Kate Murphy in The New York Times:

Mohsin Hamid, a Pakistani writer, is the author, most recently, of “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.” The film adaptation of his best-selling book, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” will be in theaters April 26.

WATCHING “Zero Dark Thirty.” It’s a very well-made film. But I didn’t particularly feel there was a humanization of Pakistan and that part of the world. Of course, there needn’t be. So I guess on its own terms, it was a successful film, but perhaps its success was in a direction that was different from my own sensibilities.

FOLLOWING 3QuarksDaily.com. I think it’s one of the most interesting aggregator blogs out there. It puts together stuff from art, science, philosophy, politics, literature. It’s a completely international, cosmopolitan place to get information. It’s become my entry point to reading on the Web.

CUSHIONING I tend to walk a lot — an hour and a half every morning. At some point I developed a pain in my foot. I was in New York and went to this really great shoe store called Eneslow on Park Avenue South, and the salesman recommended these Birko Balance cork inserts to put in my shoes. They are just fantastic — a real walking enabler.

COMPUTING I’m pretty Appled up: iPhone, iPad, Air. Kind of disturbed by that, actually. I fell in love with the underdog and now they’ve become this world-dominant thing. It was like I was rooting for the 13 colonies and somebody handed me the United States superpower.

More here.

More to the point, as Philip Gourevitch observed online at the New Yorker on Friday, “Achebe — who has gone to his grave without ever receiving the Nobel Prize he deserved as much as any novelist of his era — has said that to be called simply a writer, rather than an African writer, is ‘a statement of defeat.’” In that sense, “Things Fall Apart” is not just the starting point of African literature, but of modern African literature: contemporary, hybrid, global in its implications, influenced by everything, and richer for it in its evocation of the world. For this reason, perhaps, the most affecting tributes to Achebe are the most personal, the testimony of younger writers whose lives he helped dream into being. In a 2009 TED talk, Adichie credited him with helping her to realize “that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature,” a point she also made at Town Hall.

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

Much of our most famous literature of landscape was produced during the Romantic movement, and that may shed light on the genre’s current popularity. For then, as now, technological changes were convulsing society and creating perceived threats to the countryside; then, as now, science was in the ascendancy, promising answers to questions previously held to be beyond its reach; and then, as now, a belief in the inherent moral quality of nature developed in reaction to those changes, and, along with a renewed interest in myths and folk history, created a literature that celebrated a spiritual relationship to our environment and an emotional and historical connection to place. England was the first country to industrialise, and 90 per cent of the UK population now live in towns and cities, where wildlife must also find a way to rub along with us. The literature of nature has come to reflect that shift. Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (1973, republished in 2010) led the way for those looking beyond the bucolic for an experience of nature; as did the poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts in their dystopian and genre-defying Edgelands (2011).

more from Melissa Harrison at the FT here.

David Remnick in The New Yorker:

But beyond winning over his Israeli audience, what was Obama prepared to do about a peace process? “Peace is necessary,” he told his audience at the International Convention Center, in Jerusalem. “But peace is also just.” In diplo-speak, he was short on the “deliverables.” His harshest talk was not harsh at all. He criticized the building of settlements, but he was no longer making strict or detailed demands about halting such construction. So what would Obama say about Palestine? I admired Ben Ehrenreich’s recent New York Times Magazine piece from the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, in the West Bank—just as I have admired Lawrence Wright’s work for this magazine in Gaza, Amira Hass’s articles from the West Bank in Haaretz, Taghreed el-Khodary’s work for the Times in Gaza—precisely because that brand of reporting and writing gets at the realities of Palestinian life not through high-handed and uninformed opinion or second-hand speculation but through a keen attention to the people themselves. And so it was also good to hear Obama, after going to such lengths to demonstrate his understanding of Israeli opinion and realities, pivot and call on his audience to empathize with the day-to-day realities of Palestinians, whose “right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized”:

Put yourself in their shoes—look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home.

