I Knew a Woman

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

By Theodore Roethke

From Scientific American:

In a few short weeks, world leaders will assemble in Copenhagen for the much anticipated United Nations Climate Change Conference. Their goal: to draft an agreement that will limit global warming, chiefly by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As the 12-day meeting gets closer, the chorus from jaded pundits and politicians gets louder: “It can’t be done.”

Nonsense. The naysayers have two reasonable concerns. One: Countries will never agree on limits because they are out to protect their own interests, which differ. Two: Even if they reach an agreement, it will never hold because it will raise energy prices, which people will resist. Fortunately, both worries can be resolved.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

Numbers make modern life possible. “In a world without numbers,” University of Rochester neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon and her colleagues recently observed in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, “we would be unable to build a skyscraper, hold a national election, plan a wedding, or pay for a chicken at the market.”

The central role of numbers in our world testifies to the brain’s uncanny ability to recognize and understand them—and Cantlon is among the researchers trying to find out exactly how that skill works. Traditionally, scientists have thought that we learn to use numbers the same way we learn how to drive a car or to text with two thumbs. In this view, numbers are a kind of technology, a man-made invention to which our all-purpose brains can adapt. History provides some support. The oldest evidence of people using numbers dates back about 30,000 years: bones and antlers scored with notches that are considered by archaeologists to be tallying marks. More sophisticated uses of numbers arose only much later, coincident with the rise of other simple technologies. The Mesopotamians developed basic arithmetic about 5,000 years ago. Zero made its debut in A.D. 876. Arab scholars laid the foundations of algebra in the ninth century; calculus did not emerge in full flower until the late 1600s.

Despite the late appearance of higher mathematics, there is growing evidence that numbers are not really a recent invention—not even remotely. Cantlon and others are showing that our species seems to have an innate skill for math, a skill that may have been shared by our ancestors going back least 30 million years.

More here.

Ezra Klein in the Washington Post:

These guys took down a plane with box cutters. They used crude weapons to attack a far more sophisticated and effective fighting force. The most fearsome of them was captured at home, in his pajamas. It's not like we're putting Magneto on trial and need to keep him away from metal filings.

It's one thing to be afraid of terrorism. But there's no real reason to be afraid of terrorists, and as Daphne Eviatar argues, there's good reason not to look like you're afraid of terrorists:

The contrast of seeing these ordinary-looking men on trial in an orderly U.S. courtroom — where they’re accorded the right to a lawyer, the right to speak in their own defense and the right to call witnesses — could go a long way toward publicly revealing the absurdity of their cause, as well as the justice that a fair and functioning legal system can provide.

Trying these guys publicly, as well as holding them in normal prisons like common criminals, is good public relations.

More here.

In Guernica Magazine:

Amitava Kumar: Here’s a question: is war more a fact of life for South Asians? Is it a consistent theme in fiction written in the South Asian diaspora?

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It’s hard for me to answer that with complete confidence when I still struggle with the question of how race and ethnicity relate to literary genres and classifications. How do you think it does? People often talk to me of South Asian literature, and I’m not sure what they mean—writing by South Asians? About South Asians?

Certainly, writers in the South Asian diaspora deploy a great variety of styles—but some common themes. All fiction is political in some way, and it’s interesting to see fiction play out in some South Asian spheres in which talking about politics has become dirty, something polite people don’t do. And of course fiction does all sorts of things, goes all sorts of places, that polite people don’t go. So I was fascinated to ask some terrific fiction writers about politics and war and see what would rise to the surface, what would bubble up, and what would stay in the background.

And some things also stay in the background because in parts of South Asia and its diasporas, war and a kind of unstable politics have been normalized. I am always fascinated to watch characters dealing with their personal lives without explicitly acknowledging the hold politics has on them, even as it affects everything they do. Have they become desensitized? And how does one write about violence without fetishizing it?

