The progress of World Literature since the ’90s has accompanied that of global capitalism. In the past, the spread of money — what Marx called the “universal equivalent,” for its ability to serve as an empty vessel of exchange value — strengthened rather than weakened national boundaries and languages. It wasn’t so much “world literature” as vernacular literature — composed in Florentine Italian, say, rather than universal Latin — that developed alongside international finance in northern Italy in the late 15th century. Later, the headquarters of capitalism shifted to Holland, then England, then the US, countries mainly inhabited by Protestants who distinguished themselves from Catholics (the word catholic meaning simply “universal”) largely by listening to, but especially by reading, the Bible in the same Dutch or English they spoke over dinner. Not coincidentally, these countries attained mass literacy sooner than Catholic ones. In these countries, and others gathered into the capitalist world-system, questions about how money was to be distributed, for example, were discussed in publications produced in the local and/or national language and thus legible to far more people than any “universal” language had ever been. The overall nationalization of literature, throughout modernity, didn’t mean there could never be an internationalist literature, of the kind once imagined by 19th-century radicals. But an internationalist literature would be different from World Literature as we know it.

more from the editors at n+1 here.

From LiveScience:

About 5 percent of dying patients and 10 percent of cardiac arrest patients describe having near-death experiences. These experiences often have similar elements, such as a feeling of being out-of-body, going through a tunnel or on a river toward a warm light, seeing lost loved ones and being told it's not time to go yet. Past research revealed that near-death experiences are more vivid than real life. But scientists strongly disagree about the source of these experiences. Some argue that near-death experiences reveal the existence of heaven or the duality between mind and body, while others claim the event is caused by a flood of chemicals in the dying brain.

To sort out the issue, Borjigin and her colleagues examined nine rats. They induced cardiac arrest while the animals were hooked up to EEG machines, and the team then measured the electrical activity in the animals' brains. About 30 seconds after the heart had stopped, all the animals experienced waves of synchronized brain activity that were characteristic of the conscious brain. Rats that were asphyxiated with carbon monoxide showed a similar pattern of brain activity. The rats' visual cortex, which processes visual imagery, was also highly activated. This could shed light on why NDEs are so vivid, Borjigin said. “They all show the fingerprints of neural consciousness at near-death is at a much higher level compared to the waking state. That explains the realer-than-real human experience,” Borjigin told LiveScience. The team believes that this electrical surge may be a mechanism the brain uses to rescue itself from a sharp drop in glucose and oxygen. Though it may not work for animals in cardiac arrest, Borjigin speculates that this mechanism spurs alertness or hyperawareness in less critical situations.

More here.

From The New York Times:

These are the questions Mr. Epstein seeks to answer in this captivating book, which began as a feature in Sports Illustrated, where he is a senior writer. The book’s title misleads, since he forcefully argues that no single known gene is sufficient to ensure athletic success. His answer to the question “Nature or nurture?” is both.

…Mr. Epstein argues that we often confuse innate talent with spirit or effort. Even traits like desire may arise from DNA (see the Iditarod dogs selectively bred for enthusiastic pulling), but that does not mean they come down to any single gene. Whether it’s running faster, standing taller or jumping higher, multiple genetic pathways may lead there. In a particularly fascinating chapter, Mr. Epstein investigates an old theory that purports to explain why one small country, Jamaica, produces so many Olympic sprinters. The notion is that strong Africans were selected as slaves, that the strongest of them survived the voyage to Jamaica, and that the strongest survivors eventually escaped slavery and cloistered themselves in a remote region to form an isolated “warrior” gene stock that now produces world-class athletes. It makes a convenient story. But it is belied by the DNA research of Yannis Pitsiladis, a biologist at the University of Glasgow, who finds no genetically distinct subgroup of Jamaican sprinters. It appears that Jamaica churns out sprinters because almost everyone on the island tries the sport.

