For Justin E. H. Smith:

The Unknown Citizen

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word,
…..he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the
…..Greater Community.
Except for the war till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied him employers, Fudge Motors, Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The press are convinced he bought a paper evey day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal
…..in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was
…..fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital
…..but left it cured.
Both producers Research and High Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the
…..Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A gramophone, a radio, a car and a Frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinion for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace;
…..when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to
…..the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for
…..a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered
…..with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly
…..have heard.

by W.H. Auden

From The New York Times:

In 1960, one year after Nina Simone’s first album, “Little Girl Blue,” was released, the poet Langston Hughes struggled to put the appeal of Simone’s music and presence — that dusky voice, that unblinking gaze — into words. “She is strange,” Hughes wrote in The Chicago Daily Defender. “So are the plays of Brendan Behan, Jean Genet and Bertolt Brecht. She is far out, and at the same time common. So are raw eggs in Worcestershire.” Hughes was just getting warmed up. “She is different. So was Billie Holiday, St. Francis and John Donne. So is Mort Sahl, so is Ernie Banks.” He continued: “You either like her or you don’t. If you don’t, you won’t. If you do — wheee-ouuueu! You do!”

Simone soon befriended Hughes, and through him she dove into the beating heart of that era’s young black intelligentsia, becoming close to both James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, who would become godmother to Simone’s daughter. That Simone was absurdly talented was already clear. But her new friends helped crystallize her inchoate political thinking. One result was a stunning song, “Mississippi Goddam,” written by Simone in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham church bombings and the killing of the civil rights advocate Medgar Evers. In many respects it represented the pinnacle of what would become a long and tangled career. “Alabama’s got me so upset,” Simone sang. “Tennessee made me lose my rest./But everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam.”

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

Can a clean smell make you a better person?

That’s the provocative suggestion of a recent study in the journal Psychological Science. A team of researchers found that when people were in a room recently spritzed with a citrus-scented cleanser, they behaved more fairly when playing a classic trust game. In another experiment, the smell of cleanser made subjects more likely to volunteer for a charity. The findings suggest that simply smelling something clean makes people clean up their behavior – that a smell can provoke a mental leap between cleanliness and morality, making people think differently about the world around them. The authors even suggested that clean smells could be employed as a tool to influence how people act.

The idea that a smell can affect something as complex as ethical behavior seems surprising, not least because smell has long been seen as a “lower” sense, playing on our emotions and instincts while our reason and judgment operate on another plane. But research increasingly shows that smell doesn’t just affect how we feel: It affects how we think, in ways that are just beginning to be understood.

Other studies have confirmed that scents can trigger generosity, and that they affect our decision-making processes and judgments rather than just emotions. Even when smells aren’t on the forefront of our consciousness, our minds are trying to match them with other sensory information to interpret our surroundings.

More here.

Denis Pelli at his NYU website:

Sometimes, seeking publicity is condemned as self centered. I think this criticism misses the point. It’s good to like one’s work, and it’s a mistake to suggest that getting publicity is selfish. Today, more and more, we need to convince the public of the merit of our work. For example, if we are to help recruit undergraduates, they and their parents need to hear of us. When we publish in journals, we reach only our professional colleagues. To reach the rest of the public, we must go beyond the journals: either through publicity about our articles or by publishing in other media.

In my own experience, trying to get noticed beyond journals has been scary, frustrating, and hard. Which efforts matter, and which don’t? With journals, we’re insiders. With other media, we’re outsiders knocking at the door. And the rules are very different.

Twitter has many fans and many critics. I wrote an article in Seed about the future of literacy and publishing which was widely tweeted, attracting ten thousand visitors and a thousand Twitter and blog links (including the New York Times). That’s a lot of people reacting to my work, but, of course, it’s mostly the lay public, not university colleagues. So, it was exciting, but I couldn’t figure out the equivalent in the real currency of journal citations. I finally realized that I was asking the wrong question.

More here.

Palestine,” from which this is excerpted, is a memoir in monologue by writer and actress Najla Said, daughter of the late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said. Produced by Twilight Theatre Company in association with New York Theatre Workshop, it opens Wednesday at the 4th Street Theatre in New York and runs through March 21.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Tuesday, July 11, 2006: I am in Beirut. My friend Alex calls and asks if I want to spend the day at the beach in Tyre with him and some other friends. A day on the most beautiful beach in Lebanon — why would I ever say no? We get down to Tyre and swim in the bluest water you can imagine.

The next day I stop in an Internet cafe. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that more than a few people have their computers on the CNN home page and are looking at “breaking news.” I ask that most common question in Lebanon — “Fee shee?” — which means, literally, “Is there something?” I'm told that it is no big deal; it's in the south, near the border; Hezbollah has captured some Israeli soldiers again. This is a common occurrence down south: Israelis capture Hezbollah soldiers, Hezbollah captures Israeli soldiers, back and forth and on and on. Figuring out “who started it” is like playing the chicken-or-the-egg game.

