In the Turkish Daily News:

Today, secularism is often based on “hard” naturalism, i.e., one based on scientistic assumptions. Unlike the case of cultural relativism, this time I need not comment on the philosophical background. For what interests me in the present context is the question whether a secularist devaluation of religion, if it were one day to be shared by the vast majority of secular citizens, is at all compatible with that post-secular balance between shared citizenship and cultural difference I have outlined. Or would the secularistic mindset of a relevant portion of the citizenry be just as appetizing for the normative self-understanding of a post-secular society as the fundamentalism of a mass of religious citizens in fact is? This question touches on deeper roots of the present unease than the “multiculturalist drama”. Which kind of problem do we face?

It is to the credit of the secularists that they, too, insist on the indispensability of including all citizens as equals in civil society. Because a democratic order cannot simply be imposed on those who are its authors, the constitutional state confronts its citizens with the demanding expectations of an ethics of citizenship that reaches beyond mere obedience to the law. Religious citizens and communities must not only superficially adjust to the constitutional order. They are expected to appropriate the secular legitimation of constitutional principles under the very premises of their own faith. It is a well-known fact that the Catholic Church first pinned its colors to the mast of liberalism and democracy with the Second Vaticanum in 1965. And in Germany, the Protestant churches did not act differently. Many Muslim communities still have this painful learning process before them. Certainly, the insight is also growing in the Islamic world that today an historical-hermeneutic approach to the Koran’s doctrine is required. But the discussion on a desired Euro-Islam makes us once more aware of the fact that it is the religious communities that will themselves decide whether they can recognize in a reformed faith their “true faith”.

As the drinking commenced one cold January evening in the Bosnian countryside, President Vinko Vukoja, of the Hajdučka Republika of Mijat Tomić, or Rebel’s Republic, burst into a passionate ganga, a guttural, throbbing yodel sung in rural Croatia and Herzegovina. On the final note, his ministers joined their ruddy leader in a reverberating wail. This is the anthem of their young nation: “Sveti Ante platiti ću ti misu / samo reci koji naši nisu.” (“I will pay for your mass at Sveti Ante Church / just say who is not one of us.”)

I asked what this song meant. The men explained that with ganga, the lyrics aren’t too important—sometimes the words even change; it’s the spirit and communal reverie that matter most. But the lyrics sung by the President that night are printed on this diminutive breakaway state’s currency, called the kubura. The money appears quite official, bearing three authentications: the signatures of the President, Minister of Defense, and Governor, as well as the national seal—a bust of Mijat Tomić, a seventeenth-century Croat folk hero who fought Ottoman rule, with two kubura guns (the currency’s namesake antique pistols) crossed beneath him, a red and white checkerboard above his right shoulder. The flip side of each bill shows a dozen cars parked haphazardly in front of a rendering of the pyramidal hotel that doubles as the government seat and is owned by President Vukoja.

more from Triple Canopy here.

In The Brooklyn Rail, Rachel Bialik reviews Night Wraps the Sky and accuses Mayakovsky of being a hipster!

The book is a forceful tribute to the die-hard communist and incendiary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who unfalteringly believed that artistic performance was the medium that would open the gates for an ideological revolution. Not only did he believe it, but he had the entire country and party convinced as well. Mayakovsky was something of a superstar in his time, but editor Michael Almereyda makes a strong case in this long overdue anthology (in English translation) that the Russian Revolution’s representative poet was motivated entirely by political sincerity and socialist ambition. Though the deliberately selected primary sources and poems occasionally hint that Mayakovsky was compelled by a tormented Russian temperament, Almereyda successfully portrays a country and an ideology so raw that only a poetic persona of epic proportions could bring it to the people.

Despite the editor’s deliberate angle, multiple aspects of Mayakovsky as a writer and a person emerge from the collection. In his introduction, Almereyda explains that the writer displays, “a kind of proto-punk ferocity, a still burning aura of tough guy tenderness, soulful defiance.” In other words, Mayakovsky was a hipster.

