As you read this, a robot-human consortium is hard at work composing a verse epic on the Internet. “The World’s Longest Poem” is hosted on Benrik, a Web site run by British authors Ben Carey and Henrik Delehag, and is being written via a truly democratic process: anyone with access to the Internet can add a line of up to 60 characters. Lines range from the self-consciously literary to the merely self-conscious (“I think this poem has long lost its original purpose”) to spam ads, which get repeated so often that they form a sort of refrain (“cheap viagra online / cialis online / The blind Shakespearean and Yeatsian worshipper cries! / generic viagra online”). It’s currently 19,000 lines long, and growing at a rate of roughly 3,800 lines each year.

“The World’s Longest Poem” isn’t the longest poem in the world. It’s not even the longest poem on the Internet; that title belongs to a much better-organized effort called Choka On It. But it may be the poem with the lowest-ever barriers to entry, and that makes it a sort of literary rendering of our collective unconscious, the id of the Internet captured in snippets of 60 characters or less.

more from Poetry here.

Ingrid Rowland reviews Linda Nochlin’s Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution an exhibition at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, in the NYRB:

The “WACK!” catalog shows the room-size crocheted web of Faith Wilding’s Crocheted Environment of 1972 as well as Judy Chicago’s ceramic, embroidered, and oft-attended Dinner Party, a triangular table set for an imaginary banquet of thirty-nine women luminaries (Virginia Woolf, Georgia O’Keeffe), each with her embroidered section of the long formal tablecloth and her own distinctive plate. Neither the ceramic work nor the embroidery is of the highest quality, but the point of the piece was always its guest list, a list to spark a truly grand dinner party of the imagination. After wandering for years, The Dinner Party found a permanent home at the Brooklyn Museum just as “WACK!” opened.

It is far easier, of course, to mount an exhibition on art by women than it is to mount an exhibition of specifically feminist art. The subtitle to “WACK!,” “Art and the Feminist Revolution,” has been carefully chosen to allow its curators to include women artists who explicitly rejected any identification with the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, like the Belgian filmmaker Lili Dujourie, or who learned the hard way, like the African-American artists Howardena Pindell and Faith Ringgold, that most of its members were already daughters of privilege: predominantly white and well educated.

As the “WACK!” catalog acknowledges by its inclusive choice of artists, it was probably the sheer presence of women, rather than their personal credos, that really delivered a whack to the world of art. Ultimately, any successful movement gathers a following, and most pioneers make reluctant followers, no matter the cause. “WACK!” chiefly demonstrates that in the twentieth century, as before, women were present in every aspect of art’s avant-garde, from abstraction to realism, minimalism, performance art, body art, film, video, fiber arts, not to mention the ancient art of painting.

It was all over. The Reich was finished, Hitler dead, his charred jaw bone all Russian pathologists could find of him in the smouldering ruins of Berlin. Hundreds of miles to the south, in Austria, an SS unit prepared to stage its own private apocalypse.

On May 7 1945, they arrived at Immendorf Castle in southern Austria. The German soldiers already billeted there were ordered to leave. That morning, German forces in Austria had signed their surrender, to take effect the next day; for these SS men, it was the last night of the war.

Schloss Immendorf was a beautiful setting for their final night of power and freedom. The castle’s massive fortifications were softened with sloping tiled roofs, so that it resembled a Loire chateau, set in spacious parkland, with ivy growing up the walls. A curving staircase led to a grand interior full of art treasures, stored here by the Reich to save them from air raids on Vienna.

Among this store were 13 paintings by Gustav Klimt.

more from The Guardian here.

