From Smithsonian:

Norman Barker was fresh out of the Maryland Institute College of Art when he got an assignment to photograph a kidney. The human kidney, extracted during an autopsy, was riddled with cysts, a sign of polycystic kidney disease. “The physician told me to make sure that it’s ‘beautiful’ because it was being used for publication in a prestigious medical journal,” writes Barker in his latest book, Hidden Beauty: Exploring the Aesthetics of Medical Science. “I can remember thinking to myself; this doctor is crazy, how am I going to make this sickly red specimen look beautiful?” Thirty years later, the medical photographer and associate professor of pathology and art at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine will tell you that debilitating human diseases can actually be quite photogenic under the microscope, particularly when the professionals studying them use color stains to enhance different shapes and patterns. “Beauty may be seen as the delicate lacework of cells within the normal human brain, reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock masterpiece, the vibrant colored chromosomes generated by spectral karyotyping that reminded one of our colleagues of the childhood game LITE-BRITE or the multitude of colors and textures formed by fungal organisms in a microbiology lab,” says Christine Iacobuzio-Donahue, a pathologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital who diagnoses gastrointestinal diseases.

Barker and Iacobuzio-Donahue share in interest in how medical photography can take diseased tissue and render it otherworldly, abstract, vibrant and thought-provoking. Together, they collected nearly 100 images of human diseases and other ailments from more than 60 medical science professionals for Hidden Beauty, a book and accompanying exhibition. In each image, there is an underlying tension. The jarring moment, of course, is when viewers realize that the subject of the lovely image before them is something that can cause so much pain and distress.

Picture: HIV.

More here.

From NewStraitsTimes:

FOR nearly six decades, Indians have revelled in this Punjabi joke in all its quirky broadness: “How are you? Relaxing?”

“No, I am Milkha Singh.”

It has taken them as long, and a biopic, to recognise the modestly educated soldier-sportsman who has been the butt of that joke. Bhag Milkha Bhag (Run Milkha Run) on the life of India's most famous sports icon has begun brisk business at the box office, even as critics compete to shower plaudits or aim barbs. Born in 1935 in Faisalabad, now in Pakistan, Milkha was a victim of India's brutal Partition in 1947. Seeing his kin being killed, he ran to escape. He kept running on arrival in Delhi as a refugee — from his memories, from the police as he became a little thug and an unrequited love. The “run” as a metaphor of life's expedient circumstances, threads through the narrative. udiences empathise with Milkha not only because he ran fast, but because he wasn't afraid to stumble, falter, fall, rise and run again. He found a sense of purpose in the Indian Army. The lure of milk, eggs and freedom from fatigue duty made him take to sports. Years of hard work helped him break national records; wins at the Asian and Commonwealth games. But the hot favourite at the Rome Olympics (1960), although he broke yet another record, came fourth, losing a medal by hair's breadth. Milkha has lived through two catharses: one of bitter Partition memories and the other, not bagging an Olympic medal. Fate helped him overcome both. On Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's persuasion and Pakistan president Ayub Khan's invitation in 1962, he ran in Pakistan and washed off the double agony. He raced ahead of Abdul Khaliq, the winner of the 100m gold at the Tokyo Asian Games. Ayub Khan christened him “The Flying Sikh”. In distilling these catharses, Bollywood has performed an unusual, but commendable task amidst continuing mistrust between India and Pakistan. Bhag Milkha Bhag seems inspired by a vision of the future and a departure from the countless narratives of the terrible past and a present that does not hold much hope.

More here. (Note: A lovely film now playing in New York and maybe elsewhere.)

Over the next two decades, Otto, in chronological order, (1) got a business degree in Paris; (2) studied at the London School of Economics; (3) fought for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War; (4) earned a doctorate in economics at the University of Trieste while acting as a courier for the Italian anti-Fascist resistance; (5) served in the French Army during its futile defense against German invasion; (6) biked and walked to the unoccupied Vichy southern France where, under the alias Albert Hermant (and the nickname Beamish, for his ingratiating manner), he helped spirit Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall and thousands of other refugees from Marseille to the United States; (7) made his own way to New Jersey, where he changed his name to Albert O. Hirschman; (8) continued west to the University of California, Berkeley, where he wrote his first book and met his wife-to-be, a beautiful French-Russian refugee who had been a favorite student of Simone de Beauvoir in Paris; (9) volunteered for the American Army, ending up as a translator for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the C.I.A., and serving as interpreter for a German general in the first Allied war-crimes trial; (10) worked for the Federal Reserve in Washington as a top adviser on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe; and, (11) driven from employment in cold war Washington by suspicions about his colorful past, moved with his family to Bogotá in 1952 to advise the Colombian government on behalf of the World Bank.

more from Justin Fox at the NY Times here.

