Who is Hedda Sterne?

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At the summit of “The Irascibles,” Life magazine’s 1951 portrait of the Abstract Expressionist painters, stands an imperious-looking woman, the Romanian-born artist Hedda Sterne. She is the only female in the photograph and, in some sense, the most prominent figure—the “feather on top,” as she once put it. Now, at age one hundred, she is the sole survivor. “I am known more for that darn photo than for eighty years of work,” Sterne told me a few years ago. “If I had an ego, it would bother me.” Plus, she said, “it is a lie.” Why? “I was not an Abstract Expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible.” Who is Hedda Sterne? In 2003, when she was ninety-two and still drawing every day, I interviewed her and tape-recorded the conversation. We met in her apartment on East 71st Street near Third Avenue, where she’d lived for almost sixty years—first with her then husband, Saul Steinberg, the New Yorker artist, and later, beginning in the 1960s, alone. The kitchen and living room were one space. On a table were Sterne’s recent white-on-white drawings. Just about all the other art was Steinberg’s. On a wall hung a trompe l’oeil work spoofing Mondrian; a small table was piled with Steinberg’s wooden “books.” Over the stove hung a faux diploma for cooking, which Steinberg had presented to Sterne in the 1950s, and over the sink was another diploma, for dishwashing. A large carpet of raw canvas lay on the floor, with handwritten lines organized into the squares of a grid. This, I realized, was Sterne’s Diary from 1976, and a perfect emblem of her: a dense fabric of words, drawn with intense concentration, left to be obliterated underfoot.

more from Sarah Boxer at the NYRB here.

when allegory gets nasty

A-serbian-film-007

If you like torture porn, rape porn, incest porn, paedo porn, snuff porn, necro porn and (a bit of a breakthrough here) newborn porn, A Serbian Film has much to offer you. Even after the 49 cuts demanded by the BBFC spoilsports, it certainly earns its place on the shortlist for that sought-after accolade, “the nastiest film ever made”. Good luck to it, you may or may not think. Yet we’re not allowed to leave it at that. Famously, this film is laid before us not as a robust piece of entertainment for what will doubtless prove an appreciative niche audience, but as a political allegory. Whenever he gets the chance, the director, Srdjan Spasojevic, insists: “This is a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government. It’s about the monolithic power of leaders who hypnotise you to do things you don’t want to do.” Understandably enough, this claim has been derided as a pathetic attempt to accord respectability to a straightforward exercise in sensationalist depravity. Yet the more you hear of Spasojevic’s apologia, the more sincere he seems to be. He has after all lived through a traumatic period in his country’s history. He says he spent a decade trying to work out how to translate its essence into cinema, and concluded that pornography was the only possible metaphor for “the almost indescribable and exploitative chaos” that had dominated his life.

more from David Cox at The Guardian here.

Tuesday Poem

To the Newlyweds in the Barrio

Subtract the size of the world
from an empty stomach
and over the difference construct a roof.

Wall up hunger
give it no room to spread
to the eyes, hands and feet.

Later you'll be able to afford a TV
to bring you reports
of soldiers invading with their shadows.

But for the time
all you can afford is a radio
and guilt as you dance around your house.

by Rebecca Gonzales
from After Aztlan – Latino Poets of the Nineties
David R. Godine, Publisher, 1992

The wonders of the cell go online

From MSNBC:

Cell For many of us, the wonders of cell biology came alive when we peered through a microscope at an amoeba in science class. Today, a new online image library of cells brings that same sense of wonder and magic to anyone with an Internet connection. The library contains more than 1,000 images, videos, and animations of cells from a variety of organisms — from the Chinese hamster (Cricetulus griseus) to humans (Homo sapiens). The database aims to advance research on cellular activity with the ultimate goal of improving human health, according to the American Society for Cell Biology, which has created the database in partnership with Glencoe Software and the Open Microscopy Environment.

