In his introduction to Naked Lunch, William Burroughs explained the title as “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork”. If you have spent any time looking at the oil business, you will know exactly what he meant. So much in modern life, from plastic cups to Boeing 787s, is made from or with oil that discovering the facts of how it is extracted, processed and distributed is like peeling back the surface of the everyday world to reveal the hidden structure beneath. When BP’s Macondo well ruptured in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, many people were confronted for the first time by some of those realities – including the awe-inspiring difficulties of working in the deep waters where oil companies venture now that the more accessible areas have been sucked dry, and the catastrophic consequences of failure. The video feed from the sea bed a mile down, showing oil and gas pouring unstoppably from the well into the waters of the gulf, brought home to American consumers the ugly side of a business that they had habitually ignored.

more from Ed Crooks at the FT here.

In 2011, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei exhibited 12 bronze animal heads representing the signs of the Chinese zodiac outside the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. The heads were enlarged replicas of a set designed in the 18th century by two European Jesuits for the emperor Qianlong and displayed in the gardens of the Yuanmingyuan, the emperor’s Old Summer Palace. At the time of the exhibition, Ai had disappeared into detention in China. The political controversy overshadowed the work itself, which posed its most searching questions not to the Chinese government, but to the West. In 1860, during the Second Opium War, the Old Summer Palace was ransacked and torched by French and British soldiers. In “From the Ruins of Empire,” his timely and important history of Asian intellectual responses to Western colonialism, Pankaj Mishra quotes one looter who said that to describe “the splendors before our astonished eyes, I should need to dissolve specimens of all known precious stones in liquid gold for ink, and to dip it into a diamond pen tipped with the fantasies of an oriental poet.”

more from Hari Kunzru at the NY Times here.

Salman Rushdie is a selfless defender of artistic freedom. No, he’s really a party animal with a bombshell perpetually on his arm. Actually, he’s hiding in fear. Isn’t he? For the last 23 years he’s been a novelist living the life of a character in a novel. Unfortunately for Rushdie, the book he’s been transported into isn’t a nuanced work of art like, say, “Midnight’s Children,” the epic novel that helped make his reputation as one of the best British writers of his generation. It’s more like “a bad Rushdie novel,” he told me as we sat in the restaurant of a West Hollywood hotel. “The kind of book I’d write if I weren’t any good.”

more from Hector Tobar at the LA Times here.

A Haircut

So many impossible things have already
happened in this life. He doesn’t think
twice when she tells him to get ready:
He’s about to get a haircut.

He sits in the chair in the upstairs room,
the room they sometimes joke and refer to
as the library. There’s a window there
that gives light. Snow’s coming
down outside as newspapers go down
around his feet. She drapes a big
towel over his shoulders. Then
gets out her scissors, comb, and brush.

This is the first time they’ve been
alone together in a while – with nobody
going anywhere, or needing to do
anything. Not counting the going
to bed with each other. That intimacy.
Or breakfasting together. Another
intimacy. They both grow quiet
and thoughtful as she cuts his hair,
and combs it, and cuts some more.
The snow keeps falling outside.
Soon, light begins to pull away from
the window. He stares down, lost and
musing, trying to read
something from the paper. She says,
“Raise your head.” And he does.
And then she says, “See what you think
of it.” He goes to look
in the mirror, and it’s fine.
It’s just the way he likes it,
and he tells her so.

Read more »

Meeran Karim in Himal Southasian:

One New England fall, I encountered the man who would soon become my guide to the world’s most militarised zone. Safely tucked away on the seventh floor of the Mount Holyoke College library, I found Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali’s Rooms Are Never Finished. The first poem in the collection took me by surprise. In his poem ‘Lenox Hill’, written while mourning his mother’s death from cancer, Shahid, a Kashmiri Muslim, recalled his mother helping him build a miniature Hindu temple in his room in Srinagar: “and I, one festival, crowned Krishna by you, Kashmir, listening to my flute”. This peaceful image of Kashmir was something which shocked his readers in the West, accustomed to graphic images of communal violence in the region. Ignoring the ‘reserved’ tag on the book’s cover, I secretly put it in my satchel and headed for the dormitory. Seated by my window, which displayed a landscape reminiscent of Kashmir, I sunk into Agha Shahid Ali’s world.