In a sense, this was the moment that all of the events, along with all the previous language, were headed toward—an admonition, from a President determined to be a friend, that time is not on Israel’s side, that occupation was untenable. Obama added:

Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.

The room where Obama spoke was packed mainly with liberal, sympathetic, young listeners, and they applauded him, including after the passage about Palestinian self-determination. An Israeli friend of mine, a liberal centrist who was previously inclined to see Obama as a naïve, indifferent, and untutored statesman, e-mailed me to say that I was right—that Obama may be wary of, even loathe, Netanyahu and Israel’s radical right, which prizes the ethos of the settlers, but he is sympathetic to a truly liberal form of Zionism, one that recognizes that there is no future without negotiation, settlement, and a real and just peace. Obama may be ill at ease at AIPAC conventions, but as a young man he was a natural ally to the liberal Jews of Hyde Park, where he raised his family and began his political career. It is not by accident that on this most self-consciously crafted mission he took a pass on addressing the right-leaning Knesset but will lay a wreath, this morning, on the grave of Theodor Herzl. He managed to combine support, affection, and warning in one speech and series of gestures. Perhaps the most Obamian, and strangely overlooked, moment in the speech came when he cast doubt on the powers of politicians. This is a constant theme. Obama talks frequently about how early civil-rights leaders came to Franklin Roosevelt, asking him to take action, only to have F.D.R. reply, in essence, “make me.” Force my hand. Create a real movement. “That’s where peace begins,” Obama said in his speech:

Not just in the plans of leaders, but in the hearts of people; not just in some carefully designed process, but in the daily connections, that sense of empathy that takes place among those who live together in this land and in this sacred city of Jerusalem. And let me say this as a politician, I can promise you this: political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks. You must create the change that you want to see. Ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things.

More here.

Nadine Gordimer in The Guardian:

Taking the Irish poet WB Yeats's despairing statement of destruction – things fall apart – for its title, Chinua Achebe's first novel was a presentiment of what was to come in Nigeria during the end of the colonial occupations and their aftermath. It is the founding creation of modern African imaginative literature, the opening act of exploration into African consciousness using traditional modes of expression along with those appropriated from colonial culture, particularly the English language. That first work was also prescient – not only of Achebe's creative powers to develop as a writer in subsequent works, but of the political upheavals, the embattled end of colonialism, the fight for freedom by which the lives of the people of Africa have been shaped.

Achebe lived through these times – a tragic civil war in his country – as an activist in extreme personal danger, finally exile, fulfilling Albert Camus' statement of what it means to be a writer: “The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.” He kept faith with this commitment. Yet during those years he wrote novels, stories, essays and poems that were a bold revelation to his countrymen and women and the world of what suppression and oppression really meant. And trust Achebe to give a new definition of colonialism. His collection of essays, recently reissued as a modern classic, is The Education of a British-protected Child. Achebe's works do not fear to challenge those post-colonial, independent regimes in Africa who abuse personal power in every possible way – from banning political opposition, to corruption. His novel A Man of the People, a biting satire on corruption in freed African regimes, uses the blade of humour to alert us to official greed and the cant which legitimises it.

More here.

Love in the Time of Chain-link Fences

I watched. There was a chain-link fence, a
tear falling from her face. The echo of a car
door slamming. It was Saturday. Believe me
when I tell you I fell in love. Not with her, but
with her tears. It was Saturday & the sun
was a fat globe in the sky. I'd been staring
at it, trying to fix my eyes, when she pulled
into the parking lot. The driver's side door
slammed my fantasies into a question mark.
Dave's sister. She visited twice a month. Her
hair the color of the back of my hand. I dreamed
about her for weeks & wrote her letters.
She cried when she walked to the car and hour
after walking in, ashamed at her brother in
chains. I wanted her to be ashamed of me.

by Reginald Dwayne Betts
from Shahid Read His Own Palm
Alice james Books, 2010

A conversation with Adam Alter over at Edge:

Adam Alter is interested in examining the concrete ways in which we are affected by subtle cues, such as symbols, culture, and colors. Why are Westerners easily fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion of two lines with different arrows at their ends, while Bushmen from southern Africa are not? Why do certain colors have a calming effect on the intoxicated? Why is it that people with easy-to-pronounce names get ahead in life?

