Louis P. Masur in Slate:

In his recent speech on race, Barack Obama spoke about the legacy of racial hatred and resentment in America. One of the events he probably had in mind was the controversy over busing that erupted in Boston in the mid-1970s. A single photograph epitomized for Americans the meaning and horror of the crisis. On April 5, 1976, at an anti-busing rally at City Hall Plaza, Stanley Forman, a photographer for the Boston Herald-American, captured a teenager as he transformed the American flag into a weapon directed at the body of a black man. It is the ultimate act of desecration, performed in the year of the bicentennial and in the shadows of Boston’s Old State House. Titled The Soiling of Old Glory, the photograph appeared in newspapers around the country and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. The image shattered the illusion that racial segregation and hatred were strictly a Southern phenomenon. For many, Boston now seemed little different than Birmingham.

See the whole photo-essay here.

[Thanks to Manas Sheikh.]

Andy F. Bryan in McSweeney’s (via Mind Hacks):

Me know. Me have problem.

Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness. Me know me do wrong. Me know it isn’t normal. Me see disapproving looks. Me see stares. Me hurt inside.

When me get back to apartment, after cookie binge, me can’t stand looking in mirror—fur matted with chocolate-chip smears and infested with crumbs. Me try but me never able to wash all of them out. Me don’t think me is monster. Me just furry blue person who love cookies too much. Me no ask for it. Me just born that way.

Me was thinking and me just don’t get it. Why is me a monster? No one else called monster on Sesame Street. Well, no one who isn’t really monster. Two-Headed Monster have two heads, so he real monster. Herry Monster strong and look angry, so he probably real monster, too. But is me really monster?

Me thinks me have serious problem. Me thinks me addicted. But since when it acceptable to call addict monster? It affliction. It disease. It burden. But does it make me monster?

More here.

///

The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill
Hayden Carruth

You may think it strange, Sam, that I’m writing
a letter in these circumstances. I thought
it strange too–the first time. But there’s
a misconception I was laboring under, and you
are too, viz. that the imagination in your
vicinity is free and powerful. After all,
you say, you’ve been creating yourself all
along imaginatively. You imagine yourself
playing golf or hiking in the Olympics or
writing a poem and then it becomes true.
But you still have to do it, you have to exert
yourself, will, courage, whatever you’ve got, you’re
mired in the unimaginative. Here I imagine a letter
and it’s written. Takes about two-fifths of a
second, your time. Hell, this is heaven, man.
I can deluge Congress with letters telling
every one of those mendacious sons of bitches
exactly what he or she is, in maybe about
half an hour. In spite of your Buddhist
proclivities, when you imagine bliss
you still must struggle to get there. By the way
the Buddha has his place across town on
Elysian Drive. We call him Bud. He’s lost weight
and got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a
lot better than he used to. He always carries
a jumping jack with him everywhere just
for contemplation, but he doesn’t make it
jump. He only looks at it. Meanwhile Sidney
and Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are
over by Sylvester’s Grot making the sweetest,
cheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air,
so called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering
everywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree.
Sam, the remarkable truth is I can do any
fucking thing I want. Speaking of which
there’s this dazzling young Naomi who
wiped out on I-80 just west of Truckee
last winter, and I think this is the moment
for me to go and pay her my respects.
Don’t go way. I’ll be right back.

///

From lensculture.com:

Emerging more than twenty years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area, Deborah Oropallo (b. Hackensack, New Jersey, 1954) has moved from traditional painting and printmaking to incorporating digital media and imagery into her work, creating printed canvas paintings and related editions of pigment prints.

Oropallo has always regarded her artwork as based in photography. In her early work she painted imagery from found photographs. Later, she placed objects on a stat camera, capturing a shadow or silhouette from which she made silkscreens and stencils that transformed images of mundane objects into visual abstractions. Recently, Oropallo has been using her own photography, and digital work as a natural evolution. She says:

“I use the computer as the tool, but painting is the language of deliberation that is running through my head. I do not want to just repaint an illustration of what the computer can do, but to push the pixels themselves as paint, and to layer imagery and veils to create depth and volume. Like painting, this process can engage nuance and subtlety. It also has the ability to alter an image in a way that no other medium can deliver or predict.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments by George Johnson,

Beauty is truth, Keats declared, and truth beauty. Many prominent scientists have wished a version of this famous equation described their own work. The British quantum theorist Paul Dirac, for one, called his career “a search for pretty mathematics.” Most scientific aesthetes gaze fondly upon equations or arrangements of facts. A few, like the science writer George Johnson, also see beauty in the act of research. Johnson’s new book, “The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments,” is an appealing account of important scientific discoveries to which a variation of Keats applies: occasionally, beauty yields truth.

