Marco Brazzoduro in openDemocracy:

Since the late 1980s, Italy has been affected by an unprecedented influx of migrants. Under successive governments, policies of reception and integration have been inadequate. The result is that a feeling of uneasiness has grown among Italian citizens especially in the outskirts of big cities already suffering from poor public services. The blame for worsening living conditions is often placed on foreigners, who thus come to play the role of the classic scapegoat. Roma are at the bottom of the social scale in this respect, even lower than other categories of migrants. They are (as always since the arrival of their ancestors in Europe from India) the first to be blamed and hated.

There is another, more recent factor in the identification of the Roma as a target of accusation: the way that Italy’s media and political leaders have come to emphasise in their rhetoric the theme of “security”. This is so often tendentious and misleading: for example, official statistics suggest that criminal offences have not increased in the last decade (moreover, Italy has one of the lowest murder-rates in Europe). Thus, in objective terms there is no reason for a campaign which highlights new threats to “security”. 

Italy’s media and political leaders take little notice of such objective factors. Most media outlets draw attention to those crimes committed by foreigners and deliberately stress the nationality of the offender; while politicians campaigning for the election of 13-14 April 2008 election also played frequently on this theme. The victory of the rightwing coalition was in part a result, and has been followed by attempts to implement harsh measures against the Roma: the new government, as well as targeting Roma, is also exploring the possibility – against legal and practical obstacles – of deporting non-Roma European Union citizens (especially Romanians) if they are not able to earn a living in Italy

In Prospect (UK), Tom Chatfield talks to the author:

Beijing Coma is a novel of oppositions; of seasonal and generational changes; of the fraught relationship between hope and experience. The build-up to protest and destruction inches forward within it alongside a narrative of present squalor and defeat—[the narrator] Dai Wei’s immobile body, and the hounding of his mother by the authorities. The protestors of 1989 are painted not as revolutionaries or anarchists but, overwhelmingly, patriots fighting for what they saw as the true legacy of communism: democratic reforms. Their biggest banner, hung from the roof of the Museum of Chinese History, simply reads “honest dialogue”; other slogans include “I love democracy more than bread!” and “I can endure hunger, but not a life without liberty!” As relationships and alliances are made and broken, however, the protests take on a life of their own. At one point, the personal appearance of Zhao Ziyang, the reformist general secretary of the Communist party, offers the tantalising possibility of salvation. But even his words prove unable to break the deadlock: the political will simply doesn’t exist among the party’s elite. A day after his visit to the students, Zhao is stripped of all his positions, martial law is declared, and the final act begins: the forceful dismantling of the crowd into assaulted, isolated bodies. “Like deer gathering at a lakeside to drink,” Dai Wei recalls, “the students gathered at the Monument [at the centre of Tiananmen Square], unaware that the square was a hunting ground and the Monument was the snare.” The protestors are trapped and gunned down.

Over at the US Study Center (Australia):

In this exclusive lecture hosted by the United States Studies Centre and Sydney Ideas, Professor Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, traced how Americans have thought about the key concept of freedom through the course of history. He argued that freedom has never been a single idea, but has been the source of considerable disagreement and conflict.

Listen to the podcast (Running time 100:38)

E.L. Doctorow’s keynote address at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society meeting on “The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society,” in The Nation:

To take the long view, American politics may be seen as the struggle between the idealistic secular democracy of a fearlessly self-renewing America and our great resident capacity to be in denial of what is intellectually and morally incumbent upon us to pursue.

Melville in Moby-Dick speaks of reality outracing apprehension. Apprehension in the sense not of fear or disquiet but of understanding… reality as too much for us to take in, as, for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesomely complex white whale–scientifically in our quantumized wave particles and the manipulable stem cells of our biology, ecologically in our planetary crises of nature, technologically in our humanoid molecular computers, sexually in the rising number of our genders, intellectually in the paradoxes of our texts, and so on.

What is more natural than to rely on the saving powers of simplism? Perhaps with our dismal public conduct, so shot through with piety, we are actually engaged in a genetic engineering venture that will make a slower, dumber, more sluggish whale, one that can be harpooned and flensed, tried and boiled to light our candles. A kind of water wonderworld whale made of racism, nativism, cultural illiteracy, fundamentalist fantasy and the righteous priorities of wealth.

Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

Scientists believe that itch, and the accompanying scratch reflex, evolved in order to protect us from insects and clinging plant toxins—from such dangers as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, transmitted by mosquitoes; from tularemia, river blindness, and sleeping sickness, transmitted by flies; from typhus-bearing lice, plague-bearing fleas, and poisonous spiders. The theory goes a long way toward explaining why itch is so exquisitely tuned. You can spend all day without noticing the feel of your shirt collar on your neck, and yet a single stray thread poking out, or a louse’s fine legs brushing by, can set you scratching furiously.

