John Keay at Literary Review:

Seventy years after the guns fell silent, India's part in the Second World War is finally receiving the attention it deserves. The two million Indian combatants (according to Raghu Karnad) – or the two and a half million (according to Yasmin Khan) – comprised the largest volunteer army in the world. They pushed the Italians from the rocky heights of Eritrea, trudged back and forth through the minefields of North Africa, quelled an insurgency in Iraq, and in the 'Forgotten War' for Burma suffered heavier casualties than all the other Allies combined. Nor were civilians spared. Cities such as Calcutta and Vishakhapatnam were bombed, ships were sunk and dockyards were shelled. In 1942 some 80,000 Indians perished in the chaotic exodus from Burma and in 1943 several millions starved to death in the war-induced famine in Bengal. Acts of bravery were applauded, medals were won and loved ones were lost. There is much to record. But if the wartime sacrifice has seldom been recognised, it is because so many Indians were ambivalent about the cause they were serving. After all, it was not their war: they hadn't been consulted about it and they objected to dying for an empire they were trying to get shot of.

As Karnad puts it, Nehru, like most of his colleagues in the mainstream Congress party, 'could not accept that Indian soldiers would die for the freedom of a nation which denied that very freedom to India'. Congress's heroes were not the two million 'mercenaries' of Britain's Indian army but the 43,000 patriotic men and women of the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army, led by the strutting Subhas Chandra Bose.

more here.

Donald Kuspit at Brooklyn Rail:

The sale in March of Paul Gauguin’s “When Will You Marry?” (1892) to an anonymous buyer for $300 million—the highest price ever paid for a work of art, according to The Economist (April 4, 2015)—brings to mind two of Gauguin’s remarks, both relevant to any discussion of so-called protest art. Gauguin was a protest artist: his “ancient Eve,” as he called his Maori female, was a sort of protest against “the Eve of your civilized conception,” as he wrote in a letter to August Strindberg. She made “misogynists of you and almost all of us”; the ancient Eve, who inhabited a “paradise,” brought a “smile” to a man’s face. Gauguin’s primitivism, as it has come to be called, more pointedly what he called “the barbarism which is for me a rejuvenation,” was a radical protest against, not to say a total rejection of, the “civilization from which you [Strindberg] suffer.”

Ever since so-called “advanced” art—Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Abstract Art—has been a species of protest against supposedly retardataire civilized art. It is a clash of opposites, indeed, a fight to the death: Gauguin preferred beauty that “results from instinct” (e.g., Breton’s “convulsive beauty”) to beauty that “come[s] from study” of tradition (e.g., Renaissance beauty, grounded in the study of classical art). Thus Gauguin’s preference for “the wooden hobby-horse of his infancy” to “the horses of the Parthenon” was in effect a nihilistic protest and revolt against the classical tradition—and with it against the ruling powers and establishment ideologies it served and celebrated.

more here.

Azar Nafisi in Salon:

It all began one Friday morning, a weekend in Iran, over breakfast. My father had promised me the night before that he would tell me a new story instead of taking me to the movies, which was our usual weekend treat. That was when he first introduced me to Alice. I think he made a fair amount of it up as he went along, as I never found many of his Alice stories when I was old enough to read the books myself. But I can still remember his describing how Alice, having taken a big gulp of a special potion, began to grow smaller and smaller. “And then,” he said, “she discovered a hooka smoking caterpillar.” Now I was quite familiar with caterpillars — in those days we could buy them in cocoons from street vendors with a handful of leaves and watch them turn into butterflies — and everyone had a cousin or uncle who was overfond of a hooka. But Alice, who had never seen a hooka-smoking caterpillar, quite naturally asked him, “Who are you?” And the caterpillar threw the question right back at her, saying: “Who, Who Who are Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu?” “Tow Tow Tow, Key Haaaastiiiiiiiiiiii?” my father would say, mimicking the caterpillar in Persian. He repeated this several times and each time I laughed louder, with tears streaming down my face as my mother, glancing at me reproachfully, urged me to refrain from spitting out my bread. But my father was in a playful mood, and he paid no attention to my mother’s protestations as he tickled me and said it again.

