From The New York Times:

On June 10, 1973, a few years after Toni Morrison had published her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” the Book Review asked her for an essay, for its annual Summer Reading issue, about, of all things, cooking out. The essay Morrison delivered is lovely, and hard to read without conjuring summer and blankets spread across shady lawns. With spring almost in the air, here is Morrison’s essay again, plucked from our archives. At the time, we identified her this way: “Toni Morrison, the author of ‘The Bluest Eye,’ cooks on a proper stove in Spring Valley, N.Y.”

By TONI MORRISON

Uncle Green was late so that meant all the Blue Gums would be late too. He was up from Alabama for 20 days with a $500 bill which never broke because nobody – nobody – had change and so he had to borrow whatever he needed until the time he could get to a store big enough to handle it. Mama and Aunt Millie looked at his big bill, then at each other, then at the sky that stretched overhead with precisely the infinite patience they had lost. The fish were already awake, the potatoes were sliced and simmering next to the onions, and this whole tribal effort to have a day-long fish-and-cookout at Turkeyfoot Lake in honor of the eldest member of the Alabama wing of the family was beginning to draw Mama’s and Aunt Millie’s lips together in annoyance.

More here. (Note: In honor of African American History Month, we will be linking to at least one related post throughout February. The 2012 theme is Black Women in American Culture and History).

From The Guardian:

A major tribute to the great Syrian poet Adonis, including an exhibition of his stunning drawings and a series of literary events. Adonis is today considered one of the most important figures in the Arabic literary history of the last fifty years, and the Arab world’s greatest living poet. His work has spanned poetry, literary criticism and history, Sufism, politics and contemporary cultural affairs. His drawings are inspired by and include sections of poetry, handwritten in Arabic calligraphy and collaged with layers of found objects. These pieces, like his literary work, combine traditional and contemporary influences. Exiled to France after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, he worked to bring to Arabic poetry the international recognition it deserved. Even today, when he is more than eighty years old, he retains his fresh and critical outlook on the events of his homeland, attracting controversy and debate because of his cautionary and critical words on the Arab Spring. In 2011, Adonis was awarded the highly prestigious Goethe Prize.

About 10 years ago the Syrian poet Adonis started making images using calligraphy, colour and figurative gestures which he calls 'rakaim'. Here he talks about the inspiration behind some of his latest work, currently on show at the Mosaic Rooms in London.

Picture on right: 'This is the only rakima where I've used a photograph. It's a young woman protesting against the wall in Palestine. The text is an assemblage of pre-Islamic writings which speak of peace and against oppression.'

More here.

Jonathan Shainin in Bookforum:

On December 9, 2011, the ABC News program 20/20 aired a dramatic report from India, presented by the show’s Emmy Award–winning anchor Elizabeth Vargas. In an uncharacteristically long piece devoted to social issues in a foreign country not recently liberated from tyranny by an American invasion, the fifteen-minute segment set out to reveal what its title dubbed “India’s Deadly Secret.” The deadly secret in question—so secret that the Times of India has only mentioned it about six hundred times in the past two years, according to LexisNexis—is the propensity of Indian families to abort female fetuses: a disturbing and disturbingly widespread practice, which has produced badly skewed child sex ratios (as high as 129 boys for every 100 girls in certain districts) that indicate the “disappearance” of tens of millions of women over the past several decades.

This is a subject of unquestionable significance, but 20/20’s report on India’s “growing gender gap” turned out to be a kind of master class in how deeply a group of well-meaning journalists can drown their good intentions in a warm bath of patronizing condescension and pity. Backed by the requisite sitar-and-tabla sound track, Vargas strode bravely down dusty, crowded roads with nary a female in sight. “Walk down any street, as I did throughout India,” she said in a voice-over, “and you notice something startling: In every direction you see men, and very few women.” Cut to a slow-motion shot of four uniformed schoolgirls walking past the camera: “Now look closely at the faces of these girls. They are the lucky ones—they’re alive.” (Figures from the 2011 census suggest that they have the company of 572 million other living Indian women.)