In this conversation, we get an overview of Alter's current line of work on how we experience fluent and disfluent information. Fluency implies that information that comes at a very low cost, often because it is already familiar to us in some similar form. Disfluency occurs when information is costly–perhaps it takes a lot of effort to understand a concept, or a name is unfamiliar and therefore difficult to say. His work has interesting implications in the realms of market forces (stocks with pronounceable ticker codes tend to do better when they first enter the market than those that don't, for instance) and globalization, and is highly relevant in a world where cultures continue to meet and to merge.

—Jennifer Jacquet…

The basic idea here is that when you have a thought, any thought, it falls along a continuum from fluent to disfluent. A fluent thought is one that feels subjectively easy to have. When you speak English and you come across a common English name, like John, or Tom, or Ted, it's very, very easy to process that name. There's no difficulty in reading the name and in making sense of the name.

At the other end of the spectrum you might come across a foreign name or a novel name that you've never seen before or perhaps a name that you've seen before, but spelled very differently. In that case it's going to be much more difficult to process the name. Then it will be disfluent or subjectively difficult to process. It will feel more difficult to process. There's not only the content, what the name happens to be, and what it's like to store that information, but also what it's like to have the thoughts of processing the name, of making sense of the name.

This is a topic that I've been very interested in, and I've been interested in the concept of fluency and how that might affect a whole lot of different judgments that we make, and the way we process the world. The most basic effects in fluency research are pretty straightforward, and the idea is that when something is fluent, you feel differently about it from how you would feel if it were more difficult to process. I'll give you a few examples from my own research.

Cheryl Strayed reviews Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (photo by Ann Billingsley), in the NYT Sunday Book Review:

Sonali Deraniyagala’s extraordinary memoir, “Wave,” opens on the morning of Dec. 26, 2004, as the author putters around a Sri Lankan beach-side hotel with her family. By chapter’s end she’s pantless, half-drowned, bleeding, bruised and numbly resistant to what she’ll soon be forced to know: The five people she loves most in the world are dead. Her two young sons. Her husband. Her parents. All of them killed by a force she can’t yet comprehend, though she was caught up in it and nearly killed by it too. She only knows that “something came for us.” It was, as she and the world will soon learn, a tsunami of epic scale that took an estimated 230,000 lives across a dozen countries.

So begins the most exceptional book about grief I’ve ever read. In prose that’s immaculately unsentimental and raggedly intimate, Deraniyagala takes us deep into her unfathomable loss. In the months after the tsunami, she lives in her aunt’s house in Colombo — the city she grew up in — huddling beneath the covers of her cousin’s bed, attempting to imprint the phrase they are dead on her consciousness. She fights off sleep because it only means she will have to relearn the truth in the morning.

She doesn’t allow herself to think of her home in London, her career as an economist or even to open the curtains in her borrowed bedroom. She wants to kill herself as soon as possible, but her relatives foil her plans by locking away the knives and uncovering her hidden accumulation of sleeping pills. Still she tries. She stabs herself with a butter knife and puts out cigarettes on her hands. “An army of family and friends” begin to watch over her day and night.

She resolves to never go outside again; how could she when outside is where she went with her sons, Vikram and Malli? She asks herself, “How can I walk without holding on to them, one on each side?” When she finally works up the courage to do so, she’s devastated by everything she sees — a child, a ball, a bird, a 100-rupee note in a man’s hand. “The last time I saw one of those,” she writes, “I had a world.”

