Poor Patriarch
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The rooster pushes his head

Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker:

Last year, when plans were announced for Cordoba House, an Islamic community center to be built two blocks north of Ground Zero, few opposed them. The project was designed to promote moderate Islam and provide a bridge to other faiths. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Sufi cleric leading the effort, told the Times, in December, “We want to push back against the extremists.” In August, the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted unanimously against granting historic protection to the building at 45-47 Park Place, thereby clearing the way for the construction of Park51, as the center is now known. A month later, it is the focus of a bitter quarrel about the place of Islam in our society.

The lessons of the Danish cartoon controversy serve as an ominous template for the current debate. One reason for the initial lack of reaction to the cartoons was that they were, essentially, innocuous. There is a prohibition on depictions of the Prophet in Islam, but that taboo has ebbed and flowed over time, and only two of the twelve published cartoons could really be construed as offensive in themselves: one portrayed the Prophet as a barbarian with a drawn sword, which played into a racial stereotype; the other showed him wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb. Newspapers in several Muslim countries published the cartoons to demonstrate that they were tasteless, rather than vicious. The cartoons, in other words, did not cause the trouble. So what happened? A group of radical imams in Denmark, led by Ahmed Abu Laban, an associate of Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Egyptian terrorist organization, decided to use the cartoons to inflate their own importance. They showed the cartoons to various Muslim leaders in other countries, and included three illustrations that had not appeared in the Danish papers. One was a photograph of a man supposedly wearing a prayer cap and a pig mask, and imitating the Prophet. (He turned out to be a contestant in a French hog-calling competition). Another depicted a dog mounting a Muslim in prayer. The third was a drawing of the Prophet as a maddened pedophile gripping helpless children like dolls in either hand. The imams later claimed that these illustrations had been e-mailed to them as threats—although they never produced any proof that they hadn’t made the drawings themselves—and so were fair representations of European anti-Muslim sentiment. The leaders saw them and were inflamed. The Sunni scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi demanded a Day of Rage. So far, we have had five years of rage.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria in Guernica:

I grew up in the eighties in a Pakistan that had just escaped the shackles of military rule. My own dawning political awareness came at the euphoric time when Pakistan was about to elect its first female prime minister. It had been a grisly decade, one in which Pakistan’s own militarized version of Sharia law had played a defining role. In the late-seventies, in an effort to legitimize his dictatorship, General Muhammad Zia ul-Haque, who had grabbed power in a military coup, initiated an “Islamization” program. With the goal of producing a pure society by criminalizing all temptation, Islamization produced laws whose draconian and misogynistic character was conveniently packaged in Islamic-sounding terms and references. In real life, this meant that men and women could be asked to produce their marriage documents by any police officer. Women on television covered their hair and were never shown having any physical contact with men, leaving children like me to digest British sitcoms so censored that they often lasted only ten minutes.

It is not that preoccupations with Islamic law took up much of my attention in those early years of my life, or that I worried about the fact that legally I counted as only half a witness while my twin brother, with whom I competed and fought daily, counted as a whole. Yet these precepts, because of their existence and their ubiquity, were an invisible yet determinative theme in my life. They dictated, for example, the manner in which our home was arranged, such that an entering unrelated male could be led directly to a reception room in the front of the house, never encountering any women. In later years, it would decide who I was allowed to visit and when, which schools I would be sent to, and myriad other details of my own life and the lives of the women in our family.

More here.

Sometimes I see Rex Ryan as a medieval man. I see the Assisi in him. That’s because of the exuberance. He runs around the sidelines like a foul-mouthed saint, praising the game and all who play it. Grant me, he cries into his headset between plays, that I might not so much seek to be loved as to love. His team will always be the best team possible. His players will always be the greatest talents of all time. He believes, truly believes. Then he goes home and late at night, I am sure, the bottom drops out. He stares out the window into the darkness and knows that everything is desolation, that every play is a hopeless stab in the dark, that everything can always go wrong. He gets down on his knees and cries out a forsaken lament. He strikes his own corpulent flesh with his hands and grinds sand into his palms. He grovels on the floor and weeps. Then he calls a press conference the next morning. We will go to the Super Bowl, he proclaims. The Jets are the team to beat.

more from me at The Owls here.

BALOJI feat. KONONO n1 – KARIBU YA BINTOU from BALOJI on Vimeo.

