Galileo Year

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It’s International Galileo Year. Four hundred years after the publication of the Pisan-born polymath’s ground-breaking book The Starry Messenger, with its revolutionary description of his telescopic observations of the heavens, Galileo remains a formidable subject to write about. In taking on a figure widely accepted as the father of modern science, any aspiring Galileo biographer needs to master a handful of classical and vernacular languages, as well as possess a formidable grasp of physics, mechanics and geometry as practised by the ancients no less than by Galileo and his contemporaries. Then there is the problem of his 1633 trial for heresy and apparent recantation. It was an event that inspired and troubled Bertolt Brecht so profoundly that his play The Life of Galileo went through three different versions as he struggled to make sense of the moral and political dimensions of the trial. He oscillated between casting his protagonist as antihero and hero, as first Nazism and then the atomic strikes on Japan provided radically divergent contexts within which to view both Galileo’s achievements and their consequences.

more from Jerry Brotton at Literary Review here.

Tuesday Poem

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

by C.P. Cavafy
translation: Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard
from C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems.
Princeton University Press, 1992

california, there it went

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More than 40 years later, I still remember the bright sun and the palm trees when we got off the plane. California in 1968 was a magical place, a magnet for those seeking new opportunities or to lose an old identity. The Golden State was allowing the rich to get richer and the middle class to live out the American dream in its pristine state. The public schools and expanding state-university system (two separate systems, in fact) were the envy of the nation. The corruption and Mob influence that had paralyzed many eastern and midwestern states and cities were largely absent. When my parents announced they were uprooting the Glazer family from a cozy suburb of Philadelphia, as 5 million people did from eastern and midwestern towns between 1950 and 1980, the news was met with a mixture of awe (“California…” they would breathlessly whisper) and bewilderment (“But what is there?”). The very act of migrating by plane was itself somewhat grand. In the years before airline deregulation, one dressed up to fly, as if sailing on an ocean liner, and at prices not all that much lower than an ocean voyage’s. And yet those we were leaving behind acted as though we were traveling by caravan, leaving civilization and going into the wilderness.

more from Jennifer Rubin at Commentary here.

priceless

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George Price was born a Jewish half-breed to parents who kept his Semitic side a secret; lived much of his life an aggressive atheist and skeptic of the supernatural; and died a Christian, twice converted, albeit, to his mind, a defeated one. Several years before he abandoned his career in a mission to shelter and comfort homeless alcoholics, he made a number of extraordinary contributions to evolutionary biology, a field in which he had no training. Educated as a chemist, Price had worked previously for the Manhattan Project on uranium enrichment, helped develop radiation therapy for cancer, invented computer-aided design with IBM and dabbled in journalism. Shortly after Christmas 1974, Price slashed his carotid artery with a pair of tailor’s scissors in his room in a London squat. John Maynard Smith, with whom Price published a paper that applied game theory to natural selection, was one of the few people, along with some of those homeless alcoholics, to attend his funeral. Also present was William Hamilton, the father of kin selection, which proposed that self-sacrificing behavior was able to evolve between related organisms because of the advantages conferred to their shared genes. Price used Hamilton’s ideas about kin selection to derive his own equation, one that could explain selection at multiple levels of organization—the genetic level, as well as among individuals in kin groups and populations of unrelated others. The equation marked a breakthrough in the field: Price had provided a working mathematical model for the emergence of altruism in a theory of the world that took dogmatic self-interest as its first principle.

more from Miriam Markowitz at The Nation here.

A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,” can sincerely use the word “sincere.”

