Salima Hashmi in Himal Southasian:

Faiz on Gandhi

At the height of the Kashmir conflict in 1948, Faiz flew to Delhi for Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral. In his editorial in the Pakistan Times dated 2 February 1948, Faiz wrote:

The British tradition of announcing the death of a king is “The king is dead, long live the king!” Nearly 25 years ago, Mahatma Gandhi writing a moving editorial on the late C R Das in his exquisite English captioned it as “Deshbandhu is dead, long live Deshbandhu!” If we have chosen such a title for our humble tribute to Gandhiji, it is because we are convinced, more than ever before, that very few indeed have lived in this degenerate century who could lay greater claim to immortality than this true servant of humanity and champion of downtrodden. An agonizing 48 hours at the time of writing this article, have passed since Mahatma Gandhi left this mortal coil. The first impact of the shock is slowly spending itself out, and through the murky mist of mourning and grief a faint light of optimistic expectation that Gandhiji has not died in vain, is glowing.

Maybe it is premature to draw such a conclusion now in terms of net result, but judging by the fact the tragedy has profoundly stirred the world’s conscience, we may be forgiven if we may store by the innate goodness of man. At least we can tell at the top of our voice suspicious friends in India that the passing away of Gandhiji is as grievous a blow to Pakistan as it is to India. We have observed distressed looks, seen moistened eyes and heard faltering voices in this vast sprawling city of Lahore to a degree to be seen to be believed.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Honeybees, like tired office employees, like their caffeine, suggests a new study finding that bees are more likely to remember plants containing the java ingredient. Caffeine occurs naturally in the nectar of coffee and citrus flowers. Bees that fed on caffeinated nectar were three times more likely to remember a flower's scent than bees fed sugar alone. The findings, detailed Thursday in the journal Science, show how plants can manipulate animals' memories to improve their odds of pollination. “Remembering floral traits is difficult for bees to perform at a fast pace as they fly from flower to flower, and we have found that caffeine helps the bee remember where the flowers are,” study leader Geraldine Wright, a neuroethologist at Newcastle University, UK, said in a statement. “Caffeine in nectar is likely to improve the bee's foraging prowess while providing the plant with a more faithful pollinator,” Wright added.

In their study, Wright and colleagues measured how much caffeine was in the nectar of three different species of the Coffea plant, including the “robusta” plant used to make freeze-dried coffee and the “arabica” plant used to make espresso and filter coffee. They also measured the amount of caffeine in four species of the Citrus plant: grapefruit, lemons, pomelo and oranges. All of these plants contained caffeine. [10 Things You Need to Know About Coffee] Plants produce caffeine as a defense mechanism — a bitter-tasting brew to fend off insects. Fortunately for the bees, the caffeine levels are below the threshold that they can taste, but high enough to affect their memory, the authors say. Next, the researchers used a form of Pavlovian conditioning to test how the caffeine affected the bees' memory. Bees have a reflex where they stick out their mouth parts when they encounter something sweet. The scientists trained the bees to extend their mouths in response to a floral scent, in order to receive a reward of sugar alone or sugar containing different levels of added caffeine. Caffeine had a strong effect on the bees' memory. Even 24 hours later, three times as many bees remembered the scent that was paired with a caffeine reward as the plain sugar. Twice as many bees remembered the flowers' scent after three days.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Recent accounts of Hugo Chávez's politicized necrophilia may seem almost too lurid to believe, but I can testify from personal experience that they may well be an understatement. In the early hours of July 16—just at the midnight hour, to be precise—Venezuela's capo officiated at a grisly ceremony. This involved the exhumation of the mortal remains of Simón Bolívar, leader of Latin America's rebellion against Spain, who died in 1830. According to a vividly written articleby Thor Halvorssen in the July 25 Washington Post, the skeleton was picked apart—even as Chávez tweeted the proceedings for his audience—and some teeth and bone fragments were taken away for testing. The residual pieces were placed in a coffin stamped with the Chávez government's seal. In one of the rather free-associating speeches for which he has become celebrated, Chávez appealed to Jesus Christ to restage the raising of Lazarus and reanimate Bolívar's constituent parts. He went on:

“I had some doubts, but after seeing his remains, my heart said, 'Yes, it is me.' Father, is that you, or who are you? The answer: 'It is me, but I awaken every hundred years when the people awaken.' “

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the New York Times (image from Wikimedia Commons):

HISTORY will affirm, justifiably, the role Hugo Chávez played in the integration of Latin America, and the significance of his 14-year presidency to the poor people of Venezuela, where he died on Tuesday after a long struggle with cancer.

