From The New York Times:

A year and a half after the stroke, caused by a lesion the size of a lentil in a region of her midbrain, Dr. Roush began to feel tingling on her body in response to sounds. Today, more than ever, she feels sounds on her skin. The first time it happened, Dr. Roush was channel-surfing when she heard the voice of an announcer on a local FM station. When the announcer started to talk, she recalled, “I felt an unpleasant sensation on my left thigh, left arm, the back of my shoulder and even the outside of my left ear.”

“It was the kind of icky feeling that uniformly washes over you at a scary movie,” she continued. “I had to stop listening. It made me cringe.” Tony Ro, a psychologist from Rice University who has followed her case from the beginning, said Dr. Roush has a rare case of acquired synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition marked by odd mixings of the senses. Sensory areas of the brain that do not normally communicate engage in cross-talk. Most synesthetes are born with such crossed connections. Some experience complex tastes, like apple or bacon, in response to words. Others feel complex shapes, like pyramids, in response to tastes. Many see colors attached to specific letters or numbers. In this case, Dr. Ro said, the crossed wiring developed as a consequence of the stroke.

More here.

Rodolfo Hernández

More than a decade ago, my academic mentor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Graciela Uribe, a Chilean political geographer exiled in Mexico as a result of the dictatorship of Pinochet, urged me to write my Bachelor’s thesis about the uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), an indigenous group in the Mexican state of Chiapas. On January 1, 1994, the Zapatistas including the now world famous Sub-Commandante Marcos on January 1, 1994 declared war on the Mexican state to obtain eleven basic rights, among them education, housing, health care, liberty, peace and democracy. I never finished the thesis on the indigenous rebellion; rather I wrote a completely different piece. Even on the day I defended my thesis Graciela insisted me that a work about the Zapatistas should still be written.

In Mexico, racism shapes every day social life, and is one of the principal sources of political and economic injustice. Mexican people often not only normalize and accept racism, but sometimes they also justify it, defend it, or simply forget about it. The latter is especially true when racism and oppression are directed against indigenous peoples. Why do Mexicans accept this? About six decades ago, the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti wrote his celebrated poem Un padre nuestro latinoamericano (A Latin American Lord’s Prayer): “No nos dejes caer en la tentación/ de olvidar o vender este pasado/ o arrendar una sola hectárea de su olvido/ ahora que es la hora de saber quiénes somos” or “Lord do not leave us to fall into the temptation/ of forgetting or selling our past/ or even to lease a single hectare of its oblivion/ now that is the moment to know who we are.” (my translation)

When Benedetti wrote his poem, Latin America was moving between the nightmares of the state violence and the attempts toward the end of the fifties to create peoples’ utopias. Sadly, more nightmares were still waiting hidden along the twisted path of the Latin America history. And with them, more attempts were made to plant the enchanting temptations of living with oblivion ⎯ our individual and collective oblivion.

On the morning of December 22 of 1997, in the community of Acteal, a town located in Chiapas, 325 indigenous members of Las Abejas (The Bees), a pacifist group founded in 1992, were attacked by approximately 60 paramilitaries linked to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the party that ruled Mexico for more than seven decades. 15 children, 21 women and nine men were killed in the massacre. None of them was armed, and many couldn’t even see their assassins as they were shot from behind while praying and resting on their knees.

The massacre of Acteal was the outcome of the “Low Intensity Warfare” (LIW) strategy launched by the Mexican state. Actually LIW is of United States’ origin. Confronted with revolutionary insurgency throughout Latin and Central America, as well as in Southeast Asia, the American military had supported low-intensity tactics such as torture, assassination, and terrorizing civilian populations through the deployment of paramilitary groups as steps useful to the survival of its client states. The low intensity warfare strategy begun in the Chiapas state during 1995 consisted of the financing, training and arming of paramilitaries. As historian and anthropologist, Andrés Aubry (1997) pointed out that even before the massacre in Acteal, indigenous communities of Chiapas suffered sustained attacks by paramilitaries recruited by the Mexican government that included Chiapas young people who had no access to land and were socially detached from their communities. In 1998, Mexican journalist Carlos Marin documented the role of the Mexican Army in the development of groups such as Paz y Justicia, Los Chinchulines, and Mascara Roja.

