remembering ellsworth kelly
Kelly’s Minimalism, such as it is, isn’t doctrinaire, reasonable, on-message. Instead his huge shaped canvases cohere in more subjective space where the mind and eye play with forms, creating larger circles — systems that might not make sense — forming arcing edges or extended long slopping lines into exotic configurations that feel very much part of the world, almost architectural. Kelly’s work exists at some metaphysical-visual junction where we are in immediate contact with the medium of painting itself — its formal characteristics and uncertainties — morphologies of shape, overexposed light, mathematics, form and fragments, power, and the emancipatory openness of the eye. He gives permission to just love color, prettiness, the miracle of chromatic intensities — for themselves and the sensations that seem inherent, internal, part of form itself. It's hard to overstate just how radical this prettiness is when it comes to modernism and the ways it often comes with backstory, theory, rationale. Kelly makes us revel in something as simple as a large monochrome floating painting and see it not only as a crack into meaning, but also as something that has attained an almost inviolate foreverness. Not one of his works ever seems old to me. Instead I see enclosed Edens; cosmic geometry.
more here.
a glimpse into 17th-century china
On a cold, wet day in January 2008, Robert Batchelor decided to take a peek at a map in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, an old and venerable collection founded in 1602 and filled with arcane treasures. Anyone who has ever used the library may recall the oath that all readers are required to take (formerly in Latin, but nowadays in English, I think) not to remove, deface, or injure any of the library’s books, let alone bring in any fire or kindle one—a great temptation in a library originally devoid of any artificial heating source, especially for a generation that had just discovered the lure of Virginia tobacco. Batchelor, a historian of Britain and Asia, was about to fly back to the United States, where he teaches at Georgia Southern University, but this unusual item—“A very odd mapp of China. Very large, & taken from Mr. Selden’s”—beckoned. With the help of the Bodleian’s curator of Chinese collections, David Helliwell, he retrieved it from the bowels of the library. The map was in a fragile, indeed ruinous state, disintegrating on the stiff linen backing that had deformed it during a botched preservation job a century earlier. Helliwell would later recall that he had seen the map before, but without recognizing its full import. Batchelor was enchanted and enthralled. Here was a hand-painted map of East Asia and parts of Southeast Asia and India that raised a myriad of interesting questions.
Housed in the Bodleian since 1659, the map had previously belonged to an English lawyer named John Selden (1584–1654), who, in a codicil to his 1653 will, singled it out as a prized possession: “a Mapp of China made there fairly and done in colloure together with a Sea Compasse of their making and Devisione taken both by an englishe commander.” The 2008 rediscovery inspired a great deal of speculation about how the map had arrived at the Bodleian, and who had made it.
more here.
What’s great about Goethe?
To get a sense of how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe dominates German literature, we would have to imagine a Shakespeare known to the last inch—a Shakespeare squared or cubed. Goethe’s significance is only roughly indicated by the sheer scope of his collected works, which run to a hundred and forty-three volumes. Here is a writer who produced not only some of his language’s greatest plays but hundreds of major poems of all kinds—enough to keep generations of composers supplied with texts for their songs. Now consider that he also wrote three of the most influential novels in European literature, and a series of classic memoirs documenting his childhood and his travels, and essays on scientific subjects ranging from the theory of colors to the morphology of plants.
Then, there are several volumes of his recorded table talk, more than twenty thousand extant letters, and the reminiscences of the many visitors who met him throughout his sixty-year career as one of Europe’s most famous men. Finally, Goethe accomplished all this while simultaneously working as a senior civil servant in the duchy of Weimar, where he was responsible for everything from mining operations to casting actors in the court theatre. If he hadn’t lived from 1749 to 1832, safely into the modern era and the age of print, but had instead flourished when Shakespeare did, there would certainly be scholars today theorizing that the life and work of half a dozen men had been combined under Goethe’s name.
more here.
Unraveling the Ties of Altitude, Oxygen and Lung Cancer
George Johnson in The New York Times:
A paper published last year in the journal PeerJ plumbed the question to new depths and arrived at an intriguing explanation. The higher you live, the thinner the air, so maybe oxygen is a cause of lung cancer. Oxygen cannot compete with cigarettes, of course, but the study suggests that if everyone in the United States moved to the alpine heights of San Juan County, Colo. (population: 700), there would be 65,496 fewer cases of lung cancer each year. This idea didn’t appear out of the blue. A connection between lung cancer and altitude was proposed as early as 1982. Five years later, other researchers suggested that oxygen might be the reason.
More here.
