Benedict Anderson in the New Left Review:

I visited Surakarta in the spring of 1972, after the Suharto government had discovered that I had entered the country by roundabout methods and had informed me that I would be deported. After some negotiations, I was allowed two weeks to wind up my affairs and say farewell to friends. I took to the road with my Vespa and stopped briefly in Surakarta for a meal in the city’s pleasant amusement park. In those days, young ‘white’ men on Vespas who could also speak Indonesian fluently were a real curiosity, so my table was quickly surrounded by locals. When the topic of the mausoleum came up, I asked my new acquaintances what they thought of it. After an awkward silence, a skinny, intelligent old man replied, in Javanese: ‘It’s like a Chinese tomb.’ Everyone tittered. He had two things in mind: first, that in contrast to Muslim tombs, even those of grandees, which are very simple, Chinese tombs are or were as elaborate and expensive as the socially competitive bereaved could afford. Second, in the post-colony, many Chinese cemeteries had been flattened by bulldozers to make way for ‘high-end’ construction projects by the state and by private realtors, speculators and developers.

During the long noontide of the Suharto dictatorship, from the 1970s to the early 90s, three things happened to the mausoleum. It was gradually filled, almost to bursting, with the remains of Tientje’s para-aristocratic relations, but none of Suharto’s; it was heavily guarded by a unit of the Red Beret paratroopers who had organized the vast massacres of the Left in 1965–66; and it became a tourist attraction, especially for busloads of schoolchildren, so that it was always crowded with village women selling T-shirts, baseball caps, snacks, drinks and plaited bamboo fans. One thing did not happen: even after Tientje joined her relations not long before the Crash of 1997, the mausoleum never became sacred or magically powerful. After I was finally allowed back into the country in 1999, I often went to observe the site. No paratroopers, no busloads of children, only a desperate handful of vendors, a melancholy caretaker and the smell of a decaying building that had already endured a quarter of a century of annual monsoons. It remains to be seen what will happen to the place now that Suharto has finally joined his wife. To paraphrase Walter Abish: how Chinese is it?

Gamal Nkrumah in al-Ahram:

Anna is a personal friend. She is fond of Anwar El-Sadat, and I am more inclined to consider Gamal Abdel-Nasser my hero. Yet, we are in total agreement that Egypt and India share much in common, and we are both captivated by the subcontinent and its plethora of cultures. Boghiguian, one of Egypt’s leading artists, is devoting her next exhibition to the memory of the years when Egypt and India laboured under the yoke of British rule. She is mad as hell when she thinks she has reason to be. She is fascinated by India, and by the greatest of the subcontinent’s artistic luminaries — Rabindranath Tagore, the “Myriad-Minded Man”.

Anna Boghiguian becomes foil to the primped-perfect vacuousness of Cairene life. Forgive me, from now on she is no longer Anna, she is Boghiguian. This is a time of composition.

Nobody can accuse Boghiguian of being too pusillanimous, or so it seems in her lighter moments. Her works are bold and bohemian. Most Egyptians are ambivalent at best about India, not so with Boghiguian. Tagore was the subject of a reality document. A certain amount of speculation surrounds Boghiguian’s work. There are bid rumours and whispers in these paintings. You can see clearly that the walls have ears.

Boghiguian, a Boadicea of the Cairene cultural scene, is not making squillions. Boghiguian’s paintings are the 21st century perspectives presented in 20th century costumes. The inspiration for her exhibition was a visit she paid to the Jorasanko district of north Calcutta where the Tagore family mansion is located, today it is a museum. Any visit to the Thakur Bari, the Tagore House, is an experience of immense ramifications. On canvas, she explored the relationship between Tagore and the celebrated Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi, between Egypt and India through the interactions between the two men.

Via Delong, Jeffrey Sachs at Comment is Free:

Today’s financial crisis has its immediate roots in 2001, amid the end of the Internet boom and the shock of the September 11 terrorist attacks. It was at that point that the Fed turned on the monetary spigots to try to combat an economic slowdown. The Fed pumped money into the US economy and slashed its main interest rate – the Federal Funds rate – from 3.5% in August 2001 to a mere 1% by mid-2003. The Fed held this rate too low for too long.

Monetary expansion generally makes it easier to borrow, and lowers the costs of doing so, throughout the economy. It also tends to weaken the currency and increase inflation. All of this began to happen in the US.