Rashid Khalidi in The Nation:

Moving toward a two-state, or a one-state, solution or toward any other resolution of the Palestine question–that is, getting the Palestinians out of the parlous state they are currently in–is dependent on a reversal in the dynamic of the Palestinian polity. For several years, this has been spiraling downward, and it now seems to be nearly in free-fall. Only when the Palestinians were united, when they had some sense of what their national strategy was, and when they chose tactics appropriate to that strategy, did they have any success at all, minimal though it has been, over the past forty-one years, the past sixty years–indeed, over the past ninety years. The Palestinians were most emphatically not united around a clear strategy and appropriate tactics during the British Mandate until 1948 or during the two decades afterward, nor have they been for the past decade or so, both periods that have been disastrous for them. Even during the era from the heyday of the PLO in the late 1960s through the first intifada of 1987-91, when the Palestinians gained broad international legitimacy and sympathy, and grudging recognition from Israel, this unity and strategic clarity were flawed in many ways.

In particular, Palestinians lacked clarity about the moral, legal and political disadvantages in the use of violence against an Israeli polity able to mobilize in defense of its actions, however unspeakable, the most powerful tropes of victimhood in modern Western culture. This confusion among some Palestinians exists although farsighted thinkers like Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad understood decades ago that nonviolent resistance was integral to Palestinian success; although the greatest successes of the Palestinians were won by the unarmed popular protests of the first intifada; and despite widespread (but underreported) peaceful joint Palestinian-Israeli protest movements against Israel’s illegal wall inside the West Bank.

If I were forty years younger and yearning to come to New York, high on brains and imagination but low on capital, could I come here? Well, yes and no. There would be no way I could afford the Upper West Side—or anywhere else in Manhattan. Very few of us could afford the West Side if we had to pay market prices to be here now. That’s the bad news. The good news is that today’s younger generation has learned to explore the city as a whole with a zeal and energy and resourcefulness that my generation, obsessed with Manhattan alone, never even dreamed of. They’ve missed the delightful experience of living in Manhattan in their youth, and I can’t blame them if they are mad; I’d be mad in their place. Still, they can get here on the subway, and they do. Meanwhile, their New York is a lot fuller than ours; they have opened up a city horizon far wider than anything we could imagine. It’s amazing, in their New York, there’s so much more there there.

In the spring of 2006, I gave a reading at a Hispanic Cultural Center in Mott Haven, in the south South Bronx, in a small, brownstone, just behind the giant neon “H” sign of the History Channel. In the 1970s and 1980s, this house had been just about reduced to rubble; in the 2000s, it was still in the midst of rebuilding. The generation of kids who create new centers like this is making small-“h” history, and making the city’s post-1898 official name, “Greater New York,” mean something real. They are reinventing New York’s immense horizon, its capacity to include the whole world. But they are also facing the city’s vulnerability and inner destructiveness. They are “looking the negative in the face and living with it.” They are converting the negative into being. By affirming the ruins, they are making the rising possible. Theirs is the most authentic voice of “New York Calling” now.

more from Dissent here.

Drew Hinshaw in PopMatters:

Of all the Kenyan contributions to Obama-mania, the most thrilling might be the dream-like “Obama”, by Tony Nyadundo, a middle-aged bandleader seeking to revive traditional-esque Ohangla music with pattering drum synths and topical storytelling. On “Obama”—title track from his sixth record—he weaves quite a tale, which according to East African Standard reporter Caroline Nyanga, translates as such: On his first trip to Kenya, the future senator and the humble musician chanced into one another, and, so impressed by the singer’s immaculate English, Obama decided to give the guy 100,000 Kenyan shillings (U.S. $1,600, roughly) to buy a guitar and spread his message. It’s a demonstrably false account, and a disturbing example of Obama’s expectations being set impossibly high, and in specific dollar amounts to boot. All the same, here’s how Nyanga characterizes the anthem’s reception: “Revellers in Kenyan dancehalls usually go into a frenzy and dance with abandon as soon as Obama’s song rends the air.” Yes, they can.

Yet the best song in the Obama catalogue may well have been the first. On their “Obama”, the half-American/half-Kenyan foursome Extra Golden sing their praise for the senator, but mostly their thanks. During his 2006 tour of East Africa, Obama helped the band’s Kenyan members get a visa to tour America, thereby routing them around that prickly New Immigration Law that Coco Tea was harping about. (If Obama wants to earn the support of his African followers indefinitely, may this writer humbly suggest some comprehensive immigration reform aimed not only at the Mexican border, but at the African continent as well, where getting a visa seems to be some byzantine art of secret-society-system-working.)