Tom Chatfield in Prospect (UK):

The complexity of games like Warcraft and Eve is not the only aspect of modern gaming to defy stereotype. Consider demographics: where once gaming was the preserve of adolescent males, players increasingly come from all age groups and both sexes. According to the Entertainment Software Association of America, the world’s largest gaming association, the average American video game player is now 35 years old and has been playing games for 12 years, while the average frequent buyer of games is 40. Moreover, 40 per cent of all players are women, with women over 18 representing a far greater portion of the game-playing population (33 per cent) than boys aged 17 or younger (18 per cent). Much of the recent growth in the value of the gaming industry has been driven by the increased diversity and affluence of its consumer base; the hard core of adolescent males are no longer central. In Britain, Ofcom’s annual Communications Market report for 2007 noted that, despite the electronic games market continuing to grow in value, significantly fewer children were playing console and computer games than two years previously (61 per cent of children aged 5-15 did so regularly in 2005, compared to 53 per cent in 2007).

Perhaps most intriguingly, the video games industry is now growing in ways that have more in common with the old-fashioned world of charades and Monopoly than with a cyber-future of sedentary, isolated sociopaths. GTA IV itself has a superb collaborative mode for online gamers, while the games that have been shifting most units in the last two years belong to a burgeoning new genre known as “social-casual”: games in which friends and relations gather round a console to compete at activities that range from playing notes on a fake electric guitar (Guitar Hero) to singing karaoke and swapping videos of their performances, X-Factor style (SingStar), or playing tennis with motion-sensitive controllers (Wii Sports). The agenda is increasingly being set by the concerns of mainstream consumers—what they consider acceptable for their children, what they want to play at parties and across generations.

From the Plenty blog, Cutting Edge:

Sunrgi, a Hollywood-based start-up, came out of stealth mode this week claiming it can collect twice as much sunlight as other photovoltaic designs and convert it to electricity for 5 cents a kilowatt-hour, on par with fossil fuels.

The company’s core technology is concentrating solar power, which uses lenses to focus sunlight onto small strips of photovoltaic cells. The advantage is that more photons are collected by smaller quantities of solar cells, meaning that the systems require much less of the expensive semiconductor materials that go into making ordinary solar panels. But the cells are also fragile and easily damaged in extreme heat, as I wrote about here.

Sunrgi’s solution involves “goop–or at least that’s what GreenTechMedia quotes Paul Sidlo, a co-founder and partner at Sunrgi, as saying. It sounds like a nanotech slurry that’s mounted on the back of a fairly ordinary solar cell to conduct heat away from the cell.

SOME SCIENTISTS SEE their work make headlines. But MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the “butterfly effect,” the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz’s suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly’s wings. more stories like this

Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

First there was Watergate, then the nuclear family faded, cigars were extinguished, and now interest in cigarettes is waning. Martinis can only be next. Soon, mixed drinks will be fond recollection, a fable shared with an inattentive child.

If we don’t cultivate the demand for complex drinks—cocktails that require a commitment to acquiring certain tastes—we must prepare to relinquish gambling, prostitution, and perhaps even sex.

When we cast aside even our vices, how can we hope to preserve the very fiber of our society? Without morals, we are still a decadent and exuberant people. Without vices, we are troglogdytic hunches, scraping at the earth and mewling at the sky. For the good of mankind, we must stop ordering stupid drinks.

more from The Morning News here.

In the NYRB, Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff review several new books on neuroscience and implications of the research for memory, meaning, representation and reality:

Both [Jean-Pierre] Changeux and [Gerald] Edelman propose that during memory formation, our interactions with the world cause a Darwinian selection of neural circuits, much as the body, when invaded by a virus, “selects” the most potent antibodies from the enormous repertoire of antibodies made available by the body’s immune system. However, the resulting memory is not, Edelman says, a representation of the outside world, any more than the antibody that has protected the body against an infecting virus is a representation of that virus. Yet the antibody can protect the body against a future attack by the virus, just as the neural circuits can contribute to memory recall. Instead, Edelman writes, memory is the ability to

repeat a mental or physical act after some time despite a changing context…. We stress repetition after some time in this definition because it is the ability to re-create an act separated by a certain duration from the original signal set that is characteristic of memory. And in mentioning a changing context, we pay heed to a key property of memory in the brain: that it is, in some sense, a form of constructive recategorization during ongoing experience, rather than a precise replication of a previous sequence of events.

