That is a very famous painter!” exclaims the taxi driver at Antwerp station when I present Luc Tuymans’ address. “Are you his model?” If only … Or perhaps the suggestion is not so flattering. Using photographic sources, Tuymans paints subjects that are emotionally or morally loaded – Albert Speer or Condoleezza Rice, a patient just diagnosed with cancer or a lamp made from human skin in Buchenwald – only to transform them into bleached-out, blurry, depersonalised images, at once banal and sinister. When these quiet, subversive pictures appeared at the end of the 1980s, they challenged the era’s neo-expressionist art scene so successfully that Tuymans was hailed as the saviour of late 20th-century painting. Conceptual but painterly, engaging with the big themes of history and of today, he has not put a foot wrong since. An impressive retrospective recently toured the US and now comes home to Belgium, opening at Bozar in Brussels next week. The taxi drops me at a sleek, neutral-looking office, and it is at once obvious that, for an artist who made his name painting corruption in the corridors of power, establishment success sits uneasily. “Yes, it had a good reception,” Tuymans answers warily, as I take a seat at a desk opposite him and ask about the US tour. “Because the work is understated and clearly European, an element of exoticism played itself out. European painting is about deliberate space, American painting is about accidental space.”

more from Jackie Wullschlager at the FT here.

From the 1920s through the early ’40s, Ethel Waters was probably the most famous black woman in America: a bestselling recording artist, a popular nightclub performer, the star of five Broadway shows and several Hollywood movies. After a grim period of little work as she aged and gained weight, Waters triumphed again as an African American matriarch in the 1949 film “Pinky” and in the lyrical 1950 stage adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novel “The Member of the Wedding.” By the time Waters died in 1977, however, she was better known to most Americans as an elderly, large, devoutly religious woman who frequently appeared at Billy Graham’s fundamentalist Crusades. People had largely forgotten the glamorous crossover artist who belied stereotypes, the first black woman to headline on Broadway at the Palace — the mecca for all vaudeville performers, the star of a groundbreaking Broadway drama (“Mamba’s Daughters” in 1939) that empathetically depicted three generations of African American women. One of Waters’ biggest hits, the sultry, heartbreaking “Stormy Weather,” is remembered instead as Lena Horne’s signature song.

more from Wendy Smith at the LA Times here.

Blacksmith
—in memory of Auld Andra Fraser of Carnwath

For this reader, the great achievement of Slawenski’s biography is its evocation of the horror of Salinger’s wartime experience. Despite Salinger’s reticence, Sla­wenski admirably retraces his movements and recreates the savage battles, the grueling marches and frozen bivouacs of Salinger’s war. It’s hard to think of an American writer who had more combat experience. He landed on Utah Beach on D-Day. Slawenski reports that of the 3,080 members of Salinger’s regiment who landed with him on June 6, 1944, only 1,130 survived three weeks later. Then, when the 12th Infantry Regiment tried to take the swampy, labyrinthine Hürtgen Forest, in what proved to be a huge military blunder, the statistics were even more horrific. After reinforcement, “of the original 3,080 regimental soldiers who went into Hürtgen, only 563 were left.” Salinger escaped the deadly quagmire of Hürtgen just in time to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, and shortly thereafter, in 1945, participated in the liberation of Dachau. “You could live a lifetime,” he later told his daughter, “and never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose.”

more from Jay McInerney at the NY Times here.

From aalbc.com:

Poet, writer; born in Topeka, Kansas. Based in Chicago, she graduated from Wilson Junior College there (1936) and was publicity director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Chicago (1930s). She taught at many institutions and succeeded Carl Sandburg as poet laureate of Illinois (1968). Her verse narrative Annie Allen (1949) won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to an African-American woman (1950). From 1985-86 Brooks was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.

