Charles Petersen in n+1:

Stanley Cavell, born in 1926 and now 86 years old, is one of the greatest American philosophers of the past half-century. He was also something of a musical prodigy and like many prodigies his accomplishments struck him as a matter of fraud. During his freshman year at Berkeley, he writes in Little Did I Know, his 2010 memoir, he walked into one of his first piano courses and was asked to prove he had the requisite chops by playing a piece on the spot. Not having practiced anything but jazz for years—this was 1944, and big band swing was at its peak—the budding pianist sat down at the bench, broke into a half-remembered theme from a Liszt impromptu, and “stopped playing as the theme was about to elaborate itself, as if I could have gone on to the end were there time and need.” He could not have gone on to the end, nor even a note further, but his teacher, a brilliant young pianist with some of the look of Marlene Dietrich, was nonetheless taken in. “Isn’t it fine to hear a man’s touch at the piano?” she said to the class. Cavell felt smitten, but also unmanned. “It is true that I had really done whatever . . . . I had done, but I could not go on.” Although he could play almost anything on demand—and would later win praise from Ernest Bloch, Milton Babbitt, and Roger Sessions, rescuing the premiere of one of the latter’s works through an emergency mid-concert transposition—for Cavell it was as if each new performance followed only from instinct, without the understanding that promised a way forward. No matter his successes, he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was a fraud.

Grace

Eyes open in the womb. The struggle arrives to turn darkness into light. Dangling on the wings of
the Phoenix. The creative process begins to turn ugly. Vandalizing and robbing graves of
child prodigies turning into serious discussions of Mass Murder and the therapeutic value of
saturday morning shopping sprees. The betrayal of geniuses burning at the stake. The spider
descends. The violence is always there. The web embraces us all. More insidious than
drugs. More pleasurable than sex. Slightly entangled. Slightly confused. That possible
criminal element awakens you to the terror and lonliness of running into the silent pain of
someone else looking to you for answers. Glamorous and well financed pools of blood
profiling on neighborhood corners while smiling at and tempting the boldest gangsta rap.

The wealth we squandered on poor excuses and starving lines of poetry inspired by the
tenderness of your smile healed me, cleansed me of my indifference to the Holy Scriptures
should have told us something about being chidren of God in all this Madness, against all
these odds of too intense and too delicate to be real lovers in real times. The wind, the water,
the waves so natural in our hands. Falling on notes and images forever caressing the Full
Moon and laughter too strong to be forgotten on opening nights and wanting to be a big hit.
Run… Run… Run… to the birth, to the growth, to the experience of harmony so wise and
peaceful desires to go back to the beginning and try to be good to yourself and others… are
searching too!
.

by Umar Bin Hassan
Poetry International, 2006

Video

From BlackEducationNow:

More here. 

From Smithsonian:

When Time magazine selected the British artist Banksy—graffiti master, painter, activist, filmmaker and all-purpose provocateur—for its list of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2010, he found himself in the company of Barack Obama, Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga. He supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable, naturally) over his head. Most of his fans don’t really want to know who he is (and have loudly protested Fleet Street attempts to unmask him). But they do want to follow his upward tra­jectory from the outlaw spraying—or, as the argot has it, “bombing”—walls in Bristol, England, during the 1990s to the artist whose work commands hundreds of thousands of dollars in the auction houses of Britain and America. Today, he has bombed cities from Vienna to San Francisco, Barcelona to Paris and Detroit. And he has moved from graffiti on gritty urban walls to paint on canvas, conceptual sculpture and even film, with the guileful documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, which was nominated for an Academy Award.

Pest Control, the tongue-in-cheek-titled organization set up by the artist to authenticate the real Banksy artwork, also protects him from prying outsiders. Hiding behind a paper bag, or, more commonly, e-mail, Banksy relentlessly controls his own narrative. His last face-to-face interview took place in 2003.

More here.

Andrew Nagorski in Foreign Affairs:

One evening in June 1940, an excited crowd in Berlin awaited Adolf Hitler's arrival at the opera. The German army was scoring victory after victory in Europe at the time, and when the dictator finally entered the room, the audience greeted him with impassioned cries of “Sieg Heil!” “Heil Hitler!” and “Heil Fuehrer!” With the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact still in force, one of the attendees that night was Valentin Berezhkov, an interpreter for Stalin. “As I am watching all that,” he recalled in his memoirs, “I am thinking to myself — and the thought scares me — how much there is in common between this and our congresses and conferences when Stalin makes his entry into the hall. The same thunderous, never-ending standing ovation. Almost the same hysterical shouts of 'Glory to Stalin!' 'Glory to our leader!'”