Tara McKelvey in the Boston Review:

When Roger Benimoff arrived at the psychiatric building of the Coatesville, Pennsylvania veterans’ hospital, he was greeted by a message carved into a nearby tree stump: “Welcome Home.” It was a reminder that things had not turned out as he had expected.

In Faith Under Fire, a memoir about Benimoff’s life as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff and co-author Eve Conant describe his return from Iraq to his family in Colorado and subsequent assignment to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He retreated deep into himself, spending hours on the computer and racking up ten thousand dollars in debt on eBay. Above all, he was angry and jittery, scared even of his young sons, and barely able to make it through the day. He was eventually admitted to Coatesville’s “Psych Ward.” For a while the lock-down facility was his home. He wondered where God was in all of this, and was not alone in that bewilderment and pain.

In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort for them. The Yale study found that these soldiers were more likely than others to seek mental health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) when they came home. It was not that these veterans had unusually high confidence in government or especially good information about services at VA hospitals. Instead, they had fallen into a spiritual abyss and were desperate to find a way out. The trauma of war seems to be especially acute for men and women whose faith in a benevolent God is challenged by the carnage they have witnessed.

In the Immanent Frame:

Talal Asad and Abdullahi An-Na’im both stand at the forefront of the challenging and constructive exchange taking place today between European and Islamic traditions of political, legal, and religious thought. At a recent event organized by the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, the two scholars traded questions and criticisms concerning the concept of human rights. Moderated by José Casanova, the discussion addressed the intrinsic limitations and historical failures of the language of human rights, as well as its formidable capacity to challenge autocratic and state-centric distributions of power, creating openings for democratic contestation and political self-determination…

Talal Asad: José suggested that I should talk a little bit, first of all, about some of the main points from yesterday’s lecture. The lecture was an exploration of a number of concepts that that seem to me to lie at the origin of human rights, something I’m thinking about for my next book. But if I could just summarize, first, some things from that lecture, then I will try and make some points about Professor Abdullahi’s work, particularly his famous book, which has been much more influential than mine—my work on secularism is purely academic, you know; it tries to determine where the real effects of politics come from—and also to indicate the things that I think are good about secularity and then pose some questions I had, which it would be good to have you answer. And finally, I’ll say a few words about actual politics. I would like to begin with the effort to move some of our countries towards a more democratic form of politics and government and so on, which is not always the same thing as speaking about what one would like to see.

I basically tried to stress a couple of things yesterday, and perhaps I should focus on the most important ones. First of all, that the emotions that we talk about, like compassion and sympathy, which are supposed to lie at the base of human rights, are really much more mobile, much more unpredictable, much more uncontrollable than one thinks. They are both necessary and dangerous, one might say.

Our own Kris Kotarski in The Calgary Herald:

Earlier this fall, British company Internet Eyes figured out a way to cash in on CCTV. It bills itself as “an online instant event notification system” that will allow “viewers” to “anonymously monitor random video feeds streamed from privately owned establishments.”

“Viewers” in this case are people. “Events” are crimes, imagined or real. And the “instant event notification system” must be the object of desire for every generalissimo in the world, aspiring or real.

Internet Eyes bills its service as a game, where people “report crime as it happens,” scoring “points” for “neutral” alerts when the “viewer” acts in good faith but does not report an actual crime, or “positive” alerts when a crime was actually committed. The first results in one point; the second in three. A “negative” alert brings zero points, which does not help when one aspires to win the £1,000 monthly prize, to be awarded to “the highest crime scoring member every month.”

“This is about crime prevention,” founder James Woodward told the BBC, as his company prepares to charge “viewers” £1 per alert and CCTV camera owners £20 each month to add their footage to the central database. “What we're doing is we're putting more eyes onto those cameras so that they are monitored.”

More here.

No offense to other etiquette guides, but Laura Claridge says these are impeccable.

