Rosemarie Fiore. Fireworks Drawing # 26. 2009.

Lit firework residue on Fabriano paper.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

More here, here and here.

By Aditya Dev Sood with photographs by Nita Soans Sood

My knees are spread wide, my arms loose and ready, back supple and straight. Walls of green moss on black stone, flurries of fern and plant, the waving arms of trees fly by on the right. Sheets of terraced paddy step carefully down and into the ravine on the left, giving way to distant valleys, lake, and mountain. My mind is alert but high, this is not a normal kind of wakefulness, not a dream, and not slumber. It is a different, fourth kind of consciousness, a flow state, a murmuring of interior thoughts that I seem to be pulling in and out of, pitched to the drone of the bike, the winding of the road.

Nita and I had imagined this road trip through Bali a couple of years ago, the last time we were here. Then we were weighed down with luggage and hotel bookings and yearned to be able to be able to just ride out and find ourselves in a new part of the island whenever we wanted. This time, we’ve got one rucksack, now between my knees, and a smaller backpack, slung from the handlebars, and Nita has her camera bag under one arm, and we’re off and about, on the road in Bali.

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Sam Anderson on the issue, in the NYT:

I tend to shy away from big, sweeping, era-defining statements. It’s the fastest possible way to be wrong about the world, and usually just an excuse for various forms of sloppy thinking: cherry-picking, scapegoating, doomsaying, fear-mongering, sandbagging, arm-twisting, wool-gathering, leg-pulling. And yet it would be hard to dispute that over the last 5 or 10 years, the culture’s relationship to time has changed pretty drastically. The shift is so obvious that it’s boring, by now, even to name the culprits: Google, blogs, texting, tweets, iPhones, Facebook — a little army of tools that have given rise to (and grown out of) radically new habits of attention. Many of us are now addicted, on the dopamine-receptor level, to a moment-by-moment experience of life that’s defined by a behavior sometimes referred to as “time slicing”: jumping every few seconds between devices or windows or tabs, constantly swiveling the periscope of our attention around and around the horizon to see where the latest relevant data-burst might come from.

Whether this shift is good or bad or neutral is a cripplingly complex question, and very hard to discuss without falling into clichés about the Death of Literature and the Extinction of Humanity and How Google Is Stealing Everybody’s Grandmother’s Favorite Jewelry. (It helps to remember, when you start having these thoughts, that every era in the history of humanity has lamented the rise of whatever technology it happened to see the rise of.)

What we can say, for sure, is that sustained exposure to the Internet is changing the way many readers process the written word. Texts are shorter and more flagrantly interconnected, with all kinds of secret passageways running into and out of one another. This has already changed the way we produce, read, share and digest our writing. Inevitably, it will also redefine what it means to practice book criticism, at least for those of us who aspire to write for something like a general audience.

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[H/t: Moshe Behar]

more of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s amazing photographs at The Guardian here.

Sonnet 87
William Shakespeare

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.

For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.

Thyself thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgment making.

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter—
In sleep, a king; but waking, no such matter.

From The New York Times:

Caryl Rusbult, a researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam who died last January, called it the “Michelangelo effect,” referring to the manner in which close partners “sculpt” each other in ways that help each of them attain valued goals. Dr. Aron and Gary W. Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth University in New Jersey, have studied how individuals use a relationship to accumulate knowledge and experiences, a process called “self-expansion.” Research shows that the more self-expansion people experience from their partner, the more committed and satisfied they are in the relationship.

To measure this, Dr. Lewandowski developed a series of questions for couples: How much has being with your partner resulted in your learning new things? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? (Take the full quiz measuring self-expansion.) While the notion of self-expansion may sound inherently self-serving, it can lead to stronger, more sustainable relationships, Dr. Lewandowski says. “If you’re seeking self-growth and obtain it from your partner, then that puts your partner in a pretty important position,” he explains. “And being able to help your partner’s self-expansion would be pretty pleasing to yourself.”

More here.

From Slate:

Human rights—the notion that the protection of the immutable rights and freedoms of every individual on the planet supersedes all other concerns—did not always enjoy this prominent place in our political debate. Most historians have located the ideology's origins in previous eras, from the ancient Greeks and Hebrews to the Enlightenment to post-World War II. In his erudite new book, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Samuel Moyn proposes a more recent source. He argues that it was only in the 1970s, when other utopian ideologies—socialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-communism—fell by the wayside that human rights assumed its stature as the ultimate moral arbiter of international conduct.

As Moyn tells it, human rights might trace its philosophical lineage to earlier times—few ideas emerge from the intellectual womb as orphans—but its dominant role was not assured until a particular point in time. He takes issue most forcefully with the belief that human rights' ascension was an answer to the extermination of European Jewry. “Contrary to conventional assumptions, there was no widespread Holocaust consciousness in the postwar era, so human rights could not have been a response to it,” he writes.

More here.

