The Kiss

for David

Not the mosaic couple made famous by Klimt,
bodies cleaved close, so thin they could be
construed as one person.
Not the floating lovers Chagall lifted,
praised with brush strokes of color.
But us, seconds before
you were transported to surgery,
our kiss witnessed by a few
who dared not look away.
They still carry the moment like a postcard
purchased at the Louvre, a souvenir
against forgetting what might
or might not be, the last—our portrait
rendered without an artist, love
sculpted more naked than Rodin's nudes.
How my feet could not feel the ground.
How your heart refused letting go
all that between us shimmered.

by Donna Doyle
from JAMA, June 22/29, 2011

Jennifer Jacquet in Edge:

Financial executives received almost $20 billion in bonuses in 2008 amid a serious financial crisis and a $245 billion government bailout. In 2008, more than 3 million American homes went into foreclosure because of mortgage blunders those same executives helped facilitate. Citigroup proposed to buy a $50 million corporate jet in early 2009, shortly after receiving $45 billion in taxpayer funds. Days later, President Barack Obama took note in an Oval Office interview. About the jet, he said, “They should know better.” And the bonuses, he said, were “shameful.”

What is shame's purpose? Is shame still necessary? These are questions I'm asking myself. After all, it's not just bankers we have to worry about. Most social dilemmas exhibit a similar tension between individual and group interests. Energy, food, and water shortages, climate disruption, declining fisheries, increasing resistance to antibiotics, the threat of nuclear warfare—all can be characterized as tragedies of the commons, in which the choices of individuals conflict with the greater good.

Balancing group and self-interest has never been easy, yet human societies display a high level of cooperation. To attain that level, specialized traits had to evolve, including such emotions as shame.1 Shame is what is supposed to occur after an individual fails to cooperate with the group. Shame regulates social behavior and serves as a forewarning of punishment: conform or suffer the consequences. The earliest feelings of shame were likely over issues of waste management, greediness, and incompetence. Whereas guilt is evoked by an individual's standards, shame is the result of group standards. Therefore, shame, unlike guilt, is felt only in the context of other people.

Brian Thill in his blog:

Periodically the corporate headquarters would provide us with a new itemized inventory, and we would spend several days scouring the shelves to cull the proper number of books from the stock. Inevitably we would be left with great mounds of mass-market paperbacks that some obscure set of calculations had determined were no longer profitable for us to keep in stock. These were often books that had arrived in great numbers, loaded down with promotional displays, back-to-school promotional inserts, and more. What was necessary to have on hand in great numbers one month was literally garbage the next. The procedure in this case would be to rip the covers from each of the books, scan and bundle the covers and mail them to headquarters, and toss the piles of naked books in the trash compactor out behind the mall. In addition to being prohibited from selling coverless books, we were also forbidden to give them away; just as, each night, after having spent hours baking our fresh bread at the Italian restaurant where I worked every night cooking pasta, we were told to scoop up the heaping trays full of uneaten bread and throw them in the trash. When you’re poor, the pain of participating in the discarding of perfectly good things is particularly acute; it eats at you, you take it personally, as if that part of the world that can spare these things (a part you are kept from) is going out of its way to rub your face in it.

So I started making off with the coverless books. I’d volunteer to haul the great carts laden with garbage-books out to the compactor, and as I tossed the overstocked romance novels and spy thrillers into the bin, I would set aside the abject copies of Virginia Woolf or Philip K. Dick and tuck them behind the wall, retrieving them at the end of the night, when I would take them home and add them to my humble shelves. Neatly stacked, you could hardly tell they lacked covers. And who needed a cover anyway: hadn’t the old adage taught us how meaningless a cover was?

More here.

From The Guardian:

It may not be the most heart-pounding news of the moment, but boredom is coming back into fashion. Not boredom in the sense of lying around blank-faced in a brown study, a practice which in my experience has never really gone out of style, but boredom as a subject (rather than a product) of academic study. In recent years several scholarly books have reanimated a topic that had fallen into analytical torpor, the latest being Boredom: A Lively History by Peter Toohey, an Australian professor of classics who now lives and works in Canada – a country, alas, that bears an unfortunate reputation for being boring.