I go home early. I wake at 6 a.m to the familiar sound of bombs. There goes the airport. I guess I'm not going home.

The Israeli invasion of 2006 has officially begun. And I am here again, totally alone. My Lebanese family members are so accustomed to the sounds of war that they aren't much help. THEY can tell exactly how far away a bomb is and what kind of bomb it is; I can only hear that it sounds like it is downstairs.

“No, that's an echo over the mountain; it sounds like it's near Sidon,” my uncle might say.

But how can he tell???!!

“They're bombing the south; they are completely destroying Tyre; they're not bombing us.”

I think of the families I swam near the day before — they must all be either dead . . . or at least homeless.

“OH MY GOD . . . but I was JUST THERE.”

“Good thing you went on Tuesday and not Wednesday. HA HA HA HA HA.”

(This is Lebanese humor.)

More here.

From PoetryFoundation:

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden ShovelBy Gwendolyn Brooks

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American writer. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985. Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas to David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Wims, their first child. Her mother was a former school teacher who left teaching for marriage and motherhood, and her father, the son of a runaway slave who fought in the Civil War, had given up his ambition to become a doctor to work as a janitor because he could not afford to attend medical school. When Brooks was only six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she grew up. Her home life was stable and loving, although she encountered racial prejudice in her neighborhood and in her schools. She attended Hyde Park High School, the leading white high school in the city, before transferring to all-black Wendell Phillips. Brooks eventually attended an integrated school, Englewood High School. In 1936, she graduated from Wilson Junior College. These four schools gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city that continued to influence her work.

Her enthusiasm for reading and writing was encouraged by her parents. Her father provided a desk and bookshelves, and her mother took her, when she was in high school, to meet Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson.

More here.

In Eurozine:

AC Grayling: We are in profound agreement on many things; you and I share the much same premises, the same desires and ambitions, the same sentiments. I regard us as comrades in the same line of inquiry. But, for the purposes of discussing your book with you, I will at times play the devil’s advocate. However, there are one or two points where we have a real difference of view. That is the background against which I shall be asking you the following questions. First, a point about deism in the eighteenth century. Many people who were then atheist couldn’t say so, because it was socially unacceptable. So they assumed the label of deist. Some people who did so were probably serious about it, for example Voltaire. But a lot of other people were probably atheists. Is that your understanding?

Tzvetan Todorov: Definitely. But some of the important thinkers of the Enlightenment I think were deists. And there is one character who plays a central role for me, biographically, and this is Rousseau. He is a very singular representative of the Enlightenment, since his point was fighting against the philosophes, the extreme of the Enlightenment. He always claimed that he had to fight on two fronts, against the fanatics on one side and atheists on the other. He had a certain sort of deism, theism.

An old one, but a good one, and one with Robert Pinsky.

Ta-Nehisi Coates posts a poem by Joseph Brodsky and says, “I missed out on Brodsky, and what it means to memorize a poem, and walk around with those lines in my head.” I did have the good fortune of taking a few classes from Brodsky and knowing him socially. He was pretty insistent on every one of us memorizing the poem for the day, at least in the lyric poetry class if not the Russian poetry class. I can still recite most of the poems in class by heart. One of the commenters on Coates’ post notes how much the poem “May 24, 1980” reads like a narrative. Funnily, I was reminded yesterday and today, well before I read Coates’ post, of Brodsky’s poem Представление (Presentation) by the discussion on Tony Judt’s NYRB blog piece on 1960s radicals in Europe and the Communist East. I don’t know of a translation of the poem and would butcher it if I tried one myself, but those who read Russian may find it quite remarkable and an insightful commentary on the experiment, nightmare, farce that happened in Eastern Europe in the last century.  

Elizabeth Alexander in The New Yorker:

Clifton was born in Depew, New York, in 1937. She published her first book of poems, “Good Times,” in 1969, and in the early seventies began publishing what eventually amounted to twenty-two children’s books, most which imagined a boy named Everett Anderson. She taught for many years at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and from 1979 to 1985 was the state’s poet laureate. Among many prestigious awards, she won the National Book Award, for “Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000”; the 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize; and, just a few weeks ago, the Frost Prize, from the Poetry Society of America. Many readers were familiar with Clifton’s work from the Dodge Poetry Festival and from Bill Moyers’s “Life of the Mind” series.