Paul Collier and Bjørn Lomborg in Project Syndicate:

A new study for the Copenhagen Consensus project that includes the first ever cost-benefit analysis of United Nations peacekeeping initiatives concludes that military might is an important tool for reducing bloodshed around the world.

Iraq is a misleading guide to the effectiveness of such initiatives. Unlike the vast majority of conflicts, its civil war was sparked by an international war. The far more typical scenario is political violence within a small, low-income, low-growth nation burdened with strong ethnic divisions. 

Dealing with these structurally dangerous countries is clearly one of our generation’s most pressing security challenges. There is good reason to think that trouble will escalate.  Half of all civil wars are post-conflict relapses, and recent negotiated peace settlements have left many countries unstable. The commodity boom and discovery of mineral resources in fragile states have sown seeds of discord, while the spread of democracy in low-income countries – perhaps surprisingly – increases the statistical likelihood of political violence.

Some believe that countries in conflict should be left to sort themselves out. But compassion and self-interest dictate against this approach.

///
Happiness
Meg Batemen

Often have I seen them come together,
two old friends, two crofters,
who after a brief murmured greeting
will stand wordlessly together,
side by side, not facing each other,
and look out on the land whose
ways and memories unite them,
breathe in the air, and the scent of
tobacco and damp and lamb scour,
in the certain knowledge that talk
would hamper that expansive communion,
break in on their golden awareness
of all there is between them.

-with thanks to Neil

——————————————

Toileachas
Meg Batemen

‘S tric a chunnaic mi iad a’ tighinn ri chèile,
dithis seann eòlach, dithis chroitearan,
is às dèidh dhaibh an latha a bheannachadh
seasaidh iad còmhla gun fhacal tuilleadh,
taobh ri taobh, chan ann aghaidh ri aghaidh,
is iad a’ coimhead a-mach air an talamh
a chumas na fhilltean an uile chuimhne,
a’ tarraing anail is cùbhraidheachd
tombaca, fuaradh is spùt nan uan,
‘s an t-eòlas ac’gun cuireadh cainnt
bacadh air a’ chomanachadh òrbhuidh ud,
gum briseadh i a-staigh air am mothachadh
air na th’ann de dhualchas eatarra

-le taing do Niall

From Fair Wind/Soirbheas (Polygon, 2007)

//

From Guardian:

The Booker longlisted author of Gifted on Indian comics, shaping emotion through writing, and reading with a lazy eye.

What was your favourite book as a child and why?
The Borrowers. It mixed reality and fantasy so closely, and the characters’ struggle for autonomy is similar to being a child in an adult world. All that delicious hoarding, and the painful ending when the Ratcatcher smokes the Borrowers out of their home – you didn’t need to understand Holocaust metaphors to know that something horrific was going on.

I also was a great fan of the Amar Chitra Katha series of Indian comics, in which epics like the Mahabarata became pictorial wonders – featuring Sadhus who meditated in dense forests for decades at a time, and chariot-riding Gods and Goddesses in constant dialogue with mortal counterparts. Luscious stuff.

More here.

From Edge:

Beginning May 15, Edge travels to Iceland for the Reykjavik Arts Festival, which will reprise the Edge Formulae of the 21st Century project, presented last October at the Serpentine Gallery, London, by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of the Serpentines Exhibitions and Programmes. That World Question Center project was a response to Obrist’s question: “What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm?”

One of the highlights of the Reykjavik Arts Festival will be the Experiment Marathon Reykjavík, an exhibition and program of related events organized by the Reykjavík Art Museum and the Serpentine Gallery, London. Lasting from 15 May through August 17, the focus of the project is experimentation. The RAM [Reykjavik Art Museum] will become a laboratory in which leading artists, architects, film-makers, and scientists will create an environment of invention through a series of installations, performances and experimental films.

Additionally, previous related projects will be presented as archives within the exhibition. The exhibition and related events are curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London, in collaboration with artist Ólafur Elíasson.

