I recall a paper from a few years ago which looked at emergence of regional voting blocs for Eurovision.  It appears that the awareness of this fact is beginning to upset fans and contestants.  In Der Spiegel:

It was at last year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Helsinki that the idea of some kind of Eastern European concerted offensive first took hold. Viewers from Lapland to Lisbon saw how not one single Western European country made it through the semifinals to compete on the big night itself.

The only Western European countries that took part in the finals were the hosts and the so-called “big four,” which are always guaranteed a slot, and none of them fared well. Host Finland got off lightly, receiving 53 points and coming in 17th, while Germany was 19th but still ahead of its partners in Eurovision misery, France, the United Kingdom and Spain.

The hue and cry began almost immediately. Germany’s sole Eurovision winner, Nicole, said Germany should stop entering the competition. There was talk of countries doing each other favors and suggestions that Western Europe should start up a new competition and graciously leave Eurovision to their eastern neighbors.

One thing Western Europeans seemed to agree on: the results could only be the product of some sort of cheeky hustling for points. And if anyone was bound to be shamelessly breaking the most democratic rules of any musical contest, then surely it would be those living to the east of the former Iron Curtain. The only question is how they could be bending the rules, since viewers across Europe can call in and vote for any act they wish to, as long as it isn’t the contestant from their own country.

Fraser Newham reviews Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin, in Asia Times Online:

Stalin and Trotsky fall out early on, and in general Montefiore nicely brings out the patterns and vagaries of life as a young revolutionary. Particularly memorable are his descriptions of those long periods of exile many of them experienced from time to time, shipped upriver to the far west where it was hoped they could cause less trouble.

Conditions in these exile settlements were incredibly lax; decades later aging revolutionaries would reminisce about their times in the distant wilds, days spent reading, drinking and, far from family and moral restraints, engaged in more than a little sex. There were no fences or walls around these villages, and “escape” was all part of the game – at one point, in preparation for one such walk out, Stalin even wrote back to his mum in Georgia asking if she could send him some extra clothes.

He was exiled on at least four separate occasions; this included in the years leading up to 1917 a four-year banishment to one of the wildest corners of Siberia, inhabited largely nomadic Tungus tribesmen. Stalin took local clothes, travelled by sled and, like the locals, lived on a diet of fish and reindeer. It was an experience which he later claimed as formative, central to his steely being.

“He became the solitary hunter,” Montefiore tells us, “a role that suited his self-image as a man on a sacred mission, riding out into the snows with a rifle for company, but no attachments except his faith … For the rest of his life he regaled Politburo grandees with tales of his Siberian adventures. Even when he ruled Russia he was still that solitary hunter.”

Erika Hoff reviews Christine Kenneally’s The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language in Evolutionary Psychology:

Two developments in the later half of the 20th century changed the scientific landscape in a way that laid the groundwork for a new approach to the study of language origins. First, Noam Chomsky asserted that language was a property of the human mind, thus bringing linguistics into psychology and creating a field known as psycholinguistics, now more frequently referred to as the psychology of language. Then Leda Cosmides and John Tooby asserted that the mind, no less than the body, is the result of natural selection,  thus bringing evolution to psychology and creating the field of evolutionary psychology. Together, the premises of these two fields raised the question of how language evolved. As linguists became interested in the question, the field of evolutionary linguistics (or evolingo to insiders) emerged, and as these theoretical developments made the question of language origins legitimate, developments in related fields of science made the study of language origins potentially fruitful. Researchers in animal intelligence and communication, genetics, neurobiology, computational modeling, and developmental psychology all contributed to the enterprise. The study of how language came to be is now an active field.

In The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, Christine Kenneally describes the history and current state of this enterprise for a general audience. The task she has undertaken—describing to nonscientists the several highly technical fields that address this topic—is formidable. Kenneally does it very well, clearly supported by both her skills as a free-lance journalist and her Ph.D. training in linguistics. The first four chapters of the book focus on four researchers or research teams who have staked out different positions on the issue. The book begins, appropriately, with linguist Noam Chomsky who started the modern study of language. Chomsky has historically been associated with the position that the human language capacity is a self-contained module, separate from other cognitive abilities and unrelated to the communicative purposes to which language just so happens to be put. How this module came to be is not particularly of interest to Chomsky, and he has publicly and frequently expressed reservations about the value of considering the question.

