“As Robert Pirsig has his second novel Lila reissued, John Freeman meets the author who for decades has been a thorn in the side of academic philosophers.”

From the London Times:

Robert Pirsig has a bone to pick with philosophers. As his era-defining memoir Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance levitated up the bestseller lists in 1974, all he heard from them was grumbling.

This story of a father-son motorcycle trip across America was just a skeleton of a philosophy, they said. What exactly was this “metaphysics of quality” he kept talking about? And who was he to tell them about it? Seventeen years later Pirsig gave his answer and it came in the form of a 500-page novel, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. Now, at last, the thinkers of the world had something to tinker with. Their response? “Silence. They have just given me zero support and great hostility,” Pirsig says on the eve of the novel’s reissue in Britain.

“It’s just they don’t say anything.” Now, Pirsig believes that he has one last shot at explaining his philosophy to the public, and if it means coming out of seclusion, so be it.

More here.

Amit Chaudhuri reviews Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta, in the London Review of Books:

Like Suketu Mehta, I was born in Calcutta, a city ‘in extremis’, in Mehta’s words, and, like him, grew up in Bombay. His father, who worked in the diamond trade, and mine, then a rising corporate executive, probably moved to Bombay from Calcutta for the same reasons; to do with the flight, in the 1960s, of capital and industry from the former colonial capital in the east to the forward-looking metropolis in the west, in the face of growing labour unrest and radical politics in leftist Bengal – the troubled context that ‘in extremis’ presumably refers to.

By the early 1970s, Calcutta had ceased to be a major centre of commerce and industry. Howrah, just outside the city, where the factories were once located, became a purgatory for small enterprise, with businesses – among them my uncle’s – waiting, sometimes for years and years, to die. The lights went out in Calcutta, literally: ‘load-shedding’, or power rationing, became frequent, until, in the early 1980s, the city had occasionally to make do with only eight hours of electricity a day. Jyoti Basu, the astringent, unsmiling Communist chief minister of West Bengal, a barrister from London and a bhadralok (that is, a member of the liberal, patrician middle class), whose first name means ‘light’, began to be called Andhakaar, or ‘Darkness’. Bombay, on the other hand, began to dazzle; I have no memory of it ever not dazzling. From the 12th-floor apartment in the not altogether extravagantly named Il Palazzo where I grew up, in Bombay’s most exclusive locality, Malabar Hill, I could see the row of lights on Marine Drive known as the Queen’s Necklace, fluorescent and aquamarine (they’re now a pale golden sodium), and, further on, great neon signs saying ORWO and BOAC and other things. It was an existence remarkably open to breeze, birds and rainfall, to the arrival of daylight and evening, and it was also strangely, unselfconsciously, enclosed. It was not Suketu Mehta’s Bombay.

More here.

Ari Berman in The Nation:

On July 18, the Senate unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution “condemning Hamas and Hezbollah and their state sponsors and supporting Israel’s exercise of its right to self-defense.” After House majority leader John Boehner removed language from the bill urging “all sides to protect innocent civilian life and infrastructure,” the House version passed by a landslide, 410 to 8.

AIPAC not only lobbied for the resolution; it had written it. “They [Congress] were given a resolution by AIPAC,” said former Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who addressed the House Democratic Caucus on July 19. “They didn’t prepare one.”

More here.

Carlos Rojas in The Naked Gaze:

In an Op-ed column in this past Sunday’s NY Times, Stanley Fish discussed the case of Kevin Barrett, the University of Wisconsin Ph.D. and coordinator for the “Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth,” who is scheduled to teach a course on “Islam: Religion and Culture” this fall, but who has argued that the US government was directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks. After he discussed these views on a conservative talk show, State Representative Stephen Nass (R) lead calls for Barrett’s dismissal from the university.

In his editorial, Fish argues that much of the ensuing controversy over whether or not  Barrett’s political opinions should be protected misses the point of what “academic freedom” does and does not cover. The point of academic freedom, Fish argues, “has nothing to do with content,” but rather “is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis.”  Therefore, he concludes,

Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.

Ironically, Fish’s essay advocating a clear distinction between advocacy and analysis has been roundly criticized for its implicit ideological agenda (for some of these discussions, see Long Sunday and Sherman Don).