But how, exactly, itch works has been a puzzle. For most of medical history, scientists thought that itching was merely a weak form of pain. Then, in 1987, the German researcher H. O. Handwerker and his colleagues used mild electric pulses to drive histamine, an itch-producing substance that the body releases during allergic reactions, into the skin of volunteers. As the researchers increased the dose of histamine, they found that they were able to increase the intensity of itch the volunteers reported, from the barely appreciable to the “maximum imaginable.” Yet the volunteers never felt an increase in pain. The scientists concluded that itch and pain are entirely separate sensations, transmitted along different pathways.

More here.

///
Last Night as I was Sleeping
Antonio Machado

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvellous error! –
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart
I said: Along which secret aqueduct
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvellous error! –
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvellous error! –
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt,
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt – marvellous error! –
That it was God I had
here inside my heart.

Translation: Robert Bly

//

From The New Republic via Edge:

The collaboration of Kahneman and Tversky produced one of the major intellectual accomplishments of the late twentieth century: a series of ingeniously designed experiments that raised uncomfortable questions about “utility maximization,” which was the major assumption of microeconomics. To wit: it makes no difference in theory whether you lose a ticket to a play or lose the $10 that the ticket cost, but when people lose the ticket they are far less likely to buy another one than when they lose the money. Kahneman and Tversky’s explanation is that we create a mental account such that it makes sense to us to pay $10 to see a play but not $20, even though the utility sacrificed by losing the ticket and the money is identical.

(Note: Picture on right shows Dressed skeleton of Jeremy Bentham with wax head, British Museum).

Tversky died of cancer in 1996. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002, and is an emeritus professor at Princeton. Between them, they rattled the role of reason in the pantheon of human motives. They made clear that even if we think we know what is in our own best interest, we frequently make decisions based on misinformation, myopia, and plain quirkiness. The picture of human nature that they developed was–in contrast to the world of homo economicus— ironic, skeptical, almost wickedly complex.

More here.

From Nature:

Should we be looking for penguins on Mars, rather than little green men? Just a week after finding definitive signs of water ice just beneath the surface, news of another remarkable scientific discovery has been beamed back to Earth by the Mars lander Phoenix. This time it’s about muck. The soil under the lander was scooped up into its onboard chemistry lab just a few days ago, and subjected to a round of prodding, poking and other analysis. And the results? Martian soil is like Antarctic soil. “This soil appears to be a close analogue to surface soils found in the upper dry valleys in Antarctica,” says Sam Kounaves of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, leader of the ‘wet chemistry’ portion of the Phoenix mission.

More here.

From The New York Times:

This spring, Ibis published one of its most controversial books yet, the first English translation of “Khirbet Khizeh,” a novella by S. Yizhar, the pen name of Yizhar Smilansky, a noted Israeli writer and longtime Knesset member. Originally published in 1949, one year after the founding of Israel, the book tells of the violent evacuation of Palestinian village by a Jewish unit in the 1948 war of independence. Yizhar, who died in 2006, was born in 1916 and served as an intelligence officer in the 1948 war. Although the novella was a best-seller in Israel when it first appeared and has been on the Israeli high school curriculum since 1964, “Khirbet Khizeh” has never been well known outside Israel. The new Ibis edition was translated by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck.

Set in and around a quiet Palestinian village, the fictional Khirbet Khizeh of the title, the novella is written in a slow, meditative style that weaves together biblical allusions with contemporary slang. At first, the soldiers wait for a command. “No one knows how to wait like soldiers,” Yizhar writes. “There is the ruthlessly long waiting, the nervous anxious waiting, … the tedious waiting, that consumes and burns everything.” When the order comes, the unit begins shelling. The villagers flee. The book ends with the cri de coeur of the young soldier narrator. “This was what exile looked like,” he thinks out loud, watching the Palestinians leaving. “I had never been in the diaspora. I had never known what it was like, but people had spoken to me, told me, taught me, and repeatedly recited to me, from every direction … exile. … What, in fact, had we perpetrated here today?”

More here.