Along with the paramilitary strategy, the Mexican government attempted to stir up internal conflicts and hostility among indigenous peoples in their communities, actions that led to the displacement of more than ten thousand people. Most of the displaced were Zapatista supporters, and their flight from the low intensity warfare zones created one of the worst humanitarian crises in Mexico’s recent history. People experienced the destruction of their houses and the confiscation of their agricultural lands. The peasant plots were used by paramilitaries to produce illegal drugs.

Today as in 1997, historians such as Aguilar Camín (1998, 2007) insist that the Acteal massacre was ignited by communal and family disputes, and religious intolerance. Their dismissal of massacre claims covers over the degree to which the state sponsored violence against Acteal’s people, the vast majority of whom were treated not as Zapatista sympathizers but as domestic enemies. The Interamerican Court of Human Rights is currently hearing arguments about whether the low intensity warfare prosecuted against the peoples of Chiapas constitutes a crime against humanity, and whether then President Ernesto Zedillo approved and directed the war efforts that included the Acteal massacre.

I was 25 years old when the massacre of Acteal occurred, and I never wrote my thesis on the Zapatista movement as my mentor so urgently recommended. Instead, my wife wrote her thesis on Chiapas, from which I have benefited greatly. But I have come to believe, as did my professor, that the fight for justice in Chiapas is part of the Latin American struggle against the oblivion and the silence still imposed by many states in Central and Latin America (including Mexico).

The urgency of events represented by the Acteal massacre 10 years ago has not abated. I hope that this column, in large part first inspired by my Professor Graciela Uribe, is a testimony to her belief, and those of other Latin America progressives, that our continent from the Rio Grande to Patagonia is deserving of our enduring love and attention. Given the long history of state oppression throughout Latin America punctuated by a persistent racism toward indigenous peoples, it is sometimes hard to sustain the struggle for justice by everyone who cares, including me. As Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo wrote: “Hoy me gusta la vida mucho menos, pero siempre me gusta vivir,” or “today I like life less, but I do always like to live.”

Perhaps by sustaining the common struggle, oblivion can be avoided.

I hope readers will feel free to ask for references on the subjects raised in the column. In the meantime, best wishes for the holidays!

Sughra Raza. Safe Within My Car. July 2006.

Digital photograph.

Tina Beattie in openDemocracy:

The 19th-century confrontation between religion and science was largely fuelled by a power-struggle between men of science and men of God, most of them members of the Victorian ruling classes. Whereas the clergy and the Church of England had previously ruled the roost of English public life, in the mid-19th century the dynamics of power shifted, and scientists began to wrest much of the authority from their clerical counterparts in shaping intellectual enquiry and values. But just as this “war” masked a much more amicable and creative dialogue between scientists and theologians in a society which was still largely Christian in its beliefs, so today the attempt to portray the relationship between science and religion as one of irreconcilable conflict is a distortion of a more pluralist intellectual and religious environment.

Many scientists see no fundamental conflict between science and faith, and some argue that quantum physics challenges any attempt to maintain a strict distinction between scientific and philosophical or theological knowledge. Some scientists – such as the head of the human-genome project, Francis S Collins – have converted from atheism to Christianity as a result of their scientific research. Many members of the scientific community have sought to distance themselves from the self-publicising polemics of Richard Dawkins and his fellow “new atheists“, for they see the fact that Dawkins in particular has become so dogmatic and ideologically driven in his militant atheism as a betrayal of the very scientific values which he claims to represent.

The attempt to stage a war between religion and science – whether fuelled by religious or scientific fundamentalists – is part of the problem and not part of the solution with regard to the times we are living in. If we seek to preserve our liberal western values, then we need to resist the spirit of aggression and confrontation which is becoming increasingly characteristic of public debate – in Britain and the United States especially – concerning the role of religion in society.

