From Vanity Fair:

If you couldn’t get enough of momentous national street protests before, Iran’s ongoing Tweet-volution will certainly keep you buried in a backlog of must-see/read/post-to-Facebook digital tidbits of cyber-democracy in action for a long time. Between refreshing Andrew Sullivan’s page for the next tsunami of Persian-green tweets, and watching all those YouTube videos with bigger crowds than Braveheart, it might be easy to think you know the nooks and crannies of Tehran like the back of your hijab. However, while the mainstream media’s coverage of the posts linked round the world may resemble a brontosaurus trying to win the 100m dash, there is only so much depth you can get out of 10 mins of low-res cell phone footage or texts with a 160 character limit. So for those of us curious for a window into Iran that allows for a more leisurely, reflective glimpse, there’s certainly been no shortage of sources of late that don’t require a DSL connection—and won’t strain your eyes without the proper gamma correction:

If you’ve been within eyeshot of a New York Times best-seller list anytime with in the past five years, chances are you’ve heard of Azar Nafisi’s acclaimed 2003 memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran. After resigning from a comparatively liberal Iranian university in the mid-90s, Nafisi hand-picked female students to read “forbidden” works by Fitzgerald, James and of course, the grandiloquent patron of literary perversion himself, Vladimir Nabokov. Then, she wrote down her experience and the stories of her students demonstrating how a book club can be an act of sedition. More recently, Iranian-American Azadeh Moaveni, who first re-connected with her inner Iranian in Lipstick Jihad, returned to Tehran in 2005 to cover Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election. After she fell in love, got pregnant, and got married, she tried to make a permanent home there for herself—she didn’t quite succeed but her clashes with the Ministry of Intelligence became the backbone of her new book Honeymoon in Tehran.

More here.

Roger Cohen in the New York Times:

Khamenei has taken a radical risk. He has factionalized himself, so losing the arbiter’s lofty garb, by aligning himself with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution.

He has taunted millions of Iranians by praising their unprecedented participation in an election many now view as a ballot-box putsch. He has ridiculed the notion that an official inquiry into the vote might yield a different result. He has tried pathos and he has tried pounding his lectern. In short, he has lost his aura.

The taboo-breaking response was unequivocal. It’s funny how people’s obsessions come back to bite them. I’ve been hearing about Khamenei’s fear of “velvet revolutions” for months now. There was nothing velvet about Saturday’s clashes. In fact, the initial quest to have Moussavi’s votes properly counted and Ahmadinejad unseated has shifted to a broader confrontation with the regime itself.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

In the late 1960s, a tall and ungainly Englishman named Peter Reyner Banham brought his shaggy beard and wonky teeth to Los Angeles and declared that he loved the city with a passion. It helped that, as a visiting architecture professor (Banham was teaching at USC), he was given some pretty fancy digs: He stayed in Greene & Greene’s Gamble house in Pasadena, one of the most beautiful and romantic houses in America. So Banham had a privileged base from which to explore. But what he went looking for, and the way he wrote about what he saw and felt, redefined the way the intellectual world — and then the wider world — perceived the city. Reyner’s ” Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies” — first published in 1971 — has now been reissued in a new edition with an excellent introduction by architect and scholar Joe Day. It is a landmark in the history of writing L.A. Banham came from abroad, but he came, not to escape something, not to try to reinvent himself or to sneer at us. He came to celebrate, and, in 1971, this bucked a 40-year trend in which Los Angeles had been cast as a schlock dystopia. Banham declared (outrageously, many said at the time) that L.A. was a great city, praising not only the émigré modernist designs of its architect pioneers like Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra but also its busy vernacular: gas stations, surfboards, muscle cars and freeways.

more from Richard Rayner at the LA Times here.

[Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

“Harem culture.” Is that like HBO’s series “Big Love” except Muslim, not Mormon, and with tassels, a potted palm and no bickering? Well yes, sort of. But there are a lot more women in a harem. A lot. The seraglio of the sultan of the Ottoman Empire housed about 1,600 virgins, each hoping to be chosen for one night of honor. The sultan makes Brigham Young, who had only a few dozen wives, look like a piker with low self-esteem. Yet after reading Richard Bernstein’s fascinating new book, “The East, the West, and Sex” (which could have been subtitled “Boys Behaving Badly”), you really have to give the Mormons credit for trying to implement an American version of the infamous harem of “the East.” As if that were going to work around here. Most of the world is not only not around here, of course, but also so old and so vast that the United States is less than a blip on the screen of human erotic history. India was playing Twister — the Kama Sutra version — more than a thousand years before Columbus got a boat and came to find us.

more from Toni Bentley at the NYT here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Dawn:

If public support were absent, extremist violence could be relatively easy to deal with. But extremism does not lie merely at the fringes. As an example, let us recall that 5,000 people crammed the streets outside Lal Masjid to pray behind the battle-hardened pro-Taliban militant leader, Maulana Abdul Aziz, the day after he was released from prison on the orders of interior minister Rehman Malik.

In the political arena, the extremists have high-profile cheerleaders like Imran Khan, Qazi Hussain Ahmad and Hamid Gul who rush to justify every attack on Pakistan’s people and culture. To them it makes no difference that Baitullah Mehsud proudly admits to the murder of Allama Dr Sarfaraz Ahmad Naeemi, the recent Peshawar mosque bombing, the earlier Wah slaughter and scores of other hideous suicide attacks. Like broken gramophone records, they chant “Amrika, Amrika, Amrika” after every new Taliban atrocity.

Nevertheless, bad as things are, there is a respite. To the relief of those who wish to see Pakistan survive, the army finally moved against the Taliban menace. But, while the state has committed men to battle, it cannot provide them a convincing reason why they must fight.

For now some soldiers have bought into the amazing invention that the Baitullahs and Fazlullahs are India’s secret agents. Others have been told that they are actually fighting a nefarious American-Jewish plot to destabilise Pakistan. To inspire revenge, still others are being shown the revolting Taliban-produced videos of Pakistani soldiers being tortured and beheaded.

More here.

The bird may die
Forough Farokhzad

I feel sad,

I feel blue.

I go outside and rub my fingers

on the sleek shell of the night.

“I see that lights of contact are blocked,

All lights of contact are blocked.”

“Nobody will introduce me to the sun,

Nobody will take me to the gathering of doves.”

Keep the flight in mind,

The bird may die.

Translation: Maryam Dilmaghani

From Root:

Black men need their swagger and their game, but on Fathers’ Day it is worth remembering a little vulnerability is not the worst thing in the world. In spite of the compelling TCBY promotion that offers a free yogurt for dad on Father’s Day, many of us are in search of a more substantive and memorable family experience this third Sunday in June. In fact, when I became a dad in the early 1990s, I so wanted to help folks have meaningful Father’s Days that I edited a collection of essays called Faith of our Fathers: African American Men Reflect on Fatherhood (Dutton/Penguin). Essentially, I asked brothers I knew (Cornel West, Robin D.G. Kelley, Charles Ogletree, and others) to write about their experiences as fathers or with their fathers. I wanted the collection to be an intimate conversation between black men that would help fathers deepen their own self-awareness and more closely connect with their children, and with their dads.

I was pleasantly surprised that the most common reaction to the book was that it presented the vulnerability of African American men in a way that was not often captured in mainstream media. The images of black masculinity that are most often generated by mainstream media are patriarchal ones, meaning they feature the tough, emotionally invulnerable guy who is hardened by society and unable to make real emotional connections. While black men are still the most feared group in our society and there are reasons for them to hide their vulnerability, the media images are vastly one-sided. Thus, I realized that the presentation of black male vulnerability in my book was a way to challenge common perceptions of black masculinity. This, I knew, served the interests of both men and women.

More here.

From Edge:

“They say that in science there are complicators and there are simplifiers,” says John Bargh, Yale social psychologist known for his early work on the topic of automaticity, and more recently for bringing experimental methodology to the philosophical question of free will. According to Bargh, the tension between the complicators and the simplifiers is a good thing in any field of ideas or science. “I've always been a simplifier.” he says, “looking for the simple mechanisms that produce complex effect, instead of building a complicated model. Once we find one of these veins — one of these avenues of research — we just go for it and mine it and mine it until we run out of gold.

