From The Telegraph:

Lytton Strachey referred to E M Forster as “the Taupe”: a cruelly perfect nickname for a writer whose whiskery and short-sighted appearance was matched by a manner so self-effacing he seemed to disappear while you were looking at him. Inevitably this poses problems for a biographer. It is hard to make a case for the public importance of someone who only occasionally popped into view – appearing alongside a sobbing Winston Churchill at T E Lawrence’s funeral, or waving off Auden and Isherwood as they departed for America – before retreating into a network of secret tunnels.

For Wendy Moffat, in this superbly illuminating biography, Forster’s buried life was also his real life, and his tunnels were shared with a host of other writers whose homosexuality made it difficult to break cover. Far from being a solitary burrower, she points out, Forster was part of an underground movement, a mole only in the sense that he lived in respectable society without being detected as the true radical he was.

More here.

Alex Pareene in Salon:

No question! No question, at all, that this flotilla was a setup, designed to trick the Israeli commandos into boarding it, from a helicopter. That is why those “humanitarian” activists were so well-armed with… poles and chairs and sticks and things one would find on a boat. They had set a trap, for Israel, to trick Israel into killing between 9 and 20 people. (But because Friedman is very balanced he admits that it was very stupid of Israel to fall for this trap and kill those people.)

You must always remember that while reasonable people consider Thomas Friedman to be a joke — a barely literate cartoon mustache of oversimplification whose understanding of global politics is slightly less comprehensive than a USA Today infographic and who possesses about as much insight into world events as a lightly vandalized Wikipedia stub entry — the sort of people who ineptly manage and run the nation take him very seriously and look to him to form their opinions about important subjects outside (and sometimes relating to) their immediate expertise, be that foreclosing on families or running the Defense Department for the Bush Administration.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Power of plasma

Princeton University's fourth annual “Art of Science” exhibition features scientific imagery focused on the theme of energy. The $250 first prize for 2010 goes to “Xenon Plasma Accelerator” by Jerry Ross, a postdoctoral researcher at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. The photo shows a plume from a Hall-effect thruster, which uses magnetic and electric fields to ionize and accelerate propellant.

More here.

Dave Itzkoff in the New York Times:

Before he had graduated from New York University, majoring in marketing, Mr. Ansari, who grew up in Columbia, S.C., was avidly performing comedy in New York clubs and became a fixture of the city’s alternative scene. In 2007 the video shorts he made with fellow comedians Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer and the director Jason Woliner landed them their own MTV sketch show, “Human Giant.”

That show, on which Mr. Ansari played everything from a hard-charging agent of child actors to a police officer who pursues criminals by hot-air balloon, caught the attention of the “Parks and Recreation” producers, who hired him before they had cast its star, Amy Poehler, or settled on a concept for the series.

“He defies categorization,” said Michael Schur, who created “Parks and Recreation” with Greg Daniels. “He’s really sarcastic but also kind of lovable.” He added, “There’s so much going on with him that we felt it would be funny just to have him and Amy Poehler in the same room.”

In his stand-up act Mr. Ansari can be just as far-flung, joking about his time-wasting Internet searches or his fixation with R&B and rap stars like R. Kelly or Kanye West. (Mr. West was sufficiently flattered that he invited Mr. Ansari to a party at his house, which in turn became the basis of another stand-up bit.)

More here.

Point No Point

Did I visit this place once,
on an afternoon that skittered
between sun and rain?
I remember a desolate beach,
stepping on smooth eggs of stone,
past cedar logs lodged
like crowbars in the cove.
Did I photograph this scene then
or snap landscapes when asleep,
while walking in a dream?
In the scrapbooks stacked
against the wall, no pictures
of Point No Point exist.

Sometimes I wonder where it is,
this spot that defines futility.
Can we stick a pin in a map
and locate what might not be there?
Or, perhaps, despite seeing
where we wish to go,
we see no path; sometimes
we see a path but no destination.

On days when I feel lost,
on days when wind carries me off
to distant lands of restlessness,
on days like this, Point No Point
is where I am.

by Laury Egan
from Lowestoft Chronicle, Summer 2010

Nathan Schneider in The Nation:

For decades, sociologist Margaret Poloma struggled against the tone-deafness to spirituality that rules her discipline; she wanted to study prayer, to measure divine love, to “see God as an actor.” In the meantime, having held a tenured post at the University of Akron since 1970, she built a respectable career with a long list of journal articles and books to her name. She became an authority on Pentecostalism and on the family lives of modern women. But all along, Poloma says, “I felt like I was swimming alone upstream.”

