– Great art can change the world. As for Mr. Clapton, he would do well to lend an ear to his fellow rocker Neil Young. “I think that the time when music could change the world is past,” Mr. Young recently said. “I think it would be very naïve to think that in this day and age.” Indeed it would, but far too many artists are just that naïve, not to mention vain (which makes one wonder exactly why Mr. Young is joining with Bruce Springsteen in contributing songs to the soundtrack album of the forthcoming antiwar film “Body of War”). Clement Greenberg, the great art critic, called such foolish folk “art-silly,” going on to issue the following warning: “Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.” Least of all does it have the power to tear down the high walls of tyranny — or to feed the terror-stricken people of North Korea.

Irene Breslau, a member of the Philharmonic’s viola section, got it right on the nose: “I’ve had a lot of moral reservations based on wondering what a concert for the elite is going to do to help the people starving in the street,” she told the Associated Press. Too bad Ms. Breslau’s bosses didn’t ask themselves that question before sending her to Pyongyang.

more from the WSJ here.

The last room of “Gray” shows you how much of a beginner Johns is willing to be as he attains a great late style. Unlike many famous artists, who switch on the autopilot and go into solipsistic production, Johns about ten years ago emptied out his work. Virtually everything disappeared. He began an oft-disparaged series known as the Catenary Paintings. In each of these large works, he suspended one or more strings from one edge of a mostly gray canvas to the other — they’re like pendants hung against flesh. Sometimes the surface displays smaller pictures of the Little Dipper, the Milky Way or a fading harlequin pattern. The Little Dipper may have the North Star at its base, but there’s little to navigate these works. You’re left with what’s been there from the beginning, the resonant physicality of Johns’ art. The catenary paintings break free of the constraints of language. In a sense you’re left in the skin of the artist, literally holding on to these works by a string. For Johns’ painting has always been something more than just for looking. The Catenary Paintings seem to be about getting from one side to the other as naturally as possible.

Johns’ body and self have always been deeply embedded in his art, and that has deepened here. He has never been as cagey or removed as many have claimed. “Gray” is a powerful show because it allows you to see just how visceral, voluptuous and vulnerable he’s been all along.

more from artnet here.

I’m staring hard at the back of Antony Gormley’s balls and wondering why he doesn’t have more of a cleft in his buttocks while he expatiates on his new technique for ‘drawing’ bodies. Instead of making a mould of his body and casting it in solid iron, as he did for, say, Event Horizon (the figures on rooftops round London last summer), he is now covering the mould with a sort of metal mesh which retains the body shape when the mould is extracted, but in a lighter, airier, see-through form.

We are looking at a mould of his body from the back, which gives me ample time to study his buttocks while he holds forth about duodecahedrons and the ‘bubble matrix’ on which his metal mesh is based. There is no hope at all of my understanding the scientific theory he is talking about, but on the other hand, there is no hope at all of my stopping him, so buttocks it is.

We are all pretty familiar with Antony Gormley’s body by now, what with his fondness for scattering it round the country, and a very fine body it is too – well over six foot tall, thin, athletic, well-proportioned, altogether in good nick for someone of 57.

more from The Guardian here.

Charlotte Allen in the Washington Post:

I swear no man watches “Grey’s Anatomy” unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of “The Friday Night Knitting Club.” No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either — although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn’t some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.

Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women. The only good news was that women tended to take fewer driving risks than men, so their crashes were only a third as likely to be fatal. Those statistics were reinforced by a study released by the University of London in January showing that women and gay men perform more poorly than heterosexual men at tasks involving navigation and spatial awareness, both crucial to good driving.