More here.

Caelum Moffatt reflects on this the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence/the Palestinian Nakba,
in MIFTAH:

Following the Second World War, the holocaust and the termination of the British Mandate, UNCSOP passed Resolution 181 in November 1947 which called for a partition of the British Mandate into two bilateral states – Israel and Palestine. Even with a quarter of a decade of immigration and colonization, Jews still only comprised 30% of the population and owned just 7% of the land. Despite these facts, the state of Israel would be granted 55% of the former British Mandate. A war ensued firstly between Palestinians and Jews, then later between Arabs and Israelis after Israel had claimed independence on May 14, 1948.

The Arabs were defeated and by the time the armistice lines were drawn in July 1949, Israel had extended its territory to 78% of historic Palestine. 800,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes, 530 villages were destroyed and 86% of the Palestinians who now fell within the 1949 armistice lines were displaced. Of the 14% that remained, 70% of their land was confiscated or made inaccessible to them.

According to UNRWA estimates, there are presently 5.5 million refugees spread across 58 camps in the occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

These have been replaced by some 5.5 million Jews living in Israel flourishing in freedom, prosperity and international acceptance in what can only be described as obstinate blindness and pure disregard for the brutality they employed and still adopt today in order to sustain their existence. They maintain that their actions are justified after being subject to worldwide contempt, suffering years of persecution and anti-Semitism. It is as if their unwavering resolve to achieve their goal supersedes Palestinian claims and relegates them to the unfortunate byproduct or obstacle standing in the way of their destiny.

Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian on the legacies of 1968 and 1989:

During the Velvet revolution of 1989 I spied an improvised poster in a Prague shop window. It showed “68” spun through 180 degrees to make “89”, with arrows indicating the rotation. Nineteen sixty-eight and 1989: a tale of two revolutions. Or at least, two waves of what many called revolution at the time. A 40th anniversary this year, a 20th next. Which of the two will be most memorialised? And which actually changed more?

Nineteen sixty-eight will be hard to beat in the commemoration stakes. Already, more ink has flowed recalling that year than did blood from the guillotines of Paris after 1789. Reportedly more than 100 books have been published in France alone about the revolutionary theatre of May 68. Germany has had its own beer-fest of the intellectuals; Warsaw and Prague have revisited the bitter-sweet ambiguities of their respective springs; even Britain has managed a retrospective issue of Prospect magazine.

The causes of this publicistic orgy are not hard to find. The 68ers are a uniquely well-defined generation all across Europe – probably the best defined since what one might call the 39ers, those shaped for life by their youthful experience of the second world war. Having been students in 1968, they now – at or around the age of 60 – occupy the commanding heights of cultural production in most European countries. Think they’re going to pass up a chance to talk about their youth? You must be joking. Not important, moi?

Via Andrew Sullivan, pictures from an volcanic eruption in Chile. More here.

Ruth La Ferla in the NYT:

If steampunk has a mission, it is, in part, to restore a sense of wonder to a technology-jaded world. “Today satellite photos make the planet seem so small,” Mr. Brown lamented. “Where is the adventure it that?” In contrast, steampunk, with its airships, test tubes and time machines, is, he said, “sort of a dream , the way we used to daydream. It’s like part of your childhood’s just bursting forward again.”

For some of its adherents, steampunk also offers a metaphoric coping device. “It has an intellectual tie to the artists and artisans dealing with a world in turmoil at the time of the industrial revolution,” said Crispen Smith, a Web designer and photographer in Toronto, and a partner in a steampunk fashion business.

Now, as in the late 19th century, “we have to find a way to deal with new ethical quandaries,” Mr. Smith said, alluding to issues like cloning, the dissemination of information and intellectual property rights on the Web.

Steampunk style is also an expression of a desire to return to ritual and formality. “Steampunk has its tea parties and its time-travelers balls,” said Deborah Castellano, who presides over salonconvention.com, which organizes neo-Victorian conventions. “It offers an element of glamour that some of us would otherwise never experience.”