However, before history is allowed to dictate our interpretation of the past, we must first have a clear understanding of Mr. Chávez’s significance, in both the domestic and international political contexts. Only then can the leaders and peoples of South America, arguably the world’s most dynamic continent today, clearly define the tasks ahead of us so that we might consolidate the advances toward international unity achieved in the past decade. Those tasks have gained new importance now that we are without the help of Mr. Chávez’s boundless energy; his deep belief in the potential for the integration of the nations of Latin America; and his commitment to the social transformations needed to ameliorate the misery of his people.

Mr. Chávez’s social campaigns, especially in the areas of public health, housing and education, succeeded in improving the standard of living of tens of millions of Venezuelans.

One need not agree with everything Mr. Chávez said or did. There is no denying that he was a controversial, often polarizing, figure, one who never fled from debate and for whom no topic was taboo. I must admit I often felt that it would have been more prudent for Mr. Chávez not to have said all that he did. But this was a personal characteristic of his that should not, even from afar, discredit his qualities.

One might also disagree with Mr. Chávez’s ideology, and a political style that his critics viewed as autocratic. He did not make easy political choices and he never wavered in his decisions.

Exactly what happened at around 11 o’clock on the evening of August 13, 1922 in the Vittoriale, the retreat on the shores of Lake Garda of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s most celebrated war hero and writer, is unclear. He was sitting in pyjamas and slippers, his back to an open window, in the raised ground floor of the music room, listening to Luisa Baccara, the latest of his long-suffering mistresses, play the piano. Suddenly he toppled headfirst ten feet on to the gravel below and fractured his skull. According to one witness he had been fondling Luisa’s sister: perhaps he had lunged forward and lost his balance; or perhaps she had pushed him away a little too brusquely. Or it could be that he had simply been overcome by momentary dizziness: he was consuming quite large quantities of drugs at this time, including cocaine. He himself subsequently chose to shroud the episode in mystery, referring, with his characteristically teasing eye for self-glorification, to his “archangelic flight” – and noting, with a further twist of irreverent immodesty how, after three days in a coma, he had risen again.

more from Christopher Duggan at the TLS here.

Though he left Cairo at twenty-one, Albert Cossery never forgot its condition, even as he sat daily at Brasserie Lipp, a dandy to the outside world. Henry Miller, who helped get Cossery’s first book published in the United States, confirms this preoccupation, writing in a 1945 essay, “Despite the seemingly unrelieved gloom and futility in which his figures move, [Cossery] nevertheless expresses in every work his indomitable faith in the power of the people to throw off the yoke.” It’s a message that also finds affirmation in the work of Sonallah Ibrahim, the political prisoner turned Cairene slacker-novelist whose debut work, That Smell, was published in translation by New Directions two weeks ago (and happens to have been translated by Robyn Creswell, this magazine’s poetry editor). This darkly biting take on politics is finally seeing the light of day as a global literature, though its origins are in the tragic failures of Egypt’s mid-century political transition. Today’s rise of a suppressive Brotherhood in the face of Tahrir’s youthful spark has bred a new, mordant pranksterism, reminiscent of Albert Cossery yet unencumbered by the weight of history. With the “Satiric Revolutionary Struggle,” this strategy may have finally found its rightful place in Egypt’s opposition politics.

more from Mostafa Heddaya at Paris Review here.

The basic idea of a retreat from society for the sake of contemplation goes far into the past. The Tang Dynasty scholar-official writing affectionate poetry about his rude bamboo cottage is a familiar image. Even such sophisticates as the author of the Georgics enjoyed imagining being a farmer. The draw of a primitive life, one perhaps offering spiritual refurbishment, has always been strong. What was new in the 18th century was the decorative aspect. To the gardening gentleman or lady of the time, it was the idea of a hermit that attracted, not the prospect of being a hermit oneself. As Campbell makes plain, the impetus behind the advent of the garden hermit was a taste for the gothic and the picturesque sponsored by such trendsetters as Alexander Pope and Horace Walpole. Melancholy was suddenly considered admirable. Deliberate gloom implied deep thoughts and an affinity with nature. Where better than in the garden to express it? And what better expression of a dedication to melancholy than a real hermit’s cell occupied by a real hermit?

more from Charles Elliot at Literary Review here.