The parallels between communism and fascism have often been noted, fueling endless debates over whether the movements were fundamentally similar or different. The Devil in History, a new book by the political scientist Vladimir Tismaneanu, presents a genuinely fresh perspective on this topic, drawing enduring lessons from the last century's horrifying experiments with totalitarianism.

Instead of writing a historical treatise, Tismaneanu set out to produce “a political-philosophical interpretation of how maximalist utopian aspirations can lead to the nightmares of Soviet and Nazi camps epitomized by Kolyma and Auschwitz.”

More here.

Larry Greenemeier in Scientific American:

The number of smartphones, tablets and other network-connected gadgets will outnumber humans by the end of the year. Perhaps more significantly, the faster and more powerful mobile devices hitting the market annually are producing and consuming content at unprecedented levels. Global mobile data grew 70 percent in 2012, according to a recent report from Cisco, which makes a lot of the gear that runs theInternet. Yet the capacity of the world’s networking infrastructure is finite, leaving many to wonder when we will hit the upper limit, and what to do when that happens.

There are ways to boost capacity of course, such as adding cables, packing those cables with more data-carrying optical fibers and off-loading traffic onto smaller satellite networks, but these steps simply delay the inevitable. The solution is to make the infrastructure smarter. Two main components would be needed: computers and other devices that can filter their content before tossing it onto the network, along with a network that better understands what to do with this content, rather than numbly perceiving it as an endless, undifferentiated stream of bits and bytes.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in the New York Times:

In 1734, Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former chamber slave of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony, written in Latin and entitled “On the Impassivity of the Human Mind.” A dedicatory letter was appended from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Gottfried Kraus, who praised “the natural genius” of Africa, its “appreciation for learning,” and its “inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs” and of “divine things.” Kraus placed Amo in a lineage that includes many North African Latin authors of antiquity, such as Terence, Tertullian and St. Augustine.

In the following decade, the Scottish philosopher David Hume would write: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complection than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation.”

Hume had not heard of Amo, that much is clear. But we can also detect a tremendous difference between Hume’s understanding of human capacities and that of Kraus: the author of Amo’s dedicatory letter doesn’t even consider the possibility of anchoring what individual human beings are capable of doing to something as arbitrary as “complection.” For Kraus, Amo represents a continent and its long and distinguished history; he does not represent a “race.”

More here.

With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, Apollinaire—an assiduously cosmopolitan promoter of new movements in art, from Cubism to German Expressionism—enlisted in the French army. On New Year’s Day in 1915, while traveling by train from Marseilles to Nice, he met a young schoolteacher from Algeria named Madeleine Pagès, and their encounter soon blossomed into an intense epistolary relationship. Apollinaire’s side of the correspondence has been assembled in Letters to Madeleine, recently translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. These letters—containing the first versions of many of the poems later published in the poet’s last collection, Calligrammes—are indispensable to lovers of modern poetry, and their origins in what the poet called “the very forefront of France-in-arms,” amid the horrors of trench warfare, make them a powerful testimonial of the Great War, on the level of classic accounts by authors such as Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Erich Maria Remarque, and Siegfried Sassoon.

more from Christopher Winks at Bookforum here.

It is rare enough now to hear talk about obscenity, a reflection of our avowed permissiveness, a state within which it is increasingly hard to feel confident about advocating the punishment of something for being disgusting; if anything, we try to discourage obscenity rather than denounce it. In this way, Western culture now invests the word inappropriate with more force than its opposite, and it offers people the opportunity to enjoy the delicious authority of moral commentator on the psycho-social-sexual practice of everyday life without really dealing with anything too horrendous. This abiding discourse, however, in which we appear to be performing with ethical scrupulousness, is of course a blind; the mildly impotent talk of managing the appropriateness of interaction between work colleagues at a newspaper can carry on, for example, while the publisher of the same newspaper presides over a publishing empire whose core business is pornography. In our pornocracy, almost nothing is obscene, or rather nobody dare call it by name, as the term is just too absolute. Calling something inappropriate allows us to preserve the fantasy that we exert a moral influence on culture, even as it also implies that there are contexts in which anything might be appropriate, which is a much more violent reality than what we usually want to admit.

more from Michael Hinds at Dublin Review of Books here.

