Jil Wheeler in The Morning News:

Mumbai, meri jaan—my life, my love. It’s a city that was once described to me as New York, Los Angeles, and Lagos all wrapped into one. It’s a city I left, a city I returned to, and now it’s a city that I am really just this close to writing off. I’ve spent nine months now defending my adopted hometown as safe for women, half a sub-continent away in distance and culture from the headline-worthy rapes in New Delhi and northern India. I’ve justified my safety to my friends, to my family, to my husband, and—most importantly—to myself. And last month this came crashing down with the gang-rape of a female photojournalist as she was poking around an abandoned mill with a male colleague, before sunset and in the center of town.I don’t feel as much scared or angry as I feel betrayed by a city I praised and defended more than its own natives did. My first “Mumbai moment”—what I’ve termed a feeling of joy and peace at being here and not there—came some evening in early 2009 when I was walking with friends along Marine Drive. The pedestrian walkway runs for two miles along the sea; walking north, there are six lanes of traffic and shabby Art Deco low-rises to your right, crashing waves to your left. We had just left an Asia Society talk on the fate of the euro or trends in microhousing or maybe developments in contemporary Chinese punk music. The feeling all over Mumbai was of great optimism. The economy was booming and the world’s eyes were on the city—whether for an Oscar-winning movie about the reality TV triumph of a slumdog or the well-publicized construction of a $3 billion single-family home.

As we strolled up Marine Drive, we congratulated ourselves for being the lucky few expats in a city where Things Were Happening, New Yorkers living through the early days of the next Jazz Age. We watched the long line of streetlights come on along Marine Drive, nicknamed “The Queen’s Necklace” for the way the lights resemble jewels on a chain. Mumbai was then, and still is now, a city that pushes itself forward. Religion, caste, gender, and tradition fall by the wayside as millions of people flock to the city to try their luck in business or Bollywood. Despite—or perhaps because of—the striving, struggling, and severe overcrowding, people remain happy, considerate enough, more concerned with tomorrow than yesterday. I fell in love with Mumbai not because I belonged there but because no one really belonged there. The city and its residents were heading into uncharted waters, me included. Walking along Marine Drive, chatting with a vegetable seller in the market, watching a Hindi film, I felt a satisfying combination of promise, acceptance, and adaptability. I was happy and free in a way I hadn’t felt in the U.S.

More here.

Rich Cohen at The Jewish Review of Books:

James Salter changed his name from Horowitz for the same reason the Turks renamed Constantinople: He liked it better that way. His career, which began with spare war stories in the mid-1950s, has culminated, just now, with his magnum opus, All That Is, an autumnal novel that caps a stunning body of work. More than any other artist’s, Salter’s career, intentionally or not, has perfectly described the situation of many American Jews, who feel at once free and not free, liberated from Judaism yet stubbornly defined by it. Salter speaks to all those who intermarried and joined the club, donned white bucks and seersucker, who, lost in Sag Harbor and Hilton Head, have spent years trying to slip the shackles as Houdini, né Weiss, slipped his shackles before the multitudes. Between Salter’s most elegant lines, I can still hear Horowitz scream.Neither Bellow nor Roth, it’s Salter—defined by what he’s left out—whose art depicts the Jew who has tried to dissolve the ancient in the American quotidian but still feels a pang of difference.

more here.

at the New Left Review:

Marseille, winter 1940–41. Narrow back streets dingy by day, lost in the shadows by night, criss-crossed by washing lines draped with clothes strung from the windows. Narrow and slippery, the stone oozing poverty, magnificent ancient mansions now lairs with vast entrances like caverns (carved gates, rue de la Prison). Stench. Pizzas, Greek, Russian, Annamite, Chinese restaurants. Rue de la Bouterie, the brothels with their lights out, Chat Noir, Magdeleine, Lucy, locked doors for the rush of sailors, notices in several languages. At the bottom of the alleyway, the port’s bright lights, spindly masts, Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde on the golden rock in the distance, the azure sky.

