It is not easy to live together with our grave historical experiences. It is not easy to face the brutal fact that the trough of existence into which mankind sank during our century is not just an outlandish story, peculiar to one or two generations, but also, at one and the same time, an empirical norm that encompasses general human contingency, and thus, in this particular setting, our own contingency. One is appalled by the ease with which totalitarian dictatorships are able to liquidate the independent individual self, and with which a person becomes a snugly fitting, compliant cog in a dynamic state machine. One is seized by fear and uncertainty that so many people, even we ourselves, during certain segments of their lives, can be transformed into beings that the rational self, with its sound civic, moral instincts, will later on be unable – and not wish – to recognise or identify with. There was a time when man was God’s creation, a tragically fated creature who needed salvation. That lonely being was first leavened by ideological totalitarianism into a mass, then enclosed within the walls of a closed political system, and finally degraded into a lifeless cog in the works. At that point, there is no need for salvation, because he is not answerable for himself. Ideology has robbed him of his cosmos, his solitude, the tragic dimension of the human fate. It has squeezed him into a determinate existence where his fate is governed by his origins, his racial classification or his class loyalties. Along with his human fate, he is also robbed of human reality, the sheer sensation of living, so to say. In a totalitarian state we stand uncomprehending before the potential criminal acts, whereas all that we ought to be assessing is the extent to which the place of morality and the power of the human imagination have been subverted by the new categorical imperative: the totalitarian ideology.

more from Nobel Laureate Imre Kertesz here.

Steve Vogel’s interesting new book, The Pentagon: A History, tells the story of the design and construction of what is still the largest office building in the world—4 million square feet. One of the surprising facts to emerge from this thoroughly researched narrative is the degree to which the then-president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, involved himself in the project. For example, he played a major role in the selection of the site. The Army and the Department of War had opted for a prominent spot, at the foot of the Arlington Memorial Bridge and directly across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial. The Commission of Fine Arts, charged with overseeing design in the capital, objected on the grounds that the immense building would block the main axis of L’Enfant’s plan, and the matter landed on Roosevelt’s desk. Gen. Brehon B. Somervell, who was in charge of the project, insisted on the original location. “My dear general,” FDR hotly responded, “I’m still commander-in-chief of the Army!” The building was moved to its present, less obtrusive site.

more from Slate here.

From Nature:

Lynn Kimsey was one of 137 witnesses called to testify in the murder trial of Vincent Brothers, who stood accused of killing his wife, mother-in-law and children in Bakersfield, California. Brothers said that he was in Ohio at the time of the murders; he had rented a car there, and driven it no further west than St Louis, Missouri. When Kimsey took the stand, she revealed the identity of four key informants that would unpick this alibi: a grasshopper, a paper wasp and two ‘true bugs’. All four told her that Brothers’ rental car had been well beyond St Louis.

Kimsey, who was branded “the bug lady” by media covering the trial, is an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. She had been enlisted by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation to identify the insect carcasses plastered on the rental car’s radiator and air filters, to see whether these could place where the vehicle had been driven. The four bugs she presented to the jury are, she said, only found west of Missouri. After hearing this and much more evidence, the jury found Brothers guilty on 29 May.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The committee that recommended Salman Rushdie for a knighthood did not discuss any possible political ramifications and never imagined that the award would provoke the furious response that it has done in parts of the Muslim world, the Guardian has learnt. It also emerged yesterday that the writers’ organisation that led the lobbying for the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses to be knighted had originally hoped that the honour would lead to better relations between Britain and Asia.

The news came as the row spread around the world and the British high commissioner in Islamabad made representations to the Pakistani government over remarks supposedly made by the minister for religious affairs, Mohammed Ejaz ul-Haq, in which he appeared to justify suicide bombings as a response to the award. Rushdie was celebrating his 60th birthday in London yesterday and is not commenting on the latest threats to his life. It is understood he is anxious not to inflame the situation. Scotland Yard declined to comment as a matter of policy on whether the writer has been given police protection.

More here.

I’ve just started reading this wonderfully stimulating memoir recently and want to recommend it. The following review is by Ben Loehnen in TimeOut:

Halfway through Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s new memoir, A Mirror Garden, she describes playing a game of Twister in front of the shah: “I was sprawled akimbo on the plastic mat with my ass in the air.” This comical image—of a woman straddling East and West, the ancien régime and modernity—is a touchstone for Farmanfarmaian’s life. Born into Persia’s ruling class in 1924, she is a zany woman with a sense of adventure and curiosity reminiscent of Auntie Mame.

