Month: February 2018
the greatest ice dancers of all
For smooth sweeping – the very essence of skating on ice – it is best to watch the skaters who do fewer tricks. And that is why the highest form of skating on ice is skating in pairs and the highest form of skating in pairs is ice dancing. When you skate with another person, you are performing a kind of dance. Great dancers are often described as being able to “glide across the floor.” In skating on ice, you really can glide across the floor. The shared gliding of two human beings is, in fact, a thing stupendous. That is why ice-skating has always carried a sense of romance. When you’ve “swept smooth” with another person, you’ve shared something. Witness, if you will, the ice skating scene from the classic Cary Grant film, The Bishop’s Wife. Phenomenologically speaking, “smooth sweeping” is connected to wonder and love. Love in the romantic sense, yes. But more deeply, love in the sense of loving the world — and wonder that such a form of motion is possible at all.
Alas, the Olympic rule-makers have tried to destroy love and wonder by means of the progressive scoring system, which rewards skaters for doing many jumps and twirls and anything that has a high probability of landing them on the fanny. You’d think that something as pure and lovely as the scene from The Bishop’s Wife would not be welcome in a commercialized and crass event like the modern Olympics. But you would be wrong.
Ice dancing lives.
more here.
Getting Lost in Narrative Virtuality
We don’t have a word to properly describe the cognitive space of the reader, the way a text triggers personal trails of thought and imaginary possibilities of an emerging fiction. In Terminal Identity, Scott Bukatman compares the de-narrativized spaces in postmodern literature and author Samuel Delany’s notion of “paraspace,” a term referring to “a science fictional space that exists parallel to the normal space of the diegesis- a rhetorically heightened ‘other realm.’” (157) The emblematic use of paraspace is at the end of Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey, where astronaut Bowman (and we the viewers) experience a loss of narrative and spatio-temporal coherence as he/we enter an alien world. “The intensification of this paraspatial sequence performs an ontological deconstruction within the diegesis as well as for the film viewer.” (177) In science fiction movies and novels, many of these paraspatial techniques draw on avant-garde practices (abstraction, rapid montage, concrete poetry or fragmentary prose) to introduce an unknowable realm within the emerging known of the narrative world. The notion of a space parallel to that of the narrative space and yet within the diegesis; that introduces processes disruptive to coherent narration and yet has a narrative purpose, seems to get at the complexity of narrative virtuality in digital texts.
If electronic literature remains tied to, as Ryan argues, Roland Barthes notion of a plural text – “[a] galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds” (from S/Z in Ryan (3587) – this heritage extends well beyond modernism and postmodernism.
more here.
The anti-European tradition of Europe
Engaged as we East Europeans were in the process of re-entering the European community, we were unaware of, or overlooked, the old and lasting tensions of continental history, its constituent polychrome nature. Europe has a long tradition of self-segregation, of multi-dimensionality, of debates on national identity that can go as far as internal conflict. The first failure of our ‘common home’ was the fracturing of the Roman Empire into a western and an eastern segment. Rome broke away from Byzantium, Catholicism from Orthodoxy, Protestantism from Catholicism, the Empire from the Papacy, East from West, North from South, the Germanic from the Latin, communism from capitalism, Britain from the rest of the continent. The spectre of division is what the Belgian philosopher Jacques Dewitte (admiringly) called the ‘European exception’. We easily perceive the differences that make up our identity; we are able at any time to distance ourselves from ourselves. We invented both colonialism and anti-colonialism; we invented Eurocentrism and the relativisation of Europeanism. The world wars of the last century began as intra-European wars; the European West and East were for decades kept apart by a ‘cold war’. An impossible ‘conjugal’ triangle has constantly inflamed spirits: the German, the Latin and the Slavic worlds. An increasingly acute irritation is taking hold between the European Union and Europe in the wider sense, between central administration and national sovereignty, between the Eurozone countries and those with their own currencies, between the Schengen countries and those excluded from the treaty. All seasoned with the noble rhetoric of ‘unity’, a ‘common house,’ and continental solidarity. Where were we, the newcomers, to place ourselves in a landscape that by no means erred towards monotony? In the following, I shall choose three of the front-lines that marked and still mark the family portrait of Europe’s complicated fabric: 1) the North–South division; 2) the East–West division; and 3) the centre–periphery division.
more here.