Nathan Thrall in the NYRB:

On August 31, the night before President Obama’s dinner inaugurating direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Hamas gunmen shot and killed four Jewish settlers in Hebron, the West Bank’s largest and most populous governorate. The attack—the deadliest against Israeli citizens in more than two years—was condemned by Palestinian and Israeli officials, who said that it was meant to thwart the upcoming negotiations. According to a Hamas spokesman, however, the shooting had a more specific purpose: to demonstrate the futility of the recent cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces. This cooperation has reached unprecedented levels under the quiet direction of a three-star US Army general, Keith Dayton, who has been commanding a little-publicized American mission to build up Palestinian security forces in the West Bank.

Referred to by Hamas as “the Dayton forces,” the Palestinian security services are formally under the authority of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and chairman of Hamas’s rival, Fatah; but they are, in practice, controlled by Salam Fayyad, the unelected prime minister, a diminutive, mild-mannered technocrat. Abbas appointed Fayyad following Hamas’s grim takeover of Gaza in June 2007—which occurred seventeen months after the Islamist party won the January 2006 parliamentary elections—and entrusted him with preventing Hamas from also seizing the West Bank.

Fayyad received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin and held positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the World Bank, and the IMF before becoming finance minister under President Yasser Arafat. His reputation as a fiscally responsible and trustworthy manager ensures the steady supply of international aid on which the Palestinian economy depends. Though he has neither a popular following nor backing from a large political party (his Third Way list received a mere 2.4 percent of the votes in the 2006 legislative elections), today he is responsible for nearly every aspect of Palestinian governance. Yet he is not participating in the negotiations over a settlement with Israel, which are the province of the PLO (of whose leadership Fayyad is not a member) and are handled by its chairman, the seventy-five-year-old Abbas.

Nick Sylvester interviews Eugene Cho and Dan Balis of Escort discuss their new single, over at Riff City at channel 13. (You can get the single free over at the Escort website.):

Last week my friend Sasha Frere-Jones wrote about “the delicate art of revivals”: how deliberately vintage-sounding acts like Brooklyn funk&b group Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings or Swedish psych-pop band Dungen hold up against popular expectations that “new music” sound like “new music.” “How much of the past does one need to draw on before shifting categories from new to retro?” he wrote.

Right on cue, a Brooklyn-based disco-boogie revival outfit I like called Escort announced the imminent release of “Cocaine Blues,” their first twelve-inch in three years. (You can download the radio edit for free at their website.) Everything this band’s put out so far has the feel of an undiscovered classic, a song the disco compilations somehow forgot about. I remember hearing “Starlight,” their first single from 2006, and probably overdoing my show of disbelief when Jason Drummond, a/k/a DJ Spun, told me it wasn’t some one-off Montreal disco act from 1978. With the moody “Cocaine Blues” it’s no different; it might as well be a deep cut from some Chic LP I’ve never heard.

Dan Balis and Eugene Cho, the architects of Escort’s meticulous throwback sound and the band’s principal songwriters, were kind enough to talk about Frere-Jones’s piece and walk me through the kinds of decisions they make when putting together their records.

Riff City: A lot of your records, “Cocaine Blues” included, borrow very specific rhythms and melodies from very specific early disco tracks. How do you decide when a move or sound is ripe for borrowing, versus a move/sound that is overexposed and would potentially distract people that you’re taking it? What is your personal rulebook for “ripping something off”?

Eugene Cho: Sometimes the disco influence is very organic. We start playing our instruments and there’s a wealth of musical vocabulary that becomes second nature to you from listening to and playing dance music over the years. On the other side is that some grooves and musical ideas are so good that they’re screaming out to be explored and refined further. For “Cocaine Blues,” we found that some of the lyrics in previous incarnations of the song were taken from nineteenth century folk rhymes and we found other verses from those old rhymes and added them as well.

Dan Balis: “Cocaine Blues” is a loose interpretation of a Jamaican version of a turn-of-the-century blues song; a version, which in turn, relies on the groove from an American disco hit that was popular among Jamaican soundsystem DJs. We weren’t really preoccupied with distance, but rather with coming up with a unique and distinctive version of something we already thought was great.