During World War II, the budding artist moved to New York City, where she studied painting and became something of a fixture in the fashion world. After a turbulent marriage (and the birth of one child), she returned to Iran in 1957, lured by an incipient romance with a prince, whom she eventually married. Her privileged life allowed her to scour Iran for the folk art and architectural detritus that informed so much of her own work until 1978, when the shah fell. Knowing that they would become pariahs in fundamentalist Iran, Farmanfarmaian and her husband returned to New York City to recast the shards of their lives.

More here.

Cullen Murphy in the Los Angeles Times:

You’ve seen the phrase a hundred times: “the world’s longest boundary between a First World and Third World country.” But hearing those words the other day, as the immigration bill seemed to be falling apart in the Senate, my thoughts turned not to the 2,000-mile border of the United States and Mexico but to ancient Rome’s 6,000-mile border with … well, its border with everywhere.

There’s a widespread view that the Roman Empire was swept away mainly by a relentless tide of hostile outsiders; we’ve all heard ugly references to the “barbarian hordes” in today’s immigration debates. But the truth is that Rome was the world’s most successful multiethnic state until our own — and history’s longest lasting one, bar none.

So it’s natural to wonder if the Romans might have anything to teach Americans. I’d argue that they do. One lesson is that the notion of “taking control of the borders” is overrated; borders were pliable then, and are even harder to define (or police) now. A second lesson is the importance of nurturing a national culture. It was the source of Rome’s power, just as it is the source of ours.

More here.

Virginia Heffernan in Screens (her New York Times blog):

According to Richard Rorty, natural disasters can kill thousands and millions of people, but leave Western institutions intact.

Terrorist attacks kill comparatively few people, but because they infantilize the citizenry and engender paranoia and a spirit of vengeance that licenses despotism, they can destroy institutions, including even the rule of law.

This is Richard Rorty’s speech on the assigned subject of Anti-Terrorism and the National Security State at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, on March 4, 2004. He looks miserable delivering it. He had intended in the 1990s to shift his focus to poetry, I believe; sadly, politics kept mugging him.

Part 2 of the video here.  Also see this brilliant bit: What Died When Rorty Died?

Evan Schnittman in the Oxford University Press blog:

To avoid confusion lets get everyone on the same page. Google Library (GL, as opposed to Google Book Search) is a program that has scanning facilities set up at 17+ libraries around the globe. These facilities digitize the print books in a given collection and then index the text so that it can be discovered by Google’s search engine. The search engine displays only a snippet (250 characters or so) of the book when there is a search hit, if the book is in copyright. In exchange for sharing their collections, Google gives a digital file of each book to the library for their archives. GL should not be confused with Google Book Search (GBS), which is a publisher sanctioned program in which Google licenses the right, from publishers, to digitize, index, and display 20% of a book for the purpose of making it “discoverable” in Google’s search engine. See The ABC’s of GBS, Part 1 for a complete description.

Over the last couple of weeks there has been some buzz in the tech and publishing blogosphere over a stunt pulled by Macmillan’s UK-based CEO Richard Charkin at BEA (Book Expo America). In an effort to illustrate his view on GL, Charkin went into the Google stand with an accomplice, took two laptops, and waited nearby to see what would happen (see Charkblog). After some time, a Google rep asked what was going on – Charkin pointed out that he was doing exactly what Google was doing to publishers. As “there was no sign that said ’do not steal the laptops,’” and, therefore, he felt the right to walk off with one. While I found this extremely amusing as a prank – (Charkin Punk’d Google!) I think the effort missed on a major point.

Google interpreted copyright law in a search engine friendly manner and decided that the act of digitizing books found in libraries, indexing that content, and then displaying only the smallest “snippet” of that content (250 characters), was no different than what they do spidering the internet and displaying snippet results. This is where the world of the internet and book publishing collide culturally – Charkin sees this as theft, Google sees it as how they operate on the internet – indexing content in order to make it discoverable without having to ask permission…

More here.  [Thanks to Rebecca Ford.]

A poem by Fujiwara no Kiyosuki, via JC:

I May Live On

I may live on until
I long for this time
In which I am so unhappy,
and remember it fondly.

To editorialize: whatever I make think of knighthoods, the death sentence against Rushdie seems a great deal more provocative. In the BBC:

Iran has stepped up its protest over the knighthood awarded by Britain to Salman Rushdie, whose 1988 novel The Satanic Verses outraged many Muslims.

Iran’s foreign ministry summoned the UK ambassador in Tehran and said the knighthood was a “provocative act”.

Pakistan voiced similar protests, telling the UK envoy in Islamabad the honour showed the British government’s “utter lack of sensitivity”.

Britain denied that the award was intended to insult Islam.

I didn’t want to go back.