More here. And a response by Katha Pollitt:

The question is not why Charlotte Allen wrote her silly piece — it’s why The Post published it

In a casual essay of 1,700 words, Allen manages to stir together a breathtaking mishmash of misogynistic irrelevancies and generalizations. One minute she’s mocking women who bake cookies for their dogs; the next, she’s castigating Hillary Clinton’s campaign as “stupidest” partly because she fired her “daytime-soap-watching” Latina campaign manager too close to the Texas primary. (Note to Allen: Hillary won Texas with a flood of Latino votes.) She wonders why “no man contracts nebulous diseases” of possibly psychosomatic origins. (Note to Allen: Actually, they do.) She asks why women have more driving accidents. (Note to Allen: See below.) Could it be because women are mentally inferior, as proved by men’s greater ability to mentally rotate three-dimensional objects in space? Unless it’s a cute little puppy, that is, or maybe a cookie.

The upshot: we ladies should focus on what we’re really good at — interior decoration and taking care of men and children.

Oh, gag me with a spoon. Sure, girly culture can be silly — but what does that prove? It’s not as though men spend their evenings leafing through the plays of Moliere. Susie whips up doggy treats, Mike surfs porn sites; she curls up with the Friday Night Knitting Club, he watches football. Or maybe the two of them watch “Grey’s Anatomy” together — surprise, surprise, about half the show’s audience is male. If you go by cultural preferences, actually, you could just as well claim that women are obviously smarter than men — look around you at the museum, the theater, the opera house, the ballet, the concert hall. Women read more than men, too, especially fiction, which men tend to avoid. (A story about things that didn’t happen? How does that work?) Women even read fiction by men and about men, further evidence of their imaginative powers — while men, if they do pick up a novel, make sure it’s estrogen-free. Who’s really the dim bulb, the woman who doesn’t see the beauty of “Grand Theft Auto,” or the man who thinks Tom Clancy is a great writer?

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

From The Washington Post:

The English novelist and essayist Maurice Baring is often credited with the quip that it wasn’t Homer who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey, but another man of the same name. Regardless of who said it, we get the joke. Homer, the Ur-poet of Western civilization — and usually the first author listed on any Western Civ syllabus — has over two and a half millennia become a legend, not a personage whose life we can chart more or less accurately.

That we shall never know the truth makes this mystery all the more enticing. So instead of penning a biography of Homer, a fairly impossible task likely to produce thin work anyway, the Argentinean critic and translator Alberto Manguel offers a so-called biography of the epic poems themselves, and it turns out that we find in their lives reaching back over 2,000 years all the complexity and contradictions of any eminent life, and then some.

But of course Manguel begins with the man belonging to history, the poet himself — or herself, or themselves.

More here.

Vincent Lam in the New York Times Book Review:

Becoming a doctor, I hoped, would bring me back into the real world,” Sandeep Jauhar writes in “Intern,” his fine memoir of his training in a New York City hospital. “It would make me into a man.” The story he tells here is antiheroic, full of uncertainty, doubt and frank disgust, aimed at both himself and, sometimes, his patients. “Intern” succeeds as an unusually transparent portrait of an imperfect human being trying to do his best at a tough job.

Jauhar’s journey into medicine is driven by a swirling mix of half-reasons. Disillusioned with graduate studies in particle physics, jarred by the illness of a girlfriend and seeking a profession of tangible purpose, he entered medical school in his mid-20s with considerable ambivalence. Jauhar had always eyed doctoring suspiciously, as a “cookbook” discipline, “with little room for creativity.” His father, a plant geneticist from India who felt his own advancement was stifled by racism, had derided medicine as intellectually inferior to pure science even as he encouraged both his sons to become doctors for the sake of income and prestige.

More here.

..

Resources
Julia Casterton

For sleeping between two chairs at the hospital –
two books, which I place under my head,
and a cotton shawl from India, maroon and cream batik,
to lay across my legs.

Of the books, one is Chekhov’s stories in Spanish,
which I don’t read,
and one a life of Lorca,
which I do.

