The Eyes of Flesh

My
father
dreams
that I
shall be
a wife.

Setting me
up in weeds
outside a
house where
beds of flowers
plunge
into fertilizer (he
would plant
me there)
with greenish braids
veined on my
ivory neck
twisted above
blood-checked gingham
in a knot
of love.

All his tears
fall from
his glassy rimmed
spectacles
to awaken him.

Father, sleep
in Jerusalem.
I hate
the plastic
fixtures
in this place
where we
erase
my childhood. For
a house
is where
deep
purposes are
broken
off.

by Sandra Hochman

from No More Masks!; Doubleday Anchor, 1973

From The Guardian:

Enid Blyton's work was snubbed by the BBC for decades, it has been revealed. How could they resist?

Blyton died in 1968, and for a while it looked as if her work would die with her. So redolent of the 1940s and 50s were her books that the educationalists who held sway in the 1970s and 80s, echoing the disdain of their forerunners at the BBC, hated them. Noddy had long been dismissed as “the most egocentric, joyless, snivelling and pious anti-hero in the history of British fiction”, while a stage version of Noddy in Toyland was labelled racist.

But for better or worse, Blyton helped shape me. My generation (I was born in 1957) was saturated in her books. I hold no candle for the insipid Noddy, but The Secret Seven captivated the nine-year-old me, and The Famous Five thrilled me a couple of years later. Children of that age now, assailed by computers, are far more advanced, and you could knock a couple of years off those ages. But my bet is that these books still work for children, even though adults invariably consider them vapid. The psychologist Michael Woods once suggested why children and their parents never see eye to eye over Blyton: “She was really a child at heart, a person who never developed emotionally beyond the basic infantile level. She thought as a child, and she wrote as a child; of course the craft of an extremely competent adult writer is there, but the basic feeling is pre-adolescent.”

More here. (Note: For Bhaisab and Bhaijan who read the Enid Blyton books to Ga and me when we could not read and for Abbas to whom Ga and I read them in turn. We love the Famous Five!)

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Zahi Hawass regards the Rosetta Stone, like so much else, as stolen property languishing in exile. “We own that stone,” he told Al Jazeera, speaking as the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. The British Museum does not agree — at least not yet. But never underestimate Dr. Hawass when it comes to this sort of custody dispute. He has prevailed so often in getting pieces returned to what he calls their “motherland” that museum curators are scrambling to appease him. Last month, after Dr. Hawass suspended the Louvre’s excavation in Egypt, the museum promptly returned the ancient fresco fragments he sought. Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art made a pre-emptive display of its “appreciation” and “deep respect” by buying a piece of a shrine from a private collector so that it could be donated to Egypt.

Now an official from the Neues Museum in Berlin is headed to Egypt to discuss Dr. Hawass’s demand for its star attraction, a bust of Nefertiti. These gestures may make immediate pragmatic sense for museum curators worried about getting excavation permits and avoiding legal problems. But is this trend ultimately good for archaeology?

More here.

This vision of the recent past as already shrouded in dust acquires, in the works of a more dialectically or perversely inclined Modernism, the lineaments of the fantastic or of an oddly eroticized appreciation of decay. In the section of the Arcades Project entitled “Boredom, Eternal Return,” Walter Benjamin briefly refers to the role of dust in the nineteenth-century interior, a substance at once magical and mundane: “Plush as dust collector. Mystery of dustmotes playing in the sunlight. Dust and the ‘best room’…. Other arrangements to stir up dust: the trains of dresses.”4 In the decaying Paris arcades—the furred arteries of the modern city—dust both occludes and outlines the once-novel commodity and its slow desuetude. For Marcel Proust, too, dust was simultaneously to be feared (in the form of the lime-tree pollen that brought on his asthma, or the choking fumes of the coal fire in 
his bedroom) and welcomed for the physical and aesthetic veil it cast about him as he wrote; Proust lived his last decade in a cloud of medicinal powders, propped up among material remnants of his past—photographs, books, and furniture—that he refused to allow his servants to dust.

more from Brian Dillon at Cabinet here.