“In our research of disease, one of the key features is to understand the mechanism of disease — and that is going to happen, in many cases, at the cellular level,” David Orloff, manager of The Cell image library, told me. For example, the library will make it possible for scientists to compare different cell types online and understand the nature of specific cells and cellular processes, both normal and abnormal. This may lead to new discoveries about diseases, as well as new targets for drug development.

More here.

Real Evidence for Diets That Are Just Imaginary

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Diet Call it the Imagine Diet. You wouldn’t have to count calories, track food points or memorize rules. If, say, some alleged friend left a box of chocolate truffles in your home this holiday season, you would neither throw them away nor inhale them all. Instead, you would start eating imaginary chocolates.

You would give yourself a few seconds to imagine tasting and chewing one truffle. (If there’s a picture on the box, you could focus on it.) Then you would imagine eating another, and then another and another…until at last you could open the box of real chocolates without making a total pig of yourself. And then you could start on fantasies of other vices you wanted to eliminate. So far, the Imagine Diet exists only in my imagination, as does any evidence of its efficacy. But there is some real evidence for the benefits of imaginary eating from experiments at Carnegie Mellon University reported in the current issue of Science. When people imagined themselves eating M & M’s or pieces of cheese, they became less likely to gorge themselves on the real thing.

More here.

3QD Politics Prize 2010 Semifinalists

Hello,

The voting round of our politics prize (details here) is over. A total of 493 votes were cast for the 44 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own blogs. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

  1. Politics_160_seminfinalist Muhammad Cohen, Twenty reasons Barack Obama stinks
  2. Huffington Post, Haiti's Political and Economic Earthquake “Made in the USA”
  3. 3 Quarks Daily, The Trappers and the Trapped
  4. Sexy Beast, Spitzer, Stop Hiding From Your Call Girl Past
  5. Accidental Blogger, What was malt liquor?
  6. Farming Pathogens, The Alan Greenspan Strain
  7. 3 Quarks Daily, Who Will Be A Champion Of The Left We Can Believe In? As Bush-lite, Obama Ain't It
  8. 3 Quarks Daily, The Revolution Will Not Be PowerPointed
  9. True/Slant, Some Iran Questions Without Answers
  10. Ideas in Motion, Covering Mirrors *
  11. The South Asian Idea Weblog, 9/11: Socrates, Machiavelli, Christ and Gandhi
  12. Wisdom of the West, Politics
  13. 3 Quarks Daily, War and the American Republic
  14. NPR Check, Asymmetric Accomplices to Murder
  15. PH2.1, Getting to Agreement
  16. Zunguzungu, Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”
  17. The Philosopher's Beard, Politics: Can't Someone Else Do It?
  18. The Heart of the Matter, It's Just a Leak
  19. Naked Capitalism, End This Fed
  20. Stephen Walt, Why America is going to regret the Cordoba House controversy
  21. Black Agenda Report, The Unraveling of the Empire of Finance Capital

* This post was inadvertently left out of the list of semifinalists, so I am adding it now. My apologies. It was considered for the finalists but did not make the cut. See comments below.

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists very soon, possibly even later today, to Lewis Lapham. We will also post the list of finalists here then.

Good luck!

Abbas

Spelunking the Space behind the Bathroom Mirror

by Tom JacobsBathroom_Mirror

One night more than a decade ago, I found myself alone in the apartment I shared with several friends from college in Minneapolis. It was one of those humid summer nights where the only reasonable thing to wear were one’s boxers and a t-shirt. I was, at the time, seeking to cultivate a pompadour; this was long before there were a raft of metrosexual hair products to assist in such a project, so I was reduced to buying bryl-creem from the local old-school pharmacy. Bryl-creem, by the way, reeks: whenever you see those black and white photographs of crooners from the ‘30s and ‘40s, know that they must have trailed clouds of vaporous, vaguely mint-smelling fog.