What is boredom? Is it a mood, an emotion, an affliction, a form of social protection, a gateway to the essence of the self, the human condition, or a modern affectation? These are questions that have concerned philosophers and thinkers dating back to the Enlightenment, not least because boredom occupies territory that overlaps with capital letter concepts like Being and Time. I can't pretend that my own interest in the matter has always been quite so elevated. Mostly when I think about boredom it is out of base self-interest, as a state that I'm very keen to avoid. Ever since I was a child, I have held an extreme aversion to situations that have the potential to be boring.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Two ring-tailed lemurs, perhaps a pair, perhaps just two guys out to catch a few rays, sit side by side tilted back as if in beach chairs, their white bellies exposed, knees apart, feet splayed to catch every last drop of the Madagascar sun. All they need are cigars to complete the picture.

There’s a perfectly good evolutionary explanation for this posture. Scientists use the term “behavioral thermoregulation” to describe how an animal maintains a core body temperature. But as the animal behaviorist Jonathan Balcombe points out in his exuberant look at animal pleasure, “The Exultant Ark,” they are also clearly enjoying themselves. A scientist through and through, Dr. Balcombe can’t help giving the study of animal pleasure a properly scientific name: hedonic ethology. True to its subtitle — “A Pictorial Tour of Animal Pleasure” — “The Exultant Ark” showcases surprising, funny, touching, sad, heartwarming pictures by photographers all over the world. Dr. Balcombe’s text is a serious examination of the subject of animal pleasure, a study that “remains nascent and largely neglected in scientific discourse.” But it also delights us along the way with Dr. Balcombe’s observations and examples. On the subject of food as pleasure, for instance, he tells us, “Rats will enter a deadly cold room and navigate a maze to retrieve highly palatable food (e.g., shortbread, pâté or Coca-Cola).” If they happen to find rat chow instead, “they quickly return to their cozy nests, where they stay for the remainder of the experiment.”

More here.

Ejaz Haider in The Express Tribune:

The father was killed because he supported a Christian woman. How does that fit in with the article’s thesis that the father hated India (and Pakistan has to hate India and be Muslim) because that religious distinction lies at the core of its ‘other’-isation of India? Or is Pakistan more complex than is hinted in the article?

Aatish’s father did not ‘hate’ India. He was one of those who did much to open up Lahore — to Indians — by using the Basant festival. There is not a single viable political party in Pakistan that does not want to normalise with India. That is a matter of record. But Salmaan Taseer (Aatish’s eye for detail doesn’t inspire much confidence since he gets the spellings of his father’s name wrong), like others, was a proud Pakistani. We don’t need to ‘other’ India to be Pakistanis but neither can we ignore real problems that need to be addressed. Tackling those problems requires mature analysis, not reducing everything to Pakistan’s identity crisis vis-a-vis India.

But what of the Pakistani military, the villains in all this? Since Aatish began with India’s failed GSLV rocket test, let me put in some facts here for him.

The Indian Army, standing at over 1.1 million active-service personnel and 1.8 million reserves, is configured under six area commands (operational) and one army training command (ARTRAC). Three of these area commands — western, northern and southwestern — are totally Pakistan-specific. A fourth, central command, with one corps (1 Corps) is also primarily Pakistan-specific. The Indian Army has 13 corps, out of which eight, including one from the central command, are specific to Pakistan.

More here.

Aatish Taseer in the Wall Street Journal:

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: “Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice.”

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

More here.

It pains me to say this, given that I don’t just admire Bloom, but also find him a surprisingly endearing cultural icon, half Eeyore, half Falstaff. When he’s not going around all sad-eyed and plangent, he’s likely to be complaining that “there live not three good critics unhanged in all America, and one of them is fat, and grows old.” Besieged by ravening hordes of ideologues, Bloom has long proclaimed himself the last champion of aesthetic criticism. When Childe Harold to the Ivory Tower Came, he soon discovered that the barbarians of ideology and political correctness were within the gates. In years past, he duly fretted about “theory” and cultural studies, though more recently he has begun to worry that “visual culture will end imaginative literature.” In one splendid diatribe, Bloom derides the academy’s current flood of “comma counters, ‘cultural’ materialists, new and newer historicists, gender commissars, and all the other academic impostors, mock journalists, inchoate rhapsodes, and good spellers.” Against their advocacy of what he calls “the New Cynicism,” he now argues—like any good Augustinian—that love should be the basis for all worthwhile criticism.

more from Michael Dirda at The American Scholar here.