An Annamite or Chinese procession (funeral, festival?) files past in the rain under banners of cloth and coloured paper. Scampering, the thin, sallow faces of smart but sad coolies.

Lively square, ancient fine houses, baths, the church below the hospital. We go inside to admire the Easter crèche, with all its little figurines at work, sawing wood, shoeing horses, etc. For twenty sous, the figures move.

more here.

To My Heart On Sunday

Thank you, my heart:
you don't dawdle, you keep going
with no flattery or reward,
just from inborn diligence.

You get seventy credits a minute.
Each of your systoles
shoves a little boat
to open sea
to sail around the world.

Thank you, my heart:
time after time
you pluck me, separate even in sleep,
out of the whole.

You make sure I don't dream my dreams
up to that final flight,
no wings required.

Thank you, my heart:
I woke up again
and even though it's Sunday.
the day of rest,
the usual preholiday rush
continues underneath my ribs.
.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from Poems New and Collected 1957-1997
Harcourt Brace, 1998

Virginia Hughes in National Geographic:

Two eyes, aligned horizontally, above a nose, above a mouth. These are the basic elements of a face, as your brain knows quite well. Within about 200 milliseconds of seeing a picture, the brain can decide whether it’s a face or some other object. It can detect subtle differences between faces, too — walking around at my family reunion, for example, many faces look similar, and yet I can easily distinguish Sue from Ann from Pam.

Our fascination with faces exists, to some extent, on the day we’re born. Studies of newborn babies have shown that they prefer to look at face-like pictures. A 1999 studyshowed, for example, that babies prefer a crude drawing of a lightbulb “head” with squares for its eyes and nose compared with the same drawing with the nose above the eyes. “I believe the youngest we tested was seven minutes old,” says Cathy Mondloch, professor of psychology at Brock University in Ontario, who worked on that study. “So it’s there right from the get-go.”

These innate predilections for faces change and intensify over the first year of life (and after that, too) as we encounter more and more faces and learn to rely on the emotional and social information they convey. Scientists have studied this process by looking mostly at babies’ abilities as they age. But how, exactly, our brains develop facial expertise — that is, how it is encoded in neurons and circuits — is in large part a mystery.

Two new studies tried to get at this brain biology with the help of a rare group of participants: children who were born with dense cataracts in their eyes, preventing them from receiving early visual input, and who then, years later, underwent corrective surgery.

More here.

Marco Roth in n + 1:

From the thumbnail headshot accompanying his essay in the Times, “the drone philosopher,” as I’ve begun to think of him, appears to be in his late twenties, or a boyish 30. In an oddly confessional-style first paragraph, he recalls what it was like to watch the second Iraq War from his college dorm television. He has clean-shaven Ken-doll looks and a prominent squarish jaw, recalling the former Republican vice-presidential candidate and representative from Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, Paul Ryan. I doubt the drone philosopher would be flattered by the comparison. The tone of his article makes him out to be a thoughtful liberal, more interested in weighing complexities than in easy solutions, simultaneously attracted by and wary of power, not unlike the commander in chief he hopes will one day read his papers.

I can make out a bit of wide-striped collegiate tie, a white collar, and the padded shoulders of a suit jacket in the photograph. I know I’m being unfair, but I don’t trust his looks. Since Republicans have become so successful at branding themselves the party of white men, I now suspect that any white guy in a suit may harbor right-wing nationalist tendencies, much as the CIA’s rules governing drone strikes have determined that groups of “military age” men in certain regions of Pakistan and Yemen may be profiled as terrorists. Even more unkindly, I catch myself thinking the drone philosopher’s portrait looks like it was taken for the high school debate club he surely belonged to. Maybe that was where — for competitions in dim auditoria from state to regional to national level, prepping in a series of carbon-copy cheap motels, four to a room — he first learned to be rewarded for making audacious arguments. It was like a job or a sport. Maybe there was one particularly formative debate, “Resolved: The United States was right to use the atomic bomb against Japanese civilians.” He would have parsed this proposition into a value, such as “Right Action” or “Justice,” made up of a checklist of criteria: saving American lives, the primary but not sole duty of the deciders; weighing potential lives lost or saved on both sides when contrasted with the alternative policy of full-scale invasion of Japan.

