How The Other Half Files Its Teeth

Turns out the whole time I was on the wrong veranda,
the wrong island, with the wrong crew,
swamped by low grade talk about high grade bonds.
The porch steps swarmed with Italian leather.
A band of natives navigated the lawn in bare feet
so as not to disturb the plantings.

A splinter had announced itself to my palm
and I worked with nearly biblical stoicism
to dislodge it. An overweight mime appeared
and, without glancing up or speaking a word,
ate a heaping plate of tangible pasta, then left.
A congressman juggled chainsaws until the burnt
gasoline became an irritant and he was bullied back
to his yacht. A set of unicyclists in leathers
rode past, making infantile frowns.

Meanwhile, the splinter. I went indoors
seeking implements, iodine, a liquor chest,
& found myself before a phalanx of photoed
and portraitured family that to me meant squat.
Fireworks came to fruition at the window,
on a nearby island, and it occurred to me—
my island, my pyrotechnics lay elsewhere.

This has happened before, when I, carting
letters from the mailroom, am stopped
by a pinstriped suit with a topknot of grayish hair.
The suit smells of currency and wears on its wrist
a timepiece that mocks me with its accents.
I am asked to golf or to a cigar-smoking fete.
I stand there producing the face of a spearfish
lying dockside, an expression mainly
taken for yes. Then the inevitable clap on the back,
the click of the roulette trigger.

by Dan Pinkerton
from The Boston Review
November/December 2010

Pankhaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Last month in Kuala Lumpur I met the Malaysian politician Nurul Izzah Anwar. Just 30 years old, and formidably well-educated, Nurul Izzah is an MP as well as the mother of two children. Thrown into the political fray by the persecution of her father – Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia's former deputy prime minister – Nurul Izzah has risen rapidly within the opposition People's Justice party. Admiring glances and whispers from other diners bounced off our table at a fusion restaurant in the smart suburb of Damansara Heights as she spoke frankly and persuasively about Malaysia's frustratingly racial politics, its restless youth population, the changing role of Islam, and the country's foreign relations.

Towards the end of our conversation, she said: “You haven't asked me the big question.” Puzzled, I asked: “About what?” Laughing, she replied: “Many western journalists only want to know why I wear a headscarf.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

With all of the New Year's diet ads claiming you can lose dozens of pounds in seemingly as many days, you probably are not alone if you looked in the mirror this morning and saw a less than ideal body. Or maybe you just picked up a new magazine in which already thin models have their remaining flesh scavenged by Photoshop to make them appear even slimmer. With all of these unrealistic promises and images, it can be hard to gain an accurate sense of one's own body. But the disjunction for some people might go deeper than manipulated photos.

A new study shows that the way people perceive their external appearance is likely linked to how they experience their bodies internally. Researchers found that people who had greater difficulties sensing their own internal bodily states were also more likely to be fooled into believing a rubber hand was part of their own bodies. These results, published online in the January 5 issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, may one day help scientists understand how body image can become so distorted in disorders like body dysmorphia and anorexia nervosa, says lead author Manos Tsakiris of Royal Holloway, University of London.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Never before has the general public had access to such an array of tools by which they can pre-sort the entirety of the world's cultural production along the lines of what they already like and dislike. Let us put aside whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. It has elements both of goodness and badness, as do all such sweeping changes. What it surely does, however, is to further isolate the poor critic. The authority of the critic is diminished to near zero when, with the touch of a button, anyone can find out what millions of people with tastes just like them already feel about artist X. For what purpose is the lonely judgment of our critic, our petulant voice from a lost time? She is, increasingly, a voice shouting in the wilderness, except that the wilderness is fully peopled, the wilderness is cacophonous with voices that utterly drown her out, our little critic from another age.

Some lament this situation; they rail against the coming darkness. That is a legitimate option. Others, though, take a different approach. They face the oblivion with joy, knowing that with death comes freedom. Some critics seem to know instinctively, to feel it in their very critical bones, that the death of the critic-as-authority is the birth of another kind of criticism.

