Another Place

Another place, another life, another book,
we go on without a return ticket, on the trail
of the vanished song, the elusive lines unlocking
a whole library of meaning, our lives shelved
in comprehensive order, for us who will arrive
clothed in dust and dusk, to sit at the appointed desks
and pore over the pages, search out the thread
stringing together all arrivals and departures
which our hands will tell, over and over,
as if in prayer, as if in peace.

by Kim Cheng Boey
from Another Place
Singapore Times

Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. Here's Tauriq Moosa in The Guardian:

By being more open about what leads people to suicide, by not treating suicidal thoughts as automatic signs of insanity, we might actually reduce the number of suicides.

People don't merely want biological life, after all, they want quality life. Who wants to continue living if it means endless, incurable suffering and debilitation? Perhaps a few do, but why should their standard be applied to all?

As research indicates, by reducing social stigma, more effort can go into suicide prevention, not least because we're more likely to donate to a cause if we are not repulsed by the subject. People won't feel ashamed for having suicidal thoughts when they're treated as people, instead of pariahs. This could translate into lives saved.

Furthermore, some countries and certain American states have recognised assisted suicide as a medical option. Certain conditions must be met, of course: an incurable disease, the full consent of a “capable” patient, and other carefully circumscribed parameters. Against those who cry that legalised euthanasia will lead to abuse, murder and so on, there are years of evidence to the contrary, as io9 contributor George Dvorsky points out.

There is plenty of empirical evidence for saying that suicide is a good indicator of mental health problems, but that should be different from arguing that suicide is, by definition, a sign of insanity.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Writers of fiction like to say they ply their trade by telling lies, but Tobias Wolff really was a liar. He would not be where he is today if he hadn't been. Terrorised by a violent stepfather, dependent for refuge on his floundering mother, he made up stories in order to survive. When it was necessary to fortify his inventions with facts, Wolff made an easy transition to forgery. As an adolescent in 1960, for example, he glimpsed an escape from domestic hell through a much sought-after scholarship to a Pennsylvania prep school. The authorities requested recommendations, naturally, so 15-year-old “Jack” (he had adopted the name in homage to Jack London) posted off a sheaf of testimonies to his academic, social and sporting prowess – all written by him – and was duly accepted for a coveted scholarship place at the Hill School, whose illustrious old boys included Edmund Wilson and General Patton. Wolff describes his time there as an “idyll”, which lasted just over two years before he was “flushed out” and expelled. After a short stretch at sea, where he suspected one of his crew mates of plotting to kill him, he joined the army and was trained as a member of the Special Forces, otherwise known as the Green Berets. In the spring of 1967, he was shipped out to Vietnam. Wolff has written about these experiences with scrupulous honesty – more self-laceration than bravado – in two wonderful memoirs, This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, and in a well-crafted short novel, Old School. “It wasn't that long a time in my life”, he says, seated in his office at Stanford University, where he has taught in the English department since 1997. “I had pretty much stopped being a bullshitter by the time I joined the army. I hope I don't still con people, though I never quite believe that I got anything good legitimately. Maybe some of the imaginative effort that it took to tell lies goes into my work.”

…Wolff's brother Geoffrey is also the author of fiction and memoirs. Their father, Duke, was a genteel con man, who might have been found working as an executive in the aviation industry one year and serving time in prison on fraud-related charges the next (he had several aliases, including Saunders Ansell-Wolff III). Following their parents' separation when the boys were young, Tobias went with his mother – rolling from state to state on get-rich-quick schemes or on the run from some man she was “afraid of” – while Geoffrey moved east with their father. For seven years, Geoffrey recalls, “I didn't know where he lived, or with whom, in addition to our mother.” In fact, Tobias was living under the iron-fisted rule of his stepfather Dwight – Geoffrey calls him a “troglodyte” – whom their mother had married in 1957. The catalogue of put-downs and punishments inflicted on the young Tobias in This Boy's Life would turn the worst Dickensian tyrant queasy. “This Boy's Life began as a collection of memories I was putting down so that my children would know how I grew up,” Wolff says, “because they were raised in an academic atmosphere, and my mother by that time was a very proper old lady.” Readers of the memoir will recall how Dwight tracked Tobias and his mother to the east coast – “from Washington State to Washington DC” – where Dwight tried to strangle her. “That was the last time I saw him,” Wolff says. “Standing in a snowstorm, with policemen holding his arms. My mother had bruises on her throat for weeks afterwards. They found a knife that he'd thrown into the hedge.” When he showed his mother the manuscript of This Boy's Life, Rosemary Wolff must have sighed. Geoffrey, who is seven years older than Tobias, had published his own memoir, The Duke of Deception, a decade before. Tobias recalls her being “a little apprehensive”, and joking: “If I'd known both my sons were going to be writers, I might have behaved differently.”

