Faraz is the greatest living Urdu poet. This is for Choti:

Douglas Goetsch in The American Scholar:

In July of 2006, I received an e-mail from Richard K. Weems, who directs the creative writing division of the New Jersey Governor’s School of the Arts. He had hired me to teach poetry to a group of gifted high school students later that month, and he wanted to know if I was interested in conducting a “Drive-by poetry” field trip, which is what past teachers had done.

Drive-by poetry, as Rich described it, entails loading the students into a van, cruising around a commercial area in Trenton, and pulling over near targeted pedestrians. One of the students sticks his or her head out the passenger window and serenades — or accosts — the startled pedestrian with some passionately recited lines by Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda. The kid pops back in, rolls up the window, and the van takes off in search of the next victim.

More here.

Bharti Kher. The Skin Speaks a Language Not its Own. 2006.

Bindis on fiberglass.

More on this talented young artist here and here.

Thanks to Anjuli Kolb.

In The Smart Set, Morgan continues on the Art Basel Miami Beach, and finds solace in consumption:

Clement Greenberg is the brilliant and extreme case. He once wrote:

“Value judgments constitute the substance of aesthetic experience. I don’t want to argue this assertion. I point to it as a fact, the fact that identifies the presence, the reality in experience of the aesthetic. I don’t want to argue, either, about the nature of aesthetic value judgments. They are acts of intuition, and intuition remains unanalyzable.”

I don’t want to argue either. It is a beautiful night in South Beach and there is a man standing on a balcony not far from me exclaiming loudly, slowly, and with labored enunciation, “I am an exceptional artist” to any and everyone standing in the sudden tropical downpour below. Earlier today a man explained to me that he collects old giant objects. Not new giant objects, not old regular-sized objects. He collects old giant objects and he has been doing it obsessively for longer than I have been alive. So, agreed, I’m in no mood to argue about the substance of aesthetic experience. I would like to point out one thing though.

If Clement Greenberg is right than it shouldn’t — it couldn’t — matter whether we’re looking at a work in a museum, in a gallery, in someone’s home, or at an art fair. Intuition is going to do the mysterious work it does and no one’s going to damn well stop it. “Show me a work,” suggests Clem, “and I’ll view it and judge it practically before you even set the sucker down.” This is a site-indifferent approach to the process of looking at art. I suspect you could throw paintings at Clement Greenberg while he was standing at the bottom of a gorge and he would have been satisfied that he’d done most of them justice in the next week’s column. I exaggerate for effect.

But if my Aunt Lou Ann is right, and she has never steered me wrong, then we have to be prepared for the idea that art is not the selfsame thing in all cases that Clement Greenberg (and most of the rest of us, though in less stubborn and precise manner) assume it to be. Point being that if I glance suddenly at an Anselm Kiefer painting in a booth at Art Basel, I’m going to look at it slightly differently if I have an eye toward things I might acquire than if I intend to write an article, or borrow something for a museum show.

Via Andrew Sullivan, the paper cut sculptures of Jen Stark, in PingMag (Japan):

Look at these intriguing, repetitive shapes like eruptions by Miami-based Jen Stark: Her three-dimensional, kaleidoscopic paper art is simply hand-made with dozens of layers of thick coloured paper. With her abstract geometrical patterns just shown in the new Tactile book, PingMag feeds you an interview with the artist about the quality of cardboard.

When did you start with your… can I call it kaleidoscope paper art?

I began making paper sculptures when I went to study in France for a semester. Since I could only take two suitcases with me for five months, I decided to purchase art supplies when I got there. The Euro was high and everything was pretty expensive, so I decided to get the cheapest but coolest looking thing in the art store – a stack of construction paper! I started experimenting with what paper could turn into and it took off from there.

What is truly worrying is not simply the number of failed democracies. It is rather the extensive misuse of democratic institutions, symbols, and practices. Thus, presidential elections become an opportunity to propel to power an unstable demagogue (Venezuela) and parliamentary elections an opportunity for the business oligarchy to buy political influence (Ukraine). From Thailand to Bolivia, from Russia to the Gaza Strip, democracy everywhere has been perverted beyond recognition; often, demagogues do not even that pretend theirs is the “Western” variant of democracy. Francis Fukuyama’s contention that we are witnessing the final triumph of “liberal democracy” sounds increasingly shallow. The perception of the classical authors is probably truer. Free states are precious few, beacons of light in the dark and boundless ocean of despotism.

more from Eurozine here.