What was distinctive this time was that the new borrowing was concentrated in housing. It is generally true that lower interest rates spur home buying, but this time, as is now well known, commercial and investment banks created new financial mechanisms to expand housing credit to borrowers with little creditworthiness. The Fed declined to regulate these dubious practices. Virtually anyone could borrow to buy a house, with little or even no down payment, and with interest charges pushed years into the future.

As the home-lending boom took hold, it became self-reinforcing. Greater home buying pushed up housing prices, which made banks feel that it was safe to lend money to non-creditworthy borrowers. After all, if they defaulted on their loans, the banks would repossess the house at a higher value. Or so the theory went. Of course, it works only as long as housing prices rise. Once they peak and begin to decline, lending conditions tighten, and banks find themselves repossessing houses whose value does not cover the value of the debt. 

Jarrell wasn’t about to start tailoring what he thought was good so as better to suit this fellow, but to read Poetry and the Age is to watch a man trying to talk to him anyway. Jarrell’s intervention—and looking back fifty-odd years, it can only be described as such—was personal and relentless. While other critics affected authority, he embraced subjectivity; while others embraced a vocabulary accessible only to themselves, Jarrell could be lyrically colloquial. In Randall Jarrell and His Age, Stephen Burt describes Jarrell’s distinction as a poet: “He made the process . . . of being personally affected by what one reads, continually manifest in his prose style.” Jarrell’s style is humorous, anecdotal, occasionally mean, full of elaborate metaphors and long, shambolic sentences that employ the comma and semicolon like a man raising his finger to pause the audience as their hands go up with questions. “You can’t put the sea into a bottle,” he writes of Marianne Moore, “unless you leave it open at the end, and sometimes hers is closed at both ends, closed into one of those crystal spheres inside which snowflakes are falling on to a tiny house, the house where the poet lives—or says that she lives.”

This is not just impressionistic reviewing; it is imaginative reviewing, which seeks through a few key (but strangely controversial assumptions—that poetry refers to a world outside itself and that readers live in that world—to draw readers to the work itself.

more from Bookforum here.

And yet one doesn’t have to excuse Nixon’s many sins to wonder whether his mix of ruthlessness, self-interest, and low cunning might have been preferable to some of the alternatives on offer. Perlstein depicts a country on the edge of a civil war—a nation in which columnists openly speculated that America might embrace a de Gaulle–style man on horseback, or find a “President Verwoerd” (the architect of South African apartheid) to install in the Oval Office. It was a political moment when the old order could no longer govern, and the new order wasn’t ready. The kids who screamed for Goldwater and McGovern would grow up to be responsible Reagan­ites and Clinton­ians, but back then they had only idealism, not experience, and Nixonland is an 800-page testament to the dangers of idealism run amok.

In this climate, the voters didn’t choose Nixon over some neoconserva­tive or neoliberal FDR; no such figure was available. They chose Nixon over an exhausted establishment on the one hand—nobody seems more hapless in Nixonland than figures like Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller—and the fantasy politics of left and right on the other. They chose Nixon over the abyss.

more from The Atlantic Monthly here.

///
Letter to America
Francisco Alarcón

pardon
the lag
in writing you

we were left
with few
letters

in your home
we were cast
as rugs

sometimes
on walls
though we

were almost
always
on floors

we served
you as
a table

a lamp
a mirror
a toy

if anything
we made
you laugh

in your kitchen
we became
another pan

even now
as a shadow
you use us

you fear us
you yell at us
you hate us

you shoot us
you mourn us
you deny us

and despise
everything
we

continue
being
us

America
understand
once and for all:

we are
the insides
of your body

our faces
reflect
your future

//

WE ARE ALL familiar with the rough geography of the United States – the slash of the Rocky Mountains between two great coastlines, the bulge of Maine, the Florida peninsula, the Great Lakes, set in the heartland.

But what about the country’s psychogeography? You know, the great river of extroversion that flows roughly southeast from greater Chicago to southern Florida? Or the vast lakes of agreeableness and conscientiousness that pool together in the Sun Belt, especially around Atlanta? Or the jagged peaks of neuroticism in Boston and New York?

It’s time to learn.

Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The Guardian:

Roddy Doyle, Esther Freud, David Hare and Ahdaf Soueif will this week launch the first international literary festival in the occupied Palestinian territories. Seventeen British, American, Indian and Arab authors will visit four West Bank cities for the inaugural Palestinian Festival of Literature, subtitled: “The power of culture and the culture of power.”

