An African revolution that needs noticing: ‘The Chinese are the most voracious capitalists on the continent and trade between China and Africa is doubling every year.’

I arrived in Sierra Leone in June 2005, at the height of the rainy season. Mud washed down the pot-holed streets of the capital, Freetown, and knots of beggars, some without arms or legs, huddled under trees and against battered shop-fronts. It was a fortnight before the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, where Bob Geldof and Bono were to celebrate a huge increase in aid to Africa, but in the Bintumani Hotel no-one spoke of this. Gusts of rain-filled wind blew through the hotel’s porch to set the large red lanterns swinging. Cardboard cut-outs of Chinese children in traditional dress had been stuck on the windows. The management had just celebrated Chinese New Year.

more from Granta here.

Rembrandt would be remembered as an extraordinary self-portraitist if he had died young at, say, 45. But he lived much longer and it is the work of his old age that one most admires: that intimate, unflinching scrutiny of his own sagging, lined and bloated features, with the light shining from the potato nose and the thick paint: the face of a master, the face of a failure and a bankrupt. Life, and his own mismanagement of life, has bashed him but no one could say it has beaten him.

Such is the message of a work like the late Kenwood House self-portrait, 1661-62. By now Rembrandt was the supreme depictor of inwardness, of human thought, whether it is the self-reflection of Bathsheba or the meditation of Aristotle. He had done pictures of himself that fairly radiate a gloating success, but the deepest was saved for the last decade of his life, when he painted himself as a painter at work, holding brushes, palette and maul-stick. He has his back to a wall, or perhaps a large canvas. On the canvas are two large arcs, incomplete circles. What are these abstract forms doing there? They come from Rembrandt’s reading of a well-known and indeed exemplary story in Pliny. The great Greek painter Apelles, so Pliny’s story goes, went to visit an equally famous ancient master, Protogenes, on the island of Rhodes. But Protogenes was out, and so Apelles, rather than leave him a note, drew on his studio wall a perfect circle, freehand. Protogenes would realise that only an artist of Apelles’ skills could possibly have done this. So Rembrandt places himself before the message that compares him to Apelles, king and ancestor of his art. Old age has at last freed him to make an incontrovertible, utterly simple proof of mastery. The circle has closed.

more from Robert Hughes at the Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

ALTHOUGH it focuses on the fate of a few powerless individuals, Kiran Desai’s extraordinary new novel manages to explore, with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. Despite being set in the mid-1980’s, it seems the best kind of post-9/11 novel.

“The Inheritance of Loss” opens with a teenage Indian girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge, in the town of Kalimpong on the Indian side of the Himalayas. Sai is romantically involved with her math tutor, Gyan, the descendant of a Nepali Gurkha mercenary, but he eventually recoils from her obvious privilege and falls in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents. In a parallel narrative, we are shown the life of Biju, the son of Sai’s grandfather’s cook, who belongs to the “shadow class” of illegal immigrants in New York and spends much of his time dodging the authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another.

What binds these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. Almost all of Desai’s characters have been stunted by their encounters with the West.

More here.

From Nature:

Jackson Pollock, famed for his ‘poured’ paintings, was defiant in facing down the cynics who viewed them as random splatterings. “I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident.” And several decades after the abstract expressionist’s death, science proved him right. In the late 1990s, physicist Richard Taylor analysed a selection of Pollock’s poured paintings and found they were composed of distinct fractal patterns — made by dripping or pouring paint straight on to a canvas. Indeed, it seems that ‘Jack the Dripper’ was refining the fractal characteristics of his paintings long before the mathematics to analyse them was invented.

Now, Taylor’s evidence may prove critical in determining the authenticity of a group of recently discovered paintings that could be Pollocks. “A Pollock poured painting can be sold for millions of dollars.” In 1998, for instance, Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952 was valued at US$40 million.

More here.