Monday, January 25, 2016
Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, 1920 – 2016
A great man and one of the most significant figures in the history of Pakistan has just died. I consider it my great fortune that I came to know him and the idea of a world without him in it is quite unbearable. Here is what I wrote about him more than 10 years ago on 3QD:
The first time that I met Sahabzada Yaqub Khan about six years ago, he was in Washington and New York as part of a tour of four or five countries (America, Russia, China, Japan, etc.) relations with which are especially important to Pakistan. He had come as President Musharraf's special envoy to reassure these governments in the wake of the fall of the kleptocratic shambles that was Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's so-called democratic government. Samad Khan, or Sammy K as he is affectionately known to friends, invited me over to his apartment to meet his Dad. I had heard and read much about Sahabzada Yaqub and knew his reputation for fierce intellect and even more intimidating, had heard reports of his impatience with and inability to suffer fools, so I was nervous when I walked in. Over the next couple of hours I was blown away: Sahabzada Yaqub was not much interested in talking about politics, and instead, asked about my doctoral studies in philosophy. It was soon apparent that he had read widely and deeply in the subject, and knew quite a bit about the Anglo-American analytic philosophy I had spent the previous five years reading. He even asked some pointed questions about aspects of philosophy which even some graduate students in the field might not know about, much less laymen. Though we were interrupted by a series of phone calls from the likes of Henry Kissinger wanting to pay their respects while Sahabzada Yaqub was in town, we managed to talk not just about philosophy, but also physics (he wanted to know more about string theory), Goethe (SYK explained some of his little-known scientific work, in addition to quoting and then explicating some difficult passages from Faust), the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and Urdu literature, of which Sahabzada Yaqub has been a lifelong devotee.
More here.
Old Friends
by Brooks Riley
It may seem insulting to my living friends that I find myself revisiting the inanimate ones to try to understand their place in my personal pantheon. Friendship may even be the wrong word for the acquaintance one makes with a work of art. But the attraction is there, just as we are attracted to the singular mix of attributes of a person whom one knows will become a friend. The first time I saw my best friend, it was not in person, but in a thumbnail photograph of her among hundreds, of incoming freshmen at college. There was nothing unusual about that face, but there was a quality I noticed, something ineffable. When I later met that freshman, I recognized her immediately.
I was probably 14 or 15 years old when I first saw the Manet painting. Walking into the gallery where it hung, I was immediately drawn to it. From a distance, it was the dynamism within the frame, the chiaroscuro 20-degree angle slashed across the wide canvas from upper left to lower right, that made me want to move closer. It was also the proto-cinematic framing, heralding the 1.85:1 aspect ratio of modern cinema. The angle was formed by the body of a dead bullfighter, the only event in an otherwise nearly blank, dark canvas with little context. His head, upside down, is closest to us. His feet lie at the other end of the perspective.
Monday Poem
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Solar Filaments
the sun's intense but placid
teasing this morning’s fog from the river,
at least from this vantage, sitting as we are
at a perfect distance from its orange firebox
safe from its arcing solar filaments,
the eruptions which suddenly uncoil like snakes
and would reduce me to cinders
with their dragon breath if not for
certain equations like those that render orbits
and the change of state that gives
this river its gray vapor coat
in which it rides its way to the sea
under the cool red blast furnace blaze
of clouds caught in the cup of two slopes
behind the phone pole’s tangle of wires
to the sound of water over the dam
speaking familiar alien tongues,
and footsteps curiously synced to my pace,
and the rhythmic exhalation
of my fog-spilling lungs
.
by Jim Culleny
1/19/15
‘Made-in-India Othello Fellows’: Indian Adaptations of Othello
by Claire Chambers
I recently wrote an essay for Dawn on general postcolonial rewritings of Shakespeare's Othello. For the present column, I turn to 
In her essay '”Filmi” Shakespeare', Poonam Trivedi defies accusations of 'bardolatry' and colonial cultural cringe to trace the history of Shakespeare on the Indian big screen. She shows that this history goes back to 1935 and Sohrab Modi's Khoon-ka Khoon, a cinematic rendering of an Indian stage version of Hamlet. Because the British colonizers laid emphasis on an English literary education for the Indians over whom they ruled, there were many filmic adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. Hamlet's blend of politics and metaphysical mystery seems to have proven the most popular of the Bard's plays for Indian auteurs. These directors, according to Trivedi, in the early days of Indian cinema found themselves between the rock of leaving Shakespeare 'pure and pristine' or the hard place of making him entirely 'bowdlerized and indigenized'. By the mid-twentieth century, the most successful adaptations relocated the plays to India in their entirety. Directors 'used' rather than 'abused' the Shakespearean originals, taking ideas from their plots and themes rather than critically writing back to the plays.
