By Tolu Ogunlesi

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the Unites States of America

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I stayed up all night to watch Barack Obama become the President-elect of the United States of America. At that time I lived in a hotel room in Uppsala, a Swedish University town, far away from home (Lagos). It was hard to feel that the Swedes were in any way excited at the prospects of the sort of momentous change that was about to be unleashed on the world.

I recall comparing the apparently unconcerned Uppsala with the Lagos I left behind, a city throbbing with the nervous anticipation of History bearing down on it at top speed (even though nothing like that was happening). Even before I left two months earlier Nigeria had already been overrun by Obamastickers and Obamatalk. There was even an Obama fundraiser that brought in millions of naira; money we later learnt US campaign guidelines prohibited the Obama campaign from accepting. A friend told me that he would be attending a party hosted by the American Embassy in Lagos, where they would keep vigil as the election results came in.

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Elatia Harris

The child on the left rests her hand atop the head of the other, working her fingers gently through smooth hair like her own into the scalp. Her expression is inspectorial, proprietary – and openly so. The other gazes out at us – nonplussed, plotting. You know without being told that these two could have but one relation to each other: they are sisters. It is your sister, and only your sister, whom you may handle like this in the expectation she will take you back.

These are the Gainsborough girls, Mary and Margaret, as painted by their father, Thomas, in 1758. The double portraits Thomas Gainsborough left of Mary and Margaret, from early childhood through their late twenties – at which point he died, or surely he would have gone on painting his daughters – are the most penetrating exploration of the theme of two sisters that art has to show us. As well they might be, for it was just once that a great genius of English painting begat two nervous girls close in age, and trained his eye upon them for over a quarter of a century, recording their dominance play, their tremendous naturalness with each other – even when sisters pose, there is no posing – and, their striking individuation in late girlhood.

As they hurtled towards thirty, their father the painter did the only thing he could do – he sat them into single portraits, into superb examinations, like all great portraits, of the separateness, and the fatedness, of one being who exists apart from all others. Apart even from her sister. This is the job of portraiture, to fashion personality and character into that mute and singular appeal across centuries: Behold me — for I am yet present.

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Justin E. H. Smith

“We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content.” –Blaise Pascal (tr. Jason Boone, the epigram to his 2002 poem, “Ho There, Raise Up the Tommy Lift!”)

*

I should no doubt begin with what these days is known as a 'full disclosure': I was a friend of Jason Boone's for a short time, towards the end of the 1980s, when he would drive up through the valley from Fresno to Sacramento on weekends to go to rock shows at a night-spot called the Cattle Club, out near Highway 50, where I wasted a lot of time back then. The most peculiar thing about him, as I recall from that period, is that he always maintained that he absolutely loathed the music he heard at the Cattle Club, every bit of it, and yet he solidly refused to give any reason why he kept coming nonetheless.

“I hate guitars,” he would often announce. “I hate these flanel shirts and this whole beer and 'fuck yeah' thing.” The music was mostly what would come, within a few more years, to be called 'grunge', and featured many of the bands, then in an embryonic state, that were taking shape at that time in Seattle and touring up and down the West Coast. “The worst of all of them is this opening act called Nirvana,” Boone once said to me. “They open for Tad, who are almost as insufferably awful, but Tad's probably going somewhere. This is the end of the line for Nirvana. In ten years they'll be working shit jobs, installing cable TV, repairing copying machines, wishing they'd gone to college, and waxing nostalgic about their glory days. You can just sense it when you're watching these bands, you know, you can read their fates.” Is that why you watch them, even though you hate them? I asked. “Yes I suppose.”

It was more than anything else that halting, self-conscious “yes, I suppose,” instead of a thoughtless “yeah, I guess,” the elocution so much more natural in our shared milieu, that gave me a sense of Boone's own fate. He was dead wrong about Kurt Cobain, yet I was broadly right about him.

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by Shiban Ganju

I wish you all a happy new year and hope it starts on a lighter note; mine did.

After a year of worrying about the health reform – that wasn’t, and economic meltdown – that was, a phone call from brother in law (BIL) made me ruminate about sexually dysfunctional people. They are of two types: overachievers and underachievers. The news of our latest overachiever, Tiger Woods had caused considerable jealousy and anguish to BIL. Reason: Tiger ‘wood’ and BIL wouldn’t. Years at the hedge fund desk had sapped his libido into ‘libidon’t’.

I would not have found out about BIL’s problem, had he not fainted and fallen flat on his face. He phoned to tell me that he felt dizzy often and had fainted thrice. I was aware, that years of two-Marlboro-packs-a-day had smoke- grilled the arteries of his heart and legs into spastic narrow channels and now he had to take nitrate pills to relax them. Drugged vessels would dilate and ease the blood flow. But with drugs, bad always accompanies good. As a side effect – especially, if he stood up suddenly –his legs would accumulate all the blood gushing down with gravity; his blood pressure would drop and his blood- less head would swirl. Fainting spells pointed to excessive fall of blood pressure, which would spin him out of his senses.