Kafka was not quite 41 when he died in a sanatorium outside Vienna in June 1924. Little-known in his own lifetime, he would later be recognised as one of the 20th century’s most important writers. Samuel Beckett was drawn to his bleak and unsparing vision; today his admirers include JM Coetzee, Lydia Davis and Jonathan Franzen. If Kafka still speaks to us, it is because he is a sort of 20th-century Dante, who wrote a story of Everyman who sets out in search of salvation in this world, only to encounter a proliferating darkness. A writer of such mystique would need a very good biographer and, at first, it looked as though Kafka had found him in his literary executor Max Brod, who had refused to burn his work as instructed, and seen to its publication. While Brod’s 1937 biography had much to say about Kafka’s fiction and inner life (as well as his famed sensitivity to noise and unlikely interest in Prague nightlife), it viewed Kafka as an essentially redemptive figure, whose perceived Jewish “spirituality” was the commanding side of his personality. It is true that Kafka’s literary friends and almost his entire circle in Prague were Jews; yet the word “Jewish” does not appear anywhere in his fiction. Like many German-speaking Jews within the Austro-Hungarian empire, Kafka saw assimilation as a means of escape from the pogrom-tainted past. Nevertheless, he was fascinated by Yiddish culture and Yiddish literature; his Jewish identity was conflicted at best.

more from Ian Thomson at the FT here.

For Macfarlane is clear that holloways are possessed of the past in the way other places, and other roads, are not: “You do not have to be a mystic,” he writes, “to accept that certain paths are linear only in a simple sense. Like trees, they have branches and like rivers they have tributaries. They are rifts within which time might exist as pure surface, prone to recapitulation and rhyme, weird morphologies, uncanny doublings.” Walking along such paths, he says, “you might walk up strange pasts, in the hunter’s sense of ‘walking up’ meaning ‘to flush out, to disturb what is concealed’.” In this he follows Thomas, who claimed to have heard “the voices of long-dead Roman soldiers as he walked an ancient trackway near Trawsfynydd in Wales. In Hampshire, where a stand of aspens whispered at the cross-roads of two old paths, he listened to the speech of a vanished village: the ringing of hammer, shoe, and anvil from the smithy, the clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing from the inn.” Thomas’s poems, Macfarlane writes, “are thronged with ghosts, doubles and paths that run through people as surely as they run through places”.

more from William Dalrymple at The Guardian here.

Virginia Hughes in her National Geographic blog, Only Human:

Earlier this week, the UK’s Sunday Times rocked the publishing world byrevealing that Robert Galbraith, the first-time author of a new crime novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling, is none other than J.K. Rowling, the superstar author of the Harry Potter series. Then the New York Times told the story of how the Sunday Times’s arts editor, Richard Brooks, had figured it out.

One of Brooks’s colleagues got an anonymous tip on Twitter claiming that Galbraith was Rowling. The tipster’s Twitter account was then swiftly deleted. Before confronting the publisher with the question, Brooks’s team did some web sleuthing. They found that the two authors shared the same publisher and agent. And, after consulting with two computer scientists, they discovered that The Cuckoo’s Calling and Rowling’s other books show striking linguistic similarities. Satisfied that the Twitter tipster was right, Brooks reached out to Rowling. Finally, on Saturday morning, as the New York Times reports, “he received a response from a Rowling spokeswoman, who said that she had ‘decided to fess up’.”

While the literary world was buzzing about whether that anonymous tipster was actually Rowling’s publisher, Little, Brown and Company (it wasn’t), I wanted to know how those computer scientists did their mysterious linguistic analyses. I called both of them yesterday and learned not only how the Rowling investigation worked, but about the fascinating world of forensic linguistics.

More here.

Todd Walton in Counterpunch:

Before I tell you a little more about Norman O. Brown, I would like to recount a scene from Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the novel, not the movie.