In other words, McEwan’s fiction has sometimes felt artificial. It should be said, in his favor, that most contemporary novelists feel artificial because they are not competent enough to tell a convincing or interesting story; it is a peculiar excess of proficiency and talent, like McEwan’s–or like Robert Stone’s, W. Somerset Maugham’s, or Graham Greene’s–that produces a fiction so competently told that it also feels artificial. Still, one has tended to read McEwan with the sense that he is beautifully constructing and managing various hypothetical situations rather than freely following and grasping at a great truth. (That this latter mode is also an artifice is only a banal paradox.) In particular, McEwan’s characters, while never less than interesting, lively, and sometimes interestingly weird, have tended not to be quite human. Many of them have neither pasts nor futures, but are frozen in the threatening present. Many of them have parents who died when they were young. They rarely refer to their childhoods, and seem not to have the use of deep memory as such. McEwan, unlike most writers, has not seemed to need any kitty of childhood detail on which to draw. This absence of past stories, of loitering retrospect, allows him to polish the clean lines of his stories. Since his writing rarely dips into the reflective past, it can exist the better as pure novelty. This is the key to McEwan’s extraordinary narrative stealth. His fictions, like detective stories, are always moving forward. They seem to shed their sentences rather than to accumulate them.

more from TNR here.

This is a love letter. To a love song. One I keep returning to. One I keep feeling I need to do justice to. I don’t know if I can, but I’ll try.

A couple of months ago, I’d gone back to playing it. Only I can’t play it just once. I have to play it over and over again for hours on end. I can’t get enough of it. It’s not just a love song: It’s a road song, it’s a motel song, it’s a Southwestern desert song, it’s a disappearance and death song. It’s a Joni Mitchell song. It’s “Amelia.”

People get that way about Joni Mitchell songs. Bob Dylan once told me that he’d written “Tangled up in Blue,” the opening song of the much-celebrated Blood on the Tracks, after spending a weekend immersed in JM’s Blue (although I think he may have been talking about the whole album, not just the song).

more from Slate here.

Via NoUtopia:

Trust
Thomas R. Smith

It’s like so many other things in life
to which you must say no or yes.
So you take your car to the new mechanic.
Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.

The package left with the disreputable-looking
clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,
the envelope passed by dozens of strangers–
all show up at their intended destinations.
The theft that could have happened doesn’t.

Wind finally gets where it was going
through the snowy trees, and the river, even
when frozen, arrives at the right place.

And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
is delivered, even though you can’t read the address.

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

Fareed Zakaria deserves a medal for breaking with the mainstream media pack to slap down, with the requisite rudeness, the hysteria over Iran being manufactured by the neocons, opportunist Israeli politicians and the Bush Administration. Perhaps stung by having participated in a secret Bush Administration policy discussion to help shape the Iraq war policy before the invasion, Zakaria is acting with honor now to prevent another disaster. This while much of the rest of the media is futzing around asking the wrong questions on Iran and getting the answers that only the wrong questions can produce. Exhibit A: The Washington Post editorial suggesting that the only “alternative” to harsh new sanctions that most of the international community opposes is war, and then scolding “those who say they oppose military action — including a couple of the second-tier Democratic presidential candidates — to portray the sanctions initiative as a buildup to war by Mr. Bush. We’ve seen no evidence that the president has decided on war, and it’s clear that many senior administration officials understand the package as the best way to avoid military action. It is not they but those who oppose tougher sanctions who make war with Iran more likely.”

More here.

Robin Givhan in The Washington Post:

It’s impossible not to be charmed by the two boys who star in the film, which opened Friday and is based on the best-selling book about friendship, betrayal and guilt. Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada and Zekeria Ebrahimi have faces far more expressive and eloquent than any of the dialogue they recite. In particular, Ahmad Khan, who plays Hassan, has a face of such exquisite soulfulness that it’s almost too much to bear. It takes approximately five seconds to fall in love with him.

Because the boys’ story is set in Afghanistan in the 1970s, both speak entirely in Dari. There are English subtitles, but the young actors’ facial expressions are especially important in the telling of their story. English-speaking audiences don’t have the benefit of subtle vocal intonations to help them connect with the characters. But they do have American popular culture. It’s there from the moment Zekeria, who plays the privileged young Amir, appears on-screen. He’s wearing a striped sweater and ski vest and looks as though he has stepped from the pages of any class photo from middle America. The boys are obsessed with “The Magnificent Seven” and its stars, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson. They’ve seen the movie so many times that they can quote dialogue. And the streets of their home town are filled with Western tourists; bohemians and hippies wander through the market. There’s nothing terribly obvious or heavy-handed in the way American popular culture is portrayed. It’s simply an undeniable part of their daily life.