From The New York Times:

WHAT IF TEACHERS GAVE UP the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built? What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology

It is a radical proposition, sure. But during an era in which just about everything is downloadable and remixable, when children are frequently more digitally savvy than the adults around them, it’s perhaps not so crazy to think that schools — or at least one school, anyway — might try to remix our assumptions about how to reach and educate those children. What makes Quest to Learn unique is not so much that it has been loaded with laptops or even that it bills itself expressly as a home for “digital kids,” but rather that it is the brainchild of a professional game designer named Katie Salen. Salen, like many people interested in education, has spent a lot of time thinking about whether there is a way to make learning feel simultaneously more relevant to students and more connected to the world beyond school. And the answer, as she sees it, lies in games. Quest to Learn is organized specifically around the idea that digital games are central to the lives of today’s children and also increasingly, as their speed and capability grow, powerful tools for intellectual exploration.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Eleanor Clift in Politics Daily:

Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” for things we intuitively know are true, based on our gut, as opposed to facts. The term had its heyday during the Bush era when we fought a war “knowing” Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons. Now Charles Seife, who teaches journalism at New York University, is coming out with a book, “Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception.” It demonstrates in compelling and often amusing detail how numbers, which are supposed to be the arbiters of truth, are routinely used to advance lies and undermine democracy.

Seife reminds us how a single senator with an agenda, Joseph McCarthy, set off alarm bells when he claimed to have in his hand a list of 205 communists who had infiltrated the State Department. The number moved around in subsequent days from a high of 207 to a low of 57, and in the end McCarthy, testifying in hearings on Capitol Hill in March 1950, couldn't name a single communist working for the State Department.

It didn't matter; the numbers gave the allegation credibility, making McCarthy's line about 205 communists one of the most effective political lies in American history. Seife uses the episode to introduce the reader to a variety of examples where numbers are used to confuse rather than enlighten, often with the goal of gaining political advantage.

More here.

Eos, the goddess of dawn, persuaded Zeus to bestow immortality on her human lover Tithonus. But she forgot to ask for enduring youth as well. Big mistake. Eventually, Tithonus became a withered old wreck, and Eos shut him away for eternity. We all know the feeling, or soon will. Death may be our common fate but our common fear is the nightmare that comes first: growing old. Aristotle saw ageing as a nasty process that turns us into cynical, emotionally shrivelled Scrooges. In As You Like It, Shakespeare panned life’s last act as “second childishness and mere oblivion. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” Martin Amis, in his recent novel The Pregnant Widow, likens ageing to “auditioning for the role of a lifetime; then, after interminable rehearsals, you’re finally starring in a horror film – a talentless, irresponsible, and above all low-budget horror film, in which (as is the way with horror films) they’re saving the worst for last”.

more from Donald Morrison at the FT here.

In 1941, a doctor told Georges Simenon that he had two years to live. The famously prolific author eventually learned the diagnosis was wrong (he died in 1989), but the experience prompted him to start filling notebooks with anecdotes about his childhood in Liège, Belgium to his then 2-year-old son. He showed the material to André Gide, who told him to start over in the third person. Five years later, “Pedigree” was published. Simenon went on to dismiss the label “autobiographical novel,” but Luc Sante, who has written the excellent introduction to this reissue, isn’t buying it — and I don’t either. For the Mamelin household, read Simenon. For the character of Roger, read Georges. At the center is a mother, Élise (read Henriette), tormented and tormenting, “a girl from the other side of the bridges, a girl who, when she was with her sisters, spoke a language nobody could understand” married to Désiré (Simenon didn’t bother changing his father’s name). A stolid insurance salesman, Désiré adores routine so much that he sometimes seems more mechanism than man.

more from Liz Brown at the LAT here.

With Bolaño you rarely feel beset by monotony. Certainly not in “Antwerp,” a tiny, unclassifiable book that will be of interest mainly to his most devoted fans. Bolaño completed it in 1980, but didn’t publish it until a year before he died. “I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can’t be sure of,” he tells us in the preface. The short sections are like prose poems — a bridge of sorts between Bolaño’s fiction and poetry — with such cryptic titles as “A Monkey,” “There Was Nothing,” “Big Silver Waves.” Though not easily comprehensible, each section presents the reader with at least one startling line. A boy and a girl in “Cleaning Utensils,” for example, weep “like characters from different movies projected on the same screen.” In an essay titled “Literature + Illness = Illness,” in “The Insufferable Gaucho,” Bolaño confronts his own impending death, at the age of 50, from liver disease. He compares a patient’s voyage on a gurney — “from his room to the operating theater, where masked men and women await him, like bandits from the sect of the Hashishin” — to a hazardous 19th-century voyage where the traveler gives up everything. The best of these stories confirm Bolaño’s ideal of literature as a voyage to the zero degree of human existence, to the abyss, as Baudelaire, another of his heroes, would call it, where we lose the self in order to find it again.

more from Michael Greenberg at the NYT here.