None of us were what you would call “gainfully employed” at the time, yet all of my roommates had gone out for the evening with their girlfriends. These were the days of what DeLillo calls “languor and drift,” when the notion of a “career” was a distant horizon that can be safely ignored for the brief but more intriguing possibilities of pursuing sensuous intensities an d simple drunkennesses with little thought or care for tomorrow’s hangover. I was, then, left to luxuriate in the pleasures of self-pitying loneliness and solitude. I thought that perhaps I would practice my pompadour in the bathroom mirror. This was an older apartment—perhaps built in the ‘30s—and the lighting wasn’t so good—everything was cast in a lovely golden haze, like the opening scenes of The Godfather with Don Corleone massaging his cat. In this flavescent light signaling nostalgia (or maybe I only remember it that way…ha!) I reached atop the medicine cabinet to grasp the foul-smelling pomade and inadvertently knocked it over. It fell behind the medicine cabinet, into one of those non-spaces like the walls that separated room from room, one of those unthought about regions that contain things like pipes and wires that we tend not to want to see or think about. Realizing that I had lost my bryl-creem and thus, my pompadour, I grabbed a flashlight and stood atop the commode to see if I could retrieve it from its crypt. Leaning over the sink I strained to see what had become of the tube; shining the light into the small crevice that separated the top of the medicine cabinet and mirror from the bathroom wall, I observed a range of other objects lying on the pink fiberglass insulation—a razor, what looked to be a receipt, a variety of q-tips, a comb, and a tube of hair gel, and other things that I can’t really remember.

Read more »

Human Extinction: Not the Worst Case Scenario

Homo-velum The year is 3010 and an interesting new species has evolved: a muscular, knuckle-walking primate with sparse body hair and a strikingly human face. It appears to be deformed, with extra non-functional limbs in various anatomical positions–like something out of a sci-fi horror story or a genetic engineering experiment gone wrong. The creatures are vicious. Individuals routinely attack and eat members of their own species.

This generally isn’t how we envision our species a thousand years from now. More typical scenarios feature technological advancements, like flying cars and intergalactic travel. We might imagine that future humans will have eliminated disease and extended our lifespans substantially.

It’s debatable as to which of these scenarios is more likely. And of course, both could be far off the mark. But this much is clear: there’s trouble ahead for our species if we continue on our current path. The problems that future generations will face are largely predictable.

Our environment is becoming increasingly toxic, with carcinogens and teratogens, allergens, hormone distrupters, and pharmaceuticals accumulating steadily. Such pollutants also build up in the tissues of animals that we eat and depend upon.

Food shortages are anticipated. With the population increasing at alarming rates, there’ll be a lot more human mouths to feed. Heavier reliance on meat will worsen environmental problems, making clean drinking water harder to find. Non-animal food sources may also be much scarcer. If honey bees succumb to the threats they currently face, we’ll lose most of the foods that depend on bees for pollination.

Disease will be rife. Infectious disease will likely rise with the loss of biodiversity. Authors of a paper published last year in BioScience suggested that biodiversity loss “can increase the incidence and distribution of infectious diseases affecting humans.”1 Authors of a more recent paper appearing in Nature came to a similar conclusion, noting that, in many cases, biodiversity “seems to protect organisms, including humans, from transmission of infectious diseases.”2 Increased population size and proximity to one another will exacerbate the problem.

Cancer and environmental diseases will be widespread due in part to the greater toxicity of the physical environment and the foods we eat. Genetic disease is also expected to rise sharply. Michael Lynch, in a recent paper published in PNAS, suggested that the accumulation of deleterious mutuations will have a profound impact on members of industrialized societies within a few hundred years.3 He states: “Without a reduction in the germline transmission of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels.”

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A ramble through vowels and consonants

It’s probably unfashionable to say this, and it’s certainly a sign of a thoroughly colonized mind, but English is my favorite language. There are many reasons for this: the massive vocabulary, the puns, the double-streamed Germanic-Romance roots (so that ‘mistake’, ‘wood’ and ‘hue’ mean and evoke differently from ‘error’, ‘forest’ and ‘color’). But a large part of my affection for English lies in the sounds of the language.