For Edelman, then, memory is not a “small scale model of external reality,” but a dynamic process that enables us to repeat a mental or physical act…

From The New York Review of Books:

Alexander defeated the Persian armies in three great pitched battles, and the unfortunate Persian king was murdered by his own people. Alexander married an exotic Eastern princess, became King of Kings, and died, not quite thirty-three years old, in Babylon (323 BCE). Some said he died of a particularly violent drinking bout: heavy drinking seems to have been a tradition among the upper class of Macedon, a society by no means famous for its cultural or scholarly interests. News of his death percolated back to Greece. Some refused to believe it. If he were really dead, said one, the whole world would reek of his corpse. But dead he was, and the struggle was on for the succession to his vast realm and fabulous wealth. His generals fought it out, each aiming to keep as much as he could. Alexander’s young son was promptly murdered, and most of his family wiped out. The whole story is a cruel lesson — almost, one might feel, overemphatic in conception — on the vanity of ambition and the nothingness of power.

After a generation of warfare, things settled down. No king had been able to hold on to the whole of Alexander’s empire. Four more or less stable monarchies emerged, among them the Egypt of Ptolemy, a level-headed general, which would last for three hundred years; its last queen was the famous Cleopatra (a Macedonian name). One by one, those kingdoms fell to the rising and irresistible power of Rome. But Alexander lived on, as a figure of fantasy and romance. Sometimes he was a focus for hatred of the Roman conquerors and oppressors. If only Alexander had lived, said many Greeks, he would have conquered these horrible Romans. But Roman writers disagreed: Alexander would have met his match in the sturdy Roman legions!

There is nothing like an early death for creating legends, and Richard Stoneman gives a great many of them learned but lively treatment in his new book.

More here.

///
SWEET APPLES
Albinas Žukauskas

Well, maybe now, towards autumn,
In the dusk, when in my father’s orchard
A giant moon hangs on above the fence,
When from the boughs Newtonian apples plop into the grass –
Maybe you’ll come and ask me,
While I keep watch over the place for apple thieves,
To shake into your lap
Some of the very best sweet apples?
Maybe you’ll come now after all?
I only want to see whether you’re still as stupid
As that time, many years ago,
Whether you still can stay so long behind the orchard fence
Holding a lapful of sweet apples?
I want to see
Whether I am as stupid as I was
So many years ago.
Will I, like then, benumbed and lost in wonder,
Keep staring at you from behind the fence,
Both motionless and speechless,
Pervaded by the blazing giant moon
And by the scent of the sweet apples in your lap?
I want to see
Whether we both will, like two fools,
Stare at each other until midnight,
When you at last come to yourself, stir up
And, lowering your eyes, breathe out:
“My goodness, it is late,
I must be off now… It’s already dark.
And Mummy – God forbid! – will wake to look for me.”
Yet do come, anyway!
I only want to see
Whether we both are still as stupid
As that time, many years ago,
Whether, like then, beside the fence
Under the big full moon
We’ll stare benumbed and speechless
Until the very midnight,
Until the first night cockcrow!

Oh, hang it all!
I’m sorry, dear, I’ve clean forgotten
That the old fence has long since fallen down,
And it’s a long time since you are no more.
All that is left here is the giant moon,
An indistinct scent of sweet apples,
And me, of course,
That’s all.

Translated by Lionginas Pažūsis

//

From The New York Times:

Evolution’s recipe for making a brain more complex has long seemed simple enough. Just increase the number of nerve cells, or neurons, and the interconnections between them. A human brain, for instance, is three times the volume of a chimpanzee’s. A whole new dimension of evolutionary complexity has now emerged from a cross-species study led by Dr. Seth Grant at the Sanger Institute in England. Dr. Grant looked at the interconnections between neurons, known as synapses, which until now have been regarded as a standard feature of neurons.

But in fact the synapses get considerably more complex going up the evolutionary scale, Dr. Grant and colleagues reported online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. In worms and flies, the synapses mediate simple forms of learning, but in higher animals they are built from a much richer array of protein components and conduct complex learning and pattern recognition, Dr. Grant said. The finding may open a new window into how the brain operates. “One of the biggest questions in neuroscience is to answer what are the design principles by which the human brain is constructed, and this is one of those principles,” Dr. Grant said.

More here.

Kazuhiko Kawahara or Palla. (Composition based on one photograph.)

More on this architect/artist from Osaka here and here.

Don George in National Geographic:

What comes to mind when you hear the word “Ramallah”? Probably not gazelles, white asphodel, and a dinosaur footprint—but those are among the attributes we first meet in this illuminating new book.