More here.

by Ben Schreckinger

My alma mater, Brown University, was founded in 1764 for the purpose of training clergymen. Today, it trains economists. A lot changed in the interim. A lot didn't. Enlightenment thinking penetrated mainstream consciousness, the industrial revolution rapidly raised standards of living to remarkable levels, and a new world order emerged from the ashes of two world wars. But Brown's output, like those of the American Ivy League's other universities — which have emerged from sectarian pasts to produce economists at similarly high rates and whose graduates control institutions like the U.S. presidency, the U.S. Supreme Court, the World Bank, and the UN — represents a continuity. Today's economists constitute the West's priestly class. Yes, they're in most ways better equipped to guide our lives than the authorities of Catholicism and its Protestant successors. They aspire to the scientific method, for one. But their discipline comes with form, function, and flaws inherited from its medieval ancestor — and recognizable to students of any dogmatic religion. We need look no further than the recent dust-up over an Excel error in a paper by two Harvard economists, which discredited the most influential piece of intellectual output of the last five years, to see that. Once we do, we can start to put the discipline in its proper place.

* * *

But first, how did we get here? For most of history, religion has provided answers not just to metaphysical questions, but to ethical ones. What's the best structure for society? Should money be lent at a profit? How comfortable should we be with change? How should people decide what to do with their lives? How big should my family be? Should we accept newcomers into our midst? And what is the value of a human life? (Approximately $10 million in economics, which does not observe the same taboos as other religions). The answers provided by religion are ones most people can grasp, and when the questions got too difficult, or too pointed, religion appeals to some authority to cut the questioning off before things get out of hand. Despite what might seem like some pretty glaring flaws — Really, we're ruled by a giant invisible bull-man? A guy was dead for three days and then he wasn't? — religion has endured by proving valuable.

At a social level, we need religion to smooth coordination, to make sure we're all on the same page. Life is filled with uncertainty, but uncertainty can cause societies to break down into strife, or indecision, or fear. Religion fills in the gaps in our certainty, so that we can ignore them for a while and push onward. For much of the formation of the Western world, Catholicism played that role. Then people began to reject the structure of the church and ushered in new sects of the same religion. Christianity itself eventually took a backseat altogether and the West tried nationalism, a religion that goes awfully well with a nation-based system of politics. But two world wars provided the reductiones ad absurdum of nationalism's dogmas. The priestly class, those initiated into special knowledge and given special power at the universities, had to decide where to place its faith after God and country. A chunk of them became atheists — specifically existenialist, deconstructuralist, postmodernists — who identified and rejected the dogmas of nationalism and imperialism (and then all the other –isms they could get their hands on) so strongly that they no longer believed in anything, including science.

Read more »

by Haider Shahbaz

N.M. Rashid (1910-1975) was an Urdu poet born in Gujranwala, Punjab. At the time of his birth, Gujranwala was part of the British Raj but was later included in Pakistan after the partition of 1947. His first collection of poetry, Mavra, was published in 1941 and was hailed as one of the earliest Urdu poetry collections to use free verse instead of the Ghazal form. He published three other collections: Iran Main Ajnabi (1955), La=Insaan (1969) and Guman ka Mumkin (1977, posthumous). His break from the ghazal form was not simply a break from traditional meter and rhyme, but he also introduced a poetry that was concerned with metaphysical themes and broke with the traditional themes of love that were tackled in the Ghazal. During British rule, he was also involved with the anti-colonial Khaksar Movement. His poetry appealed to me personally because he engages with themes of colonialism, the dynamics of love and eroticism between the oppressor and the oppressed, as well as modernist themes of the relationship between words and meaning. In this latter aspect, and in his advocacy of free verse, he reminds me of the disciples of Mallarme. Indeed, his friend and close collaborator, Meeraji, translated a number of Mallarme's poems. Rashid died in a London hospital in 1975 and his body was cremated according to his will.

I have chosen the two following poems to translate because they showcase Rashid's early preoccupation with foreign rule in India as well as his later preoccupation with the legacy of Islam (the second poem takes its first line, “Society is God – do not criticize it” from a saying of Muhammad).