Paul Farhi in the Washington Post:

As always, the biggest delegations, and the big winners, will come from a familiar pool. In the history of the winter competition, dating from its inception in 1924, competitors from only six countries — the Soviet Union/Russia, Germany (East, West and combined), Norway, the United States, Austria and Finland, in that order — have won almost two-thirds of all the medals awarded. Only 17 countries have ever amassed more than 10 medals during the past 19 winter Olympiads. Only 38 countries have won even one medal.

This had turned the Winter Olympics into a remarkably insular competition. The Czech Republic (and Czechoslovakia before it) has won more medals than China, home to about one-fifth of humanity. Norway, a nation with a population smaller than metropolitan Washington, has won three times as many winter medals as the nations of Asia, Latin and South America, Australia and Polynesia, the Middle East and the Caribbean Basin combined.

More here.

Brian Cathcart reviews J D Bernal: the sage of science by Andrew Brown, in the New Statesman:

A couple of days after D-Day, the scientist J D Bernal, who had played an important part in planning the landings, went ashore at Arromanches himself and, catching sight of a group of French nuns, tried to engage them in conversation. In his diary he records with disappointment that his polite greeting “was received with frozen and taciturn virtue”.

The nuns were probably wise to scuttle away, for they are pretty well the only women to cross Bernal’s path in the first 250 pages of this marvellous book – blood relatives aside – whom he does not take swiftly to his bed.

Though we hear little of him today, Bernal was a globally important figure in the mid-20th century, both as scientist and political activist, and he proves a biographer’s gold mine on those terms alone. However, his sexual antics are so extra-ordinarily compulsive that they sometimes steal the show.

More here.

Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, the noted wit, expert on freedom, and unelected religious leader—the leader who counts—of Iran, observed the other day that in the West, “casting doubt or negating the genocide of the Jews is banned but insulting the beliefs of 1.5 billion Muslims is allowed.” He apparently thought this was a devastating point. Touché, Ayatollah Khamanei.

The worldwide fuss over 12 cartoon images of the Prophet Mohammed (some mocking, some benign) that ran in a Danish newspaper has already killed at least 10 people. Many self-styled voices of Islam have made the bizarre comparison between showing pictures of the Prophet Mohammed and expressing doubt about the Holocaust. A government-controlled Tehran newspaper announced a contest for cartoons about the Holocaust, asking “whether freedom of expression” applies to “the crimes committed by the United States and Israel.” In a spirit of “see how you like it,” a European Muslim group posted on the Web a cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler.

Muslim complaints about a Western double standard would be more telling if the factual premise was accurate. But it is not. In fact, it is nearly the opposite of the truth. Nothing is easier and more common in the West, including the United States, than criticizing the United States—except for criticizing Israel. A few Western countries have stupid laws, erratically enforced, against denying the Holocaust, but that hasn’t stopped Holocaust denial from becoming a literary industry and cultural phenomenon. This is distressing to many Jews and others because making sure that the world remembers the Holocaust has become the main strategy for trying to prevent another one. The willingness of so many people to disbelieve the reality of a historical event as relatively recent and well-documented as the Holocaust leads you to despair of the human capacity for reason, along with more or less every advance in human affairs since the Dark Ages. Nevertheless, there has been no rioting about the historical reality of the Holocaust. No one has died over it.

Meanwhile, whatever point these European Muslims were making with their cartoon of Hitler and Anne Frank is more or less disproved by their very exercise. No one tried to stop them from putting the cartoon on the Web. The notion that jokes about Anne Frank are beyond the pale is provably false. There’s a play running in New York right now called “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother.” It’s a monologue written and acted by stand-up comic Judy Gold, who says on stage every night that her mother used to read to her from a pop-up version of Anne Frank’s diary and would say, “Pull the tab, Judith. Alive. Pull it again. Dead.” Maybe you had to be there. But the New York Times reviewer called the play “fiercely funny, honest and moving” and did not demand that the author be executed, or even admonished.

more from Michael Kinsley at Slate here.

A long-lost 17th century manuscript charting the birth of modern science has been found gathering dust in a cupboard in a Hampshire home. Filled with crabby italics and acerbic asides, the 520 or so yellowing and stained pages are the handwritten minutes of the Royal Society as recorded by the brilliant scientist Robert Hooke, one of the society’s original fellows and curator of experiments.