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Sonnet VII
John Milton

ON HIS BEING ARRIVED AT THE AGE OF 23

HOW soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth,
    Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
    My hasting days fly on with full career,
    But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
    That I to manhood am arrived so near,
    And inward ripeness doth much less appear
    That some more timely happy spirits indueth.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
    It shall be still in strictest measure even
    To that same lot however mean or high,
Toward which time leads me and the will of heaven.
    All is, if I have grace to use it so,
    As ever in my great taskmaster’s eye.

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From The New Yorker:

Sometime in 1638, John Milton visited Galileo Galilei in Florence. The great astronomer was old and blind and under house arrest, confined by order of the Inquisition, which had forced him to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun, as formulated in his “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.” Milton was thirty years old—his own blindness, his own arrest, and his own cosmological epic, “Paradise Lost,” all lay before him. But the encounter left a deep imprint on him. It crept into “Paradise Lost,” where Satan’s shield looks like the moon seen through Galileo’s telescope, and in Milton’s great defense of free speech, “Areopagitica,” Milton recalls his visit to Galileo and warns that England will buckle under inquisitorial forces if it bows to censorship, “an undeserved thraldom upon learning.”

Beyond the sheer pleasure of picturing the encounter—it’s like those comic-book specials in which Superman meets Batman—there’s something strange about imagining these two figures inhabiting the same age. Though Milton was the much younger man, in some ways his world system seems curiously older than the astronomer’s empirical universe. Milton depicted the earth hanging fixed from a golden chain, and when he contemplated the heavens he saw God enthroned and angels warring. The sense of the new and the old colliding forms part of Milton’s complex aura. The best-known portrait of his mature years makes Milton look like the dyspeptic brother of the man on the Quaker Oats box, but he is far more our contemporary than Shakespeare, who died when Milton was seven. Nobody would ever wonder whether Milton was really the author of his own work. Though “Paradise Lost” is a dilation on a moment in Genesis, it contains passages so personal that you cannot read far without knowing that the author was a blind man fallen on “evil days.” Even in his political prose, Milton will pause to tell us that he is really not all that short, despite what his enemies say. Though he coined the name “Pandemonium”—“all the demons”—for the palace that Satan and his fallen crew build in Hell, he also coined the word “self-esteem,” as contemporary a concept as there is and one that governed much of Milton’s life.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In April, on the highway outside the little Punjabi town of Renala Khurd, Aitzaz Ahsan was waylaid by a crowd of seemingly deranged lawyers. The advocates, who wore black suits, white shirts and black ties, were not actually insane; they just seemed that way because they were so overcome with excitement at greeting the mastermind of Pakistan’s lawyers’ movement, perhaps the most consequential outpouring of liberal, democratic energy in the Islamic world in recent years. The 62-year-old Ahsan was on his way to address the bar association of Okara, 10 miles away, but the lawyers, and the farmers and shopkeepers gathered with them, were not about to let him leave. They boiled around the car, shouting slogans. “Who should our leaders be like?” they cried. “Like Aitzaz!” And, “How many are prepared to die for you?” “Countless! Countless!”

Pakistan’s lawyers were not, in fact, courting martyrdom, but their willingness to stand up for their convictions, and to suffer for them, has transformed their country’s legal and political landscape.

More here.

Ben Lewis on humor in communist societies, in the FT:

On the stand at the Writers’ Congress of 1934 [the pro-regime satirist Mkhail] Kol’tsov repeated the contorted counter-arguments that had been presented in the past decade. Even if one day, when the system was perfect, he conceded, there would be no need for laughter, there was still a place for it now. Even if the satire took the same forms as old-fashioned Tsarist humour, that was no reason to see it as reactionary. Since the working class were, according to Marxist-Leninist theory, the last class before the arrival of a classless society, their laughter was acceptable because, Kol’tsov said ingeniously, “In the history of the class struggle, the working class will have the last laugh.”