(Before I take my leave, I wanted to say Eid Mubarak. But then I was reminded that 30 men were killed in a suicide bombing in Quetta the night before Eid. The insurgents who killed them claim to be avenging men who have gone missing in Baluchistan or who have been killed by the security forces to put down the separatist resistance movement in Baluchistan. I don't know anymore whom to mourn – those who kill or those who die. There was a time when Eid was Eid in Pakistan. Today, amidst these tumbling walls, it feels like no Eid to me. I can only hope that what Darwish said was true: “Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.”)

And now, as Rashid said in his preface to Mavra: “After this meaningless preface, some meaningless poems.”

Revenge

That face, those features, I cannot remember
A king's harem I remember
Next to the fireplace: a stripped body
Floor with carpet, carpet with couch
Alien gods of stone and metal
in a corner of the wall;
I can hear their laughter!
The roar of fire in the fireplace
furious – for these gods are insensitive!
Reflections on tall, tall walls
remind me of WHITE tyrants
whose swords lay in this room
foundations of WHITE rule!
That face, those features, I cannot remember
That nakedness I still remember
Unknown woman; alien body
on which, all night, my “lips” took
revenge – on behalf of my helpless gods
That nakedness I still remember!

[Urdu original here.]

Read more »

David Altmejd. The New North. 2007.

Wood, foam, expandable foam, resin, paint, magic-sculpt, magic-smooth, epoxy, glue, mirror, horse hair, quartz crystals and wire

More here and here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

“Monogamy is a problem,” said Dieter Lukas of the University of Cambridge in a telephone news conference last week. As Dr. Lukasexplained to reporters, he and other biologists consider monogamy an evolutionary puzzle.

In 9 percent of all mammal species, males and females will share a common territory for more than one breeding season, and in some cases bond for life. This is a problem — a scientific one — because male mammals could theoretically have more offspring by giving up on monogamy and mating with lots of females.

In a new study, Dr. Lukas and his colleague Tim Clutton-Brock suggest that monogamy evolves when females spread out, making it hard for a male to travel around and fend off competing males.

On the same day, Kit Opie of University College London and his colleagues published a similar study on primates, which are especially monogamous — males and females bond in over a quarter of primate species. The London scientists came to a different conclusion: that the threat of infanticide leads males to stick with only one female, protecting her from other males.

Even with the scientific problem far from resolved, research like this inevitably turns us into narcissists. It’s all well and good to understand why the gray-handed night monkey became monogamous. But we want to know: What does this say about men and women?

More here.

Adults may feel exiled from the intensity and sweetness of childhood places. But perhaps there are surprising ways home.

Liam Heneghan in Aeon:

I recently sat with pencil sharpened and notebook at the ready, like an anthropologist in exotic terrain, to watch Disney’s The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), a feature-length collection of the earlier animated shorts. What happened, I wondered, when England’s most famous fictional bear migrated across the Atlantic and settled into an American landscape? Like Pooh, I had grown up in the British Isles and in my ripe maturity emigrated to the US. Like Pooh, I had spent much of my time out of doors. Over the back wall of our family home in southern County Dublin were mile after mile of farm fields, interspersed with shrubby hedgerow. Not quite as bucolic as Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood, perhaps, but there, until the summer dusk drove us home, was where we largely spent our childhood vacations. Like the transplanted Pooh, the terrain in which I now dwell in the New World is hospitable enough in many ways, and yet it is also uncanny. It is not quite home. The suspicion I am investigating here is that, from an environmental perspective, there is more to this bear of ‘very little brain’ than meets the eye.

More here.

Richard Dawkins at his own website:

You have surely heard something like the following two statements, often uttered with a measure of truculence:-

1. “There are 1.6 billion Muslims, nearly a quarter of the world’s population, and we are growing fast.” There is even, sometimes, a hint of menace added. In the words of Houari Boumediene, President of Algeria, “Le ventre de nos femmes nous donnera la victoire” (the belly of our women will give us the victory).

2. “Islamic science deserves enormous respect.” There are two versions of this second claim, ranging from the pathetic desperation of “the Qu’ran anticipated modern science” (the embryo develops from a blob, mountains have roots that hold the earth in place, salt and fresh water don’t mix) to what is arguably quite a good historical point: “Muslim scholars kept the flame of Greek learning alight while Christendom wallowed in the Dark Ages.”