Go here to see the video.

From Hyperbole and a Half:

At some point during my childhood, my mother made the mistake of taking me to see an orthodontist. It was discovered that I had a rogue tooth that was growing sideways.

My mom and I were told that the tooth, if left unchecked, would completely ruin everything in my life and turn me into a horrible, horrible mutant.

Unless I wanted to spend the rest of my natural life chained in a windowless shed to avoid traumatizing the other citizens, I was going to need surgery to remove the tooth.

I was accepting of the idea until I found out that my surgery was scheduled on the same day as my friend's birthday party. My surgery was in the morning and the birthday party wasn't until the late afternoon, but my mom told me that I still probably wouldn't be able to go because I'd need time to recover from my surgery. I asked her if I could go to the party if I was feeling okay. She said yes, but told me that I probably wouldn't be feeling well and to try not to get my hopes up.

But it was too late. I knew that if I could trick my mom into believing that I was feeling okay after my surgery, she'd let me go to my friend's birthday party. All I had to do was find a way to prove that I was completely recovered and ready to party. I began to gather very specific information about the kinds of things that would convince my mom that the surgery had absolutely no effect on me.

More here. [Thanks to Jennifer Oullette.]

Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books:

Miłosz was born in 1911 in what was then Russian Lithuania. Indeed, like many great Polish literary figures, he was not strictly “Polish” by geographical measure. Adam Zagajewski, one of the country’s most important living poets, was born in Ukraine; Jerzy Giedroyc—a major figure in the twentieth-century literary exile—was born in Belarus, like Adam Mickiewicz, the nineteenth-century icon of the Polish literary revival. Lithuanian Vilna in particular was a cosmopolitan blend of Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Russians, and Jews, among others (Isaiah Berlin, like the Harvard political philosopher Judith Shklar, was born in nearby Riga).

Raised in the interwar Polish republic, Miłosz survived the occupation and was already a poet of some standing when he was sent to Paris as the cultural attaché of the new People’s Republic. But in 1951 he defected to the West and two years later he published his most influential work, The Captive Mind.³ Never out of print, it is by far the most insightful and enduring account of the attraction of intellectuals to Stalinism and, more generally, of the appeal of authority and authoritarianism to the intelligentsia.

Miłosz studies four of his contemporaries and the self-delusions to which they fell prey on their journey from autonomy to obedience, emphasizing what he calls the intellectuals’ need for “a feeling of belonging.”

More here.

From The Economist:

Of all Pakistan’s main actors, only the armed forces have emerged from the disaster strongly in credit. Bringing boats and helicopters that the civil powers lacked, they have rescued tens of thousands of stranded people and dispensed much of the government’s aid. Over 70,000 troops have been dedicated to this work. “It was the army’s duty to come in aid of the civil power,” says the army’s spokesman, Major-General Athar Abbas. “It just set to work.” Thanks goodness for that. Then again, considering that by one estimate the armed forces lay claim to a third of Pakistan’s budget, quite right too.

In any event, the army has done itself no harm: burnishing an image sullied during the turbulent end to the regime of Pakistan’s last military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, who stepped aside in 2008. Army relief trucks, emblazoned with the slogan the “Pakistani army and the people are together” draw respectful glances as they surge through thronging Karachi and Lahore, capitals of Sindh and Punjab. Rumour has it they surge around in circles, twice or thrice, for maximum effect.

In a country ruled by generals for much of its history, any upset invites rumours of a coup, and these are now abroad. Indeed, one of the PPP’s coalition partners, Altaf Hussain, leader of the Karachi-based Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), seemed to call for one. From London, where he lives in exile accused of many crimes in Pakistan, Mr Hussain challenged “any patriotic general” to take “martial-law-like action” against corruption.

According to Punjab’s chief minister, many army officers are itching to intervene to intervene; their chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, demurs. Mr Sharif also expressed two other flood-related fears: that disaffected victims could turn to Islamist militancy, which is entrenched in southern Punjab, or that they might otherwise rise up.

More here.