That changed in the early 1990s, when she found an ally in David Larson, a psychiatrist who longed to integrate religion into the practice of medicine. He was in the process of founding the National Institute for Healthcare Research (NIHR); what the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is to medicine writ large, the NIHR would be for “the forgotten factor” of faith. In 1995 Larson brought Poloma to a conference organized by his funder: the John Templeton Foundation, established by the eponymous investor who died in July 2008 at 95. “That conference was a magical experience for me,” Poloma remembers. It was there that she met Stephen Post, a bioethicist who would later create the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love with Templeton money. With Post she began receiving grants from the foundation. By 2007 she was co-director of the Flame of Love Project, administering $2.3 million from Templeton to establish “a new interdisciplinary science of Godly Love,” with a focus on the Pentecostal tradition.

Other scholars aren't quite sure what the “science of Godly Love” means, exactly. Anthea Butler, a historian of Pentecostalism at the University of Pennsylvania, remembers that when Poloma's Flame of Love request for proposals appeared, “nobody in the field could figure out what the hell she was talking about.” Many applied anyway. “She went from being an outsider to someone with tons of money who can set the terms of discussion,” says Butler.

More here.

Liyanage Amarakeerthi in Himal South Asian:

I was born and raised in a little community in Kuliyapitiya, a typical agricultural area with three small tanks (wewa), which watered paddy fields, within walking distance on three sides of my house. Of course, there were also three Buddhist temples, almost within walking distance from each other. It was a typical village in the North-Western province, a part of which is known as bat kooralee or ‘rice province’. Where there were no tanks or paddy fields there were coconut plantations, big and small. Not surprisingly, much of the ‘coconut triangle’ is also in this province.

Ethnographically, it was a unique village because a considerable number of Sinhalese Christian families lived there, contradicting the conventional wisdom that Christians lived mostly in coastal areas. The village was unique economically too, with a semi-industrial character due to the three coconut-fibre mills in the area. Two of those were less than a mile from my house. If you did not have paddy or coconut land, you could make a living working at those mills. In that sense, the village was atypical. But this ‘self-sufficient village’ was destroyed within five years of political violence.

My village had an intersection, where three roads met. Within a quarter-mile radius of this intersection, or handiya, were three stores. One of the richest men in the village owned the first store. It was called maha kadee (big store), simply because it was the biggest of the three. Its official name was Maheswari Stores.

Now history enters the picture.

More here.

Lydia Polgreen in the NYT:

Twenty years ago, nearly 400,000 Hindus fled the Kashmir Valley, fearful of a separatist insurgency by the area’s Muslim majority. Now they are trickling back, a sign to many here that the Kashmir Valley, after years of violence and turmoil, is settling in to an uneasy but hopeful peace.

The valley’s upper-caste Hindus, Pandits as they are known, are reconnecting with their ancestral home, a few to stay and even larger numbers to visit. More than a dozen shrines have reopened in recent years, said Sanjay Tickoo, a Kashmiri Pandit who never left the valley and is now trying to entice those who left to return.

Their presence was once part of what made the Kashmir Valley a unique and idyllic patch of India, filled with apple orchards and shimmering fields of saffron framed by spiky, snow-capped peaks. A well-to-do but not overly powerful minority, the Pandits lived for centuries in relative harmony with their Muslim neighbors.

Kashmir’s mosaic of relatively peaceful coexistence first began to crack during the partition of British India, in 1947. But it was more than a decade of insurgency beginning in 1989 that turned the region into the battleground of the fierce rivalry between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan, who each control a portion of Kashmir.

Though not all fears or tensions from the past have dissipated, almost everyone here professes to want the Pandits to come back to the valley. Because they had lived here for generations, there is no sense that their return is intended to dilute the region’s Muslim majority.

“The overwhelming majority of Kashmiris believe the place is really incomplete without its diversity,” said Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. “It is an important milestone in our return to normalcy if they begin to come back.”

M. L. Dhar, a 75-year-old Kashmiri Pandit who lives in a suburb of New Delhi, returned recently to Kashmir for the first time. He was astounded at the warm welcome he received from the valley’s Muslims.