More here.

Afshin Molavi in Foreign Policy:

Today, four bottles of Johnnie Walker are consumed every second, with some 120 million bottles sold annually in 200 countries. Five of Johnnie Walker's top seven global markets are in the emerging world: Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, China, and a region the company calls “Global Travel Asia and Middle East.”

From a small town in the Scottish Lowlands, the Striding Man has come a long way — and he's still walking.

Ask anyone who travels in emerging markets or developing economies, and chances are they've been offered Johnnie Walker. These are just some of the places I've seen it poured: at a Beijing gathering of techies, a four-day wedding in Jaipur, countless bars in Dubai, a Nile cruise in Egypt, the home of an Arab diplomat in Bangkok, private homes in Tehran, a middle-class Istanbul house, and diplomatic parties in Riyadh.

Journalists who spent time in Baghdad during the Iraq war marveled at the easy availability of Johnnie Walker Black Label, even when food staples were scarce. The late writer Christopher Hitchens — who fondly referred to the drink as “Mr. Walker's amber restorative” — accurately noted that Black Label was “the favorite drink of the Iraqi Baath Party.” In Saddam Hussein's era, a smuggler could make a good living taking crates across the border for thirsty Iranians.

More here.

Peter Pomerantsev at Eurozine:

The journey of contemporary Ukrainian literature starts with violent vomiting on a Moscow side street. Otto von F, the hero of Yuri Andrukhovych's novel The Moscoviad (1993; English translation, 2008) has been on a binge (beer, champagne, vodka, meths, madeira) during the final days of the Soviet Empire, boozing his way through a psychotic city of monarchist madmen, terrorists and thieves, ranting at the great symbols of Russian might: “This is the city of a thousand-and-one torture chambers. A tall advance bastion of the East, in anticipation of conquering the West. The city of Bolshevik Imperial architecture with the high-rise ghosts of people's commissariats. It only knows how to devour.”

Otto is a Ukrainian student poet, resident in the dorm of the gigantic, jagged, neo-gothic tooth of Moscow State University, sensing “the slow bursting of the Empire's seams, with countries and peoples crawling apart, each of them now acquiring independent relevance”. If Ukrainian writers once wrote about the great capital with a mixture of fear and awe, Andrukhovych's hero drunkenly gobs and waves two fingers at it: his very name, Otto von F, announces his European superiority to the barbarous Russian East.

more here.

Elizabeth Shambelan at Bookforum:

To speak is to know that language is amoral—equally congenial to truth and falsehood, clarity and circumlocution. And therein lies the impetus not only for everyday mendacity but also for artful systems of linguistic subterfuge. As Daniel Heller-Roazen observes, human beings seem to have an innate impulse to “break and scatter” language, to alter their native idioms in order to conceal, bewilder, and dissimulate. In his fascinating Dark Tongues—which might be construed as either a highly episodic history or a collection of case studies ranging across eras and cultures—Heller-Roazen investigates this tendency, paying particular attention to those instances when secret language becomes intertwined, if not interchangeable, with poetry.

He commences with an engrossing discussion of cant, introducing us to a gang of Burgundian bandits known as the Coquillars. In 1455, a prosecutor created a glossary of the Coquillars’ “refined” argot: “Jour is torture. . . . When one of them says, ‘Estoffe!’ it means that he is asking for his booty.” Asking for one’s booty by yelling “Stuff!” hardly seems refined, but to the prosecutor, the descriptor connoted sinister craftiness.

more here.