I call that other kind of criticism, the kind that doesn't rely on authority and judgment, Romantic criticism. I call it that because of what I learned, long ago, from that melancholic and suicidal German, Walter Benjamin. Early in his career, Benjamin wrote a typically esoteric and maddeningly impenetrable essay called “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism.” There is much in that essay that I take to be wrong. There is something in it that I suspect to be crazy. But there is an important idea in it, too, an idea that took its first form in the ramblings of men like Friedrich Schlegel and the poet Novalis. The idea is that criticism does not stand outside the work of art, but stands alongside, maybe even inside, the work of art, participating in the work in order to further express and tease out what the artist already put there. In this theory of criticism, we don't need the critic to tell us what is good or bad, to tell us what to like and dislike. We need the critic, instead, to help us experience. We need the critic in the way that we need a friend or a lover. We need the critic as a companion on a journey that is a love affair with the things of the world. Benjamin once referred to this form of criticism as “the first form of criticism that refuses to judge.” The primary virtue of this kind of criticism is its inherent generosity. It wants to make experience bigger, it wants to make each work of art as rich as it can possibly be. Its sole medium, as Benjamin put it, is “the life, the ongoing life, of the works themselves.”

Just this Sunday past, the New York Times—that venerable institution of public record — put out an edition of its Sunday books section with the stated purpose of figuring out the current state of criticism. They asked six critics (Stephen Burn, Katie Roiphe, Pankaj Mishra, Adam Kirsch, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman) to weigh in on the matter. I found it particularly pleasing, moving even, to note that a Benjaminian attitude, consciously or less so, is alive and well in most of the responses (even if such an attitude is rarely to be found at a books section in which the “thumbs up, thumbs down” school of criticism is by far the majority voice).

Alasdair Wilkins in io9:

We're still waiting on analyses of the dead birds that will solve the mystery, but there are already several theories to account for the deaths. So far all we know for sure is that the Arkansas birds showed signs of blunt-force trauma, although it's possible that was just caused by slamming into the ground.

Weather could be the culprit. High-altitude hail or lightning might have hit the birds, which caused them to fall from the sky. Arkansas Game and Fish Commission ornithologist Karen Rowe says a severe weather system did move through Arkansas on New Year's Eve, so it's not impossible. The only problem is the birds don't seem to have any of the telltale bruises or injuries that a weather-related explanation would cause.

Thankfully, we can probably rule out disease and toxins. Arkansas experts say a disease would take down a lot more than just one isolated flock – and no, the second group of dead birds in Louisiana isn't enough to make disease seem like a viable possibility. The same thinking goes for poisoning – if that were the case, birds would be falling all over Arkansas, and that just isn't the case. The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality tested the area for any air toxins, but the skies are officially clean.

One thing to remember is what day and time the incident occurred: near midnight on New Year's Eve.

Jed Perl in TNR:

I am besotted with a new book that is also an old book. This is The H.D. Book, by Robert Duncan, a wild, dazzling, idiosyncratic magnum opus that the poet composed between 1959 and 1964 and that is only now being published in its complete form, by the University of California Press. What began with a request for a brief birthday homage to the American poet known as H.D.—she had been born Hilda Doolittle—morphed into one of the greatest of all meditations on the nature not only of modern poetry but of the modern artistic imagination in its bewitching complexity. Art, Duncan exclaims, makes “what is not actual real.” I am glad to be reading Duncan’s text as we head into 2011—the second decade of the century after the modern century. There is no nostalgia in The H.D. Book. Duncan’s modernism is at once lofty, optimistic, activist, and open-minded. Published a half-century after it was written, The H.D. Book reads like a clarion call. At a time such as ours, when artists are either embattled or co-opted, either locked away in some ivory tower of their own invention or overtaken by market forces and political forces, Duncan argues for the most strenuous artistic ambitions as a dynamic democratic possibility.