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Almost twenty years ago Bob Hicok published his first collection of poems, a chapbook called Bearing Witness. It’s a little hard to believe that a poet who in his latest book has a poem entitled “Hope is a thing with feathers that smacks into a window” ever could have been satisfied with that earnest, earlier title. Sure, the movement from simplicity to the witty, complex, and allusive is emblematic of the changes this poet has undertaken over a couple of decades. But there is something else in the earnestness of that early title, a sense that the act of poetry could bear witness—reach out past the merely personal and the purely linguistic—and perhaps even that it should. Behind the more nuanced frame of the recent work, that attitude has continued to inform Hicok’s poems, even as they have become syntactically complex, seriously humorous, and imaginatively demanding. I should disclose, though I do so with some embarrassment, that at the request of the publisher I contributed a particularly fatuous blurb for Bearing Witness. But I remember being genuinely impressed by Hicok’s facility with constructing wildly different personae for his poems.

more from Keith Taylor at Boston Review here.

IVF Pioneer Wins Medicine Nobel

From Science:

Ed The father of in vitro fertilization (IVF) has won this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Robert G. Edwards, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., is the sole winner of the prize. “His achievements have made it possible to treat infertility, a medical condition afflicting a large proportion of humanity including more than 10% of all couples worldwide,” the Nobel Committee wrote, noting that approximately 4 million children have been born following IVF.

Edwards is seriously ill and apparently was unable to take the phone call from the Nobel Committee notifying him of the prize. Göran Hansson, secretary of the 2010 Nobel Assembly, said that he had talked to Edwards's wife, who said she was very happy and was sure Edwards would be as well. In the 1950s, inspired by work that showed that rabbit egg cells could be fertilized in the lab and give rise to offspring, Edwards worked to understand the biology of human egg cells, sperm, and embryos. His research clarified how human eggs mature, how hormones regulate their maturation, and when the eggs can be fertilized by sperm. He also figured out the conditions necessary for sperm to activate and fertilize the egg. In 1969, he and his colleagues managed to fertilize a human egg in a test tube for the first time. But the resulting embryo was fragile and didn't develop. Edwards collaborated with gynecologist Patrick Steptoe, who had developed the technique of laparoscopy to retrieve mature eggs from ovaries. The embryos that resulted from fertilizing those oocytes developed further, but the pair ran into strong opposition to their research, and in 1971, the U.K. Medical Research Council denied their request for further funding. A private donation allowed them to continue their work. Ultimately, in 1978, Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby,” was born. Steptoe died in 1988; because Nobel prizes are awarded to living scientists only, he could not have been included in the prize.

More here.

Literary Criticism Comes to the Movies

Stanley Fish in The New York Times:

Howl There are movies based on literary works (“Paradise Lost” is on the way, I am told), bio-pics about literary greats (“Bright Star,” “The Hours”), movies that feature a bit of literary criticism (“Animal House,” “Dead Poets Society,” “The History Boys”), even movies — documentaries — about literary critics (Zizek and Derrida, who are only literary critics occasionally), but no movies I know of about literary criticism as such. None, that is, until “Howl,” the new movie about Allen Ginsberg starring James Franco, which is not only about literary criticism but is the performance of literary criticism, an extended “explication de texte.”

It is also a narrative, kind of. There are four time frames: (1) Ginsberg writing “Howl” on an old black typewriter (a nostalgia-producing image if there ever was one) (2) Ginsberg declaiming “Howl” to an appreciative “with-it” audience in what appears to be the poem’s first public reading (3) Ginsberg being interviewed about “Howl” and other things by someone you never really see and can barely hear, and (4) the trial of poet-bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had been indicted for publishing and distributing an obscene work, that is, a work that appeals only to prurient interests, has a tendency to incite lustful thoughts and has no redeeming social or literary value. Although the movie jumps back and forth among these time frames with no warning, continuity is provided by the trial whose events unfold in sequence; when the trial is over, the movie is over. But the real business of the movie — the effort to figure out what “Howl” means — is not over because it has barely begun, even though everyone has a go at it, including the members of Ginsberg’s audience who produce a running commentary in their facial expressions.

More here.