Speaking of filmmakers on filmmakers, one of my favorite film essays:

`Power and freedom’. Coupled together, these two words are repeated three times inVertigo. First, at the twelfth minute by Gavin Elster (‘freedom’ under-lined by a move to close-up) who, looking at a picture of Old San Francisco, expresses his nostalgia to Scottie (‘San Francisco has changed. The things that spelled San Francisco to me are disappearing fast’), a nostalgia for a time when men – some men at least – had `power and freedom’. Second, at the thirty-fifth minute, in the bookstore, where `Pop’ Liebel explains how Carlotta Valdes’s rich lover threw her out yet kept her child: `Men could do that in those days. They had the power and the freedom … ‘ And finally at the hundred and twenty-fifth minute – and fifty-first second to be precise – but in reverse order (which is logical, given we are now in the second part, on the other side of the mirror) by Scottie himself when, realizing the workings of the trap laid by the now free and powerful Elster, he says, a few seconds before Judy’s fall – which, for him, will be Madeleine’s second death -‘with all his wife’s money and all that freedom and power … ‘.Just try telling me these are coincidences.

Such precise signs must have a meaning. Could it be psychological, an explanation of the criminal’s motives? If so, the effort seems a little wasted on what is, after all, a secondary character. This strategic triad gave me the first inkling of a possible reading of Vertigo. The vertigo the film deals with isn’t to do with space and falling; it is a clear, understandable and spectacular metaphor for yet another kind of vertigo, much more difficult to represent – the vertigo of time. Elster’s `perfect’ crime almost achieves the impossible: reinventing a time when men and women and San Francisco were different to what they are now. And its perfection, as with all perfection in Hitchcock, exists in duality. Scottie will absorb the folly of time with which Elster infuses him through Madeleine/Judy. But where Elster reduces the fantasy to mediocre manifestations (wealth, power, etc), Scottie transmutes it into its most utopian form: he overcomes the most irreparable damage caused by time and resurrects a love that is dead.

Peter Bergmann, Teodor Münz, Frantisek Novosád, Paul Patton, Richard Rorty, Jan Sokol, and Leslie Paul Thiele discuss (trans. in eurozine):

Kritika&Kontext: What do you take to be the morally and politically most offensive passages in Nietzsche’s writings? How do you interpret them? Do you think they are representative of his general attitude toward morality and politics?

Richard Rorty: I am most offended by the passages in which Nietzsche expresses contempt for weakness, and especially by the passages which argue that there is something wrong with Christianity because it originated among slaves. So it did, but those slaves had a good idea: namely, that the ideal human community would be one in which love is the only law. So it would. One can separate this Christian ideal from the ressentiment characteristic of the ascetic priests, but Nietzsche never made that distinction.

Paul Patton: Some of his remarks about women are among the most offensive of Nietzsche’s writings. I take these to be indications of the extent to which he was a man of his time who could not see beyond the existing cultural forms of the sexual division of humankind. Like the vast majority of nineteenth century European men, Nietzsche could not divorce female affect, intelligence and corporeal capacities from a supposed “essential’ relation to child-bearing. His views on women are representative of his attitude toward morality and politics in the sense that they are in tension with possibilities otherwise opened up by his historical conception of human nature. For example, at times he recognizes that supposedly natural qualities of women or men are really products of particular social arrangements. We can conclude from this, even if he could not, that these qualities are not natural but open to change. In this domain as in other of his social and political views, he was not able to foresee some of the ways in which the very dynamics of human cultural evolution that he identified could lead us into a very different future.

Over at the Jerome T. Levy Economics Institute:

The focus of this year’s conference was the current economic and financial crisis in the United States and its effects on the world economy. Topics included the causes and consequences of the “Minsky moment”; the impact of the credit crunch on the economic and financial market outlook; dislocations and policy options; margins of safety, systemic risk, and the American subprime mortgage market; financial markets regulation-reregulation; the inefficiency of computer-driven markets; currency market fluctuations; and exchange rate misalignment.

The conference was held April 17–18, 2008, at the Levy Institute’s research and conference center at Blithewood, on the campus of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Audio: Welcome and Session 1  Speaker: Paul McCulley Session 2  Session 3      Speaker: Edward Chancellor   Speaker: James K. Galbraith  Speaker: Robert Barbera Session 4 Speaker: Maurice Hinchey

                                         

All Conference Audio

In Outlook India:

Take this lesson titled  Mathamillaatha Jeevan (Jeevan, the casteless):    

The headmaster asked the parents, who had come with their ward, to sit in the chairs before him, and began to fill the application form.    

“What’s your name, son?”    

“Jeevan”    

“Good. Nice name. Father’s name?”    

“Anvar Rashid.”    

“Mother’s name?”    

“Lakshmi Devi.”    

The headmaster raised his head, looked at the parents and asked:     “Which religion should we write?”    

“None. Write there is no religion.”    

“Caste?”    

“The same.”    