Putting these two claims together, you almost can’t help wondering something like this: “If you are so numerous, and if your science is so great, shouldn’t you be able to point to some pretty spectacular achievements emanating from among those vast numbers? If you can’t today but once could, what has gone wrong for the past 500 years? Whatever it is, is there something to be done about it?”

More here.

Not the Right Place
.
The redpolls this March are far south where they shouldn't be.
.
tearing apart dried flower stalks for the hidden seeds,
the dream of spring they trust will bring them home.
.
Here and now, a first spring spider is falling
past me, towards anywhere on the wind which turns out
to be from a tulip poplar, the kind pioneers
would hollow ou for canoes to carry them everywhere
and towards a moss pool where mosquitos will later
emerge from rafts of eggs.
.
…………………………………………The trouble is, we dream
everything happens where are aren't. That's what the shotgun
dents in the roadsigns leading nowhere tell me.
That's what the two young boys caught last night
on the school fire escape would say, trying
to make love to each other, scared by their lonliness.
.
My grandmother, whenever a relative would die,
hung out a set of clothes for the deceased to claim
or not, as custom had it, watched them shift in
the windy branches.
.
…………………………..Bernie, there's no telling
at what cost all this has come. I have let
these images of flowers, spiders, legends intrude
because I was afraid, because I have discovered, hearing
again the crazy rattle of the redpoll, that shy
bird so easy to forget, so trusting it could be
kept, that for thirty years I had pretended you had moved,
not died, but the boy in that undersized casket
was you, which I still hope to deny, saying you are
here, a simple matter of place after all, as if
I could hang these hopes out for you to fill.

.
by Ruchard Jackson
from Worlds Apart
University of Alabama Press, 1987

From NPR:

Even the smallest dose of power can change a person. You've probably seen it. Someone gets a promotion or a bit of fame and then, suddenly, they're a little less friendly to the people beneath them. So here's a question that may seem too simple: Why? If you ask a psychologist, he or she may tell you that the powerful are simply too busy. They don't have the time to fully attend to their less powerful counterparts. But if you ask Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, he might give you another explanation: Power fundamentally changes how the brain operates. Obhi and his colleagues, Jeremy Hogeveen and Michael Inzlicht, have a new study showing evidence to support that claim. Obhi and his fellow researchers randomly put participants in the mindset of feeling either powerful or powerless. They asked the powerless group to write a diary entry about a time they depended on others for help. The powerful group wrote entries about times they were calling the shots. Then, everybody watched a simple video. In it, an anonymous hand squeezes a rubber ball a handful of times — sort of monotonously. While the video ran, Obhi's team tracked the participants' brains, looking at a special region called the mirror system.

The mirror system is important because it contains neurons that become active both when you squeeze a rubber ball and when you watch someone else squeeze a rubber ball. It is the same thing with picking up a cup of coffee, hitting a baseball, or flying a kite. Whether you do it or someone else does, your mirror system activates. In this small way, the mirror system places you inside a stranger's head. Furthermore, because our actions are linked to deeper thoughts — like beliefs and intentions — you may also begin to empathize with what motivates another person's actions. “When I watch somebody picking up a cup of coffee, the mirror system activates the representations in my brain that would be active if I was picking up a cup of coffee,” Obhi explains. “And because those representations are connected in my brain to the intentions that would normally activate them, you can get activation of the intention. So you can figure out, 'Hey, this person wants to drink coffee.' ” Obhi's team wanted to see if bestowing a person with a feeling of power or powerlessness would change how the mirror system responds to someone else performing a simple action. It turns out, feeling powerless boosted the mirror system — people empathized highly. But, Obhi says, “when people were feeling powerful, the signal wasn't very high at all.”

So when people felt power, they really did have more trouble getting inside another person's head.

More here.