Later on I would sit my gentle and compliant 2-year-old brother against the wall of our room and say, “Tow Tow Tow Key Haaastiiiii?” tickling him around the navel. He smiled at me in amazement in what may have been the only time I had the privilege of actually amazing him. Since then I have read “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” many times in many different places, carrying her with me on a journey that has had its share of unexpected encounters defying all logic and explanation. “Who are you?” Isn’t this what every book asks of us as we chase its characters, trying to find out what they are reluctant to reveal? Is it not also the one essential thing we ask ourselves as human beings, as we struggle to make the choices that will define us? I can describe myself as a mother, a wife, a friend, a teacher, a sister, a writer, a reader …. So it goes. Yet none of these simple labels provides a satisfactory response. We are how we live, constantly in a state of flux. But it is essential to ask and be asked that question, one which I believe is at the heart both of the act of writing and of reading.

Over the years I have often thought of Alice as my ideal reader, the one I aspire to be.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

Researchers who are developing miniature models of human organs on plastic chips have touted the nascent technology as a way to replace animal models. Although that goal is still far off, it is starting to come into focus as large pharmaceutical companies begin using these in vitro systems in drug development. “We are pretty excited about the interest we get from pharma,” says Paul Vulto, co-founder of the biotechnology company Mimetas in Leiden, the Netherlands. “It’s much quicker than I’d expected.” His company is currently working with a consortium of three large pharmaceutical companies that are testing drugs on Mimetas’s kidney-on-a-chip. At the Organ-on-a-Chip World Congress in Boston, Massachusetts, last week, Mimetas was one among many drug and biotechnology firms and academic researchers showing off the latest advances in miniature model organs that respond to drugs and diseases in the same way that human organs such as heart and liver do.

“We’re surprised at how rapidly the technology has come along,” says Dashyant Dhanak, global head of discovery sciences at Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey, which announced last month that it would use a thrombosis-on-chip model from Massachusetts biotechnology firm Emulate to test whether experimental and already-approved drugs could cause blood clots. Proponents of organs-on-chips say that they are more realistic models of the human body than are flat layers of cells grown in Petri dishes, and could also be more useful than animal models for drug discovery and testing. A lung-on-a-chip, for instance, might consist of a layer of cells exposed to a blood-like medium on one side and air on the other, hooked up to a machine that stretches and compresses the tissue to mimic breathing.

More here.

God or No God
.
Deer not clacking through snow crust
after apples, crows thankfully asleep,
coyotes whispering to young
not yet ready to test their pipes—
midnight is broken by my sump-pump
disgorging the day’s melt-seep. Yes.
What can I do without?

The first time I rode the ambulance
there was a hole in someone’s head.
Because all matter crumbles, because
chunk and mouth, bone of skull,
because this guy knew where to point.
That my hands did all the right things;
that he died as he meant to; that he made me
wildly alive—all true.

Ten years on, cumin seeds scorching in the pan
are my children, my slipknot, my go-to.
Because I believe myself fragrant
I am spitting me back out.
I renounce dog-eared and dog tired and even
dogged—no, dogged is good.
Because God or no god are both monstrous.
Because wrists don’t age. Because kisses
or memories of kisses. Because
hull and grave equally ravish.

The first time I gave myself an eyelash of a chance
to change, it will be tomorrow, and luckily
I’m watching. Because let the tenses be scrambled.
The world happens momentarily.
.

by Ellen Doré Watson
from Dogged Hearts

Alex Mayyasi in Brooklyn Quarterly (Abounaddara logo; Credit: Abounaddara):

When Syrians took to the streets to denounce the rule of President Bashar al Assad in 2011, protesters in the revolutionary city of Homs summarized their goals in a chant: “It’s a Syrian, Syrian Revolution! For freedom and dignity!”

The inability of Syrians to achieve their demands has been well documented. Despite the unifying rhetoric, conflict has divided Syria and fostered sectarianism. Assad remains in power, and the rebels holding Syrian territory include illiberal groups like the Islamic State.

The anonymous film collective Abounaddara fights for another unachieved goal: Syrians’ dignity. The collective’s name means “the man with glasses,” a reference to documentary cinema, which it uses to “defend Syrians’ right to an image that is dignified and independent of political and media agendas.” The collective works to provide an alternative image of Syrian society, different from the prevailing narrative found in government propaganda and mainstream media. Since 2011, the anonymous filmmakers have released a short — 1- to 12-minute — film every week.