Johnson’s list is eclectic and his outlook romantic. “Science in the 21st century has become industrialized,” he states, with experiments “carried out by research teams that have grown to the size of corporations.” By contrast, Johnson (a longtime contributor to The New York Times) favors artisans of the laboratory, chronicling “those rare moments when, using the materials at hand, a curious soul figured out a way to pose a question to the universe and persisted until it replied.”

His selections include the canonical and the overlooked. The first chapter describes Galileo’s studying motion by rolling balls down an incline, often considered the founding experiment of modern science. Another chapter recounts Isaac Newton’s using prisms to grasp the nature of color. But Johnson also brings to life less familiar figures like Luigi Galvani, who illuminated the nature of electricity; Albert Michelson, who (with Edward Morley) determined the constant speed of light; and — a particularly inspired choice — Ivan Pavlov, whose famous dog experiments advanced physiology and neurology.

More here.

In bookforum, J. Hoberman on Jack Kirby:

Though he lacks Will Eisner’s urbane, insouciant spirit and Jack Cole’s sensuous, ever-surprising plasticity, comic-book artist Jack Kirby (1917–94) more than deserves the royal sobriquet with which he’s been crowned. King Kirby embodies the drama of his medium as well as the drama of its history—how, starting on the eve of World War II, a bunch of mainly working-class, first-generation Jewish kids created a garish, subliterary mythology of fantastic supermen. Kirby’s first such creature, created with Joe Simon, was Captain America: The premiere issue, which appeared nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, has the masked and star-spangled hero using his shield to deflect Nazi bullets even as he knocks Hitler off his feet with an explosive right hook to the kisser.

In a general sense, Kirby’s is the saga that Michael Chabon mythologized and made literary with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000). In his author’s note, Chabon acknowledges his “deep debt” to Kirby, not just in this novel but in “everything else I’ve ever written.” Most likely, Chabon was thinking less of Kirby’s wartime comics than of the pop deities the artist drew and/or invented twenty years later for Marvel Comics—the Fantastic Four, the Incredible Hulk, the uncanny X-Men, the Mighty Thor, and the Silver Surfer—or the even crazier characters that he would develop for Marvel’s rival DC in the early ’70s.

These hallucinations flowed from an unlikely source. A feisty five-foot-two-inch fireplug, the artist was born Jacob Kurtzberg in a Lower East Side tenement.

First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher’s mound just the right distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays, such as the double play. The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise. Whereas, basketball, e.g., is constantly (or was then) adjusting its rules to get them in balance.

Second: the game does not give unusua1 preference or advantage to special physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in different positions.

Third: the game uses all parts of the body: the arms to throw, the legs to run, and to swing the bat, etc.; per contra soccer where you can’t touch the ball. It calls upon speed, accuracy of throw, gifts of sight for batting, shrewdness for pitchers and catchers, etc. And there are all kinds of strategies.

more from Boston Review here.

From Outlook India:

“With young children,” as Jhumpa Lahiri puts it in her elegant, understated way, “the days can be rather mercurial.” That hasn’t stopped her from finding the time to write a third book. In an interview with Sheela Reddy on the launch of Unaccustomed Earth, the Pulitzer winner talks about the two great loves of her life: her children and her writing. You once remarked that winning the Pulitzer was like being a kid and winning a senior citizen’s award. Do you feel more comfortable as a Pulitzer winner now that you have written your third book? Not really. It (Pulitzer) will always remain a very strange and in some senses very early, one may say premature, period for the writer I was at that time. But it must help in terms of confidence levels? Writing is so humbling, there’s no confidence involved. It helps to have some experience, a greater degree of familiarity with the process of writing. I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done before.  More here. (Note: I just read this magnificent collection of short stories and highly recommend it).