…“Great things happen when God mixes with man.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

So…in The Last Temptation of Christ there is a memo­rable scene in which Jesus and his disciples are sitting around a campfire after a long day of spreading their gospel, when Matthew, a recent addition to the crew, is suddenly impelled by angels (or so he claims) to write the biography of Jesus. So he gets out quill and papyrus and sets to work transcribing the angelic dictation; and Jesus, curious to see what’s gotten into his latest convert, takes a peek over Matthew’s shoulder and reads the opening lines of what will one day be a very famous gospel. Jesus is outraged. “None of this is true,” he cries, or words to that effect. And then Judas (I’m pretty sure it was Judas and not Andrew) calms Jesus down with a Norman O. Brown-like bit of wisdom, something along the lines of: “You know, Jesus, in the long run it really doesn’t matter if he writes the truth or not. You’re a myth now, so you’d better get used to everybody and his aunt coming up with his or her version of who you are.” Kazantzakis, trust me, wrote the scene much more poetically and marvelously than the way I just recounted it, but…

“All good books have one thing in common. They are truer than if they had really happened.” — Ernest Hemingway

Back to Norman O. Brown. In the late 1960s, Nor­man was among the most famous pop academic writers in the world. Not only had he written Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, which made him famous, he had just published (in 1966) Love’s Body, a mainstream and academic bestseller exploring the impact of erotic love on human history; or was it the struggle between eroticism and civilization? In any case, here is one of my favorite blurbs from the hundreds of reviews that made Love’s Body so famous in its time. I will digress again (thank you, Norman) by saying if any book I ever publish gets a blurb even remotely as stupendous as the following, and said blurb appears in, say, the San Francisco Chronicle or even the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, drinks are on me.

“Norman O. Brown is variously considered the architect of a new view of man, a modern-day shaman, and a Pied Piper leading the youth of America astray. His more ardent admirers, of whom I am one, judge him one of the seminal thinkers who profoundly challenge the dominant assumptions of the age. Although he is a classicist by training who came late to the study of Freud and later to mysticism, he has already created a revolution in psy­chological theory.” — Sam Keen, Psychology Today

The myth and history web site known as Wikipedia says that Norman was a much-loved professor at UC Santa Cruz where he taught and lived to the end of his days (he died in 2002, or so they say).

More here. (Note: Why am I posting a 2011 article today? Because I am in the process of re-reading Brown and am deeply deeply affected. Please read his Life against Death and The Prophetic Tradition for a stunning snapshot of what history and the collective psyche of an epoch looks like when the mind-forged manacles are cast off)

Joseph Kahn in The New York Times:

As told in the magnum opus of ancient Chinese history, “Records of the Grand Historian,” King Goujian knew how to nurse a grievance. At the start of his reign in the fifth century B.C., Goujian’s archenemy attacked his kingdom, captured Goujian and made him a slave. The king was granted amnesty after three years and allowed to reclaim his throne. But Goujian swore off the trappings of monarchy, eating peasant food and living simply. He slept on a bed of brushwood and dangled a gallbladder from the ceiling, licking it to taste its bitterness every day. A Chinese aphorism, “sleeping on sticks and tasting gall,” celebrates his determination to remember the shame and humiliation he suffered — and to draw strength from it.

In “Wealth and Power,” their engaging narrative of the intellectual and cultural origins of China’s modern rise, Orville Schell and John Delury note that the story of Goujian was a favorite of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who united China under his rule before being forced into exile in Taiwan. They might have called it the defining theme of contemporary China. From Wei Yuan in the early 19th century, the first major intellectual to insist that the mighty Chinese Empire had fundamental flaws, to Xi Jinping, who became China’s top leader last year, the humiliations China has suffered at the hands of foreigners over the past century and a half are the glue that keeps the country together. Many nations revel in their victories. America has its War of Independence. The British still churn out documentaries about World War II. But even $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves has not healed the psychological trauma of 1842, the year of China’s defeat at the hands of the British in the first Opium War. After that conflict, China was dismembered, first by the European powers, then, more devastatingly, by Japan. Chinese troops expelled the Japanese, and the country was reunified more than 60 years ago. But it is determined to keep the memory of the abuses it suffered from fading into history.

Shame often acts as a depressant. But through the 11 biographical sketches that constitute their book, Schell and Delury argue that for generations of influential Chinese, shame has been a stimulant.

More here.

Egyptian activist Ahmed Salah's account of the 2011 protests in Tahir Square and the toppling of the Mubarak regime, in the new journal The Brooklyn Quarterly (with Alex Mayyasi, photo by Alex Mayyasi). (You can read it on Atavist’s multimedia platform here. And if you are so inclined, they are raising money to help launch the journal via a Kickstarter campaign to fund the first issue.)