More here. (Note: I just read Old School and This Boy's Life and am ravished by Wolff. Get them and read them if you have not already done so.)

Asad Raza in the New York Times:

The blue skies and brisk breezes of early September mark the end of the United States Open, and its corresponding state of near-total immersion in the shifting fortunes of professional tennis players. For observers who play the sport, this often means an enthusiastic return to the court, after two mostly sedentary weeks on stadium benches and upholstered furniture. This does not mean, however, that they are out of practice: many amateurs report that seeing tennis played at the highest level improves their own games.

Watching tennis and playing it can be mutually helpful activities, dialectically entwined.

“You get a boost, definitely,” said the tennis historian Bud Collins, who has been watching and playing the game for 60 years. “But six days later, it’s gone.”

Jon Levey, a writer and avid player said: “I always play better after watching the pros. Their form shows you that less is more. They move their body weight into the ball much better than I do. Everything seems to work in symmetry. After the Open, I suddenly know how to hit ‘up’ on my serve, like they do. But after a little while, it leaves.”

Maybe the answer is keep watching lots of professional tennis? Andy Murray said he watched about three sets per day.

More here. [Photo from Wikipedia.]

Katie Hafner in The New York Times:

Gossip.

This is Daniel Tammet’s unlikely and delightful word choice in describing a conversation about numbers with a woman he was tutoring in mathematics. His student was a homemaker whom he mistrusted at first because her motive for learning math was entirely pragmatic: she wanted to become an accountant. “There seemed to me something almost vulgar in the housewife’s sudden interest in numbers,” he writes, “as if she wanted to befriend them only as some people set out to befriend well-connected people.” Then one day, teacher and student were discussing fractions, and what happens when a number is halved, then halved again. They expressed their shared amazement, “almost in the manner of gossip,” Mr. Tammet writes. “Then she came to a beautiful conclusion about fractions that I shall never forget. She said, ‘There is no such thing that half of it is nothing.’ ” Mr. Tammet, whose previous books are “Born on a Blue Day” and “Embracing the Wide Sky,” is a “prodigious savant” — someone who combines developmental disabilities, in this case autism, with the skills of a prodigy. Happily, unlike many savants, he has a rare ability to describe what he sees in his head. His new book is, in part, a description of an intimate relationship with numbers. Not uncommonly for people with autism, he has the remarkable condition called synesthesia, in which seemingly unrelated senses are combined — so that each number is accompanied by its own unique shape, color, texture and feel. The number 289 he finds hideous, while 333 is very appealing. And pi is a thing of pure beauty. Its trillions upon trillions of digits speak to Mr. Tammet of “endless possibility, illimitable adventure.” (This is something we have been able to appreciate only in recent history: Archimedes knew pi to only three correct places, and Newton went only 13 places beyond that.)

For Mr. Tammet, the adventure culminated on March 14, 2004 — Pi Day, of course — when he recited pi from memory, to 22,514 places, over a period of five hours and nine minutes, to a packed room of spectators in Oxford, England. His description of the shape and character the digits took as they rolled across his brain, past his tongue and out his mouth, is at once eerie and poetic. In the course of his recitation, he writes, the audience sat quietly, deeply moved.

More here.

Here is some text and a graphic:

More text here.

Zhu Jinshi. Rice Paper Boat. 2013.

12-metre-long installation made of 8,000 sheets of rice paper.