When I began reporting from Iraq in 2002, I was still a wild and somewhat naïve twenty-four-year-old kid. Five years later, I was battle-weary. I had been there longer than the American military and had kept returning long after most members of the “coalition of the willing” had pulled out. Iraq had become my initiation, my rite of passage, but instead of granting me a new sense of myself and a new identity, Iraq had become my identity. Without Iraq, I was nothing. Just another photographer hanging around New York. In Iraq, I had a purpose, a mission; I felt important. I didn’t want to go back, but I needed to—and for the worst possible reason: I wasn’t ready for it to end. After twelve months away, I had a craving that only Iraq could satisfy.

more from VQR here (this is an intense and important piece).

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked:

[J]ust slating Bono misses out what has changed in world politics to allow a silly singer to become a spokesperson for Africa and a major player at the G8. First, Bono’s rise shows the role that Africa plays for many people today. For politicians and celebrities alike, Africa has become a stage for moralistic posturing. Campaigning on African poverty is something that ‘gives me a sense of purpose, something to work for’, as a contributor to Bono’s Vanity Fair puts it (21). Or as Paul Theroux bitingly argues: ‘Because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth.’ (22) Indeed, we could just as easily ask what earthly right the G8 itself has to discuss and determine what should happen in Africa’s poorest countries. Like Bono, no G8 leader has ever been elected by the nations of Africa. For these leaders, the G8 summits have become a kind of moral spectacle, intended to show that they care and they have a humane and giving side; our leaders find it easier to show ‘moral courage’ on Africa than on divisive issues at home. Never mind the fact that their aid proposals for Africa are spectacularly stingy and often place Africa in a new economic straitjacket – just the act of talking about Africa on an annual basis is intended to send a powerful message about the G8 nations’ moral integrity. Bono is only the most successful of many ‘Mr Africas’ around today.

[H/t: Elke Zuern]

It may seem strange to say we have just lost our national philosopher. Is a philosopher, after all, like a bird or an anthem? It’s the wrong question, Richard Rorty would have answered. Rorty, who died June 8 in Palo Alto, Calif., was for some 30 years the chief conductor of such national philosophical conversation as we have about the nature, meaning, and traps of our collective life.

In the classical sense he was of course a philosopher — a lover of wisdom — and only another philosopher could have denied it.

Rorty was also, in the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “an anti-philosopher’s philosopher.” He was more widely read and influential among humanists and activists of a left-liberal stripe than in departments of philosophy, two of which (Wellesley and Princeton) he eventually left behind for appointments in the humanities (University of Virginia) and comparative literature (Stanford).

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Fro Scientific American:

It’s a common fantasy to imagine that you’re the last person left alive on earth. But what if all human beings were suddenly whisked off the planet? That premise is the starting point for The World without Us, a new book by science writer Alan Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona. In this extended thought experiment, Weisman does not specify exactly what finishes off Homo sapiens; instead he simply assumes the abrupt disappearance of our species and projects the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries afterward.

According to Weisman, large parts of our physical infrastructure would begin to crumble almost immediately. Without street cleaners and road crews, our grand boulevards and superhighways would start to crack and buckle in a matter of months. Over the following decades many houses and office buildings would collapse, but some ordinary items would resist decay for an extraordinarily long time. Stainless-steel pots, for example, could last for millennia, especially if they were buried in the weed-covered mounds that used to be our kitchens. And certain common plastics might remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years; they would not break down until microbes evolved the ability to consume them.

More here.

From Science:

Ever flinch at the sight of an actor being punched in the face? The reason is that neurons in the brain light up when we watch others suffering. Now a team of psychologists has added evidence to the theory that such mirror systems in our brains are what lie behind our ability to empathize with others. The conclusions are based on a rare group of individuals who feel a touch upon their own bodies when they see someone else being touched. Only one such case of mirror-touch synesthesia had been reported previously in the literature; University College London’s Michael Banissy and Jamie Ward investigated the phenomenon in 10 other individuals.

In the new study, the researchers first established that the subjects had mirror-touch synesthesia. They had the individuals and members of a control group report where they felt a touch on their bodies while observing another person being touched. During the task, an actual touch was applied to their bodies as well–either at the same location as the person being observed or at a different location. The researchers found that mirror-touch synesthetes were quicker at detecting actual touch when it was applied to the same location as that of the person they were watching. They were also more likely than control subjects to report a synesthetic touch as a real touch.

More here.

Philip-Lorca DiCorcia. Joe Whitman, 24, Los Angeles, California. 1990-92.

Photograph.

More here, and here. Current show at the ICA, Boston here.