Shahid’s Kashmir was home to both Hindus and Muslims. Even as religious nationalisms plagued British India, Kashmiris remained committed to the ideal of a secular democratic state. In 1944, a memorandum detailing the transition of Kashmir from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional democracy was submitted to Prince Maharaja Hari Singh by Sheikh Abdullah, president of Kashmir’s leading political party, the National Conference. Contrary to the All India Muslim League and its exclusivist vision, Naya Kashmir promised to not only protect, but also to empower the valley's religious minorities. It was this very spirit of Kashmiriyat – an expression of camaraderie, resilience and nationalism in spite of religious differences – that I found in the poetry of my loyal guide.

Writing in 1997, the poet reflected upon his and his homeland’s religious identity in ‘A History of Paisley’, featuring the saffron-coloured flower popularly associated with the Hindu deity Ganesh:

You who will find the dark fossils of paisleys
one afternoon on the peaks of Zabarvan —
Trader from an ancient market of the future,
alibi of chronology, that vain
collaborator of time — won't know that these
are her footprints from the day the world began.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

In the not-so-distant future, a new kind of robot, one of the tiniest ever made, may have the ability to track down and destroy cancer cells. Films like Fantastic Voyage (1966) and Innerspace (1987) have long conjured fictional images of microscopic submarines or machinery that can travel inside the human body to cure ailments. Now Shawn Douglas, a research fellow at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, is working on making that a reality. In a recent issue of the journal Science, Douglas described a method for creating tiny machines—roughly the size of a virus—out of strands of protein and DNA.

These devices, dubbed “DNA nanorobots,” are short hexagonal tubes made of interwoven DNA that can open along their length like a clamshell. At one end is a DNA “hinge,” and at the other, a pair of twisted DNA fragments that act as “latches” to hold the device shut. Inside the nanorobot, Douglas can enclose molecules of almost any substance, essentially turning it into a molecular “delivery truck” that can transport medication to specific cells in the body. “Our goal is to make tools that can zero in on malfunctioning cells,” he says. “We want to be able to fix things when they break—when cells go haywire due to cancer or other diseases where things just aren’t working correctly. To do that, I think it makes sense to master this kind of nanoscale construction.”

More here.

Big history in all its guises has been inhospitable to the questions of meaning and intention so central to intellectual history. This is not simply for the banal reason that the big historians usually scrutinize such a superficial slice of recorded history at the end of their grand sweeps: the skin of paint on the top of the Eiffel Tower, in Mark Twain’s marvellous metaphor. Nor is it just because human agency dwindles in significance in the face of cosmological or even archaeological time. It is due, for the moment at least, to the essential materialism of the two main strains of big history, what we might call the biologistic and the economistic tendencies. The biologistic tendency is neurophysiologically reductive: when all human actions, including thought and culture, can be explained by brain chemistry, reflections approximate to reflexes. In the economistic strain, intellect is assimilated to interests. Each age simply “gets the thought that it needs”. For instance, whether it’s Buddhism, Christianity or Islam in the Axial Age, it’s all the same in the end: simply the product of the problem-solving capacity of some rather clever but needy chimps. In these regards, at least when it treats the questions of most concern to intellectual historians, deep history can appear to be somewhat shallow.

more from David Armitage at the TLS here.

