Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

If you have ever been to a Jewish wedding, you know that sooner or later the ominous notes of “Hava Nagila” will sound, and you will be expected to dance the hora. And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora.” I am pleased and relieved to report that my flailing days are through. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. Some members of the audience might have liked folding the origami boxes or scrawling messages on the floor, but for me the high point came when a neurobiologist taught us how to dance the hora. As we stepped together in klezmeric, well-schooled synchrony, I felt free and exhilarated. I felt competent and loved. I felt like calling my mother. I felt, it seems, just as a dancing body should.

In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Apartment Autumn Window. Painting 2002, photograph at my sister Azra’s house in Shrewsbury, MA, November 2007.

Acrylic on canvas. Digital photograph.

Over at Newsweek online, Alex de Waal and John Prendergast debate what to do about Darfur, continued over at the SSRC blog:

[de Waal] It’s certainly true that a lot of what has passed for U.S. Darfur policy in the last three years has been hot air—beginning with Colin Powell’s Sept. 9, 2004, determination that genocide had been committed in Darfur (and may be continuing), immediately followed by his assertion that U.S. government policy would not change. But hot air can make a difference too, when we are dealing with a government in Khartoum that has been on the receiving end of U.S. cruise missiles and that fears that the U.S. government will take sides against it in a future war for the secession of southern Sudan….

[Prendergast] First, your criticism of the advocacy community seems bizarrely misplaced, when it is the policymakers in Washington, Brussels, London, and Beijing who have been primarily responsible for the failure to confront the crime of genocide and the inability to craft relevant solutions to the complicated crisis in Darfur. Activists seek to raise the alarm bell and to shape the policy priorities of their government. We were not running the failed peace process you were a part of in 2006 that led to an escalation of violence, for example. We just want to see solutions. And we recognize that the actor that is primarily responsible for the mayhem in Darfur is the Sudanese regime and its brutal counterinsurgency campaign that has ruthlessly targeted civilian populations and attempted to divide and destroy the rebel movements and the communities that support them.

Joseph Kugelmass over at The Valve:

There is a telling moment in the film Zizek! where Zizek discusses his own books, and says that his favorite works are the ones where he manages to consider the philosophical tradition most deeply, such as Tarrying With The Negative. Although all of Zizek’s books contain analyses of popular culture and programmatic political speculation, the quarrels that he has personally found most productive have been within the long historical traditions of philosophical debate over dialectics, consciousness, subjectivity, and the way the world becomes manifest through experience. Meanwhile, believing himself capable of discussing the political issues of the day in a clear and accessible manner, Zizek has written political op-eds for a number of publications, including The New York Times, the UK Guardian, and The London Review of Books. These columns are a curious blend of agit-prop and academic exposition; while some of Zizek’s references remain bewildering to readers unacquainted with postmodern political theory, he clearly intends to write transparently and to inspire action.

In the process, he has become an embarrassment to academics and to the Left, even though, admittedly, he has never resorted to reminiscing about Frank Sinatra and Ted Williams. His newest piece, re-posted numerous places around the web, is an endorsement of Hugo Chavez that supposedly comes at the expense of the Left, which, Zizek maintains, colludes with the status quo in secret.

Zizek has become a prisoner of his own fatuous admiration for the successful seizure of power, whether it comes in the form of an attractive cinematic dream (his analysis of 300) or as somebody else’s reality (Hugo Chavez). His perpetual frustration with progressive politicians is no longer distinguishable from that of columnists like Alexander Cockburn, who use politics as a means of asserting superiority over an insular group of fellow travelers with whom they have associated all their lives.

In the LRB, Jerry Fodor responds to his critics:

Jerry Coyne and Philip Kitcher make the usual mistake. In fact, I am not worrying about whether we can tell if ‘polar bears were selected for being white or for matching their environment’. I repeat: I don’t do epistemology. Nor do I deny that we can often focus on different aspects of the causal history underlying an episode of selection. The problem is that it makes no sense at all to speak of the aspect of a causal history that selection focuses on; to say (as it might be) that selection focused on the whiteness of the polar bear rather than its match to the surround. Selection doesn’t focus: it just happens.

Coyne and Kitcher then say that ‘the concept of “selecting for” characteristics is largely a philosopher’s invention.’ I don’t know who invented it, but that can’t be right. If the theory of adaptation fails to explain what phenotypic traits were selected for, it won’t generalise over possible-but-not-actual circumstances; it won’t, for example, tell us whether purple polar bears would have survived in the ecology that supports ours. It will not be ‘news to most knowledgeable people’ that empirical theories are supposed to support relevant counterfactuals. If adaptationism doesn’t, that is news.

