James Livingston makes the case over at Politics and Letters (image from Wikimedia Commons):

In the history of drama, and that includes melodrama, there’s a difference between the Fool and the Charlatan. The Fool is motivated and animated by irony doubled unto absurdity. He’s typically empowered by the King, or by the local authorities, as diversion from the real action, as comic relief—as the man whose utterance won’t make sense to the actors on stage until the play is concluded and just about everybody is dead.

The audience is differently empowered, because it’s always in on the joke of the Fool’s mistaken identity—we get the disguise, the dissembling., from the very beginning of his act. We know this Fool is not the man he pretends to be, and, more significantly, we know him as our informant on stage, on screen, in the space where we can be only spectators, and he plays this role for us no matter how devoted he is to the cause of the King or the local authorities. So he turns irony and absurdity into information for the audience long before the dramatic action is over.

The Charlatan is the figure who is merely absurd, or simply evil, because he skips the stage of irony—because, unlike the Fool, he doesn’t know that the power to which he’s indentured himself, and this includes the effect of his own utterance, is itself divisible. The difference I’m trying to describe here is the difference between Edgar and Edmund in “King Lear.” The audience knows the Charlatan lacks either conviction or evidence, and he may know this as well, but, unlike the Fool, he doesn’t care: he’s the pawn who would be king. Like Hamlet, who only plays the Fool, Iago is either the exception to or the epitome of these rules (and that’s why these two remain the formative characters of modern literature and 20^th-century film).

Niall Ferguson is a Charlatan in these terms.

Michael Wood in The Nation:

Philip Larkin is known and admired for his “poetry of lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations”—these words are Donald Davie’s—but his best work is often both narrower and more troubling than these terms suggest, as it concerns something like the unpronounceable loss of what we were never going to have, or a complicated refusal of what was not quite on offer. The logic of the wonderful “Poetry of Departures,” for example, suggests that any tale of escape from drab reality will be both overblown and alluring, because “We all hate home/And having to be there.” So why not leave: because the tales are phony? They are, but that is not the real obstacle. No, the tales themselves help us to “stay/Sober and industrious”; more subtly, escape itself is all about home and what’s wrong with it, a reverse framing of what we can’t leave. There isn’t anywhere else. “But I’d go today,” the poem ends,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

“Reprehensibly perfect” is itself perfect, a miming of criticism that is also a form of self-congratulation. So too are those careful, mock-hesitant line breaks at “if” and “a life.” Behind the poem we intuit a Philip Larkin who has just these feelings, or at least wouldn’t disavow them, and another Larkin who is broaching them, performing them, fully aware of the poem’s crisscrossing insights and illusions, watching the man who is so anxious not to be fooled caught in the business of fooling himself.

Sady Doyle in In These Times:

In the wake of Helen Gurley Brown’s death last week, there have been endless evaluations of her feminism. Was she a bold predecessor of third-wave sex-positivity, whose 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl established the possibility of a sexually and financially emancipated lifestyle for women? Was she a throwback who told women that sexual harassment was fun and games, plastic surgery was a must-have, and “feminism” was just another word for being a drag? Both views have passionate adherents. But the fact is, Gurley Brown was neither. She was just one of the world’s great advertisers.

To get a sense of Gurley Brown’s legacy, it might help to take a look at her baby, Cosmopolitan magazine, which she took over and revamped in 1965 after 17 years as an advertising executive. The front page of Cosmopolitan’s website, for example, has a quiz—“Are You a Good Flirt?”—wherein one can earn a rating anywhere from “Ketchup” to “Tabasco: You leave every man’s tongue burning.” Which sounds like a medical condition, actually, but is apparently good. You can also learn to “Read His Beach Body Language,” learn how to “Wow Him Every Time” or discover “30 Things To Do To A Naked Man.” (Not to spoil this for you, but I’m going to bet that at least 29 of those things are “have sex with him.”) And if you “Want a Better Boyfriend”—though one hopes you already have a good one, considering the amount of time you apparently spend reading about him—you can get him a subscription to CFG: Cosmo For Guys, where he too can learn sex tips such as “get naked too.” (I’m serious.)

You can already probably see the problems with this particular feminist legacy: It’s concentrated almost entirely on men and how to please them. There are a few feints at sexual equality—you could learn some “Steamy Ways To Turn You On” after you’re done flipping through the naked-guy manual—but for the most part, getting a boyfriend and giving him adequate orgasms are presented as both a woman’s main goals in life and her ultimate reward.

Justin E. H. Smith and Danielle S. Allen in Cabinet:

What are the differences in the ways different societies conceptualize punishment? What are the differences in the ways they enact it? And what can be learned by looking at other systems of punishment about the contingency and potential for transformation of our own system? Ancient Athens has often served as a model for certain of the modern world’s deepest aspirations in democratic government and philosophical rationality. At least since Nietzsche, it has also sometimes been approached as an extremely foreign land, whose values and practices, in their strangeness, can at the same time show just how strange our own are. How, now, does Athens look when we turn our attention to its conceptualization and enactment of punishment?