In his last days
hiding out in the house of a fascist friend,
and in his last hours
in the holding house far from anywhere

before they gave him lots of coffee,
the code for shoot him,
I am there in the olive grove
with the old teacher chained to him

and he is here with me
perhaps wrapped in my Indian shawl,
the knowledge of his last hours in my vigil by your bed,
the knowledge of my vigil by your bed in his last hours.

..

Frida Kahlo of the paintings has The Look. Frida Kahlo of the photos does not. Why?

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

It’s The Look that gets to you. Frida Kahlo took up a variety of subject matter and dabbled in a number of styles. All of it worth seeing. But in the end it is the self-portraits that endure and that fuel her ever-increasing stature in 20th century art. That’s because in the portraits you get The Look. The Look is the Frida Kahlo stare. If you’ve seen any of her self-portraits then you have seen it. It is an expression that barely changes throughout a lifetime of paintings. Costumes change, parrots flutter into the frame, monkeys come and go. The Look never wavers. Walking through the major exhibit currently hanging at the Philadelphia Museum of Art or flipping through the catalog, it’s clear that The Look starts in about 1930 with the Self-Portrait of that year and keeps right on going through the last great self-portrait, Self-Portrait with Medallion, in 1948.

There’s no Frida without The Look. In fact, as time goes on and her living memory recedes further into the distance all she will be is The Look, and The Look will be her. It’s also nice that the show at the Philadelphia Museum contains a whole section of photographs taken of and by Frida over the years because it gives us something to contrast with The Look. The first and most obvious thing to note about The Look is that it is hard, harder than any version of Frida you see in the photographs. It is bold and it is uncompromising. The Look is even a little bit scary. The lips are invariably set together and sometimes slightly pursed. The face is set and without expression. The eyes look directly at the viewer, though, importantly, her head is almost always turned slightly to the left or to the right, as if she is looking away from something else and then has suddenly directed The Look straight out of the painting and into the world of the viewer.

More here.

Exploring Barack Obama’s youth, Todd S. Purdum discovers that the senator’s casual aplomb masks an aggressive, restless core.

From Vanity Fair:

After weeks of rooting around in his past, in Chicago, in Springfield, in Honolulu, I went to see Obama in his Senate office. He had just returned from the Senate floor to a sparely decorated inner sanctum, notable for a large, bright, almost child-like painting of Thurgood Marshall. After exchanging pleasantries (we have a connection: my sister-in-law, Betsy Myers, a former Clinton-administration official, was chief operating officer of Obama’s campaign; she took the job after I received this assignment, and we have not talked about her new boss since), Obama sat down and put a foot up on the coffee table. Our conversation ranged from Indonesia to Illinois, but my first question was simple: when did he realize that he had an ambition that might be ever so slightly audacious?

“There was a fundamental rupture in my life between Occidental and Columbia, where I just became more serious,” Obama said. While he was in New York, his father died, giving the son “a sense of urgency about my own life.” He added, “Now, that doesn’t mean at that point I somehow instantly had these grand ambitions for political office. But I do think it was at that point in my life—those two years when I was in New York—where I made a decision that I wanted to, I wanted to make my mark.”

More here.

Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?

Jonah Lehrer in Seed Magazine:

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on, the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air conditioner. This is Blue Brain.

The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind. “This is the first model of the brain that has been built from the bottom-up,” says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue Brain project. “There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts about the brain and just worked from there.”

More here.

Paul Hond in Columbia Magazine:

In late October of 1961, William Neal Brown ’50SW, a professor of social work at Rutgers, received an urgent telephone call from his friend Clyde Ferguson. Ferguson, a Rutgers law professor, had been scheduled to take part in a debate the following week on the Rutgers-Newark campus with Malcolm X, the fiery Black Muslim orator from Harlem. The topic was to be “Integration or Separation.”

But now, Ferguson told Brown confidentially, he would have to pull out. It seemed that Ferguson, who was serving as general counsel for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and who would later become U.S. ambassador to Uganda, had received a call from the White House, advising him that if he appeared with Malcolm X his career in public service would be jeopardized. “I need a replacement, Neal,” Ferguson said. “I asked the students for ideas, and they all said, ‘Get Brown.’”