More here and here.

Justin E. H. Smith in Paper Monument:

Jeremy Bentham thought that we no longer needed statues, or other post-mortem representations of ourselves, since innovations in the science of embalming had brought it about that we could each be our own statue after death. Bentham’s own embalmers botched the job, leaving the utilitarian’s own auto-icon with a head of wax, which kind of negates his argument, even as it stimulates further reflection among the living as to what it means exactly to be memorialized, to be iconized, when one is no longer.

If you made an effort, circa 2009, to master the news about Lady Gaga, you will by now have come to regret this unwise disposal of your time. Gaga had been an American performer of some repute, a singer and dancer, and she was held for a brief time to be shaking things up, to be causing us to see things in new ways. This perception had mostly to do with her manipulation of gender signifiers, but in this what little claim she had to iconic status was derived, mostly unconsciously, from her status as an iteration of a type that had far more blazing tokens nearly a century ago. The type passes through Madonna, on whom one was probably right to expend some mental energy, and back through the great film stars Madonna so diligently imitated, and so lovingly praised in the shout-out portion of “Vogue.” And it passes on, too, to someone who was not credited in Madonna’s 1990 hit, yet whose paintings seem to have done more to concretize the figure of the modern woman to which these later pop stars would work so hard to fit themselves, the figure that always seems so modern and insolite, while remaining eternally rooted in a mythical 1925 Paris, in the moment when Tamara de Lempicka (who had fled St. Petersburg in 1917) painted it in cool neo-cubist blues: la garçonne, the female boy, artificial and contrived even grammatically, always a surprise, always as if new, even when its long chain of iterations is revealed.

We are also iterations of ourselves through time: receding series, as Vladimir Nabokov (who also fled St. Petersburg in 1917) wrote of his Lucette at the moment of her drowning. And sometimes new series spin off from moments, and are taken up by others, while we come to look less like ourselves than our imitators do.

More here.

Your DNA is not a blueprint. Day by day, week by week, your genes are in a conversation with your surroundings. Your neighbors, your family, your feelings of loneliness: They don’t just get under your skin, they get into the control rooms of your cells. Inside the new social science of genetics.

David Dobbs in Pacific Standard:

A few years ago, Gene Robinson, of Urbana, Illinois, asked some associates in southern Mexico to help him kidnap some 1,000 newborns. For their victims they chose bees. Half were European honeybees, Apis mellifera ligustica, the sweet-tempered kind most beekeepers raise. The other half were ligustica’s genetically close cousins, Apis mellifera scutellata, the African strain better known as killer bees. Though the two subspecies are nearly indistinguishable, the latter defend territory far more aggressively. Kick a European honeybee hive and perhaps a hundred bees will attack you. Kick a killer bee hive and you may suffer a thousand stings or more. Two thousand will kill you.

Working carefully, Robinson’s conspirators—researchers at Mexico’s National Center for Research in Animal Physiology, in the high resort town of Ixtapan de la Sal—jiggled loose the lids from two African hives and two European hives, pulled free a few honeycomb racks, plucked off about 250 of the youngest bees from each hive, and painted marks on the bees’ tiny backs. Then they switched each set of newborns into the hive of the other subspecies.

Robinson, back in his office at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Entomology, did not fret about the bees’ safety. He knew that if you move bees to a new colony in their first day, the colony accepts them as its own. Nevertheless, Robinson did expect the bees would be changed by their adoptive homes: He expected the killer bees to take on the European bees’ moderate ways and the European bees to assume the killer bees’ more violent temperament. Robinson had discovered this in prior experiments. But he hadn’t yet figured out how it happened.

More here.

Santiago Zabala in Al Jazeera:

We all remember when Democratic strategist James Carville coined the famous phrase “it's the economy, stupid”, for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. It quickly became a slogan often repeated in US political culture. Together with the economy, he also emphasised the significance of “change” and “healthcare”. While Obama seems to have taken these latter two items to heart, education (in particular in the humanities) still seems to be a marginal issue among his priorities. This also occurs with other politicians. But why is it so common today?