Ann Wroe’s favourite activity, it seems, is to plunge into the lacunae between myth and reality, history and fable. As she proved by her lively descant on Pontius Pilate (who she dared to suggest might have been born in Britain), she has a flighty capacity to spin webs of words, anchored in myth and anecdote, which supply a bridge between what others have said and what fancy supplies. Both erudite and eclectic, in Orpheus she seems as much at home in Greek myth as she was, several books ago, dealing with life in the Middle Ages in the French city of Rodez, in the Aveyron. Like Dionysus, who shares some of his distracting characteristics (both led people a pretty dance), Orpheus was an alien enchanter. Never quite fully Greek, he was born in bristling Thrace, where his father was said by some to be the king and by others to be a ‘sheep-herder and a lone dweller in the fields’. The lyrical Orpheus was a marginal and, at times, a commanding figure. As keleustes on the voyage of the Argo, he stood by the mast and gave the beat to the rowers, who included the A-list of heroic and semi-divine celebrities (that other hell-raiser Heracles not least of them). When the Argo put in at Lemnos, a flat island populated by fatal women (they had all killed their husbands in an earlier episode), the crew pleasured the dangerous females, but Orpheus refrained. He was literally the guiding spirit in the quest for the Golden Fleece, and his well-timed steersmanship later squeezed the Argo between the clashing rocks of the Symplegades.

more from Frederic Raphael at Literary Review here.

THE LOVE AFFAIR between the intellectuals and the trashmeisters, now more than a hundred years old, has just overtaken the man who is by some measures the most popular painter in America. Thomas Kinkade: The Artist in the Mall is an essay collection that exudes a creepy fascination. While a number of the contributors manage to provide level-headed assessments of Kinkade’s place in the American imagination, I am not remotely convinced that such attention should be lavished on Kinkade’s sugar-drenched Middle America, with its frosted gingerbread domiciles, dew-kissed old-fashioned small-town Main Streets, and farmlands so fertile they look as if they’re on steroids. Alexis L. Boylan, who edited the book, would no doubt protest that the size of Kinkade’s reputation justifies the attention on sociological or cultural grounds, pure and simple. I know that many intellectuals believe we overlook middlebrow tastes at our own risk. But there is a large dose of reverse snobbery threaded through this collection. More than a generation after Pop Art became holy writ, it is rather tiresome to be announcing yet again that we live in a democracy where one person’s treasure is another person’s trailer trash, and that their masterworks are not necessarily inferior to the Picasso’s and Matisse’s in our museums. Many of the contributors to Boylan’s anthology want to devour every last bite of their middlebrow cake, but only after each tasty morsel has been skewered on a highbrow fork. The problem is not that they respect Kincade anthropologically, it is that they respect him as an artist.

more from Jed Perl at TNR here.

Sughra Raza. Port, Cape Town, South Africa. March, 2011.

Digital photograph.

Michael Handelzalts on Witold Gombrowicz's play “Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy” and its new staging, in Ha'aretz:

The situation in Witold Gombrowicz's play “Yvonne, Princess of Burgundy,” written in Poland in 1935, is simple yet challenging: in a small European kingdom of the sort that existed in mid-20th century films, the royal family (king, queen and princess ) admires the sunset, in full view of their subjects.

The prince, on his daily stroll, has suddenly come across a young woman. She is not pretty and does not present herself as a potential princess. Ugly, hard to size up and silent, she is accompanied by an aunt who apologizes for the strangeness of her niece.

The prince, tired of meaningless rounds of courtship, is challenged by the fact that the girl, whose name is Yvonne, radiates nothing in his presence; she is the very embodiment of passivity. It appears that anything may be done with her, and he decides to marry her. Where is it written that the prince must marry a beauty?

What begins as a game and a whim takes on monstrous proportions: Yvonne, in as much as she exists at all, wants nothing, says nothing, plans nothing, and so makes everyone uncomfortable. No one knows how to approach her. After all, there can be no creature which supplies not even a hint of its own significance and its relationship to us.

A.D. Miller in Intelligent Life magazine:

The essential theme of W.G. Sebald’s books is memory: how painful it is to live with, how dangerous it can be to live without it, for both nations and individuals. The narrators of his books—of which “Austerlitz” and the four linked narratives of exile in “The Emigrants” are the most compelling—live in a state of constant reminder. Everything blends into everything else: places, people, their stories and experiences, and above all different times, which seep into each other and blur together, often in long, unmoored passages of reported speech. The narrator of “Vertigo” gives a concise account of this method: “drawing connections between events that lay far apart but which seemed to me to be of the same order”.