If you were playing Sentimental Orientalist bingo while watching at home, your card would have filled up pretty fast. Obligatory reference—“in a land where men revere female goddesses”—to “spiritual” India? Check. Needless (and erroneous) recourse to “ancient tradition” as an explanation for contemporary behavior? Check. Failure to acknowledge that the scourge of sex-selective abortion afflicts countries from Albania and Armenia to South Korea and Vietnam? Check. Concluding with ponderous and vaguely uplifting quote on-screen from Mahatma Gandhi? Check. Spelling his name incorrectly? Bingo.

If I had to tell you one thing about Katherine Boo’s astonishingly fine new book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, I might start by noting that what a team of journalists from ABC News failed to accurately convey with fifteen minutes of video and who knows how many thousands of dollars, Boo manages in a single sentence. After describing how Fatima, one of the Mumbai slum dwellers whose lives this book chronicles with remarkable precision and a bracing refusal of pity, had drowned her own two-year-old daughter in a bucket, Boo encapsulates the whole terrible phenomenon of female feticide in India in thirty-two unadorned words: “Young girls in the slums died all the time under dubious circumstances, since most slum families couldn’t afford the sonograms that allowed wealthier families to dispose of their female liabilities before birth.”

Julia Michalska in The Art Newspaper:

Already under attack from the European Commission for its policies on banking, the law and the media, Hungary’s national conservative government is now facing a tide of protest from the arts community. The government, led by Viktor Orban, stands accused of systematically replacing key figures in cultural institutions, staging pro-government exhibitions, rethinking permanent museum displays and replacing historic statues to fit its political agenda. “The fact that an authoritarian government wants to control the arts is in itself not surprising,” says the Hungarian economist Janos Kovacs. “But it’s incredible that this is happening in the middle of the European Union without provoking angry reactions in Brussels.”

Since coming to power with a two-thirds majority in 2010, Orban’s Fidesz party has passed more than 350 laws and rushed through a constitution which, the international community argues, endangers Hungarian demo­cracy. Last month, to celebrate the official inauguration of the constitution, Orban opened a government-organised exhibition at the National Gallery. It chronicles 1,000 years of Hungarian history, focusing on sovereign statehood and Christ­ian­ity (until 16 August). The show includes 15 large state-commissioned canvases depicting important historic events spanning 150 years, including an image of Orban. The event contributed to the decision by the National Gallery’s director, Ferenc Csak, to resign before the show opened. “The government shouldn’t have the power to order exhibitions with such a high political agenda. Museums shouldn’t be getting involved in politics,” says Csak.

There have been other government-instigated changes in personnel at leading institutions. Laszlo Simon, a Fidesz party MP and chairman of the parliamentary cultural and press committee, has become the head of the National Cultural Fund of Hungary—which up until now was a body independent of government, monitored by the culture committee. It is one of the most important organisations that funds Hungarian cultural institutions, including museums, libraries, theatres and archives.

Vladimir Shiltsev in Physics Today:

As a scientist, Lomonosov was equal parts thinker and experimenter. He tested his theories and hypotheses with experiments that he planned and carried out himself. Although proficient in math, he never used differential calculus. He would work on research topics for years, even decades at a time, always with an eye toward turning discoveries into new practices or inventions.

Lomonosov believed physical and chemical phenomena were best explained in terms of the mechanical interactions of corpuscles—“minute, insensible particles” analogous to what we now know as molecules.1 Giving name to the philosophy, he coined the term “physical chemistry” in 1752.

He is perhaps best known for being the first person to experimentally confirm the law of conservation of matter. That metals gain weight when heated—now a well-known consequence of oxidation—confounded British chemist Robert Boyle, who had famously observed the effect in 1673. The result seemed to implicate that heat itself was a kind of matter. In 1756 Lomonosov disproved that notion by demonstrating that when lead plates are heated inside an airtight vessel, the collective weight of the vessel and its contents stays constant. In a subsequent letter to Euler, he framed the result in terms of a broad philosophy of conservation:

All changes that we encounter in nature proceed so that . . . however much matter is added to any body, as much is taken away from another . . . since this is the general law of nature, it is also found in the rules of motion: a body loses as much motion as it gives to another body.