Two of her poems that I personally love best:

We Real Cool
The Pool Players
Seven at the Golden Shovel

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

The Bean Eaters
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair,
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering…
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room
that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and
cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

More here. (One of my great joys of living in Chicago was to know that I shared a city with the grand Ms. Brooks)

From The Independent:

Everyone suddenly burst out singing. And laughing, and crying, and shouting and praying, kneeling on the road and kissing the filthy tarmac right in front of me, and dancing and praising God for ridding them of Hosni Mubarak – a generous moment, for it was their courage rather than divine intervention which rid Egypt of its dictator – and weeping tears which splashed down their clothes. It was as if every man and woman had just got married, as if joy could smother the decades of dictatorship and pain and repression and humiliation and blood.

Forever, it will be known as the Egyptian Revolution of 25 January – the day the rising began – and it will be forever the story of a risen people. The old man had gone at last, handing power not to the Vice-President but – ominously, though the millions of non-violent revolutionaries were in no mood to appreciate this last night – to Egypt's army council, to a field marshal and a lot of brigadier generals, guarantors, for now, of all that the pro-democracy protesters had fought and, in some cases, died for. Yet even the soldiers were happy. At the very moment when the news of Mubarak's demise licked like fire through the demonstrators outside the army-protected state television station on the Nile, the face of one young officer burst into joy. All day, the demonstrators had been telling the soldiers that they were brothers. Well, we shall see.

More here.

From The Root:

Sept. 3, 1944: It's a damp evening in the Alabama black belt, nearly midnight, but services at Rock Hill Holiness Church in the small town of Abbeville have just let out. Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old sharecropper, sets out along the town's fertile peanut plantations, accompanied for the walk home by two other worshippers from the African-American congregation. Moments later, a green Chevrolet rolls by — and their routine journey takes a horrifying turn. Wielding knives and guns, seven white men get out of the car, according to Taylor and witnesses from a state investigation of the case. One shoves Taylor in the backseat; the rest squeeze in after her and ride off. Her panicked friends run to tell the sheriff. After parking in a deserted grove of pecan trees, the men order the young wife and mother out at gunpoint, shouting at her to undress. Six of them rape Taylor that night. Once finished, they drive her back to the road, ordering her out again before roaring off into the darkness. Days after the brutal attack, Taylor's story traveled through word of mouth, catching the attention of a Montgomery NAACP activist named Rosa Parks. A seasoned anti-rape crusader, who focused on the sexual assaults of black women that were commonplace in the segregated South, Parks would eventually help bring the case international notice. Despite her efforts, however, in Jim Crow-era Alabama, Taylor's assailants were never punished.

It's curious, to say the least, that Taylor's name is not mentioned in history books. While most analyses of circumstances that inspired the civil rights movement focus on black men — being lynched or railroaded into jail, or facing down segregationists — the stories of countless black women like Recy Taylor, who were raped by white men during the same era, have gone understated, if not overlooked entirely. Nearly 70 years later, having such a brutal attack swept under the rug is still a source of pain for a surviving victim. “Wasn't nothing done about it,” Taylor, now 91, told The Root in a phone interview from her Florida home. “The sheriff never even said he was sorry it happened. I think more people should know about it … but ain't nobody [in Abbeville] saying nothing.”

More here.

From our friend Shiko Behar:

As these words are written, worldwide observers anxiously await the third communiqué within less than 24 hours from the old guard leadership of the Egyptian armed forces. This follows last night’s insulting and detached address delivered by Egypt’s defunct autocrat, Hosni Mubarak. Can these tantalizing – yet still uncertain – developments permit a minimally thoughtful reading aimed at transcending the present?

To begin with, everyone should salute the exceptional persistence and bravery of the Egyptian masses who have exhibited an exemplary, highly-politicized spirit. During the last 18 days the world has witnessed an outstanding manifestation of collective action – one that neither scholars, nor even authors of prose, could have written in such a sublime, paradigmatic manner. Egypt’s masses have compellingly reminded all members of global civil society that the core values of liberation, freedom and democracy must not be regarded as clichés. In this respect, events unfolding in Egypt constitute a quintessential part of World History rather than merely being part of Egyptian, Arab or Middle Eastern history alone.

