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39
Hilda Doolittle

We have had too much consecration,
too little afirmation.

too much: but this, this, this
has been proved heretical,

too little: I know, I feel
the meaning that words hide;

they are anagrams, cryptograms,
little boxes, conditioned

to hatch butterflies…

More on H.D.

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Lena Corner in The Independent:

My raison d’être,” says American psychotherapist Jo Ellen Gryzb, “is simply to make people a little less nice.” It’s been her mission ever since she found herself huddled in her bedroom with her husband one Christmas, whispering about how on earth they were going to get rid of their house guests. “I had no idea how to tell them they had overstayed,” she says. “I was a complete walkover.”

Gryzb returned to work at Impact Factory, a personal-development agency, and found herself in conversation with colleague Robin Chandler, who had similarly spent his holiday tiptoeing round friends and family. “I know what our problem is,” declared Gryzb. “We’re suffering from the nice factor.”

The pair set about devising a workshop designed to harden us up and cut back on excessive manners; an etiquette class in reverse, if you like. It has been so successful that they are now bringing out a book entitled The Nice Factor: The Art of Saying No.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

The Arabic world nakbah, denoting “catastrophe” best describes what George W. Bush and his American-Taliban administration has wrought in Iraq — and, as a result, what it has meant for the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of Bush’s failed attempt to violently reorder the politics of the Middle East; 4 million have been displaced from their homes; more than 4,000 American troops have been killed and some 60,000 maimed in a war that smart estimates suggest will cost the U.S. economy $3 trillion — it currently costs America $12 billion a month to maintain an occupation whose time-frame remains open-ended. The Financial Times reported today that the war has already cost the average American household of four (like mine) $16,000 in taxes.

And this blood-drenched disaster has done absolutely nothing to advance U.S. strategic interests; on the contrary, it has dramatically debilitated U.S. strategic influence by graphically demonstrating not the extent, but the limits of American military power. The “shock and awe” mantra that the U.S. media so dutifully chanted at the war’s commencement sounds like a pretty sick joke now.

More here.

Speaking of Cosma, he goes to town on Satoshi Kanazawa:

…Some of those people, owing to those tastes, pursue careers in academic research; the problem for them is that they are not actually very good at what they are supposed to do, which is come up with novel, insightful, important, precise, and accurate findings.  Suppose that you are such a person, and that you do not want to switch to some other line of work to which you might be better suited.  What to do?

Perhaps the best thing which could happen to you would be to run across a new and controversial theory which speaks to you at a deep level, both intellectually and temperamentally.  If you are what William James called “tender-minded”, like Teilhard de Chardin, then Medawar has already mapped out your trajectory, though nowadays the Templeton Foundation would likely be involved.  If instead you are what James called “tough-minded” — “materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, sceptical” — then edification-through-obfuscation is not an option, but it wouldn’t even occur to you.  Instead, you take your theory and you write papers about it, where you make claims about lots of hot-button topics, especially sex and current political controversies.  The papers seem to carry the signs of rigor, but are actually deeply fallacious — maybe you see this, but are so convinced the conclusions are right you don’t care, or maybe you’re so convinced of the conclusions you can’t see the errors.  (There is some peer-reviewed venue where you can publish almost arbitrarily sloppy papers, so getting into print won’t be a problem.)  Then — and this is the key — you start promoting your papers, and find that more salacious and provocative your spin on them, the bigger the response…

Ladies, gentlemen, and distinguished others, I give you Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics, the Fenimore Cooper of sociobiology, a man who has leveraged an inability to do data analysis or understand psychometrics into an official blog at Psychology Today, where he gets to advocate genocidal nuclear war as revenge for 9/11.  He seems to mean it, rather than be fukayaming.

His argument — to the extent that it is an argument and not just a wish-fulfillment fantasy — has to do with his earlier attempt to explain “why most suicide bombers are Muslims”.  Leave to one side whether his attempted explanation is coherent, two things strike one on reading that. 