The collective has described its work as “bullet films” and its members as “snipers” who sabotage Bashar al Assad’s propaganda through seemingly innocuous films. Many feature regular Syrians telling a story. In Confessions of a Woman—Part Two, a woman describes how the conflict has increased her awareness of sectarianism. Other films such as Who is the Military Fighting? use more artistry, showing a toy soldier crawling through peaceful urban streets…

– AM

1. When did the first members of Abounadarra found the collective? Was its founding spurred by a specific event?

It was out of desperation that we launched our collective in 2010. For years each of us had been making films of our own without ever getting any interest from producers or distributors. We absolutely had to change the way our society was represented — a representation monopolized by a tyrannical government and a blind culture industry. And we wanted to believe it was still possible to do that.

More here.

Judith Levine in Boston Review:

The plaintiffs who moved the Supreme Court to grant homosexuals “equal dignity” in marriage under the U.S. Constitution were the bereaved widower of a man who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, an Army lifer and his male partner, and a couple of lesbians so devoted to children that they adopted three with severe disabilities.

Like the nine African Americans whose murder in Charleston has persuaded white America finally to consider doing something about racism—“good people, decent people, God-fearing people,” President Barack Obama called the church members—they were as innocent as victims could be.

And like the families of the slain, the gay and lesbian petitioners forgive the people and institutions that have hurt them. Indeed, they “respect [marriage] so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves,” writes Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. All they want is “not to be condemned to live in loneliness”—apparently the fate of unmarried people. Yet because of “their immutable nature,” they have no option but same-sex matrimony.

In other words, these people did not choose their plight; they do not deserve their punishment. Unlike, say, the hundreds of African American bad guys killed by police every year—the guilty victims.

The morning the Court’s ruling came down, I was sitting in a frigidly air-conditioned room in a Dallas church, listening to a preacher give a motivational speech to a roomful of guilty victims. It was the annual convention of Reform Sex Offender Laws, or RSOL, a national coalition of registered sex offenders (RSOs), men currently incarcerated on sex offense convictions, and their loved ones fighting to end the U.S.’s war on sex.

Texas was a logical place to hold the gathering: the state’s sex offender registry lists 86,000 people—about 10 percent of the nation’s total.

More here.

David Roth at The Believer:

More than a decade later, it’s still unclear who actually said the words. We think we know that, in 2004, they were said to the journalist Ron Suskind, who published them in the New York Times Magazine. We know that there are perhaps half a dozen members of George W. Bush’s first-term war council who might reasonably be considered suspects. They are not all the way gone, this cast of defective vulcans, men whose acronyms and abstractions and daisy-­cutter diplomacy terraformed nations and upended or just ended a great many lives both half a world away and much closer.

The world we live in still bears the bruises they left, but it is difficult, from our present distance, to remember these people with any degree of specificity. It is, anyway, maybe not worth trying to remember which was who, or how; which was the one with the neat beard who never spoke on the record, which was the bald one and which the one with the crisp LEGO-man brush cut, which the one indicted for lying to Congress a generation earlier, which the professorial one, which the leatherette lifer with the consultancy. The thing is that any one of them could well have been the one who said, to Suskind:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

more here.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Relations of power affect us all. But do we know what power is? Steven Lukes sets out his three-dimensional account of this key concept in conversation with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bitespodcast.

Listen to Steven Lukes on Power

Nicola Shulman at The Times Literary Supplement:

Gardens are the least enduring of all art forms. Seldom is much left to tell us what they were – an outline in faint pencil, a bill for plants. Detailed painted records, of the type that appear in this handsome exhibition Painting Paradise: The art of the garden, are rare survivors of the general oblivion. Were there no other consideration, that would make them precious. There are many other considerations, however. “The Art of the Garden” is a very broad subject. It must trace the relationship between garden history and art history, making clear what in each picture is the garden maker’s art and what the painter’s, and where their aims coincide – or not. It must ask why a garden looked like it does, who it was for, what went on there. It must ask what was the purpose of recording it. There are gardens here that are built as emanations of a principle, such as godliness, or liberty, or omnipotence, or scientific curiosity. A painter can magnify those properties or make other decisions, reframing elements of the garden to show it as a museum, as nature’s apothecary, as laboratory, as a souvenir of a changing map of the world. The subject is so potentially unwieldy that it must come as a relief to have to stick to objects in the Royal Collection. Wonderful objects they often are too, organized here into broadly chronological sections such as “renaissance garden” and “baroque garden”, with thematic diversions such as “botanic” or “sacred” garden imagery tucked in where they make most sense in the historical narrative.

more here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

A single neuron can’t do much on its own, but link billions of them together into a network and you’ve got a brain. But why stop there? In recent years, scientists have wondered what brains could do if they were linked together into even bigger networks. Miguel A. Nicolelis, director of the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University, and his colleagues have now made the idea a bit more tangible by linking together animal brains with electrodes.