In The H.D. Book the great enemy is T.S. Eliot. Although Duncan cannot but admire The Waste Land, he will never forgive Eliot for being so quick to isolate tradition from the present, for giving art, as Duncan puts it, “a histrionic remove.” While Duncan welcomes all the difficulties and obscurities of modern art, he sees them as inextricably related to the pluralism of modern experience. This, I believe, could be Duncan’s great contribution to the arguments that are going on in the art world and the literary world right now.

Omar Waraich in The Independent:

“Who the hell are these illiterate maulvis to decide whether I'm a Muslim or not?” Salmaan Taseer asked me, a month before he was brutally assassinated outside his Islamabad home by his own bodyguard. Taseer, the governor of Punjab, never shrank from speaking out.

When Asia Bibi, the Christian woman accused of blasphemy, was sentenced to death, he was the first to visit her in prison and call for her release, earning fatwas against his life.He was also an usual politician. The son of a poet, Taseer was a rare example of a self-made man who first succeeded in becoming one of the country's wealthiest businessmen and, later, one of its most high-profile politicians.Having endured torture and solitary confinement under the military dictatorship of Gen Zia-ul-Haq in the grim 1980s for supporting Benazir Bhutto, he said he had decided that Pakistan could not afford to suffer under religious hardliners.”You have to have zero tolerance when it comes to militancy,” I recall him insisting time and again. He was constantly frustrated by the state's failure to prosecute those responsible. “When they went after the mafia in Italy,” he said, “the prosecutor, the judge, and witnesses all wore a mask. You can't just wish them away.”It was hardly a popular position to uphold. When two Ahmadi mosques were attacked by terrorists last May, killing over 100 worshippers, he was savaged by the religious right and its supporters in the local media for expressing solidarity.

More here.

Yesterday, I wrote about the latest flap over Mark Twain’s use of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn. NYC Councilman Charles Barron apparently thinks the book should be banned: “I find it interesting that Huckleberry Finn is a classic when it says [the n-word] 200 times,” he said. Barron is not alone in his reservations. Poet and professor Sam Gwynn made this comment on yesterday’s post: “Frankly, I just can’t teach it any longer. I know it’s great, and I can lecture for a day or so about how Twain is being faithful to the dialects and to the way that people spoke back then. But trying to lecture about its literary merits takes a back seat when I see how African American students (I’m talking about teenage sophomores, taking the class for core credit) are reacting to the iterations of THAT WORD. The problem is that Twain doesn’t distinguish between those who are using the word in a “kindly” manner (we could probably assume that this is the only word for black people that Huck has ever heard) and those who are using it an an epithet. Used indiscriminately in these ways, it just makes everyone in a classroom uncomfortable. Maybe if I were a better (or younger) teacher I could use this book to challenge all kinds of assumptions about language and art. I just don’t find myself up to the fight anymore, at least at the sophomore level. I think this is a pretty good 2/3 of a novel, but I really wonder why it has become canonized as the GAN.” [That’s the Great American Novel for the uninitiated.]

more from Cynthia Haven at Book Haven here.

Giacomo Leopardi may be the most erudite, philosophically astute, and linguistically refined poet you’ve never heard of. Part of the blame lies in Leopardi’s historically inclined vocabulary and style, which draw heavily on Greco-Roman authors ranging from Theocritus to Virgil as well as early Italian masters, especially the fourteenth-century Tuscan poet who was the preeminent model for Renaissance lyric, Francis Petrarch. But Leopardi was no antiquarian: His synthesis of past literary forms and experimental poetics makes his work a daunting mix of erudition and inventiveness. It would be an oversimplification to call Leopardi’s language Italian, because, like Italy itself, such a thing did not yet exist in his brief lifetime (1798–1837). Italian unification, and with it the standardization of the national tongue, didn’t occur until the 1860s. He would never see the official Italy whose cause absorbed a great deal of his career. Leopardi’s nearly “inexhaustible energies,” as Jonathan Galassi describes them in the introduction to his new translation of the Canti, fueled such projects as a massive philosophical notebook called the Zibaldone, a series of operette morali (moral tales) on issues ranging from the necessity of illusion to the nature of literary fame, and seminal essays on Italian Romanticism and the character and customs of the Italians. But it was his poetry that earned Leopardi immortality in Italy—a Janus-faced poetry that presents the translator a grim set of challenges.

more from Joseph Luzzi at Bookforum here.

