Over at n+1:

In a recent article on the lack of ethnic diversity on American television, the critic Emily Nussbaum paused from pondering the absence of blacks on TV — the usual complaint against homogeneity — to note the sudden ubiquity of South Asians. “Black and white are not the only colors of diversity,” she wrote, and listed roles accorded to desi actors in The Office, Parks and Recreation, Community, Smash, The Big Bang Theory, Whitney, and The Good Wife. Never mind that at least two thirds of these shows suck. The mottling by occasional brown faces of the otherwise creamy expanse of TV whiteness, like the smattering of freckles on Pippi Longstocking, should be a sign of character — and progress. Nussbaum understands that diversity isn’t quite the right word for this. “At times I’ve wondered if this isn’t a psychic workaround: is brown safer than black?”

Every South Asian reader knew the answer. When even whiteness is freighted in liberal circles with maudlin guilt, no color is safer than South Asian brown. No minority presence in the US is more reassuring, or less likely to get angry or acknowledge your antiblack racism. The South Asian is sometimes the soft-spoken but intense professional— the alert-eyed and firm-jawed Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN. But just as often the television South Asian echoes the gestures of the standard fawning coolie of yore: palms clasped together, head shaking from side to side, mumbling “sahib” through an apologetic smile crowned with an anachronistic mustache. Or she is a cartoon auntie flinging her sari over her shoulder as she hovers over a pot of steaming aloo methi, yelling to her son in Rushdiean patois: “Eat-na, why you no eat! Food is spoiling-goiling,” et cetera. Nussbaum didn’t mention that the show that for a while came after The Office in the NBC Thursday night lineup was called Outsourced. The show followed the comic travails of whites stranded in an Indian call center, but was chiefly humiliating because its South Asian actors had lined up eagerly, in possession of free will, to portray racist stereotypes. South Asians have done this proudly for years, chiefly in film: from the many who played monkey brain eaters in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to Kal Penn as the repressed nerd in the Van Wilder movies, Dev Patel tomming through The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and the guy who literally played a coolie in The Royal Tenenbaums. Such minstrel figures paved the way for and now coexist with the accentless, “American” desi nebbish who fills the minority quota on TV.

But if we blamed the ghoras for their tacit racism, we’d only be going too easy on ourselves. The presence of desis on television isn’t just a sign of executives obliged to present diversity and doing it by stereotyping a docile minority.

Flach calls his photographs portraits, and yet they often lack faces. In a portrait of a sphinx cat, the head is just outside the frame, leaving the viewer to contemplate the skin folds on an anonymous, hairless, pink body. On page 248 is a rusty keyhole dropped onto a pile of white and orange stones that is actually the eye of a gecko. Stretched across two pages at the beginning of the book is a grey swathe of skin and fur. Brown cracks run along folds in the skin. What animal does this skin belongs to? An elephant? A monkey? You aren’t even sure what part of the animal it is. An ear? An arm? Never mind not seeing the forest for the trees. In this animal portrait of flesh and fur, you cannot even see the trees for the bark. Flach writes that his aim with these photographs is to bring the viewer “into an unnatural proximity to the subject and [allow] them to engage with it, creating an unreality that in turn brings the viewer closer to reality.” Flach’s photography holds out the promise that the animals will reveal more to us the nearer we get to them. But the closeness of the photographs often brings us to a wall rather than a door. On page 176, an armadillo is rolled up into a ball of its own shell. The detail on the shell’s surface is a bit like flowered wallpaper. The animal is all surface. You cannot see the armadillo’s face, or its legs, or anything identifying it as animal. It may be a rock for all we know. We are told there’s an animal in this portrait yet it’s nearly impossible to find.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