Colin Myen in In These Times:

At a 2001 rock concert in Tehran, Iran, members of the alternative rock band O-hum wore jeans and T-shirts. Some of them had mop tops. The lead singer jumped around with his bright red guitar as young girls screamed and boys climbed onto the stage before jumping off and body surfing the crowd.

Hundreds of young Iranians packed the Russian Orthodox Church (a neutral site not under government control) to hear O-hum’s Persian Rock—a blend of Western and Iranian music that lead singer Shahram Sharbaf and guitarist Shahrokh Izadkhah co-created. Juxtaposing the lyrics of Hafez, a 17th-century Persian poet, with soft Middle Eastern string instruments, drum beats and electric guitar riffs, O-hum’s music was hard and distinctly rock and roll.

O-hum, which means “illusions” in Farsi, was at the forefront of the Iranian underground music scene, building a voice of dissent and a refuge from the rigid censorship of the cleric-run government. The 2001 concert was O-hum’s first in Iran—and one of its last.

On this day before Christmas Eve:

by Joseph Brodksy, translated by Alan Myers

When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi.
At the grocers’ all slipping and pushing.
Where a tin of halva, coffee-flavored,
is the cause of a human assault-wave
by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels:
each one his own king, his own camel.

Nylon bags, carrier bags, cones of paper,
caps and neckties all twisted up sideways.
Reek of vodka and resin and cod
orange mandarins, cinnamon, apples.
Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway
toward Bethlehem, shut off by snow.

And the bearers of gifts, unassuming,
leap on buses and jam all the doorways,
disappear into courtyards that gape,
though they know that there’s nothing inside there:
not a beast, not a crib, nor yet Her,
round whose head gleams a nimbus of gold.

Emptiness. But the mere thought of that
brings forth lights as if out of nowhere.
Had Herod but known the stronger he seemed,
the more sure, the more certain the wonder.
Every year this constant relation
is the basic machinery of Christmas.

This they celebrate now everywhere,
for its coming push tables together.
No demand for a star yet awhile,
but a sort of goodwill touched with grace
can be seen in all men from afar,
and the shepherds have kindled their fires.

Snow is falling: not smoking but sounding
chimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain.
Herod drinks. Every wife hides her child.
He who comes is a mystery to no one:
but the signs are confusing, men’s hearts may
find it hard to acknowledge the stranger.

But the draft through the doorway will part
the thick mist of the hours of darkness
and a shape in a shawl stand revealed,
and the Christ-child and Spirit that’s Holy
will be sensed in the soul without shame;
a glance skyward will show it—the star.

Via Amitava Kumar, George Saunders in the NYT:

Let us consider Daniil Kharms, the Russian writer often described as an absurdist, largely unpublished in his lifetime except for his children’s books, who starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad, having been put there by the Stalinist government for, among other reasons, his general strangeness. Kharms gave flamboyant poetry readings from the top of an armoire, did performance art on the Nevsky Prospect — by, for example, lying down on it, sometimes dressed as Sherlock Holmes — and was a founder of the Union of Real Art, an avant-garde group also known as Oberiu. His brilliant, hilarious, violent little stories, written “for the drawer,” are now being discovered in the West through translations by Neil Cornwell (collected in “Incidences”) and by Matvei Yankelevich, whose anthology “Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms” (Overlook, $29.95) has just been published.

Kharms’s stories are truly odd, as in: at first you think they’re defective. They seem to cower at the suggestion of rising action, to blush at the heightened causality that makes a story a story. They sometimes end, you feel, before they’ve even begun.

Over at YouTube, a Philoctetes Center discussion with with Edward Casey, Francisca Cho, Harry Eyres, Robert Michels, Mark Norell, and Christopher Peacocke.