Hal Foster has complained that “contemporary exhibitions often feel like remedial work in socialization: come and play, talk, learn with me.”[3] Moreover, Foster claims, the collective endeavour involved in such artworks no longer has any political meaning: “today simply getting together sometimes seems to be enough.” The architect and writer Markus Miessen has also questioned the associations frequently drawn between participation and empathy, consensus and democracy. For Miessen, “Any form of participation is already a form of conflict.”[4] A similar desire for conflict – for art that provokes and disrupts, is abrasive and perverse rather than soothing and consensual – is the driving force behind Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012). Bishop’s book is exactly the kind of historically aware and politically sophisticated study that participatory art so badly requires. She assesses the current vogue for collaboration and participation in the context of the many attempts made during the twentieth century to rethink the role of the spectator, the artist and the artwork. Despite her initial caveats about the study’s scope, which is mainly limited to Europe, but which also includes work from Argentina, Cuba and North America, she includes a fascinating array of examples, each thoughtfully considered and skilfully summarised (no easy feat given that so many participatory projects involve a lengthy back-story). She is especially generous, but by no means uncritical, towards artistic intentions and the range of meanings provoked by individual works. This is part of a broader commitment to aesthetics. Bishop laments “the paucity of our ability to defend the intrinsic value of artistic experiences today,” which means that participatory art is often justified, rather lamely, for its apparent social benefits.

more from Richard Martin at Berlin Review of Books here.

The premiere of Gloriana has gone down in operatic history as a famous disaster, and the critical reception was not much better. Only in the twilight of the second Elizabeth’s own reign, sixty years on, will this difficult masterpiece be returning to its birthplace, with a new production at Covent Garden in 2013. Heather Wiebe’s subtle account of Gloriana in her fascinating study, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and memory in postwar reconstruction, underlines the difficulty of the task which Britten undertook, and his anomalous position after the war, somehow straddling the old, pacifist Left of the 1930s, where he had started his career, and the revived upper-class society with which he now broke bread. One of Britten’s closest friends, Marion Stein, the daughter of his publisher Erwin Stein (an old associate of Schoenberg’s in pre-Anschluss Vienna), had married the Earl of Harewood, and it was in discussions with Harewood – a cousin of the Queen, but also a vigorous and innovative cultural impresario – that the notion of a “national opera” to match Italy’s Aida, Czechoslovakia’s Bartered Bride or France’s Manon was conceived. This was, Kildea suggests, “a slightly anachronistic idea for mid-twentieth-century Britain, a country without any of the nineteenth-century opera traditions and historical reformations that gave rise to the genre on the Continent”.

more from Ian Bostridge at the TLS here.

Surrealism’s chief artistic invention is probably the “exquisite corpse” drawing. It is created when a group of people pass around a piece of paper, and each participant, unaware of how the folded sheet has been handled by the previous person, adds his or her own contribution and sends it along. (The name “exquisite corpse” comes from a line in a poem that, made in the same group fashion, began with these words.) That most exquisite corpse drawings, including those in this exhibition, end up showing weird but not brilliantly weird standing figures has never dampened the game’s allure. The often could-be-better-next-time results may be why the Surrealists, we are told, found the game “addictive” and why we still like playing it. The corpse drawings on hand are certainly no match for the other kinds of works on display. They include collages, automatic drawings—doodles, essentially, in which the doodler goes as far as he or she can—and calligrams, or word drawings, comprised solely of words, letters, or made-up words in a made-up script. There are works of frottage, formed by putting a piece of paper over a textured surface of some sort and rubbing it with a pencil, say, to bring up that surface.

more from Sanford Schwartz at the NYRB here.

From NewsDay:

Nigeria’s literary icon and publisher of several novels, Chinua Achebe, is dead.

A source close to the family said the professor had been ill for a while and was hospitalised in an undisclosed hospital in Boston.

The source declined to provide further details, saying the family would issue a statement on the development later today.

Contacted, spokesperson for Brown University, where Mr. Achebe worked until he took ill, Darlene Trewcrist, is yet to respond to our enquiries on the professor’s condition.