Coyne and Kitcher suggest that evo-devo doesn’t purport to be an alternative to adaptationism but rather is ‘consistent with’ natural selection. That’s right but not relevant. Part of my point was that if adaptationism is independently incoherent (as, in fact, I believe it to be) then we’re in want of an alternative. Evo-devo may reasonably be considered a step towards supplying one.

In the NYT, a profile of Tino Sehgal, who’s most recent situation, entitled “This Situation”, opens November 30th at the Marian Goodman Gallery.

ART can be defined, provocatively, as an intangible quantity that transforms an ordinary object — a urinal, a soup can, an unmade bed — into something worth many times more than its material value. Tino Sehgal seeks to isolate precisely that intangible quantity. His art is completely immaterial; it can be bought and sold without involving any objects whatsoever.

Mr. Sehgal, 31, who lives in Berlin, creates what he calls “staged situations”: interactive experiences that may not even initially declare themselves as works of art. Take “This Is New,” in which an attendant quotes a museumgoer a headline from that day’s papers: only the visitor’s response can trigger an interaction that concludes with the work’s title being spoken. Or “This Success/This Failure,” in which young children at play in an empty room attempt to draw visitors into their games, and after a certain time decide themselves whether the result has been a success or a failure. Or “This Situation,” a more complex piece, with six adult players, which opens at the Marian Goodman Gallery on Friday and is Mr. Sehgal’s first New York show.

Part of the point is to free art from the glut of material overproduction. But Mr. Sehgal, unlike many performance artists, is not protesting the art market itself. His work is specifically conceived to function within the art world’s conventions: it is lent and exhibited, bought and sold.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

For many years, Orlando Figes observes, the memoirs of intellectual dissidents, like Eugenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “were widely greeted as the ‘authentic voice’ of ‘the silenced,’” telling us “what it had ‘been like’ to live through the Stalin Terror as an ordinary citizen.” Their books did indeed reflect the experience of people like themselves, who were “strongly committed to ideals of freedom and individualism.” But they did not represent what happened to millions of other people who were not opponents of the regime and did not engage in any kind of substantial dissent, but were still dispatched to labor camps, to exile in remote settlements or to summary execution. As Figes, a leading historian of the Soviet period, concludes in “The Whisperers,” his extraordinary book about the impact of the gulag on “the inner world of ordinary citizens,” a great many victims “silently accepted and internalized the system’s basic values” and “conformed to its public rules.” Behind highly documented episodes of persecution, famine and war lie quieter, desperate stories of individuals and families who did what they could to survive, to find one another and to come to terms with the burden of being physically and psychologically broken. But it was not only repression that tore families apart. The regime’s reliance on “mutual surveillance” complicated their moral burden, instilling feelings of shame and guilt that endured long after years of imprisonment and exile.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Peter Gay opens his survey of the culture of Modernism with a discussion of Baudelaire’s call to artists to draw their inspiration from contemporary urban realities, and closes it with some sort of ironic ne plus ultra, as Damien Hirst roars with laughter after a ‘pile of organised chaos representing the detritus of a painter’s studio’ that he presented as an installation is mistakenly swept into a bin bag by an innocent cleaner assuming it to be bona fide rubbish.

In between, Professor Gay travels through 150 years of the history of the visual arts, literature and music. It must have been an exhausting journey for this distinguished Yale-based chronicler of the Enlightenment and German intellectualism, now in his mid-eighties. Yet nothing fazes him: he confronts this maelstrom of artistic activity, much of it the product of extreme neurosis and persecution, with calmly measured lucidity and authoritative accuracy (the only significant errors I spotted were a confusion of Virginia Woolf’s The Years with The Waves and the entirely false notion that Wagner ‘ ultimately did not challenge traditional tonality’.)

more from The Spectator here.

Charles Bukowski may be a Los Angeles icon, but reading “The Pleasures of the Damned” — the new volume of his selected poetry edited by John Martin, his longtime benefactor at Black Sparrow Press — it’s impossible not to ask some hard questions about his status and whether it is deserved. I’ve often thought his place in this city’s literary pantheon was more a matter of opportunity than of talent; when he started writing full-bore, in the mid-1950s, few people were creating an authentic local literature, which, for better or worse, is what he did.

Back then, most L.A. writing was the work of outsiders, with a small indigenous poetry scene, leftist and oddly formal in its aesthetics, centered around such journals as Coastlines and the California Quarterly. Although Bukowski published in such venues, he stood against all that; a loner, avowedly apolitical, he focused on the small degradations of daily life. “there is a loneliness in this world so great / that you can see it in the slow movement of / the hands of a clock,” he wrote in “The Crunch,” describing “the terror of one person / aching in one place / alone / untouched / unspoken to / watering a plant.” He was trying to articulate a vision of Los Angeles as an urban landscape, not exotic but mundane, where we not so much reinvent ourselves as remain unreconciled.

more from the LA Times here.