Fabrizio Plessi is one of the pioneers of video art, but, just as importantly, he is a master of water — the mythical stream of water Heracleitus said one could not step in twice, the water that is one of the four primary elements, the wetness that tradition thought the melancholiac lacked, the water that poured forth from a desert stone when Moses struck it — the water without which there is no universe and life. Like a dolphin, or the boy who was rescued by one in Greek mythology, and was triumphantly carried on its back as it swam the seven seas, Plessi is astonishingly at ease with water. He never surrenders to its treachery, never submits to the siren song of its surface beauty, inviting one to plunge into its depths. Water, which hides death in its depths, and is traditionally a seductive feminine element — tempting but deceptive — has a certain masculine potency for Plessi. Waterfall (1976) suggests as much: one need not be overwhelmed by water to identify with its rushing power.

more from artnet here.

Two men, two speeches. The men, both lawyers, both from Illinois, were seeking the presidency, despite what seemed their crippling connection with extremists. Each was young by modern standards for a president. Abraham Lincoln had turned fifty-one just five days before delivering his speech. Barack Obama was forty-six when he gave his. Their political experience was mainly provincial, in the Illinois legislature for both of them, and they had received little exposure at the national level—two years in the House of Representatives for Lincoln, four years in the Senate for Obama. Yet each was seeking his party’s nomination against a New York senator of longer standing and greater prior reputation—Lincoln against Senator William Seward, Obama against Senator Hillary Clinton. They were both known for having opposed an initially popular war—Lincoln against President Polk’s Mexican War, raised on the basis of a fictitious provocation; Obama against President Bush’s Iraq War, launched on false claims that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and had made an alliance with Osama bin Laden.

more from the NYRB here.

….

from [Statue of Liberty]
Ann Killough

So now what if the Statue of Liberty has found out that she can move
and is only waiting for the right moment?

What if there are beginning to be words in her book, more and
more words on the coppery pages, the ones that do not turn, or not
yet?

What if she is beginning to feel the horror of her position, the way
she has no peers or even anyone who understands that she is in the
tradition of the enormous destroyer?

What is it she is becoming convinced she must destroy?

…………………………………..

So now picture what you think the Statue of Liberty might destroy
and realize that you are not right.

That whatever you thought of is not it, or at least not quite it and
certainly not all of it.

That you have no idea what she is thinking, or at least not a complete
idea.

That the very nature of her body renders her susceptible not only to
alien transmissions but to all the other transmissions of the earth.

That she is a kind of Pole along with the North and South ones and
draws the magnetic fields of the earth toward herself like shiploads
of huddled immigrants and reads them like ticker tape inside her
spiky head.

That she feels what you feel but much more of it.

That she sees what you see but the backside of it as well, the side
you will never see.

That she has already begun to change something even in you, even
in me.

That we already know what it is.

…

From Scientific American:

Scientists for the first time have identified long-term changes in mice brains that may shed light on why addicts get hooked on drugs—in this case methamphetamines—and have such a tough time kicking the habit. The findings, reported in the journal Neuron, could set the stage for new ways to block cravings—and help addicts dry out.

Researchers, using fluorescent tracer dye, discovered that mice given methamphetamines for 10 days (roughly equivalent to a human using it for two years) had suppressed activity in a certain area of their brains. Much to their surprise, normal function did not return even when the drug was stopped, but did when they administered a single dose of it again after the mice had been in withdrawal.

Study co-author Nigel Bamford, a pediatric neurologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, says that if similar changes occur in humans, it will indicate that an effective way to fight addiction may be to design therapies that target the affected area—the striatum, a forebrain region that controls movement but also has been linked to habit-forming behavior.

More here.

It was a year ago today that Kurt Vonnegut died. Like so many others, we at 3QD were extremely saddened and for a couple of days we almost became a KV-only site. (Check it out here.)

Deirdre Wengen in PhillyBurbs.com:

“If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

A year after his death, it almost feels as if Kurt Vonnegut has traveled through a chrono-synclastic infundibulum and reemerged—mop-headed and mustached—to warn the world one last time about the grim consequences of human folly. Recently released, “Armageddon in Retrospect” contains twelve previously unpublished writings by the popular prognosticator—all dealing, in one way or another, with the infinitely debatable topics of war and peace.