From the Wall Street Journal:

1. On the Civility of Children's Conduct

By Erasmus

1530

The great classical scholar of the Northern Renaissance, Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, also had some thoughts about proper behavior. Teach manners early, Erasmus believed. To that end, he produced this small book addressed to children. It admirably commanded the attention of his young audience and remained popular for three centuries. “To lick greasy fingers or to wipe them on your coat is impolite. It is better to use the table cloth,” he counsels. Also: “It is not seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and peer into it as if pearls and rubies might have fallen out of your head.” He returns repeatedly to the era's apparently vexing problem of the gaseous bellows: “Retain your wind by compressing the belly” and “Do not move back and forth on your chair. Whoever does that gives the impression of constantly breaking or trying to break wind.” If attempts at restraint fail, he advises, then do what you must but “cough loudly” to cover the sound.

2. Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior

By George Washington

1748

Though often credited with writing this treatise on manners, the 16-year-old George Washington at best merely translated the rules compiled in 1595 by French Jesuits. A translation had already appeared in England long before the young Washington produced what may have been a school assignment, but in the folklore associated with our nation's first president, his name has been attached to the advice given in “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior.” In any event, the American document retains its interest as a window into the standards of behavior that Washington thought, early on, to set for himself and, by extension, for his nation. One of the rules would become increasingly relevant to the leader after he received his ivory (not wooden) dentures: “Cleanse not your teeth with the Table Cloth Napkin Fork or Knife but if Others do it let it be done wt. a Pick Tooth.”

More here.

Darryl Campbell in The Bygone Bureau:

After all, almost no one in the under-30 set — certainly no one under twenty — can remember what it was like to grow up under the shadow of the Soviet Union. We Millennials grew up fearing nuclear power plants more than ballistic missiles; we’ve drawn our political battle lines around legalized abortion and gay marriage, not Marxism and its derivatives. And however we understand our nation’s role in the world, whatever present or future threats we might see in China, Russia, or the Islamic world, we know that we are far removed from the East-versus-West world of the Cold War. Soviet-style Communism has gone, in the words of Leon Trotsky, into the dustbin of history.

In a 1989 essay, Francis Fukuyama argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union showed that there were no viable alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy. We’d arrived, in other words, at the “end of history.” I don’t know if his thesis is true or even provable — Fukuyama himself later backed away from it in his 2002 book Our Posthuman Future — but it seems to me that he’s at least got something right about our relationship to the past.

Those of us who grew up after the Wall fell may never completely understand what it was like before November 9th, 1989.

More here.

Mustafa Qadri in The Guardian:

Although the Taliban have openly claimed responsibility for the recent epidemic of suicide bombings against civilian targets in Peshawar and Islamabad, many Pakistanis appear convinced that the real culprits are India or the United States.

“These are India's agents,” an anti-narcotics bureaucrat tells me in Islamabad with a confident grin. With its operatives active in a string of Indian consulates along the Pak-Afghan border, so goes the popular claim, they direct New Delhi's latest attempt to topple the Islamic Republic. It is a common refrain in Pakistan. In fact, so common, that almost everyone I venture to ask blames the Indians, or Americans, or foreigners for the terrorism.

The country has faced many crises over the years, but these are particularly unsettling days. In the past, violence tended to be unilateral: avoid the angry mob on days of protest, neighbourhoods patrolled by gangs, or criticising vocal mullahs and life was generally quiet. But today's enemy moves with stealth and could be anywhere.

Already poor migrants from Afghanistan and the central Asian republics have been evicted from the slums of Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Karachi on the suspicion that someone among their numbers is responsible for the violence. But these are just the small fry, and even the media and the government claim there is good intelligence implicating foreign powers.

So where, one has to ask, do these rumours come from?

More here. [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

I just saw something quite weird in Amsterdam. David Sedaris describes it in Esquire:

In France and Germany, gifts are exchanged on Christmas Eve, while in Holland the children receive presents on December 5, in celebration of Saint Nicholas Day. It sounded sort of quaint until I spoke to a man named Oscar, who filled me in on a few of the details as we walked from my hotel to the Amsterdam train station.

