he argues that it has created a new kind of European state along with “a dramatically new international system within Europe.”

There had been an earlier age of peace. The half-century following Waterloo was notably pacific after the violence from which it had emerged, and 1871 to 1914 saw the longest period until now without any war at all between larger European powers. There was besides a vigorous peace movement. Sheehan describes the vogue for such books as Bertha von Suttner’s “Lay Down Your Arms,” Ivan Bloch’s “Future of War,” which inspired the 1899 Hague peace conference, and Norman Angell’s “Great Illusion.” So it was that “at the beginning of the 20th century, as at the beginning of the 21st, a relatively peaceful Europe lived in a dangerously violent world.”

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Sahabzada Abdus-Samad Khan’s excellent analysis at World Security Network:

No one expected that one fatal move – the removal of the Chief Justice – would have unleashed such a rash of democratic forces that would so rapidly lead to the serious political impasse Pakistan is faced with today. In the process, President Musharraf lost much of his most important constituency – the professionals and the middle class.

For the U.S., the assassination of Benazir Bhutto means that it is left with little or no options, seeing that Washington had pinned its hopes on the “Musharraf Plus” package. The latter envisaged the President in control of foreign policy and national security matters, and a Benazir Bhutto-led government focusing on all other matters of state (and giving the country a democratic façade).

Not realizing that such blatant “engineering” of the Pakistani political dispensation is no longer viable and will only exacerbate a tenuous situation, the U.S. is scrambling to devise a “Plan B” and is purportedly negotiating with the leader of the only other major party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), led by former PM Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz Sharif. This is all the more untenable in view of the seemingly irreconcilable differences between the President and the Sharifs.

More here.

From The New York Times:

For Americans of African descent, one of the difficulties in writing about identity is that the discussion, intentionally or not, is simultaneously intensely personal and profoundly public. Our unique experience and the racial identification manifested in melanin binds us inextricably to both our individual, subjective, personal experiences and to the collective experience of the group. Efforts to be seen as “an individual” necessitate that we differentiate ourselves from some supposedly monolithic black identity and authenticity. Like it or not, our individuality is dependent on first identifying and, depending on where we are coming from and where we are going, either embracing or distancing ourselves from the group.

Randall Kennedy’s “Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal” and “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win,” by Shelby Steele, illustrate this dichotomy. Kennedy uses the historical and contemporary notion of the race traitor as a prism through which to view black identity, while Steele uses Barack Obama’s candidacy as a window on contemporary black identity and progress.

More here.

The Guest House
Jelaluddin Rumi

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

translation by Coleman Barks

Rumi Festival, Saratoga Springs, NY: this weekend

..

“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place, and ain’t I a woman? … I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me — and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well — and ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to slavery and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me — and ain’t I woman?”

Sojourner Truth was born in 1797 on the Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh estate in Swartekill, in Ulster County, a Dutch settlement in upstate New York. Her given name was Isabella Baumfree (also spelled Bomefree). She was one of 13 children born to Elizabeth and James Baumfree, also slaves on the Hardenbergh plantation. She spoke only Dutch until she was sold from her family around the age of nine. Because of the cruel treatment she suffered at the hands of a later master, she learned to speak English quickly, but had a Dutch accent for the rest of her life.

She was first sold around age 9 when her second master (Charles Hardenbergh) died in 1808. She was sold to John Neely, along with a herd of sheep, for $100. Neely’s wife and family only spoke English and beat Isabella fiercely for the frequent miscommunications. She later said that Neely once whipped her with “a bundle of rods, prepared in the embers, and bound together with cords.” It was during this time that she began to find refuge in religion — beginning the habit of praying aloud when scared or hurt. When her father once came to visit, she pleaded with him to help her. Soon after, Martinus Schryver purchased her for $105.

Sometime around 1815, she fell in love with a fellow slave named Robert, who was owned by a man named Catlin or Catton. Robert’s owner forbade the relationship because he did not want his slave having children with a slave he did not own (and therefore would not own the new ‘property’). One night Robert visited Isabella, but was followed by his owner and son, who beat him savagely (“bruising and mangling his head and face”), bound him and dragged him away. Robert never returned. Isabella had a daughter shortly thereafter, named Diana. In 1817, forced to submit to the will of her owner Dumont, Isabella married an older slave named Thomas. They had four children: Peter (1822), James (who died young), Elizabeth (1825), and Sophia (1826).