Via Cosma Shalizi, here’s a tool that “tracks the flow of oil money in US politics. Click on the search tools below to find out which companies are pumping their dirty oil money into politics, who is receiving it, and how it correlates to key climate, energy and war votes.”  My preference ordering over the Democratic presidential candidates seems to nicely be negatively correlated to the amount of money received.

Dean Christopher in Discover Magazine:

4  Although famously monogamous, female Adélie penguins slip away from their mates occasionally to couple with unattached males. They exact a fee (pdf) for such a dalliance—stones to bolster their nests—not unlike certain people.

5  Some talented penguin teasers can get a gift even without putting out. Again, not unlike certain people.

6 Barbary macaques have a distinctive way to get their mates to make a sperm donation: yelling. If the female does not shout, the male almost never climaxes.

7 How do we know this? German primatologist Dana Pfefferle watched a group of macaques, counting the females’ yells and the males’ pelvic thrusts. She says this work is “quite weird, but it’s science.”

8  Here in the US of A, that kind of stuff ends up on YouTube.

Gabriel Lafitte on the revolt in Tibet, in openDemocracy:

The Tibetan revolt of March 2008, like those of 1959 and 1987, will be crushed by the overwhelming might of the Chinese military. No match could be more unequal: maroon-clad nuns and monks versus the machinery of oppression of the global rising power. In recent months, fast-response mobile tactical squads whose sole purpose is to quell the people have been overtly rehearsing on the streets of Tibetan towns for just what they are now doing.

What is the point of revolt if it is almost certainly suicidal?

This uprising has many uniquely Tibetan characteristics. At street level, a favourite item seized from Chinese shops was toilet-rolls – hardly the usual target of looters. Not that Tibetans, over millennia, have felt much need for the paper rolls, or even for the basics of the Chinese cuisine such as soy sauce. What the Tibetans did with the loo paper was to hurl it over power lines, instantly making Lhasa, and other Tibetan towns, Tibetan again. Right across the 25% of China that is ethnically and culturally Tibetan, the unrolled toilet paper looks like wind horses, the white silken khadag [or kata] scarf with which Tibetans greet and bless each other. As all Tibetans know, they carry their message on the wind: victory to the gods!

That is what this revolt is about: making Tibet Tibetan once more.

Against Happiness is not a cultural critique, it’s a love letter to Wilson’s own emotional state. As the book progresses, the potential audience gets smaller and smaller. It opens talking to all Americans, but by the second chapters he has narrowed his focus to “we melancholics,” and later to “melancholic intellectuals.” By the end he’s just curled up with his aloneness, and we somehow stumbled into his interior monologue.

He sees himself as apart from and superior to all others, referring to the American culture with a sinister “they.” “They haunt the gaudy and garish spaces of the world and ignore the dark margins… They adore the Lifetime channel. They are happy campers. They want God to bless the world. They want us to ask them about their children… They join Book-of-the-Month clubs and identify with sympathetic characters.” These happy types are to be despised and avoided. Wilson turns away from America to take long walks in the woods and contemplate dead sparrows. “I must admit then that regardless of my own efforts to take flight through many escapes America offers, my basic instinct is toward melancholia – a state I must nourish. In fostering my essential nature, I’m trying to live according to what I see as my deep calling. Granted, it’s difficult at times to hold hard to this vocation, this labor in the fields of sadness.”

more from The Smart Set here.

Johns also talked about art in different ways from the Abstract Expressionists. Barnett Newman once claimed that if “read…properly my work would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.” But in a sketchbook note from the early Sixties, Johns wrote, “Take an object, do something to it. Do something else to it.” At a time when the collectors John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Mark Rothko to paint monumental triptychs for their nondenominational chapel in Houston (1965–1966), Johns decided that “looking at a painting should not require a special kind of focus like going to church.”