Unlike the jolly, obese American Santa, Saint Nicholas is painfully thin and dresses not unlike the pope, topping his robes with a tall hat resembling an embroidered tea cozy. The outfit, I was told, is a carryover from his former career, when he served as a bishop in Turkey.

One doesn't want to be too much of a cultural chauvinist, but this seemed completely wrong to me. For starters, Santa didn't use to do anything. He's not retired, and, more important, he has nothing to do with Turkey. The climate's all wrong, and people wouldn't appreciate him. When asked how he got from Turkey to the North Pole, Oscar told me with complete conviction that Saint Nicholas currently resides in Spain, which again is simply not true. While he could probably live wherever he wanted, Santa chose the North Pole specifically because it is harsh and isolated. No one can spy on him, and he doesn't have to worry about people coming to the door. Anyone can come to the door in Spain, and in that outfit, he'd most certainly be recognized. On top of that, aside from a few pleasantries, Santa doesn't speak Spanish. He knows enough to get by, but he's not fluent, and he certainly doesn't eat tapas.

While our Santa flies on a sled, Saint Nicholas arrives by boat and then transfers to a white horse. The event is televised, and great crowds gather at the waterfront to greet him. I'm not sure if there's a set date, but he generally docks in late November and spends a few weeks hanging out and asking people what they want.

“Is it just him alone?” I asked. “Or does he come with some backup?”

Oscar's English was close to perfect, but he seemed thrown by a term normally reserved for police reinforcement.

“Helpers,” I said. “Does he have any elves?”

Maybe I'm just overly sensitive, but I couldn't help but feel personally insulted when Oscar denounced the very idea as grotesque and unrealistic. “Elves,” he said. “They're just so silly.”

The words silly and unrealistic were redefined when I learned that Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as “six to eight black men.”

More here. [Thanks to Ram and Ramani.]

The Eyes of Flesh

My
father
dreams
that I
shall be
a wife.

Setting me
up in weeds
outside a
house where
beds of flowers
plunge
into fertilizer (he
would plant
me there)
with greenish braids
veined on my
ivory neck
twisted above
blood-checked gingham
in a knot
of love.

All his tears
fall from
his glassy rimmed
spectacles
to awaken him.

Father, sleep
in Jerusalem.
I hate
the plastic
fixtures
in this place
where we
erase
my childhood. For
a house
is where
deep
purposes are
broken
off.

by Sandra Hochman

from No More Masks!; Doubleday Anchor, 1973

From The Guardian:

Enid Blyton's work was snubbed by the BBC for decades, it has been revealed. How could they resist?

Blyton died in 1968, and for a while it looked as if her work would die with her. So redolent of the 1940s and 50s were her books that the educationalists who held sway in the 1970s and 80s, echoing the disdain of their forerunners at the BBC, hated them. Noddy had long been dismissed as “the most egocentric, joyless, snivelling and pious anti-hero in the history of British fiction”, while a stage version of Noddy in Toyland was labelled racist.

But for better or worse, Blyton helped shape me. My generation (I was born in 1957) was saturated in her books. I hold no candle for the insipid Noddy, but The Secret Seven captivated the nine-year-old me, and The Famous Five thrilled me a couple of years later. Children of that age now, assailed by computers, are far more advanced, and you could knock a couple of years off those ages. But my bet is that these books still work for children, even though adults invariably consider them vapid. The psychologist Michael Woods once suggested why children and their parents never see eye to eye over Blyton: “She was really a child at heart, a person who never developed emotionally beyond the basic infantile level. She thought as a child, and she wrote as a child; of course the craft of an extremely competent adult writer is there, but the basic feeling is pre-adolescent.”