Read more »

Tariq Ali's reactions, in the Guardian:

The new wave of mass opposition has happened at a time where there are no radical nationalist parties in the Arab world, and this has dictated the tactics: huge assemblies in symbolic spaces posing an immediate challenge to authority – as if to say, we are showing our strength, we don't want to test it because we neither organised for that nor are we prepared, but if you mow us down remember the world is watching.

This dependence on global public opinion is moving, but is also a sign of weakness. Had Obama and the Pentagon ordered the Egyptian army to clear the square – however high the cost – the generals would have obeyed orders, but it would have been an extremely risky operation for them, if not for Obama. It could have split the high command from ordinary soldiers and junior officers, many of whose relatives and families are demonstrating and many of whom know and feel that the masses are on the right side. That would have meant a revolutionary upheaval of a sort that neither Washington nor the Muslim Brotherhood – the party of cold calculation – desired.

The show of popular strength was enough to get rid of the current dictator. He'd only go if the US decided to take him away. After much wobbling, they did. They had no other serious option left. The victory, however, belongs to the Egyptian people whose unending courage and sacrifices made all this possible.

And so it ended badly for Mubarak and his old henchman.

Katherine Marino in n+1:

As historian Christine Stansell explains in her masterful new book The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present, the global recognition of women’s worth was the goal of women’s rights activists even before the term “feminism” was coined in the late 19th century. While never a homogenous movement, feminism, embodying many variations based on politics, race, class, and region, has always been broadly defined by its constitutive tenet: the belief in women’s equal worth.

Stansell’s narrative charts the course of the struggle for sexual equality in the US over the longue durée, from the radical fringes of political thought in the 18th century to its center in the 21st. Achieving national gains in the US such as the vote, education, and contraception, feminism finally gained a signal breakthrough into international politics in 1975, when activists from around the world put women’s equality on the agenda of the United Nations at the United Nations First World Conference on Women in Mexico City, the largest and most diverse gathering of women regionally and socioeconomically to date. The subsequent “UN Decade for Women” initiated a host of new internal programs with women’s rights agendas such as the Development Fund for Women and the World Health Organization, as well as NGOs. These organizations collected global facts about women’s life expectancy, years of education, agricultural productivity, literacy, employment, and maternal mortality. This was, as Stansell points out, “the first time the world’s women were carefully counted.” And it was this very data from the UN and World Health Organization that Sen used to write his famous article, which, in turn, helped spur other innovations in the new field of development studies and international relations. Increasingly, issues that had not been the subject of international policy discussions—maternal mortality, female infanticide, rape, and violence against women—became legitimate areas of global research and even topics of discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations. The 1995 UN Beijing World Conference on Women made a surprisingly simple conceptual and political breakthrough with its announcement that “women’s rights are human rights.”

Such a treacherously quick portrayal of feminism’s triumphant march into the world of international politics barely begins to summarize Stansell’s rich and dense history. But it does emphasize one central goal of her work: to explain not only how feminism has trickled from the radical fringes of political debate to ultimately course through its lifeblood, but also how, in that very process, feminism’s work has come to be overlooked.

The extraordinary thing about Franz Liszt is that he remains one of the most famous composers of the 19th century despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of his music is forgotten — and likely to stay forgotten. He wrote enough of it, that’s for sure. If you were to listen to his works one after another without interruption, it would take about a week. I’m basing that estimate on the fact that Leslie Howard’s 98 CDs of Liszt’s complete piano music, which are just about to be reissued by Hyperion, last for just over five days. That’s nine million notes spread over 12 miles of printed pages, in case you were wondering. Add the orchestral and sacred music and you’d have about 120 CDs. But, even though 2011 is Liszt’s bicentenary year, there was never any danger of Radio 3 giving us ‘Liszt Week’. Even his fervent champions — who are always telling us that he beat Wagner to the Tristan chord, reinvented symphonic form, anticipated Schoenberg in his frighteningly spare last piano style, etc. — might blanch at the prospect of wall-to-wall Liszt. (Radio 3 announcer: ‘And that was the Marche pour le Sultan Abdul Medjid-Khan. Next, the Tarantella d’après la Tarantelle de “la Muette de Portici” d’Auber.’)

more from Damian Thompson at The Spectator here.