The nationalist perspective – which equates society with the society of the nation state – blinds us to the world in which we live. In order to perceive the interrelatedness of people and of populations around the globe in the first place, we need a cosmopolitan perspective. The common terminological denominator of our densely populated world is “cosmopolitanisation”, which means the erosion of distinct boundaries dividing markets, states, civilizations, cultures, and not least of all the lifeworlds of different peoples. The world has not certainly not become borderless, but the boundaries are becoming blurred and indistinct, becoming permeable to flows of information and capital. Less so, on the other hand, to flows of people: tourists yes, migrants no. Taking place in national and local lifeworlds and institutions is a process of internal globalisation. This alters the conditions for the construction of social identity, which need no longer be impressed by the negative juxtaposition of “us” and “them”.

For me, it is important that cosmopolitanisation does not occur somewhere in abstraction or on a global scale, somewhere above people’s heads, but that it takes place in the everyday lives of individuals (“mundane cosmopolitanisation”).

more from Sign and Sight here.

There are few enough points of continuity between the official state ideology of Maoist China and the ideology espoused by the country’s leaders today. But the significance of Qin Shi Huangdi, First August and Divine Emperor and subject of the outstandingly popular BM exhibition, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, might be one of them.* In the mid-1970s he had a starring role in one of the more bizarre movements of the Great Helmsman’s fading years. This was the so-called Struggle between Confucianism and Legalism, an attempt to recast the whole of Chinese history into a Manichaean conflict between two ‘lines’. You had the Confucian bad guys (humanist, conservative, capitalist) and the Legalist good guys (harsh authoritarian proto-socialists, with History on their side). ‘Burying the Confucians and burning the books’ – for which the First Emperor had been excoriated by centuries of historians – was now reconfigured as the forward-thinking decisiveness necessary to crush backsliding and ensure the victory of the correct line. The modern, slightly (but not much) subtler version of this appears in Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film portrayal, Hero. There, the emperor voices in impeccable classical Chinese the sentiment that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, or, to put it differently: the deaths of many are a necessary part of China’s rise to Unity and Greatness. The ‘resistance is futile’ film clips of the all-conquering armies of Qin, projected onto the walls of the Reading Room, look as if they use some of the costumes from the movie. Underneath the visitor’s feet are the old library desks, one of which was arbitrarily decided by curators to be ‘Marx’s seat’, in order to satisfy the curiosity of pious delegations from the East; not so very long ago, either.

more from the LRB here.

“I don’t think that I ever managed real philosophy,” Michael Walzer says in the interview that forms the last chapter of “Thinking Politically” (Yale University Press, 333 pages, $30), the stimulating new collection of his essays. This may sound like false modesty coming from Mr. Walzer, who is one of America’s leading political philosophers. But in fact, by forswearing the name of philosopher, he is merely trying to give a more precise definition of the kind of thinking he does. “I couldn’t breathe easily at the high level of abstraction that philosophy seemed to require,” he explains. “I quickly got impatient with the playful extension of hypothetical cases, moving farther and farther away from the world we all lived in.” Mr. Walzer’s essays take exactly the opposite approach: They set up camp in the midst of the world we all live in bringing the rigor of political theory to the messiness of political debate. It makes sense that Mr. Walzer is both a professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and an editor of Dissent, the left-liberal journal: His theories are always also interventions.

more from the NY Sun here.

From The Boston Globe:

No one, it seems, ever had a tepid reaction to Bella Abzug.

Amy Swerdlow, who worked with her, said, “I learned a lot from Bella. I don’t think Bella would ever think she ever learned anything from anybody.” Edward Kennedy, one of her admirers, said, “She stirred the House in such a way to push her view, irritate, antagonize, cajole, persuade, inspire, and lead.” Geraldine Ferraro, on Bella as a role model for women, said, “She didn’t knock lightly on the door. She didn’t even push it open or batter it down. She took it off the hinges forever! So that those of us who came after could walk through.”