Macaulay’s stepchildren

Anjum Altaf in Himal:

Sighting_atlaf Thomas Babington Macaulay, commonly known as Lord Macaulay, is widely recognised yet inadequately understood in Southasia. While the legacy of his ‘decisions’ is correctly criticised, that criticism is often for the wrong reasons. Macaulay served on the Supreme Council of India from 1834 until 1838, during which time he sided with Governor-General William Bentinck in the adoption of English as the medium of instruction from the sixth standard onwards. Today, he is castigated for his infamous comment:

We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.

This single sentence bears the burden of all the subsequent problems with education in India. It is a pity that the rest of the 1835 Minute on Education, of which this comment is a part, is left unexamined. Indeed, merely inserting the two sentences that immediately precede and follow the comment begins to add a layer of complexity. Part of the preceding sentence reads: “it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people.” And the one that follows states:

To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

From these three sentences, one could interpret Macaulay as saying that, given limited resources, it would be cost-effective to train master-trainers in modern methods to further disseminate knowledge to the masses – prescribing, in effect, a ‘trickle down’ strategy for mass education. Clearly, one cannot read into the text either an aversion to mass education or a rejection of vernacular languages, the charges most often levelled against Macaulay.

More here.

Robert Boyle’s to-do list

Felicity Henderson in the blog of the History of Science Center at The Royal Society:

BP1%20for%20web Boyle's List of Scientific Projects:

The Prolongation of Life.
The Recovery of Youth, or at least some of the Marks of it, as new Teeth, new Hair colour’d as in youth.
The Art of Flying.
The Art of Continuing long under water, and exercising functions freely there.
The Cure of Wounds at a Distance.
The Cure of Diseases at a distance or at least by Transplantation.
The Attaining Gigantick Dimensions.
The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education only.
The Acceleration of the Production of things out of Seed.
The Transmutation of Metalls.
The makeing of Glass Malleable.
The Transmutation of Species in Mineralls, Animals, and Vegetables.
The Liquid Alkaest and Other dissolving Menstruums.
The making of Parabolicall and Hyperbolicall Glasses.
The making Armor light and extremely hard.
The practicable and certain way of finding Longitudes.
The use of Pendulums at Sea and in Journeys, and the Application of it to watches.
Potent Druggs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc.

More here. [Thanks to Justin E. H. Smith.]

A Strange New Probability Puzzle

John Allen Paulos in his Who's Counting column at ABC News:

Nm_Its_A_Boy_100929_mn Assume that you know that a woman has two children, at least one of whom is a boy. You know nothing about this boy except his sex. Given this knowledge, what is the probability that she has two boys?

You might jump to the conclusion that the answer is […] 1/2, reasoning that the sex of one child has no bearing on the sex of the other. This conclusion is incorrect, however, since you don't know whether the boy you know about is the older or the younger child.

So let's look at the possibilities. Listing two children in the order in which they might be born, we note four possibilities: B-B, B-G, G-B, G-G. Since you know that at least one of the two children is a boy, the G-G possibility is eliminated. Of the three remaining equally likely possibilities (B-B, B-G, and G-B) only one results in two boys. Therefore the correct conclusion in this case is that the probability the woman has two boys is 1/3, not 1/2…

Now for the odd result. Suppose that when children are born in a certain large city, the season of their birth, whether spring, summer, fall, or winter, is noted prominently on their birth certificate. The question is: Assume you know that a lifetime resident of the city has two children, at least one of whom is a boy born in summer. Given this knowledge, what is the probability she has two boys?

More here.

A Library Without Walls

Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books:

Dartnon_1-102810_gif_210x860_q85 Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it.

Despite the complexities, the fundamental idea of a National Digital Library (or NDL) is, at its core, straightforward. The NDL would make the cultural patrimony of this country freely available to all of its citizens. It would be the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress, but instead of being confined to Capitol Hill, it would exist everywhere, bringing millions of books and other digitized material within clicking distance of public libraries, high schools, junior colleges, universities, retirement communities, and any person with access to the Internet.

More here.