The publication is, however, about far more than subject matter. It acts as a fond farewell, a last goodbye, to an author whose work spans multiple generations. In the introduction, Mark Vonnegut offers a candid account of his father’s life and work, from Vonnegut’s favorite jokes and strange habits to how he regarded his readers and reacted to the Iraq War. The first ten pages even provide amusing allusions to the writer’s ever-increasing pile of concerns, among them his “skinny legs” and inability to play tennis. The tribute is humorous, heartfelt and a delight to read—a chunk of bittersweet marble in Vonnegut’s monolithic memorial. But, as Mark himself explains, his father’s writing needs no introduction.

More here.

Yesterday, in a private email to my siblings, I lamented the treatment of Hindus in Pakistan. This fit of regretful pique was brought on by reading the news of one 22-year-old Jagdeesh Kumar who was beaten to death in a factory in Karachi by his coworkers for allegedly blaspheming the prophet Muhammad. You can read the whole sad, but all-too-common, story here. So it is timely that Ali Eteraz sent his excellent article to me today about Hindus in Pakistan. This is from The Guardian:

The cultural and institutional marginalisation of Hindus in Pakistan is a travesty of human dignity and freedom.

Hindus in Pakistan have suffered grievously since the founding of the nation in 1947. Recently, in the southern province of Sindh, a Hindu man was accused of blasphemy and beaten to death by his co-workers. This comes at the heels of the abduction and dismemberment of a Hindu engineer.

A little while earlier, the military removed 70 Hindu families from lands where they had been living since the 19th century. To this day the temples that Pakistanis destroyed in 1992 in response to the destruction of the Babri mosque in India have not been restored.

Pakistan, according to many accounts, was founded as a way to protect the rights and existence of the minority Muslim population of Colonial India in the face of the larger Hindu majority. Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, is reported to have said in 1947: “In due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims – not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state.” It is therefore a travesty of Pakistan’s own founding principles that its Hindus – and not to exclude Christians and Ahmadis – have suffered so grossly.

There are two levels of prejudice in Pakistan with respect to Hindus – the cultural and the legal.

While it is difficult to say which one is more pernicious, cultural prejudice is certainly more difficult to uproot because it is perpetuated by religious supremacism, nationalism, stories, myth, lies, families, media, schooling and bigotry.

More here.

How economics and game theory explain the shortage of available, appealing men.

Mark Gimein in Slate:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the available, sociable, and genuinely attractive man is a character highly in demand in social settings. Dinner hosts are always looking for the man who fits all the criteria. When they don’t find him (often), they throw up their hands and settle for the sociable but unattractive, the attractive but unsociable, and, as a last resort, for the merely available.

The shortage of appealing men is a century-plus-old commonplace of the society melodrama. The shortage—or—more exactly, the perception of a shortage—becomes evident as you hit your late 20s and more acute as you wander into the 30s. Some men explain their social fortune by believing they’ve become more attractive with age; many women prefer the far likelier explanation that male faults have become easier to overlook.

The problem of the eligible bachelor is one of the great riddles of social life. Shouldn’t there be about as many highly eligible and appealing men as there are attractive, eligible women?

More here.

May 28-June 1, 2008 is the World Science Festival in NYC. 

Speaker include: David Albert, Alan Alda, Nancy Andreasen, Karole Armitage, Steven Benner, Cynthia Breazeal, Blaine Brownell, Robert Butler, Majora Carter, Patricia Churchland, Francis Collins, Brian Cox, Antonio Damasio, Paul Davies, Daniel Dennett, Dickson Despommier, David Eagleman, James P. Evans, Mark Everett, Ira Flatow, Peter Galison, Jim Gates, Brian Greene, Saul Griffith, Heidi Hammel, Jonathan Harris, Eric Haseltine, Marc Hauser, Lucy Hawking, Peter Head, Shirley Ann Jackson, Mitchell Joachim, Tim Johnson, Bill T. Jones, Michio Kaku, Sandra Kaufmann, Helge Kragh, Bernie Krause, Lawrence Krauss, Robert Krulwich, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Leakey, Leon Lederman, Lukas Ligeti, Alan Lightman, Doug Liman, Marilyn Maye, Dan Nocera, Paul Nurse, Lyman Page, William Phillips, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Nikolas Rose, Oliver Sacks, Cliff Saron, James Schamus, David Sinclair, Anna Deavere Smith, Paul Steinhardt, Leonard Susskind, Julia Sweeney, Ian Tattersall, Max Tegmark, David Thoreson, Maggie Turnbull, and Richard Weindruch. 