More here. (Note: For Bhaisab and Bhaijan who read the Enid Blyton books to Ga and me when we could not read and for Abbas to whom Ga and I read them in turn. We love the Famous Five!)

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Zahi Hawass regards the Rosetta Stone, like so much else, as stolen property languishing in exile. “We own that stone,” he told Al Jazeera, speaking as the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. The British Museum does not agree — at least not yet. But never underestimate Dr. Hawass when it comes to this sort of custody dispute. He has prevailed so often in getting pieces returned to what he calls their “motherland” that museum curators are scrambling to appease him. Last month, after Dr. Hawass suspended the Louvre’s excavation in Egypt, the museum promptly returned the ancient fresco fragments he sought. Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art made a pre-emptive display of its “appreciation” and “deep respect” by buying a piece of a shrine from a private collector so that it could be donated to Egypt.

Now an official from the Neues Museum in Berlin is headed to Egypt to discuss Dr. Hawass’s demand for its star attraction, a bust of Nefertiti. These gestures may make immediate pragmatic sense for museum curators worried about getting excavation permits and avoiding legal problems. But is this trend ultimately good for archaeology?

More here.

This vision of the recent past as already shrouded in dust acquires, in the works of a more dialectically or perversely inclined Modernism, the lineaments of the fantastic or of an oddly eroticized appreciation of decay. In the section of the Arcades Project entitled “Boredom, Eternal Return,” Walter Benjamin briefly refers to the role of dust in the nineteenth-century interior, a substance at once magical and mundane: “Plush as dust collector. Mystery of dustmotes playing in the sunlight. Dust and the ‘best room’…. Other arrangements to stir up dust: the trains of dresses.”4 In the decaying Paris arcades—the furred arteries of the modern city—dust both occludes and outlines the once-novel commodity and its slow desuetude. For Marcel Proust, too, dust was simultaneously to be feared (in the form of the lime-tree pollen that brought on his asthma, or the choking fumes of the coal fire in 
his bedroom) and welcomed for the physical and aesthetic veil it cast about him as he wrote; Proust lived his last decade in a cloud of medicinal powders, propped up among material remnants of his past—photographs, books, and furniture—that he refused to allow his servants to dust.

more from Brian Dillon at Cabinet here.

What makes economies grow? It’s a question that has occupied thinkers for centuries. Most of us would tick off things like education levels, openness to trade, natural resources, and political systems. Here’s one you might not have considered: hell. A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies – and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell.

more from Michael Fitzgerald at The Boston Globe here.

by Tolu Ogunlesi

To the outside world, we are all “Africans”.

‘Africa’, that continent of “colourful emergencies” (a term coined by novelist Helen Oyeyemi in a 2005 essay); ‘African’, that oversized brush dripping a paint handy for tarring every living thing found within a thousand-mile radius of the Sahara desert.

As Africans – and by extension African writers – we’re supposed to be united by geography, culture and experience (mostly of the negative sort), and thus a herd of interchangeable entities. There is after all such a thing as African literature, written by African writers, dealing with African issues – poverty, wars, AIDS, Aid, military dictatorships, coup d’états, corruption, civilian dictatorships, and very lately, dubious power sharings.

Never mind that Nigeria and Uganda are no more similar (in my opinion) than America and Russia. Or that Nigeria’s religious dichotomy (and the resulting tensions) confers on it a greater similarity with India than with South Africa. Or that Nigeria and fellow English-speaking Ghana are separated by two impregnable walls of language known as Benin and Togo. Or that a conference proclaimed as a “Festival of Contemporary African Writing” will very likely be no more than a Festival of Anglophone African Writing.

Chimamanda Adichie’s short story, Jumping Monkey Hill (first published in Granta 95, and which appears in her story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck) – which William Skidelsky, writing in the Guardian (UK) calls “the most obviously autobiographical (and funniest) of the stories in The Thing Around Your Neck” – tells the story of an “African Writers’ Workshop” for which the British Council has selected participants.

Read more »