No matter how elaborate the words they use, poets strive to tell elemental truths. As Clifton often reminded her acolytes, “truth and facts are two different things.” Time and again, she made luminous poems premised on clear truth-telling, but always with a twist, and with space for evocation and mystery. Her style was as understated as the lowercase type of her poems, a quiet, even woman’s voice telling sometimes terrible truths. Like psalms, koans, and old folks’ proverbs, Clifton’s poems invite meditation and return.

That pure distillation is one of the remarkable technical accomplishments of the work. She wrote physically small poems with enormous and profound inner worlds. Of great poets whose poems are kin to Clifton’s, I think of Emily Dickinson; to Dickinson’s intense compression Clifton adds explicit historical consciousness. And of Pablo Neruda: Clifton subtracts hyperbole from his elemental clarity.

Clifton’s poems are committed to truth-telling in the face of silence.

Cord Jefferson makes the case in The Root:

In October 2008, amidst claims that one of its subsidiaries was knowingly hiring illegal immigrants, North Carolina poultry producer House of Raeford Farms initiated a systematic conversion of its workforce.

Following a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid that nabbed 300 undocumented workers at a Columbia Farms processing plant in Columbia, S.C., a spooked House of Raeford quietly began replacing immigrants with native-born labor at all of its plants. Less than a year later, House of Raeford’s flagship production line in Raeford, N.C., had been transformed, going from more than 80 percent Latino to 70 percent African-American, according to a report by the Charlotte Observer.

Under President George W. Bush, showy workplace raids like the one that befell Raeford were standard—if widely despised—fare. And though the Obama administration has committed itself to dialing down the practice, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has occasionally found herself the bearer of bad news to immigration activists who expected the raids to end entirely under her watch.

For the most part, the workplace crackdowns themselves are unremarkable—gaudy, ad hoc things that mitigate America’s immigration problem the way a water balloon might a forest fire. Increasingly however, their immediate aftermaths—in which dozens of eager African-American job applicants line up to fill vacancies—call into question a familiar refrain from the nation’s more vocal immigration proponents: Illegal immigrants do work American citizens won’t. Even former Mexican President Vicente Fox fell victim to the hype, infamously declaring in 2006 that Mexican immigrants perform the jobs that “not even blacks want to do.”

Four years later, with national unemployment hovering around 10 percent and black male unemployment at a staggering 17.6 percent, it seems even less likely that immigrants are filling only those jobs that Americans won’t deign to do. Just ask Delonta Spriggs, a 24-year-old black man profiled in a November Washington Post piece on joblessness, who pleaded, “Give me a chance to show that I can work. Just give me a chance.”

Bequest

In every Catholic home there's a picture
of Christ holding his bleeding heart
in his hand.
I used to think, ugh.

The only person with whom
I have not exchanged confidences
is my hairdresser.

Some recommend stern standards.
Others say float along.
He says, take it as it comes,
meaning, of course, as he hands it out.

I wish I could be a
Wise Woman
smiling endlessly, vacuously
like a plastic flower,
saying Child, learn from me.

It's time to perform an act of charity
to myself,
bequeath the heart, like a
spare kidney–
preferably to an enemy.

by Eunice de Souza
from Ways of Belonging: Selected Poems
publisher: Polygon, Edinburgh, 1990

From Scirnce:

A dose of the “trust hormone” oxytocin may help bring some autistic people out of their shell. Patients with the condition usually have a hard time interacting with others, but when they inhaled oxytocin in a new study, they began looking at people in the eye and recognizing social concepts like fairness in a computer game. Although the results are preliminary, the work could lead to drugs to treat a variety of social disorders, including schizophrenia and anxiety, says expert Evdokia Anagnostou, a child neurologist at the Bloorview Research Institute in Toronto, Canada.

Oxytocin appears to function as a sort of “social glue” for many mammals. Mice and monkeys release the hormone when they groom and mate, for example, and humans given a dose of oxytocin are more likely to offer a total stranger money, even if they don't get anything in return. Autistic people have less oxytocin circulating in their blood than those without the disorder, so neuroscientist Angela Sirigu of the Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive in Lyon, France, wondered whether ramping up the hormone would make them more socially adept.

Sirigu's team asked 13 adults with Asperger's Syndrome–a form of high-functioning autism–to play a computer game of toss. On the “field” were four boxes, indicating three players and the participant. To throw the ball to another player, the participant touched a given box. The computerized players were sometimes friendly, meaning they threw the ball to other players, and sometimes bullies, meaning that they kept the ball to themselves. The volunteers received either a placebo or a nasal spray of oxytocin on one day and then swapped formulations a week later. That way, the researchers could observe how the same individual performed with and without the hormone boost. The oxytocin made a difference. Without the hormone boost, volunteers tended to play equally with the good guy and the bully, indicating their difficulty in grasping important social concepts like fairness and empathy. With the hormone, they tended to avoid playing with the bully.

More here.