The Bengali film Saptapadhi was in 1961 probably the first to namecheck Othello. In it, a pair of starcrossed lovers − a Brahmin boy 
Perceptions
Agnes Denes. Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan. 1982
“Two acres of wheat planted and harvested by the artist on the Battery Park landfill, Manhattan, Summer 1982. After months of preparations, in May 1982, a 2-acre wheat field was planted on a landfill in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty. Two hundred truckload of dirt were brought in and 285 furrows were dug by hand and cleared of rocks and garbage. The seeds were sown by hand adn the furrows covered with soil. the field was maintained for four months, cleared of wheat smut, weeded, fertilized and sprayed against mildew fungus, and an irrigation system set up. the crop was harvested on August 16 and yielded over 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat”
Some free-form musings on the Star Wars phenomenon
by Yohan J. John
I had two reasons to watch the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, as soon as I was able. Firstly, I knew that despite all the talk of spoiler warnings and respect for “the fans”, I would have to basically avoid the internet until I managed to see it. (There's always some kill-joy on your facebook feed who gets a kick out of giving it all away, or an oaf who does not know what a spoiler is.) Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted to join in the conversation. One of the great things about a pop cultural juggernaut (such as Star Wars, Pope Francis, or the FIFA World Cup) is that a lot of people —friends, family, strangers in bars, members of the chatterati — will be talking about it. Pop cultural mega-events are like Rorschach tests: whether we enjoy them or not, we feel the urge to project onto them our emotions, our theories, our politics, our ideals. By virtue of their popularity, these events bring us together and draw our attention to a common focal point, at which point we can share our projections with each other.
In his book Finite and Infinite Games, James P Carse defines finite games as those that are played for the purpose of bringing play to an end. Infinite games, by contrast, are played “for the purpose of continuing the play”. When we think about games we typically think about the finite sort: their end goal is some victory or end state, at which point the game is over. Wars take the form of a finite game — they aim to bring an end to the adversary's 'play'. Debates takes this form too; their goal is to silence the opponent. A scathing critical review is meant to remove a work of art from the field of aesthetic play. But real conversations, by contrast, are infinite games. Their goal is to enlighten and entertain all the participants. A conversation is an occasion not only to look at a topic, but also to look through a topic, treating it as a prism that can be pointed at self, other, and world. A good conversation never comes to a definitive end; it is simply held in abeyance for a time, to be revisited later or carried on by new participants. The road goes ever on.
What follows are some impressions gleaned from the Star Wars Conversation, and some ideas for how we might carry on the infinite play and entice more people to join in. I'm not sure this will add up to a coherent essay, so feel free to skim, as you would a listicle or an annotated reading list. And by all means, contribute to the conversation in the comments section.
CATSPEAK
by Brooks Riley
Poem
Childhood
A Version after Iqbal
Earth & sky were new realms for me
My mother’s embrace the world
If anyone made me weep, I found
Comfort in rattling the door chain
O to gaze for hours at the moon
Journeying silently amidst clouds
Above mountains & deserts
Astonished at the blend of truth & lies
I trained my eyes to see, lips to move
My heart yearned
Translated from the original Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari whose collection ‘In Another Country’ is available here.
The Big Chill—The Missing Publishers
by Gail Pellett
The books published by Mighty Current had survived in the lively Hong Kong book market for two decades while being banned in China. They were particularly popular with mainland day tourists visiting Hong Kong. Now their popular bookstore is closed and the press is shut. Like any troubling story there are complexities and mysteries.
On Dec. 30, Lee Bo, one of Gui's business partners in the publishing company, suddenly disappeared as well. Lee and his wife owned the bookstore that sold their publications. Soon after disappearing Lee made a strange communication to his wife from Shenzhen that he was “working on an investigation.” His wife noted that he had left his passport at home. A passport he would need to enter Mainland China from Hong Kong. Lee Bo is a British citizen.
Last weekend, Sunday, Jan. 17, Gui, who is a naturalized Swedish citizen, suddenly showed up on CCTV —China's official TV network—confessing tearfully that he had violated his probation back in China for a drunken driving accident in 2003 that had ended in a fatality. Hong Kong based China watchers were quick to point out the edits in the video as revealed by the fact that Gui‘s t-shirt changed color mid-way.
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Pakistan’s Unnecessary Martyrs
Mohammed Hanif in the New York Times:
A month before that, Pakistan marked the first anniversary of the Army Public School attacks in Peshawar, where more than 140 people, the vast majority of them students, were slaughtered by the Taliban. Most were in their early teens. Never again, we said then. Parliament gave the military all the powers it wanted, and Pakistanis vowed to eliminate the killers of our children.
We marked the anniversary by honoring the dead and giving memorial shields to their parents. We put lots of flowers and candles around the young students’ pictures. Newscasters on television dressed up in the school’s uniform to express solidarity. The Pakistani Army’s public relations department released a music video with students waving flags and raising fists. The singing students pledged not only to defeat the Taliban, but also to educate the enemy’s children in revenge.