You can find a list of events and buy tickets here.  I’m very excited about the talk on the Science of Morality on Thursday, May 29, 8:15 PM –  9:45 PM, at the 92nd Street Y, featuring Patricia Churchland, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser.

Science is investigating the biological roots of empathy, altruism and cooperation to discover whether we possess an innate moral grammar, much like language, or whether morality arises from the interactions among biological and social systems.

In this presentation with the 92nd Street Y, Patricia Churchland, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett and Marc Hauser discuss the science of right and wrong, and explore how our scientific understanding of morality may affect society, from shaping justice systems to deciding whether to engage in wars or to assist others in economic and humanitarian struggles.

Martin West, who has written what is surely the definitive book on Indo-European language and religion, states his case well: ‘The assumption of a single parent language as the historical source of all the known Indo-European languages . . . is still a hypothesis, not an observable fact, but it is an inescapable hypothesis.’ The Indo-European map links languages together in a group that is distinct from other groups, such as those that include Chinese or Tamil, say. The evidence that the Indo-European languages are related lies primarily in their grammar and vocabulary. Thus ‘foot’ is pada in Sanskrit, pes, pedis in Latin, pied in French, fuss in German, foot in English and so forth, and nouns and verbs behave entirely differently from their Hebrew or Navajo counterparts.

Indo-European linguistics assumes a diffusionist, centrifugal cultural movement: the political centre sends out armies and imposes its rule on neighbouring lands. The paradigm is Latin, which did indeed diffuse outwards to all the lands the Romans conquered, which therefore speak languages that we call Romance. Linguists then constructed, on the Roman model, an earlier family tree diverging from the centre, in this case not Rome but the Caucasus (or somewhere else in Central Asia). West calls the original common territory ‘Eurostan’ and remarks: ‘If it be asked what sea the worshippers of these prehistoric divinities went down to in *nawes and sailed on and foundered in, the likely answer is the northern Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.’ The mythical land of the family home might just as well be thought of as *Indo-Europe, the land east of the asterisk.

more from the LRB here.

My favorite part of “©Murakami,” a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of the juggernautish Japanese artist-entrepreneur Takashi Murakami, was the most controversial element in the show when it originated, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, last October: a functioning Louis Vuitton outlet, smack in the middle of things, selling aggressively pricey handbags and other bibelots, all Murakami-designed. (Vuitton has reportedly done hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of business in Murakamiana since its deal with the artist began, in 2003.) The shop is lovely. Shelving units in chrome and white enamel, with recessed fluorescent lighting that sets brass fittings on the merchandise aglint, caress the eye. They provide a haven from the strident grotesquerie of what might be termed Murakami’s fine-art product lines: paintings, sculpture, and wallpapered environments that play off the charms of Japanese traditional and popular arts with close to no charm of their own. But, then, retail swank is an aesthetic lingua franca today, and equations of art and commerce, pioneered by Andy Warhol and colonized by Jeff Koons, among others, are, at least, familiar. The show’s less cozy aspects remind me that I have never been to Japan. I don’t like Murakami’s work, but my dislike, being moody, feels out of scale with the artist’s terrific energy and ambition. For the second time in a couple of months—the first being at the Guggenheim retrospective of the meteoric Chinese festivalist Cai Guo-Qiang—New Yorkers have a chance to absorb our new geo-spiritual fate, as provincials in a world of creative paradigms that no longer entreat our favor. That has to be good for us.

more from The New Yorker here.

It is important not to suggest that it is only in rather special states of creativity – say, reading or writing poems – that we are distanced from animals. This is a mistake. We are different from animals in every waking moment of our lives. The bellowing on the lavatory that I referred to earlier demonstrates a huge gulf between us and our nearest animal kin. But if we deny this difference (invoking chimps etc) even in the case of creativity – and the appreciation of works of art – then no distance remains. That is why one would expect critics to be on the side of the poets, with their sense of this complexity, rather than siding with the terribles simplificateurs of scientism…

Neuroaesthetics is wrong about the present state of neuroscience: we are not yet able to explain human consciousness, even less articulate self-consciousness as expressed in the reading and writing of poetry. It is wrong about our experience of literature. And it is wrong about humanity.

more from the TLS here.