Palaeoart: Visions of the Prehistoric Past
Such images reveal a profound unease about the very idea of extinct, prehistoric creatures. In a Christian society, the precise place these newly discovered animals held in God’s creation was a source of debate and consternation. Were they antediluvian beings, who had been destroyed in the Flood? Did that mean they’d been wicked – undeserving of the salvation afforded other animals? Did they date from a time earlier still, a ‘pre-Adamic’ moment of creation? Or had they never lived at all, their bones having been placed in rocks by the Creator as a test of faith? In 1830, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology had argued that the Earth was much older than the six thousand or so years suggested by scripture, and in 1859 Darwin’s On the Origin of Speciespromoted a new theory that scandalously linked all of organic life together through an iron law of competition and extinction. Meanwhile, the factories of the industrial revolution were issuing forth new, smoke-belching, roaring creations. The wild violence of much early palaeoart, with its images of frenzied consumption and environmental disaster, were symptomatic of these alarming uncertainties.
Alongside these visions of universal catastrophe, a more peaceful ancient world also existed. In much early British palaeoart, the dinosaur is dignified lord of creation not hellish dragon. These visions of a sublime prehistory can be seen as a transformation of Romantic landscape painting, and in them dinosaurs appear as the just rulers of a natural kingdom.
more here.
Tuesday Poem
Mrs. Kessler
Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,
And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,
And stood on the corner talking politics,
Or sat at home reading Grant’s Memoirs;
And I supported the family by washing,
Learning the secrets of all the people
From their curtains, counterpanes, shirts and skirts.
For things that are new grow old at length,
They’re replaced with better or none at all:
People are prospering or falling back.
And rents and patches widen with time;
No thread or needle can pace decay,
And there are stains that baffle soap,
And there are colors that run in spite of you,
Blamed though you are for spoiling a dress.
Handkerchiefs, napery, have their secrets
The laundress, Life, knows all about it.
And I, who went to all the funerals
Held in Spoon River, swear I never
Saw a dead face without thinking it looked
Like something washed and ironed.
by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology
.
In praise of fallibility: why science needs philosophy
by Paul Braterman
Karl Popper
More recent strata lie on top of older strata, except when they lie beneath them. Radiometric dates obtained by different methods always agree, except when they differ. And the planets in their courses obey Newton's laws of gravity and motion, except when they depart from them.
As Isaac Asimov reportedly said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' [I have found it], but 'That's funny …' " And there is nothing that distinguishes so clearly between the scientific and the dogmatic mindset as the response to anomalies. For the dogmatist, the anomaly is a "gotcha", proof that the theory under consideration is, quite simply, wrong. For the scientist, it is an opportunity. If an idea is generally useful, but occasionally breaks down, something unusual is going on and it's worth finding out what. The dogmatist wants to see questions closed, where the scientist wants to keep them open. This is perhaps why the creationist denial of science can often be found among those professions that seek decision and closure, such as law and theology.
The rights and wrongs of falsification
Dogmatists regularly invoke the name of Karl Popper, and the work he did in the 1930s. Popper placed heavy emphasis on falsifiability, denouncing as unscientific any doctrine that could not be falsified. Freud's theories, for example, were unscientific, because a patient's disagreement with its findings could be explained away as the result of repression. Marxism, likewise, he regarded as unscientific because when events failed to unfold as Marx had predicted, his followers could always say that the right historical conditions had not yet arisen. The theory that biological diversity is a product of Intelligent Design is also unscientific by this criterion, since its advocates can and do say1 that any apparent failure of design may merely reflect our lack of insight into the motivations of the designer.
But what about theories that almost all of us would agree to regard as scientific, such as the theory of planetary motion, or atomic theory, or the theories of geology, or of the origin of species by evolution? Here, current thinking can be and at various times has been falsified by observation. But what, precisely, was falsified?
No theory exists on its own, as the philosopher-scientist Duhem pointed out over a century ago,2 and when a theory fails an observational test there are two kinds of possible explanation. The fault may lie with the theory itself, or with the assumptions we make while testing it. More specifically, as Lakatos pointed out in 1970,3 every application of a theory involves ancillary hypotheses, which can range from the grandiose (the laws of nature are unchanging) to the trivial (the telescope was functioning correctly). When a theoretical prediction fails, we do not know if the fault is in one of these, rather than the core theory itself. Much of the time, we are not even aware of our ancillary hypotheses, which is one reason why we need philosophers of science.
Bridging the gaps: Einstein on education
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
The crossing of disciplinary boundaries in science has brought with it a peculiar and ironic contradiction. On one hand, fields like computational biology, medical informatics and nuclear astrophysics have encouraged cross-pollination between disciplines and required the biologist to learn programming, the computer scientist to learn biology and the doctor to know statistics. On the other hand, increasing specialization has actually shored up the silos between these territories because each territory has become so dense with its own facts and ideas.
We are now supposed to be generalists, but we are generalists only in a collective sense. In an organization like a biotechnology company for instance, while the organization itself chugs along on the track of interdisciplinary understanding across departments like chemistry, biophysics and clinical investigations, the effort required for understanding all the nuts and bolts of each discipline has meant that individual scientists now have neither the time nor the inclination to actually drill down into whatever their colleagues are doing. They appreciate the importance of various fields of inquiry, but only as reservoirs into which they pipe their results, which then get piped into other reservoirs. In a metaphor evoked in a different context – the collective alienation that technology has brought upon us – by the philosopher Sherry Turkle, we are ‘alone together’.
The need to bridge disciplinary boundaries without getting tangled in the web of your own specialization has raised new challenges for education. How do we train the men and women who will stake out new frontiers tomorrow in the study of the brain, the early universe, gender studies or artificial intelligence? As old-fashioned as it sounds, to me the solution seems to go back to the age-old tradition of a classical liberal education which lays emphasis more on general thinking and skills rather than merely the acquisition of diverse specialized knowledge and techniques. In my ideal scenario, this education would emphasize a good grounding in mathematics, philosophy (including philosophy of science), basic computational thinking and statistics and literature as primary goals, with an appreciation of the rudiments of evolution and psychology or neuroscience as preferred secondary goals.
This kind of thinking was on my mind as I happened to read a piece on education and training written by a man who was generally known to have thought-provoking ideas on a variety of subjects. If there was one distinguishing characteristic in Albert Einstein, it was the quality of rebellion.
perceptions
Diamond Stingily. Elephant Memory, 2016.
Installation.
"… combines various shades of the store-bought hair not with cute or colorful accessories but with forbidding steel chains and sturdy hooks more befitting the exhibition’s explicit allusions to the threat of violence and to the troubled threshold between public and private. A group of battered apartment doors, weary sentinels armed with baseball bats in the darkened gallery, composed the solemn suite Entryways, 2016; nearby, projected behind a section of chain link fence, footage borrowed from a 1967 documentary looped: Black schoolgirls (many with braids in their hair) sing happily at the playground, but one unnerving chanted refrain—“How did he die?”—evokes looming tragedy."
Thanks to Anjuli Kolb for introducing!
In which I am obsessed with Jordan Peterson
by Mathangi Krishnamurthy
I am currently obsessed with Jordan Peterson and his videos instructing men on ways in which to be men. He goes on to inform us that in his experience, so many are men petrified by women and specifically by the specter of being dismissed by them, and how men need to fix themselves because they are probably being rejected for "real" reasons. Peterson is currently a popular figure on the internet, and in many ways, defies glib categorization. See, for example, Slavoz Zizek's as ever quick take on why Peterson captures something in popular imagination.
But my obsession with him has to do with my own interests in the ways in which gender is produced in the world, as an either or—either, it is a binary — or as fluid one that can be placed along many combinations of body, desire and soul on a world-wide, gender-wide spectrum. At a recent conference organized by QueerAbad in Ahmedabad, India, author of Sexualness, social anthropologist and activist Akshay Khanna spoke about rites of passage in academia in terms of being able to speak about gender and gender fluidity. Rightly invoking Judith Butler, and questioning the seeming need to always begin all such conversations, even in Indian academia, with her seminal work, he emphasized the need to find local language, affect, and feeling, to be able to describe forms of gendered imagination.