“Tahrir” means “liberation” in Arabic, but the symbolic value of Tahrir Square goes beyond the name. It is the beating heart not only of Cairo but of the entire nation, surrounded by symbols of the government’s power: the headquarters of the regime’s political party and of the Arab League, a major mosque where state funerals take place, and a massive bureaucratic building called the Mugamma. Egyptians have rallied there in protest since the days of British rule. Western businesses have also left their mark on it: enormous billboards top the surrounding apartment buildings, fast food chains line the sidewalks, a Ritz Carlton is under construction, and the old American University in Cairo lies at the southeast end of the square. A three-lane traffic rotary fed by seven streets dominates the central space; the entire square has a surface area equal to 10 American football fields. On its northern edge stands the Egyptian Museum, where on a normal day tourists line up for hours to see treasures like the burial mask of King Tut.

Yet January 25, 2011 was not a normal day. Around 4 p.m. I gazed up at the iconic pink stone of the museum as I approached Tahrir — with 6,000 other Egyptians marching all around me. When we entered the square, we realized we were entering a battlefield. Several people joining our rally told us that security forces had blocked the nearby 6th October Bridge spanning the Nile. Police were fighting to keep a similar-sized crowd on the other side of the square from crossing to our side. Dense smoke clouded the square, but I could make out the hazy forms of protesters and a dark tide of police opposite them.

Very few of the people around me had been to a protest before, let alone the sort of violent confrontation this was sure to become, and yet with a yell, they charged forward without hesitation. Spreading out into the open space, they sprinted four or five hundred yards to the frontlines halfway across the square, all the while ducking the stones and tear gas canisters that rained down on us. I remember thinking — even as I huffed and puffed in the back — that this was the scene I had always dreamt of seeing. And now I was seeing it.

Martin Eiermann in The European Magazine (photo by Eitan Abramovich):

As I am writing this, 300,000 people are marching in Rio de Janeiro against corruption and public sector cuts ahead of next year’s soccer World Cup. It must be bad if Brazilians start anti-soccer riots. In Greece, protests have been ongoing for several years. In Spain, Italy and Portugal, popular discontent has ousted several governments and continues to cause a headache for their successors (in Greece, the government coalition is crumbling right now). In Great Britain, cuts to the National Health Service inspired regular demonstrations and a special segment during the Olympic opening ceremony in 2012, which defiantly celebrated the NHS as one of the great achievements of modern British society. Look at any newspaper front page today, and you are likely to see one or more photos of police in riot gear, shooting tear gas into crowds of protesters.

The decades since World War II have brought unprecedented increases in expectations about living standards in much of the world. I’m saying “expectations” because the actual increase in wealth and living standards has often been highly stratified: Those at the top benefit the most, sometimes at the expense of those at the bottom. In many countries of the Global North, inequality has increased significantly since the 1970s as real wages have stagnated or declined for many income groups. In the countries of South America, Asia, and parts of Africa, living standards for the middle class have increased somewhat, but the amount of money accumulating at the top meant that middle class expectations often continued to outpace actual improvements. No wonder, then, that protests in Rio have driven a broad cross-section of the population into the streets. As the BBC’s Paul Mason reminds us, the chances for upheaval are much higher when the middle class grows frustrated: “Even where you get rapid economic growth, it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.”

Fred Dretske in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Prior to Gettier it was more or less assumed (without explicit defence) that knowledge, knowing that some proposition P was true (when it was in fact true), was to be distinguished from mere belief (opinion) that it was true, by one’s justification, evidence, or reasons for believing it true. I could believe – truly believe – that my horse would win the third race without knowing it would win. To know it would win I need more – some reason, evidence or justification (the race is fixed?) that would promote my true belief to the status of knowledge. Gettier produced examples to show that this simple equation of knowledge (K) with justified true belief (JTB) was too simplistic. His examples triggered a widespread search for a more satisfactory account of knowledge.

Gettier’s counterexamples are constructed on the basis of two assumptions about justification, both of which were (at the time he made them) entirely uncontentious. The first of these was that:

1: The justification one needs to know that P is true is a justification one can have for a false proposition.

Almost all philosophers who aren’t sceptics accept 1 without hesitation. After all, if one can, as we all believe we can – sometimes at least – come to know (just by looking) that there are bananas in the fruit bowl and (by glancing at the fuel gauge) fuel in the automobile tank, then given the existence of wax bananas and defective gauges, the justification, the kind of evidence, needed to know is clearly less than conclusive. It is something one can have for a false proposition.