The notes describe in detail some of the most astounding and outlandish scientific thinking from meetings of the society between 1661 to 1682. There is the very earliest work with microscopes, confirming the first sightings of sperm and micro-organisms. There is correspondence with Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren over the nature of gravity, with the latter’s proposal to fire bullets into the air to see where they might drop. And there is a page that lays to rest the bitter controversy over who designed the watch that would eventually lead to the first measurements of longitude.

more form The Guardian here.

Just after dawn, on the morning of April 13, 1300, Dante enters the Earthly Paradise at the top of Mt. Purgatory. There, amid an angelic procession, a prophet sings a line from the Song of Solomon, “Come with me from Lebanon and be crowned.” Beatrice then appears and speaks to Dante. The poet is overcome with her presence; he weeps and stammers. Of this impossible but sublime meeting in the 64th line of the 64th canto of The Divine Comedy, Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “Beatrice existed infinitely for Dante; Dante existed very little, perhaps not at all, for Beatrice.” Borges ruefully concludes, “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.” Walid Raad, founder of the semi-fictitious Atlas Group, a collective that archives ephemera from Lebanon’s civil war, shares both Borges’s proclivity for elaborate fiction laced with apparent fact and Dante’s rhetoric of exile. Raad transforms his native Lebanon into a kind of Beatrice, or lost love.

more from Salz at the Village Voice here.

Stuart Hall: David, your book Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment is written in the shadow of what you call the exhaustion and collapse of “the social and political hopes that went into the anti-colonial imaginary and postcolonial making of national sovereignties.” What do you think went wrong, fundamentally, with that project?

David Scott: Stuart, here’s one way of answering your question. I was born in 1958 in Jamaica. And since Independence came in 1962 I am part of the first generation to grow up more or less entirely inside the New Nation. I have no personal experience of colonialism. I have no memory of the Union Jack coming down, no sense of an ending and a new beginning. I live, therefore, not so much the contrast between the colonial and the postcolonial as the early internal struggle over the kind of nation it would be. The 1970s was my generation’s short decade of hope and expectation and longing. Whether you were a Rastafarian (as I was for a while in high school), or whether you were part of Michael Manley’s democratic socialist People’s National Party or the communist Worker’s Party of Jamaica (or, as I was, on the fringes of both), you lived inside a surging momentum (well, maybe not surging) for radical social change. The 1980s brings this lurching to a close with the assassination of Walter Rodney in June 1980; the defeat of Michael Manley in October of the same year; and the implosion of the Grenada Revolution in 1983. I am old enough to have believed in the 1970s, but I am also young enough to be skeptical of the mythology of the narrative of emancipation and to be able to cast an impassive eye on its rhetorical structure. This is the generational vantage from which I come at Conscripts of Modernity.

more from BOMB here.

Photography has had its own difficult relationship with fine art, one that hasn’t really been resolved to this day. Why take the time and expense to have a portrait, a picture of your house, or views of exotic lands painted when you can get a truer-to-reality depiction with a simple photograph? As this turf war took center stage, Modernists seized on photography for its inherent abstraction, its immediacy, and its very lack of historical baggage. This essentially oppositional position — combined with the medium’s scientific, journalistic and amateur documentary functions (i.e., snapshots) — kept it out of the inner circle of legitimate art media for most of the 20th century.

By the time photography finally started coming into its own in the early ’70s, the art establishment’s authority was under serious attack from a number of cultural forces — including the emergence of Outsider art as a legitimate parallel to the fine-art world, with its own star system, dealers, collectors and critics. Recent mainstream interest in “de-skilled” art-making, the exponential growth in available photographic technology (particularly digital), and the curatorial reclamation of “found” and amateur photography have further blurred the boundaries of what might be called Outsider photos — before the boundaries have even been established.