For Francis, the answer lay, not in escape from the desperations of natural life, but in a transformation in his spiritual understanding of the interwoven meaning of suffering and love. He came to see that the whole of creation, and each of its varied creatures in their distinct strengths and struggles, reflected and revealed the perfection of the Creator. If all things are from one Father, then all are kin and worthy of solicitude and appreciation. It was not nature in the abstract that he loved but every differentiated being in its particularity and individuality. Likewise, he loved not humanity in the abstract so much as individual human beings. He described this love as courtesy, a tender affection and concern for others as precious and unique, as creatures beloved of God; and his courtesy was born not of magnanimity or largesse (with their implicit sense of superiority) but of genuine humility of heart. He became the “little brother” (the Order of Friars Minor is the official name of his followers), placing himself in a position of neediness before others. Not so much a giver of gifts as a “giver of giving,” Francis provided the invitation to give by putting himself in circumstances that drew forth the generosity of others — and with it, their self-respect.

more from William B. Hurlbut at The New Atlantis here.

Arcosanti felt like an anachronism, a permanent representation of a different time and a different ideology. Walking through the domes felt like walking through ruins, rather than the white-hot center of architectural thought it ought to have been, and to many, always seemed so close to becoming. (The idea of arcology has always been touted as of crucial importance — just not yet.) Unlike New Delhi, which has blossomed since I lived there, Arcosanti was too rigid of a structure — literally, its physical plant couldn’t adapt, and figuratively, its social structure was too fixed — to contain the full spectrum of people a city needs to survive; not just high priests and acolytes, but entrepreneurs and rogues too. From my perspective as an eighteen-year-old architecture student who, at the time, shared (or thought he shared) Soleri’s vision, Arcosanti was undone by the same thing that killed off so many other projects: the people living in it. Not so much because they didn’t believe what Soleri believed, but because the original people working there either got frustrated and left, or stayed there and got older and settled into their cozy, Soleri-designed apartments to live a pleasant, hippy-dream life, sustained by the acolytes, the eager arcology champions like myself, who paid a couple hundred dollars to come out to the Arizona desert and learn from the master.

more from James McGirk at Wired here.

From Salon:

When I watch the footage of the first explosion, I look at the Boston Public Library Main Branch across the street, and I think no matter who they turn out to be–Islamic jihadists, home grown militia, neo-Nazis, something else–what really scares them, what they truly hate, is the access to knowledge that building exemplifies. Youngest victim is 8. Sigh. What can you do with that? If your “CAUSE” involves the death of kids, it’s not a cause, it’s a pestilence.

So proud to be a Bostonian tonight. So brokenhearted to be one, too.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Eight years of work, thousands of researchers around the world, $1 billion spent — and finally it was done. On April 14, 2003, a decade ago this week, scientists announced that they had completed the Human Genome Project, compiling a list of the three billion letters of genetic code that make up what they considered to be a sort of everyperson’s DNA. To commemorate the anniversary, Eric D. Green, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, spoke about what has been accomplished, what it means and what is coming next. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

How hard is it today to sequence a person’s genome? We can sequence a human genome in a couple of days for well under $10,000, probably around $4,000 or $5,000. And we sequence the genome you got from your father and the one you got from your mother. That’s a total of six billion bases. It is already around the cost of an M.R.I., and it will get cheaper yet. The original Human Genome Project sequenced just one representation, three billion bases.

How did it get so cheap? In April 2003, right after the completion of the human genome, our institute put into print a call for technology to deliver a $1,000 human genome sequence. That became the battle cry. I remember thinking someday we would get to a $1,000 genome. I don’t worry about the $1,000 genome anymore. We have had six orders of magnitude improvement in a decade.

What about the naysayers who asked, “Where are the cures for diseases that we were promised?” I became director of this institute three and a half years ago, and I remember when I first started going around and giving talks. Routinely I would hear: “You are seven years into this. Where are the wins? Where are the successes?” I don’t hear that as much anymore. I think what’s happening, and it has happened in the last three years in particular, is just the sheer aggregate number of the success stories. The drumbeat of these successes is finally winning people over. We are understanding cancer and rare genetic diseases. There are incredible stories now where we are able to draw blood from a pregnant woman and analyze the DNA of her unborn child. Increasingly, we have more informed ways of prescribing medicine because we first do a genetic test. We can use microbial DNA to trace disease outbreaks in a matter of hours. These are just game changers. It’s a wide field of accomplishment, and there is a logical story to be told.