Nonetheless, despite the overwhelming appeal of 1, accepting it lands one in the epistemological soup. Well, almost in the soup. The added push is supplied by Gettier’s second assumption:

2: If you are justified in believing P, and you know that P entails Q and accept Q as a result, you are justified in believing Q.

The idea behind 2, of course, is that one does not lose justification by performing deductive inferences one knows to be valid. If you have reasons to believe P is true, and you know P can’t be true unless Q is true, then you have equally good reasons to believe Q is true. It is difficult to see how 2 could be false if logic is to be regarded as a useful tool for expanding one’s corpus of rationally held beliefs.

But, alas, accepting both 1 and 2 lands you in deep trouble. Gettier explains why.

Our own Morgan Meis in French Culture:

I first opened Swann’s Way on a train. This is more than twenty years ago, Amtrak heading from New York City up the Hudson and finally to Montreal. It was a nine-hour train ride, the way I remember it. I remember stepping off the train in Montreal and wondering where the hours had gone.

Of course, I’d been in Combray for those nine hours, strolling through the sun-soaked gardens and the rich object-laden rooms of Proust’s childhood. Proust’s great aunts are teasing his grandmother again, poking at her with their relentless barbs. Then the book wavers and twitches in my hand. My head lolls back into that specific nook between the train-seat headrest and the window. The giant trees of the Hudson River are flickering past. The morning sun slides across the water, sparkling as tiny waves lick at the light. A morning yellow that isn’t even quite yellow yet. The presaging of yellow. The train car is quiet with morning readers, morning nappers.

Proust is trying to get to sleep again. Only, the wandering of his thoughts and memories will not let sleep come. Or is it the other way around? Maybe he’s been pulling the dream world so completely into his waking life that he doesn’t know how to be fully awake anymore. The train has reached full speed and rocks like a metronome slowly side to side even as it plunges ahead, north, north, away from the city and into the forests and rivers of another world, the world of Frederic Church and Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School of painters who tried, again and again, to capture the roundy, orange-tinged leafy luminescence of the landscape along the river.

More here.

Over at More Intelligent Life:

BEFORE THE DISASTER, there was always something reassuring about life by the sea in Ukedo, on the Fukushima coastline. Farther up Japan’s north-eastern shores, the rias, or inlets, would often become deathtraps when tsunamis barrelled up the narrow coves, crashing over isolated villages before the residents had time to flee. But in Ukedo, which lies on a smooth grey beach, ruffled in the early morning only by gulls’ feet and crabs’ claws, the Pacific Ocean was typically gentler. In summer, surfers would lie idly for hours out at sea waiting for a wave big enough to ride. If ever the waves did rise, giant concrete sea walls stood between them and the village like grim-faced centurions.

For generations, villagers came together twice a year to celebrate the bounty of the ocean. At New Year, dozens of fishing boats, festooned with flags, would join a parade out to sea, their horns blaring. In the lead was the vessel that had caught the most fish the year before. Two months later, when the sea was cold and rough and the fishermen needed an excuse to stay on shore drinking, the main matsuri, or Shinto festival, was held. It honoured the sea and the paddy fields of Ukedo, which together provided the two staple ingredients of every Japanese table: fish and rice. Children would dress up in gaudy costumes, with red and yellow flowers on their hats, speckled robes and red clogs, dancing to songs that celebrated life by the sea. Young fishermen would strip down to a pair of tight white shorts, and, fired up with slugs of the village’s sake, they would hurl themselves into the icy water, carrying heavy wooden shrines that sloshed about on the waves. The name of the festival spoke to the success of their entreaties to the Shinto spirits of the sea. It was called the Amba Matsuri, or Festival of the Safe Wave.

Richard Marshall interviews Tim Maudlin in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’re working in the area of philosophy of physics and science. This hasn’t been an altogether happy relationship and recent spats have broken out that suggest that physicists don’t think they need to heed philosophy and philosophers think physicists are inept at interpreting their own theories. You tend to be in this latter camp don’t you, and have been pretty vociferous in arguing that there is a role for philosophy in understanding physics. How do you diagnose the problem – and how come it is philosophy that tends to be sober in their interpretations and the scientists who seem more content with paradoxes and contradictions and expensive ontologies like multiverses?

