Over the course of the publication’s intermittent production until 1974, the editorial group’s location rotated among cities in Europe and the United States, during short, intense periods when the group lived together; Suck also produced the Wet Dream Film Festival of banned erotic and pornographic films in Amsterdam, which took place in 1970 and 1971, and published a book (Wet Dreams: Films and Adventures) commemorating the festivals in 1973. “Everyone was lovely,” Williams recalls of the era in Haynes’s 1984 autobiography, Thanks for Coming! “Suddenly the vision of everyone Coming Together could only be physical . . . no longer intellectual. The sex politics of Reich, the belief of Auden that we must love one another or die, the holy orgiastics of Willie Blake, God’s Rake, had to burst through. . . . Suck was a display of pantheistic and revolutionary Schtupping. You cannot fuck everyone in the world, but at least you can try.” As Suck lore has it, the magazine’s first editorial meeting took place in the London offices of the Transatlantic Review, during which Williams and Shrimpton excused themselves to make love in an adjoining room. “Later,” Haynes wryly writes, “I looked back on this meeting as our first mistake. We should all five have made love together.”

more from artforum here.

From Tribeca Film Festival:

The South Asian community was out in force for the premiere of Mehreen Jabbar’s (pictured right) Ramchand Pakistani on Monday night, and though the crowd was certainly engaged by the all-too-topical true story, in which eight-year-old Ramchand accidentally wanders over the Pakistani border with India and winds up imprisoned for almost five years, it was star Nandita Das (pictured left) who had the packed theater in the palm of her hand.

Das drew an ovation for her almost-wordless performance as Ramchand’s mother, Champa, and got another round of applause upon opening her mouth to riff on Jabbar’s explanation of how she lassoed the Bollywood superstar into her debut feature. “I told Mehreen that I’d do the film, but only if I could play Ramchand,” quipped Das, who went on to note that this was, in fact, her second time performing for Jabbar, following a short film the two women had worked on together.

According to the director’s father, Javed Jabbar, who also produced Ramchand Pakistani, Das isn’t the only person with Ramchand-envy.

More here.

From American Scientist:

Our ability to use words is a critical part of our species’ mastery of language. In practice, that mastery comes down to saying what we mean without having to think too much about it. When we have something to say, we first retrieve the correct words from memory, then execute the steps for producing the word. When these cognitive processes don’t mesh smoothly, conversation stops. Suppose you meet someone at a party. A coworker walks up, you turn to introduce your new acquaintance and suddenly you can’t remember your colleague’s name! My hunch is that almost all readers are nodding their heads, remembering a time that a similar event happened to them. These experiences are called tip-of-the-tongue (or TOT) states. A TOT state is a word-finding problem, a temporary and often frustrating inability to retrieve a known word at a given moment. TOT states are universal, occurring in many languages and at all ages.

People resolve TOT states using a variety of methods. Some are conscious strategies, such as mentally going through the alphabet to find the word or consulting a book or person. However, the most common method for resolving TOT states is an indirect approach: relaxing and directing one’s attention elsewhere. The missing word suddenly comes to mind without thinking about it. These “aha!” moments are known as “pop-ups.” The purpose of this article is to explore the cognitive processes that cause pop-up resolutions and to document changes in these processes with healthy aging. The ability to resolve TOT states changes significantly in old age, which is particularly important because older adults have more TOT states than do younger adults.

More here.

Dear Readers,

I am sorry for the disappointment to many of you about the Dawkins lecture. We were under the impression that the NY Academy of Sciences is providing a lot more space than it turns out they are. Had I found out early enough about this, I would have informed you, but I spent almost 24 hours in transit from Italy to NYC (Brixen to Verona to Milan to Frankfurt to NY!) and arrived dead-tired late last night.

I will be interviewing Richard Dawkins for 3QD, and will post a video of that interview soon. Also, I will see if it is possible to get a video of the lecture itself and, if so, will post that as well. Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions for questions to ask Prof. Dawkins, please leave them in the comments section of this post.

Again, I am sorry about all the confusion, and that not everyone who wants to will be able to attend.