Kenan Malik over at his blog (h/t: Zack Beauchamp over at Andrew Sullivan):

The difference between believers and atheists is not about whether either can explain the ultimate cause of the universe. It is about how we wish to explain it. I am happy to say, ‘I do not know what First Cause is, or even if there is one. It may be that one day we discover the answer to that. Or it may be that we never will. For now I am happy to keep an open mind, accept our ignorance of First Cause and live with the uncertainty of not having one’. Believers are unwilling to say that. They insist that there must be a First Cause and that that First Cause must take the form of God. They cannot live with the uncertainty about First Cause that comes with non-belief. In Peter Stannard’s words they know – they have to know – that God exists. The difference between believers and atheists is, in other words, not simply a difference of philosophy, it is also a difference of psychological temper.

A similar distinction can be drawn between atheists and believers with respect to the second issue for which it is claimed that God is necessary – morality. ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’. Dostoevsky never actually wrote that line, though so often is it attributed to him that he may as well have. It has become the almost reflexive response of believers when faced with an argument for a godless world. Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. ‘The elimination of God’, the theologian Alister McGrath writes, ‘led to new heights of moral brutality’. Though given the extent of brutality undertaken in the name of God, I am not sure that that is a particularly astute sentiment.

‘If God does not exist’, William Craig claims, ‘Objective moral values and duties do not exist’. There is a voluminous philosophical literature on the debate between moral realists and moral anti-realists, that is between those who see moral values as akin to facts, and those who reject that idea. It is an intellectual swamp, and one into which I do not intend stepping, at least in this talk. All I would say is it is possible to believe that moral questions have non-arbitrary answers without conflating facts and values.

An anonymous writer in Caravan:

ON THE AFTERNOON OF 19 MAY 2009, at around 1:20 pm, a ration shop accountant named Sivarajan ran to the front of the winding lunch queue in the Anandakumaraswami Zone 3 refugee camp to serve rice and sodhi, a watery concoction of chillies and coconut milk. Swarna, a former militant, sat in her tent nearby, yelling at her mother for having told an army man from the morning shift that their family belonged to Mullaitivu, on the northeastern coast, where the war between the Sri Lankan Army and the separatists—“Tigers,” she called them—was still raging.

At that moment, they got a text message on their mobile phones from the government’s information department. Addressed to all Sri Lankans, it proclaimed, in Sinhala—a language neither Sivarajan nor Swarna could read—that Velupillai Prabhakaran, the man who led a 26-year-long separatist battle for a Tamil Eelam (state), had been killed by the army in a lagoon just a two hours drive north of where they were. So when the news was announced in Tamil over a loudspeaker that evening, they did not believe it. When it finally sank in, they realised—neither with remorse nor relief, but mere wonder at its very possibility—that in an instant the war they had been born into had left their lives.

Nothing would ever be the same again.

ONE

IT HAD TO BE INAPPROPRIATE to want a bath when shells were raining from the sky. But for the fifth day in a row, it was all Siva could think of. Crouching with his wife, daughter and six others in a hastily dug five-foot deep hole in the ground that was dissolving in the nonstop downpour, he was going crazy with the thick layer of mud on his skin. It itched, and he was sure he could smell blood and shit on it.

Above Siva’s head, across the coconut orchard of Kombavil village in Puthukkudiyiruppu region of Mullaitivu district, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan Army were exchanging gunfire. Aircraft ejected shells into the area, which had once been home to about 50 families; since April 2009, it had been transformed into a dizzying two sq km maze of felled trees and underground bunkers dug and redug by the army, LTTE and fleeing, hiding villagers. Below the rain rivulets and the rattle of machine guns, about 3,000 people cowered underground, packed like iron rods in a truck, judging danger and safety by the ebb and rise of the sounds of battle. They were petrified, but more unbearably, they were hungry.