Michael Idov in The New Yorker:

Leonid Mozgovoy, the owl-eyed seventy-one-year-old actor, has played Chekhov (goatee), Hitler (mustache), and Lenin (goatee, bald cap), all in films by the famed Russian director Alexander Sokurov. And sometimes, in his natural hair, he becomes Humbert Humbert in “Lolita,” a one-man show featuring Humbert reading his own story out loud, that has played in Saint Petersburg on and off over the last two decades. When it was first staged, the monologue had to pass muster with the khudsovet, a Soviet censorship organ. It did. “They said I perform it rather chastely,” Mozgovoy recalled in an interview.

On a snowy night in early 2013, “Lolita” went up once again, unchanged, but it had suddenly become the most scandalous show in town. The performance had been postponed since last October amid threats to Mozgovoy and others. In January, three men jumped the play’s twenty-four-year-old producer, Anton Suslov, giving him two black eyes and a concussion while calling him a “pedophile”; a murky video of the beating was posted online. The same libel was slashed in spray paint across the walls of the Nabokov museum in St. Petersburg and the writer’s ancestral estate in Rozhdestveno, about fifty miles from the city. Anonymous activists had petitioned to have the play banned, the museum closed, and Nabokov’s books purged from stores. The author, whose novels thrum with ironic recurrences, might have been perversely pleased with this: thirty-six years after his death and twenty-two years after the fall of the Soviet Union with all its khudsovets, Vladimir Nabokov is, once again, controversial.

More here.

Eva Wiseman in The Observer:

Casey Legler is standing, topless, by our rail of clothes, reading them like they're credits on a film. Some are “drag”, some “boy”. Some she'll wear if she wants to “serve you 'girl'”, some she won't wear at all. As a child, all she wanted to do was sit by a swimming pool in a pink tutu, and read her difficult books. She moved a lot when she was younger, between Louisiana, Florida and Aix-en-Provence, and, noticing that the fashions (and prejudices) in France and America were completely different, Legler “learned early on,” she tells me later, “that what you looked like wasn't necessarily who you were”. People had “different armour. I realised things only mean what we want them to mean, and it's not appropriate information for differentiation. What you look like is just what you look like. Then there's… everything else.”

Legler is 6ft 2in, 35 years old, and the first woman to sign exclusively as a male model. She is muscular and cheery, with the awkward swagger of a rock star. Her voice is soft and earnest, and when she talks, she holds unblinking eye contact. In front of the camera, edges appear. Spikes. She juts her chin; she becomes a boy.

Fashion has always played with gender, from 18th century men in their wigs and make-up, to Patti Smith and David Bowie, through to the recent success of Andrej Peji'c, the male model who FHM named as the 98th “sexiest woman in the world”.

More here.

Noam Chomsky in AlterNet:

The term “capitalism” is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, with substantial state intervention ranging from subsidies for creative innovation to the “too-big-to-fail” government insurance policy for banks.

The system is highly monopolized, further limiting reliance on the market, and increasingly so: In the past 20 years the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, reports scholar Robert W. McChesney in his new book “Digital Disconnect.”

“Capitalism” is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support – both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz.

Some might even use the term “capitalism” to refer to the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, America’s leading social philosopher, in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.”

More here.

From The New Yorker:

Of the many ways that things can go wrong in bed, sleep troubles are probably the most prevalent. According to a 2011 poll, more than half of Americans between the ages of thirteen and sixty-four experience a sleep problem almost every night, and nearly two-thirds complain that they are not getting enough rest during the week. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that fifty to seventy million Americans suffer from a “chronic disorder of sleep and wakefulness.” The results are dangerous as well as annoying. A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that almost five per cent of adults acknowledge nodding off at the wheel at least once during the previous month. The U.S. Department of Transportation has determined that what might be called D.W.D.—driving while drowsy—causes forty thousand injuries a year in the United States and more than fifteen hundred deaths.