This is a complicated thing to say about your first language. It’s much easier to know what a language sounds like when you don’t speak it, before comprehension has made the language transparent. It’s hard to reconstruct the way a language sounded before you learned it, and this is much more so if you grew up speaking it. Still, while some impressions are only available to a non-native speaker and others are irretrievably lost, others never leave or even wait to be discovered later on.

To me, the most striking thing about English is its diversity of vowels, something I only noticed after many years of speaking the language. English, in many dialects, has about 15 vowels (not counting diphtongs). Listen to the vowels through these words: a, kit, dress, trap, lot, strut, foot, bath, nurse, fleece, thought, goose, goat, north[1]. There are languages that have more (Germanic ones tend to be vowel rich), but there aren’t many of them, and none that I know well enough to frame a sentence in. And compare this vowel list to the relative paucity of vowels in so many other languages. Hindi really has only about 9 or 10 vowels; Bengali, which has lost several long-short distinctions has slightly fewer (though lots of diphtongs). Some languages (including these two) do include extra vowels formed by nasalizing existing ones; these nasalized vowels often sound lovely, but feel very similar to their base vowels. It’s more a flourish than a genuinely new creation. Japanese and Spanish have about 4 or 5 apiece, and I’m told that Mandarin and Arabic have about 6.

English, then, is capable of exceptionally rich assonance and exuberant plays on vowel sound[2]. Listen to the interplay between the ‘ai’ sound in ‘light’, ‘shines’, ‘tides’ and ‘file’ with the ‘o’ in ‘no’, ‘broken’, ‘ghosts’, ‘glow’ and ‘bones’, and notice the diverse vowel background they’re embedded in:

“Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides;

And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,

The things of light

File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.”

(From “Light breaks where no sun shines” – Dylan Thomas)

Read more »

Photography

I thought at first it was a bomb, but when I got up to the wreck I realised that the man had been speaking German, and it had been a ‘baum’ that had done for the car. It made more sense that it was a tree, as this road had been out of the fighting for days as far as I knew. (It also turned out that the dead guys were German, but I don’t suppose the Croat who told me changed the nationality of the tree on purpose.) Anyway, by the time I got there, they were just two pairs of feet sticking out from under a blanket and the tree was being cut up for logs. It must have happened about twenty minutes ago, because the people in the short traffic jam were already arguing. There was room to get a car round the wreck but not a lorry, and the drivers of the former were trying to get those of the latter to get out of the way. Someone in a blue serge uniform was shouting at everybody, including the dead Germans, and nobody was paying him any attention at all. He looked pretty old, and had no belt or epaulettes.

It was the guys from the village chopping up the tree who gave me the idea, because some of them began to turn their attention to the mangled car. They were the only ones there who seemed happy, and practical, and alive, and I like people like that. The thing to do was obviously to shunt the car off the road, where the rest of the useful bits of it could be best pirated and where it wouldn’t be blocking irate people with guns in their glove compartments.

It’s simple sign language to convey ‘move car from road into ditch’, and it was truly pleasing to see how easily an angry crowd can be transformed into a cooperative workforce when presented with a mission. It took less than a minute for ten of us to pick it up and manoeuvre it to the side, and without being asked several others kicked the debris after it. God knows who had pulled the Germans out and covered them up, but I’d lay money on the fact that no wallets or mobile phones will have been found on the bodies.

It was all smiles and laughter now, and someone even produced a bottle of slivovic. The man in uniform was still shouting occasionally, but as far as I could tell it was aimed even less specifically than before. I briefly wished I had my camera with me, because the sun had reappeared and was reflecting off the shards of the windscreen. It was shatterproof and had come off in one piece but in many pieces, stuck together by whatever they coat it with. Blood had filled all the little cracks, and the mid-afternoon sun danced and sparkled off the whole bits of glass, the tessera of the most beautiful mosaic I had ever seen.

But I realised that that sunny afternoon, that sudden comradeship, that tragedy for two families I had never met, that peculiar beauty – that is something a camera can never catch. Furthermore, the small new side to one’s character that such experiences create is young and impressionable, and readily lied to by photographs. I find most things are best left to memory, because even if you think you’ve forgotten something it’s usually in there somewhere, a problem of access not storage, sculpting the insides in subtle ways.