This vote of faith meant a lot to Brown. With no political aspirations of his own to protect, and with just days to prepare, he agreed to pinch-hit for Ferguson.

More here.

There is a great deal of sweetness in the prevalent vision of McCullers as the poet of haunting oddbods, the laureate of American loneliness, the gifted bard of adolescent girls. But any reader of McCullers with a half-open eye knows her routing of sentimentality as one of the central actions of her fiction. The Member of the Wedding, published in 1946, has, in more recent years, picked up critical kudos as a mid-20th-century gay classic. It has influenced works as culturally inquiring and politically vibrant as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), the first line of which profoundly echoes McCullers’s novel. The Bell Jar’s opening pages go out of their way to suggest a close kinship between them. As Morrison and Plath knew, The Member of the Wedding is a cutting piece of fiction, and its antecedents are equally sharp. But still the sentimental image persists.

more from The Guardian here.

WERNER HERZOG: Walking out of one of your films, I always had the feeling—the sense that I’ve seen a movie, that I’ve seen something equivalent to a feature film. That’s very much the feeling of the feature film Vernon, Florida or even the film with McNamara—The Fog of War. Even there I have the feeling I’ve seen a feature, a narrative feature film with an inventive narrative structure and with a sort of ambience created that you only normally create in a feature film, in an inventive, fictionalized film.

The new film that I saw, Standard Operating Procedure, feels as if you had completely invented characters, and yet they are not. We know the photos, and we know the events and we know the dramas behind it. And yet I always walk out feeling that I have seen a feature film, a fiction film.

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. The intention is to put the audience in some kind of odd reality. [To moderator] Werner certainly shares this. It’s the perverse element in filmmaking. Werner in his “Minnesota Manifesto” starts talking about ecstatic truth. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

But what I do understand in his films is a kind of ecstatic absurdity, things that make you question the nature of reality, of the universe in which we live.

more from The Believer here.

This guy never ceases to amaze me. Here he is, pushing eighty, and instead of dimming the lights and shuffling off to somber senescence, he’s upping the ante and teaching new dance steps.

T. S. Eliot said that the job of poets and saints is “to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time.” This job description can be applied as well to the work undertaken by the last of the great philologists, Ernst Robert Curtius and Erich Auerbach, both of whom passed from this world in the late 1950s, just as George Steiner was beginning his academic career as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and working on his first book.

If Curtius and Auerbach can be said to have an heir, it is Steiner, who has surpassed them in his investigation of the crossroad where time and timelessness breathe as one. Curtius and Auerbach were clinical in dissecting the historical, literary, and linguistic knowledge they commanded. Steiner has ventured further, wandering from academic confines to where mysterious wildflowers, germinated by Heraclitean and Gnostic elements, blossom forth in light and shadow. Where Curtius and Auerbach illuminated, Steiner has been a weaver of illuminations.

more from Bookforum here.

..

   Backdrop Addresses Cowboy
Margaret Atwood

Starspangled cowboy
sauntering out of the almost-
silly West, on your face
a porcelain grin,
tugging a papier-mâché cactus
on wheels behind you with a string,

you are innocent as a bathtub
of bullets.

Your righteous eye, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the streets with villains:
as you move, the air in front of you
blossoms with targets

and you leave behind you an heroic
trail of desolation:
beer bottles
slaughtered by the side
of the road, bird-
skulls bleaching the sunset.

I ought to be watching
from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront
when the shooting starts, hands clasped
in admiration,
but I am elsewhere.

Then what about me

what about the I
confronting you on that border
you are always trying to cross?

I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso

I am also what surrounds you
my brain
scattered with your
tincans, bones, empty shells,
the litter of your invasions.

I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.

..