That struggle was for democracy: for choice, human rights, and basic freedoms—ideas all the more enthralling for having always been denied. But fundamentally, that struggle had always been rooted in the granular. From underground or under the chronic scrutiny of intelligence agents and informers, Thar and Nigel and Suu Kyi and dissidents across Burma’s pro-democracy movement had fought through the darkest years of military rule for a thousand daily practicalities: to earn a degree without bribing an examiner, to have electricity, to keep the rice paddy land that your family had tilled for generations, to hold an identity card if you happened not to be part of the Buddhist majority, or, if you were, to scrap the system that required one in the first place. They wanted—they believed—they had a right to assemble in groups of more than five; to use the word “nightmare” if they chose to in the lyrics of their songs; to paste a poster on a wall and not face prison for the privilege. Their concerns, the concerns of Burma’s “most passionate dissidents,” Suu Kyi had written recently, reflected “the sense of freedom as something concrete that has to be gained through practical work, not just as a concept to be captured through philosophical argument.”

more from Delphine Schrank at VQR here.

Since antiquity, the harbours of the Mediterranean have exerted a fascination over travellers and cultural researchers.[1] Visiting them today, however, one is presented with no more than a shadow – part run down, part picturesque – of their former grandeur and importance. These ports once lay at the heart of the first trans-Mediterranean phase of globalization, the central axis of which shifted to the Atlantic in the sixteenth century. Nowadays, the turnovers of even the larger Mediterranean harbours, such as Istanbul or Marseille, are easily outstripped by the container terminals in East Asia and the Gulf.[2] The Mediterranean serves as a passageway for around one third of all global transports of crude oil and natural gas. Its harbours are largely the destinations of cruise liners and ferries, just as its airports are the starting and end-points for beach holidays and city breaks.

more from Claus Leggewie at Eurozine here.

If parenting, even responsible parenting, made me feel like a torturer, it wasn’t exactly because I’m melodramatic or overwrought, but because the official torturers now conceive of themselves in the same terms as the parenting manuals. They, too, are technicians of the naked human personality. The “Human Resource Exploitation Manual,” a formerly classified government document used to instruct “anti-communist” Latin American security forces in the bad old 1980s, puts the theory of torture in terms that any reader of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child can easily understand. The aim of torture, here called “questioning,” is “to induce regression in the subject,” i.e., to shatter that person’s identity by returning him to a state of infantile dependence on his captors. For this, violence itself is actually deemed inefficient and unnecessary (not to mention risky and unpopular once the news gets out). For some of us, the scandal of Abu Ghraib and the sadomasochistic sexual tortures of Guantanamo Bay (fake menstrual blood, simulated sex, et cetera) is less about our horror at torture than the broken taboos, the lack of restraint on display, in comparison to the refined techniques once taught in the School of the Americas.

more from Marco Roth at n+1 here.

From The Telegraph:

From Smithsonian:

Writers are often told to write what they know, so it should come as no surprise that many of the most famous characters in literary history are based on real people. Whether drawing inspiration from their spouses, friends and family, or finally, after decades worth of work, inserting themselves into the text, authors pull nearly every word and sentence from some element of reality, and most often, that element is people. Many characters, like Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (based on real-life beatnik Neal Cassady), come to mind as obvious, but this list is for the real-life literary characters that do not get recognized enough, and who deserve as much credit as their fictional counterparts.

1. Prospero (The Tempest, 1611)/William Shakespeare

Considered Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest is the artist’s farewell to the theater. Prospero is the island’s great magician, and with his powers he controls the tortoise-like character of Caliban and the sprite, spry Ariel. Prospero’s magic is in his books, and he decides when the Tempest should arrive, and who should come along with it. Sounds an awful lot like a playwright, doesn’t it? Prospero writes the script and wonders, like Shakespeare understandably would, what the future will be without him and his power. With frequent allusions to “the Globe” (the world, but also the name of Shakespeare’s theater), it is difficult to miss Prospero’s likeness to his great creator. Shakespeare critic and scholar Stephen Greenblatt says that the play brings up all of the “issues that haunted Shakespeare’s imagination throughout his career.” By writing himself into his final play, Shakespeare reminded the world of his own immortality as a public literary figure.