The Humanists: Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth

Nightonearth

by Colin Marshall

On its surface, Night on Earth is nothing but people talking in taxicabs. The untold production hassle involved in this supposedly simple setup — towing gear, elaborate car-mounted lighting, routes to be driven and re-driven with each and every take — represents a truth about pretty much every Jim Jarmusch film: what doesn’t look like much in one sense turns out, in others, to actually be quite a lot. This holds especially true for for his choppier black-and-white pictures of the 1980s which, to the untrained eye, offered little more than slouchy characters walking, running, and standing around. Night on Earth is substantially glossier, in its own way, than those early projects, but it also manages to be more accessible than the even slicker productions that would follow. Purists might argue that, as penance, the movie has wound up as one of Jarmusch’s least seen; purists might argue that, but I won’t.

Whether intentionally or accidentally, Night on Earth proves difficult to write about without digging in the mothballs for a set of clichés tiring even to ponder. Taxicab stories force the lazy critic’s hand: if you don’t talk about the liminal state — the “non-place” — of such a temporary, disposable, rattly means of transit, you’ll probably talk about the distinctive short-term commercio-social dynamic between rider and driver. This is safer territory for a filmmaker like Jarmusch, whose deadly allergy to cliché demands that, for his own safety, he keep these risk factors at a distance. I assume the all-knowing, cigarette-bottomed, somehow unironically ironic deadpan stare of the 1970s NYC hipster by way of Akron scares them, as it would you or I.

Nevertheless, the forces of temperance seem to have come down just slightly harder on this film than on the rest of the Jarmusch canon. I consider it modern cinema’s loss, however slight, that Night on Earth lost its original title, Losangelesnewyorkparisromehelsinki. That word search, which contains the film’s five locations, wields the advantage of specificity, not to mention truth in advertising. Night, sure. Earth? Well, America’s biggest coastal cities, the two most romanticized ones in continental Europe, and one in, uh, Finland. It’s a point both for and against the movie that you wonder if Buenos Aires, Bombay, or Tokyo lay buried on a cutting room floor somewhere.

Each darkened city has its own cab, its own driver, and its own passengers; these form separate segments that, happily, share nothing else. It would have taken a certain art to tie all these vignettes together with common characters, incidents, or structures, but that’s not Jarmusch’s art. On the broadest level, each scene is about a different relationship between a cabbie and their fares, but these relationships are different enough that, in saying that, I’m not saying much of anything. Do I get any closer to the truth with the claim that that, in all five cities, Jarmusch harnesses the rich, creatively nourishing randomness generated by the matching of people in need of a ride with drivers in need of about fifteen bucks?

Read more »

Nostalgia

Nostalgia, according to Webster's New World Dictionary1, is “a longing for something far away or long ago”. We all feel it, and it seems to play a larger role in our lives the older we get. Which makes perfect logical sense because the older we get the more we think about the “good old days”. Eventually there comes a point where there are more days in the past than in the future.2

I recently went with my wife and our two children to her high school reunion down in Centreville, Maryland. She graduated from Gunston Day School, class of 1985. I never had an experience like that when I was in high school (or college for that matter). Since Gunston at the time was a boarding school, my wife lived there during the school year and obviously went back home to New Jersey when summer came around. I never left home. I took the bus to high school, and I commuted to college. When we arrived at that reunion, I could feel that nostalgia even though I never went there. I could tell my wife had this sense of such joy from remembering all her best friends from high school. That was accompanied by a feeling that you can never get back to those days, the sadness, the brink of tears.

It's that mix that describes nostalgia for me.

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Trouble in a Heartland Town Hall

Michael Blim

Suddenly the blue below turns to white and gray. We pass over the last of Lake Michigan and begin our descent into O’Hare, crisscrossing the orderly Chicago street grid, former corn farm townships since divided into smaller squares still, each comprising a family or two. Past the countless brown lawns, now covered with snow we go, skidding just a bit on the tarmac where little ice flows glow in the landing lights.