From The Times:

Sameem Ali’s life is as neat and tidy as the small red-brick terraced house in which she lives in Moss Side, Manchester. She’s a first-time author, a happily married mother of two grown-up sons and, since organising her neighbours to lobby the city council to spend £1 million to clean up their area, renovate houses, plant trees and stop fly-tipping, a busy councillor. “This is my community now,” Sameem says. Even her book is called Belonging, but that is where the neatness ends and something altogether more alarming and brutal takes it place. “To this day I cry when I remember all the things that were done to me,” she says. “My memories are not a comfort to me, a place to retreat to; they are a curse.”

In Belonging, Sameem tells how she was abused by her family, taken to Pakistan at the age of 13 and forced to marry a man who would rape her repeatedly. She was pregnant by the time she was 14, but at the age of 17 she escaped her family and, a few months later, a kidnap attempt by armed men hired to bring her back. Years later she was told that a 5cm tumour had lodged itself in her head. If it were a novel, you would think it far-fetched, but the horror of her forced marriage happened exactly as Sameem tells it and her story is not unique. What is unique is that she has broken a taboo to expose the abuse suffered by many young people in Britain.

“I want to inspire women to have a voice, whatever they are going through,” says the 38-year-old. “It was many years before I raised my voice.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

THE SEXUAL PARADOX Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap

by Susan Pinker.

Why do girls on average lead boys for all their years in the classroom, only to fall behind in the workplace? Do girls grow up and lose their edge, while boys mature and gain theirs?

Pinker, a psychologist and a columnist at The Globe and Mail in Canada, is careful to remind her readers that statistics say nothing about the choices women and men make individually. Nor does she entirely discount the effect of sex discrimination or culture in shaping women’s choices. But she thinks these forces play only a bit part. To support this, Pinker quotes a female Ivy League law professor: “I am very skeptical of the notion that society discourages talented women from becoming scientists,” the professor writes. “My experience, at least from the educational phase of my life, is that the very opposite is true.” If women aren’t racing to the upper echelons of science, government and the corporate world despite decades of efforts to woo them, Pinker argues, then it must be because they are wired to resist the demands at the top of those fields.

Thus, Pinker parks herself firmly among “difference” feminists. Women’s brains aren’t inferior, she argues, but they vary considerably from men’s, and this is the primary explanation for the workplace gender divide. Women care more about intrinsic rewards, they have broader interests, they are more service-oriented and they are better at gauging the effect they have on others. They are “wired for empathy.” These aren’t learned traits; they’re the result of genes and hormones. Beginning in utero, men are generally exposed to higher levels of testosterone, driving them to be more competitive, assertive, vengeful and daring. Women, meanwhile, get a regular dose of oxytocin, which helps them read people’s emotions, “the truest social enabler.” Then there’s prolactin, which, along with oxytocin, surges during pregnancy, breast-feeding and caretaking. Together, the hormones produce such a high that mother rats choose their newborns over cocaine.

More here.

In his rhapsodic 1840 lecture on Dante and Shakespeare, “The Hero as Poet,” Thomas Carlyle wrote: “Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means!” The poet alone (“King Shakespeare”) rather than brute military or political authority, he insisted, had the metaphoric power to hold together the British Empire. Russia, whose czar ruled over great tracts of land, offered nothing but “dumb greatness.”

Carlyle proved wrong about Russia, but he was right about literature. Growing up in Bulgaria in the 1990s, soon after the Soviet government had loosened its hold and the West had offered its hand, I cheerfully fell under the influence of Russian and English writers. The only time Bulgarian literature held me in its grip was when it put me to sleep. I simply could not hear an “articulate voice,” much as I strained to; nobody managed to express “what the heart of it means.” While high school teachers tried to seduce me, day after day, with the beauties of our native tradition, I furtively held a volume of Keats under my desk. In a small Balkan country, where lack of interest in propagating one’s cultural heritage could be interpreted as a desecration of the national Priapus, that was a mortal sin.

more from Boston Review here.