Sebald, born in Bavaria in 1944, spent most of his adult life as an academic in Britain. He died in Norfolk in 2001, after having a heart attack at the wheel of his car. He wrote in German, but worked closely with his English translators, Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell. In either language, his voice is mesmeric.

Key decision

To invent his own hybrid form. Sebald’s main works blend travelogue and meditation, fiction with history and myth. They have a narrator who both is and is not Sebald himself: a spectral character who is sensitive, digressive and restless, compulsively peregrinating around Europe and its past.

Strong points

Finding a voice to fit his preoccupations. His sentences are looping, reflexive, moving forward yet endlessly turning back on themselves. By the time he wrote “Austerlitz”, the last book he published before his death, Sebald had more or less dispensed with paragraph breaks altogether. This fluidity creates a feeling, as the character Austerlitz says of his own sense of history, that “time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back after it”—clauses that are themselves part of a much longer, circular sentence. This is a style that tries to unbury the dead through syntax.

A Five Books interview by Eve Gerber:

Finally Christine Stansell’s The Feminist Promise examines the sweep of American women’s history. What can we learn by reading it?

Stansell shows why women’s rights became a central element of modern American liberalism. And she helps us understand how liberalism evolved to embrace individual rights and privacy in the most intimate areas of personal life. That came through the women’s movement. Stansell gives a very good account of how these feminist issues, on the one hand, go very deep back in American history, and, on the other hand, reached a critical mass of popular engagement during the 1960s.

Why did women’s rights become so aligned with the left?

In the 1970s social issues became more important to the Republican Party, and the notion that the women’s movement was a threat to the family and the stability of society became a mantra among conservatives. I think it’s important to remember that it wasn’t always that way. A century ago the movement for women’s suffrage was just as likely to get support from Republicans. Even in the 1960s plenty of conservatives supported legal equality. But today women’s rights are a dividing line between liberalism and conservatism.

Amanda Marcotte in Pandagon:

With all the excitement over the last Harry Potter movie coming out, I thought it would be a fun time to float a thought I've had about the book that often seems to surprise people when I mention it. Even recently I was talking with some folks who were plowing through the books and enjoying them, and when one of them characterized Harry as “nerdy”, I had to take issue.

“Harry isn't a nerd,” I said, “Harry is a jock.” I mean, Harry has an existential crisis that gives him some depth, but social outcast and/or geek he's not. The opposite, in fact.

I realized then that the “band of misfits” theme has so much power over the American imagination (maybe not the British, which could explain Rowling's choices) that people just sort of shove Harry and his friends into that mold, and then rely on a handful of rationalizations for it—Harry wears glasses, Hermione is a bookworm, Ron is a redhead—in order for that theory to make sense. We're used to the X-Men or Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Scooby Gang, so much so that we don't see that Harry's trajectory is the inverse of Buffy's. Buffy is a former cheerleader whose magic powers actually make her a geek and an outcast. Harry is a nobody-special who finds out that he's special, and becomes not just the star athlete and hero of his school, but an actual celebrity. Sure, there's ups and downs, but his trajectory is away from being the outcast and towards being the homecoming king. Which may not be as emotionally satisfying as “my greatness makes me an outcast”, but is probably more realistic. In his world, being a badass is appreciated and he's realistically rewarded in his society for it.

A. Ranganayaki in Open The Magazine:

One morning, two months ago, I read a horrific news report in the Hindustan Times about the rape and subsequent gangrape of an 18-year-old girl in Delhi. She was first raped by her brother’s father-in-law, who had asked her to his home on some familial pretext; she managed to escape him, found a taxi driver in her catatonic state, and asked to be dropped home. Instead, the driver and his companions took her someplace in Dwarka and gangraped her.

It was the use of the word ‘allegedly’ littered throughout the very short report that I first registered. It made me so angry, for some reason. I don’t think the word has been used or drawn my attention as sharply in reports about other crimes. Allegedly. Supposedly. Apparently. Maybe. We’re not sure.

Perhaps it is to do with my own ghosts, perhaps not. Reportage on sexual violence has, in recent years, become far more prevalent; popular, even. The typical ‘progressive’ response to this is one of affirmation, validation; the willingness to talk about it in public. My response was different. My entire being revolted against the ambivalence of the writing, because if anything, its uncertainty made the monstrosity of the act palatable. It gave me the option of feeling a passing horror at the article, and moving on. Then, there were responses from people on Delhi and its total lack of safety. That appalled me too. Is geography central to this story? I don’t believe it is. Relevant as an aside perhaps, nothing more. The cab driver and his mates raped her again. Because she told them what happened? Because she was already a tainted, violated body? Did it excite them?