My parents’ house is about six miles from the airport. We may have passed above it, but one square looks like every other at a couple of thousand feet. I had tried in vain to find the expressway junctures, but like houses from above, every cloverleaf looks like every other too. Even a big, but rare patch of forest preserves, an odd and invented site on the prairie, doesn’t help me figure where we were or what I might have seen.

Best to have stuck with “white and gray.” Topography is destiny, if only for this trip to America’s self-proclaimed heartland.

Wherever I go, I read newspapers, as many as I can find and even in languages I don’t know. It’s true that the papers in unknown languages are like those infernal English crosswords, number and nameless, and for me thus clueless. Still I hope that I’ll pick up something, remembering even now my one great coup when marooned on an Adriatic island I deduced from Croatian that Sadam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Compulsions, it seems, require little reinforcement.

My father gets two papers at home, the Daily Herald, a town daily, and the Chicago Tribune. Giving my mother’s advancing Alzheimer’s disease, he only has time now to glance at them, choosing the editorials and op-ed pages over the rest. To me, it’s like he eats the wrong part of the chicken. I have plenty of opinions and a low opinion of the opinions of others. I prefer the facts, such as they are.

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An Open Letter to the National Punditry

Dear Esteemed Pundits of America,

Beck Chalkboard The 2010 mid-term elections are behind us, and all the post-mortem analyses of the races are complete. Yet the 24/7 news cycle, and the corresponding demand for your incisive commentary, will not abate. So, what next? Will you turn your attention to the Congress and examine the ways in which the new House leadership clashes with President Obama? Will you look ahead to 2012 and offer odds on who will be the Republican nominee and how likely he or she is to defeat Obama? Will you continue to discuss the Tea Party in your ongoing attempt to discern who they are, what they want, and whether they matter? Will you investigate the gradual implementation of our healthcare bill and monitor the inevitable dissolution of DADT? Will you be able to sustain your interest in our increasingly quixotic military adventures? Or will you take up a cause you regard as underappreciated among the American people? These are all arguably worth your consideration. But we have a better idea: Resign from your job in broadcasting and run for public office.

We admit that this is a bold suggestion. Perhaps it has never occurred to you to seek political office. But consider how this course of action is required in light of the things you say and how you understand yourselves.

You take yourselves to be public figures committed to keeping the American government in check and on the right track. You offer daily commentary on national politics as a crucial contribution American democracy. You do not merely report the day’s news; indeed, many of you claim that you are not reporters at all. Rather, you claim to be commentators on the news, and you draw a sharp conceptual divide between yourselves and “the mainstream media.” We understand that you must insist on this distinction, for you take one of your central tasks to be that of exposing the media’s biases, distortions, and blind-spots. You understand your job to be that of helping the American citizenry to strip away propaganda, double-talk, and spin. You present the facts, and then you help the American people to understand what they mean. We’re thankful.

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The Glasgow Boys: Pioneering Painters 1880-1900 – Royal Academy of Arts

Sue Hubbard

The rather amorphous group of artists known as The Glasgow Boys emerged at the end of the 1870s to reject Victorian sentimentalism, staid academicism and the execution of idyllic Highland landscapes in favour of painting scenes taken from everyday life. The first significant group of British artists since the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood they consisted of twenty young artists, including twelve key painters who took their ideas largely from European artistic models. Whilst the French Impressionists may have seemed a little too outré for their taste, they were attracted by the naturalism and realism of Jean-Francois Millet and by James McNeill Whistler’s austere and limited palette. Now the Royal Academy has mounted a major show of their work, billing them as ‘Pioneering Painters’. The first large-scale survey of the work of 'the Boys' to have been staged in London for 40 years it reveals, to a largely new audience, the work of James Paterson, William York Macgregor, James Guthrie and George Henry, together with younger painters such as John Lavery and Thomas Millie Dow, who were among the group’s leading figures. Though, sadly, the Royal Academy has only 80 out of the 130 included in the original version of the exhibition, which had a hugely successful run at Glasgow's Kelvingrove galleries earlier this year.Key_103