Inevitably, it also contains within it two Americas. One is the America which develops and uses—not once, but twice—a weapon of a destructive capability which far outstrips anything that has come before, the America which decides what price some other country’s civilian population must pay for its victory. There is nothing particular to America in this—all nations in war behave in much the same way. But in the years between the bombing of Hiroshima and now, no nation has intervened militarily with as many different countries as America, and always on the other country’s soil; which is to say, no nation has treated as many other civilian populations as collateral damage as America while its own civilians stay well out of the arena of war. So that’s one of the Americas in Hiroshima—the America of brutal military power. But there’s another America in the book, that of John Hersey. The America of looking at the destruction your nation has inflicted and telling it like it is. The America of stepping back and allowing someone else to tell their story through you because they have borne the tragedy and you have the power to bear witness to it. It is the America of The New Yorker of William Shawn, which, for the only time in its history, gave over an entire edition to a single article and kept its pages clear of its famed cartoons. It is the America which honored Hersey for his truth telling.

more from Kamila Shamsie at Guernica here.

“The twentieth century,” Tony Judt asserts in this luminous book of conversations with the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “is the century of the intellectuals.” What does it say about intellectuals, then, that the century in which they exercised so much influence on policymaking and public opinion was also the bloodiest in history? There are some sobering answers—few of them flattering—in Thinking the Twentieth Century. Published two years after Judt’s death from motor neurone disease, this book contains his final views on politics and economics and on a range of thinkers from Keynes to Eric Hobsbawm. A relatively obscure British academic based in New York, Judt refashioned himself in the last decade of his life into a strikingly bold and prominent public intellectual. Published in 2005, his masterpiece Postwar, a panoramic account of Europe after the second world war, broadened his reputation as a scholar of French intellectual history. But Judt was to become even better known for his eloquent defence of the old values of good governance, social and economic justice, and his attacks on his peers—western liberal intellectuals—for having succumbed to the false consolations of dogma and the blandishments of power.

more from Pankaj Mishra at Prospect Magazine here.

Canadians are still “dead serious” about water. Coureurs de bois and the ghost of Tom Thomson haunt the misty lakes of our collective subconscious. The effect, too often, is to dissolve reasoned debate about the subject in a solution of mythic imagery infused with implied threats to our identity. A reflexive “aqua-nationalism,” clothed in environmental righteousness, is hostile to any suggestion that Canada’s water could ever become a tradable commodity. The animus is all the more implacable if the discussion involves trading water with Americans — an idea close to treason in some eyes. In this atmosphere it’s easy to ridicule visionaries who dream of replumbing the continent. Nonagenarian Newfoundlander Tom Kierans’s scheme to dike James Bay and pipe water to the US Midwest through the Great Lakes invites a check of the old man’s sanity, and it hardly surprises that right-wing American anti-Semite Lyndon LaRouche is behind a plan to reroute water from the Peace and Liard rivers from northern BC deep into the United States. But our hostile reductionism is going to become difficult to sustain as greenhouse-gas emissions continue to heat up the planet. New patterns of wind, humidity, and ambient temperature are already dramatically altering the weather map. Some parts of the country are receiving more rain than ever before; other regions are drying up.

more from Chris Wood at The Walrus here.

Julian Barnes in the New York Review of Books:

Philip Larkin was one of those who adored Mrs. Thatcher. “I got the blue flash,” he reported after meeting her—that moment of what the diarist and Tory minister Alan Clark (who also adored her) described as Führer Kontakt. “Her great virtue,” Larkin told an interviewer in 1979, “is saying that two and two makes four, which is as unpopular nowadays as it has always been.” Later that year, he elaborated: “At last politics makes sense to me, which it hasn’t done since Stafford Cripps (I was very fond of him too). Recognizing that if you haven’t got the money for something you can’t have it—this is a concept that’s vanished for many years.”