Humour offered the early communists the same philosophical conundrums that every other area of culture offered: what belonged to yesterday and what to tomorrow? Many argued that humour could be used to ridicule the old bourgeois habits that persisted … But, said others, given that the Soviets were creating a perfect world, there would soon be nothing left to laugh at in Russian politics or society … No, said others with equal gravity: the liberation of the working classes meant that finally the masses could take control of the language of humour that used to be the preserve of the elite … No, not quite, a third group of straight-faced critics theorised comically, there would still be laughter under communism, but the new society would invent an entirely new sense of humour.

Kathy G. on (Michelle) Obama bashing:

[T]he feminist blogosphere has largely ignored the extremely nasty racism, sexism, and character assassination that has been targeted at Michelle Obama. Worse, some “feminists” have themselves gleefully joined in the Michelle-bashing. Tami quotes one Hillary supporter who wrote a vitriolic post about Michelle with the charming title, “God Damn Michelle Obama”; among other things, the writer takes a cheap shot at Michelle’s physical appearance. Tami also cites a post by another Hillary supporter who attacks Barack for somehow being less than a man; it’s the typically vicious, catty, and extremely sexist Maureen Dowd dealio.

This kind of crap from people who, like Michelle, are Democrats and feminists saddens me. That the right would pull this kind of shit was a no-brainer, but it’s more painful when it comes from people you think are your allies. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, though. When I wrote an earlier post about the attacks on Michelle, I got a couple of troll-riffic commenters who more or less said that bashing Michelle was a-okay with them, and as best I could tell, those commenters were Democrats.

Ewen Callaway in New Scientist:

God may work in mysterious ways, but a simple computer program may explain how religion evolved

By distilling religious belief into a genetic predisposition to pass along unverifiable information, the program predicts that religion will flourish. However, religion only takes hold if non-believers help believers out – perhaps because they are impressed by their devotion.

“If a person is willing to sacrifice for an abstract god then people feel like they are willing to sacrifice for the community,” says James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, US, who wrote the program – called Evogod (download the code here).

Dow is by no means the first scientist to take a stab at explaining how religion emerged. Theories on the evolution of religion tend toward two camps. One argues that religion is a mental artefact, co-opted from brain functions that evolved for other tasks.

Another contends that religion benefited our ancestors. Rather than being a by-product of other brain functions, it is an adaptation in its own right. In this explanation, natural selection slowly purged human populations of the non-religious.

“Sometime between 100,000 years ago to the point where writing was invented, maybe about 7000 BC, we begin to have records of people’s supernatural beliefs,” Dow says.

To determine if it was possible for religion to emerge as an adaptation, Dow wrote a simple computer program that focuses on the evolutionary benefits people receive from their interactions with one another.

“What people are adapting to is other people,” he says.

Amanda Marcotte in TPM Cafe, in a book club discussion of Nixonland:

People have become more self-referential, in part because of pop bands like Devo that made arty-farty post-modernism the lingua franca of our era. (Devo is particularly useful—it might have puzzled Norman Lear to have people love his show for both sending up and celebrating the Archie Bunkers of the world, but Devo, which cartoonishly loves and loathes the Silent Majority culture, would have been thrilled for such mixed reactions.) Conservatives who go on “The Colbert Report” know they’re being lampooned; they just hope that it manages to sell a few books anyway.

Self-referentiality may make us smarter, but it has an ugly downside, which Devo predicted by making “We must repeat” the 5th plank in their platform. The thing that’s made me alternately panic and laugh darkly during the whole Iraq war debacle is how the memory of the 60s dominated people’s behavior. We romanticize the 60s, and thus people snapped right into the roles written for us in the past: The liberal hawks hiding behind reasonableness, bloodthirsty conservatives who get teary-eyed at patriotic displays, leftist wanks who think protest is a chance at self-expression and can’t stay focused on the topic at hand (bringing “Free Mumia” signs to war protests), and then of course the larger, dare I say silent, majority of war opponents who do stay on message but can’t seem to catch a break to be heard.