Bargh's lines of research all focus on unconscious mechanisms that underlie social perception, evaluation and preferences, and motivation and goal pursuit in realistic and complex social environments. That each of these basic psychological phenomena occur without the person's intention and awareness, yet have such strong effects on the person's decisions and behavior, has considerable implications for philosophical matters such as free will, and the nature and purpose of consciousness itself. He maintains that the resulting findings “are very consistent and in harmony with evolutionary biology. And this is very unlike psychology, which has always presumed a kind of consciousness bottle-neck or a self, some kind of a homunculus type of self sitting there, making all the decisions and deciding without any explanation of where they comes from or what's causing the self or what's causing the conscious choices. Emphasizing what our unconscious systems do for us, in turn, links us very strongly to other organisms and other animals very closely. Recent primate research is showing that primates are closer to us than we thought. They fall for the same kind of economic fallacies that Kahneman and Tversky talked about in humans 30 years ago.”

More here.

Readers,

As you can tell from my increasingly frequent postings on Iran here at 3QD, I have become more and more caught up in the current events there. I grew up in a Shia religious household in Pakistan and one of the standard things we did in Moharram while commemorating the seventh-century AD martyrdom of Imam Hussain, was to ritualistically proclaim our wish that we had been in Kerbala with him and his extended family, and died with him as he opposed the illegitimate and brutal, but supposedly “Islamic” government of Yazid. Though I am no longer religious, at the present instant, in my frustration that we who are not in Iran can supposedly do nothing, I feel something of the sentiment behind that ritual chant: at this very moment, I tremble with the eagerness to be with my brothers and sisters in Iran who are peacefully resisting the illegitimate government of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, and who are about to be slaughtered.

Let the rest of the world no longer remain quiet and hope that by doing so, we will protect the brave forces of change from charges of being allied with foreign interests who are meddling in Iran. The time to remain silent is over. It is time to take sides, AND to urge our governments to take sides. I am a US citizen, and I will use every means at my disposal to push my government to make sure that they let the government of Iran know in no uncertain terms that they will be held accountable and punished if the innocent civilians and the brave youth of Iran are attacked, killed, or injured in any way. I hope you will, too. It is NOW the time for the desperate, weak, and lying government of Iran to know that not only their own children, but the world is against them.

If you don't yet understand the urgency of this moment or the imminent savagery that awaits Iranis, have a look at some of the Twitter messages coming out of Iran (all other media are too heavily censored, or completely blocked) that are appended below this note. This is NOT a matter of supporting any Western or other interests, it is a matter of supporting the courageous hopes and defiant dreams of freedom of the Irani masses. This collection of Tweets comes via Andrew Sullivan (whom I proclaim an honorary Shia for his extraordinary decency, humanity, skill, and good moral judgment in covering the post-election crisis in Iran!).

Do something now! Write to whitehouse.gov or your representative. Do something! NOW! NOW! NOW!

Death to tyranny! Long live Iran!

Yours ever,

Abbas

Recent Tweets from Iran:

In Iran, Friday Prayers are rallying toward Hashemi Rafsanjani's office. They calls him “Head of Devilry”.

Maryam Ameri central party headquarters was arrested Mehdi Karroubi [Google translation]

is called Tajzadh, Amin Zadeh, Rmzanzadh, Abtahi and other detainees severely confession fabricated for television are under pressure [Google translation]

hold Quran and cite Quran 8.61 “If they seek peace then seek you peace” Shame them into peace!

Protest with the Quran in your hand, sit down if they attack, while citing the Quaran 8.61, Use Gandhi method

Khamenei had declared war, but Green must remain calm and continue silent rallies.

@PerezHilton aww that's so sweet! Thanks! From Tehran 😉

unconfirmed reports – Revolutionary Guard has been mobilised to secure Tehran

Dear UN & NGOs, why is Iran allowed to butcher civilians without even a word from you?

The situation in Iran is now CRITICAL – the nation is heartbroken – suppression is iminent

Pls:Mousavi:PEOPLE OF THE WORLD: We need help and sourvernity, today it turned out we need it more than ever.

Imprisoned bloggers: Mohammad Ali Abtahi. Mhsaamrabady, Arghndh Karim Pour, Emad Bhavr, Shyvanzrahary, Mohsen and Mojtaba Poor Somayeh Tvhydlv [Google translation]

Mousavi spox Makhmalbaf says 7OO campaign workers and advisors have been arrested, he is 2O% free, 8O% under house arrest

Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph:

Aamer Hussein writes only short fiction. Since 1993 he has published four collections of stories set mainly in Pakistan and London. Among those who appreciated his early work, there was an expectation that a full-scale novel would follow. It has not. In fact his last two books, Turquoise (2002) and Insomnia (2007), have been his most compact in terms of length and style.