Politicians are, inevitably, elected by people who know less about politics than they do, and Mrs. Thatcher’s favorite schtick was making out that a state’s fiscal responsibility was merely a scaled-up version of good housekeeping. Thrift, hard work, common sense: the housewife virtues were what she pushed, and she convinced many. Though of course whenever a government really wants to afford something—like the Falklands War—it does so; mysterious contingency funds are suddenly discovered (and their size kept from the public until much later). This is a bit like being attentive to the cost of a pint of milk while having a millionaire husband in the background—which was the case with Mrs. Thatcher.

More here.

Aleksandar Hemon in Granta:

German was not German – he was from Ecuador, but his father was born in Germany, hence the nickname. He was a UPS truck driver in his mid-forties, suntanned, wearing a moustache. Every Saturday and Sunday, he’d arrive by the lake around 2.00 p.m. in a decrepit, twenty-five-year-old van, on which a soccer ball and the words were painted. He’d unload goalposts and nets, bagfuls of single-colour T-shirts and balls, plus the flags of different countries – Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, the United States, Spain, Nigeria – and he’d distribute the shirts to the guys who came to play. Most of them lived in Uptown and Edgewater and were from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Belize, Brazil, Jamaica, Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Senegal, Eritrea, Ghana, Cameroon, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, France, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam, Korea. There was even a guy from Tibet, and he was a very good goalie.

Normally, there’d be more than two teams, so the games lasted for fifteen minutes or until one team scored two goals. The games were very serious, as the winner stayed on the field, while the losing team had to wait on the sidelines. German refereed and he almost never called a foul – it seemed he needed to hear the sound of a breaking bone to use his whistle. Sometimes, if a team needed a player, he’d referee and play.He was particularly hard on himself and once he gave himself a yellow card for a brutal tackle. We – immigrants trying to stay afloat in this country – found comfort in playing by the rules we set ourselves. It made us feel that we still were part of a world much bigger than the United States.

More here.

David Dobbs in Wired:

As faithful readers know, I’m working on a book, provisionally titled The Orchid and the Dandelion and likely to be published next year, about the orchid-dandelion hypothesis: the notion that genes and traits that underlie some of humans’ biggest weaknesses — despair, madness, savage aggression — also underlie some of our greatest strengths — resilience, lasting happiness, empathy. If you’re used to the disease model of genes that are associated with mood and behavioral problems, this hypothesis can seem puzzling. The turn lies in viewing problems such as depression, distractibility, or even aggression as downsides of a heightened sensitivity to experience that can also generate assets and contentment.

I first wrote about the orchid-dandelion hypothesis in an Atlantic article two years ago. Last week, New Scientist published a feature I wrote about some of the research I’ve come across while researching the book. The article is behind a paywall now, so you’ll need a subscription to read it; I’ll post the whole thing here in a few weeks when the New Scientist exclusive-run period ends. In the meantime, I thought I’d excerpt here a couple passages of particular interest.

One is the opener, which describes how toddlers react to a clever test of their generosity and then lays out the gist of the hypothesis. The other is a multigenic study that sought to expand the hypothesis beyond single-gene candidate-gene studies.

More here.

Ahmed Rashid at his own website:

After eleven years of war the Taliban’s public declaration that they will hold talks with the United States in Qatar is a major breakthrough for the political process, for Afghanistan’s internal stability and for the relative peace that will be needed by the US and NATO in 2014 before they can exit Afghanistan in good order and without too much bloodshed.

The year-long clandestine talks brokered by the Germans, fostered by Qatar and eventually ending in direct meetings between US officials and Taliban representatives will hopefully lead to a major reconciliation with the Kabul regime. The Taliban’s present insistence that they will only talk with the Americans is not realistic in the long term, while Karzai’s recent policy flip-flops and contradictory statements belie the fact that he was kept in the loop every step of the way by the Germans. The talks will go ahead because there is no other alternative to ending the war.