Donna Rifkind reviews The German Bride by Joanna Hershon, in the Washington Post:

Joanna Hershon’s sinuous new novel roams away from the milieu of her two previous books, which were modern family dramas, into the territories of historical fiction and immigration literature. Hershon spins the tale of a German Jewish woman named Eva Frank who, after a hasty marriage in 1865, leaves her wealthy father’s mansion in Berlin to pursue a new life among the “low mud-cake hovels” of the American West. Accompanied by her husband, Eva journeys across the ocean and then across the United States to set up housekeeping in Santa Fe, a makeshift, dirty, danger-ridden settlement that was just beginning to organize itself into a town.

While Eva’s transformation from pampered European cosmopolite to Wild West frontierswoman might sound outlandish, her story is, as a matter of historical fact, not all that unusual. Hershon makes clear in the novel’s “Note on Sources” that she has done research showing that a significant number of European Jews participated in the American westward migration and pioneer life of the 19th century. The most famous of these immigrants — including Levi Strauss (from Bavaria) and Mike Goldwater (from Poland) — made enormous fortunes as boomtown entrepreneurs in California and Arizona. Others settled with their families and flourished in Western frontier towns just as enthusiastically, if not quite as spectacular…

…To the many expressions of this threshold experience in American immigration literature, by authors from Anzia Yezerskia to Jhumpa Lahiri, Hershon adds an eloquent voice.

More here.  Joanna Hershon’s own website is here, where you can read other reviews, interviews, and more.

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Relatives
Ruth Stone

Grandma lives in this town;
in fact all over this town.
Granpa’s dead.
Uncle Heery’s brain-dead,
and them aunts! Well!
It’s grandma you have to contend with.
She’s here – she’s there!
She works in the fast food hangout.
She’s doing school lunches.
She’s the crossing guard at the school corner.
She’s the librarian’s assistant.
She’s part-time in the real estate office.
She’s stuffing envelopes.
She gets up at three A.M.
to go to the screw factory;
and at night she’s at the business school
taking a course in computer science.
Now you take this next town.
Grandpa’s laid out in the cemetery
and grandma’s gone wild and bought a bus ticket
to Disneyland.
Uncle Bimbo’s been laid up for ten years
and them aunts
are all cashiers in ladies’ clothing
and grandma couldn’t stand the sight of them
washing their hands and their hair
and their panty hose.
“It’s Marine World for me” grandma says.

Published in Prairie Schooner 71:1 (Spring 1997)

///

Susan Bein in lensculture:

Most people photograph nouns. Or pretty.

I photograph things others hurry by on their way to photograph— things they step over or drive by. I take my camera when there’s nothing to photograph, nothing going on, no one interesting, lousy light.

I photograph verbs, light, questions.

What camera? I’m the camera — not that costly glob of technology I hold up to my face to edit the world. My eyes and brain and the excitement of seeing are what take photos, noticing things, imagining things and sometimes getting gifts that happen like sprinklings of fairy dust.

I’m not in style. I’m not working off an intellectual construct or a big concept. That neck-up stuff seems like so much sawdust to me. No heart in it. No risk. No viscera.

I hope my photos speak to you. I hope they sing songs to you. Songs you’ve never heard before.

More here.

Fareed Zakaria in Foreign Affairs:

Summary:  Despite some eerie parallels between the position of the United States today and that of the British Empire a century ago, there are key differences. Britain’s decline was driven by bad economics. The United States, in contrast, has the strength and dynamism to continue shaping the world — but only if it can overcome its political dysfunction and reorient U.S. policy for a world defined by the rise of other powers.