Our collective weariness is the subject of several new books, some by professionals who study sleep, others by amateurs who are short of it. David K. Randall’s “Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep” belongs to the latter category. It’s a good book to pick up during a bout of insomnia. Randall begins with an account of his own sleep problems, which include laughing, humming, grunting, bouncing, kicking, and, on at least one occasion, sleep-walking into a wall. He considers a range of possible explanations for the national exhaustion—too much light, too much warmth, too much avoirdupois—and finds them all compelling. The electric light bulb has made darkness optional, eliminating the enforced idleness that used to begin at sunset. Modern mattresses and bedclothes trap the heat that the body gives off as its core temperature drops each night. Obesity increases the chances of developing sleep apnea, a condition that combines choking and waking in an exhausting, sometimes life-threatening cycle. For all these reasons and more, Randall anticipates a bright future for the emerging field of “fatigue management.” One sleep expert he interviews predicts that “fatigue management officers” will soon be as common at major corporations as accountants. Like time, sleep, it turns out, is money.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

When I was little, my dad used to read us Sherlock Holmes stories before bed. While my brother often took the opportunity to fall promptly asleep on his corner of the couch, the rest of us listened intently. I remember the big leather armchair where my dad sat, holding the book out in front of him with one arm, the dancing flames from the fireplace reflecting in his black-framed glasses. I remember the rise and fall of his voice as the suspense mounted beyond all breaking point, and finally, finally, at long last the awaited solution, when it all made sense and I’d shake my head, just like Dr. Watson, and think, Of course; it’s all so simple now that he says it. I remember the smell of the pipe that my dad himself would smoke every so often, a fruity, earthy mix that made its way into the folds of the leather chair, and the outlines of the night through the curtained French windows. His pipe, of course, was ever-so-slightly curved just like Holmes’s. And I remember that final slam of the book, the thick pages coming together between the crimson covers, when he’d announce, “That’s it for tonight.”…

And then there’s the one thing that wedged its way so deeply into my brain that it remained there, taunting me, for years to come, when the rest of the stories had long since faded into some indeterminate background and the adventures of Holmes and his faithful Boswell were all but forgotten: the steps. The steps to 221B Baker Street. How many were there? It’s the question Holmes brought before Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia,” and a question that never once since left my mind. As Holmes and Watson sit in their matching armchairs, the detective instructs the doctor on the difference between seeing and observing. Watson is baffled. And then, all at once everything becomes crystal clear.…

“You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.”

“Frequently.”

“How often?”

“Well, some hundreds of times.”

“Then how many are there?”

“How many? I don’t know.”

“Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.”

More here.

Bhaskar Sunkara in Vice:

Everyone else seems to be either mourning at or dancing on Hugo Chavez's grave, but I’m feeling decidedly unmoved. And not out of some deep apathy. It’s just that the Chavez being invoked by both supporters and enemies can't be dead, because that man never existed.

One dead Chavez was a despot. Democratically elected over and over again, popularly reinstated after a 2002 coup, but still some sort of Stalin or mini-Pol Pot. (They both had that irresistible smile.) The other dead Chavez was a saint. Some demi-god sent from above to massage away our earthly suffering and sing us tender bedtime songs afterward. He could do no wrong.

These narratives are utterly incompatible, setting the showdown for a month's worth of heated Twitter sparring and inane web-comment dueling. Now, there's nothing I like more than a good fight, but I'm not picking a side. Or I guess I'm picking both.

In its 14 years in power, Chavez's administration was at once authoritarian and democratic, crudely demagogic and genuinely participatory. History is messy like that.

El Presidente was part of a long line of Latin American populists, the left-wing variety of which has always attracted cheering fan boys. And for good reason: It's the fiery rhetoric of Italian fascism tempered by the warm-and-fuzzy egalitarian core of Scandinavian socialism. And Chavez lived up to some of those socialist ambitions: He was more committed to redistributing wealth and power than just about any Latin American leader that came before him. His government reduced extreme poverty by 70 percent, millions got reliable healthcare and a decent education for the first time, and attempts were made to construct community councils and other organs of direct democracy.

Vaughan Bell in The Observer:

Scientific concepts have always washed in and out of popular consciousness but like never before, the brain has become part of contemporary culture. With the recent announcement of two billion-dollarscience projects, the Human Brain Project in Europe and the Brain Activity Map in the US, it would be hard to ignore the impact on public spending. Meanwhile, the Barbican has just kicked off an unprecedented month-long festival of neuroscience called Wonder, suggesting even the traditionally science-shy art world has raised an eyebrow.