If, as William Carlos Williams wrote, “The pure products of America / go crazy,” where does that leave Tim Burton, a pure product not just of America but also of Southern California, land’s end of our national phantasmagoria? Hollywood, maybe, where Burton — born in Burbank, raised on TV and the films of Ray Harryhausen, educated at the California Institute of the Arts — landed in the late 1970s. Or London, where he now lives with the actress Helena Bonham Carter and their two kids. Really, though, the landscape Burton occupies is one of the imagination, a territory marked by whimsy and darkness, in which the visuals are the main event. “My background is animation,” he says by phone from his home in England. “Early on, I was essentially a nonverbal person.” Even now, the director of “Beetle Juice,” “Batman,” “Corpse Bride” and “Edward Scissorhands” seems not completely comfortable in conversation; he pauses, backtracks, like someone speaking in a second language, as he discusses “The Art of Tim Burton,” a lavish art book featuring more than 1,000 images, some of which go back to childhood.

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

Three years ago, Cynthia Ozick published an essay in Harper’s Magazine lamenting the decline of criticism, which she argued was impoverishing literature itself. Without the “consciousness that only a critical infrastructure can supply,” Ozick wrote, readers and writers are doomed to talk at cross-purposes, or at random; it takes a corps of influential critics to unite individual reactions into a common discussion. Indeed, this excellent novelist and excellent critic concluded, “Superior criticism not only unifies and interprets a literary culture but has the power to imagine it into being.” To see what we are missing, all we have to do is contrast our own moment with the postwar decades “when Lionel Trilling prevailed at Columbia,” and “Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin enlivened the magazines.” There is a grim comedy, then, in turning to Kazin’s essay about criticism — written in 1960, when Ozick’s giants walked upon the earth — and reading about “the absence of echo to our work, the uncertainty of response, the confusion of basic terms in which we deal.” It seems to be a case of “the worst is not / So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’ ” What looked to Kazin like a dwindling, fissiparous literary culture looks to us like a golden age. (As yet another great critic, Randall Jarrell, once said, in a golden age people go around complaining about how yellow everything looks.)

more from Adam Kirsch at the NYT here.

In the New Statesman:

The King James Bible occupies nearly 42 pages of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, only narrowly beaten by Shakespeare, with 45. Not just literature in the high sense but everyday speech is laced, suffused – riddled, even – with biblical phrases the status of which ranges from telling quotation (“They have sown the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind”) to cliché (“No peace for the wicked”) and all points between. A word in season and perhaps we can see eye to eye. Although I wouldn't call the Bible my ewe lamb, and I would have to go the extra mile before I killed the fatted calf for it, you don't need the wisdom of Solomon to see how biblical imagery dominates our English. If my words fall on stony ground – if you pass me by as a voice crying in the wilderness – be sure your sin will find you out. Between us there is a great gulf fixed and you are a thorn in my flesh. We have come to the parting of the ways. I fear it is a sign of the times.

It has to be the King James version, of course. Modern translations break the spell as surely as a sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. Listen to this, if you can bear to, from the Good News Bible, whose clunking title matches its style:

It is useless, useless, said the Philosopher. Life is useless, all useless./You spend your life working, labouring, and what do you have to show for it? Generations come and generations go, but the world stays just the same.

Older readers might hear the voice of Tony Hancock. Or is it Victor Meldrew? Anyway, now here's the real thing:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity./What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?/One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

Real thing? Well, let me not emulate that notorious slogan against the teaching of Spanish in Texas schools: “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for the children of Texas.” Hebrew, alas, is a sealed book to me (yes, that's another one: Isaiah 29:11), but I have it on respected authority that Ecclesiastes, at least, is pretty damn good poetry in the original. If so, it certainly doesn't make it through the Good News mangling. But I shall argue that poetry can gain in translation, and I believe this may have been achieved with the King James Bible.

Aloysius Siow interviewed by Romesh Vaitilingam in Vox EU:

Menopause – or post-reproductive survival – is rare among mammals and, from an evolutionary perspective, anomalous since it reduces consumption for current offspring without producing future offspring. Aloysius Siow of the University of Toronto talks to Romesh Vaitilingam about his theory of menopause, which is based on the fact that, unlike other mammals, humans understand the reproductive process. The interview was recorded at the Centre for Market and Public Organisation in Bristol in October 2010.

Listen here

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Richard Van Noorden, Heidi Ledford and Adam Mann in Nature:

Nature looks at key findings and events that could emerge from the research world in 2011.

The Eemian revealed The North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project reached bedrock in July 2010, at a depth of more than 2,500 metres. The fruits of that effort should soon be seen, now that researchers are analysing gas and particles trapped inside the ice core to reveal details of the climate of the Eemian interglacial period (130,000–115,000 years ago), when the average global temperature was about 5°C warmer than today.

GWAS prove their worth Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have uncovered plenty of links between diseases and particular regions of the genome, but frustratingly haven't revealed much about the biochemistry behind these associations. In 2011, expect to see real mechanistic insights explaining how genes, and non-coding regions, affect the medical conditions they have been linked with. Metabolism, obesity and diabetes are among the hottest targets.

Anand Giridharadas in the NYT:

I came to Umred to write about a riot. A few months earlier, power blackouts that rural Indians always suffered silently triggered a violent reaction. Why? Umred was just another small town in the middle of nowhere, dusty and underwhelming. But Umred had begun to dream, townspeople told me, because of television, because of cousins with tales of call-center jobs and freedom in the city. Once Umred contracted ambition, blackouts became intolerable. A psychological revolution, a revolution in expectations, had taken place.