Danielle S. Allen is a political theorist who has addressed these questions in her work on both ancient Athens and modern America. Author of The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton University Press, 2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Why Plato Wrote (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Allen is UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Justin E. H. Smith spoke to Allen by phone about the relationship between justice, punishment, and citizenship.

Read the interview here.

Sebastian Anthony in Extreme Tech:

Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.

It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival.

More here.

H. M. Naqvi in India Today:

Unlike Lahore or Islamabad, Karachi is not pretty. It's a rough and tumble megalopolis like Sao Paulo, like Mumbai, that features a hardy, dynamic populace. Karachiwallahs make Karachi Karachi. The city is populated by thugs and humanitarians, businessmen and novelists. No other city in Pakistan (or say, Austria for that matter) could sustain something like the Karachi Literature Festival. No other city can boast weekly qawwalis and mushairas as well as art exhibitions and plays. Karachi has changed dramatically in three centuries and will continue changing at the same pace. Whether it will change for the better or worse is a matter best left to punters and political pundits. I need qawwali, a plate of nihari and the energy of a megalopolis.

Like my grandfather, I might not own any real estate in the city (or, for the record, anywhere else), but I have carved a life for myself here. As a storyteller, Karachi fascinates. There's a story under every stone.

More here.

Fromm The Telegraph:

From The New York Times:

Alexander Kumar, a physician and researcher at Concordia Station, writes from Antarctica, where he conducts scientific experiments for the European Space Agency’s human spaceflight program.

Wednesday, Aug. 15

After three months of dreaming about the sun, I awoke early Sunday morning with a glow outside my window. I clambered out onto the roof and closed the hatch below me. The horizon beamed with light — the sun was bursting and breaking from the constraints of the long, dark, cold and lonely Antarctic winter. Change was afoot. I had programmed my iPod to play “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles. Disappointingly, in minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, its batteries died from the cold before the end of the song — another consideration for future Mars missions, should they wish to listen to David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” as they build red sand castles, live and survive on the Red Planet. The most magnificent sunrise unfolded before me over the ice. It felt as if we had been frozen into the sea ice, the 360-degree panorama revealing what appeared to be a flat, frozen ocean in all directions.

More here.

Frame, an Epistle

Sughra Raza. Morning errands in Purana Sheher, Lahore. 2010.

Digital photograph.

A highly ideological, jingoistic clique masquerades as objective scholars, all to justify US militarism.

Glenn Greenwald's last column for Salon before he moves to The Guardian:

There is no term more potent in our political discourse and legal landscape than “Terrorism.” It shuts down every rational thought process and political debate the minute it is uttered. It justifies torture (we have to get information from the Terrorists); due-process-free-assassinations even of our own citizens (Obama has to kill the Terrorists); and rampant secrecy (the Government can’t disclose what it’s doing or have courts rule on its legality because the Terrorists will learn of it), and it sends people to prison for decades (material supporters of Terrorism).

It is a telling paradox indeed that this central, all-justifying word is simultaneously the most meaningless and therefore the most manipulated. It is, as I have noted before, a word that simultaneously means nothing yet justifies everything. Indeed, that’s the point: it is such a useful concept precisely because it’s so malleable, because it means whatever those with power to shape discourse want it to mean. And no faction has helped this process along as much as the group of self-proclaimed “terrorism experts” that has attached itself to think tanks, academia, and media outlets. They enable pure political propaganda to masquerade as objective fact, shining brightly with the veneer of scholarly rigor. The industry itself is a fraud, as are those who profit from and within it.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Richard Polt follows up on his previous essay, in the NYT's The Stone:

In a recent essay for The Stone, I claimed that humans are “something more than other animals, and essentially more than any computer.” Some readers found the claim importantly or trivially true; others found it partially or totally false; still others reacted as if I’d said that we’re not animals at all, or that there are no resemblances between our brains and computers. Some pointed out, rightly, that plenty of people do fine research in biology or computer science without reducing the human to the subhuman.

But reductionism is also afoot, often not within science itself but in the way scientific findings get interpreted. John Gray writes in his 2002 British best seller, “Straw Dogs,” “Humans think they are free, conscious beings, when in truth they are deluded animals.” The neurologist-philosopher Raymond Tallis lambastes such notions in his 2011 book, “Aping Mankind,” where he cites many more examples of reductionism from all corners of contemporary culture.

Now, what do I mean by reductionism, and what’s wrong with it? Every thinking person tries to reduce some things to others; if you attribute your cousin’s political outburst to his indigestion, you’ve reduced the rant to the reflux. But the reductionism that’s at stake here is a much broader habit of thinking that tries to flatten reality down and allow only certain kinds of explanations. Here I’ll provide a little historical perspective on this kind of thinking and explain why adopting it is a bad bargain: it wipes out the meaning of your own life.