Until his death, the renowned author of Things Fall Apart was the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown.

The University described him as “known the world over for having played a seminal role in the founding and development of African literature.”

“Achebe’s global significance lies not only in his talent and recognition as a writer, but also as a critical thinker and essayist who has written extensively on questions of the role of culture in Africa and the social and political significance of aesthetics and analysis of the postcolonial state in Africa,” Brown University writes of the literary icon.

Mr. Achebe was the author of Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, and considered the most widely read book in modern African Literature. The book sold over 12 million copies and has been translated to over 50 languages worldwide.

More here. And the New York Times obituary is here.

From The Telegraph:

Hamid has already staked out this fast-changing world as his literary territory. His first novel, Moth Smoke (2000), is the riches-to-rags story of Daru Shezad, a Pakistani financier, who descends through the circles of Lahore society when he loses his job, falls in love with his best friend’s wife, and becomes addicted to heroin. The novel was widely acclaimed as the first fictional portrait of a new, vibrant, grungy Pakistan: a far cry from the genteel poeticism of much South Asian literature. In his Man Booker Prize-shortlisted second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Hamid turned his attention to the changing relationship – before and after 9/11 – between this new Pakistan and the West. The novel is narrated by a Princeton graduate originally from Lahore, who once worked for a high-powered consultancy firm in New York; he addresses his story, in a kind of dramatic monologue, to an American man who may be a tourist, but on the other hand might be a CIA agent come to rendition him, since his decision to leave his job and return to Lahore has aroused suspicion. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is brilliantly structured and is written in a prose style of lapidary beauty; it was a massive international hit, and established Hamid as one of the most auspicious new voices in world literature. (A film adaptation is being released in May.) Changez, the narrator of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, comes from a privileged background (his father is a lawyer), but he is conscious of the shifting class structures of his society: his family looks “with a mixture of disdain and envy upon the rising class of entrepreneurs – owners of businesses legal and illegal – who power through the streets in their BMW SUVs”. It is this “rising class” that is the subject of Hamid’s new novel.

“You” are born in rural poverty, in a compound where food is cooked over a fire and water is drunk slightly upstream of the same channel used for washing and sewage, but your family soon moves to the city in search of better opportunities. You find after-school work delivering pirated DVDs on your bicycle, and through your job you meet the pretty girl, an aspiring actress who wants to learn more about films. She seduces you, and being the sort of man who believes that “the first woman you make love to should also be the last” you are smitten. But she soon leaves the neighbourhood with a producer who tells her he can help her career. Because you are the youngest child, you are able to finish school (your brother is sent out to work and your sister is married off) and, being clever, you obtain a scholarship to the university. There you join a “political organisation” (which seems more like a religious organisation), in order to secure some influence for yourself. But you realise that if you are ever to re-enter the pretty girl’s orbit – she is now a successful model, her face visible on billboards all around the city – you will have to make some money. You find a job selling expired goods to small vendors, before setting up your own business: bottling boiled water and selling it on as mineral water. This grows and grows until you are filthy rich. The pretty girl eventually comes back into your life; but the path to true happiness, the novel suggests, can’t be dictated by a 12-point plan. The second person voice allows Hamid to move around his hero’s life – and sometimes to move away from it altogether – much more nimbly than would be possible in a traditional first- or third-person narrative. The self-help device also allows him to dispense nuggets of genuine wisdom: love “dampens the fire in the steam-furnace of ambition”; nepotism “is not restricted to swaggering about in its crudest, give-my-son-what-he-wants form. It frequently assumes more cunning guises, attire, for example, or accent.” If the conceit is ultimately a bit gimmicky, Hamid’s style rescues it from becoming irritating. His sentences have a beguiling formality, but are always underscored by warmth and wit. The novel is filled with crisp images: after a riot, “broken glass and bits of rubble rest like five o’clock shadow on the city’s smooth concrete”.

More here.