The Australian splendid fairy-wren has a peculiar way of passing on its genetic material. It starts off in a manner that might seem familiar to anyone who’s seen a 1950s family sitcom: Boy meets girl, boy partners with girl for life, boy and girl raise family together. But that’s where the similarities end. After the baby wrens grow up, they don’t pair up with other wrens right away; instead, they help their parents raise the next brood. Except that next brood is likely not the true genetic offspring of the “father” of this family. You see, while splendid fairy-wrens do pair up in family units for life, they rarely mate with their original partners. Instead, both males and females like to get together for dangerous sex with other wrens, who in turn may be socially paired with other wrens. And calling this sex “dangerous” may be only a slight exaggeration. Science writer Rob Mitchum blogged last week about research showing that these tiny wrens not only mate primarily outside the family unit, they may be more interested in mating in the presence of one of their primary predators, the butcherbird.

more from Dave Munger at Seed here.

Jacques Barzun once observed that Walter Bagehot was ‘”well-known” without being known well’. Something similar, I suspect, might be said of the great Czech writer Karel Capek (1890-1938). The Insect Play (1921), co-authored with his brother Josef, is a classic in the library of anti-totalitarian satire, as is the proto sci-fi fantasy War with the Newts (1936). Janácek adapted The Makropulos Case (1922) for the libretto of his 1926 opera, and Punch declared Capek’s travel book Letters from England (1925) ‘the best book about our race since the Germania of Tacitus’. And yet how many Anglophone readers really know Capek’s work? Not many, I’d wager. The chief datum that the multitude possesses about Capek is that he coined the term ‘robot’. That is nearly correct. The word – from an old Czech word for ‘labour’ – does appear in his play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1920). But ‘robot’ was actually coined by Josef (Karel was toying with ‘laborator’, a clearly inferior alternative). The true story of Capek’s most famous linguistic benefaction is told in a paragraph-long newspaper column called ‘About the Word Robot’ (1933). You’ll find it, and scores of other charming vignettes, observations, expostulations, comments, remarks and (alas) love letters, in Believe in People, an eminently likeable book that lives up to its subtitle: read this journalistic miscellany and you really will come close to ‘The Essential Karel Capek’.

more from Roger Kimball at Literary Review here.

From Nature:

Sex and violence are intertwined in mice. A tiny patch of cells buried deep within a male's brain determines whether it fights or mates, and there is good reason to believe humans possess a similar circuit. The study, published in Nature today¹, shows that when these neurons are quieted, mice ignore intruding males they would otherwise attack. Yet when the cells are activated, mice assault inanimate objects, and even females they ought to court. The cells lie within an area of the hypothalamus with known links to violent behaviour. An electrical jolt to this vicinity causes cats and rats to turn violent, but neurophysiological experiments conducted decades ago stimulated too big an area to identify the specific brain circuits, let alone the individual neurons, involved in aggression.

More recently, scientists studying mice engineered to lack specific genes have found that some of them act more aggressively than normal mice. “We really don't know which part of the brain went wrong in those mice. Consequently it's tough to make sense of that behaviour,” says Dayu Lin, a neuroscientist now at New York University and an author of the study, who began searching for the seat of aggression in mice while working with David Anderson at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More here.

Men Made of Words

Meera Nanda in Open:

Indians tend to affirm their claims on yoga by trotting out the familiar icons of the ‘5,000-year-old Vedic tradition,’ which supposedly stretches from the Pashupati seal of the (actually very unVedic) Indus Valley civilisation to the Bhagvad Gita and the venerable Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Yoga, Indians like to solemnly declare, is ‘eternal’ and ‘timeless’ and all the great yoga masters, from Swami Vivekananda to BKS Iyengar to Baba Ramdev of our own time, have only restored or reinstituted an ancient practice. It is also commonplace to hear Indians—even those who are not particularly spiritual themselves—blame Americans and other ‘decadent’ Westerners for reducing their spiritually rich tradition to mere calisthenics.