In teaching Butler to undergraduates—many of them often being exposed for the first time to feminist theory—I sometimes conduct an exercise bringing props such as wigs, face paint, and make-up to class, encouraging participants to experiment and play with their appearances. Many do so. As they pose and prance, I also gently suggest that they take a walk around the building and premises of one of the premier technology and science institutions in India, going as far as they dare, before returning to the safe space that is class. I sometimes daydream about appearing in class, teaching in zoot suit, suspenders, and gelled hair, but am never quite able to find similar enough courage to play. We also speak about Aravanis or Thirunangais, the community of transgender women specific to Tamil Nadu, where I teach, and the ways in which their appearance, both as an act and a phenomenon may invoke a whole set of feelings and affects in their heteronormative audiences. We agree collectively, that yes, we perform gender; we nod agreeably that gender has solidified in us over years of performative rendition; and we silently hope that our experiments in class may lead us to be more fluid in our daily lives.
And yet, over five years of teaching Butler, identity theory, and gender performativity, I am interested more than ever in the resurgence, and arguably, the never-ever-gone-ness of the unspoken norm of the gender binary, and the investment that discourses have in making them real. Here, I use real not in the sense of a "constructed" real, but in the sense of belief, inhabitation and feeling. I am, hence, obsessed with Jordan Peterson.
A Novel to Cross a Desert With
When I was a young, I don't remember why, but I scribbled a poem by Osip Mandelstam on a piece of thick, mauve-color Nepalese mulberry paper. And as I wrote it, I thought to myself, "This is a poem to cross a desert with."
Depriving me of sea, of a space to run and a space to fly,
And giving my footsteps the brace of a forced land,
What have you gained? The calculation dazzles
But you cannot seize the movements of my lips, their silent sound.
–Osip Mandelstam 1935
I carried this poem around in my wallet for twenty-five years–like an amulet. Looking back, I can only wonder what in the world drew me to it when I was still so young and free-spirited…But in fact, this poem of Russian gulag captivity gave me strength during times of hardship; for contained within those few short lines is a beautiful testament to the great strength that our inner lives have to sustain us…
Fast forward twenty-five years when a forty-five year old woman scrawled one line from another poem on the back of that same mauve-color piece of mulberry paper. This time it was the famous line from Tao Yuanming's poem, Plucking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence:
採菊東籬下
A world away in spirit from Mandelstam's poem perhaps. As the poem sums up perfectly the serenity achieved by a life of cultivation –at the end of the hero's journey.
飲酒詩 陶淵明
結盧在人境 而無車馬喧
問君何能爾 心遠地自偏
採菊東籬下 悠然見南山
山氣日夕佳 飛鳥相與還
此還有真意 欲辨已忘言
Drinking Wine (#5)–Tao Yuanming
I’ve built my house where others dwell
And yet there is no clamor of carriages and horses
You ask me how this is possible– (And so I say):
When the heart is far, one is transported
I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern fence
And serenely I gaze at the southern mountains
At dusk, the mountain air is good
Flocks of flying birds are returning home
In this, there is a great truth
But wanting to explain it, I forget the words (my trans）
That line has become a perfect touchstone for the next part of my life; another poem to cross a desert with.
POETRY IN TRANSLATION
Iqbal Complains to God
by Mohammed Iqbal
Why should I map my own loss,
not think of tomorrow,
forget my profit, lose my due,
grieve, ignore a nightingale’s wail,
be silent
as a rose?
Words give me courage
‑—dust be in my mouth—
I’ve a complaint. God,
famous for praising You,
we now can’t help
but complain.
When a rose bloomed
it was unable to disperse
its scent.
We became the breeze,
we spread its essence.
Before our arrival
some bowed to trees,
others to idols—
not to a god
they couldn’t see.
Who called out Your name —
ancient Greeks, Jews, Nazarenes:
when things fell apart
did they draw their swords?
Who tore down the gates of Khaibar,
reduced Constantinople
to rubble,
turned Iran’s fire-temples cold?
Who stamped the crescent
on every heart,
who brought the idols to proclaim,
“There is no god but God?”
Me Too? Not Me
by Carol A Westbrook
On the other hand, when I was a young woman, discrimination was so prevalent it was ignorable. Putting up with discrimination was the price one had to pay for trying to make it in a man's world, for trying to do something with your life other than become a subservient wife and mother. Social attitudes were very different then. It was the 60's.