The army, however, did not answer the one question the parents of the dead students have been asking for more than a year: Who is responsible for the security of the children in a school managed by the army itself? Instead it released slickly edited music videos.
This year was declared the year that terror will end. Safe havens have been bombed into oblivion. Terrorists have been hanged and the rest are waiting for their turn, we are told. Hours after the attack in Charsadda, the Pakistani Army’s spokesman told the nation that Operation Zarb-e-Azb, its sweeping antiterrorism campaign, has been a success and the “results are there for everyone to see.”
Security experts, a group likely to find a silver lining in hell, say that the Taliban are targeting schools because these are soft targets – and that this is proof the Taliban have been weakened and can no longer attack cantonments or airports. Apparently, we are supposed to take solace in the slaughter of our children because our cantonments and airports are safe.
More here.
The feral chickens of Kauai provide a unique opportunity to study what happens when domesticated animals escape and evolve
Ewen Callaway in Nature:
The chickens have every reason to distrust Henriksen and her colleague, evolutionary geneticist Dominic Wright, who have travelled to the island from Linköping University in Sweden armed with traps, drones, thermal cameras and a mobile molecular-biology lab to study the birds.
As the two try to act casual by their rented car, a jet-black hen with splashes of iridescent green feathers pecks its way along a trail of bird feed up to a device called a goal trap. Wright tugs at a string looped around his big toe and a spring-loaded net snaps over the bird. After a moment of stunned silence, the hen erupts into squawking fury.
Opaekaa Falls, like much of Kauai, is teeming with feral chickens — free-ranging fowl related both to the domestic breeds that lay eggs or produce meat for supermarket shelves and to a more ancestral lineage imported to Hawaii hundreds of years ago.
These modern hybrids inhabit almost every corner of the island, from rugged chasms to KFC car parks. They have clucked their way into local lore and culture and are both beloved and reviled by Kauai's human occupants. Biologists, however, see in the feral animals an improbable experiment in evolution: what happens when chickens go wild?
More here.
Cancer and Climate Change
Piers J. Sellers in the New York Times:
This diagnosis puts me in an interesting position. I’ve spent much of my professional life thinking about the science of climate change, which is best viewed through a multidecadal lens. At some level I was sure that, even at my present age of 60, I would live to see the most critical part of the problem, and its possible solutions, play out in my lifetime. Now that my personal horizon has been steeply foreshortened, I was forced to decide how to spend my remaining time. Was continuing to think about climate change worth the bother?
After handling the immediate business associated with the medical news — informing family, friends, work; tidying up some finances; putting out stacks of unread New York Times Book Reviews to recycle; and throwing a large “Limited Edition” holiday party, complete with butlers, I had some time to sit at my kitchen table and draw up the bucket list.
Very quickly, I found out that I had no desire to jostle with wealthy tourists on Mount Everest, or fight for some yardage on a beautiful and exclusive beach, or all those other things one toys with on a boring January afternoon. Instead, I concluded that all I really wanted to do was spend more time with the people I know and love, and get back to my office as quickly as possible.
More here.
These Unusual American Ants Never Get Old
Marcus Woo in Smithsonian:
Like the naked mole rat, ants are social creatures that usually live in highly organized colonies. It's this social complexity that makes P. dentata useful for studying aging in people, says Giraldo, now at the California Institute of Technology. Humans are also highly social, a trait that has been connected to healthier aging. By contrast, most animal studies of aging use mice, worms or fruit flies, which all lead much more isolated lives. “Maybe the social component could be important,” she says. “This could be a really exciting system to understand the neurobiology of aging.”
More here.
Ending Syria’s Atrocities Is a Prerequisite to Ending Its War
Ken Roth at Human Rights Watch:
In October in Vienna, the main foreign actors in the war, including Russia, adopted guiding principles for the talks. They speak of the eventual defeat of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS) “and other terrorist groups,” maintenance of Syria’s prewar borders, and the protection of minority groups and state institutions.
Yet major points of dispute remain, and the Vienna principles outline no plan to build the trust among the warring parties needed to facilitate difficult compromises. Diplomacy will not be enough if the warring parties continue the attacks on civilians and other atrocities that are driving Syrians apart.
The war has continued for so long in part because both the Syrian government and the armed groups aligned against it believed that they could prevail militarily. Russia’s entry into the war may have helped to dispel those illusions. Its airpower has been enough to bolster the Syrian government against collapse but not to make significant progress against the opposition. Meanwhile, the rise of ISIS and its demonstrated ability to attack in Europe, as well as the mass exodus of Syrian refugees, have led many external actors to renew their push for a political compromise. They hope to encourage their Syrian allies to fight ISIS and other extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra rather than each other.
More here.