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

From the Times Literary Supplement:

Flaubert is exemplary, indeed talismanic, for the stern separation he made between his public and private writings. His novels are objective constructions which unfold in authorial absence; his letters are a place of riotous opinion-giving and frank emotional unbuttoning. Yet the distance between the two was not empty but connective. It was part of Flaubert’s literary strategy to treat his correspondence as a déversoir, an overflow, an outlet which purged the intrusive self and helped liberate the fiction into its desired impersonality. Three years before Madame Bovary appeared, he bade farewell, in a letter to Louise Colet, to “the personal, the intimate, to everything connected with me”. His “old project” of one day writing his memoirs was now officially abandoned: “Nothing personal tempts me any more”.

This makes such overflow as we have the more fascinating: the incomparable letters, but also the travel notes and the Cahiers intimes of 1840–41.

More here.

From MSNBC:

That fresh grassy smell wafting up from the newly sliced tomato may be its way of saying “I’m good for you.” Indeed, the odors from foods ranging from garlic and onions to ginger and strawberries may be nutritional signals that the human nose has learned to recognize. “Studies of flavor preferences and aversions suggest that flavor perception may be linked to the nutritional or health value” of foods, researchers Stephen A. Goff and Harry J. Klee report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.Klee and Goff analyzed two types of tomato, the wild cerasiforme and the commercially grown Flora-Duke. Except for one chemical that also affects color, the sugars, organic acids and volatile compounds associated with tomato flavor were reduced in the commercial product.

For example, one of the volatile compounds associated with the “tomato” or “grassy” flavor is called cis-3-Hexenal, which is also an indicator of fatty acids that are essential to the human diet. They found that the wild tomato contained more than three times the amount of that chemical than the cultivated version.

More here.

From The National Academy of Science:

Scientists have found disease-causing proteins known as prions in the muscle tissue of deer in 11 states and two Canadian provinces. This is the first time prions have been found outside the brain and spinal cord of deer, and the discovery has raised concerns about human consumption of deer meat.

Prions are the abnormal form of particular proteins that naturally occur in mammals. When these proteins transform into prions, they cause rare, fatal brain diseases such as chronic wasting disease in deer and elk, mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in sheep, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in people. Deer and elk appear to transmit chronic wasting disease through excretions like saliva, although the details remain unclear; research in this area is ongoing. There is no evidence to date on whether prions in deer cause disease in humans or other mammals.

More here.

“Sayyed Nadeem Kazmi’s quest to find out what devotion to Hussein means for those who participate in the ceremonies is documented in his film Ten Days. Here, he explains why he thinks Ashura is yet to be properly understood.”

Sayyed Nadeem Kazmi at the BBC:

Hussein ibn Ali was the beloved grandson of the Prophet Muhammad through the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima, and her husband, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Imam Hussein’s martyrdom 14 centuries ago was a turning point in the history of Islam.

It is a tragedy that resonates today among all Muslims, Sunni as well as Shia, for whom love for the Holy Prophet and his immediate family is an unwritten article of faith. But it is particularly important to the Shia who interpret Hussein’s sacrifice as an enduring ethical and moral legacy from which all humanity can take lessons.

Some years following the death of Muhammad, the temporal leadership of Islam turned away from its spiritual roots and became what many view as a corrupt dynasty. During the time of Hussein, Yazid bin Mu’awiya was de facto “king” of a now evolving Muslim military empire.

For Yazid, it was essential that the blood descendants of Muhammad, whom he saw as his own family’s historical enemies pledge allegiance to him. Yazid’s own grandfather was Abu Sufyan, the most notable enemy of the Prophet, who embraced Islam only after several battles with and severe persecution of the Muslims.

Hussein was a threat not only because he was the grandson of the Messenger of Islam but because he insisted on Yazid renouncing what he saw as the corrupt and cruel form of government that he believed had hijacked the pristine Islam of his holy grandfather.

Both parties refused to yield and Hussein, along with about 70 of his kith and kin (which included women and children), was besieged at Karbala where an unprecedented massacre occurred at the hands of an army numbering thousands.

During the 10-day siege, Hussein’s camp suffered unimaginable tortures, including the cutting off of water supplies and the killing and wounding of infants.