His new book, Another Gulmohar Tree, barely breaks 100 pages. It tells the story of a marriage between an Englishwoman and a Pakistani in the Fifties. Lydia first meets Usman at a symposium at Senate House in London. She wants to hear the discussion on newly independent countries. He is spending a year on The Daily Telegraph’s foreign desk and is speaking on behalf of Pakistan. They soon form a close friendship: “When Usman was with Lydia, everything seemed spontaneous and natural, even the long silent lapses in their conversation.” She is a painter and he is a story writer. Lydia suggests they work together on translating his stories which, unlike other writers of his background, are in Urdu. “You don’t choose the language you write in, it chooses you,” Usman tells her.

More here.

As Robin reminded me earlier today by IM (en route from Johannesburg to Rome!) things did not turn decisively against the Shah in 1978/79 until the labor unions went on strike, crippling the economy. Now, via Andrew Sullivan, there this from Al Giordano in The Field:

The workers of the Khodro automobile company in Iran today issued the following declaration (translated for The Field from the original Farsi by Iraj Omidvar):

Strike in Iran Khodro:

We declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran.

Autoworker, Fellow Laborers (Laborer Friends): What we witness today, is an insult to the intelligence of the people, and disregard for their votes, the trampling of the principles of the Constitution by the government. It is our duty to join this people's movement.

We the workers of Iran Khodro, Thursday 28/3/88 in each working shift will stop working for half an hour to protest the suppression of students, workers, women, and the Constitution and declare our solidarity with the movement of the people of Iran. The morning and afternoon shifts from 10 to 10:30. The night shift from 3 to 3:30.

Laborers of IranKhodor

This announcement – to my knowledge this is the first place it appears in English anywhere – obtained by The Field by the auto workers of the largest automobile producer in Iran, is significant on multiple levels.

The obvious one is that once the workers begin to flex their muscles on the means of production, no illegitimate regime can continue standing.

Another is that it reveals the malicious lie spread by some that the Iranian resistance is an upper class phenomenon restricted to one or two regions for what it is: untrue.

More here.

It is part of Robert Ryman’s legend that he is a self-taught artist. He moved to New York in 1952, at age twenty-two, to pursue a career in jazz. A year later, he took a job at the Museum of Modern Art as a security guard. Paintings had begun to interest him “not so much because of what was painted but how they were done. I thought maybe it would be an interesting thing for me to look into—how the paint worked and what I could do with it.” So he bought some art supplies and began to experiment. At no point, then or later, did he try to depict anything—a face, a figure, a natural object like a tree or a flower, an artifact like a bottle or a guitar: “I thought I would try and see what would happen. I wanted to see what the paint would do, how the brushes would work. . . . I had nothing really in mind to paint. I was just finding out how the paint worked, colors, thick and thin, the brushes, surfaces.” He evidently found the activity sufficiently absorbing that he put music aside. By the end of the ’50s, Ryman was using white paint almost exclusively, as if color interested him far less than certain physical properties of paint. He had developed a signature style. Suzanne P. Hudson’s Robert Ryman: Used Paint is the first book-length study of the artist’s achievement, and it comes with an interesting thesis, namely that his paintings exemplify what the author calls “embodied thinking,” which I interpret to mean that his paintings are not the product of thought, but thought itself.

more from Arthur Danto at Bookforum here.

Ever since the first days of the Islamic Republic of Iran, there have been two sovereignties in Iran: one divine and one popular. The popular part of the equation is codified in Iran’s Constitution, which calls for the popular election of a president and parliament. Divine sovereignty is believed to derive from God’s will, as interpreted by Shiite institutions that bestow power on the faqih, or supreme leader — currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Increasingly, the divine sovereignty has been less about religion than about political theology. As for the popular sovereignty, it has found its due place in the social work and political action of Iranian civil society. The presence of these two incompatible and conflicting conceptions of sovereignty, authority and legitimacy has always been a bone of contention in Iranian politics, often defining the ideological contours of the political power struggle. The present crisis in Iran after the presidential election is rooted in the popular quest for the democratization of the state and society, and the conservative reaction and opposition to it. Another factor distinguishing the current political crisis from the previous instances of political factionalism and internal power struggle is a deep-seated ideological structure inherited from the Iranian revolution.

more from Ramin Jahanbegloo at the LA Times here.