For those of us who had the good fortune to be educated by teachers who guided our intellectual interest and social wellbeing regardless of where we were enrolled, we know it's always the faculty that makes the difference, not the institution. If, as Noam Chomsky once pointed out, “our kids are being prepared for passive obedience, not creative, independent lives”, it's because we live in a corporate world where most institutions are ranked according to criteria that too often ignore the essence of the discipline in favour of the job market.

It is also interesting to notice how the failure of MOOCs (massive open online courses, which represent corporate universities' latest development), lies in the impersonal nature of the courses – because students are unable to meaningfully interact with their professors, one of the fundamental aspects of any serious education. This is why, asSarah Kendzior brilliantly explained, colleges must be “reformed, not replaced”. How can we reform our higher education system? And why is it necessary?

More here.

From ArtAsiaPacific:

In June, the Pakistan-born, New York-based artist Shahzia Sikander and Vishakha N. Desai, president emerita of Asia Society and Asian art scholar, met at Sikander’s studio in Midtown, New York, to mark her participation in Sharjah Biennial 11, the 5th Auckland Triennial and the 13th Istanbul Biennial. Their discussion focused on the transnational nature of Sikander’s work, complexities around the questions of her identity, and her role in the rise of contemporary miniature painting in Pakistan and its reception around the world.

Vishakha N. Desai: So let’s begin with the Sharjah Biennial, as your latest project, Parallax (2013), was unveiled there and will go on to the Istanbul Biennial in September with some modifications. Parallax is an amazingly nuanced installation—an immense three-channeled video projection—but of course you began your career as a miniature artist. So please, could you tell us about the relationship of this new work and its scale to your original training, and describe your experience of working in Sharjah?

Shahzia Sikander: Miniature painting for me has always been heroic in scope and not limited by its scale—it is a space to unleash one’s imagination. Parallax is in fact a compact, varied, multilayered, expandable projection created from hundreds of small drawings. It came about as a result of my visits to Sharjah, and in particular from driving in and around the emirate, across its deserts and up and down its coasts. There is no better activity than driving to get a sense of a space in a car culture, and I picked up a great sense of the topography of the land. Parallax examines Sharjah’s position beside the Strait of Hormuz, and its role as a stopover for the old Imperial Airways. This proximity to water, sand and oil, and of course the historical power tensions surrounding maritime trade, all became fodder for visual play between solid and liquid representations in the work. All of the liquid states in the animation are made up of millions of silhouettes of hair that have been culled from images of gopis—female worshippers of Krishna often portrayed in Indian miniatures. These transform into large swaths of static noise that hover between multiple representations, ranging from oceans, water and oil, to flocks of birds and patterns of human migration.

By isolating the gopi hair from its source, I emphasized its potential to cultivate new associations. Similarly, there is no fixed viewing point in the film. It is simultaneously aerial and internal. For me, even the Arabic recitation in the score doesn’t need a translation, as the emotional range in the delivery is vast and inclusive. This is also a reference to the non-Arabic-speaking Muslim cultures such as Pakistan, where Arabic is primarily aural. I see Parallax as immersive and limitless in scale. Scaled up using certain projectors it could defy all sorts of architectural boundaries, and scaled down it could even be a sort of “Sharjahnama” illuminated manuscript.

More here.

Usha Alexander in Shunya's Notes:

The most difficult part was the fair amount of officialdom and red tape to untangle, which Namit took on single-handedly. I was useless in these tasks, being both unable to drive and unsure with my Hindi, let alone entirely ignorant about how these things work in India. So armed with his parents’ insider advice, Namit made his way around to the various agencies and businesses to set things up, including health insurance, phone and internet service, cooking gas permit, electrical billing, ID cards, police verification, tax filing, bank accounts, and other essential mundanities. None of these things are to be had as straightforwardly as in the States: one must produce official documents, various proofs of identity and residency, forms in triplicate procured from one office and stamped by the clerks in another, multiple properly framed and sized headshots, and the names of dead ancestors. All this for a cylinder of propane for the kitchen.