The portrait that emerges from the many voices gathered here is of a fearless, brilliant, dynamic, charismatic, assertive, abrasive, impatient woman. While she annoyed many people, she also inspired many and advanced the causes she believed in: world peace, Zionism, social justice, equality for women, environmental awareness, and economic equality.

More here.

Dennis Drabelle in The Wsahington Post:

Author Jeff Warren is summarizing a psychological study in which “one group practiced tensing and relaxing a finger in their left hands, and another group just imagined doing the same thing.” When it was all over, the finger strength of the physical tensers had increased by an average of 30 percent, but that of the mental tensers had gone up nearly as much, to 22 percent.

But if you look beyond the book’s flower-child title, as well as its numerous drawings and diagrams, you find yourself being instructed by a serious journalist with both feet on the ground — except when he’s in bed and taking part in experiments. In The Head Trip, Warren pursues his conviction that “consciousness exists in more widely varied and abundant forms than simple waking, sleeping, and dreaming” by talking with experts and submitting to protocols.

Salvador Dali used to trawl his brain for bizarre images to go into his surrealist paintings by sitting in a chair after a meal with his hands extended beyond the chair-arms and a key held between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. When he nodded off, the key would fall to the floor, make a clink, and wake him up so that he could go sketch the melting watch he’d just glimpsed on his inner canvas.

More here.

Jason Wilson in The Smart Set:

I write a column about booze every other week for a major newspaper, and I often travel outside of the country, sometimes simply to drink some type of alcoholic beverage that I will eventually write about in my column. I also happen to be a father of two young boys. It therefore may not come as a total shock to learn that I am regularly seized by the terrifying notion that I am the worst, most horrible parent in the world. These moments usually strike when, say, I am sampling a vintage port on a lovely Portuguese afternoon or tasting a Dutch gin a stone’s throw from Amsterdam’s Red Light District, and then suddenly realize that back home in New Jersey it’s early morning and my wife is likely getting the kids ready for school.

Perhaps this is the reason that I recently took my oldest son, 5-year-old Sander, along with me on a business trip to Finnish Lapland so he could meet the “real” Santa Claus. So many acquaintances have asked me what on Earth possessed me to take a 5-year-old to the Arctic Circle in the middle of December — I’m still not exactly sure myself, but I’m guessing parental guilt played as big a role as any.

Even the elves at Santa’s Office, in Santa Claus’ Village, in Rovaniemi, Finland seemed incredulous that we should come from so far away to stand in line for something we could have experienced at the local mall. “You’re from USA?” asked the “elf” who logged our reservation to meet Santa, the one wearing a pointy hat and nametag that read “Lara,” who arched her eyebrow with the sort of disdain that only a local teen can convey to a visiting tourist. “What brings you all the way to Rovaniemi? That is a very long way to come just to see Santa Claus.”

More here, including a very nice slide show.

If R. Kelly was at all worried about his recent legal woes, he sure didn’t show it during his performance at a crowded United Center on Friday.

The Chicago-born R&B singer/writer/producer, who is finally set to stand trial in 2008 in connection with a 2002 indictment on 14 counts of child pornography, missed a courtroom appearance the week leading up to the concert and nearly had his bond revoked.

Still, the steady stream of controversy has done little to slow Kelly’s momentum. His latest album, “Double Up,” debuted atop the Billboard charts and has already gone platinum. But that’s not to say that the singer can’t feel the wolves circling. On a stage decked out like a boxing ring, Kelly made his way through the crowd like a prizefighter before lashing out at his detractors on “The Champ.” “Spread rumors/Point fingers/Throw stones,” he sang. “Hate me/Love me/Hug me/Curse me.”

more from The Chicago Tribune here.