///
In 1969, Song of Lawino was published. It is written in the style of a traditional Acholi song. It is an Acholi wife’s lament about her college-educated husband, who has rejected Acholi traditions and ideas for Western ones. Much of Lawino’s anger is directed at her husband’s lover who embodies these Western values and customs, and who she contrasts with herself.

In Song of Ocal, her husband responds to her, decrying what he perceives as Africa’s backwardness, and extoling the virtues of European society and ideas. Lawino and Ocal’s debate reflects the discourse taking place at the time in African societies about the implications of adopting Western culture and ideals. Other works, including Song of A Prisoner (1971) and Song of Malaya (1971) are written in the same poetic style.

Okot p’Bitek has been criticized by other African writers, including Ngugi wa Thiong’o, for not adequately addressing the underlying causes of Africa’s problems. Okot, however, believed that his work, like all good African literature, dealt honestly with the human condition and had “deep human roots.”   More.

——————————

Transalation by Taban lo Liyong:

Lawino is a female voice, taking issue with her husband whom she witnesses imitating a European culture which is destroying a more deeply rooted African culture. The text is a deeply philosophical meditation on the subject of its original subtitle: ‘The Culture of Your People You Do Not Abandon’. The translator is the distinguished Sudanese writer Taban lo Liyong, and colleague and friend of the author. His translation was twenty-two years in the making and began as a collaborative project with the author. Although the text was once translated into English by the author himself, lo Liyong asserts the need for a reworking from the original Acholi, since the author only loosely wrote an English version as a reaction, to satisfy an English speaking audience, and gave prominence to the parts which were most easily rendered into English.

Lo Liyong reproduces the original as faithfully as possible, attempting to convey the intricacies, nuances and thoughts of the whole text in a rhythmic English which suits the original discourse. He further intends his translation of the classic as an assertion of the need to engage with, and reflect upon the primacy of African languages and culture in a new era of cultural and linguistic dominance.  —The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry

Excerpts from
The Song Of Lawino
Okot p’Bitek

1. My Husband’s Tongue Is Bitter

Husband, now you despise me
Now you treat me with spite
And say I have inherited the stupidity of my aunt;
Son of the Chief,
Now you compare me
with the rubbish in the rubbish pit,
You say you no longer want me
Because I am like the things left behind
In the deserted homestead.
You insult me
You laugh at me
You say I do not know the letter A
Because I have not been to school
And I have not been baptized

You compare me with a little dog,
A puppy.

My friend, age-mate of my brother,
Take care,
Take care of your tongue,
Be careful what your lips say.

First take a deep look, brother,
You are now a man
You are not a dead fruit!
To behave like a child does not befit you!

Listen Ocol, you are the son of a Chief,
Leave foolish behavior to little children,
It is not right that you should be laughed at in a song!
Songs about you should be songs of praise!

Read more »

From the sightlines in Berkeley, California, where I lived then and live now, I recall 1968 as a year of horror and bad faith… With the Vietnam War all but rolling back across the Pacific to poison the United States itself, it was as if people turned to spectacular lies and glamorous trivialities to hide from themselves the fact that their imaginations had turned to ice. Truly enormous events taking place elsewhere did not travel. Word of the Prague Spring arrived only in fragments, and no speaker stood up to put the pieces together. News of the massacre of scores – no, hundreds – of students in Mexico City was suppressed so profoundly, it would take 40 years for the facts to come out of the ground. But few if any looked; curiosity withered; people were swept up in their own vanity. The faces of those who said no were smug in their automatic righteousness.

more from The New Statesman here.

Klein combines her critical analyses of the corporate economy with a naive celebration of ‘joyous’ populism, democracy and mass movements. The cynical abuse of democratic slogans by the Bush administration gives her no pause. She defends her idealised picture of democratic movements from critical scrutiny, in the time-tested way, by making sure we cannot see them in action. Anti-immigrant xenophobia, hostile as it is to the free-market model that she, too, opposes, is never mentioned as a genuine expression of democratic populism. Wasn’t there majority white support for the dispossession of New Orleans’ black community after Katrina? And wasn’t there majority Russian support for Putin’s wars in Chechnya? Isn’t the ordinary citizen’s fear and hatred of otherness as malicious a force as the corporate profiteer’s insatiable greed?