Soueif, one of the festival’s organisers, said they had invited “authors who we really liked, and who showed a concern for the world in general”. Others taking part include the Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan and Pankaj Mishra, who is Indian, as well as the British-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub, and the American-Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad. They will work with Palestinian writers at events in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Jenin and Bethlehem.  Soueif said that the lack of Israelis taking part was not deliberate, but added: “I’m resistant to this idea of always having to twin, that every time you talk about Palestine you have to invite an Israeli, or vice versa. They aren’t twinned.”

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

“Why are humans so smart?” is a question that fascinates scientists. Tadeusz Kawecki, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Fribourg, likes to turn around the question. “If it’s so great to be smart,” Dr. Kawecki asks, “why have most animals remained dumb?” Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health.

Learning is remarkably widespread in the animal kingdom. Even the microscopic vinegar worm, Caenorhadits elegans, can learn, despite having just 302 neurons. It feeds on bacteria. But if it eats a disease-causing strain, it can become sick. The worms are not born with an innate aversion to the dangerous bacteria. They need time to learn to tell the difference and avoid becoming sick. Many insects are also good at learning. “People thought insects were little robots doing everything by instinct,” said Reuven Dukas, a biologist at McMaster University.

More here.

Robin Rhode. Still from “Untitled, Harvest”. 2005.

Digital animation.

More here and here.

Jill Filipovic interviews Amanda Marcotte on her new book It’s a Jungle Out There, in AlterNet:

Jill Filipovic: What inspired you to write It’s a Jungle Out There in the first place?

Amanda Marcotte: Well, with the very personal nature of blogs I get a lot of questions on how to fight back against sexism on a personal, day-to-day level. I also live in a red state, albeit in a blue city in a red state, so I felt like I had a unique perspective on how to confront the sexism that’s still out there, since I feel like I get it more often than a lot of other feminists do. I came up with a survival guide, a la The Zombie Survival Guide. I thought that it would just be a fun book for feminists to read and have a laugh at the unending sexism we address on a daily basis.

JF: Is the book aimed at nonfeminists too?

AM: I tried to address the issue of women who don’t call themselves feminists but who are in fact feminists by kind of making fun of the whole debate. If you’re afraid to call yourself a feminist, it’s probably an unfounded fear. So I would hope that women who don’t like sexism but who are still scared to call themselves feminists read this and walk away identifying themselves more accurately. But there are other books that address the issue more thoroughly, so I didn’t want to deal with it too much.

In Scientific American:

The prospect of slipping into a robotic exoskeleton that could enhance strength, keep the body active while recovering from an injury or even serve as a prosthetic limb has great appeal. Unlike the svelt body armor donned by Iron Man, however, most exoskeletons to date have looked more like clunky spare parts cobbled together.

Japan’s CYBERDYNE, Inc. is hoping to change that with a sleek, white exoskeleton now in the works that it says can augment the body’s own strength or do the work of ailing (or missing) limbs. The company is confident enough in its new technology to have started construction on a new lab expected to mass-produce up to 500 robotic power suits (think Star Wars storm trooper without the helmet) annually, beginning in October, according to Japan’s Kyodo News Web site.

CYBERDYNE was launched in June 2004 to commercialize the cybernetic work of a group of researchers headed by Yoshiyuki Sankai a professor of system and information engineering at Japan’s University of Tsukuba. Its newest product: the Robot Suit Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) exoskeleton, which the company created to help train doctors and physical therapists, assist disabled people, allow laborers to carry heavier loads, and aid in emergency rescues.

Gregor Dotzauer in Taggesspiegel (translated over at signandsight):

When an angel first whispered in his ear that Central Europe would end in tragedy, it is impossible to say, after all the angels which have populated Delimir Resicki‘s poems. They feed him with clever and terrible words and if possible both at the same time. “If you have matches / then it its easy / to find a needle in a haystack,” they whisper to him for example, although the sinisterness of these lines is sapped by the daylight. At first glance, the Central European tragedy which Resicki is evoking here has something ghostlike about it. Perhaps it travels invisibly with the Bora, the Jugo or the Maestra, the three great winds which blow across Croatia. Or it hides behind the sun which floods the whole country from cave to coast, right down into the drowned valleys of the Adriatic. Beyond the showy Baroque that dazzles the visitor in Zagreb reigns the misery of the pre-fab high-rise, and beyond the elegant Roman ruins of Pula lurks a provincial narrowness you wouldn’t want to cross. But these things are not inescapable, as long as you can still find respite in Zagreb’s parks, or among a pile of books in a sofa of the art cafe Cvajner, once a bank of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with the intent not to rise again until next summer arrives.