In a pair of studies published on Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, the researchers report that rats and monkeys can coordinate their brains to carry out such tasks as moving a simulated arm or recognizing simple patterns. In many of the trials, the networked animals performed better than individuals. “At least some times, more brains are better than one,” said Karen S. Rommelfanger, director of the Neuroethics Program at the Center for Ethics at Emory University, who was not involved in the study. Brain-networking research might someday allow people to join together in useful ways, Dr. Rommelfanger noted. Police officers might be able to make collective decisions on search-and-rescue missions. Surgeons might collectively operate on a single patient. But she also warned that brain networks could create a host of exotic ethical quandaries involving privacy and legal responsibility. If a brain network were to commit a crime, for example, who exactly would be guilty?

More here.

after Osip Mandelstam

Streets of Kiev

In Red Square, giant plasma screens loom blank

and wall-eyed, there’s no news today. The Kremlin

thug needs time to think. He never counts his

losses, pays no heed to them. His mongoloid eyes

turn unperturbedly to the southwest. Any day now,

he will perform the prisyadka in Khreshchatyk Street.

Under the black belt moon, he cocks one leg,

a kick to the solar plexus, to the groin, to the temple.

Pectorals flex, Abs ripple. His favourite cocktail,

Polonium-210, he serves up to those who dare oppose.

His expression resembles that of a firing squad,

this former KGB analyst calculates the odds quiet

as frost at midnight, his every move accounted for:

pieces of tibia, femur, cranium, each precious object

finds a place on his chessboard. Any day now,

he will perform the prisyadka in Andreevsky Spusk.

(Prisyadka: the squat-and-kick move that belongs

to the Ukrainian ‘Cossack Dance’, known as Kazatsky.)
.
.
by Stephen Oliver
from Beton, Belgrade Cultural Journal
translation Max Nemstov

Read more »

Julian Baggini in Aeon:

If Kierkegaard is your benchmark, then you judge any philosophy not just on the basis of how cogent its arguments are, but on whether it speaks to the fundamental needs of human beings trying to make sense of the world. Philosophy prides itself on challenging all assumptions but, oddly enough, in the 20th century it forgot to question why it asked the questions it did. Problems were simply inherited from previous generations and treated as puzzles to be solved. Kierkegaard is inoculation against such empty scholasticism. As he put it in his journal in 1835:

What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth, of working through all the systems of philosophy and of being able, if required, to review them all and show up the inconsistencies within each system … what good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognised her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather than a trusting devotion?

When, for example, I became fascinated by the philosophical problem of personal identity, I also became dismayed by the unwillingness or inability of many writers on the subject to address the question of just why the problem should concern us at all. Rather than being an existential problem, it often became simply a logical or metaphysical one, a technical exercise in specifying the necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying one person as the same object at two different points in time.

So even as I worked on a PhD on the subject, located within the Anglo-American analytic tradition, I sneaked Kierkegaard in through the back door. For me, Kierkegaard defined the problem more clearly than anyone else. Human beings are caught, he said, between two modes or ‘spheres’ of existence. The ‘aesthetic’ is the world of immediacy, of here and now. The ‘ethical’ is the transcendent, eternal world. We can’t live in both, but neither fulfils all our needs since ‘the self is composed of infinitude and finitude’, a perhaps hyperbolic way of saying that we exist across time, in the past and future, but we are also inescapably trapped in the present moment.

The limitations of the ‘ethical’ are perhaps most obvious to the modern mind. The life of eternity is just an illusion, for we are all-too mortal, flesh-and-blood creatures. To believe we belong there is to live in denial of our animality. So the world has increasingly embraced the ‘aesthetic’. But this fails to satisfy us, too. If the moment is all we have, then all we can do is pursue pleasurable moments, ones that dissolve as swiftly as they appear, leaving us always running on empty, grasping at fleeting experiences that pass. The materialistic world offers innumerable opportunities for instant gratification without enduring satisfaction and so life becomes a series of diversions. No wonder there is still so much vague spiritual yearning in the West: people long for the ethical but cannot see beyond the aesthetic.