On June 22, 1897, about 400 million people around the world — one-fourth of humanity — got the day off. It was the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s ascension to the British throne. The Diamond Jubilee stretched over five days on land and sea, but its high point was the parade and thanksgiving service on June 22. The 11 premiers of Britain’s self-governing colonies were in attendance, along with princes, dukes, ambassadors, and envoys from the rest of the world. A military procession of 50,000 soldiers included hussars from Canada, cavalrymen from New South Wales, carabineers from Naples, camel troops from Bikaner, and Gurkhas from Nepal. It was, as one historian wrote, “a Roman moment.”

In London, eight-year-old Arnold Toynbee was perched on his uncle’s shoulders, eagerly watching the parade. Toynbee, who grew up to become the most famous historian of his age, recalled that, watching the grandeur of the day, it felt as if the sun were “standing still in the midst of Heaven.” “I remember the atmosphere,” he wrote. “It was: ‘Well, here we are on top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there forever. There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.'”

But of course, history did happen to Britain.

More here.  (Note: Thanks to Jaffer Bilgrami and S.T.Raza).

Crispin Sartwell in the Los Angeles Times:

That the University of Colorado is raising $9 million to endow a professorship of conservative studies is rather delicious in its ironies. It smacks of affirmative action and casts conservatism in the syntax of departments decried by conservatives for decades: women’s studies, gay studies, African American studies, Chicano studies and so on.

Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems gratuitous. These other groups may be oppressed, but conservatives run whole wars, black site prisons, sprawling multinational corporations. In fact, if these other groups are oppressed, it’s conservatives who are the oppressors, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense.

But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative (anarchism has its privileges), let me tell you why I think a “professor of conservative thought and policy” in Colorado, or anywhere else, is not such a bad idea. Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. At the University of Colorado, for instance, one professor found that, of 800 or so on the faculty, only 32 are registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or phys ed.

More here.  [Thanks to Bilal Siddiqi.]

Kelly Bulkeley over at The Immanent Frame:

To appreciate the cultural impact of the “cognitive revolution” discussed by David Brooks in his New York Times op-ed column “The Neural Buddhists” (May 13, 2008), we need to be clear about what has and has not been revolutionized by neuroscience. Brooks gets the research essentially right, but he overlooks some key issues raised by “neural Buddhism” that make me question his view of its future effects on religion and culture.

To begin with, neuroscientist Andrew Newberg’s brain-imaging studies of meditation, highlighted by Brooks, can easily be used to confirm rather than disprove a materialist worldview. Newberg’s finding that people who are meditating have measurable decreases in parietal lobe activity fits perfectly with the idea advanced by Richard Dawkins and others that religious experience is a product of altered or abnormal brain functioning. Contrary to the popular view that Newberg’s research supports religion, it can readily be taken as supporting the “militant atheism” Brooks wants to reject. The mind may, as Brooks says, have “the ability to transcend itself,” but we didn’t need Newberg’s SPECT scanners to tell us that.

“Read the story and the painting,” Nicolas Poussin wrote in 1639 to his friend and patron Chantelou, “in order to see how each thing is proper to its subject.” How to think about that—I’ve been puzzling to myself these last three years, looking every week at Poussin, on my trips to the Met and sometimes the Louvre. “Lisez,” Poussin commanded. What would that be, to read a painting? How would it feel in the mind?

Poussin was forty-five when he wrote the letter, living in Rome with a wife, Anne-Marie née Dughet, childless, and with the moderate but definitive success dear to his Norman heart: perpetual commissions from a small but devoted group of patrons, who hung the works in special rooms in their private homes and went to look at them every day. The early struggles in Paris; the failed attempt to get to Italy (turned back at the border for his debts); the first stay in Venice, enamoured of Titian; the eventual arrival in Rome, which was to be his city until his death; the months drawing from the statues of the antique with his friend, the Belgian sculptor Duquesnoy; the syphilitic, raunchy nights and the impoverished, jobbing days: all this had passed. Now, burgher of the erudite brush, he painted.

more from the Threepenny Review here.