Whereas Rothko’s floating expanses of dark color seemed to offer the possibility that art can provide transcendental spiritual experience, Johns’s work was down to earth. A flag or target by Johns is a real object occupying a real space, which the artist made by using certain procedures in a certain order. In his paintings you don’t find anything that Johns didn’t deliberately put into them—and that the viewer can’t see that he put into them. This is the moral center of his art. It doesn’t lie, it doesn’t deceive, and it doesn’t signify anything other than what the viewer can see in front of his eyes.

more from the NYRB here.

In 1968, Howard Sanders, a young scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, published a paradigm-shifting paper on deep-sea biology. With careful, analytical study and a heavy weight of data Sanders finally killed the prevailing theory of the depauperate, species-poor deep sea, and showed incontrovertibly that the small, mud-dwelling species – mainly polychaete worms and crustaceans – are actually more diverse in the deep than in temperate or even tropical shallow-water areas. These data, generated from what was essentially the first comprehensive but mundane sampling program, astounded scientists, and even today we speak of “before or after” the Sanders study.

William Beebe was the first man to descend into the deep sea in the early 1930s, using a highly primitive steel sphere equipped with two fused-quartz viewing ports, and open trays of soda lime to keep carbon-dioxide levels low. But without a camera or any means to take samples, Beebe was forced to recount from memory and his notes the organisms that he observed. The fantastical bioluminescent displays he reported seeing were considered with scepticism by most scientists at the time.

more from the TLS here.

From The Guardian:

Uncle Quentin is no more. The cream buns and lashings of ginger beer have been replaced by pizza and mobile phones. But Timmy the dog is still endowed with preternatural intelligence and at the end of every episode beastliness and wrongdoing are foiled by common decency and raw pluck. Sixty-six years after Enid Blyton created her child detectives, the Famous Five are to be revived in a TV cartoon series and books. Perhaps wary of the original books’ reputation for snobbery, sexism and implicit racism, the series producers have replaced Blyton’s characters with a more international generation of adventurers led by Jyoti, the Anglo-Indian daughter of George.

Julian’s place is taken by his adventure-sports loving son Max, 13, while drippy Anne is replaced by Allie, her California-born daughter, a shopping and texting-obsessed mall rat. Dylan, the son of Dick, is a geekish 11-year-old, who follows the markets on his laptop. Timmy is still Timmy. Where the original characters tackled Cornish smugglers, Famous Five: On the Case sees the new generation take on a phoney environmentalist running a pirate DVD operation.

More here. (For Bhaisab and Bhaijan who patiently read and translated Enid Blyton books for Ga and me when we were little).

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Gift
Rita Gabis

I took everything from my mother, her liquor, her ghosts,
her sweetness, her heavy lips, her breath of sorrow.
I took her waist and her spools, her ears and her thimble,
I took her green thumb, and the purple cosmos blossoms
that trembled under her kitchen window.
I took her feet and her loneliness, the cities
she lived in, the small towns, the friendless dusks,
her quilts and perfumes and fingers,
I took the sound of her dresses at midnight,
and the goat she kept as a child.
I took the crickets beneath the boards of her first houses
and her lovers; I got lost in their shadows.
I took her hatred of her father,
I ate from dishes in rooms that smelled of the sea.
I took the war and the horses that pulled the cart
that carried her mother away.
I took the odor of crushed thyme and sweat,
I took a handkercheif embroidered by my great-aunt
and the iron in her shoulder and the road signs
of old villages.
I took my mother’s maiden name and her fear of oceans,
I took her bravery and her strangeness,
I took a blessing from her and
the lullabies she whispered, drunk,
and my terror of that dark music.
I took my love for a woman
who walked through a broken doorway
with her eyes closed,
following no one.

..

From Science:

Astronomers have detected the organic molecule methane in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet for the first time and have confirmed earlier observations of water vapor. Alas, the findings don’t come close to suggesting that life has emerged on this other world, but they do contribute to a growing body of data about planetary evolution outside our own solar system. Over about 15 years, astronomers have discovered 277 planets orbiting other stars. They have relied on two techniques, nicknamed “wobble” and “dip,” which infer the mass and position of far-off planets from the effect they have on the motion and brightness of their stars. Astronomers can learn a bit more when a planet transits between its star and Earth: Changes in a star’s light spectrum may reveal chemicals in a planet’s atmosphere.