The metrics of calculating how successful NATO forces have been on the ground combating the Taliban, despite heady announcements by NATO generals, are mired in considerable controversy and doubt. The ability of the Taliban, unlike al-Qaeda, to rebound from severe hits has proved them to be remarkably resistant to casualties, with a deep bench of commanders, logisticians, recruiters and administrators for their cause.

More here.

Old Lem

I talked to old Lem
and old Lem said:
“They weigh the cotton
They store the corn
We only good enough
To work the rows;
They run the commissary
They keep the books
We gotta be grateful
For being cheated;
Whippersnapper clerks
Call us out of our name
We got to say mister
To spindling boys
They make our figgers
Turn somersets
We buck in the middle
Say, “Thankyuh, sah.”
They don't come by ones
They don't come by twos
But they come by tens.
.

Read more »

From Divinecaroline:

Speech: Mary McLeod Bethune (1939)

In 1906, a teacher named Mary Bethune built the Daytona Literacy and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls in Florida. Initially a one-woman operation, she enlisted the help of a few community members and sold baked goods to help raise funds for supplies and maintenance. After getting funding from one of the founders of Proctor and Gamble, the school joined forces with an all-boys school in Jacksonville and it became the Bethune-Cookman College. Later, she went on to found the National Council of Negro Women and worked with FDR on minority issues and youth policies.

Democracy is for me, and for 12 million black Americans, a goal towards which our nation is marching. It is a dream and an ideal in whose ultimate realization we have a deep and abiding faith. For me, it is based on Christianity, in which we confidently entrust our destiny as a people. Under God’s guidance in this great democracy, we are rising out of the darkness of slavery into the light of freedom. Here my race has been afforded [the] opportunity to advance from a people 80 percent illiterate to a people 80 percent literate; from abject poverty to the ownership and operation of a million farms and 750,000 homes; from total disfranchisement to participation in government; from the status of chattels to recognized contributors to the American culture. As we have been extended a measure of democracy, we have brought to the nation rich gifts. We have helped to build America with our labor, strengthened it with our faith, and enriched it with our song. We have given you Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, Marian Anderson, and George Washington Carver. But even these are only the first fruits of a rich harvest, which will be reaped when new and wider fields are opened to us. The democratic doors of equal opportunity have not been opened wide to Negroes. In the Deep South, Negro youth is offered only one-fifteenth of the educational opportunity of the average American child. The great masses of Negro workers are depressed and unprotected in the lowest levels of agriculture and domestic service, while the black workers in industry are barred from certain unions and generally assigned to the more laborious and poorly paid work. Their housing and living conditions are sordid and unhealthy. They live too often in terror of the lynch mob; are deprived too often of the Constitutional right of suffrage; and are humiliated too often by the denial of civil liberties. We do not believe that justice and common decency will allow these conditions to continue.

A picture-perfect replica of the Hollywood sign shines in the clear, cool sunlight, a helicopter beside it and, down below, a city of fake fronts with signs advertising “Greg’s Pistol Ship,” “Bala’s Inn Bed and Breakfast,” and “Yogi Bear Bounty Hunters.” Not far away, in a square that’s closed to the public, a mob of children dressed in school uniforms is dancing and lip-synching furiously behind a pair of pouting lovers as cameras roll. I’m surrounded by 11 Indian men in matching white baseball caps, five young women in saris, and a screeching child. We’re seated in a minivan with whirring fans above every row, offering the “air-conditioning” that is part of the $25 V.I.P. “Ramoji Star Experience” tour. In the past few minutes we’ve seen a “Sun Fountain” that would fit in at Versailles, a Japanese “Sayonara Garden,” and an intricate hedge maze; at this moment we’re passing an “Arizona Cactus Garden” across from a town that could sit in the shadow of the Himalayas. Now, in the bright late-monsoon-season morning, I watch young women in shalwar kameezes—and black cowboy hats—sauntering toward the “Wild Western Days Shooting Gallery.” An Islamic woman clad from head to toe in a burka is approaching the Gunsmoke restaurant.

more from Pico Ayer at Vanity Fair here.