We women of the 60's had more rights and privileges than did our mothers and grandmothers– we had the vote, and a few more property rights–but we were by no means legally equal to men. Birth control was available, but abortions were not. There were many jobs which excluded women. Pregnant women had to quit when they started to "show." Married women lost control of their finances, and sometimes their bodies, too–marital rape was not even a crime in some states! Married women couldn't hold credit cards in their own name. In the 60's it was okay for a man to date his secretary or pressure his intern for sex. It may have been ill advised or downright coercive, perhaps, but not illegal.
Women were regarded as inferior members of the human race, not able to do men's work, and needing a man's protection so they could fulfill their God-given role of wife and mother. Some women accepted this role, but others of us felt that it kept us back from our full potential. We were called "feminists," but we were just women trying to carve out our own place in a man's world.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Driftin’ And Dreamin’
by Max Sirak
And, in honor of his passing, but more in remembrance of his life, I want to dedicate my little sliver of cyberspace, a realm he was passionate about, to highlight three pieces of his writing and thought. First, a political document; second, a code of conduct; and lastly some lyrics.
A Child Of Boundless (Digital) Seas
JPB was a pioneer of an open, free-range internet. He, along with others, founded The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) (here), a "nonprofit defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation" in 1990. He literally wrote the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (here) in 1996.
For those who don't want to read it, it is what it says it is. It begins with, "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone."
The Declaration goes on to lay out the foundational premise of what the internet should be. A "global social space" independent of past tyrannies and a natural emergence of human creativity to serve as a self-regulating web of communication free from commercial enterprise and regulation.
Idealistic? Sure. Naive? Quite possibly. But don't those two usually walk, arm-in-arm, like sunshine and daydreams?
Where Do You Live? Part 2
by Christopher Bacas
The Pre-War building crumbled around us. The steps to the 5th floor roof held small monuments: a bottle of cheap liquor, stubbed-out blunt, sometimes a slimy condom. On cold days, running the steps for exercise, dog in tow, I dodged the messes. The dog charged right through them, scattering nastiness. Sometimes, high school canoodlers, truants who left the ashen relics, blocked our path completely. Carrying my trash through the back door, I once encountered a teen couple, partially disrobed, going at it under the stairs. Another kid, holding his belt, stood nearby. As I exited with a heavy trash bag, he nodded rhythmically at me. When I returned, no one had moved. The kid in the on-deck-circle didn’t even look around.
During the coldest nights, our radiators hissed for a few minutes, then went silent for icy hours. We boiled water for nighttime baths. Small ceramic heaters crackled and hummed in the dark, blistering our throats and noses. The super looked on when we wildly pantomimed the conditions in our apartment. I’ll never know if his expression meant worry about our comfort or just our sanity.
We began regular calls to the city and our property manager, and stopped paying rent.
Fuck you, I like guns
From Engineering, Parenthood, and a Solid Attempt at Adult Status:
With all that said, enough is enough.
More here.
A Conversation With Harvard Geneticist George Church
Georg Church in Edge.org:
I imagine that we could probably populate my company enEvolv, which has evolution in the title, mostly with creationists and they would still get the products out. You just follow a recipe. Even though you’re doing evolution, you don’t need to believe it. Maybe it would help if the very top scientists believed in neo-Darwinism or something. Those are curious things that people fight about and have deep feelings about, but they don’t affect day-to-day life.
Global warming is something that could be catastrophic. You could argue that it’s in the same category because you can’t prove that my life today is worse because of global warming, but it’s something where it could be exponential. The odds are against it, but we don’t even know how to calculate the odds. It’s not like we’re playing blackjack or something like that. There’s more carbon in the Arctic tundra than in the entire atmosphere plus all the rain forests put together. And that carbon, unlike the rain forest where you have to burn the rain forest to release it, goes into the atmosphere as soon as you get melting. It’s already many gigatons per year going up. That’s something that could spiral out of control.
More here.
To sleep, perchance to forget
From Phys.Org:
A large team of researchers sectioned the brains of mice and then used a scanning electron microscope to photograph, reconstruct, and analyze two areas of cerebral cortex. They were able to reconstruct 6,920 synapses and measure their size. The team deliberately did not know whether they were analyzing the brain cells of a well-rested mouse or one that had been awake. When they finally "broke the code" and correlated the measurements with the amount of sleep the mice had during the six to eight hours before the image was taken, they found that a few hours of sleep led on average to an 18 percent decrease in the size of the synapses.
More here.
“Ain’t I a Woman”
More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honor Black History Month)