Palestinian Walks presents six sarhat—aimless wanderings designed to nourish the soul and rejuvenate the self—taken in the hills around Ramallah and the nearby wadis of the Jerusalem wilderness and the ravines by the Dead Sea from 1978 to 2006. Author and human-rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh has lived in Ramallah his entire life, and his account is imbued with a quiet passion to preserve—in memory if not in fact —this wild landscape that has been increasingly demarcated and developed before his eyes.

The book begins with a transporting walk to his family’s palatial country qasr (stone structure). The scenery in the surrounding hills is wild, unkempt, free. In subsequent chapter-walks, as the years go by, the hills become increasingly hemmed in by Jewish settlements. Where old roads amble along the contours of the land, new highways are blasted straight through; once wide open spaces are covered with concrete buildings. Still, Shehadeh continues to pursue pilgrimages of solace and serenity in the wild hills.

As the natural landscape changes, the contours of Israel–Palestine relations changes as well, and Shehadeh records this evolution too. Initially an idealistic lawyer battling to save what he feels are legitimate Palestinian claims to land, he becomes embittered as case after case is decided against his clients. Honest people disagree profoundly over the history, legitimacies, and injustices in this region. What I love about this book is that it reveals a side of the region that we never hear about; it builds natural and human connections to Ramallah that will forever change what I imagine when I hear the word on TV or read about it in the news.

The other gift of this book is how it illuminates the way landscapes become part of people and help define them. I grew up taking my own New England sarhat in the woods behind my Connecticut home, and now I feel like the rocks, bare fall branches, and green spring buds are a part of me wherever I am.

The sense of love and loss that permeates this poignant book transcends the brambly politics of the region, and Shehadeh’s deeply felt accounts become lessons for us all on the fundamental value of unbridled nature in the landscape of our lives.

//
A Little East of Jordan (59)
Emily Dickinson

A little east of Jordan
Evangelists record,
A gymnast and an angel
Did wrestle long and hard,

Till morning touching mountain—
And Jacob, waxing strong,
The Angel begged permission
To breakfast to return.

“Not so,” said cunning Jacob!
“I will not let thee go
Except thou bless me—Stranger!”
The which acceded to,

Light swung the silver fleeces
“Peniel” hills beyond,
And the bewildered gymnast
Found he had worsted God!

Painting: Jacob Wrestles with an Angel; Rembrandt

//

The German poet, playwright, and critic Friedrich Schiller thought there were two kinds of poets: “sentimental” and “naive” (and neither term, for Schiller, was an insult). Sentimental poets, he said, are self-conscious and retrospective; they “look for lost nature” in the people and things they write about. Their characteristic works, Schiller believed, sound carefully wrought, conclusive, even if written at high speed. Naive poets, on the other hand, seem to “be nature”—poetry seems to come out of them as wind from the sky, or leaves from the trees, as if it were their native speech. Naive poets often sound as if they never revise, even when we know they’ve worked hard on many drafts; their poetry seems to flow and does not want to end.

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) was in Schiller’s sense the most “naive” of America’s very good poets. His poems, written over nearly 50 years, include almost every kind of speech-act a person can say, from shrugs to prophecies, and they sound spontaneous even when it’s clear they reflect decades of thought.

more from Poetry here.

In form, Human Smoke is unique. Nicholson Baker seeks to tell the story of the origins of World War II through a chronological sequence of several hundred vignettes, as if one were to screen Gone with the Wind through a series of uncaptioned snapshots. Yet however impressionistic Baker’s technique may seem, he is pursuing an ambitious and sweeping reinterpretation of his subject: He evidently regards the “good war” as bad, a colossal mistake. In other words, Baker is tilting against the most deeply settled and ardently embraced piece of conventional wisdom in the current armory of American myth. His prime targets are Prime Minister Winston Churchill, perhaps the most highly touted figure of the past century, and, to a lesser extent, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, though Baker has not forgotten to provide a portrait of Hitler as incomparably worse than either. His heroes are Mohandas K. Gandhi and an assortment of American Quakers and other pacifists who opposed the war—people of whom most readers will be hearing for the first time.

more from Bookforum here.