Yours,

Abbas

Here is a May Day story I told Amitava Kumar while he was reviewing Eqbal Ahmad’s Selected Writings for The Nation.

This past summer, Robin Varghese, a former student of Ahmad’s at Hampshire, recounted a story to me that he had heard his teacher tell in class. When Ahmad was in his 20s, he received a Rotary fellowship to come to the United States for further studies. He knew that he wanted to see four things when he left the subcontinent. Three of those four sites he visited en route to this country. He went to the Highgate Cemetery in London to pay homage to Karl Marx; he also visited 21B Baker Street, for its well-known literary landmark; and he wandered through the British Museum, where his reaction was “Return the loot!” The fourth place that Ahmad wanted to visit was in the United States, in Chicago, and it was the site of the Haymarket riot of 1886. Ahmad wanted to go there because, as a boy, he had been taken to May Day celebrations in India. He now wanted to lay flowers at the Haymarket monument to honor the striking workers who had marched in the first May Day parade.

But several years were to pass before he could visit Chicago. He had arrived in the United States in 1957 to study history at Occidental College; a year later he enrolled at Princeton as a graduate student in political science and Middle East history. His research then took him to Tunisia, an even further detour from Chicago. It was not until 1967, during his three-year stint as a teacher at Cornell, that Ahmad found himself giving a job talk in the city where in 1886 laboring men and women had fought to win the eight-hour workday. He left his hotel, picked up a bouquet of flowers and, when he arrived at Haymarket, asked where he could find the monument. No one seemed to know of it. Finally someone pointed it out to him. It was a statue of a policeman who had preserved law and order on that day long ago. Ahmad brought the flowers back with him and gave them to his girlfriend, Julie Diamond, who eventually became his wife.

In 1968, in a speech at an antiwar sit-in, Ahmad, who was now a fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago, spoke of his search for the Haymarket monument. He told the audience how shocked he had been that the historical memory of workers’ resistance, recognized and celebrated throughout the world, had not been honored in its own place of origin. Not long after, two FBI agents showed up at Ahmad’s door. They wanted to know what he had said about Haymarket and who had been in the audience. It turned out that the Weathermen had just blown up the offending statue of the Chicago policeman.

“I am inclined to tell stories,” Eqbal Ahmad had once said, and, in one of his interviews, he offered a vignette about the visit from the two FBI agents:

They first asked me if I was a citizen of the United States. I said, “No.” They said, “Don’t you feel that as a guest in this country you should not be going about criticizing the host country’s government?” I said, “I hear your point, but I do want you to know that while I am not a citizen, I am a taxpayer. And I thought it was a fundamental principle of American democracy that there is no taxation without representation. I have not been represented about this war. And my people, Asian people, are being bombed right now.” Surprisingly, the FBI agents looked deeply moved and blushed at my throwing this argument at them. They were speechless. Then I understood something about the importance of having some congruence between American liberal traditions…and our rhetoric and tactics.”

(Interviews with Tilly on causal mechanisms, individualism and cognitive science, state formation and other issues in political science and sociology can be found at YouTube.)

[H/t: Pablo Policzer.]

Say it’s 1958, you are the wife of a famous poet, and it is your turn to have the Partisan Review gang over for drinks and barbed conversation. Maybe the line from Delmore Schwartz’s poem (“All poets’ wives have rotten lives”) runs through your head as you finish the grunt work of the hostess: emptying ashtrays, dumping half-eaten food into the trash, piling up as many glasses as you can carry to the sink. If you are Elizabeth Hardwick, your husband, Robert Lowell, is most likely passed out drunk or off having an affair-slash-breakdown with another woman. Lowell or no Lowell, there is much to do before you sleep: sweeping the floors, rubbing rings off places where coasters should have been, making a cursory pass over the upholstery, opening the windows to air out the smoke of a hundred pensive and hostile cigarettes. Thus the rhyming line of Schwartz’s poem: “Their husbands look at them like knives.” Elizabeth Hardwick as a critic was like Elizabeth Hardwick as a hostess: she did the grunt work as gracefully as the glamorous work, slipping in the plot, the theme, and her unlikely brilliant discoveries as if it were as easy as introducing two long-lost friends, in the meantime leaving no glass unwashed, no surface unpolished.

more from The Believer here.