Just to pick on him, I asked, “What other medicine are you on? Are you taking Cialis?”

“No, I am not.”

“Then it must be Levitra or Viagra.”

“How do you know?” he was surprised. The fact is, I didn’t know – until then.

“BIL, doubling your vessel dilators is a no-no.”

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“Abraham said to his father and his people: 'What are these images to whose worship you cleave?'
They said: 'We found our fathers worshipping them.' He said: 'Certainly you have been, you and
your fathers, in manifest error.'”
— Koran, Chapter 21, verses 52-54

The Tughra

Loophole

Warnings in the Hadith
to make no image of God
or man or animal
are no match for the loophole
function of the human mind
which will overcome obstacles
like certainty
and threats of hellfire
to make real any
object of longing
mystic or material
as can easily be seen
in the lovely lyrical
portrait, the Tughra
(signature of Sulaiman
the Magnificent),
disguised as calligraphy,
a loophole allowed in
Muhammed’s line by men
who knew the futility of
banning beauty

by Jim Culleny,
January 2, 2009

By Aditya Dev Sood

She begins with the soles of my feet, tracing out nodes and ridges into which all my wanderings in the world are graven. She is a rehabilitating prisoner at the Chiang Mai Women’s Correctional Facility, halfway out of the system, learning massage as a trade that may keep her out of trouble once she’s released. The massage parlour is a long shed of a room, grimly institutional, the green-blue sheets on the mattresses on the floor match the uniforms the masseuses are wearing. Her touch is light, I close my eyes, the memories and impressions she is unleashing are vivid, the idea of this piece has already taken form.

To be massaged by the opposite gender is a pleasure no longer available in India. Islamic social norms, the demise of courtly and courtesanal culture, Victorian prudence, and Gandhian puritanism have all surely conspired to ensure that when a man and woman are on a mattress together, it must be a flagrant scandal. But varieties of massage survive across East and South-East Asia, as techniques of wellness propagated in Buddhist monasteries, and now more widely available in more and less commercialized spas and treatment centers. The massage services offered by the Chiang Mai Women’s Prison may be a novelty, but they also demonstrate how widely and well established is the practice of massage in the culture and institutions of Thailand.

Mister, you lay down now, she said, without introducing herself. She is small and round, and reminds me of Lotta from the comic strip. I am wearing a kind of Karate outfit of cotton pyjama and jacket with two tie-strips, which I was given to wear before entering the massage hall. Here, six or eight mattresses sit on the floor, backpackers and travelers, all of us, laying upon them. They are melting away under Lotta’s hands, I am only dimly aware, my selfhood dissolving into pure patience, a knower only of pleasure.

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Psychological Science: Measurement, Uncertainty, and Determinism – Part 2

by Norman Costa

Part 1 of this article can be found HERE.

Other articles in Norman Costa's 'Psychological Science' series can be found HERE.

The [Sad] Story So Far

Few ideas are as fundamental to psychological science, and all science, as the concept of measurement. Science does not exist without measurement. Yet, many psychologists who would identify themselves as scientists do not seem to understand the most fundamental definition of measurement: Measurement is a comparison to a standard. This does not speak well for those who are responsible for scientists-in-the-making at the undergraduate level and especially at the graduate level.

Standards of measurement are inventions of the human mind, they are arbitrary, and they require only consensus and demonstrated utility. Over time, standards are improved, changed, or even discarded. For example, standards of measuring time have evolved from naturalistic observation of the cycles of day and night, to using the oscillating properties of the cesium atom. Standards for measuring psychological depression have evolved from vague and general descriptions to a tallying of specific behaviors that can be observed.

Science is an approach to understanding nature and ourselves that has method and content. Science as method is the systematic observation of phenomena and the recording of data. Without measurement, there is no recording of data from observation. Measuring, comparing to a standard, takes place on many levels from the most simple to the very complex. The most basic comparison to a standard is determining that a phenomenon is present or not present. Other comparisons allow us to determine similarity or dissimilarity. If a decision is made that something is dissimilar to a standard, then we might determine how dissimilar, and in what direction, like more or less. Science as content is the organization of this information into a body of knowledge. For example, we have the science of metallurgy, the science of biology, and the science of verbal learning.

So where is this academic exercise leading us? I thought you would never ask. It is leading us to the next important topic associated with measurement: Error, more specifically, errors of measurement. One of the biggest mistakes that scientific psychology makes, however, is confusing the notion of errors of measurement with Werner Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle.' Do you want to know why physicists laugh themselves silly when psychology presents itself as a science? Do you want to know why many scientists in other fields regard scientific psychology as an oxymoron? Please read on.

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