       

I, too, will consider Fish’s editorial and the issues it raises, but will approach them somewhat indirectly, by turning first to two other recent incidents which underscore the power of speech and its implicit limits. On July 9th, Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt of Marco Materazzi was in response to verbal taunting. Although FIFA states that both parties denied that the taunting was racist in nature, they nevertheless gave Materazzi a surprisingly harsh two-game suspension. More recently, on July 28 Mel Gibson was pulled over for drunken driving, and proceeded to launch into a profanity laced, anti-Semitic tirade, saying among other things, “F—— Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”

More here.

“Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well.”

Philip E. Ross in Scientific American:

A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is José Raúl Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row.

How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? “I see only one move ahead,” Capablanca is said to have answered, “but it is always the correct one.”

He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master’s advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.

But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training?

More here.  [Thanks to Nicholas Hofgren.]

Edward B. Rackley in his excellent blog, Across the Divide: Analysis & Anecdote from Africa:

I’ve been working with child soldiers in the DR Congo most of this year. My focus has been on evaluating programs run by the usual aid agencies: UNICEF, Save the Children, International Rescue Committee, the Red Cross network, and a host of smaller Congolese groups. These actors are funded by tax revenues and private donations from people in developed countries, so directly or indirectly, you and I are paying for them. Such evaluations provide accountability to donors that they’re getting what they paid for. Anyone who says international aid is unaccountable is simply uninformed.

In previous postings I’ve explored some of the problems posed by the child soldier phenomenon, but I tend to take for granted the big picture dilemma that this sad group of victims cum perpetrators poses to our world. It’s worth mentioning here: What to do when previously accepted morals and norms prohibiting certain forms of behavior (universally shared taboos, if you like) cease to enforce the limits of barbarism? Capturing and re-programming underage youth to slaughter enemy combatants and innocents is one such taboo that no longer exists in 37 of 55 recently ended or ongoing conflicts.

More here.

How can a nation that is so heavily militarised stop itself from becoming coarsened by violence? How can Israel keep its humanist ideals? Beneath the surface there are signs that Mr Yehoshua is deeply worried about Israel’s moral future: not just in the face of war against Hizbullah, for example, but in its very own soul. Mr Yehoshua’s warmest character is the old bakery owner, a man who ignores the need to sleep—he is aware enough to know there will be plenty of time to sleep once he is gone—yet who frets about doing the right thing before he dies. “I don’t want to apologise,” he says when he realises the calamity of having one of his employees go missing in a morgue. “I want to do penance.”

Mr Yehoshua’s “A Woman in Jerusalem” is a sad, warm, funny book about Israel and being Jewish, and one that has deep lessons to impart—for other people as well as his own.

more from The Economist here.

A Chinese entrepreneur has registered the image of Zinedine Zidane’s notorious headbutt as a trademark for beer and hats under the name Tietougong (Iron Head Kung Fu). Zhao Xiaokai, the general manager of a sports publicity company, says he is in negotiations to sell the black and white logo to brewers and clothing companies… “I know it is illegal and violent, but the headbutt was also a positive thing,” said Mr Zhao. “It will make people remember the World Cup, it was a popular action in France – and even in China, many fans think it was justified after Materazzi insulted his mother and sister.”

But he said he would not try to register the trademark in Italy. “That would look too wicked,” he said.

more from The Guardian Unlimited here.

The sex gallery is ostensibly devoted to voyeurism—that’s to say, visual penetration. It is ironic, however, that in such a hot, sticky exhibition (literally, as PS1 is severally challenged in climate control, making the show a dubious summer destination) the cummulative effect of looking at so much biology is ultimately so unvisceral. This has to do with the fact that so many works are dreary black and white photographs and texts. There is barely any painting in the show, and what there is is limp illustration.

The thought I had, on leaving this exhausting, puerile display, is that a single painting by Francis Bacon would metaphorically fuse every sensation laid out so literally by the photographers, performers and video makers in this show, and penetrate the viewer where virtually nothing in this show does—the solar plexus. But metaphor, depictive relish and the catharsis of painting are obviously too trangressive for some.

more from Artcritical here.

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

His “terrorist” is a boy named Ahmad living in today’s New Prospect, New Jersey, for whom the immolation of 3,000 of his fellow citizens is by no means enough. For him, only a huge detonation inside the Lincoln Tunnel will do. Let’s grant Updike credit for casting his main character against type: Ahmad is not only the nicest person in the book but is as engaging a young man as you could meet in a day’s march. Tenderly, almost lovingly, Updike feels and feels, like a family doctor, until he can detect the flickering pulse of principle that animates the would-be martyr.