What’s Wrong with Classical Music?

by Colin Eatock

Colin_Eatock_small Every day I pass through Toronto’s Bathurst Street Subway Station, on the way to work. And sometimes, on days when I’m not running late, I pause to listen to the classical music that the Toronto Transit Commission pipes into the station. But as much as I enjoy being gently eased into my working day with a Mozart symphony or a Vivaldi concerto, I’m well aware that the TTC isn’t really trying to gratify my particular musical tastes. There are other motives at work here.

Bathurst Street Station is a multicultural crossroads in the downtown, and there are several high schools nearby. Among the subway riders who pass through the station are thousands of young people of differing backgrounds – a volatile mix that’s constantly in danger of boiling over. The TTC’s answer to this threat is to crank up the classical music.

The use of classical music in public places is increasingly common: in shopping malls, parking lots, and other places where crowds and loitering can be problems. The TTC is by no means the only transit service to use the technique: in 2005, after classical music was introduced into London’s Underground, there was a significant decrease in robberies, assaults and vandalism. Similar results have been noted from Finland to New Zealand. The idea may be a Canadian innovation: in 1985, a 7-Eleven store in Vancouver pioneered the technique, which was soon adopted elsewhere. Today, about 150 7-Elevens throughout North America play classical music outside their stores.

As a classical music lover, I’d like to believe that my favourite music has some kind of magical effect on people – that it soothes the savage breast in some unique way. I’d like to think that classical music somehow inspires nobler aspirations in the mind of the purse-snatcher, causing him to abandon his line of work for something more upstanding and socially beneficial.

But I know better. The hard, cold truth is that classical music in public places is often deliberately intended to make certain kinds of people feel unwelcome. Its use has been described as “musical bug spray,” and as the “weaponization” of classical music. At the Bathurst Street Subway Station, the choice of music conveys a clear message: “Move along quickly and peacefully, people; this is not your cultural space.”

Some sociologists have expressed concern that this particular use of classical music only serves to further divide society along lines of age, class and ethnicity. And, not surprisingly, some in the classical music community are offended by this new purpose for their art. The English music critic Norman Lebrecht has written that using classical music as a policing tool is “profoundly demeaning to one of the greater glories of civilization.”

Read more »

Enthusiasm Gap? Enthusiasm Spike!

by Jeff Strabone

ObamaSuperManPollsKyrptonite The more I read about the so-called enthusiasm gap among Democrats—the idea that they have so lost their enthusiasm for President Obama that they somehow won't be able to vote in next month's Congressional and local elections—the more I wonder about the lack of public skepticism about its existence. True, one hears a lot of bellyaching on the left these days, but when does one not hear bellyaching on the left? Come Election Day, the enthusiasm gap may turn out to be true, and it may not. Given the talent gap in the Republican Party and its surfeit of certifiable psychos, a.k.a. the Tea Party, there could just as likely be something stronger brewing among the center-right: a revulsion gap, i.e. Republican voters unable to vote for kooks like Rand Paul in Kentucky, Sharron Angle in Nevada, and Sarah Palin's uncanny double, Christine O'Donnell of Delaware.

Predictions are fun, and I've issued my share of them publicly and privately. But the conversation that Democrats ought to be having is whether we should be feeling an enthusiasm gap at all or rather, as I believe, an enthusiasm spike.

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Monday Poem

Last Zucchini

But for two still-green plants
the zucchini have been pulled

a heap of hollow stalks and yellow leaves
lies at the end of their once-lush row

the reaper’s been through
the day of zucchini is done

The sun-starved weeds that hunkered tenuously
under the zuke’s broad fronds sprout now
in the short late sun unaware of their
cramped circumstances: the late hour,
the short days, the persistence of cosmic
revolutions, the meaning of the cant of axes:
the pinch of relativity—

Just 10 weeks ago I wrote of the first zucchini:
a compliant stud swelling in shade, I said,

bound for succulent sacrifice in a sauté
and I spoke true —it was like savoring sun

but now, from one of two remnants plants,
I pluck Mr. Last without remorse hoping

that in this or some other inevitable revolution
in one certain approaching autumn or another