More here.

Sharon Core. Untitled I, 2014.

Photograph.

“… Core’s photographs replicate as closely as possible those of 17th-century artists (Ambrosius Bosschaert, Jan Brueghel the Elder), and, striving for authenticity, she grew long-lost or out-of-fashion specimens. She then composed and correctly lit them to appear like paintings and titled them the date of the earlier works …”

More here and here.

Regan Penaluna in Nautilus:

Humans are land animals, and not natural swimmers. We have to learn how to swim, and it is up to us to find the fastest way to do so. The search may finally be coming to an end. In the last few decades, stroke mechanic experts have discovered that swimming under the surface is faster than swimming on the surface. “It’s hard to fathom that this could happen in track and field,” says Rick Madge, a swim coach and blogger. “Nobody is going to come up with a new way of running that is going to be faster than anything else. Yet we just did that in swimming.” And the fish kick may be the fastest subsurface form yet.

More here.

David Friedman in The Morning News:

In 1952, while Oliver Sacks was in England studying medicine at Oxford, the first 3D feature film was released in America: a jungle adventure called Bwana Devil. The New York Times called the movie “puerile” and “crude” but audiences loved it, launching a first wave of 3D films. Unfortunately, the technology of the time left audiences with headaches, and 3D movies quickly faded from mainstream into a long period of novelty. I grew up in the 1980s, when 3D movies were uncommon, but not forgotten. Occasionally a movie like Jaws 3-D came out, and I was amazed. When I saw a diving mask sinking underwater just inches in front of my face, I felt like I could reach out and grab it (forgetting that moments earlier it was worn by a character who was just eaten by a great white shark). If the technology existed to make a movie that immersive, I couldn’t understand why every film wasn’t made in 3D. The mere fact that 3D cinema was possible excited me.

I have always been an “intensely stereoscopic person,” a phrase I borrow from Oliver Sacks, who described himself the same way. The fact that human brains (and those of many other mammals) can take two slightly different flat images — one delivered from each eye — and turn them into a multi-layered world rich with textures and depth and space between objects absolutely amazes me. There are times when I literally pause to look around me and marvel at this. Growing up, I loved 3D photos and illustrations, and eventually made my own. I studied comic book art converted to 3D by Ray Zone, and in high school I drew anaglyph 3D images by hand using red and blue colored pencils. In college, I went through a period where I rented every Alfred Hitchcock movie I could find at my local video store. But I deliberately avoided Dial M For Murder after learning that Hitchcock intended it to be viewed in 3D. When it was originally released in theaters, the 3D fad had passed, and only a 2D version was shown, so audiences never saw the movie Hitchcock really wanted them to see. I finally got my chance to when a restored 3D version was screened at New York City’s Film Forum in December 2001.

It was great.

More here.

Alexa Tsoulis-Reay in New York Magazine:

Prosopagnosia is a neuropsychological condition that impairs the sufferer’s ability to recognize faces. It’s also known as face-blindness, and those who are afflicted lack a skill that comes naturally to most humans, forcing them to find ways to work around this deficit. Oliver Sacks, the face-blind neurologist, relied on distinguishing features like flaming red hair or heavy glasses to identify his best school friends, but he still had difficulties: Once, he ignored his own psychiatrist when he saw him in the lobby shortly after their session (as he wrote in the New Yorker, his assistant would instruct their dinner-party guests to wear name tags).

The artist Chuck Close managed his condition through his work — after photographing his larger-than-life portraits, he could remember the person attached to the face: “Once I change the face into a two-dimensional object, I can commit it to memory,” he once told a newspaper. Face-blindness is generally accompanied by a raft of problems, including a lack of interest in people, social anxiety, inattentiveness, and various phobias (Sacks avoided conferences or large gatherings). According to the National Institutes of Health, face-blindness “is thought to be the result of abnormalities, damage, or impairment in the right fusiform gyrus, a fold in the brain that appears to coordinate the neural systems that control facial perception and memory.” At the moment, there aren’t any treatments that are known to be effective — management of the condition, the NIH notes, should focus on “develop[ing] compensatory strategies.”

More here.