…3. Dorian Gray (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890)/ John Gray

A member of Oscar Wilde’s lively literary circle, John Gray was a lovely, boyish poet who could pass for a 15-year-old at age 25. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde describes the youth as a “young Adonis,” and judging by a black-and-white photo of John Gray, we can only suggest that he was not far off. Wilde met Gray in London at the home of a fellow artist, and, for a while was one of the author's many romantic affairs. The similarities between Gray the character and Gray the poet were striking. Like Dorian, John Gray found himself easily corrupted by the city and the title character’s first name came from an ancient Greek tribe, the Dorians, who were famous for perpetuating love among men. After the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray people began to call John Gray Dorian, which made him so uncomfortable that he went so far as to sue a London publication for libel for making the association. The fate of this real-life hero was more dramatic than Wilde could have ever written: John Gray moved to Rome and studied for the priesthood.

More here.

Amna R. Ali in Newsline:

Do you think the film has done justice to the novel vis-à-vis adaptation?

I would put it slightly differently; I don’t think the job of a film is to be a novel on screen. A film is a work of art that is inspired by, in this case, a novel. A lot of people may say that the film didn’t do justice to the novel etc…but I would ask, is the film itself a good film? The reason why that is the right criterion to judge is because, a novel works by allowing the reader to do much of the imagining in their minds as they read it. It’s like going to a shop and buying tomatoes, onions, rice and lentils etc. and cooking a meal. It’s your shopping list. A film is like a meal that’s been cooked for you. You know what things look like, sound like – it’s all pre-imagined for you. So, it’s natural that readers will feel that the film may not do justice to the book, because the film is somebody else imagining, not you. But, I don’t think it’s the right lens to view the success of a film. What’s more important is, does the film work aesthetically? Are its politics in the right place? Does it have real integrity and power?

Did you have any input in the writing the script? Did the scriptwriters, William Wheeler and Ami Boghani coordinate with you at any point?

Mira tried to find someone from Hollywood to do it and had enormous difficulty, because she could find people who could do Wall Street, but they couldn’t do Pakistan, or people who could do Pakistan but couldn’t do Wall Street. Finally, she asked Ami Boghani, who at the time was Mira’s assistant and later became a co-producer of the film, and me, to write the first couple of drafts of the complete screenplay under her guidance. Ami and I produced a couple of drafts, after which Wheeler was hired to take it to a different level, since neither Ami nor I are trained screenwriters.

More here.

Jason G. Goldman at the BBC:

While the details vary from tradition to tradition, the pattern is undeniable: humans seem to find value in guarding or watching the bodies of the deceased for some period of time following death.

But as we are beginning to discover, these behaviours may transcend species boundaries as well.

On 10 October 2003, a researcher watched as a female elephant named Eleanor collapsed. Her swollen trunk had been dragging on the ground while her ears and legs displayed evidence of another recent fall. One of her tusks was broken. An elephant named Grace, a member of a different social group, galloped towards Eleanor and tried to heave Eleanor back to her feet with her massive tusks, but Eleanor's back legs were too weak. The rest of the herd had moved on, but Grace remained with Eleanor at least another hour, until the sun disappeared below the horizon and night fell over Kenya. Eleanor died the following morning at 11am.

The parade of elephants that followed may – in some deep, fundamental way – be no different from those who gather to pay respects to a dignitary lying in state. Over the course of several days, the carcass was visited by five other elephant groups, including several families that were completely unrelated to Eleanor. The elephants sniffed and poked the body, touching it with their feet and trunks.

More here.

Ali Sethi in The New Yorker:

In the south of Pakistan, where Hindus have lately been kidnapped for ransom and their daughters forcibly converted to Islam, Hindu families have started fleeing to India in trains. As they waved to their relatives from train windows, possibly for the last time, many Hindu girls contorted their faces and wept. To the north, near an industrial city, policemen poured paint over Koranic verses inscribed on Ahmadi graves. This is because Ahmadis have no right to Koranic verses in Pakistan: the law classifies them as non-Muslims and the media regularly portrays them as treacherous deviants from the faith. Still higher up, in a scenic mountain valley, Shias were pulled out of buses, lined up and shot dead by gunmen who may or may not belong to one of Pakistan’s many banned sectarian outfits. And just two weeks ago, not far from the pristine capital, a mob of a hundred and fifty Muslims ran after a mentally handicapped, low-caste Christian girl, wanting to burn her alive for having held in her hand—this was the rumor in her neighborhood—a singed Islamic manual.