I’ll be attuned enough to know
what it means to be myself
matter-of-factly plucked

by Jim Culleny;
9/22/10

The Owls | Gekko-Sploitation, Wall Street 2, and Late Boomer Guilt

Ws2 Ben Walters and J. M. Tyree chat about film for The Owls site. Together, they wrote the BFI Film Classics book about The Big Lebowski for The British Film Institute, and they’ve co-written reviews of No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading for Sight & Sound. This month, they discussed Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to Wall Street and Stone’s take on the financial sector meltdown in the United States in 2008.

JMT: Where did you see Wall Street 2? Did the audience seem to enjoy it?
2:26 PM BW: well, i saw it at a press screening so it’s hard to tell. critics don’t make for very expressive audiences
JMT: How does the film look from the UK, the austerity land of Conservative budgets?
2:27 PM BW: well, kind of out of time, i must say – i thought it felt like a period piece
as if it were set at the end of the previous era (greedisgoodia) rather than during the subsequent one (austerityland). bit of a shame, as the first film was so zeitgeisty
2:28 PM but i suppose Stone was going for a gotterdammerung kind of thing…?

2:30 PM JMT: One thing I noticed is that, while Michael Moore trashes the bank bailouts in Capitalism: A Love Story – essentially giving the Republicans their election year playbook in his supposedly progressive film – Stone goes to great lengths to “explain” the government’s actions as “responsible,” etc., in that very wooden scene set during the abyss of the financial crisis.
BW: well, when you’ve got eli wallach telling you the world’s gonna end, you better listen, right?
2:32 PM JMT: A lot of cameos, speaking of Wallach. That same real estate broker is back. The new music by Eno and Byrne makes a delicious bookend to Stone’s use of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in the first film, it all seems so promising at first! Stone himself appears – am I mistaken? – as a purveyor or buyer of “ridiculous art.” Hmm…
BW: haha
2:33 PM i wasn’t sure if he was purveying or looking to buy. bookend i think is exactly right – i was expecting more of a survey of the new landscape but WS2 is more elegiac – or at least trying to be?
JMT: The original Wall Street [WS1] has a lot of wit. And it’s so fast paced. It’s a cocaine film.
BW: right, and very streamlined and sleek
2:34 PM this was a lot more muddled… but could that be apt?

Limos & Hairgel

2:37 PM JMT: Very interesting –> WS1 has this delight in the evil. Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is totally seduced by Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) and the interior design stylings of Daryl Hannah. It’s a film about pinkie rings, two-inch TV screens, ordering “Evian” at the restaurant, big hair, cocaine in limos…as Iain Sinclair once said about the 1980s, “cocaine in the executive washroom.” But here in WS2 the protagonist, Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf) isn’t really fully seduced into the realm of evil. He’s got his Third Way idealism about his laser fusion plant investment scheme intact all the way until the end. I thought it could have been funny if the fusion plant turned out to be a “green tech” scam…

Read more »

Fanaa

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By Maniza NaqviAugust - September, 2010 155

Out of sync by six hours and seven years, this ancient country's, age old way of marking time. A half century completed, mine. I find, here years gained, time lost, at the end of the Meher rains, and the festival of Meskel—in the month of Meskerem. I am here. Fire and water on my mind: a burning, a drowning, a joy and a sorrow.

September 11, 2010 marked the new year of 2003, at exactly 6 .00 pm, in the month of Meskerem, Ethiopian time. I am— I think, finally, perhaps, at the exact and true time. I am here during Meskel-the celebration that commemorates the “Finding of the True Cross” by Queen Helena in the 4th century in Jerusalem. Having seen in a dream, the way that she would find the true cross, she ordered a bonfire to be sprinkled with Frankincense and lit— its smoke rising and falling to the spot where the true cross was buried. Each year the celebrants light bonfires and candles, dance, chant, pray and renew faith.August - September, 2010 118

Here, confirmation and joy, is expressed almost as a sob, a sigh, or a breathless surprise. I am here in the season between exquisite joy and sorrow when rains much prayed for have come on time but have not left. The long rains this year are perhaps too long. Much before now and every year I have been drenched by these Meher rains from Ethiopia in a place elsewhere and faraway. Elsewhere bonfires of faith are under contemplation. Elsewhere floods threaten annihilation. Elsewhere a summer ends and winter begins.For they say in Pakistan, where the rains have stayed long this year and where the Indus is in flood this year, they say that the Monsoon, comes from here. The Meher in Ethiopia used to make a season of love elsewhere. I am here at the source of that season of love and rebirth, the Monsoon.

In the season of hide and seek between darkening rain and smoky light—in this place where identities blur, each candle lit from another, I too am here, where the faces of fruitsellers, priests, mullahs, professors, farmers, goat herders, bankers and the conductors hanging out of the blue van taxis calling out the next destination, resemble those east of here and west of here and of the icons revered in churches in St. Petersburg and Belegrade. And where the call from the church and the mosque carried on the breeze echo and sound the same. It is noon on Sunday–I listen to the singing that sounds like a dirge from the church that comes over the breeze in undulating waves to me. All its intonations familiar—the pathos of a Marsiya or a Noha or a Salaam during Moharam and the defiance of Qatubas of Friday prayers—or the rebuke of ghazals—that way of singing, that way of engagement, endearment, transports me to another place—all things known disappear and melt into a new familiar. I am taken aback, by seven years—set off kilter, by six hours, steadied back into balance, by what matters, in this place that marks its own time while the world marks another, hours forward by years back.August - September, 2010 127

All of these sounds, the calls to prayers, seem the same to my ears and that perhaps is because the call for prayer began from here most probably, the same call to prayer brought to Islam by Bilal al Habashi. He is attributed for delivering the first call of prayers, I would venture that he called to prayer in the manner that he already knew how to do and so beautiful was it in its rendering that those who considered themselves superior to him in station took ownership of his initiative. There over the breeze as suddenly as it starts, it is gone, the azaan.

Rain just started has as suddenly moved on–The sun, blurred till now peaks out as though from inside its wrap of a soft white gauze just as bright yellow breasted birds alight on the balcony. Blue painted taxis, inch their way through traffic towards the hill where the palace sprawls and from there all the way down the slopes of the hillside shanty towns cascade downwards. Rumor has it that Haile Selassie’s ghost probably walks the corridors of the palace —and the only others in there behind those heavily guarded walls are prisoners and may as well be ghosts, held in the barracks in the ground below. An Emperor and his palace makes prisoners of men. And women. Still.

Again the call begins. This time, the churches. The sound that floats to me is distilled through my filters and transforms into the familiar sound of mourning. A lament, a catch in the voice, about the plight of kings, an intonation that the inheritance of true Kings, princes and princesses is poverty that truth can only be destitute—persecuted—exiled—dispossessed. Never to be rich, that is the mark of true kings, the lions of God, never to possess except the bounty of poverty. Such is the message that can only be contrived in a palace.

There is thunder, a storm is brewing and the calls of prayer are joined by the tap-tap, thud-thud sound of construction from the high rises going up all around are a clear indication that change is massively and rapidly afoot here. High rises are under construction all around—and on the outskirts of Addis, gated communities are going up of villas-with terracotta roofs and faux roman colonnades for the Diaspora to purchase.

Nearby a greenhouse and hot house plants —all waiting to be transferred to the hotel nearby for the pleasure of the guests there. Almost all of them here, I would wager in the name of poverty reduction. Inside my room, the storm, on television is on mute—for the story has run over and over again—of a possible burning of the Koran.