She claims that economic ‘reform’ in 1990s Russia was ‘one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history’, thwarting an ‘authentic democratic revolution’. Here she is making the same mistake of which she rightly accuses Friedman. She is confusing the absence of obstacles with the presence of preconditions. Authentic democracy will not spontaneously emerge simply because tyranny has been knocked down and all the ‘distortions’ have been removed. Klein might defend herself by saying that the ‘democracy’ she apotheosises is exclusively a democracy of protest, never a democracy of governance, and therefore invulnerable to criticism for unfairness, stupidity or abuse of power. But this response would not sit well with her understandable but unrealistic hope that ordinary citizens around the world will soon ‘become the authors of their national destinies, at last’.

more from the LRB here.

So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”.

It is unlikely that the two books under review, both of which present damning criticisms of Said’s book at length and in detail, will change anything. Daniel Martin Varisco is a professor of anthropology who has specialized in Yemeni agriculture. It is perhaps because of this that he takes exception to Said’s “textualism” and his consequent neglect of anthropology, sociology and psychology. Varisco has a multitude of other charges to bring against Orientalism and he is able to draw on an astonishingly long list of witnesses for the prosecution, including Sadiq Jalal al-’Azm, Bryan Turner, Malcolm Kerr, Ziauddin Sardar, Bernard Lewis, Nadim al-Bitar, Victor Brombert, Ernest Gellner, Jane Miller, John Sweetman, John Mackenzie and many others.

more from the TLS here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

Nathan Myhrvold met Jack Horner on the set of the “Jurassic Park” sequel in 1996. Horner is an eminent paleontologist, and was a consultant on the movie. Myhrvold was there because he really likes dinosaurs. Between takes, the two men got to talking, and Horner asked Myhrvold if he was interested in funding dinosaur expeditions.

Myhrvold is of Nordic extraction, and he looks every bit the bearded, fair-haired Viking—not so much the tall, ferocious kind who raped and pillaged as the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords trying to turn lead into gold. He is gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale. He graduated from high school at fourteen. He started Microsoft’s research division, leaving, in 1999, with hundreds of millions. He is obsessed with aperiodic tile patterns. (Imagine a floor tiled in a pattern that never repeats.) When Myhrvold built his own house, on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle—a vast, silvery hypermodernist structure described by his wife as the place in the sci-fi movie where the aliens live—he embedded some sixty aperiodic patterns in the walls, floors, and ceilings. His front garden is planted entirely with vegetation from the Mesozoic era. (“If the ‘Jurassic Park’ thing happens,” he says, “this is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.”) One of the scholarly achievements he is proudest of is a paper he co-wrote proving that it was theoretically possible for sauropods—his favorite kind of dinosaur—to have snapped their tails back and forth faster than the speed of sound. How could he say no to the great Jack Horner?

More here.

From Scientific American:

In research that could give doctors a way to reassign sex in cases of unclear gender, scientists report this week that they have figured out why some children with genes that should make them boys are instead born as girls. The study, published in Nature, explains why some embryos with X and Y chromosomes—which should be born as male—develop ovaries and eventually become girls.

The key is whether a gene called Sox9, involved in formation of the testes, is active. “There are a surprisingly large number of cases where this process goes wrong,” says Robin Lovell-Badge, a biologist at London’s MRC National Institute for Medical Research, who estimates that this phenomenon could effect up to 1 in every 20,000 genetic males. “Maybe one could treat some of these sex reversal or intersex cases after birth by manipulating whether Sox9 is active or not. This is all speculation but it’s possible.”

If Sox9 is somehow switched on in a genetic female—an embryo with two X chromosomes—it causes male gonads to form; if it fails to turn on in males, the cells it controls will become follicle cells, which mature into ovaries.

More here.