The headmaster leaned back in his chair and asked a little gravely:     “What if he feels the need for a religion when he grows up?”    

“Let him choose his religion when he feels so.”

This is the passage that has been singled out by the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF), the Church and Muslim organisations. They are demanding immediate withdrawal of the Class VII social studies book, being taught under the Kerala board, from which this passage has been taken.

The reason? Large portions of the book, they allege, is an an attempt to teach atheism to impressionable schoolchildren. They say that such lessons and others which illustrate caste cruelties will sow sectarian discontent.

In the Telegraph, Julian Schnabel explains to Sheila Johnston why he loves Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev:

He explains that he used to like to watch his chosen film with his children (he has five) when they were very small. Bedtime viewing chez Schnabel was unusually demanding, however. No Kung Fu Panda for his kids. Andrei Rublev is more than three hours long, in black and white, and in Russian.

“I would read the subtitles to them, as if I was reading a book,” he says.

“It’s like a fairytale – there are all these battles and things in it. And I think it affected them and informed the way they see things now.”

Andrei Tarkovsky’s film is set in medieval Russia, a country drowning in waves of invasion, plague and famine. There is much grist here for the imagination of the curious six-year-old. Boiling oil is poured down a man’s throat, a horse falls down a flight of stairs, a man’s eyes are gouged out, then the perpetrator looks around distractedly for his whip.

“He has no concern at all for what he’s done,” says Schnabel.

“The casualness of how death comes to people in the film is hauntingly real. Another moment, when a guy gets shot by an arrow and falls into the water, in slow motion, is incredibly powerful.”

It will come as no surprise that Andrei Rublev is another tale of a troubled artist: a great icon painter, and his struggles with his libido, his faith and his vocation.

Leigh Eric Schmidt in The Immanent Frame:

Not long ago, researchers wired up the atheist Richard Dawkins with a helmet that would create magnetic fields partially simulating the brain activity of temporal lobe epilepsy, which they linked to dramatic visionary religious experiences and to less dramatic feelings of sensed presences. It turns out, though, that hooking up a hardboiled atheist to a machine, known as the transcranial magnetic stimulator, produced no such experiences. “It was a great disappointment,” Dawkins related after 40 minutes on the machine. “Though I joked about the possibility, I of course never expected to end up believing in anything supernatural. But I did hope to share some of the feelings experienced by religious mystics when contemplating the mysteries of life and the cosmos.”

As my own mind was being massaged with images of Richard Dawkins having his temporal lobes stimulated, an odd notion popped into my head: namely, when it comes to religion, history and culture trump neurology. I quickly noticed that the same neuroscientists who were experimenting on Dawkins, among other more amenable test subjects, were also enfolding American religious history into their neurotheological data. One of the neurologists involved in the Dawkins stunt suggested in an interview, for example, that Ellen G. White, nineteenth-century prophet of the Seventh-day Adventist movement, suffered a childhood head injury that affected her temporal lobes in such a way as to produce her subsequent religious visions.

That example immediately struck me as a curious incursion of history into the laboratory. To be sure, even as an outsider, I was aware that a thriving set of conversations exists on the borders of neuroscience and religion. There are the theological questions, the God-spot questions: can the places of divine-human encounter, or, at least, the places of the felt-experiences of divine-human encounter be scanned and visualized? There are the ethical questions: for example, can the lying brain be mapped, detected, and exposed? Or, can compassionate affects be imaged and reproduced—in effect, is altruism a mental skill that can be trained? There are also, of course, innumerable psychotherapeutic questions; prominent among them is whether prayer and meditation are effective allies in the healing arts and medical sciences. But, here was the prolific visionary, Ellen G. White, suddenly thrust into the speculations of a pediatric neurologist studying temporal lobe epilepsy, all because she had been hit in the face by a rock when she was nine years old. Perhaps there is, indeed, a conversation to be had not only between religion and neuroscience, but also, more specifically, between American religious history and American neuroscience.

In this week’s TPM Book Club, a discussion of Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure. Gourevitch:

A hundred years ago in Boston, the Congo Reform Association published a pamphlet by Mark Twain called “King Leopold’s Soliloquy, A Defense of His Congo Rule.” The text takes the form of a monologue by the Belgian monarch, as he reads through a stack of protest literature, describing crimes perpetrated by his colonial agents against his Congolese subjects: torture, abduction, enslavement, starvation, mutilation, extermination. “Blister the meddlesome missionaries!” the king fulminates. “They seem to be always around, always spying, always eye-witnessing the happenings; and everything they see they commit to paper.” But, even as he rails, Leopold comforts himself with the boast that he has never come across a critic (however truthful) whom he could not discredit, stifle, or convert by the application of force or cash. Then he comes upon a pamphlet that contains photographs of mutilated Congolese, and he quakes before the evidence of this “most powerful enemy” – “the incorruptible Kodak”:

The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe… the pictures get sneaked around everywhere, in spite of all we can do to ferret them out and suppress them. Ten thousand pulpits and ten thousand presses are saying the good word for me all the time and placidly and convincingly denying the mutilations. Then that trivial little Kodak, that a child can carry in its pocket, gets up, uttering never a word, and knocks them dumb!

