Here is a May Day story I told Amitava Kumar while he was reviewing Eqbal Ahmad’s Selected Writings for The Nation.

This past summer, Robin Varghese, a former student of Ahmad’s at Hampshire, recounted a story to me that he had heard his teacher tell in class. When Ahmad was in his 20s, he received a Rotary fellowship to come to the United States for further studies. He knew that he wanted to see four things when he left the subcontinent. Three of those four sites he visited en route to this country. He went to the Highgate Cemetery in London to pay homage to Karl Marx; he also visited 21B Baker Street, for its well-known literary landmark; and he wandered through the British Museum, where his reaction was “Return the loot!” The fourth place that Ahmad wanted to visit was in the United States, in Chicago, and it was the site of the Haymarket riot of 1886. Ahmad wanted to go there because, as a boy, he had been taken to May Day celebrations in India. He now wanted to lay flowers at the Haymarket monument to honor the striking workers who had marched in the first May Day parade.

But several years were to pass before he could visit Chicago. He had arrived in the United States in 1957 to study history at Occidental College; a year later he enrolled at Princeton as a graduate student in political science and Middle East history. His research then took him to Tunisia, an even further detour from Chicago. It was not until 1967, during his three-year stint as a teacher at Cornell, that Ahmad found himself giving a job talk in the city where in 1886 laboring men and women had fought to win the eight-hour workday. He left his hotel, picked up a bouquet of flowers and, when he arrived at Haymarket, asked where he could find the monument. No one seemed to know of it. Finally someone pointed it out to him. It was a statue of a policeman who had preserved law and order on that day long ago. Ahmad brought the flowers back with him and gave them to his girlfriend, Julie Diamond, who eventually became his wife.

In 1968, in a speech at an antiwar sit-in, Ahmad, who was now a fellow at the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago, spoke of his search for the Haymarket monument. He told the audience how shocked he had been that the historical memory of workers’ resistance, recognized and celebrated throughout the world, had not been honored in its own place of origin. Not long after, two FBI agents showed up at Ahmad’s door. They wanted to know what he had said about Haymarket and who had been in the audience. It turned out that the Weathermen had just blown up the offending statue of the Chicago policeman.

“I am inclined to tell stories,” Eqbal Ahmad had once said, and, in one of his interviews, he offered a vignette about the visit from the two FBI agents:

They first asked me if I was a citizen of the United States. I said, “No.” They said, “Don’t you feel that as a guest in this country you should not be going about criticizing the host country’s government?” I said, “I hear your point, but I do want you to know that while I am not a citizen, I am a taxpayer. And I thought it was a fundamental principle of American democracy that there is no taxation without representation. I have not been represented about this war. And my people, Asian people, are being bombed right now.” Surprisingly, the FBI agents looked deeply moved and blushed at my throwing this argument at them. They were speechless. Then I understood something about the importance of having some congruence between American liberal traditions…and our rhetoric and tactics.”

(Interviews with Tilly on causal mechanisms, individualism and cognitive science, state formation and other issues in political science and sociology can be found at YouTube.)

[H/t: Pablo Policzer.]

Say it’s 1958, you are the wife of a famous poet, and it is your turn to have the Partisan Review gang over for drinks and barbed conversation. Maybe the line from Delmore Schwartz’s poem (“All poets’ wives have rotten lives”) runs through your head as you finish the grunt work of the hostess: emptying ashtrays, dumping half-eaten food into the trash, piling up as many glasses as you can carry to the sink. If you are Elizabeth Hardwick, your husband, Robert Lowell, is most likely passed out drunk or off having an affair-slash-breakdown with another woman. Lowell or no Lowell, there is much to do before you sleep: sweeping the floors, rubbing rings off places where coasters should have been, making a cursory pass over the upholstery, opening the windows to air out the smoke of a hundred pensive and hostile cigarettes. Thus the rhyming line of Schwartz’s poem: “Their husbands look at them like knives.” Elizabeth Hardwick as a critic was like Elizabeth Hardwick as a hostess: she did the grunt work as gracefully as the glamorous work, slipping in the plot, the theme, and her unlikely brilliant discoveries as if it were as easy as introducing two long-lost friends, in the meantime leaving no glass unwashed, no surface unpolished.

more from The Believer here.