More here.

Kevin Mahnken in Humanities:

“In Crime and Punishment, there is a sentence that goes like this: ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Richard Pevear lets the words hang in the air, along with a note of faint bafflement. From his Paris apartment, one half of the world’s only celebrity translation team is recollecting some of the knotty, cross-lingual jumbles that he has spent his working life trying to untangle.

“I came running to Larissa”—Larissa Volokhonsky, Pevear’s wife of thirty years and collaborator on twenty-one works of Russian-to-English translation—“and said, ‘Can that be? Is that what he said?’ And she checked and said yes. ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Reassured, if still skeptical, he jotted it down and moved on to Dostoyevsky’s next syntax-warping creation.

The inconspicuous passage would resurface before long, though. The translation was published and, Richard recalls, “one very eminent reviewer . . said, ‘They occasionally lapse into banalities, for instance.’ And he quotes this same sentence.” First lodged years ago, the complaint is a rare blemish on a generally worshipful public reception, perhaps tempting the duo to tidy up such repetitive, infelicitous wording. Instead, two decades and many printings later, Richard shrugs off the critic’s jibe and sticks to his guns. “But it’s unmistakable in Russian!”

“It’s very simple,” adds Larissa in her heavy Slavic accent, “so simple, I later found the same sentence in Chekhov.”

But there is nothing simple about the ongoing Pevear-Volokhonsky partnership (known widely in literary circles as PV). Their output, spilling over tens of thousands of pages and encompassing the hundred-fifty-year golden age of Russian literature, rivals even their most prolific forerunners in both quality and quantity. It is easier to list the canonical prose authors they have neglected (only Turgenev and Nabokov, though Larissa has lobbied her husband to turn their attentions to the former) than all of those they have translated. From the Patriotic War against Napoléon to the era of nineteenth-century radicalism and reform, and then on to the October Revolution, the Communist terror, and the postwar period, the Pevear-Volokhonsky project now surveys a cultural expanse as broad as the Siberian frontier.

Even their unconventional division of labor sets them apart from their contemporaries. Occupying separate rooms, husband and wife execute a two-step process that begins with Larissa’s word-for-word English rendition from the original. Richard, who speaks only basic Russian, then shapes Larissa’s special proof into literary English while rejecting anachronistic vocabulary and constructions. After hundreds of chapters, revisions, and personal consultations, the method has resulted in two prestigious PEN Translation Prizes and—as a mark of their uncommon public acceptance—a much-coveted selection to Oprah Winfrey’s juggernaut book club.

Now they have passed another important milestone. In putting their stamp on Lev Tolstoy’s final novel, Hadji Murat, they have at last reached the end of the great writer’s immense corpus.

by Dave Maier

Paul Horwich is a philosopher best known for his “minimalist” (or “deflationist”) theory of truth: that there is nothing more to the idea than that saying that something is true (“'Grass is green' is true”) is the same thing as saying it oneself (“Grass is green”). This view has met with little success, and now Horwich is dressing it in Wittgensteinian garb for resale. As marketing strategy goes, this isn't terrible – Wittgenstein's views are notoriously obscure, and his “quietism” has the same generally meta-skeptical tone as “minimalism” – but I'm not buying it, in neither the old guise nor the new.

Michael Lynch isn't buying it either. He too has a theory of truth (let's not get into it right now), and doesn't appreciate it being dismissed, not for its content, or his arguments for it, but merely for its being a “constructive” theory of truth in the first place. But it's hard to know whom to root for here, as Lynch's anti-Wittgensteinian remarks simply reprise the same trite, uncomprehending dismissals that philosopher has endured for nearly a century now. I won't have enough space here to say what Wittgenstein really meant, nor why he was right to say it; but it's important not to let these things go unchallenged.

Horwich begins by painting himself as the underdog fighting the good fight: “Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core supporters the usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value.”