But even as he frets about the dangers of photography, and sees himself exposed in the grisly images of his mutilated subjects, the old Belgian discovers the true consolation of the political criminal. After all, he tells himself, the world’s response to the pictures will surely be to shudder and turn away. With that thought he bucks himself up, defiant as ever. “Why certainly,” he says. “That is my protection… I know the human race.”

Shuddering and turning away. We did it again at Abu Ghraib.

Emily Mitchell reviews the memoir of the poet Sarah Manguso, in the NYT Book review:

In her sharp, affecting new memoir, “The Two Kinds of Decay,” Manguso writes from the far side of a long period of remission. “For seven years I tried not to remember much because there was too much to remember,” she writes. From an original welter of experience, she has carefully culled details that remain vivid. Filtered through memory, events during her illness seem like “heavenly bodies” that “fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.” Manguso is acutely interested in these processes of renaming and remembering, the way time changes what we say about the past. Her book is not only about illness but also about the ways we use language to describe it and cope with it.

The author of two books of poetry, Manguso brings the virtues of that form to the task of writing memoir. Her book is divided mostly into one- and two-page chapters titled like poems. She mixes high and low language, the crass and the scientific, with a lyric poet’s sure-handedness. The chapters themselves — among them “The Hematologist,” “The Forgetful Nurse,” “Corroboration” — resemble her own poetry, broken into aphoristic, discrete sections on the page. This disjointedness gives the prose a rhythm that mirrors the confusion and fragmentation of illness.

It also clears space for one of the book’s most remarkable aspects: its dark humor. What makes this account both bearable and moving is Manguso’s keen sense of the absurdities that accompany severe illness.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more.

The word criticism has its root in the Greek word krinein, which means — in its most original sense — to divide or separate. It’s about sorting things out and making distinctions. Criticism is thus about doing something that is, in this era, almost impossible to do. It is difficult simply to keep up with the vast global cultural output, let alone to make determinations and judgments.

So the critic lives in terror and humiliation, without purpose, without audience, without platform. Newspaper book reviews are shutting down (as are the newspapers that used to house them). Magazines are less and less inclined to devote space or resources to traditional criticism. The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself.

Zadie Smith reviews Louis Begley’s The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay, in the NYRB:

[I]f we’re not to read Kafka too [Max] Brodly, how are we to read him? We might do worse than read him Begley. Gently skeptical of the biographical legend, Begley yet believes in the “metaphysical smile” of the work, the possibility that it expresses our modern alienation—here prophet Kafka and quotidian Kafka are not in conflict. He deals first, and most successfully, with the quotidian. The Kafka who, like other diarists, indulged a relentless dramaturgy of the self; the compulsive letter-writer who once asked a correspondent, “Don’t you get pleasure out of exaggerating painful things as much as possible?” For Kafka, the prospect of a journey from Berlin to Prague is “a foolhardiness whose parallel you can only find by leafing back through the pages of history, say to Napoleon’s march to Russia.” A brief visit to his fiancée “couldn’t have been worse. The next thing will be impalement.”

The diaries are the same, only more so: few people, even in that solipsistic form, can have written “I” as frequently as he. People and events appear rarely; the beginning of the First World War is a matter to be weighed equally with the fact that he went swimming that day. The Kafka who wrote the fictions was a man of many stories; the private Kafka sang the song of himself:

I completely dwelt in every idea, but also filled every idea…. I not only felt myself at my boundary, but at the boundary of the human in general.

I am the end or the beginning.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often—and in my inmost self perhaps all the time— I doubt that I am a human being.

One could quote pages of similar sentiments: Kafka scholars usually do. Thankfully, Begley has more of a comic sense than most Kafka scholars, tending to find Kafka in quite other moods; at times whiny, occasionally wheedling, often slyly disingenuous, and, every now and then, frankly mendacious. The result is something we don’t expect. It’s a little funny:

It turns out we really do keep writing the same thing. Sometimes I ask whether you’re sick and then you write about it, sometimes I want to die and then you do, sometimes I want stamps and then you want stamps….