TM: I don’t think that the spats between physicists and philosophers are more heated, or of a different kind, then the spats that break out among philosophers or among physicists; they just get more public attention. Disputes in foundations of physics typically cannot be settled by observation or experiment, so argumentation has to come to the fore. And the analysis and evaluation of arguments requires a certain fastidiousness about terms and concepts that can be fostered by a background in philosophy.

That said, though, I do not see any deep fissure that runs between the two fields. In my view, the greatest philosopher of physics in the first half of the 20th century was Einstein and in the second half was John Stewart Bell. So physicists who say that professional philosophers have not made the greatest contributions to foundations of physics are correct. But both Einstein and Bell had philosophical temperaments, and Einstein explicitly complained about physicists who had no grounding in philosophy. The community of people who work in foundations of physics is about evenly divided between members of philosophy departments, members of physics departments and members of math departments. Many of us on all sides are trying to open and broaden channels of communication across disciplinary boundaries. And I don’t see that there is much correlation between disciplinary affiliation and sobriety: no one is more sober than Bell and Einstein were, or more cavalier (at times) than Bohr or John Wheeler. A more salient division in contemporary foundations is between those, like myself, who judge that Bell was basically correct in almost everything he wrote and those who think that his theorem does not show much of interest and his complaints about the unprofessional vagueness that infects quantum theory are misplaced.

To understand why Dreamliners catch fire, we must look all the way back to the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, when major defense contractors were facing the prospect of declining defense budgets and consequent diminishing profits. In response, William Perry, newly installed as Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Clinton Administration, presided over a series of mergers between the big firms, which produced an industry dominated by five giant “primes.” Perry offered handsome subsidies to the firms as encouragement to merge, promoting the initiative as beneficial to the taxpayer because it would cut down on wasteful overhead. Needless to say there were no such savings for taxpayers, and the resultant corporate oligopoly inevitably led to increased weapons costs. One of the mergers united Boeing, the world’s pre-eminent commercial-airliner manufacturer, with McDonnell Douglas, a pure defense company. Boeing was of course also a defense contractor, but top management had traditionally kept the civil and defense divisions separate for fear that the defense team might infect the civilians with their culture of cost overruns, schedule slippage, and risky or unfeasible technical initiatives. These habits were all very well when the taxpayer was footing the bill for cost-plus contracts that might or might not result in a useful product, but they could obviously have proved disastrous when it came to competing with the company’s own money in a free-enterprise market.

more from Andrew Cockburn at Harper’s here.

Over at Open Culture (I guess it's on):

Well with all deep respect that I do have for Chomsky, my first point is that Chomsky, who always emphasizes how one has to be empirical, accurate, not just some crazy Lacanian speculations and so on… well I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically wrong in his descriptions in his whatever! Let’s look… I remember when he defended this demonstration of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.” And when later he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe and so on, his defense was quite shocking for me. It was that “No, with the data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know enough, so… you know.” But I totally reject this line of reasoning.

For example, concerning Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: Even if we have no data about their prisons and so on, isn’t it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have a regime which in the first two years (’75 to ’77) behaved towards itself, treated itself, as illegal? You know the regime was nameless. It was called “Angka,” an organization — not communist party of Cambodia — an organization. Leaders were nameless. If you ask “Who is my leader?” your head was chopped off immediately and so on.

I have arrived – finally – in Gago Coutinho, after an apocalyptic journey, the kind of journey I never imagined I would make in my entire life: we set off in buses at three o’clock in the morning on the 22nd, to travel from Luanda to Nova Lisboa, through the most marvellous scenery, which by eleven o’clock at night I began to find somewhat wearisome. We reached Nova Lisboa at dawn, where we slept in our seats, and at three o’clock in the afternoon of the 29th (or was it the 23rd?), after 600 km on the bus, they put us on a train to Luso: two days of travelling in fourth-class carriages – that celebrated English invention for the inhabitants of the third world, and which the Benguela railway company has, very Englishly, adopted – in which we formed great mounds of arms and legs, weapons and heads. These carriages are fitted with only three long benches: two running on either side beneath the windows and a double one in the middle, like a line drawn down the centre. Since there were not enough carriages, the scene was indescribable: from every side there emerged limbs that appeared to belong to no particular body. I ended up scratching my head with someone else’s hand. I slept, or pretended to sleep, and ate some canned food – the floor was awash with cans and spilled sauces – that played havoc with my insides. Jews being deported to some Nazi concentration camp.

more from António Lobo Antunes at Granta here.