What makes economies grow? It’s a question that has occupied thinkers for centuries. Most of us would tick off things like education levels, openness to trade, natural resources, and political systems. Here’s one you might not have considered: hell. A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies – and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell.

more from Michael Fitzgerald at The Boston Globe here.

by Tolu Ogunlesi

To the outside world, we are all “Africans”.

‘Africa’, that continent of “colourful emergencies” (a term coined by novelist Helen Oyeyemi in a 2005 essay); ‘African’, that oversized brush dripping a paint handy for tarring every living thing found within a thousand-mile radius of the Sahara desert.

As Africans – and by extension African writers – we’re supposed to be united by geography, culture and experience (mostly of the negative sort), and thus a herd of interchangeable entities. There is after all such a thing as African literature, written by African writers, dealing with African issues – poverty, wars, AIDS, Aid, military dictatorships, coup d’états, corruption, civilian dictatorships, and very lately, dubious power sharings.

Never mind that Nigeria and Uganda are no more similar (in my opinion) than America and Russia. Or that Nigeria’s religious dichotomy (and the resulting tensions) confers on it a greater similarity with India than with South Africa. Or that Nigeria and fellow English-speaking Ghana are separated by two impregnable walls of language known as Benin and Togo. Or that a conference proclaimed as a “Festival of Contemporary African Writing” will very likely be no more than a Festival of Anglophone African Writing.

Chimamanda Adichie’s short story, Jumping Monkey Hill (first published in Granta 95, and which appears in her story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck) – which William Skidelsky, writing in the Guardian (UK) calls “the most obviously autobiographical (and funniest) of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck” – tells the story of an “African Writers’ Workshop” for which the British Council has selected participants.

Read more »

Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne. Moby Dick. 2009.

Moby-Dick is the second show in a trilogy of Wattis Institute exhibitions that are based on canonical American novels. The first, The Wizard of Oz, was presented in fall 2008; the third will be The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in fall 2010. All three stories have major themes related to exploration and (self-)discovery, and the corresponding exhibitions function as metaphorical journeys through which the audience experiences various notions of America's reality, both contemporary and historic. Established and emerging contemporary artists from around the world are invited to address the key themes of the books and the historical moments in which they were written. Many of the artists create new commissions specifically for the shows.

More here.

Interrogator’s Notebook

We learned to translate minesweeper
from Russian, read a relief map upside down,
empty a man with the least effort possible.

A soldier is an open book when the ink
is his fingertip. Sometimes even the subtle
tricks will do: waking a prisoner every few

minutes, pulling triggers of unloaded revolvers,
smiles that mimic a closing vise. We wrote
about stolen battle plans, officer predilections

and desperate meanderings. But the truth
can only be found inside men and what we do
when no can see our hate and intervene.

The Interrogator’s Notebook is the scariest
tome I know, more frightening when closed.
That means the questions have ended

and another long night begins for captured
troops who warm themselves with shadows
as a roof of desert stars pierce their eyes,

shards of light pulsing beneath the skin.
If God is the purveyor of all things unseen,
we should pray in every language we know.

by Martin Ott

from New Plains Review, Fall 2009

From Edge:

[SEAN CARROLL:] Why does the universe looks the way it does?
This seems on the one hand a very obvious question. On the other hand, it is an interestingly strange question, because we have no basis for comparison. The universe is not something that belongs to a set of many universes. We haven't seen different kinds of universes so we can say, oh, this is an unusual universe, or this is a very typical universe. Nevertheless, we do have ideas about what we think the universe should look like if it were “natural”, as we say in physics. Over and over again it doesn't look natural. We think this is a clue to something going on that we don't understand.

One very classic example that people care a lot about these days is the acceleration of the universe and dark energy. In 1998 astronomers looked out at supernovae that were very distant objects in the universe and they were trying to figure out how much stuff there was in the universe, because if you have more and more stuff — if you have more matter and energy — the universe would be expanding, but ever more slowly as the stuff pulled together. What they found by looking at these distant bright objects of type 1A supernovae was that, not only is the universe expanding, but it's accelerating. It's moving apart faster and faster. Our best explanation for this is something called dark energy, the idea that in every cubic centimeter of space, every little region of space, if you empty it out so there are no atoms, no dark matter, no radiation, no visible matter, there is still energy there. There is energy inherent in empty spaces. We can measure how much energy you need in empty space to fit this data, this fact that the universe is accelerating. This vacuum energy pushes on the universe. It provides an impulse. It keeps the universe accelerating. We get an answer and the answer is 10^-8 ergs per cubic centimeter, if that is very meaningful.