From The Guardian:

A slender, beautifully bound blue hardback showed up on my desk. Its pages were creamy, its typeface clear in a formal, old-fashioned way. Each page number was picked out in scarlet. It was a book to put Kindle out of business, so covetable that, I almost thought, it scarcely mattered what it contained. It was then I noticed its curious title, Things I Don't Want to Know, and a quotation, picked out on the cover in pink type: “To become a WRITER I had to learn to INTERRUPT, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then LOUDER, and then to just speak in my own voice which is NOT LOUD AT ALL.” The writer is Deborah Levy, shortlisted last year for the Man Booker for her marvellous novel Swimming Home. Things I Don't Want to Know is published by Notting Hill Editions, a small, choice, independent publisher committed to “reinvigorating the essay as a literary form”. They came up with the idea of commissioning writers to respond to essays of distinction. Levy has had George Orwell's “Why I Write” (1946) at her elbow.

…The opening line hooks one instantly: “That spring when life was hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn't see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations.” She writes about depression, without naming it, in a blackly funny way. She describes directionlessness yet knows where she is going: the essay is immaculately planned. There are many wonderful lines: “When happiness is happening it feels as if nothing else happened before it, it is a sensation that happens only in the present tense.” Or: “A female writer cannot afford to feel her life too clearly. If she does, she will write in a rage when she should write calmly.” Even the coat hangers in an irregular Mallorcan hotel are perfectly described: “four bent wire clothes hangers on the rail, they seemed to mimic the shape of forlorn human shoulders”.

More here.

Elizabeth Castelli in The Nation:

The “most embarrassing interview Fox News has ever done,” in which anchor Lauren Green challenged the legitimacy of author Reza Aslan for writing Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, seemed to be popping up everywhere on social media last week. The absurdity of the spectacle was multifold: Why—why?!—would a Muslim want to write about Jesus, Green kept asking, as though a nefarious plot to undermine Christianity were somehow afoot. Meanwhile, Aslan made a show of insisting that he possesses not only the academic credentials and but also the professional duty to do so (“My job as a scholar of religions with a PhD in the subject is to write about religions”). The story was quickly framed as a battle between the right-wing Islamophobes of Fox News and Aslan, the defender of intellectual life and scholarship.

Then an article in the right-wing Catholic publication, First Things, challenged Aslan’s claims about his academic credentials (his 2009 PhD is in sociology and was awarded on the basis of a 140-page dissertation on contemporary Muslim political activism) and his academic position (he is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and does not hold either a doctorate nor a teaching position in the academic study of religion).

Those of us in the academic field of religious studies, especially biblical scholars and historians of early Christianity, found the whole business deeply cringe-worthy.

More here.

Kenan Malik on Jonathan Israel's radical vision, in Eurozine:

Like many before him, Israel lauds the Enlightenment as that transformative period when Europe shifted from being a culture “based on a largely shared core of faith, tradition and authority” to one in which “everything, no matter how fundamental or deeply rooted, was questioned in the light of philosophical reason” and in which “theology's age-old hegemony” was overthrown. And, yet, despite language and imagery that hark back to Kant, Israel is also deeply critical of much of the Enlightenment, and hostile to the ideas of many of the figures that populate the works of Cassirer and Gay. At the heart of his argument is the insistence that there were two Enlightenments. The mainstream Enlightenment of Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume is the one of which we know, which provides the public face of the Enlightenment, and of which most historians have written. But it was the Radical Enlightenment, shaped by lesser-known figures such as d'Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and, in particular, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, that provided the Enlightenment's heart and soul.

The two Enlightenments, Israel suggests, divided on the question of whether reason reigned supreme in human affairs, as the radicals insisted, or whether reason had to be limited by faith and tradition – the view of the mainstream. The mainstream's intellectual timidity constrained its critique of old social forms and beliefs. By contrast, the Radical Enlightenment “rejected all compromise with the past and sought to sweep away existing structures entirely”.

In Israel's view, what he calls the “package of basic values” that defines modernity – toleration, personal freedom, democracy, racial equality, sexual emancipation and the universal right to knowledge – derives principally from the claims of the Radical Enlightenment.