Zach Zorich in Archaeology:

If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. Over the past 4 years those beads have been gathering tiny fragments of DNA from samples of dissolved organic materials, including pieces of Neanderthal bone. Genetic sequences have given paleoanthropologists a new line of evidence for testing ideas about the biology of our closest extinct relative.

The first studies of Neanderthal DNA focused on the genetic sequences of mitochondria, the microscopic organelles that convert food to energy within cells. In 2005, however, 454 began a collaborative project with the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, to sequence the full genetic code of a Neanderthal woman who died in Croatia's Vindija cave 30,000 years ago. As the Neanderthal genome is painstakingly sequenced, the archaeologists and biologists who study it will be faced with an opportunity that seemed like science fiction just 10 years ago. They will be able to look at the genetic blueprint of humankind's nearest relative and understand its biology as intimately as our own.

More here. [Thanks to Pete Chapman.]

Duncan Gardham in The Telegraph:

Dressed in tennis gear and carrying racquets and balls, the guests who wandered through the lobby of Dubai’s al-Bustan Rotana hotel on Jan 19 couldn’t have looked less threatening.

But within hours they and nine accomplices had carried out the ruthlessly efficient assassination of the Hamas military Commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who had just a few seconds’ warning of his fate as the killers overpowered him in his room.

The murder bears the hallmarks of a meticulously-planned operation by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, though Israel has so far refused to say whether it was involved.

What is beyond doubt, however, is that the alleged hit team, travelling on forged British, Irish, German and French passports, spent no more than 19 hours in the Gulf state, killing Mr Mabhouh just five hours after he had flown in from Syria.

After trawling through dozens of hours of CCTV footage, investigators have been able to piece together a minute-by-minute reconstruction of how the hit unfolded.

The 11-strong team arrived in Dubai in the early hours of Jan 19 on flights from France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, dressed as businessmen with trolley bags and laptops and blending in perfectly with other passengers.

As they checked into several different hotels, a young woman carrying a false Irish passport in the name of Gail Folliard, was filmed accepting the help of a porter to carry her bag.

More here.

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

As someone who has long believed that there is something morally repellant about living in a country that prides itself on being the greatest democracy in the world but where the top one-tenth of one percent of the people “earn” as much money per year collectively as the entire bottom fifty percent of working people, I would like to offer a modest proposal that might “level the playing field,” as the popular saying has it, and thus provide a foundation for a democracy worthy of the name. Instead of the old Marxist plan to redistribute property–and let's face it, that always took a bloody revolution and even then, it didn't always work out so well–how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?

Since it is a matter of sheer luck whether one is born into a rich family and then, as a birth-right, is entitled to first-class housing, top-flight health insurance, excellent schools, and, if need be, the best attorneys money can buy, or whether one is born into a poor or middle-class family and not be assured of getting any of these amenities, why not give rational order to what has been a wildly haphazard and obviously unjust state of affairs? A public program implementing the big baby lottery would at last make official what has in truth been the unspoken ethos of our government policy for decades and is in accord with the casino way of life–the stock market, the housing market, the state lotteries–to which so many Americans are wholeheartedly committed.

And just think of the unexpected public benefits my little plan will reap, not least of which would be immediate racial harmony through the creation of integrated families–think Asian Obamas, black Kennedys, white Jacksons, the kind of thing trail-blazing mothers like Madonna and Brad Pitt's current wife and, lest she be forgotten, Mia Farrow have been achieving through adoption of “third-world” children, but now in our own backyard!

More here.

Read more »

Originally published in Le Monde on February 13 2010 (translated by Alberto Toscano), over at Infinite Thought:

For almost thirty years, the present, in our country, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that does not offer its youth, especially the youth of the popular classes, any principle to orient existence. What is the precise character of this disorientation? One of its foremost operations consists in always making illegible the previous sequence, that sequence which was well and truly oriented. This operation is characteristic of all reactive, counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve been living through ever since the end of the seventies. We can for example note that the key feature of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals impeded any political understanding. This view of things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to disorient the people, which was considered to be, as it always is, potentially revolutionary.

To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.

In the debate concerning the rationality of the French Revolution during the Third Republic, Clemenceau produced a famous formula: ‘The French Revolution forms a bloc’. This formula is noteworthy because it declares the integral legibility of the process, whatever the tragic vicissitudes of its unfolding may have been. Today, it is clear that it is with reference to communism that the ambient discourse transforms the previous sequence into an opaque pathology. I take it upon myself therefore to say that the communist sequence, including all of its nuances, in power as well as in opposition, which lay claim to the same idea, also forms a bloc.

So what can the principle and the name of a genuine orientation be today? I propose that we call it, faithfully to the history of the politics of emancipation, the communist hypothesis.