More here.

Tad Safran in The Times:

In the iconic chick-flick Bridget Jones’s Diary, the title character is a sad, lonely, overweight, posh-sounding chain-smoker in her thirties with a drinking problem and no dating prospects. She then, one day, goes to the gym for an hour or two, spends £200 at Topshop, reads a self-help book and, lo and behold, she finds herself in the delightful position of having to decide between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth.

Women of Britain: Bridget Jones’s Diary is not a documentary. It’s a work of fiction, a fairytale. The fact is that control-top granny pants are simply not a substitute for regular exercise, thoughtful grooming and a healthy diet. Certainly not if you’re single and interested in men. An informal poll of my US female friends revealed that they spend roughly $700 (£350) a month on what they consider standard obligatory beauty maintenance. That covers haircut, highlights, manicure, pedicure, waxing, tanning, make-up, facials, teeth whitening etc. They will spend a further $1,000 (£500) a month on physical conditioning such as military fitness, spinning sessions, vikram yoga, Pilates, deep-tissue sports massage, personal training etc. On top of that, add the occasional spa day, a week-long “bikini boot camp” in Mexico at the start of every summer and seasonal splurges on personal shoppers and clothing. I’m not sure any of my British female friends spends £700 during an entire year on her appearance. American women see these costs as a simple and sensible investment in their future.

More here.

Mark Kamine in the New York Times Book Review:

The name Charm City first came into use during a 1974 garbage strike and heat wave that led to looting and arson. This darkly droll anecdote, with which the novelist Madison Smartt Bell opens his guide to Baltimore, gives fair warning of what’s to follow. A standard tourist itinerary can be gleaned from the handful of walks Bell describes, but Frommer would serve better for those interested in simply seeing the sights and eating fine food. Bell’s Baltimore is a real city: complex, ever changing, often gritty and dangerous, always interesting.

The four walking partners Bell teams up with become guides to very particular facets of the city. Eric Singer, a transplant from South Africa, accompanies him through a sketchy stretch of discount stores, thrift shops and dive bars. Singer, like Bell, has an eye for racial divisions. Here we pick up useful tourist lore, including the local nickname for narcs (“knockers”) and the location of a grove of old trees in a church garden whose “deep calm” may be the reason homeless people camp there.

More here.

A Yemeni man never charged by the U.S. details 19 months of brutality and psychological torture — the first in-depth, first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons.

Mark Benjamin in Salon:

The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated in its network of secret prisons known as “black sites.” But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on — there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation — one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.

It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words “I am innocent” in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.

So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die.

More here.  [Thanks to Élan Reisner.]

Rachel Donadio in the NYT:

This month, Viking will publish “Diary of a Bad Year,” the latest novel by J. M. Coetzee. With his spare prose and unsparing sense of the human condition, Coetzee is one of the most important novelists at work today. His biographical note mentions his 2003 Nobel Prize and 18 previously published books. It also presents, understatedly, a significant fact: “A native of South Africa, Coetzee now lives in Adelaide, Australia.

A host of questions lurk behind that simple sentence. Why would a novelist who has written so powerfully about the land of his birth pack up and leave? Were his 2002 move and his taking of Australian citizenship last year a betrayal of his homeland, or a rejoinder to a country whose new government had denounced one of his most important novels as racist? Was it just another example of the “white flight” that has sent hundreds of thousands of generally affluent South Africans to other Anglophone countries since the end of apartheid? Or was it a tacit acknowledgment that Coetzee had exhausted his South African material, that the next chapter in the country’s history was the rise of the black middle class, and what did an old resistance writer, with his aloof, middle-aged white narrators, know about that?

Rusty Rockets in Science a Go Go:

Now that scientists are readily identifying genomic changes due to selective pressures, what’s next? Would it be too far fetched to suggest that social pressures could affect brain function at a genetic level? At least one study has identified collective behavioral differences between Western cultures like the United States and China, possibly suggesting the beginning of brain divergence among humans.