Jeffrey Tayler on Luigi Pirandello, in The LA Review of Books:

FOR MOST PEOPLE, the lyrical, lilting surname Pirandello probably elicits only vague remembrances of absurdist things past. “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” his existential 1921 masterwork, survives mostly in the world of headline writers who play off of existing titles, probably not the fairest legacy for one of Italy’s foremost dramatists (more than 50 plays), poets, novelists, and short-story writers. Yet for his “bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art,” Luigi Pirandello, born in Sicily in 1867, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. Despite continental fame — in 1932 Metro Goldwyn Mayer adapted of one of his comedies for the screen — that lasted until his death in 1936, Pirandello, outside Italy, has lapsed into obscurity partly because of where he was from: During its calamitous stint as a colonial power, Italy never possessed the international prestige of, say, Britain or France, so Italian was never widely spoken outside Italy (and Switzerland’s southern cantons). Also, the playwright’s tempestuous flirtation with, and support from, Benito Mussolini surely did nothing to help his reputation after World War II. (Pirandello broke with the Fascists in the late 1920s.) To this day, much of his voluminous oeuvre remains untranslated into English or, if translated, out of print.

This is a shame. His prose (the subject of this essay) brims with sympathetic, contemporary-seeming characters, some struggling to live true and maintain their dignity in straitened circumstances such as those now befalling so many in the West today. Others strive to get by in a society — usually Sicilian — suffocated by religion and reactionary attitudes toward women. A few begin their lives comfortably but find their dreams dashed by events beyond their control, their situations rendered suddenly precarious. His dramatis personae are invariably common folk, men and women beset by problems that we would find familiar today. If all this doesn’t make Pirandello relevant to us now, then what would?

Masha Gessen in The Daily Beast:

The cathedral had been virtually empty during the morning hours, and the protest lasted all of 40 seconds before the women were removed by security. But church staff members testified during the trial that they were deeply traumatized by observing the young women in brightly colored dresses and balaclavas lip-sync to a recording of what Pussy Riot calls its punk prayer: “Mother of God, cast Putin out.”

I listened to one of New York’s performance artists read a Pussy Riot manifesto sent from jail. “Patriarch Kirill [head of the Russian Orthodox Church] has repeatedly evangelized on behalf of the figure of Putin—clearly no saint—and continues to urge his parishioners not to participate in protest rallies…We respond to the political activity of the faithful, and counter the patriarch’s efforts to distort the truth on behalf of all believers. And we needed to sing it at the altar, not on the street in front of the temple—that is, in a place where women are strictly forbidden. The fact is, the church is promoting a very conservative worldview that does not fit into such values as freedom of choice, the formation of political identity, gender identity, or sexual identity, critical thinking, multiculturalism, or attention to contemporary culture. It seems to us that the Orthodox Church currently lacks all of these virtues.”

I suddenly realized these texts sounded better in English than they do in Russian. It wasn’t that the translators had improved the quality of the writing: the originals, which I had read in Russian, had been clear and cogent and surprisingly erudite for three very young women—they range in ages from 22 to 30—who had been known for staging radical actions, not for writing political commentary. The problem with the writing in Russian was that the women were speaking the language of the modern world in a country that is rapidly traveling backward in time.

Michael Gazzaniga in Discover:

We humans think we make all our decisions to act consciously and willfully. We all feel we are wonderfully unified, coherent mental machines and that our underlying brain structure must reflect this overpowering sense. It doesn’t. No command center keeps all other brain systems hopping to the instructions of a five-star general. The brain has millions of local processors making important decisions. There is no one boss in the brain. You are certainly not the boss of your brain. Have you ever succeeded in telling your brain to shut up already and go to sleep? Even though we know that the organization of the brain is made up of a gazillion decision centers, that neural activities going on at one level of organization are inexplicable at another level, and that there seems to be no boss, our conviction that we have a “self” making all the decisions is not dampened. It is a powerful illusion that is almost impossible to shake. In fact, there is little or no reason to shake it, for it has served us well as a species. There is, however, a reason to try to understand how it all comes about. If we understand why we feel in charge, we will understand why and how we make errors of thought and perception.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in the desert of Southern California—out in the desert scrub and dry bunchgrass, surrounded by purple mountains, creosote bush, coyotes, and rattlesnakes. The reason I am still here today is because I have nonconscious processes that were honed by evolution. I jumped out of the way of many a rattlesnake, but that is not all. I also jumped out of the way of grass that rustled in the wind. I jumped, that is, before I was consciously aware that it was the wind that rustled the grass, rather than a rattler. If I had had only my conscious processes to depend on, I probably would have jumped less but been bitten on more than one occasion.

Conscious processes are slow, as are conscious decisions.

More here.

Straits of Malacca 24 Oct 1957

a.
…Soft rain on the
…gray ocean, a tern
…still glides low over
…whitecaps
…after the ship is gone

b.
…Soft rain on
……………….gray sea
.. .a tern
……….glides brushing
…………………….waves
The ship's silent
…………………wake

c. Fog of rain on
………………..water
……Tern glides
……Over waves,
………………the
……..wake

.

by Gary Snyder
from Left Out in the Rain
North Point Press, 1986