Amit Chaudhuri at n+1:

What do I mean by “modernity,” in the special sense I discovered through the Calcutta I knew as a child? Not electric lights, telephones, cars, certainly, though it might encompass these—we had plenty of those in Bombay. I’ll keep it brief: by “modernity” I have in mind something that was never new. True modernity was born with the aura of inherited decay and life. My first impressions of Calcutta from the mid-sixties are of a Chowringhee whose advertisements shone through the smog; and of my uncle’s house in Pratapaditya Road in Bhowanipore, which, with its slatted windows, seemed to have stood in that place forever. It was built, in fact, roughly forty years before my first becoming conscious of it. Similarly, the city itself—which is by no means old by the standards of Rome, Patna, Agra, or even London—is, actually, fairly new, its origins traceable to three hundred and twenty years back in time, the groundwork for the Calcutta we now know probably laid no more than two centuries ago. Yet if you look at paintings and photographs, and see old films of the city, you notice that these walls and buildings were never new—that Calcutta was born to look more or less as I saw it as a child.

more here.

Thessaly La Force in Vice:

Marilynne Robinson was my fourth and final workshop instructor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is an intimidating intellectual presence—she once told us that to improve characterization, we should read Descartes. When I asked her to sign my copy of Gilead, she admitted she had recently become fascinated by ancient cuneiform script. But she is also generous and quick to laugh—when she offered to have us to her house for dinner, and I asked if we ought to bring food, she replied, “Or perhaps I will make some loaves and fishes appear!” Then she burst into giggles. After receiving my MFA this May, I left Iowa believing that there’s no good way to be taught how to write, to tell a story. But there is also no denying that Marilynne has made me a better writer. Her demands are deceptively simple: to be true to human consciousness and to honor the complexities of the mind and its memory. Marilynne has said in other interviews that she doesn’t read much contemporary fiction because it would take too much of her time, but I suspect it’s also because she spends a fair amount of her mental resources on her students. Our interview was held on one of the last days of the spring semester. The final traces of the bitter winter had disappeared, and light filled the classroom, which now felt empty with just the two of us. My two years at Iowa were over, and I selfishly wanted to stretch the interview for as long as possible.

VICE: You recently told the class you had discovered the ending to your new novel—or so you hoped. How does that happen for you? How do you know?

Marilynne Robinson: A lot of the experience of the novel—after the beginning—is being in the novel. You set yourself with a complex problem. If it’s a good problem or one that really engages you, then your mind works on it all the time. A novel by its nature is new. The great struggle, conscious or unconscious, is to make sure that it is new. That it actually has raised issues that deserve to be dealt with in their own terms. They’re not terms that you have seen elsewhere. It’s sort of like composing music. There are options that open and options that disappear, depending on how you develop the guidelines. You think about it over time. And then something will appear, something that is the most elegant response to the question that you’ve asked yourself. And it can absorb the most in terms of the complexities that you’ve created.

More here.

Sean M. Carroll in Nature:

Thomas Pynchon's novels have several recurring themes: paranoia and conspiracy, pastiches of high and low culture, synchronicity and coincidence, shadowy networks lurking around every corner, and the impact of science and technology. With the coming of the Internet age and the surveillance society that sprang up in the wake of 11 September 2001, it seems as though reality has finally caught up with his vision. In his latest work, Bleeding Edge, Pynchon takes full advantage of this convergence. The first question asked of a new Pynchon book is: is this one of the sprawling, spiralling, time-tripping monsters with innumerable characters and a plot that is tricky to bring into focus, like Gravity's Rainbow or Against the Day; or is it one of the fun detective stories with a well-defined protagonist, like The Crying of Lot 49 or Inherent Vice? Bleeding Edge is definitely in the latter category. There is a colourful cast of memorable personalities, and high jinks often ensue, but the tale is told linearly, from the point of view of an acknowledged main character, with something approximating an explicit goal. The year is 2001. The dot-com bubble has just burst and Silicon Alley, New York's version of Silicon Valley, is in disarray. The Internet revolution is just beginning to gather steam. And, of course, the imminent 11 September attacks loom over every page.