The study, from the University of Chicago, makes the claim that people living in the United States have difficulties with accepting another person’s point of view, which they put down to US culture prizing individualism. They say that in China, where a collectivist attitude is encouraged, quite the opposite is true, with Chinese citizens being much more in tune with how others are thinking. As a result, the researchers argue that there may be more scope for communication confusion among Western citizens relative to citizens of China. “Members of these two cultures seem to have a fundamentally different focus in social situations. Members of collectivist cultures tend to be interdependent and to have self-concepts defined in terms of relationships and social obligations,” says Boaz Keysar, a Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago. “In contrast, members of individualist cultures tend to strive for independence and have self-concepts defined in terms of their own aspirations and achievements.”

In the Economist:

PROBABLY, more bad science has been conducted on the concept of human race than on any other field of biology. The reason is that an awful lot of research into race has been motivated by preconceived ideas that one lot of people are somehow “better” than another lot, rather than being a disinterested investigation of regional variations in a single species and the evolutionary pressures that have created them.

Contrariwise, even well constructed studies, if they do find racial differences, risk opposition from those who deny that people from different parts of the world could ever differ genetically from one another in important ways. As a result, only the foolish or the daring rush in to add to the carnage. It remains to be seen which category the authors of two papers in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences fall into.

One of the papers, written by Andrea Migliano and her colleagues at Cambridge University, looks at a local outcome of human evolution—the short stature often known as pygmyism—and tries to explain the evolutionary circumstances that cause it. The other, by Robert Moyzis of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues, asks a broader question: how much evolutionary change has happened since Homo sapiens climbed out of his African cradle and began to colonise the world? The answer is, quite a lot—and the rate of change seems to have speeded up.

Roger Scruton reviews Charles Griswold’s Forgiveness in the TLS:

Forgiveness is not achieved unilaterally: it is the result of a dialogue, which may be tacit, but which involves reciprocal communication of an extended and delicate kind. The one who forgives goes out to the one who has injured him, and his gesture involves a changed state of mind, a reorientation towards the other, and a setting aside of resentment. Such an existential transformation is not always or easily attained, and can only be achieved, Griswold suggests, through an effort of cooperation and sympathy, in which each person strives to set his own interests aside and look on the other from the posture of the “impartial spectator”, as Smith described it. Crucial in this process are the “narratives” which the parties recount to themselves, and Griswold draws interestingly on recent work in “narratology” in his search for the crucial factor in the process of psychic repair. This is the factor that permits a voiding of resentment in the one soul, and a self-giving through contrition in the other. Each party’s narrative is both an account of the injury, and an allocation of blame; ideal and reality, exoneration and fault, are all woven together, and forgiveness can be seen as in part an attempt to harmonize the narratives, so that the story comes to an end in a new beginning.

Griswold’s arguments are deep, far-reaching and all the more effective for the many interesting examples, drawn from recent events and biographical accounts. He sets a paradigm before us, in which one person injures another, seeks forgiveness and then receives it. The injury and the seeking are as important for Griswold as the final forgiveness, and he rightly rejects the view that forgiveness is simply a “gift” that can be bestowed by the injured party whatever the state of mind of the one who had hurt him. You don’t succeed in forgiving when you have shown no recognition of the fault, and you don’t recognize a fault if you regard it with indifference, and without the natural resentment with which one moral being receives the injuries inflicted by another.

Matthew Night at CNN:

Not since the 1970’s, when the energy crisis forced oil prices through the roof, have solar power solutions been so warmly received.

Most people associate solar power with shiny black panels — called photovoltaic cells (PV’s) –which nestle on rooftops trapping the heat from the sun and converting it into electricity.

But sightings of solar panels on suburban streets remain rare, not least because of the prohibitive cost of purchase and installation.

But there are other ways of capturing the power of the sun which may provide a considerable chunk of our energy needs in the years ahead. Research is increasingly focusing on ‘concentrated solar power’ systems — CSP for short.

More here.

Almost anyone who muddled their way through high school has heard of the Transcendentalists. Plenty of people could even name some of them: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau or even, perhaps, Walt Whitman. Some of us might even own a dog-eared paperback of “Walden.” But only a few of us could tell you what Transcendentalism actually means.

We shouldn’t feel too bad about this, it turns out, for even in its heyday, from the 1830s through the 1850s, the average American was equally befuddled by the term. “When a speaker talked so that his audience didn’t understand him, and when he said what he didn’t understand himself — that was transcendentalism,” as one newspaper reporter joked in 1853.

Philip Gura, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sets out to change all that. He has succeeded grandly. In “American Transcendentalism: A History,” Gura untangles this complex web of ideas and characters and weaves them into a clear, coherent and compelling tale of America’s first, and maybe greatest, major intellectual movement.

more from The LA Times here.