Europe has never been a matter of boundaries alone. “European civilization has entered into the truth, into the plan of Providence”, as the historian-statesman François Guizot put it. “It advances according to the ways of God. That is the rational principle of its superiority.” Borders themselves – the Sava River, the Bosphorus, the Urals – were always negotiable. Because it stood for so much more than mere territory, Europe’s nineteenth-century Powers had no difficulty universalizing their values in its name. Backed by their temporary but highly impressive technological and military superiority, they were able to impose the emergent rules of their state system on the rest of the world as the epitome of civilized order.

Guizot’s paradigm blossomed into a story of global progress under European guardianship. In law and in war, the Victorians and their successors held fast to the idea of a single “standard of civilization” that marked Europe (and honorary members like the North Americans) out from barbarians and savages. Africa and Asia’s shortcomings they attributed to biology, or to the pernicious impact of ossified religious and political traditions. Either way, there was, as the twentieth century dawned, nothing innocent about the concept of civilization, and it was impossible to separate it from the Eurocentric character of the world and the international system that had evolved with it.

more from the TLS here.

For casual museum-goers, Spanish art ends with Guernica, Picasso’s monumental protest, painted in 1937, of the Fascist bombing of the Basque capital during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso had left Spain for good in 1904; it was from his self-imposed exile in Paris that he pulled down his agonizing painted curtain on his native land. Aside from the old joker (and Franco supporter) Salvador Dalí and the respected Catalan abstract painter Antoni Tàpies, it is hard to think of a Spanish artist of any stature who emerged during Gen. Franco’s seemingly endless reign of repression and national stagnation following World War II. A retrospective of painter and sculptor Antonio López García at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, makes a strong case that this intense Realist, now in his 70s and much admired in Spain, deserves an international audience. His arresting Sink and Mirror, like certain paintings of his idol Velásquez, combines two radically different perspectives: a head-on view of the mirror and a plunging view down toward the sink. The hauntingly empty mirror adds to our sense of visual disorientation.

more from Slate here.

From The Guardian:

Rather than blunting her criticism, these counterattacks have made Kakutani one of the world’s most influential book reviewers. In her early 50s, she has worked at the New York Times since 1979, and despite being described as “reclusive” — avoiding literary parties and interviews — her prominence is such that she once featured as a plot device in an episode of Sex and the City. Little is known about her other than that she is a Yale graduate, her father was a mathematician, she likes the New York Yankees and may well be friends with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

What’s significant is the criticism. In 1998, Kakutani was awarded a Pulitzer for her “fearless and authoritative” journalism, and her work has been described as “destination programming”, meaning that it’s required reading for literary types. Of all the authors who have bitten back, the most offensive was the late Norman Mailer, who described Kakutani as “a one-woman kamikaze” in 2005, and said he didn’t know what had “put the hair up her immortal Japanese ass” and that the only reason the Times didn’t fire her was because she was “a twofer”, being “Asiatic” and “feminist”.

Why Mailer thought the Times would want to fire someone with the guts to describe one of his books as “silly, self-important and at times inadvertently comical” is beyond me. Other authors take note. Attack Kakutani, and only one person ends up looking stupid.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

Welcome to Spelkeland, or, to give it its proper name, the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, run by the cognitive psychologist Prof Elizabeth Spelke, which is dedicated to understanding what shapes the most powerful known learning machine – the infant mind. Great philosophers have mused for millennia about human consciousness and how it makes sense of its surroundings. Like any good scientist, Spelke has turned philosophical hot air into firm experimental data that suggests that we are born with a significant amount of ‘core knowledge’ hardwired into our brains.

Spelke is arguably the most influential figure in the relatively new field of baby brain research, and has been named by Time magazine as one of America’s best in a list of ‘brilliant researchers who are the envy of the world’. One prominent British experimental psychologist, Prof Bruce Hood of the University of Bristol, says she has ‘revolutionised infancy mind research’. The psychologist and writer Steven Pinker, Spelke’s colleague at Harvard, is another who acknowledges her profound impact, and says her ingenuity has shown that ‘babies are smarter than we thought’.