For me, the great tragedy of Benedict was his panic after the Second Council. There is no disputing the elegance of his mind or the exquisite meticulousness of his perfect, orderly German theology – and his work alongside the more consistently modernist Hans Kung will stand the test of time. But his post-1960s theology had as much relationship to the real challenges of the 21st Century as the effete, secluded German scholar, embalmed in clerical privilege for his entire adult life. And his early promise as a theologian calcified into the purest form of reaction and fear when given the power to enforce orthodoxy, which is what he essentially did for well over two decades. It was excruciating to watch such a careful, often illuminating scholar turn into a Grand Inquisitor. It was revealing that a bureaucrat who never missed even a scintilla of heresy was able to turn such a blind eye to the monstrous rapes of so many children.

more from Andrew Sullivan here.

Kenneth W. Warren in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I'd like to make a claim that runs counter to much of literary scholarship. Historically speaking, the collective enterprise we call African-American or black literature is of recent vintage—in fact, it's just a little more than a century old. Further, it has already come to an end. And the latter is a fact we should neither regret nor lament.

African-American literature was the literature of a distinct historical period, namely, the era of constitutionally sanctioned segregation known as Jim Crow. Punctuated by state constitutional amendments that disfranchised black Americans throughout much of the South, legitimated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 with the infamous “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, and stumbling into decline in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, Jim Crow and the fight against it gave rise to—and shaped—African-American literary practice as we have come to know it. Like it or not, African-American literature was a Jim Crow phenomenon, which is to say, speaking from the standpoint of a post-Jim Crow world, African-American literature is history. While one can (and students of American literature certainly should) write about African-American literature as an object of study, one can no longer write African-American literature, any more than one can currently write Elizabethan literature.

More here. (Note: At least one daily post throughout February will be devoted to African American History Month)

John Tierney in The New York Times:

New Orleans — In the quest to find true love, is filling out a questionnaire on a Web site any more scientific than praying to St. Valentine? Yes, according to psychologists at eHarmony, an online company that claims its computerized algorithms will help match you with a “soul mate.”

…Unlike many other Web dating services, eHarmony doesn’t let customers search for partners on their own. They pay up to $60 per month to be offered matches based on their answers to a long questionnaire, which currently has about 200 items. The company has gathered answers from 44 million people, and says that its matches have led to more than half a million marriages since 2005. Dr. Gonzaga, a social psychologist who previously worked at a marriage-research lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, said eHarmony wouldn’t let him disclose its formulas, but he did offer some revelations. He said its newest algorithm matches couples by focusing on six factors:

¶ Level of agreeableness — or, put another way, how quarrelsome a person is.

¶ Preference for closeness with a partner — how much emotional intimacy each wants and how much time each likes to spend with a partner.

¶ Degree of sexual and romantic passion.

¶ Level of extroversion and openness to new experience.

¶ How important spirituality is.

¶ How optimistic and happy each one is.

The more similarly that two people score in these factors, the better their chances, Dr. Gonzaga said, and presented evidence, not yet published, from several studies at eHarmony Labs. One study, which tracked more than 400 married couples matched by eHarmony, found that scores from their initial questionnaires correlated with a couple’s satisfaction with their relationship four years later.

More here.

A Visit

Gone are the days
when you could walk on water.
When you could walk.

The days are gone.
Only one day remains,
the one you're in.

The memory is no friend.
It can only tell you
what you no longer have:

a left hand you can use,
two feet that walk.
All the brain's gadgets.

Hello, hello.
The one hand that still works
grips, won't let go.

That is not a train.
There is no cricket.
Let's not panic.

Let's talk about axes,
which kinds are good,
the many names of wood.

This is how to build
a house, a boat, a tent.
No use; the toolbox

refuses to reveal its verbs;
the rasp, the plane, the awl,
revert to sullen metal.

Do you recognize anything? I said.
Anything familiar?
Yes, you said. The bed.