Once again, obesity and consumerism and urban sprawl are the radix malorum. At the seaside:

Devils. The guts of the men sag hugely and the monstrous buttocks of the women seesaw painfully as they tread the boardwalk in swollen sneakers. A few steps from death, these American elders defy decorum and dress as toddlers.

Whereas in the schools:

“They think they’re doing pretty good, with some flashy-trashy new outfit they’ve bought at half-price, or the latest hyper-violent new computer game, or some hot new CD everyone has to have, or some ridiculous new religion when you’ve drugged your brain back into the Stone Age. It makes you wonder if people deserve to live seriously — if the massacre masterminds in Rwanda and Sudan and Iraq didn’t have the right idea.”

The speaker in this latter instance is Jack Levy, a burned-out little Jewish man with a wife named Beth (“a whale of a woman giving off too much heat through her blubber”).

More here.

From MSNBC:

NASA scientists have joined the search for the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker, long thought to be extinct but recently sighted in Arkansas. NASA used a laser-equipped research aircraft to fly over the Big Woods area of the Mississippi Delta to learn more about the big woodpecker’s potential habitat. NASA’s aerial effort is part of a quest that began in 2004 after a kayaker reported spotting the woodpecker along the Cache River in Arkansas. Before that, there had been no confirmed sightings of ivory-bills for half a century.

In 2005, researchers published a report in the journal Science that at least one male ivory-bill still survived, but this finding has been challenged.

More here.

From Yahoo! Picks via the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory:

Ancient Writings Revealed!
After figuring out the answer to a problem, the mathematician and engineer Archimedes once shouted “Eureka!” and ran naked through the streets. The enthusiastic Sicilian lived between 287-212 B.C., and is widely recognized today as one of the most important minds of ancient Greece. At some point along the way, the science whiz recorded some of his ideas on a papyrus manuscript. In the Middle Ages, though, a monk wrote over the manuscript to create a prayer book. It wasn’t until 1906 that the underlining layer of Archimedes’ writing was discovered. And it wasn’t until August 4, 2006 (today!) that an x-ray at the Stanford Synchotron Radiation Laboratory cut through the monk’s notations to read the Greek text below. Or so the Exploratorium, Stanford University, and the National Science Foundation hope. Follow along on their live webcast as the x-ray examines the 1,000-year-old document—and the results are transmitted simultaneously around the world. We’ll be listening for shouts of “Eureka!”

From Blue Tea:

There are several Body Art galleries at Flesh and Color, in categories like Metallic, Abstract, Blends, and Floral. Some nice stuff, particularly the blends.

Guido Daniele does professional bodypainting for advertising projects. The scope of the work ranges from a few strokes here and there to full coverage, from abstract prints to animals.

Philippo Ioco does excellent bodypainting for both commercial and personal projects. His extensive personal work is divided into a number of galleries, including Painted Fashion, Movement of Color, and Animal Kingdom. Beautiful stuff.

More here.

Benjamin Kunkel in The New Yorker:

We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?” one character asks another in Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play “Endgame.” It turns out to be a well-warranted concern. Beckett’s writings constitute probably the most significant body of work produced by a twentieth-century author, in that they’re taken to signify the greatest number of things. “You might call Beckett the ultimate realist,” one eminent critic says, while the title of Anthony Cronin’s fine 1997 biography calls him “the last modernist,” and, equally, thanks to his spiralling self-referentiality, he’s often accounted the first postmodernist. Emptying his books of plot, descriptions, scene, and character, Beckett is said to have killed off the novel—or else, by showing how it could thrive on self-sabotage, insured its future. A contemporary playwright suggests that Beckett will remain relevant “as long as people still die.” Introducing Beckett’s later novels in a new Grove edition of the writer’s work issued to mark his centenary this year, Salman Rushdie takes the opposite—or, life being what it is, perhaps the identical—view: “These books, whose ostensible subject is death, are in fact books about life.” One of the most purposely obscure writers of the last century has become all things to all people.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise:

The Israeli invasion is creating a huge anti-Israeli backlash and a surge in popular support for Hezbollah. Iran certainly has no incentive to curb its support for Hezbollah under these circumstances. On the contrary, Hezbollah wants to make Lebanon an Islamic state on the model of Iran. Hezbollah is the most powerful military force in Lebanon right now. So, if the Lebanese government falls, as many fear it will, Hezbollah is likely to come out on top.