So where is the tragedy? Is it heralded by the two German estate agents who in the queue at the airport shamelessly deliberate the most efficient way of coaxing the locals out of their houses while they forge plans to conquer Belarus and Ukraine because Croatia, as the mercenaries ensure one another, is the gateway to the entire East? Or does it manifest itself in the Russians who roll up with their coffers of cash to get their hands on private islands, as Tito did with Brioni, before EU regulations interfere? Or is it revealed in the skirmishes which border on bitter comedy, where politicians continue to slug it out as if, a decade after Franjo Tudjman‘s death, the leaden nationalism of the first post-Yugoslavian president was still alive, while all around the consumer world glitters in every capitalist brand and colour?

Augustin Carstens in Project Syndicate:

As the turmoil swirling through global financial markets continues, there is a growing realization that global economic problems require global solutions and improved global governance. This March, amid the latest financial twists and turns, a significant achievement in this regard went largely unnoticed: an agreement by the executive board of the International Monetary Fund on a new quota formula and increases in quotas for under-represented members, particularly emerging-market and developing countries.

With that move, the IMF gave these countries a stronger voice in the main international organization charged with ensuring financial stability – and thus in the global economy itself. The decision, taken after nearly two years of highly technical and sometimes arcane negotiations, involved a set of measures that change the way quotas (which determine voting power in the IMF) are distributed.

Of course, at the end of the day, the total shift in voting power from developed to developing countries was only about 2.7%. So why is it important?

William Hogeland on Pete Seeger, William F. Buckley, Jr., and public history in the Boston Review:

Buckley and Seeger share, along with fake-sounding accents and preppie backgrounds, a problem that inspires forgetfulness, falsification, and denial in their supporters. Fired by opposed and equally fervent political passions, both men once took actions that their cultural progeny find untenable.

But these two men—their careers strangely linked in the hunt for communists, the struggle for equal rights, and the emerging “culture wars” of the postwar era—are worthy of consideration without air-brushed reminiscence. Their names alone may evoke, for those who lived through it, the anxiety and turmoil that marked American cultural and political life during the Cold War. Mutual hostility between Seeger types and Buckley types devolved on fears of imminent, world-ending invasions; plans for preventing evil from ever recurring on a mass scale; and stark disagreements over what is legitimately American. When the Soviet Union was annexing its neighbors, filling gulags, and making swaggering predictions of world dominance, and the United States was toppling elected leaders in favor of authoritarians and hounding domestic dissenters, all amid the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, the division among Americans could feel, to those on both sides, like the last battle for humanity’s soul. What Seeger and Buckley’s youthful actions meant in their time, deliberately obscured by today’s lionizers, continues to mean something crucial now.

///
In the southwest corner of China, the grand mountains and rivers that border the Tibetan plateau are home to the Yi, an ethnic group often portrayed in the Chinese popular imagination as a fierce and defiant highland people. A down-to-earth poet caught between the Yi highlands and the Han Chinese lowlands, Jimu Langge (his Yi name) writes fluently in-between: More 

Humility
Jimu Langge

Within the literary world
of an era not distance past
because something was missing
(materially and spiritually
though young,
I still experienced that era)
There was a phenomenon, or call it
the style of an entire era,
and that was humility
If one was not humble then nothing was possible
Humility was a moral virtue
Only with moral virtue could you become an important person
and not being humble was arrogant
Arrogance would not make an important person
Not becoming a big important person
meant you were an unimportant person
A little unimportant person was just
a fucking peon
What other reason is there for writing?
See, one lapse in concentration
and again I’m being influenced by that era
It was such a reactionary era
because it was so humble

I like people who aren’t humble
and like arrogant fellows even more
The more arrogant he is the more I respect him
And vice-versa: the more humble he is
the more it makes me look down on him
Even though I know he has
humility

Today
my son said
“People should be humble.”
This is what his teacher taught him
I didn’t say a word
I thought, “You’re still young,
wait till you get older.
After you can think for yourself,
the first thing I want you to do is
not be humble.”
To not be humble, you need arrogance
and to be arrogant, you don’t need humility
Of course if you say you can when you really can’t
you will suffer the bigger loss

But this already has nothing to do with humility

Kamila Shamsie in The Telegraph:

The pleasure you will derive from The End of Sleep by Rowan Somerville is directly related to your willingness to embrace exuberance as the primary tone in a novel. Rowan Somerville’s debut is awash with it. Almost nothing happens in a muted way – not the sipping of tea, not the drive through Cairo’s streets, and certainly not any act of eating food.