Could it be possible that all of religion—is about the rains? The burning anxiety for their arrival and fear of their staying too long. Followed by warmth and relief at their timely departure. Could religion be the eternal recording of the anxious searching of the night sky for the brightness of the stars and divining from the clarity of these criss-crossing points of lights shooting out in four, five or six directions the arrival and departure of the rains? The appeasing of the sun, the praising of the stars, the beseeching of the moon? Could the call to prayer, carried over through time be the beckoning of people to participate in a communal cajoling of the true mercurial tempered emperor, rain, to stay on schedule? To be merciful, to be kind? Could all religion be the anxiety wrought by the fear of what if, it is, too much, or too little, or too late? Could all of religion be a translation of this anxiety for survival, a desire to shed the shroud of despair with a persistence of hope? Could religion be a metaphor for the story of need and want for exactly that which can bring joy but once arrived in abundance wreaks havoc? Could religion and its accompanying props and paraphernalia all be in support of the retelling of this—ordinary story about rain—morphed into a story about a dangerous love, a narrative layered and coded beyond recognition of a justification of that individual universal fear of too little or too much and the communal instinct of survival through the rejection of a possibility that fear need not exist? And the eternal collective remorse that when things go wrong it is always because of something shameful, because of a fault—something left wanting and therefore the need for eternal penance and search for forgiveness? Could it be so, that holy is the making unholy of an abundance of love?August - September, 2010 149

A tiny yellow bird, lands on the railing of the balcony and there it remains for a few moments in communion with me —a thought occurs, in this land of frankincense and myrrh–and Bilal Habasha——in this land of mosques and churches singing out the call to prayer, of Meskel, Eid and the Epiphany, of processions of taboots — in this the land of the Lion of God, the Queen of Sheeba and the traces of King Solomon, in this land of a Queen who seduced a King and who bore him a son—a thought occurs to me: Is it always about the seduction of a King by a queen and the bearing of a son? The attraction between “the others” and the inevitable seducing of the other, come to me—come to me—-to a union come—to an adoration.August - September, 2010 109

I put my question to my tiny visitor. I am from here she says and you? And I reply—I am from somewhere near the Abyssinia lines—-and I tell her that monsoon comes there from here. I tell her the clouds go from here across the Indian Ocean reaching the shores over there making their way north past the desert, past the plains to the highlands there, then crashing into the wall of the Himalayas. And there stopped by that wall of mountains, stunned and crowded in that way, they have no other path but to stagger backwards, breakdown and weep and flood the plains. Bringing joy and bringing sorrow. She calls to me, you are here! You are from here. Just then, thunder rolls from the direction of the hills and startles her and with a swift flapping of her wings she is gone. This year the Meher has been plentiful and long. The Nile is in flood here. And there—in the land of my birth the Indus has over reacted and gone further and spilled into the plains and much lies in ruin. Such over abundance of benevolence is to be feared, kept in check with prayer. Could holy be the making unholy of the overflowing of love? Can only a fire or a flood, a burning or a drowning lead to rebirth?

(photographs from Meskel this year 2003 and 2010, September and Meskerem)

More Writing by Maniza Naqvi (here)

Life as invention: Colin Marshall talks to blogger, entrepreneur and non-conformist Chris Guillebeau

Chris Guillebeau is a blogger, entrepreneur, and liver of the unconventional life. Having written his blog The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel for “a small army of remarkable people” since 2008, he’s now the author of a book which expands on his ideas and experiences, The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [iTunes link]

This is the question anybody who reads your book is going to ask first: how many countries are you up to?

Right now, I think it's 151. It's kind of funny; in the book, it's outdated now. The book says 125, but I'm at 151 now, and I've surrendered my passport for the next four months so that I can go around America and talk about the book. Next year, I'll be getting back out on the road.

You have this mission to get to all 192 or 193 countries before your 35th birthday. Now you talk about surrendering your passport for four months. Kind of getting to know you through the book and the blog, I feel like that is a painful thing for you to do, to surrender a passport.

Yes, that's correct. I'm out on the road constantly, usually in about 20 countries a year. To surrender the passport was a big decision, but hopefully it'll be worth it.