Sexual violence and abuse are primal and unspeakable. It is far more comfortable to denounce them in terms of morality, emotionality and religiosity than to actually engage with them. They defy historicity, context and the narratives of modernisation. They are liminal, suspended, beyond the reach of articulation. Predicated upon cornerstones of morality, anything remotely related to sexuality is always exciting press, but it’s a fine line—you don’t want to offend sensibilities. People ask me if talking about experiences of rape, abuse and violence help “get over” it. “Is it somehow therapeutic?” they enquire sweetly and cluelessly. No, I tell them. You never “get over” violence. The experience of violence is always constitutive of our beings, our identities and sexualities. The reason I speak is because I can; because I want to; because it affords some navigability through a maelstrom which holds no “rationale”, escape or solace.

To follow up Julia Galef on the fallacy of difference in art, Samuel McNerney on confirmation bias in art, in Scientific American:

If we are defining confirmation bias as a tendency to favor information that confirms our previously held beliefs, it strikes me as ironic to think that it is almost exclusively discussed as a hindrance to knowledge and better decision-making, or as an aid to argumentation and persuasion as reinforced by Mercier and Sperber. With such a broad definition, I think it also explains our aesthetic judgments. That is, just as we only look for what confirms our scientific hypotheses and personal decisions, we likewise only listen to music and observe art that confirms our preconceived notions of good and bad aesthetics. Put differently, confirmation bias influences our aesthetic judgments just as it does any other judgment.

Let's observe music, a popular topic in the psychology world. One of the common themes to emerge from the literature is the importance of patterns, expectations, and resolutions. Many authors argue that enjoyable music establishes a known pattern, creates expectations, and resolves the expectations in a predictable way. As neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music explains, “as music unfolds, the brain constantly updates its estimates of when new beats will occur, and takes satisfaction in matching a mental beat with a real-in-the-world one.” This is one reason we repeatedly listen to the same songs and bands, we know exactly what we are going to get, and love it when they fulfill our preconceived expectations.

In this light, the relationship between confirmation bias and music is clear. In the same way that we decide to watch Fox or MSNBC, we decide to listen to Lady Gaga or The Beatles. In either case, our brains are latching onto patterns and getting pleasure from accurately predicting what comes next. Here is the key: your brain doesn’t “know” the difference between Glen Beck and Paul McCartney, but it does know, and it does care about confirming each in the context of their work: McCartney sings the chorus to “She Loves You,” while Beck reams Obama's latest political move. In other words, its predictions don't discriminate between different mediums; it just wants its expectations to be fulfilled. So ask yourself this: is there really any difference between a Beatles concert and a Glen Beck rally? Are people not just going to these events to have their opinions confirmed?

Katrina Onstad in the NYT Magazine:

Miranda July stood in her living room in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, apologizing for the sunflowers. It really was a copious amount of sunflowers.

They sprouted from Mason jars and vases, punctuating the austere, Shaker-like furniture in the sunny home that July, who is 37, shares with her husband, the filmmaker Mike Mills, who’s 45. Noticing me noticing the sunflowers, she interjected: “We just had a party. We don’t usually have sunflowers everywhere.”

In person, July was very still, with ringlets of curly hair falling over her wide blue eyes like a protective visor, and she seemed perceptively aware of the “precious” label that is often attached both to her and to her work. At a different point in our time together, I followed her into a hotel room in San Francisco, where Mills had left her a knitted octopus wearing a scarf and hat on the couch. She laughed when she saw it but also appeared a bit mortified: “Oh, God,” she said. “It’s kind of a joke. . . . It’s not. . . . Really, this isn’t us at all.”

At their house, Mills emerged from his office; in contrast to July’s measured composure, Mills seemed in constant motion, often running his hands through his Beethoven hair. Both he and July have directed new films being released this summer. His film, “Beginners,” is loosely based on the true story of his father’s coming out at age 75. July’s film, “The Future,” is her second feature as a director, and it’s a funny, sad portrait of a couple at a crossroads. Sophie, played by July, works at a children’s dance school, and Jason, played by Hamish Linklater, provides tech-support by telephone from their sofa. The couple is weeks away from adopting Paw-Paw, an injured cat and a symbol of impending adulthood who is also the film’s narrator. A talking cat is exactly the kind of detail that might endear people who are endeared by Miranda July and infuriate people who are infuriated by her. There are plenty of both.