This is too stark a picture, not to mention a bit self-serving. It's not that there isn't such a clique, or such harsh rejection; but I'd identify at least two further gradations between idolatry and contemptuous dismissal. First, many mainstream philosophers recognize Wittgenstein's contributions, even without accepting (or understanding) his conclusions. More to the point, you don't have to be a “hard-core supporter” to share Wittgenstein's general attitude toward the tendencies in philosophy he objects to. I for one would be perfectly happy to leave Wittgenstein out of it entirely if I could get what I wanted some other way. But there are some things we need that only he gives us.

After some throat-clearing, Horwich boils his Wittgenstein down into four main claims (for elaboration see his recent book on the subject).

1. Philosophy is “scientistic” in aiming at “simple, general principles”.

Such principles, I take it, are fine for science, where no one is complaining about the abstract generality of, say, Newton's laws. But philosophy is not science. I'd agree with this part, except to point out that philosophy was aiming at such principles long before science came along. In fact science as we know it developed from what we used to call “natural philosophy”. More important than labels, though, is the fact that there's nothing wrong with either simplicity or generalization if they're properly understood.

Read more »

In Haifa you avoided testing the imagination in the room where it had trained you to step out of yourself. You were content with observing, like a bird watching a feather clinging to the bitter orange tree. — Mahmoud Darwish [1

By Sousan Hammad

The emphasis of this text is to discuss the role that the imaginary plays in poetry that is rooted in both a geographic place and virtual (poetic) space, arguing that the poem, in its poetic imaginary, is an attempt to become a place that exists in its displacement. By using images that create an imaginary representation of a space it enables spectators to see the possible variations of a place. In so doing, it will aim to serve as an archive of an imaginary Haifa, creating a platform to collectively rethink and reimagine our experiences with Palestine, a challenge that maps multiplicities: those experiences and feelings in a particular space that are totally unknown or ‘unreal' to some readers, or actual and ideal to others.

“The Breast” by Rene Magritte, 1961

Still, no physical reality of Palestine can ever take the place of the mythic place that was lost. The liturgy of longing for Palestine, for a lost time and space, has become a tired and clichéd phenomenon (as the traditions of memorializing have proved) for its diasporic, exiled, and refugee communities. Rather than end the reaction to longing, rethinking nostalgia and the force of roles, such as the imaginary, can be understood as modes for provoking liberation from the ‘what has been' and ‘what is'. It is a break from clichés and manifestos, a way to cope with the obsession of the Palestine question that every Palestinian struggles with. The attraction of imagining new forms is that it lets us dream in a new Palestine and live in a new Palestine – in other words it allows us to ‘materialize' an imaginary Palestine, one that can be thought of in various ways, for Palestine exists in its multiplicities.

This is not to say that Palestine should merely exist in our imagination, but this is what it has come to: a place that must go beyond reality, for there is no one physical place that is equal to a Palestinian's memories, longings and reveries – our imaginations. Our notions of the real and the imaginary are nothing but misunderstandings. This is why the role of longing is much more than a problem to be solved, it, like translation, lets itself be represented in fantastic variations.

Read more »

Oliver Clegg. There You Are. 2010

Oil on dismantled 1970's school desk.

More here and here.

From 1977, Joseph Brodsky in the NYRB (image from Wikimedia Commons):

The uneventfulness of Cavafy’s life extends to his never having published a book of his poems. He lived in Alexandria, wrote poems (occasionally printing them infeuilles volantes, as pamphlets or broadsheets in a severely limited edition), talked in cafés to local or visiting literati, played cards, bet on horses, visited homosexual brothels, and sometimes attended church.

I believe that there are at least five editions of Cavafy’s poetry in English. The most successful renderings are those by Rae Dalven and Messrs. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. The hard-cover version of the latter is bilingual. Since there is little or no cooperation in the world of translation, translators sometimes duplicate others’ efforts without knowing it. But a reader may benefit from such duplication and, in a way, the poet may benefit too. In this case, at least, he does, although there is a great deal of similarity between the two books in the goal they set themselves of straightforward rendering. Judged by this goal, Keeley and Sherrard’s versions are certainly superior. It is lucky though that less than half of Cavafy’s work is rhymed, and mostly his early poems.