Using this technique, researchers report in tomorrow’s issue of Nature that a 40-minute gaze with the Hubble Space Telescope last May has revealed methane in the atmosphere of HD 189733b, a Jupiter-size planet orbiting close to its very bright parent star located 63 light-years away. The observation also confirmed last year’s discovery by the Spitzer Space Telescope of water vapor in the planet’s atmosphere.

More here.

Larry Greenemeier in Scientific American:

It sounds like the far-fetched plot of a sci-fi thriller: Bad guys strike down a high-ranking politician or captain of industry by hacking into and remotely tinkering with his or her pacemaker, insulin pump, implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or other medical implant. Unfortunately, new research shows such a scenario is no longer just science fiction.

Scientists from Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Washington in Seattle say they were able to launch cyber strikes against and glean private patient data from an ICD’s communication protocol while testing the device’s safety and security.

The researchers tested a Maximo DR VVEDDDR (manufactured by Minneapolis-based Medtronic, Inc.), because it is a typical ICD with pacemaking (steady, periodic electrical stimulation) and defibrillation (single, large shock) functions that communicates with an external monitoring device smaller than a laptop. The monitoring device has a handheld antenna that the patient holds over his or her chest, where the ICD is implanted, to read information wirelessly. The scientists acknowledge their findings are limited to this particular ICD (available in the U.S. since 2003), but warn that it highlights potential dangers that manufacturers must address.

More here.  [Thanks to Felix E. F. Larocca.]

(Via Andrew Sullivan) in New York Magazine:

The Platonic Blow
W. H. Auden

…
Our eyes met. I felt sick. My knees turned weak.
I couldn’t move. I didn’t know what to say.
In a blur I heard words, myself like a stranger speak
“Will you come to my room?” Then a husky voice, “O.K.”

I produced some beer and we talked. Like a little boy
He told me his story. Present address: next door.
Half Polish, half Irish. The youngest. From Illinois.
Profession: mechanic. Name: Bud. Age: twenty-four.

He put down his glass and stretched his bare arms along
The back of my sofa. The afternoon sunlight struck
The blond hairs on the wrist near my head. His chin was strong.
His mouth sucky. I could hardly believe my luck…

Over at Slate, six liberal hawks on how they got Iraq wrong:

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I’m proud of my service there, but now it’s time for us to leave,” by Phillip Carter. Posted March 18, 2008.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I forgot that security must come first if democracy is to come later,” by Josef Joffe. Posted March 18, 2008.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I thought we had a chance to stabilize an unstable region, and—I admit it—I wanted to strike back,” by Richard Cohen. Posted March 18, 2008.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I trusted Colin Powell and his circumstantial evidence—for a little while,” by Fred Kaplan. Posted March 17, 2008.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I underestimated the self-centeredness and sectarianism of the ruling elite and the social impact of 30 years of extreme dictatorship,” by Kanan Makiya. Posted March 17, 2008.

“How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I didn’t,” by Christopher Hitchens. Posted March 17, 2008.

And one ex-New Lefty (wow, written out, there’s a description where both the original and the prefixed seem terms of derision) Christopher Hitchens on how he didn’t:

None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty and unintended consequences of their own. I don’t know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam’s immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it’s not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn’t count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

To editorialize, I think that a post-Saddam Iraq without coalition presence would have looked a lot better if only because a board cross-sectarian, cross-ethnic coalition in Iraq–with internal rules on disagreement and decision making–would have been necessary to overthrow a Ba’athist state.  Call it the Solidarnosc  (Poland) model of overthrowing a dictatorship, where, at least in that case, the seeds of democratic  coexistence was developed and instituted inside the movement itself.

