This is from 2008, but it’s a good speech:
J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.
Wednesday Poem
A well-turned interpretation in the mind of a narcissist
may end in a long walk off a short pier.
— Anon.
Nero’s Term
Nero was not worried when he heard
the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle.
“Let him fear the seventy three years.”
He still had ample time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty. More than sufficient
is the term the god allots him
to prepare for future perils.
Now he will return to Rome slightly tired,
but delightfully tired from this journey,
full of days of enjoyment —
at the theaters, the gardens, the gymnasia…
evenings at cities of Achaia…
Ah the delight of nude bodies, above all…
Thus fared Nero. And in Spain Galba
secretly assembles and drills his army,
the old man of seventy three.
by Constantine P Cavafy
from The Complete Poems of Cavafy;
Harcort Brace, 1961
Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim
Our own Asad Raza spent the last year producing this Tino Sehgal show which is currently at the Guggenheim in New York. In an email about the New York Times review (below), Asad [shown in photo here] writes:
I think Holland Cotter got it pretty well. We are, I think, doing something, reaching so many people in their subjective particularity rather than as a mass audience, on a scale that no one has ever done before, which took lot of homework–in addition to finding and training all the people and organizing everyone and everything, we were running computer models, studying how it would work with thousands of people a day–we had 3753 people on saturday! Tino said to me the other night, as we were sitting alone talking over the next day, that this scale is way beyond anything he's ever done. It really is a big operation.
Holland Cotter writes about the show in the New York Times:
It begins when you walk a short way up the rotunda ramp. A child comes over to greet you. My greeter, a girl of 9 or 10, introduced herself as Giuliana and stated matter-of-factly, “This is a piece by Tino Sehgal.” She invited me to follow her and asked if she could ask me a question. “What is progress?” I gave a broad answer, then at her request, a clarifying example. We went further up the ramp.
Soon we were joined by a young man, a teenager, who said his name was Will. Giuliana carefully and accurately paraphrased for him my response to her question and slipped away. I walked on with Will, who commented on my comments on progress, which prompted me to try to refine my initial thoughts.
About halfway up the rotunda, Will was replaced by Tom, whom I took to be in his mid-30s and who introduced a new topic.
He had read a scientific report that morning saying that dinosaurs, long envisioned as drab-gray and green, might have been brightly colored, even gaudily striped. We had both, we said, been fascinated by dinosaurs as kids, as was his young son today. And now everyone would have to reimagine them, though artists already had done that. So Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” turns out to be natural history. Art beats science to the punch.
As we neared the last stretch of the ramp, Tom handed me over to Bob, who was, like me, in late middle age and who broached another topic. He had just returned from Bulgaria where he had talked with a range of people over 20 about their feelings about the state of their country and lives. He found, he said, a pervasive nostalgia for life under Communism, a yearning for a society that promised to take care of everyone.
More here.
Culture-Changing Genius
Christopher Lydon in conversation over at Open Source:
Terry Teachout’s fine reconsideration of the man called “Pops” solidifies Louis Armstrong’s standing as not just the greatest horn player since the angel Gabriel, but an all-transforming artist at the level of James Joyce or even Shakespeare, and a black American freedom fighter of character and conscience, too. Louis Armstrong’s power to astonish was never in doubt. Hoagy Carmichael, the songwriter of “Stardust” and “Georgia,” dropped his cigarette and gulped his drink the first time he heard Louis, barely out of his teens, in 1921. “Why,” Hoagy moaned, “isn’t everybody in the world listening to that?” Over the next 50 years the whole world heard Louis, and marveled, but there were always questions, too: Could honky-tonk music from red-light New Orleans get standing, really, with Schubert and Bach? Was Louis in artistic decline after the Twenties? Was he an Uncle Tom in all that Satchelmouth clowning?
All the modern answers as Terry Teachout documents them are over the top now in favor of Louis Armstrong. Listen to the testimonies his fellow horn players Ruby Braff and Wynton Marsalis gave me on Louis’s legendary centennial, July 4, 1900: that if Louis wasn’t actually God, he was at least proof of God. His grandeur, complexity and consistency as man and artist seem now beyond question. Harold Bloom, keeper of the cultural canon and an astute jazz listener, too, pairs Armstrong with Walt Whitman as the greatest American contributor to the world’s art, the genius of this nation at its best. It turns out we could believe our ears after all.
More here. (Note: Thanks to Bryon Giddens-White)
CLOUD CULTURE: THE PROMISE AND THE THREAT
Charles Leadbeater in Edge:
We are about to get a very different kind of Internet, one replete with huge potential and danger. The spread of cloud computing will allow much greater personalisation and mobility, constant real time connection and easier collaboration. Cloud computing will give rise to a cloud culture. Many of the purveyors of that culture will be cloud capitalists. Our chief challenge will be to make cloud culture and cloud capitalism work, for public as well as private good.
The Net we have grown up with was based around data and software stored quite close to where it is used on personal and mainframe computers. That gave people a sense of ownership and control, exploiting cheap local storage because the bandwidth to download data from remote sources was too expensive and unreliable. The Net was a way for us easily to link these disparate and disconnected machines, with their separate data and software. In the world of cloud computing our data — emails, documents, pictures, songs — would be stored remotely in a digital cloud hanging above us, always there for us to access from any device we like: computer, television, games console, handheld and mobile, embedded in our kitchen table, bathroom mirror or car dashboard. We should be able to access our data from anywhere, thanks to always on broadband and draw down as much or as little as and when we need. Instead of installing software on our computer we would pay for it only when we needed it.
More here.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
The lilac—dying, it drinks, goes on swilling
One day back in graduate school my advisor, a savvy and successful novelist whose books meant a lot to me and whom I had just traveled three thousand miles to come work with, called me into his office and sat me down sternly. “Look, no offense,” he said, holding up a page of my manuscript, a page so capillaried with red marks it looked like the face of a stroke victim, “but you’ve got to cut it out with these frigging F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences.” This was, on one level, the nicest compliment the man ever gave me. After all, it was my love for Fitzgerald and his frigging sentences that had made me want to be a novelist in the first place. If every writer, as Bellow once said, is a reader moved to emulation (and my advisor wasn’t so hot on Bellow’s sentences either), then to be told I was now writing the kinds of frigging sentences that had made me want to, uh, write those kinds of frigging sentences? On one level it was very nice to hear. Unfortunately my advisor didn’t mean it on that level. He meant it on a different level, a lower level. He meant that being enthralled as I was to lovely, thrilling, Daisy Buchananish prose was in my case less the solution than the problem. He himself was a rough-and-tumble realist, streety and sharp—a Redskin, in Philip Rahv’s famous phrase. Already he had me pegged as a member of that wan lesser tribe, the Palefaces, one of those cerebral, overly refined aesthetes who hung out in libraries and coffee shops doodling bon mots in overpriced notebooks. Moi! That this peremptory judgment was ludicrously unfair, ungenerous, and reductive did not make it any less true. I hurried out of his office that day with my face burning, my hands clenching and unclenching, shadow-boxing with shame.
more from Robert Cohen at The Believer here.
bomb power
One day last November, I spent the morning at Garry Wills’s elegant brick home along the main street of Evanston, Illinois, pondering the Promethean scale of presidential power in the atomic age. Wills’s startling new book, Bomb Power (Penguin Press, $28), argues that the prototype of the modern president is not Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan. It’s General Leslie Groves—the administrator of the Manhattan Project, which Wills says was the inadvertent template for today’s secret government and imperial presidency. And his reasoning will scare the hell out of you. The Manhattan Project was the single most awesome undertaking in the history of the country, occupying some eighty facilities nationwide. Hanford, in Washington State, where project officials collected and prepared the plutonium, employed more than one hundred thousand people. The electromagnetic plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, covered 825 acres. Project administrators also commandeered an entire Pacific island as the staging ground for the fatal atomic-bomb flights. To staff the laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Groves enjoyed the kind of powers ascribed to Jesus in the Left Behind series: All of a sudden, the greatest scientists in the country and their families would suddenly disappear, Hoovered up into the desert behind a triple ring of fences, “with sentries on horseback or in jeeps patrolling the circuit twenty-four hours a day.” Almost nobody was allowed to know what any of it was for, and only one man understood how to master all its parts: Groves, who “carried the whole enterprise in his head.”
more from Rick Perlstein at Bookforum here.
123 Count With Me
I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he’s an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The strange symbols keep him out. He says he doesn’t even know how to pronounce them. In fact, his alienation runs a lot deeper. He’s not sure what mathematicians do all day, or what they mean when they say a proof is elegant. Sometimes we joke that I just should sit him down and teach him everything, starting with 1 + 1 = 2 and going as far as we can. Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.
more from Steven Strogatz at The Opinionater here.
Make Black History Month Your History Month
February is Black History Month. Like previous years, we will be posting at least one story each day which pays tribute to African Americans.
The Root wants you to help us celebrate Black History Month. We will publish photos that chronicle your family’s experience in this country. We’re looking for historical photographs, family reunions, graduations, weddings and funerals—in other words, images that chronicle African-American life, past and present.
We will post these photos to our site throughout February. We've published some of our favorites here as inspiration.
(Picture: 50th wedding anniversary)
More here.
Tuesday Poem
Magritte
I am a man in a black bowler hat, 
showing my back to the world.
If I turn, an apple blocks my face.
My first glimpse of art was in a churchyard,
so close it is to death.
I listened to the silence of that place.
Sometimes, laid out, she elevates behind me
as I walk the towpath.
Stiff-necked, I do not look around.
My art has no laws of gravity,
but a woman’s chestnut hair falls to the ground
and bowler-hatted men are falling rain.
I have seen boulders floating in the sky,
and every day a cloud comes in my door.
Baguettes, instead of clouds, go drifting by.
In woods, between the horse’s head and rider,
a vista slips, slim as the trunk of a tree.
What’s visible hides what’s also visible.
The sea is one with what is not the sea.
by Ciaran O'Driscoll
from Surreal Man; Pighog Pres, Brighton, 2006
Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally
Natalie Angier in The New York Times:
The theory of relativity showed us that time and space are intertwined. To which our smarty-pants body might well reply: Tell me something I didn’t already know, Einstein. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen found that when people were asked to engage in a bit of mental time travel, and to recall past events or imagine future ones, participants’ bodies subliminally acted out the metaphors embedded in how we commonly conceptualized the flow of time. As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent.
“When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.”
More here.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Revisiting Dan Hoyle’s ‘Tings dey happen’
***
American Dan Hoyle lived in Nigeria for ten months in 2005/2006. During that time he was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Port Harcourt, in Nigeria’s restive delta region, the source of most of country’s wealth – and turmoil. He attributes the decision to come to Nigeria to a Professor at the Northwestern University, who, aware of his desire to study globalization (a 2002 grant was spent researching the activities of American companies in developing countries), stabbed at a map of the world and said: “If you want to study globalization, just go right here!” “Here” turned out to be Escravos, a region in the west of the Niger delta.
Hoyles obeyed, and his Nigerian sojourn in Nigeria inspired him to write TINGS DEY HAPPEN, an award-winning one-man performance piece set in the delta and exploring the complicated set-up that is the Nigerian oil industry. Nigerian ‘Poilitics’ if you will.
TINGS DEY HAPPEN is in Pidgin English. When I heard Hoyle was going to be performing in Nigeria, at the invitation of the State Department, I decided I had to see the show. More than anything, I was curious to see what Hoyle’s idea of pidgin amounted to. There is so much contrived stuff that passes for Pidgin English in popular culture, that I really didn’t have any significant expectations.
By the end of the 75 minute performance, which took place at the heavily guarded American Guest Quarters on the Ikoyi waterfront in Lagos, I was more than impressed. Hoyle’s pidgin is impressive, and as 'authentic' (I hesitate to use that word) as it gets.
Much has been written about the Niger delta. It is my guess that an entire publishing industry – academic papers, seminars, lectures financed by Universities and think-tanks mostly in Europe and America – is built on the workings – misworkings more like – of Nigerian oil.
This is not to mention the fact that the bulk of the news about Nigeria in the international media streams forth undistilled from the dark, polluted mangroves of the delta. The 18 – 24 November 1995 edition of the Economist bears as its headline: NIGERIA FOAMING WITH BLOOD. The accompanying image is of an oil rig from which blood is spewing forth, clearly at high pressure. The Financial Times journalist, Michael Peel’s A Swamp Full of Dollars: Paramilitaries and Pipelines at Nigeria’s Oil Frontier, was shortlisted for the Guardian UK’s first book Award in 2009. And then there is a growing genre of ‘Niger delta literature’, inspired by the cataclysmic events of the last decade and half (one of the landmark ones being the 1995 extra-judicial murder by the Abacha government of activist and writer Ken Saro Wiwa, arguably the most prominent environmental activists to emerge from the delta). Books like Kaine Agary’s novel, Yellow Yellow, and Ahmed Yerima’s play, Hard Ground (both winners of the Nigeria Prize for Literature) are set in the delta. A novel forthcoming from Helon Habila, (tentatively titled “Oil on Water”) is set against a background of violence and kidnapping in the delta.
Of the Smashing of Ripe Quinces: Notes on Stefan George
Justin E. H. Smith
What language is poetry about? Generally, it is about the language it is in. In translation, in turn, poetry is about the limitations of the fit of one language with another. These two facts together mean that, in writing poetry, in contrast with prose (more or less), it matters what language one is writing in. I have become convinced, in fact, that good poetry, the best poetry, is the poetry that seeks to lay bare the essence of the language that serves as its medium. Now I understand that from a historical-linguistic point of view languages do not have essences, but are ever-evolving accretions of borrowings, local adaptations, creolizations and mishearings, but that does not change the fact that, in terms of expressive power, 'life', 'earth', and 'kin' sound closer to the soul of English than, say, 'vitality', 'terrestrial', or 'family'. I have thus also come to appreciate the extent to which the essence of English is Anglo-Saxon and Germanic, and to think that no one understood his task as a poet better than Seamus Heaney, when he undertook to translate Beowulf into modern English, in part, as he explained, to come to better know not just the source language, but also the target language.
The Other Swastika
I was probably in high school before it first dawned on me just what it was that kept me from the swastika that day: Growing up in an observant Brahmin household in the US (from which I’ve long since recovered), I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated with something like serenity, nurturance, and cosmic benevolence, and at the same time with “evil,” hatred, and genocide.
Being more awesome, taking comedy seriously and experimenting with public radio: a conversation with broadcaster Jesse Thorn, host of The Sound of Young America
Jesse Thorn is the host and producer of Public Radio International's The Sound of Young America, a cultural interview program he grew from humble beginnings at KZSC, the radio station of his alma mater, UC Santa Cruz. He's also the proprietor of Maximumfun.org, which hosts such other audio ventures as Jordan, Jesse, Go!, Coyle and Sharpe: The Impostors and The Kaspar Hauser Comedy Podcast. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio show and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]
We've got to do some awareness-raising. What makes The Sound different from other public radio interview shows one might hear across the dial?
More awesome.
How much more?
The premise of the show is, “a public radio show about things that are awesome.” That translates to, essentially, a public radio show from my editorial perspective. We focus on things that are fun and funny, which means you get — for lack of a less annoying word — a “hipper” public radio show, but you also get a lot more comedy, a lot more indie rock and hip-hop and books about things that are fascinating.
Is this sort of thing totally absent from the public radio airwaves other than on your show? I feel like I haven't heard many comedians anywhere but on your show.
Comedians are almost totally absent from anywhere in serious public discourse, unfortunately. The kind of stuff I cover on my show occasionally pops up on other public radio outlets, and there have been public radio attempts to hew to this formula in a more system-wide or “big money” type of way that have thus far failed.
Usually, if you hear someone who's been on my show on another show, whether a good one or a bad one — and it could be on Fresh Air, which is one of my favorite shows in the world — when you hear that person, it's like they're a visitor. They're not native to those other programs. They're a curiosity, or a novelty, or they focus on some aspect of their story which doesn't have a lot to do with their work. Maybe it has more to do with the kind of narrative theme that somebody picks out for a newspaper feature story. You know, “So-and-So Happened to Be Raised By Dogs”? On my show, I like to think they're a little more at home.
Read more »
Perceptions
Rohit the Golfer
by Aditya Dev Sood
I know the grip, more or less, but nothing else about how to swing a club. I hold the club away from me, shuffle into a likely stance, and settle its head down, behind the ball, already resting on the tee. Hold your right foot steady as you swing back, Abhinav says, and your eye on the ball. My brother is a natural coach, but I am an awkward athlete. Yet there is a determination in me to show physical and kinesthetic ability now, in full adulthood, that I never felt in my youth. I see the ball staring back at me, daring me to hit it.
My cousin Rohit has been on my mind a lot, lately, and perhaps that's why I'm here at the driving range. He was the one who first showed me how to hold a golf stick and sink balls into the little holes marked with numbered, red, rusting markers. The putting green was right next to the club house, from where a roar of social chatter rose up, among many uncles boasting and guffawing over multiple beers, each of which progressively drowned out more sound. That nineteenth hole was where my cousin really shined, winning people over with his smile, his one chipped tooth that could kick-start any number of increasingly incredible bar tales.
Interview: Tariq Ali on Writing Novels
Maniza Naqvi: You have spent a lifetime leading political, anti war and socialist activism through demonstrations, protest marches; political articles, books, lectures, interviews, and speeches . You have spoken out in all sorts of forums ranging from university settings to the streets during anti war demonstrations. You are noted as the leader of the Left in Europe. You’ve been a hero and example for many of us. So, in all of this, where does writing novels fit in? You have now written five novels, two of which I absolutely loved reading: The Book of Saladin and Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree.
Tariq Ali: I started writing fiction in 1990. Why? I don't know. I felt like it but recently on a trip to Pakistan I came across a letter I'd written my mother in 1966 or '67, soon after leaving Oxford. I was quite surprised because I'd written that I was thinking about writing a novel. I have no memory of what I might have been thinking of…then 1968 happened and swept our generation away into the utopian wilds. It was the end of that period that started me thinking of fiction again. I had written plays and film scripts in the 80's and early 90s. So a full-scale novel was not such a huge leap forward.
Maniza Naqvi: What draws you to fiction? Can you place the role of fiction writing in your life?
Tariq Ali: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree was begun in 1991 after the first Gulf War. I wanted to excavate the history of European Islam and went, naturally, to Spain. Here I saw the Great Mosque in Cordoba, went to Granada, wandered round Seville and imagined the ruins whispering to me…stories of their past and those who had built them. So I imbibed the atmosphere and wrote the first novel of the Quintet. Edward Said read it and liked it and said: 'Don't stop now. Tell the whole bloody story.' He meant the whole bloody story of the clash between Western Christendom and Islamic Arab civilization. So I did and it was Edward who first started referring to it as the Islam Quartet, which soon became a Quintet. Writing these historical novels became the centre of my intellectual life till 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reality dragged me back to non-fiction which I had more or less given up. Now I do both, but to write fiction I have to cut myself off completely from everyday life which isn't easy. Had the US agreed to the bombing of Iran I might not have been able to finish the Quintet.
Psychological Science: Sigmund Freud – A Personal and Scientific Coward?
Psychological Science: Sigmund Freud – A Personal and Scientific Coward?
by
Norman Costa
by
Norman Costa
This article is, in part, a retelling of 'The Heroic Age of Hysteria,' a section from chapter 1, 'A Forgotten History,' in the 1997 book, “Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror,” by Judith Herman, M.D. It was published by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, New York. I highly recommend this book to all interested in the subject.
In part, this article relies on the work of Harold Bloom, principally, his 1998 book, “Shakespeare: The invention of the human,” and a few of his interviews related to Sigmund Freud. The book was published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., New York.
At the time Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) began his research into Hysteria, it was understood as a malady peculiar to women (according to 25 centuries of medical thinking) and accounted for any disease whose symptoms could not be found to have an organic cause. It was manifest in symptoms like partial paralysis, hallucinations, sensory losses, convulsions, and amnesias. Lumped into these symptoms was anything found (by men) to be mysterious or incomprehensible in women. The source of the problem, it was believed, resided in the uterus, and thus the medical term, Hysteria.