But it's the sheer penetration of neuroscience into everyday life that makes it remarkable. We talk about left- and right-brain thinking, brainstorming and brain disorders. Differences between the male and female brain are the subject of regular press speculation and newspapers publish stories on brain scans that claim to explain everything from love to memory. Young people are increasingly warned that everything from video games to sexual activity could “damage their brains” while old people are encouraged to “train their brain” lest they lose its functions later in life.

Unpleasant experiences from malaise to trauma to mental illness are reframed as primarily neurological problems, while art and music are evaluated for their neurochemical effect.

More here.

The Shakers are now known for austerity, especially in their design. In worship, however, the Shakers were anything but restrained. Shaker religious services were ecstatic chaos, full of hopping, writhing, trembling, singing, screaming, convulsing, and shaking (and this is how the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing got their nickname). The Shakers crowed like roosters and ran naked through the woods, seized with the spirit. Neighbors could often hear their rituals from miles away. How could such apocalyptic fervor spawn so utilitarian an object as the flat-bottom broom? Moreover, why was the humble broom such an important part of the Shakers’ gospel? While living in mid-18th century Manchester, the young Ann Lee worked 14-hour days in a cotton mill. We don’t have much documentation about this time in Lee’s life. Suffice it to say, she knew well how the making of goods could be as meaningless and hard as it was necessary. The simple, clean, agrarian Shaker life was meant to be in drastic contrast with the crowded, anonymous, industrial life of Manchester. Flattening the broom’s bottom seems like a small innovation.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Various attempts have been made to explain Piero’s unique qualities since his “rediscovery” in the late nineteenth century, many of them insightful. Early on, John Addington Symonds claimed that “by dignity of portraiture, by loftiness of style, and by a certain poetical solemnity of imagination, he raised himself above the level of the mass of his contemporaries.”1 Of course, Piero was also indebted to some of those contemporaries, and his relationship to Florentines such as Domenico Veneziano and Uccello, as well as to Flemish artists, has long been acknowledged. Yet in most respects the influence of others upon his work seems to be fairly minimal, and one might argue that he had a greater debt to the architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti than to any of his painting predecessors. What is it, then, that makes him so distinct from his contemporaries? Piero’s innovative use of oil paint and his perfection of perspective are two qualities that have been often discussed, as have his use of color to express form and his ability to evoke space. His phenomenal mastery of light and his breathtaking depiction of it have also been repeatedly noted.2 But Piero’s singular importance in the history of landscape painting has, so far as I am aware, rarely been adequately appreciated…

more from Walter Kaiser at the NYRB here.

Adler’s novels concede the necessity of making fiction quicker, more terse, descriptively less elaborate than the traditional thing called a novel, not so much in deference to shrunken attention spans, but as the most plausible way of rendering the distracted, fragmentary quality of contemporary consciousness. Their reportorially even tone is quite distinct from the distorting lyricism found in most novels of sensibility; omitting much of what we expect in first-person narratives, Adler gets at the overfull yet depleted condition we find ourselves in now, peripatetic and restless, ever more deprived of the time and mental space to reflect on what we are really doing, or who we really are. They describe what it’s like to be living now, during this span of time, in our particular country and our particular world. This is what the best novels have always done, and with any luck will continue to do.

more from Gary Indiana at Bookforum here.

Bryan Appleyard in the New Statesman:

The book is in two halves – the first is Grayling’s case against religion; the second outlines the humanist alternative, which is “an ethics free from religious or superstitious aspects, an outlook that has its roots in rich philosophical traditions”.

First, to take the book on its own terms, this is a lucid, informative and admirably accessible account of the atheist-secular- humanist position. Grayling writes with pace and purpose and provides powerful – though non-lethal – ammunition for anybody wishing to shoot down intelligent theists such as Alvin Plantinga or to dispatch even the most sophisticated theological arguments, such as the ontological proof of the existence of God. That said, the first half, which is in essence analytical, is much better than the second half, which is rather discursive and feels almost tract-like in its evocation of shiny, happy people having fun in a humanist paradise. Nevertheless, this is rhetorically justifiable to the extent that it is an attempt to answer the question necessarily posed by any attempt to eliminate religion – what would be put in its place? Even the most rabid followers of the horsemen cannot seriously deny that religion does serve some useful purposes: providing a sense of community, consoling the bereaved and the suffering, telling a story to make sense of the world, and so on. Grayling tells a humanist story in the belief that it is perfectly capable of answering all these needs.

More here.