One of the most striking things separating the United States and Canada is the line that divides the United States from Canada. While oceans, lakes, rivers, drainage basins, deserts, mountain ranges, and valleys dictate the size and shape of many nations, the pin-straight border running from Lake of the Woods to the Pacific Ocean is nothing if not completely and utterly arbitrary. The western half of the world’s longest land border was laid down in three stages: In 1783, an understandably cocksure Benjamin Franklin won British acceptance of a border extending from the “northwesternmost point” of Lake of the Woods to the Boundary Waters laid out in the Treaty of Paris, the denouement of the United States’ fight for independence. This border would have made much more sense if the source of the Mississippi River had been where both parties suspected, but then it was a botanist, not a professional cartographer, who had created the map negotiators were working from. In the aftermath of the second, wholly less conclusive war with Britain (the War of 1812), the forty-ninth parallel was established in the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 as the border between Lake of the Woods and the Stony [Rocky] Mountains. In this agreement, the point identified by Franklin was linked to the slightly more southerly forty-ninth parallel by a north-south line that would later form the boundary between present-day Manitoba and Ontario.

more from Grant Stoddard at The Walrus here.

The luminous, gentle tone of these passages is central to Inoue’s art. Leon Picon, in his 1965 introduction to The Counter­feiter and Other Stories, says that “human pathos and suffering, loneliness and isolation, oriental fatalism and Buddhistic concepts of predestination form dominant strands in the fabric of virtually all of the writing of Yasushi Inoue,” and while I can’t exactly disagree, I am certainly dissatisfied with the dated cliches, and suspicious of the capitalized Orientalisms on display here. The note in The Sh̄wa Anthology is surely closer to the center of the truth, characterizing Inoue’s work as “the examination of the faintest ripples of cultural interchange between Japan and the outside world, ripples often created by lonely individuals who remain essentially nameless and faceless in the annals of official history.” I would say—aware that my own reflections will no doubt seem time bound and off-key in a few decades, not to mention the centuries that are Inoue’s usual time scale—that Inoue’s great theme, spanning his historical, contemporary, and autobiographical works, is how the life you lead is not your real life. What we think of as our personal struggles—our decisions, desires, deliberations, the choices we make and the things we do—are less real, less to be trusted, and perhaps ultimately less important than the wider forces of historical destiny or the cultural past or the way we started to feel as a child, or simply the fact that other people are not who we think they are, and nor are we.

more from Damion Searls at The Quarterly Conversation here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Express Tribune:

My green passport requires standing in a separate immigration line once my plane lands at Boston’s Logan airport. The ‘special attention’ from Homeland Security, although polite, adds an extra two to three hours. I belong to the fortunate few who can get a visa, but I am still annoyed. Having travelled to the US frequently for forty years, I now find a country that once warmly welcomed Pakistanis to be strangely cold. The reason is clear.

Foreigners carrying strong negative feelings — or perhaps harmful intentions — are unlikely to find enthusiastic hosts. I know that the man who tried to bomb Times Square, Faisal Shahzad, a graduate of the University of Bridgeport, is my compatriot. So is Aafia Siddiqui, our new-found dukhtur-e-millat (daughter of the nation). Another Pakistani, Farooque Ahmed, with a degree from the College of Staten Island, made headline news in November 2010 after his abortive attempt to blow up DC Metro trains.

If such violent individuals were rarities, their nationality would matter little. But their actions receive little or no criticism in a country consumed by bitter anti-Americanism, which now exceeds its anti-Indianism.

Example: after the Faisal Shahzad news broke in early May 2010, TV channels in Pakistan switched to denial mode. Popular anchors freely alleged conspiracies against Islam and Pakistan. None revisited their claims after Shahzad proudly pleaded guilty in June. Calling himself a “Muslim soldier”, he read a prepared statement: “It’s a war … I’m going to plead guilty a hundred times over”.