More here.

The great sociologist Charles Tilly died today.  I did not have the good fortune of being one of his advisees, but he was certainly a presence in my old department.  Kieran Healy over at Crooked Timber:

Tilly was a comparative and historical sociologist, an analyst of social movements, a social theorist, a political sociologist, a methodological innovator—none of these labels quite capture the scope of his work. I think of him as someone who was interested in the general problem of understanding social change, and he attacked it with tremendous, unflagging energy.

And Dan Nexon, who was one of his students, from the acknowledgments of his forthcoming book:

What can I possibly say about Chuck Tilly that an endless number of his students and peers have not already written in their prefaces? I hope the others I thank will take no offense if I describe him as the most powerful intellect I have ever encountered in the social sciences. I expect that people will still be reading and debating his enormous and varied corpus of work for decades to come. Yet Chuck treats all of his students as members of an intellectual community of equals. He seeks out their opinions; he discusses his own views with humility and an open mind.

Columbia University’s announcement:

President of the Social Sciences Research Council Craig Calhoun called Tilly “one of the most distinguished of all contemporary social scientists,“ adding: “He is the most influential analyst of social movements and contentious politics, a path-breaker in the historical sociology of the state, a pivotal theorist of social inequality.”

“His intellectual range and level of productivity are virtually unrivaled in the social sciences,” said Columbia sociology Professor and Chair Thomas DiPrete.  Adam Ashforth, professor of anthropology and political science at Northwestern University, described Tilly as “the founding father of twenty-first century sociology.”

In the TLS, Carol Travis reviews Daniel Nettle’s Personality:

What a difference a century makes. One hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud’s answer to Daniel Nettle’s question – “What makes you the way you are?” – would have begun with your unconscious mind: the unique pattern of fantasies, defences, and instinctual conflicts that create your neurotic insecurities and self-defeating habits. These unconscious mechanisms would, in turn, have been profoundly influenced by your parents, who overpunished you or underappreciated you, who told you too much about sex or not enough. You can’t do much about your personality, though you can tweak it a bit with years of psychoanalysis.

Today, personality researchers almost uniformly agree that the things that make you the way you are consist of a combination of your genes, your peers and the idiosyncratic, chance experiences that befall you in childhood and adulthood. Your parents influence your relationship with them – loving or contentious, conflicted or close – but not your “personality”, that package of traits we label extroverted or shy, bitter or friendly, hostile or warm, gloomy or optimistic. Your genes, not your parents, are the reason you think that parachuting out of planes is fun, or, conversely, that you feel sick to the stomach at the mere idea of doing such a crazy thing voluntarily. You can’t do much about your personality, though you can tweak it a bit with cognitive therapy.

Nikolas Kozloff in the wake of the Fernando Lugo electoral victory, in Brazzil.com:

During the 1980s and 1990s Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, acted as John Paul II’s doctrinal czar. At the time, John Paul was in the midst of a fierce battle to silence prominent Church liberals. “This conception of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth,” the Pontiff once said, “does not tally with the church’s catechism.”

In 1983 the Pope wagged his finger at Sandinista government minister and Nicaraguan priest, Ernesto Cardenal on a trip to Managua, warning the latter to “straighten out the situation in your church.” Cardenal was one of the most prominent Liberation Theologians of the Sandinista era.

Originally a liberal reformer, Ratzinger changed his tune once he became an integrant in the Vatican hierarchy. As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog agency, Cardinal Ratzinger warned against the temptation to view Christianity in an exclusively political light. Liberation Theology, he once said, was dangerous as it fused “the Bible’s view of history with Marxist dialectics.”

Calling Liberation Theology a “singular heresy,” Ratzinger went on the offensive. He blasted the new movement as a “fundamental threat” to the church and prohibited some of its leading proponents from speaking publicly. In an effort to clean house, Ratzinger even summoned outspoken priests to Rome and censured them on grounds that they were abandoning the church’s spiritual role for inappropriate socioeconomic activism.