The state of New York began in 1799 to legislate the gradual abolition of slaves, which was to happen July 4, 1827. Dumont had promised Isabella freedom a year before the state emancipation, “if she would do well and be faithful.” However, he reneged on his promise, claiming a hand injury had made her less productive. She was infuriated, having understood fairness and duty as a hallmark of the master-slave relationship. She continued working until she felt she had done enough to satisfy her sense of obligation to him — spinning 100 pounds of wool — then escaped before dawn with her infant daughter, Sophia. She later said:

“I did not run off, for I thought that wicked, but I walked off, believing that to be all right.”

On June 1, 1843, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth and told friends, “The Spirit calls me [East], and I must go.” She wandered in relative obscurity, depending on the kindness of strangers. In 1844, still liking the utopian cooperative ideal, she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts. This group of 210 members lived on 500 acres of farmland, raising livestock, running grist and saw mills, and operating a silk factory. Unlike the Kingdom, the Association was founded by abolitionists to promote cooperative and productive labor. They were strongly anti-slavery, religiously tolerant, women’s rights supporters, and pacifist in principles. While there, she met and worked with abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and David Ruggles. Unfortunately, the community’s silk-making was not profitable enough to support itself and it disbanded in 1846 amid debt.

Sojourner went to live with one of the Association’s founders, George Benson, who had established a cotton mill. Shortly thereafter, she began dictating her memoirs to Olive Gilbert, another Association member. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave was published privately by William Lloyd Garrison in 1850. It gave her an income and increased her speaking engagements, where she sold copies of the book.

1852 – in August, attends abolitionist meeting in Salem, Ohio, where she confronts Frederick Douglass, asking “Is God gone?”

In 1864, she worked among freed slaves at a government refugee camp on an island in Virginia and was employed by the National Freedman’s Relief Association in Washington, D.C. She also met President Abraham Lincoln in October. (A famous painting, and subsequent photographs of it, depict President Lincoln showing Sojourner the ‘Lincoln Bible,’ given to him by the black people of Baltimore, Maryland.) In 1863, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s article “The Libyan Sibyl” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly; a romanticized description of Sojourner. (The previous year, William Story’s statue of the same title, inspired by the article, won an award at the London World Exhibition.) After the Civil War ended, she continued working to help the newly freed slaves through the Freedman’s Relief Association, then the Freedman’s Hospital in Washington. In 1867, she moved from Harmonia to Battle Creek, converting William Merritt’s “barn” into a house, for which he gave her the deed four years later.

Sojourner made a few appearances around Michigan, speaking about temperance and against capital punishment. In July of 1883, with ulcers on her legs, she sought treatment through Dr. John Harvey Kellogg at his famous Battle Creek Sanitarium. It is said he grafted some of his own skin onto her leg. Sojourner returned home with her daughters Diana and Elizabeth, their husbands and children, and died there on November 26, 1883, at 86 years old.

Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

Hillary Clinton is smart, energetic, immensely knowledgeable, and, as she likes to say, hard-working. I’ve been appalled by the misogynous vitriol (and mean-girl snark) aimed against her. If she is the nominee I will work my heart out for her.

But right now, I’m supporting Barack Obama. On domestic politics, their differences are small– I’m with her on health care mandates, and with him on driver’s licences for undocumented immigrants; both would probably be equally good on women’s rights, abortion rights and judicial appointments. But on foreign policy Obama seems more enlightened, as in less bellicose. Maybe Hillary Clinton’s refusal to say her Iraq vote was wrong shows that she has neo-con sympathies; maybe she simply believes that any admission of error would tar her as weak. But we already have a warlike president who refuses to admit making mistakes, and look how that’s turned out. The election of Barack Obama would send a signal to the world that the United States is taking a different tack.

More here.

To understand consciousness and its evolution, we need to ask the right questions.

Nicholas Humphrey in Seed:

It all depends on asking the right questions at the outset. I can show what I mean with the example of a well-known visual illusion. Consider what you might want to explain about the experience of looking at the object in the picture to the left (Fig. 1), a solid wooden version of the so-called impossible triangle. Since it is at first sight so surprising and impressive, any of us might very well innocently ask the (bad) question: “How can we explain the existence of this triangle as we perceive it?” Only later—indeed only once we have seen the object from a different viewpoint (Fig. 2), and realized that the “triangle as we perceive it” is an illusion—will it occur to us to ask the (good) question: “How can we explain the fact we have been tricked into perceiving it this way?”

Now, no one wants to think that consciousness is likewise some kind of trick. But let’s nonetheless see where the analogy may lead. The standard philosopher’s example is the case of what it’s like to see red. So, suppose you were looking at a ripe tomato: What might you want to explain about the qualia-rich red sensation that you are experiencing?

More here.