More here.

—an excerpt from
A Herbal

What was better then

Than to crush a leaf or a herb
between your palms,

Then wave it slowly, soothingly
Past your mouth and nose

And breathe?

*

If you know a bit
About the universe

It's because you've taken it in
Like that,

Looked as hard
As you look into yourself,

Into the rat hole,
Through the vetch and dock
That mantled it.

Because you've laid your cheek
Against the rush clump

And known soft stone to break
On the quarry floor.

*

Between heather and marigold,
Between sphagnum and buttercup,
Between dandelion and broom,
Between forget-me-not and honeysuckle,

As between clear blue and cloud,
Between haystack and sunset sky,
Between oak tree and slated roof

I had my existence. I was there.
Me in place and the place in me.

*

Where can it be found again,
An elsewhere world, beyond

Maps and atlases,
Where all is woven into

And of itself, like a nest
Of crosshatched grass blades?

by Seamus Heaney
from Human Chain
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

From PhysOrg:

Over at the Minneapolis Fed's The Region (via brainiac):

After listening to Yale finance economist Gary Gorton deliver a talk on “shadow banking” and the recent financial crisis, Randy Wright, a brilliant monetary theorist, was both perplexed and intrigued. Region readers may well have the same reaction after dipping into the following interview with Gorton.

Shadow banking—the intricate web of financial arrangements and techniques that developed symbiotically with the traditional, regulated banking system over the past 30 or so years—is territory Gorton has studied for decades, but it (and he) have been largely on the periphery of mainstream economics and policy.

That all changed in mid-2007, when panic broke out in the subprime mortgage market and financial institutions that support it. Expressions like “collateralized debt obligation” and “repo haircut” escaped the confines of Wall Street and business schools, and began to fill the airwaves. We’re still struggling to come to terms—and few are in a better position to help than Gorton…

Region: Why don’t we begin with some background on so-called shadow banking—the factors behind its enormous growth, and then its collapse during the financial crisis? Do you prefer a different term? You use “securitized banking” in some of your papers.

Gary Gorton: The term shadow banking has acquired a pejorative connotation, and I’m not sure that’s really deserved. So let me provide some context for banking in general.

Banking evolves, and it evolves because the economy changes. There’s innovation and growth, and shadow banking is only the latest natural development of banking. It happened over a 30-year period. It’s part of a number of other changes in the economy. And let me give even a little more context, historical context. I want to convince you that shadow banking is not a new phenomenon, in a sense—that we have had previous “shadow banking” systems in the past—and that there is an important structure to bank debt that makes it vulnerable to panic. So, the crisis is not a special, one-time event, but something that has been repeated throughout U.S. history.

Before the Civil War, banking involved issuing private money—that is, banks issued their own currency or bank notes. And this system worked in the way economists would expect it to work. The private bank money did not trade at par when it circulated any significant distance from the issuing bank. Instead, it was subject to a discount, so that a bank note issued by a New Haven bank as a $10 note might only be worth $9.50 at a store in New York City, for example.

Such discounts from par reflected the risk that the issuing bank might not have the $10—redeemable in gold or silver coins—by the time the holder took the note back to New Haven from New York. The discounts from par were established in local markets. But you can see the problem of trying to buy your lunch when the cook has to figure out the discount. It was simply hard to buy and sell things in such a world.

Nathan Englander and Zadie Smith in conversation over at Guernica:

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Nathan Englander talks with Zadie Smith at the Matawi Fundraiser from Guernica Magazine on Vimeo.

Matt Kaplan in Nature News:

A few psychologists have explored the psychology of climate-change belief, with some work revealing that climate scepticism relates to peoples' tendency to defend the status quo, but little else has been done. “We saw a giant hole in the literature when it came to looking at psychological responses to global-warming messages,” says Feinberg.

So Feinberg and his colleague Robb Willer, also at Berkeley, asked 45 online participants spread across 15 cities in the United States to engage in what was ostensibly a sentence-unscrambling activity.