When we started The New York Review in February 1963 we asked some of the writers we admired most to send us book reviews within three weeks, for no payment, in order, as we said, “to suggest the qualities that a literary journal should have.” Norman, whom we all had known in New York, was among the first we turned to, and he soon delivered a review of Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris, which he found to be “a modest bad dull book which contains a superb short story about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Callaghan.” And by telling that story, about how Fitzgerald, acting as timekeeper in a boxing match, had allowed Callaghan extra time to knock out Hemingway, Norman made a brilliant review out of what he called Callaghan’s “dim writing.”

more from the NYRB here.

From Powell.com:

Already a hit in England (according to the jacket blurb, anyway), The Book of General Ignorance is now available in the US. It is ostensibly a book of factoids, but with a twist: these are facts many people have a mistaken knowledge of. Famously, George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth (they were mostly made from hippopotamus teeth). The factoid format makes this a perfect bathroom or coffee table book.

Some interesting tidbits at random: most tigers in the world live in the US (in zoos and as pets); Napoleon’s troops didn’t shoot the Sphinx’s nose off (it came off long ago and has never been found); there was no curse on King Tut’s tomb; Thomas Crapper invented the manhole cover but not the flush toilet; Thomas Edison may have invented the word hello (before Edison it was halloo or hullo); and Columbus thought the world was pear-shaped and much smaller than it is. Some “it didn’t originate where you think” bits: haggis is from Greece; kilts are Irish; chicken tikka masala comes from Glasgow; champagne is an English invention (as is baseball); Panama hats are from Ecuador; and, the guillotine was invented in Yorkshire.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Tom Brokaw’s sprawling new book about the 1960s has a striking cover, and it includes interviews with 50 people, many of them recognizable names from the era, like Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Andrew Young and Gloria Steinem. Combining oral history with the author’s own memories, this 662-page tome touches on nearly all the major events of that extraordinary time. Unfortunately, it tells us nothing new about any of them.

The main leitmotif is that it’s too early for anyone to judge the impact of this remarkable period. Brokaw writes, “The evidence is still coming in and the jury is still out — and forty years later we don’t seem anywhere near being able to render a verdict,” and “for the rest of my days, when my mind wonders back to the Sixties, I will probably think: Boom! what was that all about?”

More here.

Speaking of secularism, over at Princeton University Press, chapter 1 of Elizabeth Shakman Hurd’s The Politics of Secularism in International Relations:

RELIGION IS A PROBLEM in the field of international relations at two distinct levels. First, in recent years religious fundamentalism and religious difference have emerged as crucial factors in international conflict, national security, and foreign policy. This development has come as a surprise to many scholars and practitioners. Much contemporary foreign policy, especially in the United States, is being quickly rewritten to account for this change. Second, the power of this religious resurgence in world politics does not fit into existing categories of thought in academic international relations. Conventional understandings of international relations, focused on material capabilities and strategic interaction, exclude from the start the possibility that religion could be a fundamental organizing force in the international system.

This book argues that these two problems are facets of a single underlying phenomenon: the unquestioned acceptance of the secularist division between religion and politics. Standard privatization and differentiation accounts of religion and politics need to be reexamined. Secularism needs to be analyzed as a form of political authority in its own right, and its consequences evaluated for international relations. This is the objective of this book. My central motivating question is how, why, and in what ways does secular political authority form part of the foundation of contemporary international relations theory and practice, and what are the political consequences of this authority in international relations? I argue, first, that the secularist division between religion and politics is not fixed but rather socially and historically constructed; second, that the failure to recognize this explains why students of international relations have been unable to properly recognize the power of religion in world politics; and, finally, that overcoming this problem allows a better understanding of crucial empirical puzzles in international relations, including the conflict between the United States and Iran, controversy over the enlargement of the European Union to include Turkey, the rise of political Islam, and the broader religious resurgence both in the United States and elsewhere.

Over at the Immanent Frame, Akeel Bilgrami provides some insights in the question on modernity and secularism:

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is an inspired yet rigorously argued Wagnerian effort to analyze the distinctive anxieties of modern intellectual and social life, by one of the most important and interesting philosophers of the last five decades.

I will pick up one strand that illustrates Taylor’s central themes of religion and secularity and the conceptual and historical continuities and discontinuities between them: the process of so-called ‘disenchantment’ that is supposed to mark our modernity. And I will stress in particular the identification of a fault-line (that may seem like a tendentious expression but I believe it captures Taylor’s own view of things) in some of the intellectual and theological and social alliances that emerged in the Early Modern period in the West.