Condemned by some critics for a lack of originality and plagiarism (The Observer newspaper accused James Guthrie's opening painting A Funeral Service in the Highlands 1881-2 of being over reliant on Courbet's A Burial at Ornans 1849-50, in fact, what is interesting about this work, is how much it reflects the political mood that was sweeping Europe at the time, one that portrayed peasants and farmers in a sympathetic but unsentimental light. In atmosphere and composition Guthrie’s funeral is very similar to Fritz Mackensen’s Sermon on the Moor 1895, which shows a group of German Lutheran peasants dressed in their Sunday best, listening to an outdoor sermon. It is unlikely that Mackensen would have known Guthrie or Guthrie Mackensen, who lived in an artist’s community in Worpswede on the north German moors that counted the poet Rilke and the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker among its participants. Guthrie's work was actually inspired by a painting expedition to Brig o' Turk in the Trossachs. The dark, almost monochromatic canvas is based on a tragic, real life incident, an outdoor Presbyterian service held for a young boy who had drowned in the river during the artist’s stay. The weight of the community’s grief can be felt in the stooped stature of the men who surround the coffin under the metal-grey sky.

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Anthropology, Science, and the AAA Long-Range Plan: What Really Happened

Ps.xhwsxbbt.170x170-75The American Anthropological Association at its annual meeting dropped the word “science” from its long-range plan. Daniel Lende, over at Neuroanthropology, discusses the change:

Nicholas Wade in the NY Times article Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift has brought the controversy over the American Anthropological Association dropping “science” from its long-range plan back into the public eye.

The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

I already covered the controversy in my post Anthropology, Science and Public Understanding, where I also provide an up-to-date list of reactions to the controversy – including reactions to Wade’s NYT article. So look there for my points about the changes in the AAA long-range plan and the different takes anthropologists have had. Because today I want to provide a more accurate recounting of the controversy than Wade presents, and also defend anthropology.

Why Did the Controversy Explode? An Internal Process Gone Public

Nicholas Wade paints the explosion in light of the “bitter tribal warfare after the more politically active group attacked work on the Yanomamo people of Venezuela and Brazil by Napoleon Chagnon, a science-oriented anthropologist, and James Neel, a medical geneticist.”

This is not an apt reading of what actually happened. The issues that prompted this debate are both more mundane and more central to the present state of anthropology than some “tribal warfare” trope. Indeed, in the more than 50 reactions to the AAA decision, the el Dorado controversy has been a minor sidenote, when mentioned at all.

The blow-up over the dropping of “science” began as a two-step process: (1) a new document created through an internal process became public, and (2) initial reactions on the Internet fueled a broader controversy through polarizing takes on the meaning of that document.

Also see this statement from the AAA.

[H/t: Linta Varghese]

The Tolstoy We’ve Forgotten

188220560Anatoly Naiman in Moscow News:

On November 20, 1910 (November 7 by the old calendar), the 82-year-old Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy died at the obscure railway station of Astapovo. No death before or since has produced such a shock wave in Russia or such resonance throughout the world.

It is impossible to convey just what Tolstoy was. The closest you can come to it, if asked, would be to point a finger toward 100 or so volumes that make up his complete collected works and the memoirs people wrote about him: Read these, you might tell the inquirer, and things will be a little clearer.

But one thing is already clear, actually – that there is no answer to who Tolstoy was, and there can’t be, in principle. Dealing with Tolstoy is like dealing with a concept on the order of life, earth, or mankind: no matter how closely you examine it or try to stretch your imagination around it, the only thing you understand completely is that you can’t fit it into a formula.

Or put it this way: modernity can’t cope without the irrational value of Pi, which trails off elusively into numerical infinity. The more you read Tolstoy, and the more you read about Tolstoy, the more obvious his Pi-ness – his infinite and elusive nature – becomes.