Better to watch the stream
that flows across the floor
and is made of sunlight,

the forest made of shadows;
better to watch the fireplace
which is now a beach.

by Margaret Atwood

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

A book that I wish I had read many years ago. JJ Clarke’s Oriental Enlightenmentis a superb study of ‘The encounter between Asian and Western thought’, as the subtitle puts it. It is primarily a historical study of Western perceptions of Chinese and Indian cultures and philosophies. Any exploration of the role of ‘Eastern’ thought in the Western intellectual tradition necessarily lies in the shadow of Edward Said’s 1978 work Orientalism, which has effectively set the terms of the debate. Western historians, philologists and philosophers, Said argued, have fabricated a complex set of representations about the Orient through which ‘European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’.

As the title of Clarke’s book reveals, he is not only aware of Said’s importance in this debate, but takes Orientalism as the starting point for his own study. But if Clarke draws upon Said’s insights, he also rejects much of his argument. ‘Where Said painted orientalism in sombre hues, using it as the basis for a powerful ideological critique of Western liberalism’, Clarke writes, ‘I shall use it to uncover a wider range of attitudes, both dark and light, and to recover a richer and often more affirmative orientalism, seeking to show that the West has endeavoured to integrate Eastern thought into its own intellectual concerns in a manner which, on the face of it, cannot be fully understood in terms of “power” and “domination”.’

More here.

Kate Clancy in Scientific American:

Evolutionary psychology, the study of human psychological adaptations, does not have a popular or scientific reputation for being rigorous, even though there are rigorous, thoughtful scientists in the field. The field is trying to take on an incredibly challenging task: understand what of human behavior is adaptive and why. We can better circumvent the conditions that lead to violence, war, and hatred if we know as much as we can about why we are the way we are. What motivates us, excites us, angers us, and how can evolutionary theory help us understand it all?

Because of this, there are consequences to a bad evolutionary psychology interpretation of the world. The biggest problem, to my mind, is that so often the conclusions of the bad sort of evolutionary psychology match the stereotypes and cultural expectations we already hold about the world: more feminine women are more beautiful, more masculine men more handsome; appearance is important to men while wealth is important to women; women are prone to flighty changes in political and partner preference depending on the phase of their menstrual cycles. Rather than clue people in to problems with research design or interpretation, this alignment with stereotype further confirms the study. Variation gets erased: in bad evolutionary psychology, there are only straight people, and everyone wants the same things in life. Our brains are iPhones, each app designed for its own special adaptive purpose.

More here.

Mickalene Thomas. Le déjeuner sur l'herbe: Les Trois Femmes Noires. 2010.

C-print

More here and here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Although Galileo and Shakespeare were both born in 1564, just coming up on a shared four-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday, Shakespeare never wrote a play about his contemporary. (Wise man that he was, Shakespeare never wrote a play about anyone who was alive to protest.) The founder of modern science had to wait three hundred years, but when he got his play it was a good one: Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” which is the most Shakespearean of modern history plays, the most vivid and densely ambivalent. It was produced with Charles Laughton in 1947, during Brecht’s Hollywood exile, and Brecht’s image of the scientist as a worldly sensualist and ironist is hard to beat, or forget. Brecht’s Galileo steals the idea for the telescope from the Dutch, flatters the Medici into giving him a sinecure, creates two new sciences from sheer smarts and gumption—and then, threatened by the Church with torture for holding the wrong views on man’s place in the universe, he collapses, recants, and lives on in a twilight of shame.

It might be said that Brecht, who truckled to the House Un-American Activities Committee—“My activities . . . have always been purely literary activities of a strictly independent nature”—and then spent the next bit of his own life, post-Hollywood, accessorized to the Stalinist government of East Germany, was the last man in the world to be pointing a finger at someone for selling out honesty for comfort. But then the last man who ought to point that finger is always the one who does. Galileo’s shame, or apostasy, certainly shapes the origin myth of modern science, giving it not a martyr-hero but a turncoat, albeit one of genius. “Unhappy is the land that breeds no heroes,” his former apprentice says at the play’s climax to the master who has betrayed the Copernican faith. “No,” Galileo replies, “unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” It is a bitter valediction for the birth of the new learning. The myth that, once condemned, he muttered under his breath, about the earth, “But still, it moves,” provides small comfort for the persecuted, and is not one that Brecht adopted.

More here.