Khan’s story is a three-decade-long cloak-and-dagger saga, one that jumps from Washington, Amsterdam and Johannesburg to Islamabad, Tehran and Timbuktu and drags in corrupt Pakstani generals, unscrupulous European businessmen and dissembling American diplomats. It’s no surprise that there has been a cascade of books on Khan in recent years. But the three newest — “The Nuclear Jihadist” by Douglas Frantz (a former L.A. Times managing editor) and Catherine Collins, “Deception” by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark and “America and the Islamic Bomb” by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento — drive home the point that Khan is not the real story here. More important is how and why he was able to flout the nuclear nonproliferation regime for so many years, “ushering in,” as Frantz and Collins put it, “the second nuclear age.” Jonathan Schell, in his new book “The Seventh Decade,” calls this the era of “nuclear anarchy.”

more from the LA Times here.

It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad,” begins Colin McGinn’s review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. “It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.”

The ending isn’t much better: “Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others).”

And in the middle, there is nothing to cheer the book’s author. Honderich’s book is, according to McGinn, sly, woefully uninformed, preposterous, easily refuted, unsophisticated, uncomprehending, banal, pointless, excruciating.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Tris McCall Report:

Snoop Dogg — “Sensual Seduction”

Ignore the title, that’s just the radio-approved handle; real fans and bootleggers know it as “Sexual Explosion”. This is Snoop‘s long-awaited tribute to Zapp, which means he’s run his entire vocal through a talkbox. Poppin’, to be sure, but nine out of ten casual listeners will miss the reference and mistake this for yet another digitized T-Pain performance. (Is that the secret to the popularity of the pitch-corrected sound, I wonder?; that it reminds us of Zapp, the Mothership, and the funky vocoder?) Arguably, “More Bounce To The Ounce” and “Computer Love” were the two primary sources for the g-funk sound, and as Nasir the Fussy Archivist pointed out on Hip-Hop Is Dead, Roger Troutman’s name is barely remembered these days. Snoop does his best to resurrect it here, and in the process, he’s given the Westside something new to low-ride to. It’s a neat novelty, but to be honest, when he breaks convention midway through the track and begins to rap, it feels like a happy homecoming.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

From The Times:

China, Dubai, Moscow or Kazakhstan apart, there’s a shift among many young architects away from flash, if lucrative, bling buildings and towards, what? The uniconic? The spiritual leader of this not-quite-movement, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, calls it slow architecture. Like slow food, this is about local produce that tastes good. It’s about that hard-to-define idea, integrity. Architecturally, it means back to basics building: providing beautiful shelter, addressing human needs with architecture which has longevity and presence, undeniably modern but also showing the mark of human hand. Its response to the bombast, fakery and crash-bang-wallop of globalisation is radical in its reactionariness.

In this year’s runners and riders in the AR Awards, for instance, you’ll find not skyscrapers and bling, but a beigel-shaped kindergarten in Tokyo with a huge rooftop playground, Madrid’s beautiful memorial to 2004’s Al Qaida bombings, a low-cost school for South Africa. This is tactile architecture, architecture that speaks of its social, environmental and spiritual obligations.

More here. (For Jaffer).

David Leavitt in The New York Times:

“Henry James: The Mature Master” by Sheldon M. Novick strives to supplant the common view of James as “a passive, fearful man, a detached observer of the life around him” with one of the writer as a gregarious, sometimes heroic, often troubled citizen of the world. Far from a sniffy celibate living comfortably on independent means or a “little boy with his nose pressed against the glass of a shop window,” Novick’s James was an authentic cosmopolite who led a life as emotionally, sexually and financially complex as those of the characters in his fiction.

Does Novick succeed in giving us a new, more “ordinary,” less cerebral Henry James? The answer, for better or worse, is yes. Indeed, the life that he describes (“The Mature Master” begins with the successful 1881 publication of “The Portrait of a Lady” and ends with James’s death in 1916) is one that, for any urban writer, will seem eerily, even tiresomely familiar. Passionately devoted to his craft, James is also burdened by the constant pressure to make money. He suffers from back pain and constipation, and often feels overwhelmed by the amount of writing he has to do: in addition to the novels, many of them published in serial form, there are the short stories, travel articles, reviews and “potboilers” from which he earns his living, not to mention the correspondence with which he feels dutybound to keep up.

More here.