Richard Posner, Brian Eno, Mark Edmundson, Jurgen Habermas, Martha Nussbaum, Virginia Heffernan, Michael Berube and Stanley Fish remember Richard Rorty. This is Daniel Dennett writing, in Slate (via Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex):

I first met Dick Rorty in 1970 when he invited me (all the way from UC Irvine) to give a talk at Princeton—the first talk I ever gave to an audience of philosophers—and then hosted an unforgettable party at his house afterward. His two 1972 papers “Dennett on Awareness” in Phil. Studies and “Functionalism, Machines, and Incorrigibility” in J.Phil. put my work in the limelight, and he continued through the years to write with insight and appreciation about my work, so I owe a great debt to him over and above all I learned from him in his writing and in our conversations and debates. Dick was always trying to enlist me, an avowed Quinian, to his more radical brand of pragmatism, and I always resisted his inducements, feeling like a stick in the mud. But this didn’t always stop Dick from re-creating me—or others he more-or-less agreed with—in his own radical image. In one of these discussions, which took place in St. Louis in 1981 or thereabouts, I decided to tease him by inventing the “Rorty Factor”: Take anything Dick Rorty says and multiply it by .742 to get the truth! (See his “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” and my “Comments on Rorty” in Synthese in 1982.)

We continued in this vein for years. At one three-hour lunch in a fine restaurant in Buenos Aires, we traded notes on what we thought philosophy ought to be, could be, shouldn’t be, and he revealed something that I might have guessed but had never thought of. I had said that it mattered greatly to me to have the respect of scientists—that it was important to me to explain philosophical issues to scientists in terms they could understand and appreciate. He replied that he didn’t give a damn what scientists thought of his work; he coveted the attention and respect of poets!

More here.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being elicited considerable interest after its publication (in French in 1984, in Czech in 1985) and ultimately became Milan Kundera’s best-known novel. A major discussion took place in the exile journal Testimony, in which Milan Jungmann reproached Kundera for pandering to his readers, for dealing too loosely with the details of real life under the normalization regime,[1] and for his “method of beautiful fabulation.” After the critical Jungmann, some voices spoke out defending Kundera (including Kvetoslav Chvatik, Petr Kral, Ivo Bock, and Josef Skvorecky), pointing out that irrational anti-Kundera positions were determined by something “essential to the whole Czech character” (Kral). In 1988, Jaroslav Cejka added salt to the wounds with another criticism of Kundera, calling the novel “third-generation kitsch”. In essence, Cejka repeated Jungmann’s reproaches to the effect that Kundera merely wanted to gratify his readers, as well as (and here he was also in accordance with Jungmann) rebuking him for his erotic scenes and meditations on defecation. How strange: Jungmann, a dissident writing unofficial samizdat, and Cejka, an official critic from the very top of the Communist establishment who wrote for the principal cultural-political weekly, both managed – where Kundera was concerned – to agree.

How does The Unbearable Lightness of Being look more than twenty years after its original publication? Answering this question means hunting through our memory to track down just what Kundera’s novel did to us in the mid-1980s.

more from Eurozine here.

Richard Phillips makes jpeg art — that is, imagery that looks absolutely fantastic when transferred digitally from gallery to collector, curator, critic or magazine art director. The paintings themselves are enormous, and there is no denying the fact that images of bare-breasted babes and Nazi insignia still pack a wallop in a media-glutted world. In fact, this is partly what the work is about, the backbreaking effort to make “paintings as such” while burdened with a head full of Yale-induced Postmodern critical theory.

“Is it a vital medium or a redundant object of nostalgia connoisseurship?” intones the Gagosian Gallery press release. If the answer to that question is based on Phillips’ paintings, the answers would have to be no and yes. The act of laying paint on canvas is not Phillips’ gift. His paintings have none of the fluidity of Tom Wesselmann or the eroticism of David Salle.

more from artnet here.

The curiosity shop that artist Nancy Shaver runs in Hudson, N.Y., is named Henry. It is an antique store filled with non-art objects in display cases that customers pay cash for and carry away. In one sense Shaver makes straightforward modernist/minimalist sculptures: brightly colored or patterned little boxes that are lined up or stacked on object pedestals such as wheeled dollies or handmade shelving units or placed on the walls in object frames such as musical instrument cases and in handmade wooden boxes. In another sense, Shaver transforms, through an intuitive predominantly visual decision making process, real objects she does not modify in any way into expensive art objects. Shaver’s exhibition at Feature Inc. includes non-art objects from Henry, sculptures that are completely handmade by the artist and sculptures that combine the handmade and the found object. This work is all about the nexus of the utilitarian object that has hidden poetic qualities and the self-consciously constructed art object. Shaver’s art is also about accumulation, juxtaposition, and the visual habits we form with objects that we live with day to day.

more from artcritical here.