Lately, Hindus in America have started flying the saffron flag over American-style yoga, which consists largely of yogic asanas and stretches. The leading Indo-American lobby, Hindu American Foundation (HAF), has recently started a vocal campaign to remind Americans that yoga was made in India by Hindus. Not just any ordinary Hindus, but Sanskrit-speaking, forest-dwelling Brahmin sages who learned to discipline their bodies in order to purify their atman. The purist Hindu position, articulated by the HAF, is that all yoga, including its physical or hatha yoga component, is rooted in the Hindu religion/way of life that goes all the way back to the Vedic sages and yogis.

There is only one problem with this purist history of yoga: it is false.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

When Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of the transistor in 1948, the press release boasted that “more than a hundred of them can easily be held in the palm of the hand.” Today, you can hold more than 100 billion transistors in your hand. What’s more, those transistors cost less than a dollar per billion, making them the cheapest and most abundant manufactured commodity in human history. Semiconductor fabrication lines churn out far more transistors than the world’s farmers grow grains of wheat or rice.

In this thriving transistor monoculture, can a new circuit element find a place to take root and grow? That’s the question posed by the memristor, a device first discussed theoretically 40 years ago and finally implemented in hardware in 2008. The name is a contraction of “memory resistor,” which offers a good clue to how it works.

Memristor enthusiasts hope the device will bring a new wave of innovation in electronics, packing even more bits into smaller volumes. Memristors would not totally supplant transistors but would supplement them in computer memories and logic circuits, and might also bring some form of analog information processing back into the world of computing. Farther out on the horizon is a vision of “neuromorphic” computers, modeled on animal nervous systems, where the memristor would play the role of the synapse.

More here.

More about Crowdrise here.

Tom Vanderbilt in Slate:

The logic, presented by many readers, is breathtakingly clear and simple. To quote one:

“When backing in, I have to drive past the slot, then back in. On my way past it, I can look in the slot to ensure it is clear. I have situational awareness, so it is pretty safe to back in. When I leave, I just have to drive out and that is safer than backing out. If I don't back in, when I leave I have to back out into what is basically unknown traffic.”

Backing into traffic in parking lots is more hazardous than you might think. Parking lot crash statistics are a bit hazy, particularly for crashes involving only property damage, but a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in 2001 and 2002 found that 14 percent of all damage claims involved crashes in parking lots (some number of which must have involved vehicles moving in and out of spaces). More seriously, there is a whole category of crashes, often fatal, tracked by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, called “backover crashes“: These typically occur in driveways and parking lots, often involve children, and happen at a higher rate to drivers of SUVs and “light-duty trucks,” owing to the reduced visibility they offer (not just to their drivers but to those parked adjacent). Indeed, the last crash I was involved with occurred when a driver backed his SUV from a parking space into my driver's side door as I waited for traffic to clear. The driver said he never saw me, even though our cars were only a few feet apart, and it's almost certain the crash would not have happened had the driver employed “back-in, head out” parking.

More here.

Asef Bayat in Jadaliyyah:

For years, western political elites and their local allies have charged the Arab peoples with political apathy and lethargy. The argument that Arabs are uninterested in seeking to wrest greater democratic freedoms from their authoritarian rulers always rested on shaky foundations. But now that millions of Egyptians, following the Tunisians’ example, have proved it wrong by mobilising against power, the sceptical ground has adjusted: toward the murmured fear that Egypt’s uprising would develop into an “Islamist revolution” along the lines – demagogic, violent, intransigent, expansionist, anti-western – of that of Iran in 1979.

The idea of an “Islamic revolution in Egypt” is voiced by four sources. The first is the Hosni Mubarak regime, in the attempt to dissuade its western allies from supporting the uprising. The second is Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israel and its allies in the United States and Europe, which wish to maintain the autocratic regime more or less intact by keeping such players as Omar Suleiman (the new vice-president and former intelligence chief) in power after Mubarak. The third is Iran’s Islamist hardliners, who are making a desperate effort to downplay the democratic thrust of the Egyptian revolution and present it as Islamic and Iran-inspired one. The fourth is a section of Egypt’s own citizens who express genuine concerns about a possible new Islamic revolution in the heart of the Arab world.

More here.