Every poet loses in translation, and Cavafy is not an exception. What is exceptional is that he also gains. He gains not only because he is a fairly didactic poet, but also because, starting as early as 1900-1910, he began to strip his poems of all poetic paraphernalia—rich imagery, similes, metric flamboyance, and, as already mentioned, rhymes. This is the economy of maturity, and Cavafy resorts to deliberately “poor” means, to using words in their primary meanings as a further move toward economy. Thus he calls emeralds “green” and describes bodies as being “young and beautiful.” This technique comes out of Cavafy’s realization that language is not a tool of cognition but one of assimilation, that the human being is a natural bourgeois and uses language for the same ends as he uses housing or clothing. Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language’s own means.

Alex Sayf Cummings in Salon:

Imagine that a popular American rock band – say, the Black Keys – wrote a song about immigrants. There are too many of them, the lyrics suggest, and they take jobs away from native-born workers. The chorus recommends that they go back to their countries of origin, where they really belong. Though the song was meant to satirize xenophobia, “No Mexicans” could be easily interpreted as an anthem of racism.

This was the situation that the Beatles faced in 1969, when they first concocted the song that would become “Get Back.” Better known as a playful take on counterculture, starring the gender-bending Sweet Loretta Martin and the grass-smoking Jo-Jo, the song originally dealt with South Asian immigration to the United Kingdom. The strange story of “Get Back,” its politics, and its bootlegs tells us much about the limits of what musicians, even hugely popular and politically engaged ones, can say in popular music — and what’s at stake in the battle over file-sharing and free culture today.

An early version of the song, known to bootleggers as “No Pakistanis,” began with Paul McCartney muttering, “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs.” Many Americans have heard similar complaints, having listened to the anti-immigrant invective of Joe Arpaio and Tom Tancredo for years. Brits are also familiar with such rhetoric, seeing the British Nationalist Party ride their slogan of “British jobs for British workers” to prominence in the last decade.

Many who hear the song today are startled to hear this sort of cranky posturing from the Beatles, the lovable moptops who told us that “All You Need Is Love.” Bootleg versions of “No Pakistanis” have even won the hearts of neo-Nazi groups like Stormfront, who believe that the Beatles were really on the side of the white man’s cause all along. (The white supremacist band Battlecry even recorded its own clueless version of the tune.) If released today, a similar song would likely ignite controversy, regardless of the songwriter’s intentions.

Pigeons
.
Like every kingdom,
the kingdom of birds
has its multitude of the poor,
the urban, public poor
whose droppings whiten
shingles and sidewalks,

who pick and pick
(but rarely choose)
whatever meets their beaks:
the daily litter
in priceless Italian cities,
and here, around City Hall—
always underfoot,
offending fastidious people
with places to go.

No one remembers how it happened,
their decline, the near-
abandonment of flight,
the querulous murmurs,
the garbage-filled crops.
Once they were elegant, carefree;
they called to each other in rich, deep voices,
and we called them doves
and welcomed them to our gardens.

.
by Lisel Mueller
from Alive Together
Louisiana State University Press

Eran Gilat in lensculture:

I am a neuroscientist and an avid art photographer. In recent years I found myself directing most of my attention and energy to still life photography of biological specimens, highly inspired by my long-lasting confrontation with biological tissues in my clinical research. It takes a while for a young clinician or a researcher to accommodate to the laboratory or hospital scenes. Even after extensive training, some cannot adjust to the visuals. I feel my photographic activity carries me to these sometimes emotionally disturbing regions too.

My photographic activity deals with the aesthetics of the scene, improvising various contexts; the tools and paraphernalia shown are not just the typical ones used in the operating place. My “Life Science” project situates biological tissue into relatively pleasant, sometimes artificial scenarios, contemplating issues of materialism, erotica and mortality, corresponding with the complicated and intriguing category of “Animal Reminder” in the visual arts. I feel my work also challenges various ideas about violence. We tend to describe violent humankind behavior as an animal-like beastly revolting one, associated with violent animal behavior. However, I believe in many aspects we are inferior to the moral conduct of the animal world, while being superior in our “creative violent behavior”.

More here.