What We Have

Our men do not belong to us. Even my own father, left one afternoon, is not mine. My brother is in prison, is not mine. My uncles, they go back home and they are shot in the head, are not mine. My cousins, stabbed in the street for being too—or not—enough, are not mine.

Then the men we try to love, say we carry too much loss, wear too much black, are too heavy to be around, much too sad to love. Then they leave and we mourn them too. Is that what we’re here for? To sit at kitchen tables, counting on our fingers the ones who died, those who left and the others who were taken by the police, or by drugs, or by illness or by other women. It makes no sense. Look at your skin, her mouth, these lips, those eyes, my God, listen to that laugh. The only darkness we should allow into our lives is the night, and even then, we have the moon.
.

From Fortune:

The 2045 Initiative is a complex and expensive research project, but its goals are fairly straightforward. First, by 2020 scientists will figure out how to control robots via brain-machine interfaces (read: mind control). By 2025 the goal is to place a human brain into a working robot and have that person's consciousness (memories, personality, and everything else that makes up the “self”) transfer along with it. After that things tip very seriously over into the realm of science fiction, as the later stages of the project aim to create robots with artificial brains to which human consciousness can be uploaded (by 2035) and, finally, completely disembodied consciousness that is something like a hologram version of a person's mind. If this all sounds a little crazy, Itskov says, that's because it is. But it's certainly not impossible. He likens the initiative to the U.S. space program, whose ultimate achievements seemed impossible in 1939, three decades prior to the moon landing. And, as with the space program, Itskov sees the 2045 Initiative as an engine for technological and economic development, one that will drive discovery in neuroscience, robotics, artificial intelligence—even spirituality. When Itskov begins leafing through slides on his laptop highlighting very real, very sophisticated brain-machine interface technologies that already exist in research labs today, the first phase of his project suddenly feels more realistic. The later phases of the 2045 Initiative still seem to border on the impossible, but Itskov is completely confident that technology will evolve to conquer these seemingly insurmountable challenges.

He's not the only one. Speakers at this year's Global Future 2045 Congress in New York City—the second annual event put on by the 2045 Initiative—include legendary futurist and investor Ray Kurzweil, former X PRIZE Foundation chairman and entrepreneur Dr. Peter H. Diamandis, and Dr. George Church, the molecular biologist who helped initiate the Human Genome Project, as well as a long list of influential thought leaders in business, robotics, neuroscience, and spirituality. (Itskov has even met with the Dalai Lama, who was intrigued by the project.. Several of these backers, including Kurzweil and Diamandis, recently signed a letter sent to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon inviting him to join the 2045 Congress when it convenes in June to talk about the future of both humanity and the 2045 Initiative.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in National Geographic:

On July 30, 2003, a team of Spanish and French scientists reversed time. They brought an animal back from extinction, if only to watch it become extinct again. The animal they revived was a kind of wild goat known as a bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex. The bucardo (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica) was a large, handsome creature, reaching up to 220 pounds and sporting long, gently curved horns. For thousands of years it lived high in the Pyrenees, the mountain range that divides France from Spain, where it clambered along cliffs, nibbling on leaves and stems and enduring harsh winters.

Then came the guns. Hunters drove down the bucardo population over several centuries. In 1989 Spanish scientists did a survey and concluded that there were only a dozen or so individuals left. Ten years later a single bucardo remained: a female nicknamed Celia. A team from the Ordesa and Monte Perdido National Park, led by wildlife veterinarian Alberto Fernández-Arias, caught the animal in a trap, clipped a radio collar around her neck, and released her back into the wild. Nine months later the radio collar let out a long, steady beep: the signal that Celia had died. They found her crushed beneath a fallen tree. With her death, the bucardo became officially extinct.

But Celia’s cells lived on, preserved in labs in Zaragoza and Madrid. Over the next few years a team of reproductive physiologists led by José Folch injected nuclei from those cells into goat eggs emptied of their own DNA, then implanted the eggs in surrogate mothers.

More here.