Air brakes screeching, a truck comes to a halt uncomfortably near to our taxi on a busy Barcelona street. Thomas Bayrle nods at one of its giant wheels and says: ‘See that tyre? That’s what’s interesting to me.’ Knowing of his craze for traffic and roads – understood as metaphors for the complex systems and superstructures that control and organize us – I realize he’s not being ironic or flip. Take, for instance, the sculptural wall relief $ (1980), which consists of a model, dollar-sign-shaped cardboard motorway interchange dotted with plastic toy cars and trucks as scrupulously positioned as the coloured squares on Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–3). Bayrle was in Barcelona for a retrospective of his work at the city’s Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA) titled ‘I’ve a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore’. The artist and I had just met for the first time and it was immediately apparent what a generous thinker and beguiling talker he is. But with this statement he seemed also to be making clear to me that the thoughts on art, politics and people that he offers and happily debates, are grounded in personal observation, in telling details lifted from the real. Later, I started thinking about all the billions, perhaps trillions, of tonnes of rubber rolling around on asphalt in clouds of exhaust fumes. And about the fact that the most visible signs of the economic integration and expansion of the European Union are not blue flags with yellow stars, but the endless processions of trucks that run along its roads, connecting the continent to the arteries of global trade.

more from Dominic Eichler at Frieze here.

Inscription
Mehdi Akhavan-Sales

The stone lay there like a mountain
and we sat here a weary bunch
women, men, young, old
all linked together
at the ankles, by a chain.

You could crawl to whomever your heart desired
as far as you could drag your chain.

We did not know, nor did we ask
was it a voice in our nightmare and weariness
or else, a herald from an unknown corner,
it spoke:

“The stone lying there holds a secret
inscribed on it by wise men of old.”
Thus spoke the voice over and again
and, as a wave recoiling on itself
retreated in the dark
and we said nothing
and for some time we said nothing.

Afterwards, only in our looks
many doubts and queries spoke out
then nothing but the ambush of weariness, oblivion
and silence, even in our looks
and the stone lying there.

One night, moonlight pouring damnation on us
and our swollen feet itching
one of us, whose chain was the heaviest
damned his ears and groaned: “I must go”
and we said, fatigued: “Damn our ears
damn our eyes, we must go.”
and we crawled up to where the stone lay.
One of us, whose chain was looser
climbed up and read:

“He shall know my secret
who turns me over!”

Read more »

From Scientific American:

The left hemisphere of the human brain controls language, arguably our greatest mental attribute. It also controls the remarkable dexterity of the human right hand. The right hemisphere is dominant in the control of, among other things, our sense of how objects interrelate in space. Forty years ago the broad scientific consensus held that, in addition to language, right-handedness and the specialization of just one side of the brain for processing spatial relations occur in humans alone. Other animals, it was thought, have no hemispheric specializations of any kind.

Those beliefs fit well with the view that people have a special evolutionary status. Biologists and behavioral scientists generally agreed that right-handedness evolved in our hominid ancestors as they learned to build and use tools, about 2.5 million years ago. Right-handedness was also thought to underlie speech. Perhaps, as the story went, the left hemisphere simply added sign language to its repertoire of skilled manual actions and then converted it to speech. Or perhaps the left brain’s capacity for controlling manual action extended to controlling the vocal apparatus for speech. In either case, speech and language evolved from a relatively recent manual talent for toolmaking. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, was thought to have evolved by default into a center for processing spatial relations, after the left hemisphere became specialized for handedness.

More here.

From the BBC:

Iran's Supreme Leader has issued a stern warning that protests against the country's disputed presidential election results must end.

In his first public remarks after days of demonstrations, Ayatollah Khamenei said the outcome must be decided at the ballot box, not on the street.

He said political leaders would be blamed for any violence.

Demonstrators calling for a new election earlier vowed to stage fresh protests on Saturday.

Addressing thousands of people at Tehran University, the ayatollah voiced support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying his views on foreign affairs and social issues were close to his.

Responding to allegations of electoral fraud, the ayatollah insisted the Islamic Republic would not cheat.

More here.