The adjustment might have been more difficult, though. Happily, we have no children, which means, among other things, we aren’t agonizing about their health with each sip of water and every mosquito bite, nor are we selecting schools and private tutors to ensure the right college admissions, as we see other middle-class parents doing. This alone collapses our risks and costs immeasurably and increases our freedom. Just as much, we are fortunate to not have to seek conventional employment—provided we live modestly—which means we avoid the grind of daily commutes, workaday insults, and the weariness of mounting the career ladder. The upwardly mobile, family-oriented lifestyle emerging in India seems even more of a rat-race than it is in the US, and a good part of our secret to gladness in being here is that we are not pursuing it.

More here.

Over at Eurozine, an interview with Jerzy Jarzebski, editor of Gombrowicz's Kronos:

Adam Puchejda: How would you describe Gombrowicz's Kronos? Is it private, intimate, sublime, banal?

Jerzy Jarzebski: Ambivalent. It is private, personal and intimate, but at the same time it is none of these. Primarily, it is a record of facts that are not private as such. It contains the humdrumness of life. I met with this and that person, I drank another cup of coffee, I signed a contract with the publishing house, etc. Of course, in Kronos you can also find very personal fragments, the ones dealing with Gombrowicz's sexual and emotional relationships, but throughout the text he tries to be strictly objective. This is a record that Gombrowicz writes for himself in order to read it again and again, trying to grasp a sense of his own life. If you think about it this way, you understand why this text strives to be at least an attempt to record an objective, factual truth. It becomes personal only when you start to interpret it – something that Gombrowicz does himself, even within the text.

AP: But how can you make any sense of this tangle of names, dates and events, a sort of raw record of almost all life's events?

JJ: Gombrowicz was a metaphysician and, at various moments of his life, looked for a pattern in his own existence. When he sailed back from Argentina to Europe – we read in his Diary – he expected to see the “Chrobry” sailing in the opposite direction. The Chrobry was the name of the ship he took to Argentina in the first place, 24 years earlier. Seeing it again, in accordance with the vision that Gombrowicz entertains, would be a sign that the period of his life spent in Argentina has come to an end. Sometimes Gombrowicz – already in Kronos – is playing with numbers and it is very funny, because he is not able to add two and two. Wherever there are calculations, we find in them some horrendous mistakes, but it was on these erroneous calculations that Gombrowicz based his conclusions.

Joselle DiNunzio Kehoe in Plus magazine:

By the nineteenth century mathematicians struggled with the meaning and implications of their ideas and tried to shore up the foundation of mathematics, fearing perhaps that the weightlessness of the purely abstract could threaten the integrity of their discipline. They reflected on, and argued about, the meaning of their work — what it could address, and how. What was a function? Was “infinity” simply shorthand for an unending process, or was it something? In 1829 the legendary mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote, “mathematics has for its object all extensive quantities.” Other kinds of quantities could be considered “only to the extent that they depend on the extensive.” By extensive quantities Gauss meant lines that are described by length, surfaces, solid bodies and angles, as well as time and number. The non-extensive quantities he allowed included speed, density, hardness, height, the depth and strength of tones, the depth and strength of light, and probability. But he also provided an important qualification, “One quantity in itself cannot be the object of a mathematical investigation: mathematics considers quantities only in their relation to one another.” Here, quantities and their measures are considered together, and they can each be thought of as magnitudes.

Gauss's student Bernhard Riemann brought a definitive clarification to the meaning of measure. He acknowledged in the introduction to his famous lecture On the hypotheses which lie at the bases of geometry that this was influenced, not only by Gauss, but also by ideas of the philosopher John Friedrich Herbart, who pioneered early studies of perception and learning. Herbart's work played a significant role in debates centered on how the mind brings structure to sensation.

Like cognitive scientists today, Herbart broke down the world of appearances into the subjective impressions that build it. He rejected the idea that space was the thing that contained the physical world. For him spatial forms were mental images derived from relationships among any number of things we experience. They arise in our conception of time (the future being ahead of us and the past behind us), as well as number, and are applied to all aspects of the physical world. Herbart accepted that any perceived object could be thought of as a collection of properties bound together.