BORN IN 1928, Karlheinz Stockhausen grew up in rural Germany under Nazism, endured deprivation and war, flirted with poetry, and studied philosophy, finally deciding in 1950 to devote his life to defending so-called degenerate art, and to composing a new music of transcendent abstraction. Inspired by the power of radio, he first came to public attention as a white-coated, nuclear-age modernist and composer of the awe-inspiring Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths, 1955–56), a five-channel tape composition dedicated to the Catholic faith and grounded in information science and linguistics. In both his electronic and his instrumental music, Stockhausen pursued a poetics of spatiality and movement prefigured in Disney’s 1940 Fantasia but ultimately abandoned by Hollywood. To his musical inventions he brought an unparalleled fluency in acoustics and a rejection of cliché. The intense frown and piercing gaze of the young man situated in the back row on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper are straight out of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I, and the engraving’s symbolism of hourglass, numerology, astrology, and geometry—even of the carpenter’s nails on the floor—is also strangely appropriate. Stockhausen’s music is intelligent, haunting, elusive, intimidating, and curiously revealing, to the performer or listener who is prepared to work for it, of an inexplicable and profound beauty. Underpinning the invertible Bauhaus graphics and jazzy exuberance of Zyklus for solo percussionist (1959), for example, is a delightful and truly genial dissertation on chance and determinism.

more from artforum here.

Howie Kahn: Why Vieira de Mello?

Samantha Power: I think brokenness is the operative issue of our time. Broken souls, broken hearts, broken places. And I don’t know of any historical figure, or any contemporary figure, who, as much as he did, bumped up against brokenness and tried to bring his experience to bear to mend—not fix—but mend, heal, and improve people’s lives. I thought, at a time when we all talk about transnational threats and global challenges, it makes sense to do a book on a global guy, a guy who lived in that world, who crossed borders. All of our contemporary heroes are still very parochial in a way—still national, still people who operate within states rather than among them.

It took until the end for me to really understand what the book was: It’s like The Education of Henry Adams, but about a peacemaker, a humanitarian, someone who deals with these broken places. It allows people to access him at the beginning of the book as an idealist and tolearn with him in his moments of adaptation, to witness the mistakes he’s making so that we don’t have to make the mistakes ourselves.

more from Triple Canopy here.

Dostoevsky famously railed against Turgenev not for attending an execution, but for being unable to watch the final, grisly moment when the condemned’s head was chopped off. “No person has the right to turn away and ignore what happens on earth,” Dostoevsky later fumed to a friend, “and there are supreme moral reasons for that.” I am reminded of this Russian literary dispute whenever I watch the films of Michael Haneke, the German-born Austrian director who has managed to achieve simultaneously the status of revered auteur (complete with a MOMA retrospective and Cannes acclaim) and reviled-Austrian-at-large. (Usually, one is first the provocateur, then the master, but Haneke, in a Teutonic coup, has managed to inhabit both roles concurrently). His genius, it seems to me, is to straddle without comprise this Dostoevsky/Turgenev divide: Philosophically, he is the former; formally, the latter. His heart, no doubt, is with Dostoevsky, but he does not (as Dostoevsky surely would if he survived long enough to wield a Hi-Def camera) force us to watch the beheading. Rather, he forces us to watch ourselves turning away from it.

more from TNR here.

From The Guardian:

Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author and technological visionary best known for the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at his home in Sri Lanka, aged 90. Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books in a career spanning seven decades, died of heart failure linked to the post-polio syndrome that had kept him wheelchair-bound for years. His forecasts often earned him derision from peers and social commentators. But although his dreams of intergalactic space travel and colonisation of nearby planets were never realised in his lifetime, Clarke’s predictions of a host of technological breakthroughs were uncannily accurate.

He was one of the first people to suggest the use of satellites for communications, and in the 1940s forecast that man would reach the moon by the year 2000 – an idea that experts at first dismissed as nonsense. The astronomer Patrick Moore, a friend of Clarke’s since the 1930s, said: “He was a great visionary, a brilliant science fiction writer and a great forecaster. He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970, while I said 1980 – and he was right.”

More here.