Edmund White reviews Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow, in the NYRB:

The Pregnant Widow begins as a beautifully poised, patient comedy of manners, in the tradition of the nineteenth- century English novels that Martin Amis’s college-age hero, Keith Nearing, is reading; then, in the last third, the narrative skips ahead and thins out and speeds up and starts to destroy itself joyously, like one of Jean Tinguely’s self-wrecking sculptures—or like civilization itself in the twenty-first century. It’s as if As You Like It, after carefully staging explorations of love and gender in a sylvan setting, were to knock itself out in a violent, messy, urban free-for-all right out of Animal House. In this respect alone I was reminded of Gravity’s Rainbow, in which the main theme, entropy, causes the book itself to give up on being, intermittently, a fairly traditional historical novel about World War II and to go to pieces, to run down, and the main character, Slothrop, to vanish.

Karl-Ludwig Günsche in Spiegel Online:

The façade of a country in a celebratory mood veils a nation that is actually festering, where people are sick and tired of being fobbed off with promise after empty promise. Labor leaders haven't been shy of threatening strikes during the World Cup. “Nobody must say 'Hold on, there are visitors around, don't do anything about this matter,'” Zwelinzima Vavi, who heads the Congress of South African Trade Unions, said last Thursday. “Our struggles … are bigger than the World Cup.”

Slum dwellers increasingly fight their fate. In Balfour they even shouted down Zuma, the former national hero. One in every two South Africans are unhappy with the public sector and the state's services, according to a survey by the TNS research institute. The ruling ANC party recently lost a ballot in the Western Cape for the first time, conceding their traditional stronghold to the opposition…

Ahead of next year's local elections, the ruling party is nervous, divided and embroiled in internal power struggles. The ANC leadership appears to have silenced the head of the Youth League, Julius Malema, whose hate speeches and chants fomented a climate of violence and racism. But his followers continue to pile on the pressure. Youth League functionary Loyiso Nkohla called on the ANC youth to devastate Cape Town and make it ungovernable. The mayor of the touristy city, Dan Plato, then called on Khayelitsha township residents to challenge the ANC youth with burning tires, an apartheid-period symbol of oppressive regimes. Amnesty International warned that the violent outbreaks could quickly escalate into xenophobic unrest.

From Prospect Magazine:

There is a pattern typical of these end-phase periods, when an artistic movement ossifies. At such times there is exaggeration and multiplication instead of development. A once new armoury of artistic concepts, processes, techniques and themes becomes an archive of formulae, quotations or paraphrasings, ultimately assuming the mode of self-parody.

Over the last decade, not only conceptualism—perhaps the dominant movement of the past three decades—but the entire modernist project has been going through a similar process. Of course, some important and inspired artists have made important and inspired work in recent years—from famous photographers like Andreas Gursky and painters like Luc Tuymans to lesser-known video artists like Lindsay Seers and Anri Sala. But there is something more fundamentally wrong with much of this century’s famous art than its absurd market value. I believe that this decline shares four aesthetic and ideological characteristics with the end-phases of previous grand styles: formulae for the creation of art; a narcissistic, self-reinforcing cult that elevates art and the artist over actual subjects and ideas; the return of sentiment; and the alibi of cynicism.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Also, Saeed Kamali Dehghan on the filming of the documentary, in The Guardian. And here, a story on the Iranian regimes efforts to jam the documentary, also in the Guardian.

From The Guardian:

There is much speculation about the nature of the mind, its relation to the brain, even doubt that the word “mind” is meaningful. According to EO Wilson, “The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbour a nonphysical mind”. Perhaps this statement is to be taken as tongue in cheek. But to prove a negative, or to treat it as having been proved, is, oddly enough, an old and essential strategy of positivism. So I do feel obliged to point out that if such a site could be found in the brain, then the mind would be physical in the same sense that anything else with a locus in the brain is physical. To define the mind as nonphysical in the first place clearly prejudices his conclusion. Steven Pinker, on the soul, asks, “How does the spook interact with solid matter? How does an ethereal nothing respond to flashes, pokes and beeps and get arms and legs to move? Another problem is the overwhelming evidence that the mind is the activity of the brain. The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals,” and so on. By identifying the soul with the mind, the mind with the brain, and noting the brain's vulnerability as a physical object, he feels he has debunked a conception of the soul that only those who find the word meaningless would ever have entertained.