Watch the video over at Seed:

Dear 3quarksdaily Readers,

Thank you for the overwhelming response to The Sixth Harvey Preisler Memorial Symposium invitation, I am deeply moved. Unfortunately, because of limited space, we can only accommodate the first 25 responders along with their guests. Please check in the comments section to make sure whether you belong to this group or not. A guest list has been submitted to the New York Academy of Sciences and if your name is not on the list, security will not allow you to enter. I am deeply sorry if I am causing any disappointment to you. Hopefully, next year we will be able to arrange a bigger venue. Please accept my apologies once again and my gratitude for your kind responses.

Azra Raza.

There is no memory and all signs of the immediate past are carefully erased – democrats dynamited Dimitrov’s mausoleum as the authorities did with the last of the mosques after the liberation in 1877; tourist guides replace the communist past with references to Roman ruins. Why should memory block the freedom of the present to move, reinvent itself? Foreign friends often tell us that the charm of the city is in its disorder, its dirt, its chaos, in the liberty it allows to paint one’s house or not to paint it, to plant roses in the yard or tomatoes. The ethos of modernization is probably the reason why we locals resist such a vision and refuse to accept that what surrounds us could be real.

Sofia is growing – who knows whether it won’t soon reach the three-million mark? It flows elusively in a southeasterly direction and up the mountain, producing pleasant towered mansions and postmodern office blocks, leaving behind the ugly northern part of the city, with the one-storey houses, the misery, abandoning even its cemeteries. The city is flowing, fleeing itself. If its inhabitants have become fluid, working part time in Spain or Greece and part time at home, if they are half-way between village and city, between capitalism and state socialism, then what else could one expect than a fluid city?

more from Eurozine here.

What one takes away from Kahlo’s art, however, is a less wide-ranging or exalted experience. She found a way to show a certain emotion, at once accusatory, nervy, furious, a little adolescent, and, as Fuentes says, funny. She is giving the world the finger, whether in The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, where she does it with a masterful complexity, in some of her folk art– like self-portraits of the 1930s, where she can be raw or charming about it, or even in her less spirited self-portraits of the following decade, when illness was getting the better of her. It was an emotion, in any event, that she never quite lost, as it is there in the last words of her diary when she wrote, “I hope the exit is joyful—and I hope never to come back.”

more from the NYRB here.

When Miley Cyrus was asked about the picture of herself clutching a satin sheet to her chest that Annie Leibovitz has taken for the current issue of Vanity Fair, she said it looked “pretty and natural” and that she thought it was “really artsy”. If by this she meant artistic, rather than artsy-fartsy, she was right on the money. In western art most of the women portrayed semi-clad or totally nude are children. Their nipples are pallid and undeveloped, their breasts hard and veinless, their pubes unfurred. When Lucian Freud paints girl children, nobody cares; when Leibovitz photographs them, everyone goes ballistic. When Botticelli paints the yet-to-be-enjoyed goddess of love emerging from the sea, people come from all over the world to gape at her. The Greeks and Romans liked their goddesses meaty; our preferred Venuses are children. Hardy perennials such as Diane de Poitiers held their sway as long as they did because their bodies never matured.

more from The Guardian here.

///
Poet Gary Snyder is the winner of the 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986 and presented annually by the Poetry Foundation, the award is one of the most prestigious given to American poets, and at $100,000 it is one of the nation’s largest literary awards. Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and chair of the selection committee, made the announcement today. The prize will be presented at an evening ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago on Thursday, May 29.

In announcing the award, Wiman said: “Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself. His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.”

More

The Rabbit
Gary Snyder

A grizzled black-eyed rabbit showed me
……………………………….
…irrigation ditches, open paved highway,
………white line
…to the hill. bell
…chill blue jewel sky
……..banners
Banner clouds flying,
The mountains all gathered,
..juniper trees on the flanks
……..cone buds,
…..the snug bark scale
…….in thin powder snow
…..over rock scrabble, pricklers, boulders,
..pines and junipers,
…..singing.
The trees all singing.

The mountains are singing
To gather the sky and the mist
..to bring it down snow-breath
……ice-banners,
..and gather it water
Sent from the singing peaks
….flanks and folds
Down arroyos and ditches by highways the water
The people to use it, the
….mountains and juniper
Do it for men,
……………
Said the rabbit.