“Electricity is essential to ambition,” an energetic young man named Ravindra Misal explained to me, “because I need it to do my homework, I need it to listen to music if I am a dancer, I need it to listen to tapes of great speakers, I need it to surf the Internet. But I cannot, so people get angry.” Over plates of mutton and chicken, Misal and his friend Abhay offered examples of the little things that were changing in Umred: young men hunting online for wives, farmers’ sons deserting the farms to work at a bank in a nearby town, a deluge of students signing up for English classes. And beauty pageants. “I see Fashion TV on television, Miss India contests in the big cities,” Misal said. “So I thought, Why can’t we have that also?” And so he organized the first Mr. and Miss Umred Personality Contest, which seemed to be half about physical appearance and half about the communication skills that are all the rage in small-town India.

Misal embodies the type of person who will truly transform India: not an engineer or a financier, but an average person who refuses to be satisfied with the status he was born to. Umred rioted because its people had somehow acquired the courage of their own dissatisfaction. But what kind of India will they build?

Richard Twine in The Scavenger:

In 1989 Dutch cultural anthropologist and philosopher Barbara Noske in her book Humans and Other Animals coined the phrase the ‘animal industrial complex’.

This event should have kick started a whole array of social science analyses into the political economy of animal agri-business yet in the intervening period I would suggest a paucity of such work and indeed a lack of refinement over just what the concept of the ‘animal industrial complex’ actually means.

I think we can safely assume that Noske took inspiration from the concept of the ‘military industrial complex’ originally named by US President Eisenhower in his farewell address in January 1961 and used to characterise the network of relationships between governments, the various armed forces and the corporate military/security sector that supplies them. One wonders what he would make of the global scale of such relationships 50 years on.

Inherent to that concept and also applicable to Noske’s is a sense of a powerful network acting via a certain sense of concealment. Yet we should also account for the implicit public support of and complicity with such networks and the work that various ideologies perform in presenting a certain natural inevitability to their existence.

In this vein I would like to offer a definition of the ‘animal industrial complex’ as a partially opaque network of relations between governments, public and private science, and the corporate agricultural sector. Within the three nodes of the complex are multiple intersecting levels and it is sustained by an ideology that naturalises the human as a consumer of other animals. It encompasses an extraordinary wide range of practices, technologies, identities and markets.

A large proportion of global crop cultivation is implicated and we must, following Noske, also include the networks and practices of animal experimentation as a part of the complex – indeed, research links between the agricultural and the medical are one of its features. As Noske herself pointed out, “Disease-prone animals are a source of big profits for the pharmaceutical industries.”

The animal-industrial complex achieves the annual slaughter of in excess of 56 billion farmed animals (a Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) figure), a figure that excludes marine animals, experimented animals and those farmed animals that don’t make it to the slaughterhouse count.

This figure deserves some pause for thought. It’s an annual figure and it’s on an upward trajectory.

Jeremy Harding in the LRB blog:

Two things we can learn about Morocco’s illegal occupation of Western Sahara from the US embassy in Rabat, courtesy of WikiLeaks: 1) it’s a source of personal revenue for Moroccan army officers but 2) everything’s fine really.

Western Sahara used to be a Spanish possession, which Madrid was due to hand over to the indigenous population in 1975. King Hassan II of Morocco took advantage of the chaos in Spain at the time of Franco’s death and annexed the territory. The UN deplored the move; the Polisario Front embarked on a liberation war, which resulted in stalemate and a ceasefire in 1989. By this time Morocco controlled most of the territory and was pouring in settlers to outnumber indigenous Sahrawis.

Under UN auspices, both parties – the kingdom of Morocco and Polisario – agreed to a referendum on independence. Twenty years later, the vote is a lost hope: the Moroccans have driven it into the ground with Byzantine objections, year on year. The UN mission has been sidelined; the settler colonial project continues; there are hundreds of thousands of refugees in Algeria and a population inside the territory that’s punished when it calls for independence.

These are trifling matters for Ambassador Thomas T. Riley, filing from Rabat in 2008. What counts is America’s ‘robust military relationship’ with Morocco, confirmed by ‘the purchase of sophisticated weapons from the US to include 24 F-16s this year’. The regime, Riley announces,

has also increased its activities under a partnership arrangement with the Utah National Guard, which regularly deploys to Morocco to conduct joint training and humanitarian relief operations.

Even so, he’s disturbed by corruption in the Moroccan army (total numbers 218,000; between ‘50 and 70 per cent… preoccupied with operations in the Western Sahara region’). Riley cites Lieutenant Geneneral Abdelaziz Bennani, commander of the Southern Section – i.e. the annexed territory. Apparently, Bennani has used his position to

skim money from military contracts and influence business decisions. A widely believed rumour has it that he owns large parts of the fisheries in Western Sahara… There are even reports of students at Morocco’s military academy paying money… to obtain positions in lucrative military postings.

Top of the list: Western Sahara.