If, as Taylor thinks, our modern life is beset with distinctive anxieties, then the Early Modern period of history (and intellectual history) provides a good focus for a genealogical diagnosis of the conditions in which we find ourselves today. It is a focus that can get lost—partly because Weber’s term “disenchantment,” which in the past had so dominated our description of the distinctiveness of modernity on these matters, though not false, is too omnibus to be useful, and partly because the hectoring tomes written by our up-to-the-minute atheist bully-boys like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, pick up the thread of contemporary secularism in a much later period than Early Modernity.

Over at PBS’s NOVA, a two-hour documentary on the trial over intelligent design and its background. (Via richarddawkins.net.)

Chad Boutin in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin looks at the work of 3QD friend Thomas Gregor and his colleagues:

In the equipment-filled rooms of Princeton’s Icahn Laboratory, nearly everything in sight is advancing through some stage of development. Newly hatched fruit flies crowd each other in their glass tube nurseries; a freshly modified microscope for examining the insects exposes its wire-forested innards. A recent biology paper lies open to its last page, where the list of new questions the work has inspired beckons a future research team to probe the mysteries of life even further.

For the past five years, a quartet of Princeton researchers has undergone a development of its own, trying to resolve a tricky and timeworn issue about the first moments of life by examining the fruit fly. The effort has netted the group not only a surprising discovery and two papers in a prominent scientific journal, but plaudits from scientists at other institutions, who have hailed the work as setting a new standard for the integration of physics and biology.

“This team broke down biology until they could study it with physics, and it’s only through that kind of detailed analysis that we can see the complicated dynamics that go on in biological systems,” said Nipam Patel, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California-Berkeley. “Their work is a marriage between people who are experts in one field, but who understand and appreciate the other field. It’s a nice blueprint for these kinds of collaborations.”

Their collaboration grew out of a quest for a different sort of blueprint — the one that biologists have sought ever since they peered through microscopes to witness what physicist David Tank refers to as “magic”: a complex animal like the fruit fly developing from a single egg, seemingly from nothing.

(See also this piece in TheScientist.com.)

William Dalrymple in The Times Literary Supplement:

About 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue. Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi’ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together. Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: “No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him.” He also argued for what he called “the pursuit of reason” rather than “reliance on the marshy land of tradition”.

All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portu-gal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’Fiori. It is worth emphasising Akbar, for he – the greatest ruler of the most populous of all Muslim states – represented in one man so many of the values that we in the West are often apt to claim for ourselves. I am thinking here especially of Douglas Murray, a young neocon pup, who wrote in The Spectator last week that he “was not afraid to say the West’s values are better”, and in which he accused anyone who said to the contrary of moral confusion: “Decades of intense cultural rela-tivism and designer tribalism have made us terrified of passing judgment,” he wrote.

More here.

Scott McLemee in the New York Times Book Review:

As the march of events has lurched in unexpected directions over the past three decades, many a political thinker has been thrown off track and hurled into confusion, if rarely into silence. But not John Gray. He has usually been a little ahead of the zeitgeist, waxing contrarian about whatever consensus is about to form. Gray has been called a chameleon. If so, he belongs to a very peculiar species: one with precognition, able to change colors before landing on whatever patch of landscape lies just around the corner.

In the early 1980s, Gray, who teaches European thought at the London School of Economics, was the most capable defender of Friedrich von Hayek as a social philosopher rather than just a propagandist for free-market policy. But he later became decidedly critical of any notion that the future belonged to liberal democracy. In 1989, as the Soviet Union was reforming itself out of existence, he wrote that this would not inaugurate “a new era of post-historical harmony” but rather “a return to the classical terrain of history, a terrain of great-power rivalries, secret diplomacies, and irredentist claims and wars.” Over the following decade, he advanced a critique of globalization that sounded, at times, profoundly anticapitalist, if by no means Marxian.

More here.

Jim Harrison in The New York Times:

Charles Bukowski was a monstrously homely man because of a severe case of acne vulgaris when he was young. Along the way he also had bleeding ulcers, tuberculosis and cataracts; he attempted suicide; and only while suffering from leukemia in the last year of his life did he manage to quit drinking. Bukowski was a major-league tosspot, occasionally brutish but far less so than the mean-minded Hemingway, who drank himself into suicide.

It is hard to quote Bukowski because there are virtually none of those short lyrics with bow ties of closure that are so pleasant for a reviewer to quote. I will excerpt a poem evidently written quite near the end of his life:

it bothers the young most, I think:
an unviolent slow death.
still it makes any man dream;
you wish for an old sailing ship,
the white salt-crusted sail
and the sea shaking out hints of immortality

sea in the nose sea in the hair
sea in the marrow, in the eyes
and yes, there in the chest.
will we miss
the love of a woman or music or food
or the gambol of the great mad muscled
horse, kicking clods and destinies
high and away
in just one moment of the sun coming down?

More here. (For Molly Sharma)