More here. (Note: You can also enjoy watching this intelligent conversation with the brilliant and masterful Dr. Carroll on video)

From The Guardian:

She's 81 and growing frail, but revered author and poet Maya Angelou has lost none of her legendary wisdom and humour. In a rare interview, she explains why she's not about to retire.

During a trip to Senegal, Maya Angelou called Samia, a friend she had made in Paris several years before, and was invited over for dinner. Passing a room where people apparently clung to the wall to avoid standing on the rug, Angelou became incensed. “I had known a woman in Egypt who would not allow her servants to walk on her rugs, saying that only she, her family and friends were going to wear out her expensive carpets. Samia plummeted in my estimation.”

Keen to challenge her host's hauteur, she walked back and forth across the carpet. “The guests who were bunched up on the sidelines smiled at me weakly.” Soon afterwards, servants came, rolled up the rug, took it away and brought in a fresh one. Samia then came in and announced that they would be serving one of Senegal's most popular dishes in honour of Angelou: “Yassah, for our sister from America… Shall we sit?” And as the guests went to the floor where glasses, plates, cutlery and napkins were laid out on the carpet, Angelou realised the full extent of her faux pas and was “on fire with shame”. “Clever and so proper Maya Angelou, I had walked up and down over the tablecloth… In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity.” Such is an example of the 28 short epistles that comprise Letter To My Daughter, Angelou's latest book.

More here.

“Wer groß denkt, muß irren. A great thinker is bound to make mistakes,” Board Number One quotes him. Heidegger, the man whose philosophy came very close to the Nazi spirit in the 1930s, is notorious for not apologising for the Holocaust and not removing offensive passages. Accused in his 1929 book on Kant of forcing German philosophy into an alien mould, he insisted postwar on the unaltered text, since “everyone keeps accusing me of force” and “thinking people learn all the better from their mistakes”. If this is one of a number of indirect “apologies”, it seems grudging. Much of the problem was character. He hated confrontation. As his supercritical student Karl Löwith put it: “The natural expression of his face included a working forehead, veiled face, and lowered eyes, which now and then would take stock of a situation with a short and swift glance. If someone temporarily forced him into a direct look by speaking to him, then this extremely disharmonious face, jagging angularly in all its features, would become somewhat reserved, wily, shifting and downright hypocritical…What was natural for it was the expression of cautious mistrust, at times full of peasant cunning.” The emotionally hopeless letters Heidegger wrote to Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political philosopher with whom he fell in love when she was his student, are a key. Evasive in love, he was stubborn in achievement and recalcitrant by nature. Like his semi-literate parents, he was a head-down, uncommunicative type in the old rural mould. The extraordinary thing is that he also gave this stubborn, self-concealing character to truth and philosophised on that basis.

more from Lesley Chamberlain at Standpoint here.

In a noble if melodramatic way, Koestler had once held a sort of dress rehearsal for suicide with Walter Benjamin, as both contemplated being taken alive by the Gestapo. (He kept the pills Benjamin gave him, while the latter swallowed his on the Spanish border a few days later.) By comparison, his own suicide in 1983 was an affair very much lacking in grandeur. His mind and his body were certainly both giving way, but he seems to have allowed or perhaps encouraged his healthy wife, Cynthia, to join him in the extinction. An earlier study by David Cesarani was lurid to the point of sensationalism about Koestler’s callousness toward his wives and other women (to say nothing of other people’s wives). It has been plausibly alleged that in his compulsive seductions—of Simone de Beauvoir, for one—he did not always stop quite short of physical coercion. Scammell does his best to plead extenuation here, but is obviously uncomfortable. Just as many of the people who believe in numinous coincidence and supernatural intervention are secretly hoping to prove that it is they themselves who are the pet of the universe, so many of those who overcompensate for inferiority are possessed of titanic egos and regard other people as necessary but incidental. At least this case is a tragic one when considered as a life story, because it shows us what a noble mind was there o’erthrown.

more from Christopher Hitchens at The Atlantic here.