My sister and fellow 3QD editor Azra has, to my delight, decided to celebrate Black History Month at 3QD by posting at least one thing related to that subject each day of this month. Here is a contribution by me. A song that gives me goosebumps each time I listen to it:

More info on the song here.

The New York city of Saratoga Springs will glow with the light and warmth of Rumi’s Spirit as lovers of his writing are inspired when they gather to read,  hear, and veiw on film the sacred substance of his insightful poetry. This festival will move across the weekend and throught the town in a circular turning fashion just as the sufi dervishes who follow Rumi have always whirled in
spiritual ecastasy.

The spirit of Rumi has remained alive and timely for nearly 800 years and never more so than in today’s troubled times.

Many people whose lives turn
naturally around Saratoga already live by the example of this universal poet and lover of God. Don’t miss this chance to rekindle the spark of Rumi in your soul.

Join us for this turn through Saratoga!

More here about Saratoga Springs’ Rumi Festival, this weekend 
Saturday Poem: The Guest House, by Jelaluddin Rumi

..

3QD friend and occasional contributor Alex Cooley, in Georgia Today:

There is no easy way out or ideal solution at this point.

For the US, the independence for Kosovo has been a long-term goal, but Washington lost momentum for this goal after the rejection of the Ahtisaari Plan.  In Europe, we perhaps overestimated the intensity of support for Kosovo independence within certain EU countries. Cyprus has consistently and unequivocally expressed its opposition to an independent Kosovo. And over the last year, it has become clear that EU member states such as Romania, Greece, Slovakia and Spain also have deep reservations about recognizing a unilateral declaration of independence, given the status of their ethnic minorities.  These countries will likely follow a broader EU policy in the interests of European unity, but they will not necessarily do so enthusiastically.

The Russian policy on Kosovo is tied to a number of considerations within Russia’s domestic and foreign policy.  For some, Kosovo remains an open legacy of a NATO campaign and a settlement that was agreed upon at a time of Russian geopolitical weakness. Drawing a line in the sand regarding Kosovo is now a sign of Russia’s renewed engagement in world affairs and desire to actively shape the international rules of the game.  Others view Russia’s position as defending international law and the terms of UN resolution 1244 that reaffirmed Serbia’s sovereignty with guarantees for Kosovo’s substantial autonomy. In terms of domestic politics, there is very little incentive for Putin or his successors to back down from this position that is also strongly supported by the Russian public.

Over at the NewsHour, a look at the contest over reforming DC schools:

John Merrow reports on the controversial practices that D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee is using to shake up the city’s school system, including closing 23 schools by 2010 in a bid to tackle a $100 million budget deficit — a move that has raised a storm of protest…

JOHN MERROW: Rhee wasted no time getting started. Weeks before the first day of school, she discovered thousands of textbooks and supplies not in classrooms where they belonged, but gathering dust in a warehouse.

She got them delivered to schools in time for opening day and then went after the cause of the problem: the district’s central office, long criticized for its inefficiency.

Rhee asked the city council to pass a law giving her the power to fire central office employees at will.

MICHELLE RHEE: It is a matter of trust.

HARRY THOMAS, JR., D.C. City Council Member: It is a matter of trust.

JOHN MERROW: Rhee met with city council members, like Harry Thomas, Jr., lobbying for votes.

MICHELLE RHEE: For a leader of an organization not to have the power to remove ineffective employees means that you are severely handcuffing that person and putting up barriers to their effectiveness.

NATHAN SAUNDERS, General Vice President, Washington Teachers Union: This legislation is devoid of an educational impact plan for children at the classroom level.

William Deresiewicz in the Nation:

At the top of the page, an argument is being pursued. It is a political argument; right now, it is taking up the rightward drift in Western politics since 9/11. “Next week there will be federal elections in Canada,” the voice is saying, “and the Conservatives are tipped to win.” In the middle of the page, the author of this argument is writing a letter to his secretary. Not his secretary, exactly–the neighbor he has coaxed into typing his notes. She is young, married, half-Filipina and crushingly sexy, the kind of woman who gives men ideas they can’t get rid of. He’s paying her three times what the work is worth, but they’ve had an argument, and she has refused to go on. “You have become indispensable to me,” the letter begins. At the bottom of the page, the young woman is reporting a conversation she has had with the man she lives with. He has been tapping into her employer’s computer, but not because he wants to spy on his private thoughts. He’s interested in other things. Like what, she’s asked. “Like his finances,” he says. Her employer is old, and rich. “Like what is going to happen with his assets after he dies.”

We are about halfway through J.M. Coetzee’s eleventh novel, Diary of a Bad Year, and we have gotten used by now to the ways it wants to be read.