Fin, the Irishman who leads us through this story, has an in-between relationship with Cairo. He has been there too long to be a tourist, but not long enough to cease being an outsider. He is at the stage when a traveller takes on the air of propriety that comes with a slightly more than superficial encounter with a place, while every utterance still serves to underscore his alienness.

More here.

From Scientific American:

In novels and films, the most common scientist by far is the mad one. From H. G. Wells’s Dr. Mo­­reau to Ian Fleming’s Dr. No to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, scientists are portrayed as evil geniuses unrestrained by ethics and usually bent on world domination. Over the past two years, as I struggled to write my own novel about physicists and their quest for the Theory of Everything, I often worried that I was falling prey to this stereotype myself. It is incredibly difficult to create fictional scientists who are neither insane villains nor cardboard heroes. To faithfully depict the life and work of a researcher, you need to immerse yourself in the details of his or her research, and very few writers have done this task well.

One of the earliest attempts to draw a realistic picture of science was Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1926. The book tells the story of Martin Arrowsmith, a callow Midwestern youth who after long travails throws off the temptations of money, power and fame to pursue a life of solitary medical research. Martin isn’t a very likable character—he’s peevish, disdainful and annoyingly self-important. One gets the sense that even the author doesn’t care for him much. The true hero of the tale is Martin’s mentor, Max Gottlieb, a long-suffering German-American bacteriologist. Dr. Gottlieb provides the novel’s wisest insights: “To be a scientist—it is not just a different job … it is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry.” Arrowsmith also gives readers a fascinating glimpse of microbiology in the early 20th century. To get his facts right, Lewis relied on Paul de Kruif, a bacteriologist and science writer who received 25 percent of the book’s royalties in return for his help.

More here.

In the NYT Keith Gessen reviews Solomon Volkov’s The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture From Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn:

Volkov is not [morally] outraged because, in his view, he is telling a triumphant tale. In the book’s livelier second half, he narrates the post-Stalin era as a story of the irreversible liberalization of the arts, a liberalization that eventually spread to the rest of Soviet life. He may overstate the political significance for the arts, but even the crudest of crude oil determinists will admit that the yearning of the Soviet intelligentsia toward the West helped demoralize the regime. Volkov also spends some time on his own milieu, the émigrés and exiles who came to Paris, Boston and especially New York in the 1970s. Solzhenitsyn, thundering from his Vermont hermitage against the Soviets and, increasingly, the decadent West, was a distant presence for these émigrés; their true avatar was Brodsky, of Mount Holyoke and the West Village.

For a 20th-century Russian writer, Brodsky was notably apolitical — or, put another way, art was his politics. His poetry, partly confessional, partly metaphysical, held as its highest value the sanctity of the private self. Brodsky was anti-Soviet as a matter of course, but also a cosmopolitan. “Like a despotic sheik … untrue / To his vast seraglio and multiple desires,” he wrote in “Lullaby of Cape Cod,” “I have switched Empires.” The only constant was poetry, music and art. “I close my eyes and almost see them standing in their dilapidated kitchens, holding glasses in their hands, with ironic grimaces across their faces,” Brodsky wrote about his generation. “‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité. … Why does nobody add culture?’” This is the world that Volkov came from…

Kurt Kleiner in New Scientist:

Thirty years ago next week, Gary Thuerk, a marketer at the now-defunct computer firm Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an email to 393 users of Arpanet, the US government-run computer network that eventually became the internet. It was the first spam email ever.

That commercial message, sent on 3 May 1978, drew a swift and negative reaction. Recipients complained directly to Thuerk, who had made no attempt to hide his identity, and DEC was reprimanded by the Arpanet administrators.

Nevertheless, the email was a portent of things to come. Today, spam makes up 80 to 90% of all emails sent – around 120 billion messages per day – and is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Today spammers target not just email, but also websites, blogs, social networking sites, and cellphones.

[H/t: Linta Varghese]

And there seems to be no end in sight, as spam-fighters struggle to keep the junk from overwhelming useful communications. Spammers and anti-spammers seem locked in an arms race. No one expects that the fight against spam will be won anytime soon, despite Bill Gates promise in 2004 that the world would be spam-free by 2006.