//

From The Washington Post:

“History works itself out in the living,” says a character in Louise Erdrich’s new novel, and, indeed, the history in The Plague of Doves is something of a workout. She’s challenged us before with complex, interconnected stories about the Ojibwe people of North Dakota, but here she goes for broke, whirling out a vast, fractured narrative, teeming with characters — ancestors, cousins, friends and enemies, all separated and rejoined again and again in uncanny ways over the years. Worried about losing track, I started drawing a genealogical chart after a few chapters, but it was futile: a tangle of names and squiggling lines. That bafflement is clearly an intentional effect of this wondrous novel; the sprawling cast whose history Erdrich works through becomes a living demonstration of the unfathomable repercussions of cruelty.

In the creepy, one-paragraph chapter that opens The Plague of Doves, a man murders five members of a white family in Pluto, N.D., near the Ojibwe reservation in 1911. The chronology of the stories that follow is radically jumbled, but the massacre in Pluto precipitates another one: When four hapless Indians come upon the dead family, they discover that a baby has been left alive in the house. Determined to save the child from abandonment but worried they’ll be held responsible for the murders, they leave an anonymous note for the sheriff. Their plan backfires, though, and a gang of white men lynches the Indians in a heartbreaking scene that is among the most moving and mysterious in the novel.

More here.

From Scientific American:

In the market for more brain power? In what’s being touted as “a landmark” result, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (U.M.) researchers report that a specific memory exercise may improve so-called fluid intelligence—the capacity to succeed at new cognitive tasks and in new situations. The finding flies in the face of conventional wisdom in psychology that training for one brain task cannot be transferred to improvement in other mental abilities. If proved, the finding could lead to new therapies and prevention of learning disorders and age related memory loss.

The study contradicts decades of research showing that attempts at crossover training effects, known as far transfer, do not work well. Previous research has shown that improving on one kind of cognitive task does not improve performance on other kinds—for example, memorizing long strings of numbers does not help people learn strings of letters.

Researchers gave 35 volunteers a standardized intelligence test and gave them another such test after training them on a complex memory task for a variable number of days (eight, 12, 17 or 19). Thirty-five other study participants simply took the tests. Both improved on the second one, but those who did the exercise showed far more improvement—and the more they trained, the better they got.

More here.

Last year, the annual lecture in memory of my sister Azra’s late husband, Harvey David Preisler, was delivered by Medicine Nobel laureate Craig Mello. I wrote about that lecture here.

This year, the lecture will be delivered by Richard Dawkins. The lecture is entitled “The Purpose of Purpose,” and Professor Dawkins will make himself available for a question/answer period afterward. If you are in the New York City area (or can be on Saturday), I urge you to attend. I myself will be flying in from Italy for the lecture and hope to see you there.

RSVP in the comments section to me to be put on a complimentary list, courtesy of my sister.

[Dawkins photo from the BBC.  More about this site here.]

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights by David S. Reynolds.

When Abraham Lincoln gave an audience to Harriet Beecher Stowe, he is supposed to have greeted her by saying that she was the little woman who had started this great war. That fondly related anecdote illustrates the persistent tendency to Parson Weemsishness in our culture. It was not at all the tear-jerking sentiment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that catalyzed the War Between the States. It was, rather, the blood-spilling intransigence of John Brown, field-tested on the pitiless Kansas prairies and later deployed at Harpers Ferry. And John Brown was a man whom Lincoln assiduously disowned, until the time came when he himself was compelled to adopt the policy of “war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt,” as partisans of the slaveocracy had hitherto been too proud of saying.

David Reynolds sets himself to counter several misapprehensions about the pious old buzzard (Brown, I mean, not Lincoln). Among these are the impressions that he was a madman, that he was a homicidal type, and that his assault on a federal arsenal was foredoomed and quixotic. The critical thing here is context. And the author succeeds admirably in showing that Brown, far from being a crazed fanatic, was a serious legatee of the English and American revolutions who anticipated the Emancipation Proclamation and all that has ensued from it.

More here.