Good people do not, generally speaking, make good subjects for operas. Like the Greek tragedies that the sixteenth-century Venetian inventors of opera sought to recreate, Western musical drama has tended to be preoccupied with the darker extremes of human emotions: excessive passion and wild jealousy, smoldering resentment and implacable rage. These, after all, are the emotions that spark the kinds of actions—adultery, betrayal, revenge, murder—that make for gripping drama. Unpleasant as they may be in real life, such actions are essential to the Western idea of theater itself, in which the very notion of plot is deeply connected to difficulties, problems, disasters. Aristotle, in his Poetics, refers to plot as a knot tied by the author (he calls it a dêsis, a “binding up”) out of the manifold strands representing competing wills or desires or ideologies; an ugly and worrisome knot that will, in due course, ultimately come undone in a climactic moment of loosening or release of tension (the lysis, or “undoing”)—a concept that survives in our term “dénouement.”

There can, that is to say, be no theater unless bad things happen, unless there are terrible problems, insoluble knots; without them, there would be nothing for the characters to do. That “doing” gives us the very word by which we refer to what happens on stage: “drama” comes from the Greek drân, “to do” or “to act.” When we go to the theater, we want to see characters doing things. Bad things, preferably.

more from the NYRB here.

The child of a United Nations official, getting her first look at the UN’s Turtle Bay headquarters in New York, asks her mother how many people work there. “About one in four” is the dyspeptic reply. That old UN chestnut still makes the rounds because it sums up a paper-pushing, jobs-for-the-boys institutional culture that successive “management reforms” have stirred but never really shaken. But among those one in four, the UN every so often attracts, and more surprisingly retains, the loyalty of individuals who would stand out in a crowd of thousands.

Sergio Vieira de Mello, the brilliant and charismatic Brazilian troubleshooter whose life is charted in exhaustive, indeed excessive, detail in Chasing the Flame by the almost equally brilliant and charismatic American political academic Samantha Power, was the most flamboyantly unforgettable of that select breed. A soixante-huitard who got his first taste of violence as a student revolutionary manning the Paris barricades, he came to the UN pretty much by chance in 1969 when his immersion in Marxist philosophy – a lifelong fascination which later resulted in an impenetrable doctorat d’État on “the significance of supranationality” – was interrupted by the sordidly bourgeois necessity of earning his keep. His diplomat father had been sacked by the Brazilian junta, for reasons which possibly included a fondness, soon acquired by his son, for Johnny Walker whisky.

more from the TLS here.

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………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
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Aretha. Deep buter dipt, burnt pot liquor, twisted sugar cane,
Vaselined knock knees clacking extraordinary gospel.
hustling toward the promised land in 4/4 time, Aretha.
Greased and glowing awash in limelight, satisfied moan
‘neath the spotlight, turning ample ass toward midnight,
she the it’s-all-good goddess of warm cornbread
and bumped buttermilk, know jesus by his first name.
carried his gospel low and democratic in rollicking brownships,
sang His drooping corpse down from that ragged wooden T,
dressed Him up in something shiny, conked that Holy head of hair,
then Aretha rustled up bus fare and took the deity downtown.
They coaxed the DJ and slid electric untill the lights slammed on,
she taught Him dirty nicknames for His father’s handiwork.
She was young then, thin and aching, her heartbox shut tight.
So Jesus blessed her, He opened her throat and taught her
to wail that way she do, she do wail that way don’t she
do that wail the way she do wail that way, don’t she?
Now every time ‘retha unreel that screech, sang Delta
cut through hurting to glimpse been-done-wrong bone,
a born-again brother called the Holy Ghost creeps through that.
and that, for all you still lookin’, is religion.

Dare you question her several shoulders, the soft stairsteps
of flesh leading to her shaking chins, the steel bones
of a corseted frock eating into bubbling sides,
zipper track etched into skin,
all those faint scars,
those lovesore battle wounds?
Ain’t your mama never told you
how black women collect the world,
build other bodies onto their own?
No earthly man knows the solution to our hips,
asses urgent as sirens,
titties familiar as everybody’s mama
crisscrossed with pulled roads of blood.
Ask us why we pray with our dancin’ shoes on, why we
grow fat away from everyone and toward each other.

//