One of the elements of this unconventional life, of the non-conformist life I talk about you as living, is that you do travel so much. You've got this goal of getting to all the countries. You talk about so many travel experiences. That seems to be one of the main things that draws people to you, that has gotten you such an audience. Specifically that, the traveling part; why do you think that's so resonant?

When you ask people, “What would you do with your life if time and money were no object?”, almost a majority of people identify travel as something they would do more. They might not do it as much as I do; they might not be interested in going to every country in the world. But I've found that when you talk to people about those big, life-dreaming questions, people always identify travel as something they would like to do, whether it's just a trip here and there or someplace they've always wanted to go. Whether it's backpacking or some other kind of experience, people are drawn to travel. They like the idea of being able to do more of it and to have more freedom that way.

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‘Philosophy Killed My Children’: A Response

Baby-chocolate My previous article, ‘How Philosophy Killed My Children and Why it Should Kill Yours’, seemed to have generated some debate. Unfortunately, there was much heat but little light shed on taking the subject further from most commentators/critics. Yet, what little light was shed by critics is a welcome furthering of this important discussion. Considering I was made into the title of a Nicholas Smyth post on this website, and considering the excess to which the debate collapsed into denigration, dogma and shouting matches, I wish to respond to some of the claims. In fact, this might take longer than the original piece itself considering the widespread misreading of my argument.

My argument is quite simple: there is no reason to create more people and every reason not to. I also attempted to severe the link between parenthood – an ethical attitude of helping younger people, wanting to lessen their suffering, and using our own experience to better theirs – and procreation. The latter is my target. Indeed, parenthood need not be tied to procreation. The parenting-attitude can be applied to those who already exist, not requiring us to create human life to care for. No critic highlighted a good argument to create more people, other than emotional reasons which I highlighted is, firstly, unpersuasive and, secondly, is an insult to adoptive parents who can testify to the reciprocated feelings of their adopted children. That is, we may fulfil the desire for parenthood through non-procreative means, adoption being one way.

But adoption, as they say, is one option. As I highlighted, not all of us – including me, given my age, income, etc. – would pass adoption procedures. The information I have obtained from adoption agencies highlights this much. Being unable to adopt should also tell us something important: if adoption agencies won’t let us be parents to these children, what does that tell us about the automatic pass we get to simply use our reproductive organs to make children? If agencies judge us unfit to be parents for those children who do exist, it should smack hard of blatant arrogance to bypass such a well-founded judgement to produce children of our own (I hope adoptive parents will provide some more personal details on this. I prefer hearing from them, rather from adoption agencies). This is why people who argue unless I adopt I should not judge simply fail to make a point: if I cannot adopt because I would not pass first-level acceptance as an adoptive parent, what gives me the right to just breed away? This should immediately tell me I am unfit as a parent, be it for my own or those who exist.

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One-Stop Living

Pilar Viladas in the New York Times:

ScreenHunter_02 Oct. 04 08.50 In 1953, the architect Benjamin Thompson (1918-2002) opened a store called Design Research on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass. Thompson, a former partner of the Modernist master Walter Gropius, wanted a place where people could buy everything they needed for contemporary living. He made Marimekko dresses and Iittala glasses must-haves, eventually opening stores in New York and San Francisco and designing a striking new glass-and-concrete home for the Cambridge store that opened in 1969. ‘‘The architect’s place on this planet,’’ he said, ‘‘is to create that special environment where life can be lived to its fullest.’’ D/R, as it was known, closed in 1978, but many people, including me, never got over it.

The history and influence of D/R are examined in ‘‘Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes’’ (Chronicle), a new book by Jane Thompson and Alexandra Lange. Thompson, a respected urban planner (who won this year’s Lifetime Achievement honor at the National Design Awards), is the architect’s widow and, after meeting him in the 1960s, worked with him on pioneering projects like Faneuil Hall Marketplace and the South Street Seaport.

More here.