The novel begins simply, in the mundane beauty of an ordinary morning. Maxine Tarnow is walking her kids to school in Manhattan on the first day of spring, stopping to admire the sunlight shining through a pear tree's blossom. The lapsed-licence fraud investigator is about to be drawn into a sinister web of intrigue. An old acquaintance asks her to investigate the suspiciously successful dot-com for which he is filming a corporate documentary. Poking around brings Tarnow into contact with shady hackers, gregarious Italian–American venture capitalists, Mossad agents, bloggers, petty fraudsters who are in over their heads, trophy wives, a private investigator whose primary tool is his sense of smell, a pair of disarmingly likeable Russian gangsters with a fondness for hip hop, and a mysterious government operative. Some will be exiled, some will run away and some will carry on; not all will survive.

More here.

Yolk

One, two, three—is the ring of chairs around our daily
table the right size? Is it time to stretch open
or do right by? Is the operative term underfoot,
undercapitalized, or under duress?
Every room seems to have a ceiling mirror
and here we are: dressed up, dressed down,
hand to mouth, a spray of lonesome hair, a tuft
of camaraderie, a swag of hope, crown of thorns.
Are we headed for Lake Dry Dock or a wide green
barge on the Nile? If I had to choose,
what would I wish inside me from this month's love?
A stray fragrance, ravaged memory, safe
echo? Or a swoon of repeating cells,
an undertow of more? I'm not sure I can
look up from my plate. This morning's yolk
is glowing around a jot, a tiny knob of the possible
and my lap is yellow with longing.
.

by Ellen Doré Watson
from We Live in Bodies
Alice James Books, 1997
.

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

One fascinating thing about logic is that it is common property. We all reason from what we already believe to new conclusions. Sometimes logic helps us to make up our minds; by thinking through the implications of an idea, we can weigh its merits against others. To think at all is to employ logic; as Aristotle noted, even to question logic is to deploy it. Logic is inescapable.

Logic's inescapability explains its grip on us. Exposing a logical error is always a winning argumentative strategy. And that's because no matter how deeply people might otherwise disagree about other important matters, we all embrace the strictures of logic and the standards of good reasoning that they supply. Oddly, the universality of logic also explains why logic is so often misapplied. As Charles Peirce observed, few actually study logic because everyone thinks himself an expert. Consequently we all strive to be rational; yet there is a lot of poor reasoning around.

A complicating feature is that our powers of logic are frequently exercised within interpersonal contexts of disagreement with others. In these contexts, extra-rational factors — social standing, good manners, pressures to conform, and so on — can infiltrate our logical activities and lead us astray. And yet it is undeniable that reasoning is a collective endeavor. In order to reason well, we must reason with others. But reasoning with others forces us to confront disagreement. Accordingly, the study of logic leads us to the study of argumentation, the processes of interpersonal reasoning within contexts of disagreement.

There are at least two tracks upon which argumentation theory travels. One is explored in our forthcoming book Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement (Routledge 2013). An alternative is suggested by the pseudonymous author (“Protagoras”) of the first installment in a series at The Guardian about “How to Argue.” (Interestingly, Protagoras's opening column is titled “Why We Argue— And How To Do It Properly“– further evidence that the subject matter is common property). The historical Protagoras held that “man is the measure of all things,” and we suspect that this is the inspiration for the current Protagoras's proposal that we argue because we find ourselves needing to convince others to agree with us. Note that the need here is practical; disagreement obstructs plans for action. Successful argument, then, removes or dissolves such obstacles by convincing others to share one's view. Protagoras hence associates proper argument with the “art of rhetoric,” the skill of bringing others in line with one's own thoughts. It should be mentioned that this art is not as manipulative as it might appear, for the aim is not simply to compel agreement, but to actually convince others of one's view. As it turns out, the artful rhetorician must take careful account of the reasons and commitments of his or her audience; the rhetorician must attempt not only to reason with the audience, but reason from the audience's own premises to the rhetorician's preferred conclusion.

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Claudio Bravo. Circe. 1986.

Oil on canvas.

More here and here.