“Is it true that water or urination would be difficult to fake?” Boliker asks. While Pixar would agree with that sentiment, Palm says that “a lot of things would be possible to fake at this level.” His theory is that VHS recorders were used to cover up the fakery—that the image degradation on the third- or fourth-generation copies sold on street corners and received by the Sun-Times’ Jim DeRogatis was an attempt to hide the cutting and pasting of a digital-effects maestro. Such changes would be easy to spot on the big screen, but much harder to suss out on a crappy video. (Also, while Palm doesn’t protest, Boliker isn’t being fair to him here. He’s not suggesting that the urine on the tape is a special effect. In the Palm scenario, all of the urine on the tape would be real; the fake part would be the head attached to the urinator’s body.)

The week of testimony ends with Kelly’s attorneys finally bidding adieu to the Little Man theory. The new defense premise: the Michael Jordan theory. The classic Gatorade ad showing the young Michael Jordan playing one-on-one against the old Michael Jordan, defense attorney Marc Martin says, reveals the kind of magic you can create by superimposing images. Watch the commercial, though, and you’ll notice that you rarely see the two Jordans’ faces at the same time; when you do, it looks fake. Not to mention that the video is short, cost a ton of money, and doesn’t show young Michael Jordan peeing on old Michael Jordan. I remain unconvinced, and I imagine the jury does as well.

more from Slate here.

From Prospect Magazine:

Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate
by Kenan Malik.

The Great Hall at the University of Reading is a lively piece of Victoriana: a broad neo-Romanesque structure suggestive of a nave, with a concave arched ceiling of gilt-edged rectangular sections painted a pastel green and decorated with rosettes. The uniformity of its architectural style contrasts with the people I can see under its roof. Perhaps 200 students are at work here, and my guess, from their faces, is that between them they could trace their ancestry to Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the far east and perhaps the Indian subcontinent.

These observations collide with Kenan Malik’s insistence in his new book, Strange Fruit, that there is no such thing as race: that it is nothing more than a social construct, having little to do with biology. It is true that the history of racial thinking is mostly an odious embarrassment. And using the idea of race as an assertion of abrupt or clear genetic boundaries between peoples is wrong. All of humanity shares the same genes, and we can all happily and successfully interbreed. And, contrary to the pronouncements of some well-known public figures, there is no evidence that human groups differ in the genetic factors that cause intelligence or even cognitive abilities in general. But we mustn’t take this to mean that there are no differences among us. Variants of our shared genes do differ among human groups. If my ancestors were from the far east, I would have the epicanthal fold of skin above my eyes so distinctive of peoples from that region. Were I able to trace my ancestry to the Ethiopian highlands, it is likely that I would have a wiry frame and sinewy muscles. And were my ancestors from the Tibetan plateau, it is likely that my body shape would be good at conserving heat. I could go on; and the list could contain far more than morphological characters—just think, for example, of who carries genes to protect against malaria or to digest milk proteins as adults.

More here.

From The New York Times:

WHILE THEY SLEPT by Kathryn Harrison:

The violations that destroy human lives, or maim them, seem to demand telling. Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs. Mythology and literature (and their descendant, the Freudian talking cure) manifest a profound hunger for narrating what is called, paradoxically, the unspeakable. Raped, her tongue torn out, Philomela becomes the nightingale, singing the perpetrator’s guilt. When Oedipus appears with bleeding eye-sockets, the tragic chorus simultaneously narrates and says it cannot speak; it looks while saying it must look away:

What madness came upon you, what daemon
Leaped on your life with heavier
Punishment than a mortal man can bear?
No: I cannot even
Look at you, poor ruined one.
And I would speak, question, ponder,
If I were able. No.
You make me shudder.

In the “Inferno” of Dante, Count Ugolino, forced to cannibalize his children’s corpses, is led to narrate the horror by Dante’s offer to retell the story up in the world above. Genesis 19 not only tells the story of incest between Lot and his daughters, but proceeds to name their offspring: Moab and Ben-ammi, and the Moabites and Ammonites descended from them. Abel’s blood “cries out” with its story, and the fratricide Cain is marked.

“Therapeutic” is too mild and cool a word for the telling that rises from such drastic extremes as incest, parricide, fratricide: something like “reconstructive” — as in post-traumatic facial surgery — might be more accurate for such narrative. An eerie, immediate impulse in the direction of storytelling characterizes the thoughts of the terrified 16-year-old Jody Gilley in her upstairs bedroom one night in Medford, Ore., in 1984. Jody is aware that her brother Billy has just clubbed their parents and their younger sister to death with an aluminum baseball bat (though the 11-year-old sister is still breathing).

More here.

How odious! Via Unfogged, from  the Women’s Media Center: