Scott Appleby in The Immanent Frame:

During his landmark address to the world, delivered in Cairo last June, President Obama proposed to open a new era of engagement with “Muslim communities”—engagement, that is, not just with Muslim states or regimes, but also with other economically and politically influential social sectors, including religious groups, educational institutions, civic organizations, health care institutions, and youth affiliations.

In the hopes of accelerating the process of rethinking America’s attitude toward the Muslim word, The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has issued a Task Force Report (TFR), entitled “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy.” As co-chair of the task force (with Richard Cizik), which has been convening since the fall of 2008, I welcomed the president’s shrewd remarks about Islam, and I was pleased to work with the dozens of leaders in business, higher education, government, and media who signed the report, which was released today. Our hope is to build on the president’s ideas and explain why they apply not only to Islamic communities, but to religious communities more generally.

Three aspects of the approach sketched by Obama in Cairo are new, or at least newly placed front-and-center in American foreign policy. First is the administration’s willingness to see Islam (and, by extension, all transnational, globalizing religions) as a no-longer-ignorable “player of impact,” for both good and ill, in setting national and international agendas, ranging from the provision of health care to economic development and environmental sustainability to women’s rights, conflict resolution, and democratization. Second is the “for good” part of that formula. Even before 9/11, the agency of religious actors abroad has been perceived and framed primarily in terms of counterterrorism policy: how do we defeat Al-Qaeda and the Taliban? But this is just one part of the security and prosperity puzzle. The enormous constructive—or potentially constructive—roles of religious actors beyond our shores, while never formally denied by past administrations, have rarely been viewed as an asset to be developed. Oddly, for a religious nation such as ours, believers elsewhere have been seen as adversaries or obstacles, and not as partners.

How to build on this new awareness of religion? The TFR outlines the major elements of a comprehensive policy of constructive engagement with religions and religious actors abroad, indicating whom to engage, how to help them succeed, what vocabulary to use, and what the limits of such engagement are.

Going off-piste is about pursuing private passions. Mine include two eminent Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen, suitably whiskered, fond of wearing three-piece tweed suits and spats – although surely not together. They are seemingly the very antithesis of ardour and are more or less overlooked today: Alfred Edward Housman and Edward William Elgar. Last year marked the sesquicentenary of Housman’s birth, and it passed without pomp and circumstance; and notwithstanding the popularity of the tune of the same name at the Last Night of the Proms, few today associate Elgar with the piece. The two men originate from the same corner of the Welsh Marches where the counties of Shropshire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire meet, were born within a few miles of each other, and died at the same age. But as far as I can gather from the biographies I have devoured, they lived oblivious of each other. Sociology is obsessed with outsiders. As the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman once said, the discipline finds itself at home in the world of hipsters, drug addicts, jazz musicians, night people, drifters, grafters and skid-row denizens: “It prefers the offbeat to the familiar, the standpoint of the hip outsider to the dull insider.” I disagree, or at least I believe this no longer applies. It is not people on the margins of society who are more interesting but those who transgress its boundaries; those who do not fit because they transcend rather than live outside convention.

more from John D. Brewer at THE here.

Philip Hoare is best known for his biography of Noel Coward, but he turns his attention to a much grimmer subject than the follies of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” in “The Whale,” an eminently readable chronicle of the tragic interaction between humans and whales. Using Herman Melville’s life and “Moby-Dick” as touchstones, Hoare traces the whaling industry from its origins in 18th century New England to the present. Although the basic story of the near-extermination of the great whales is well known, the numbers Hoare cites are staggering. In the mid-18th century, more than 5,000 street lamps burned whale oil every night in London alone. Turning whales into oil, corset stays and scrimshaw was big business: “By 1833, seventy thousand souls and seventy million dollars were tied up in whaling and its associated crafts; ten years later that figure had nearly doubled. The United States exported a million gallons of oil to Europe each year.” Production on that scale decimated whale populations: more than 1 million sperm whales swam the world’s oceans in 1712; by the end of the 20th century 360,000 existed.

more from Charles Solomon at the LA Times here.

The mountain that John D’Agata is ostensibly concerned with in his slim but powerful new book, “About a Mountain,” is Yucca Mountain, located approximately 100 miles north of Las Vegas. And he’s not the only one interested in it: since the mid-1980s, the United States government has been doing back flips to bury the country’s entire reservoir of spent nuclear waste — some 77,000 tons of apocalyptic yumminess — deep inside Yucca. In the summer of 2002, the summer after D’Agata helped his mother move to a Vegas suburb, Congress was proceeding with plans to make the mountain a nuclear dump. Also that summer, 16-year-old Levi Presley jumped to his death from the observation deck of a third-rate Vegas hotel. These subjects, disparate though they are, animate D’Agata’s sprawling narrative. The author of a well-regarded book of essays and the editor of two exceptional essay anthologies, D’Agata has an encyclopedic understanding of the form’s intricate artistry. Moreover, he is a serious thinker who regularly lays down stylish, intelligent sentences: “I do not think that Yucca Mountain is a solution or a problem. I think that what I believe is that the mountain is where we are, it’s what we now have come to — a place that we have studied more thoroughly at this point than any other parcel of land in the world — and yet still it remains unknown, revealing only the fragility of our capacity to know.”

more from Charles Bock at the NYT here.

Fragile

I know these leaves
are not fragile,
but I'm alone
as I brush past them;
garbage in hand,
clear sky above
sharp with dawn.
The house is empty—
no socks on the floor,
no strands of hair in the tub,
just a few shreds
of cardboard from packing
and the fragile, faint
petal-soft
scent
of your missing soap.

by Christine Klocek-Lim

from How to Photograph the Heart
publisher: The Lives You Touch Publications, 2009

This is the second poem I've posted here of the poetry of Christine Klocek-Lim. Both are from a chapbook collection, How to Photograph the Heart. I like these poems. They're at the same time direct and nuanced. Her words are concise and lush, again at once. Her voice is clear. Her poems are grounded. To find out for yourself how full a little chapbook can be: just go here.

A S Byatt in The Guardian:

As a child, I think, I kept the Alice books in a different box in my brain from other books about imaginary children. I don't think they were read to me – there was “a war on”. I think I puzzled them out when I was about seven or eight, younger than ­Alice Liddell was on the famous “golden afternoon” in 1862 when she and her two sisters rowed from Folly Bridge, Oxford, to Godstow with the 30-year-old Lewis Carroll and his clerical friend Robinson Duckworth, and were told the first version of the story. A child reader's imagination inhabits the world of a book in many different ways, depending on the book. She walks deep into imaginary forests; she saves desperate beasts; she flirts with brave boys. The Harvard academic Maria Tatar has observed wisely that children do not usually “identify” with fictional children – they stand a little apart inside the fictional world and intensely observe the people and the action. But Wonderland and the world through the Looking Glass were, I always knew, different from other imagined worlds. Nothing could be changed, although things in the story were always changing. There was, so to speak, nothing going on in the hinterland of the clearing with the Mad Hatter's tea party, or beyond the Red Queen's garden gate. Carroll moves his readers as he moves chess pieces and playing cards. This is not to say that the reader's experience of the world is not vivid, enthralling and ­entirely memorable. It is just different.

More here.

Daisy Rockwell in Chapati Mystery:

The quote at the beginning of this post is from the novel Home Products (Picador India, 2007), by Amitava Kumar, which will be published in the US in July 2010 under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing. I first heard this excerpt, along with other sections of the novel, presented as part of a year-long lecture series on ‘the city’ as a unit of study. Kumar’s lecture was the final presentation of what had been a series of buzz-word-heavy talks dealing exclusively with issues surrounding the ‘mega-city’—massive metropolises such as Bombay, Hong Kong and São Paolo. Kumar’s lecture itself was titled “Lights, Karma, Action: Report from Bombay.” As the series had progressed, I had been perplexed at the lack of attention being paid to all the lesser cities of the world, the also-rans, where millions of people live, but one can’t find a good wild-mushroom risotto for love nor money. I settled in for this final talk with low expectations: another afternoon, another trip to Bombay.

The lecture was, from the start, a surprise, as it was not a lecture at all, but a reading of a work of fiction. I kept waiting for the story to stop and the dry dissection to begin, but it never did. And what I, along with the rest of audience no doubt, had assumed would be a “report from Bombay” to us, the audience sitting in a lecture hall at a major research university in the United States, was instead a report from Bombay to Patna, the capital of Bihar. This change in direction was shocking and destabilizing, as we reversed direction to travel instead from mega-city to provincial city.

More here.

Jamal Juma in Electronic Intifada:

Six years ago, we were busy preparing for the start of the hearings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. The world's highest court was to decide on the legal consequences of Israel's wall in the occupied West Bank, which together with the network of settlements, military zones and Jewish-only roads annexes around 46 percent of Palestinian West Bank land. The court's decision, months later, was clear: Israel's wall is illegal, it needs to be torn down and the international community has an obligation to ensure that it is dismantled.

A victory? Not quite. Until today, neither foreign governments nor the UN have joined the Palestinian communities who have been destroyed by Israel's wall in their efforts to dismantle it. Still, Palestinian villages show incredible perseverance and creativity in protesting the theft of their land and tearing down pieces of the cement blocks or iron fencing. They do so in the face of overwhelming repression.

The year 2004, when the court was deliberating the case, marked the first wave of repression aimed at the grassroots movement mobilizing against the wall. The key features of the Israeli attacks consisted of killings, mass injuries, arrests and collective punishment measures such as curfews, the closing of access to the villages protesting the wall and the denial of permits for farmers and workers to reach their jobs and lands beyond the wall or the “green line,” the internationally-recognized boundary between Israel and the occupied West Bank. The villages in northwest Jerusalem bore the brunt of Israeli violence.

Today the movement against the apartheid wall is once again in the crosshairs of Israeli repression.

More here.

Our own Justin E. H. Smith has unearthed much information about yesterday's video. From Justin's blog:

The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil', or, better yet, Эдуард Хиль. According to his Russian Wikipedia page, Hill was born in Smolensk in 1934, and finished his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1960. By 1974 he had been named a People's Artist of the USSR, and in 1981 he was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples. He is best known for his interpretations of the songs of the Soviet composer, Arkadii Ostrovskii. As for the peculiar name, I could find no information, but imagine that he is descended from the English elite that had established itself in western Russian cities by the 17th century. He is not a defector of the Lee Harvey Oswald generation. He is entirely Russian.

The song he is interpreting, “I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home,” is an Ostrovskii composition, and it is meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, that is to say sung, but without words. I have seen a number of comments online, ever since a flurry of interest in Hill began just a few days ago, to the effect that this routine must have been meant as a critique of Soviet censorship, but in fact vokaliz was a well established genre, one that seems close in certain respects to pantomime.

Recent interest in Hill has to do with the perceived strangeness, the uncanniness, the surreal character of this performance. There is indeed something uncanny about a lip-synch to a song with no words, and his waxed face and hair helmet certainly do not carry over well. But once one does a bit of research, one learns that the number was not conceived out of some desire to cater to the so-bad-it's-good tastes of the Western YouTube generation, but in fact was meant to please –to genuinely please– Soviet audiences who were capable of placing this routine, this man, and this song into a familiar context. The audiences would recognize, for example, that the same number had been performed by the Azerbaidzhani singer Muslim Magomaev in a film from the early 1960s, The Blue Spark:

More here.

Martin Luther King Jr. in The Nation:

From 1961 to 1966, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an annual essay for The Nation on the state of civil rights and race relations in America. This article originally appeared in the March 15, 1965, issue.

When 1963 came to a close, more than a few skeptical voices asked what substantial progress had been achieved through the demonstrations that had drawn more than a million Negroes into the streets. By the close of 1964, the pessimistic clamor was stilled by the music of major victories. Taken together, the two years marked a historic turning point for the civil rights movement; in the previous century no comparable change for the Negro had occurred. Now, even the most cynical acknowledged that at Birmingham, as at Concord, a shot had been fired that was heard around the world.

Before examining 1964 in greater depth, some comment is necessary on the events currently unfolding in Alabama. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act and with the defeat of Barry Goldwater, there was widespread expectation that barriers would disintegrate with swift inevitability. This easy optimism could not survive the first test. In the hard-core states of the South, while some few were disposed to accommodate, the walls remained erect and reinforced. That was to be expected, for the basic institutions of government, commerce, industry and social patterns in the South all rest upon the embedded institution of segregation. Change is not accomplished by peeling off superficial layers when the causes are rooted deeply in the heart of the organism.

Those who expected a cheap victory in a climate of complacency were shocked into reality by Selma and Marion, Ala. In Selma, the position was implacable resistance. At one point, ten times as many Negroes were in jail as were on the registration rolls. Out of 15,000 eligible to vote, less than 350 were registered.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Abbas Raza)

It’s also—praise God—small. The Biennial has finally been pared down to a manage-able 55 artists. It is not visually assaultive; it gives all the art room to breathe, whereupon you realize how bombastic most such shows are. The 2010 Biennial is anti-blockbuster. It avoids razzmatazz, star power, and high production. It’s more like a medium-size group show than a big museum smorgasbord. It isn’t New York–centric, youth obsessed, or drawn mainly from a coterie of high-powered New York galleries. It is quiet. The art world has clamored for these things for years, and people should cheer this show. They probably won’t, though. By now it’s clear that there is no such thing as a “good biennial,” that the form itself is bound to generate a mixed bag. This time, the clunkers are the bland placeholders. Too much of the two-dimensional work either recaps ideas about craft and abstraction in generic ways or touches on issues of identity without saying anything. But the unexpected curatorial choices outnumber the banal. I love that, instead of encountering a huge installation in front of the giant fourth-floor window, we see Richard Aldrich’s tiny abstract voodoo doll. Huma Bhabha’s Giacometti-esque sculpture of decaying gods stands almost directly below Sharon Hayes’s videos of someone trying to listen very hard: Does she hear them? Or that the self-reflective, formalistic films and photos of Babette Mangolte are given an entire room, and thus form one of the beating hearts of this show. This veteran artist’s obsessive examinations of what it means to make and display art, her investigations into seemingly outmoded ideas of modernism and presentation, and the ways these things make visible the self are touchstones for much of the work in this show.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

My first perception of Borges is Borges himself. In other words: I see Borges. Let me explain. I must be nine or ten and I’m walking my uncle, who’s in his twenties, along the pedestrian Calle Florida in Buenos Aires. I say that I’m walking my uncle because my uncle is blind. My uncle hoped to become a great painter. During his adolescence he’d won important scholarships and prizes, but he went blind from juvenile diabetes, and at this point – he doesn’t know it, but he senses it – he has two or three or four years left to live. So we’re walking and suddenly someone says, ‘There’s Borges,’ and I look and I see Borges and I say to my uncle, ‘There’s Borges.’ Borges is coming toward us and he, too, is on the arm of a friend or a fan and then my blind uncle – who was the humorous type, wickedly funny – shouts ‘Borges! How are you? You look great.’ And Borges turns his unseeing gaze on the precise spot from which the voice of my blind uncle issues and reaches him and the two of them look at each other without seeing each other, and there I am, in between, unable to believe what I’m seeing.

more from Rodrigo Fresán at Granta here.

We’ve all heard the trope that wine is an everyday pleasure, that there are so many interesting, authentic wines under $20. Yet so many people still ignore this notion, still remain intimidated by wine — or else approach wine as a luxury to be acquired, a foe to be conquered, or a scientific puzzle to be methodically solved. I want to weed out the so-called “luxury” experiences that don’t deliver, and seek out the ones that do. I want to tell stories about wines from lesser-known regions and grape varietals, as well as values from well-known producers. I want to talk about wine as an idea, rather than as a status symbol. Beyond the quality-price ratio, I want to explore wine as a legitimate plank of the humanities, worthy of the highest sort of criticism. A good value wine offers us an experience similar to that of a book or a film or an art exhibition. Tasting wine, then, becomes no different from study in any of the other humanities — reading works of Russian literature or looking at German Expressionist paintings or listening to Rigoletto. It goes without saying that you don’t have to be rich to enjoy those cultural activities. I believe it’s the same with the wine. That’s what this column will be about.

more from Jason Wilson at The Smart Set here.

My Mother's Sari

There, in the wooden box
my mother's sari, enveloped in white muslin,
with mothballs.

Her sense of order is in each one
of its folds,
and the press of her palm.
A universe of ironing lies beneath the pillow.
Tiny packets of camphor, incense and
fragrant roots –
her perfume.

My mother's sari's tucked-in eagerness
coupled with the jingling of bangles
is the zest to get down to work.

Lines running across the broad pallu,
the unbroken bridges of an upright life,
keeping all evil at bay –
a cane to reprove naughty children.

Folds tucked into a knot,
a mysterious treasure-house of meanings,
the pretty yellow Madhura sari
with its green border of blooms . . .
. . . that queen was perhaps like my mother.
Read more »

From The Telegraph:

On the evening of March 1 1983, Arthur Koestler sat down opposite his wife Cynthia in their Knightsbridge sitting room, swallowed a handful of sleeping tablets washed down with brandy and wine, and waited to die. It was the end of an extraordinary journey that had taken him from the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to British-occupied Palestine, Weimar Germany, the Spanish Civil War, the French Foreign Legion, George Orwell’s London and California at the height of flower power. To his admirers he was one of the greatest writers of the modern age, a brave, lonely man who had dared speak truth to power. And yet, even in death a shadow hung over him for, as Koestler’s friends were horrified to discover, Cynthia, then just 55 and in good health, had killed herself alongside him. As everyone knew, she was totally under her husband’s thumb, and their friend Julian Barnes was not alone in wondering: “Did he bully her into it?”

At once melodramatic, moving and disturbing, Koestler’s passing was typical of the man. Although he is best remembered today as the author of one of the 20th century’s most influential novels, Darkness at Noon, even he would surely have admitted that his own life story was too implausible for fiction. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, he was a shy, nervous boy who shocked his parents by dropping out of university, converting to Zionism and disappearing to Palestine, where he tried (and failed) to join a kibbutz and eventually wangled a job as Middle Eastern correspondent for a German newspaper empire. By 1931, he was well regarded enough to be picked as the chain’s correspondent on board the Graf Zeppelin’s pioneering flight over the North Pole. And if his odyssey had ended there, it would make an entertainingly unlikely story.

More here.

Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books Blog:

“Identity” is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses. In Britain, the mandarins of New Labour—not satisfied with installing more closed-circuit surveillance cameras than any other democracy—have sought (so far unsuccessfully) to invoke the “war on terror” as an occasion to introduce mandatory identity cards. In France and the Netherlands, artificially stimulated “national debates” on identity are a flimsy cover for political exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment—and a blatant ploy to deflect economic anxiety onto minority targets. In Italy, the politics of identity were reduced in December 2009 to house-to-house searches in the Brescia region for unwanted dark faces as the municipality shamelessly promised a “white Christmas.”

In academic life, the word has comparably mischievous uses. Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: “gender studies,” “women’s studies,” “Asian-Pacific-American studies,” and dozens of others. The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves—thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.

As so often, academic taste follows fashion. These programs are byproducts of communitarian solipsism: today we are all hyphenated—Irish-Americans, Native Americans, African-Americans, and the like. Most people no longer speak the language of their forebears or know much about their country of origin, especially if their family started out in Europe. But in the wake of a generation of boastful victimhood, they wear what little they do know as a proud badge of identity: you are what your grandparents suffered. In this competition, Jews stand out. Many American Jews are sadly ignorant of their religion, culture, traditional languages, or history. But they do know about Auschwitz, and that suffices.

More here.

Megan McArdle in The Atlantic:

A couple of years back, I learned that an adult I had grown up around was a pedophile. He had never, to anyone's knowledge, done anything about it. Certainly he was never anything but decent to me, and I babysat his kids when I was a pretty young kid myself. Rather, a technician mucking around on his work computer had discovered a stash of child porn. He went to jail for a while. His life was destroyed.

This changed a lot of the way that I think about pedophiles. I used to use the kind of hyperbole one often hears–that people who look at child porn “should be shot” and so forth. I don't say those things any more.

Obviously, I am not going to defend the use of child porn at all; it's despicable, and jail is the appropriate sentence, because the man who purchases child pornography is encouraging its manufacture. But it made me think of them for the first time with sympathy. They didn't choose to be like this–God, who would? Sex is one of the most powerful drives we have, and as Dan Savage's columns testify every week, we have little control whether it focuses on something relatively normal, or something . . . um . . . extremely statistically unlikely.

What do you do when your sex drive is channeled towards something so utterly morally wrong–something it is socially taboo to even think about, that you can't help thinking about?

More here.

Chris Wilson in Slate:

The war in Iraq will always be remembered for the failures of intelligence that preceded it and the insurgency that bedeviled coalition forces long after President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations. Amid all that disaster, the capture of Saddam Hussein has become a forgotten success story. It's an accomplishment that wasn't inevitable… I'll explain how a handful of innovative American soldiers used the same theories that underpin Facebook to hunt down Saddam Hussein. I'll also look at how this hunt was a departure in strategy for the military, why its techniques aren't deployed more often, and why social-networking theory hasn't helped us nab Osama Bin Laden.

In the war's early days, coalition forces raced through the deck of the cards. By May 1, 2003, when President George W. Bush stood beneath that infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner, 15 of the men on the cards had surrendered or been captured. Coalition troops bagged another 12 top targets in May, including one of Saddam's sons-in-law. But despite snagging all those high-profile detainees, the trail to Saddam—if he was alive—was not getting any warmer. And when the military did catch someone important, he usually wasn't much help.

More here.