This declension, from the ethereality of the mind/soul as spirit to the reality of the mind/brain as a lump of meat, is dependent, conceptually and for its effects, on precisely the antique dualism these writers who claim to speak for science believe they reject and refute. If complex life is the marvel we all say it is, quite possibly unique to this planet, then meat is, so to speak, that marvel in its incarnate form. It was dualism that pitted the spirit against the flesh, investing spirit with all that is lofty at the expense of flesh, which is by contrast understood as coarse and base. It only perpetuates dualist thinking to treat the physical as if it were in any way sufficiently described in disparaging terms. If the mind is the activity of the brain, this means only that the brain is capable of such lofty and astonishing things that their expression has been given the names mind, and soul, and spirit. Complex life may well be the wonder of the universe, and if it is, its status is not diminished by the fact that we can indeed bisect it, that we kill it routinely.

More here.

All the People Who Are Now Red Trees

When I see the red maple,
I think of a shoemaker
and a fish peddler
red as the leaves,
electrocuted by the state
of Massachusetts.

When I see the red maple,
I think of flamboyán's red flower,
two poets like flamboyán
chained at the wrist
for visions of San Juan Bay
without navy gunboats.

When I see flamboyán,
I think of my grandmother
and her name, Catalán for red,
a war in Spain
and nameless laborers
marching with broken rifles.

When I see my grandmother
and her name, Catalán for red,
I think of union organizers
in graves without headstones,
feeding the roots
of red trees.

When I stand on a mountain,
I can see the red trees of a century,
I think red leaves are the hands
of condemned anarchists, red flowers
the eyes and mouths of poets in chains,
red wreaths in the treetops to remember,

I see them raising branches
like broken rifles, all the people
who are now red trees.

by Martín Espada
from Touching the Fire
Anchor Books, 1998

The idea of evil, remarks Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, has in recent decades been seen as “a holdover from a mythical, Christian worldview whose time had already passed”. But the fact that Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Evil is being published within weeks of literary critic Terry Eagleton’s On Evil and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s Memory as a Remedy for Evil suggests that the secular world is not quite ready to dispense with the concept of evil just yet. At the same time, a new reissue of theologian John Hick’s 1966 classic Evil and the God of Love shows there’s still life in the Christian perspective too. Perhaps this resurgence of interest is inevitable, for even though evil as an idea may have been out of fashion, as a reality it has never gone away. Attempts to do without the word in the face of genocide, torture and flagrant disregard for life, collapse into euphemistic absurdity. But what exactly is evil? Hick adopts the standard theological distinction between the natural evil that arises independently of human action, such as earthquakes and pestilence; the moral evil that is the result of human action; and the metaphysical evil that inevitably results from a finite and hence imperfect universe.

more from Julian Baggini at the FT here.

In chronicling his crippling attempts to read the great authors, keep up with the newest radical-highbrow scholarship and mingle with the social elite — all at the same time — Krim produced one of the great anti-intellectual screeds of his time. Coming on like Kerouac, he indicted the spokesmen of his age for using “too many words to say too few things that matter today to life-bombed kids.” The work of becoming an intellectual was fraught with peril; Krim was devoured by the “anxiety of influence” years before Harold Bloom popularized the term. “I knew gifted, fresh, swinging writers who told me in moments of confidence that they knew they weren’t ‘great’ or ‘major,’ ” he wrote, “and their voices were futile with flat tone when they confessed to this supposed weakness: as if the personal horn each could blow was meaningless because history wasn’t going to faint over them. History, the god of my grotesque period, the pursued phantom, the ruby-circled mirror of our me-worshipping egos which made monomanical fanatics out of potentially decent men!”

more from Akiva Gottlieb at the LAT here.

There are any number of reasons you shouldn’t read “The Man Who Loved Children” this summer. It’s a novel, for one thing; and haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about? To read “The Man Who Loved Children” would be an especially frivolous use of your time, since, even by novelistic standards, it’s about nothing of world-historical consequence. It’s about a family, and a very extreme and singular family at that, and the few parts of it that aren’t about this family are the least compelling parts. The novel is also rather long, sometimes repetitious and undeniably slow in the middle. It requires you, moreover, to learn to read the family’s private language, a language created and imposed by the eponymous father, and though the learning curve is nowhere near as steep as with Joyce or Faulkner, you’re still basically being asked to learn a language good for absolutely nothing but enjoying this one particular book.

more from Jonathan Franzen at the NYT here.