After losing his own children to Yazid’s forces, Hussein was himself beheaded and his body mutilated. The few who survived were taken on foot to Damascus (some dying along the way) where Yazid’s dungeons awaited them.

It is said that many bystanders along the route recognised what had happened and began to beat themselves, some even weeping to death. This event was probably the beginning of the self-flagellation rituals we see today.

More here.  [Thanks to Husain Naqvi.]

Germaine Greer in The Guardian:

Betty Friedan “changed the course of human history almost single-handedly”. Her ex-husband, Carl Friedan, believes this; Betty believed it too. This belief was the key to a good deal of Betty’s behaviour; she would become breathless with outrage if she didn’t get the deference she thought she deserved. Though her behaviour was often tiresome, I figured that she had a point. Women don’t get the respect they deserve unless they are wielding male-shaped power; if they represent women they will be called “love” and expected to clear up after themselves. Betty wanted to change that for ever. She wanted women to be a force to be reckoned with, and yet she let Carl Friedan have all the income from The Feminine Mystique. Or so she told me, sotto voce, in 1971. Something to do with community property, I guess. She was not yet divorced from him then.

My difficulties with Betty begin with the fact that, as I see it, it’s the three million readers of The Feminine Mystique that made the book great. Morever, I disagreed with its basic premise. Betty’s Zeitgeist was not mine. She had seen the alternative roles that women had fulfilled perfectly adequately during the war years closed to them, so they were forced to return to Kinder, Küche, Kirche. She contributed three children to the baby boom. That was the era of the New Look when hemlines dropped and waists were cinched and breasts were pushed out. According to Betty, what happened was that women’s sexuality was emphasised at the expense of all their other talents and attributes. What Betty saw as sexuality, I saw as the denial and repression of female sexuality. The Female Eunuch was conceived in reaction to The Feminine Mystique.

More here.

From Nature:

Ask any dinner-party palaeontologist and they’ll tell you that, despite its star turn in Jurassic Park, Tyrannosaurus rex didn’t live in the Jurassic period. But now a team in China has found a tyrannousaur that did, and it gives us valuable clues about the rise of this clan of prehistoric predators. The new species, found in Xinjiang province in northwestern China, lived around 160 million years ago. This makes it more than twice as old as T. rex, and the most primitive known member of the family.

At just 3 metres long, the creature is a small relative of T. rex, which could reach a mighty 13 metres. But its gaping, beak-like face armed with teeth, and its powerful legs, show that it too would have been a ferocious killer.

More here.

From GEO:

Yaum-e-Ashur, the 10th of Muharram-ul-Haraam, will be observed throughout the country today with religious reverence to commemorate the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain (RA).

The followers of Islam, while recalling the sacrifices rendered by the grandson of the Holy Prophet (SAW) for the cause of Islam, will reiterate their resolve to fight for the cause of justice.

The martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain (RA) is a guideline to the Muslims to fight for the cause of justice and not to surrender against the evil forces. During the last nine days, the faithful held special Majalis in almost all parts of the country, while the radio and TV channels telecast special programmes with a changed pattern to pay tributes to Hazrat Imam Hussain (RA).

More here.  [I will take a break from posting anything further today.]

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

more from Granta here.

And then the Vatican weighed in on the Danish cartoon freakshow that is now literally burning up Eurasia. “The right to freedom of thought and expression,” said the little city-state that could, “cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers.”

Cannot? Really? Uh, screw you, New Pope!

Who’d have thought World War III, the war between secular societies and theocratic ones, would have come to a roiling boil over a dinky Danish newspaper?

But last week, bat-shit crazy theists of all stripes, international policy suckjobbers, NGO lifers, and European and American publicist-trained politicians and their dumb-eyed lackeys together hit a wall with the international incident.

Instead of blaming imams who toured the Arab world with inflammatory material of unknown origin, instead of say, keeping their mouths shut, the only way politicos could find to weasel out of their troubles was by trashing the international free press.

more from the Morning News here.