Europe has never been a matter of boundaries alone. “European civilization has entered into the truth, into the plan of Providence”, as the historian-statesman François Guizot put it. “It advances according to the ways of God. That is the rational principle of its superiority.” Borders themselves – the Sava River, the Bosphorus, the Urals – were always negotiable. Because it stood for so much more than mere territory, Europe’s nineteenth-century Powers had no difficulty universalizing their values in its name. Backed by their temporary but highly impressive technological and military superiority, they were able to impose the emergent rules of their state system on the rest of the world as the epitome of civilized order.

Guizot’s paradigm blossomed into a story of global progress under European guardianship. In law and in war, the Victorians and their successors held fast to the idea of a single “standard of civilization” that marked Europe (and honorary members like the North Americans) out from barbarians and savages. Africa and Asia’s shortcomings they attributed to biology, or to the pernicious impact of ossified religious and political traditions. Either way, there was, as the twentieth century dawned, nothing innocent about the concept of civilization, and it was impossible to separate it from the Eurocentric character of the world and the international system that had evolved with it.

more from the TLS here.

For casual museum-goers, Spanish art ends with Guernica, Picasso’s monumental protest, painted in 1937, of the Fascist bombing of the Basque capital during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso had left Spain for good in 1904; it was from his self-imposed exile in Paris that he pulled down his agonizing painted curtain on his native land. Aside from the old joker (and Franco supporter) Salvador Dalí and the respected Catalan abstract painter Antoni Tàpies, it is hard to think of a Spanish artist of any stature who emerged during Gen. Franco’s seemingly endless reign of repression and national stagnation following World War II. A retrospective of painter and sculptor Antonio López García at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, makes a strong case that this intense Realist, now in his 70s and much admired in Spain, deserves an international audience. His arresting Sink and Mirror, like certain paintings of his idol Velásquez, combines two radically different perspectives: a head-on view of the mirror and a plunging view down toward the sink. The hauntingly empty mirror adds to our sense of visual disorientation.

more from Slate here.

From The Guardian:

Rather than blunting her criticism, these counterattacks have made Kakutani one of the world’s most influential book reviewers. In her early 50s, she has worked at the New York Times since 1979, and despite being described as “reclusive” — avoiding literary parties and interviews — her prominence is such that she once featured as a plot device in an episode of Sex and the City. Little is known about her other than that she is a Yale graduate, her father was a mathematician, she likes the New York Yankees and may well be friends with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

What’s significant is the criticism. In 1998, Kakutani was awarded a Pulitzer for her “fearless and authoritative” journalism, and her work has been described as “destination programming”, meaning that it’s required reading for literary types. Of all the authors who have bitten back, the most offensive was the late Norman Mailer, who described Kakutani as “a one-woman kamikaze” in 2005, and said he didn’t know what had “put the hair up her immortal Japanese ass” and that the only reason the Times didn’t fire her was because she was “a twofer”, being “Asiatic” and “feminist”.

Why Mailer thought the Times would want to fire someone with the guts to describe one of his books as “silly, self-important and at times inadvertently comical” is beyond me. Other authors take note. Attack Kakutani, and only one person ends up looking stupid.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Welcome to Spelkeland, or, to give it its proper name, the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, run by the cognitive psychologist Prof Elizabeth Spelke, which is dedicated to understanding what shapes the most powerful known learning machine – the infant mind. Great philosophers have mused for millennia about human consciousness and how it makes sense of its surroundings. Like any good scientist, Spelke has turned philosophical hot air into firm experimental data that suggests that we are born with a significant amount of ‘core knowledge’ hardwired into our brains.

Spelke is arguably the most influential figure in the relatively new field of baby brain research, and has been named by Time magazine as one of America’s best in a list of ‘brilliant researchers who are the envy of the world’. One prominent British experimental psychologist, Prof Bruce Hood of the University of Bristol, says she has ‘revolutionised infancy mind research’. The psychologist and writer Steven Pinker, Spelke’s colleague at Harvard, is another who acknowledges her profound impact, and says her ingenuity has shown that ‘babies are smarter than we thought’.

More here.