Half of the volunteers were asked to unscramble sentences such as “Somehow justice will always prevail”, whereas the others were given sentences such as “Often, justice will not prevail”. This activity primed them to have either a strong or weak belief in a just world. The participants then completed a survey that measured their scepticism over climate change, asking questions such as “How solid is the evidence that the earth is warming?” and requiring participants to rate their answers on a six-point scale, in which six was not at all solid and one very solid.

Next, participants watched two short global-warming warning videos created by the Environmental Defense Fund, a charity based in New York that campaigns on green issues. The first showed a train speeding towards a small girl as a metaphor for the impending catastrophe that awaits the world's children (see video). The second showed anxious children verbally simulating a clock ticking while describing the climate devastation that is coming (see video). After watching, participants again had their degree of scepticism over climate change measured. They were also asked to rate how willing they were to take action to reduce their carbon footprints.

Off-target?

Feinberg and Willer found that participants primed to have a stronger belief in a just world reported levels of scepticism that were 29% higher, and a willingness to reduce their carbon footprint that was 21% lower, than those primed to see the world as an unjust place.

Ellen Barry and Sophia Kishkovsky in the NYT:

A couple of months ago one of Russia’s elder statesmen set out on a paradoxical mission: to rehabilitate one of the most beloved figures in Russian history, Tolstoy.

This would have seemed unnecessary in 2010, a century after the author’s death. But last year Russians wrestled over Tolstoy much as they did when he was alive. Intellectuals accused the Russian Orthodox Church of blacklisting a national hero. The church accused Tolstoy of helping speed the rise of the Bolsheviks. The melodrama of his last days, when he fled his family estate to take up the life of an ascetic, was revived in all its pulpy detail, like some kind of early-stage reality television.

And in a country that rarely passes up a public celebration, the anniversary of his death, on Nov. 20, 1910, was not commemorated by noisy galas or government-financed cinematic blockbusters. Officially speaking, it was barely noted at all.

With this in mind Sergei V. Stepashin, a former prime minister here, sat down to write to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has become an arbiter of politics and culture. In painstakingly diplomatic language, acknowledging “the particular sensitivity” of “this delicate theme,” Mr. Stepashin asked forgiveness on behalf of Tolstoy, who was excommunicated 110 years ago.

The impulse had swelled up during a lonely visit to an unmarked mound of earth where Tolstoy is buried. Mr. Stepashin described the visit — made while he was director of the Federal Security Service, successor to the K.G.B. — as an emotional experience that he has never been able to shake off.

“You look at the house where he lived and worked, where he created his works, and then you come to a place where there is nothing but this small hill,” said Mr. Stepashin, who has close ties to the church. “It was puzzling, on a human and a moral plane. And then I decided to write this letter.”

Ambivalence toward Tolstoy is new in Russia.

It is an irony of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity that it finds the definition of ambiguity itself somewhat elusive. That title makes it sound like the author already knows what he’s looking for, but Empson figures out what he means by the term as he goes along. In the revised edition, he starts with this: “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.” (The first edition defines ambiguity in the negative, relative to prose.) Already in that phrase “alternative reactions” there is enough room to drive a truck through. Interestingly, though, in laying store by the way real readers respond or could respond, and not by self-contained features of the text, Empson skews toward the empirical, communal, and provisional, and away from the purely analytical. For one of the core books of the New Criticism, this is an out-of-character approach. I wondered briefly why Empson did not do the opposite and identify instances of passages giving no room for alternative reactions, as on the face of it this would seem to allow for more definiteness. When I tried to identify a few such instances, the answer became evident quickly: in order to show the presence of ambiguity under his definition, it is enough to give two or more readings for a passage. In order to show the presence of clarity, you have to supply the reading and show that no other readings exist. Since this task is practically impossible, clarity seems doomed to be a comparatively wishy-washy concept. Literature has played a trick on us: clarity is murky, and ambiguity is clear. But clarity’s virtues are so taken for granted that the question of how those virtues might be demonstrable seems like it ought to be within reach.

more from D. H. Tracy at Poetry here.