As I’ve argued before, offline and in comments: Hezbollah is using Israel to create an Islamic Lebanon.

More here.

Alma Guillermoprieto in the New York Review of Books:

Bolivia, a country with an area approximately twice the size of France, has barely nine million inhabitants, most of whom identify themselves as members of one of the pueblos originarios: the Aymara, Quechua, and Guaranì Indians, who are descendants of the great nations that inhabited the Andes and the jungle before the Conquest, and who were subsequently condemned to lives of odious isolation and unimaginable servitude. Serfdom was abolished at last in 1945, and during the revolution of 1952 latifundio land was distributed to the peasants in the Andes, but the average income for members of the pueblos is still well below a thousand dollars a year. Most other Bolivians are racially indistinguishable from the proclaimed pueblos originarios, and are almost as poor; these are the mestizos and urbanized Indians widely and sometimes insultingly called cholos, who in the Bolivian Andes throng the cities of La Paz, El Alto, Oruro, and Cochabamba, and in the tropics, Santa Cruz.

For its entire post-Conquest existence, Bolivia has survived through one principal export: first the silver from the mountain of Potosì that made the Spanish Golden Age possible; rubber from the Amazon region; then tin from the mines of Potosì and Oruro; coca paste for cocaine, briefly; and now gas from subterranean reserves that are estimated to be the second-largest in South America.

More here.

From Slate:

In August 2003, 30-year-old Rory Stewart took a taxi from Jordan to Baghdad and asked the British Foreign Office for a job. The Farsi-speaking former diplomat soon found himself appointed deputy governor of Maysan province in southern Iraq. His new book, The Prince of the Marshes, describes his experiences in Maysan and Nasiriyah. This week we are publishing five excerpts from the book detailing episodes from Stewart’s early days in Maysan, as he attempted to understand the system, the region, and the players, particularly tribal leader Karim Mahood Hattab, the “Prince of the Marshes.”

Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2003
If the province was to remain reasonably quiet, I believed I would have to build a close relationship with the Prince of the Marshes and since I had failed to make an impression in his house, I invited him to my office. He drove his small Japanese car right into the compound—no one dared to search him—parked beside an armored personnel carrier, returned the policeman’s salute and strode down the path, lifting his fine gold-braided cloak out of the dust.

More here.

Alex Chadwick at NPR:

Renowned wildlife photographer Frans Lanting has unveiled a new project with an unexpected new partner — acclaimed American composer Philip Glass. Their collaboration is Life: A Journey Through Time, a multimedia presentation that’s a feast for both the eyes and ears.

The genesis of the project was sparked years ago while Lanting was taking pictures of horseshoe crabs — a life form that has remained basically unchanged over hundreds of millions of years. Lanting realized that the creatures offer a window into the past, and that there exist many other examples of how time tempers the shape of life on Earth, and how the Earth is in turn changed by the life it harbors.

More here.

James C. McLane III in The Space Review:

To put a human on Mars within the lifetime of America’s current generation, only one scheme is feasible, and this feasible concept challenges our traditional thinking about risk and the value of life. The mission must be a one-way trip. It’s possible that the crew might consist of only one person. For the first manned landing on Mars, there can be no provision for the space traveler to return to Earth. We should call such a solo mission the “Spirit of the Lone Eagle” in honor of Charles Lindbergh, the original “Lone Eagle” who flew solo across the Atlantic. The manned Mars mission (which could be arranged to occur in 2017, just 90 years after Lindbergh’s famous flight) will require a person of special ability who can accept a great challenge.

Return to Earth from the Martian surface is a daunting technical problem for which current technology offers no obvious solution. Realistically, there aren’t even any schemes based on futuristic technology that are likely to be perfected within the next 20 years. When we eliminate the need to launch off Mars, we remove the mission’s most daunting obstacle. Huge engineering challenges remain, but without a Mars launch, we can reasonably expect to devise a program that may be accomplished within the scope of current technology.

More here.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein at Edge:

Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of us a thing of inestimable worth, demonstrably deserving of dignity and compassion. That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is itself a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed it in the 17th century, adding fire to the denunciation of him as a godless immoralist, had found its way into the minds of men who set out to create a government the likes of which had never before been seen on this earth.

Spinoza’s dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might seem hopelessly quixotic at this moment, with religion-infested politics on the march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have seemed on that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our sorry world would have been without it.

More here.