The best at writing about Tolstoy were Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Korolenko and Alexander Kuprin, largely because they were major figures themselves; as such they were big enough to understand that the lesser are not given scales by which to measure the greater. But they could, and did, find a point from which they could observe him, both in his human simplicity and in the complexity of his spirit at a given moment.

The worst at describing him were the ideologists – including, alas, the Tolstoyans themselves. My father was a Tolstoyan (not one of the “professionals”, happily) who in 1920, as a member of the Tolstoyan community at Taininka, in the Moscow region, served the time in Butyrka prison required of those who refused to enter the military in those days. So for me Tolstoy was from childhood a sort of distant relative, a mysterious, not entirely real uncle.

Tough Love and Revelation: The Films of Frederick Wiseman

TiticutFollies1_jpg_470x457_q85Andrew Delbanco in the NYRB blog:

The first film by Frederick Wiseman I saw was Titicut Follies (1967). It was the fall of 1969, my freshman year of college, too long ago to trust my memory scene by scene. What I mainly remember is the festive mood in the dining-hall-turned-theater as the lights went down and latecomers ducked under the projector’s cone of bluish light as they made their way to sit with friends across the room. A very cool senior had made introductory remarks to the effect that what we were about to see had been “banned in Boston” (always promising), and I think we half-expected the local police to show up as if we had gathered in Rick’s gambling den in Casablanca (1942). I remember a little snickering during the opening pan across the expressionless faces of the inmates singing “Strike up the Band” while they wave—tentatively, almost spastically—their pompoms. But once the film started, there was only silence in the room, interrupted now and then by a gasp.

A few months ago, forty years older, I watched Titicut Follies on a DVD on my computer screen in my study at home. Memories of that first viewing came flooding back: the guards tormenting an inmate named Jim, marching him naked up and down the bright-lit hallways, peppering him with variations on one relentless question: “How’s that room, Jim? … You gonna keep that room clean, Jim? … How’s that room gonna be tomorrow, Jim? … How come it’s not clean today?” until he screams out his compliance in rage and helplessness. And then there was the German psychiatrist who looks for all the world like Hermann Goring, pestering an inmate with questions in a monotone voice about how often he masturbates. Did he feel guilty after raping his own child? “I need help but I don’t know where I can get it,” says the young man, handsome and fit, but with a deadness in his eyes. “You get it here, I guess,” says the doctor—help, as the rest of the film makes clear, in the form of lockdowns, hosings, strip searches, and assorted other humiliations…

Watching the film today is an utterly different experience. I see images of Abu Ghraib. I see failed men exposed to mockery for having failed, men who once had families and jobs and respectable credentials, but, unable to manage their sexual or violent urges, descended into the pit into which any of us might fall.

Evidence-based Policy: Where is Our Theory of Evidence?

NancyfromCohen Nancy Cartwright, Andrew Goldfinch and Jeremy Howick in Journal of Children's Services:

What is it in virtue of which a fact is evidence for a hypothesis? Our philosophical accounts fall into two categories. First are accounts based on some features of the probabilistic relations between the evidence and the hypothesis – for example, increase in probability or various functions of likelihoods (see Mayo, 1996 Chapter 3 for an overview of such positions). These are not useful for evidence-based policy. What we need is a concept of evidence that we can use to judge whether some fact should be taken into consideration – whether it should be ‘on the table’ for consideration. Then we would expect to look at all the evidence on the table to decide on the probability of the proposed policy claim. Concepts of evidence based on facts about probabilities put the cart before the horse. We need a concept that can give guidance about what is relevant to consider in deciding on the probability of the hypothesis not one that requires that we already know significant facts about the probability of the hypothesis on various pieces of evidence.

Second are those accounts that are based on facts about explanation – for example, versions of inference to the best explanation (Lipton, 2004) or explanatory connectedness (Achinstein, 2001). The problem here is the concept of explanation. A good many accounts end up explaining explanation by reference to probability relations between the ‘explanans’ [the means of making plain] and the ‘explanandum’ [that which is being made plain]. This simply recreates the previous problem.