In the rest of the country, the end of Ramadan was celebrated with the usual fanfare, show of color, and generosity of spirit.

The hysterical synchronicity of these happenings is typical of the Pakistan encountered nowadays in the news. It is also Manto-esque, which is to say that it feels like it could have been imagined, in exactly these tones, with just such a flatly ironic counterpoint for an ending, more than fifty years ago by a man called Saadat Hassan Manto, the writer whose centennial is being marked this year in Lahore amid an unshakeable and vaguely shaming sense of déjà vu.

More here.

Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

It’s hard to keep up with Naomi Wolf. She wants women to take their sexuality back from the patriarchy—but she’s written in praise of Muslim veiling and Orthodox Jewish headscarves. In a notorious New Republic piece, she argued that pregnant women are indeed fetal vessels and blamed abortion on drunken sluttery. In the last dozen years she’s gone from paid adviser to the Gore campaign to Tea Party fan to champion of Occupy who made headlines by claiming on scant evidence that local arrests were organized from on high by the federal government. She waited decades to attack Harold Bloom in a New York magazine cover story for “encroaching” on her thigh when he was her professor at Yale, but today she thinks what rape complainants need is for their names to be made public—especially the names of Julian Assange’s accusers, whom she mocks as women scorned, frail Victorian flowers, or both. Even leaving aside the 2006 interview in which she described a vision of herself transformed into a teenage boy who saw Jesus, it’s been a long, strange twenty-one years since The Beauty Myth.

Perhaps opinion-mongering, black-and-white thinking and relentless TMI are the price of remaining a world-class celebrity feminist. In any case, that process has surely reached a nadir withVagina: A New Biography. What a silly book!

By now the whole world knows that the story began when Wolf found her orgasms becoming merely clitoral, losing their “Technicolor” glow and feeling of oneness with the universe. Surgery for a trapped pelvic nerve fixed her right up, which led Wolf to her big “discovery”: like every other sentient part of the body, the vagina is connected, through the nervous system, to the brain! Furthermore, every woman’s wiring is different! No wonder a touch that thrills one woman doesn’t do much for another. That is actually a useful point: even today, women fake orgasms rather than ask for what they want, and men can be quick to judge if what worked with one girlfriend doesn’t work with the next. Unfortunately, having “discovered” that every woman is sexually unique, she proceeds to write 300 more pages arguing that they are all the same, i.e., just like Naomi Wolf.

Molly Watson in Gastronomica:

In college, a Xeroxed copy of this graph (click image to enlarge) hung on our refrigerator, so taken were my housemates and I with Pierre Bourdieu’s assessment of food inDistinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979). Food-specific coverage takes up just 23 pages of the 604-page tome, but it was the early 1990s and sex and gender and studies of the body were all the rage, so passages like “[t]astes in food also depend on the idea each class has of the body and of the effects of food on the body, that is, on its strength, health, and beauty… It follows that the body is the most indisputable materialization of class taste” blew us away, just as the notion that our love of Ethiopian food and yogurt said as much about our class, education, and social status as it did about our taste buds unnerved us.

I’ve long thought a chronological and geographic update is in order. When I finally pulled the well-thumbed copy of the book from the shelf and turned to page 186, I was struck again by the elegance of such complex information displayed so simply. Parts of the chart hold true 30-plus years later and a continent away (raw and recherché food can still be seen as the purview of those with more cultural than economic capital), and yet other elements have completely flip-flopped. Charcuterie, listed as a choice of those without economic or cultural capital, has, if nothing else, become recherché.

So here is a new take on Bourdieu’s “The food space” chart.

Kathryn Schulz in New York Magazine: