///

Kudu
Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’  

My father told me this story
when I was a child. We sat
in the shade of a tree and he began:

Long ago there lived a king
who sprouted a pair of horns – just buds,
at first, but he checked them every day
and wore his turban low to hide
this blemish, to hide this mark of shame.

But a king, of course, doesn’t wash his own hair!
His man-servant knew all about the king’s shame
and day by day the knowledge grew
inside him, a word that had to be spoken,
a terrible secret that had to be told.

They said, You’re mistaken.
He said, No.

They said, Dead men keep secrets.
He said, Ah…

Read more »

From The Abbeville Manual of Style:

Malcolm Gladwell is one of the world’s best-selling authors and most prominent public intellectuals, having risen to superstardom on the basis of such volumes as The Tipping Point and Blink. He is a skilled and entertaining writer, exemplifying the modern New Yorker “house style” for journalism with its combination of solid research, amused detachment, and quirky anecdotes in the Ken Burns mold. Tragically, Gladwell is also often very wrong. His work, famous for its forays into sociology, social psychology, market research, and other trendy disciplines, is a testament to both the exciting possibilities and the intellectual limitations of those fields. His penchant for what might be called pop statistical analysis sometimes leads to elegant, well-supported, and counterintuitive conclusions, but just as often recalls the man who couldn’t possibly have drowned in that river because its average depth was five feet.

We bring all this up in large part because of an article called “Late Bloomers” that he wrote for last month’s New Yorker.

More here.

Joseph Bottum in The Weekly Standard:

During a brief remission in his wife’s cancer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist V.S.Naipaul casually explained to a journalist that he had always been “a great prostitute man,” mongering among the whores from the early days of his marriage. The publicity that followed from the remark “consumed” his wife, he later admitted to his biographer, Patrick French. “She had all the relapses and everything after that. She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. .  .  . I feel a little bit that way.” Unfortunately, he didn’t feel “that way” enough to think it inappropriate to move into his house, the day after he cremated his wife, his new mistress, a Pakistani journalist he’d just met (and would, in short order, marry).

Even before the whoring revelations, Naipaul’s first wife, a middle-class woman named Patricia Hale whom he’d met while he was a student on scholarship to England, had known about a prior mistress–but only because Naipaul himself decided one day to tell her, explaining the violent acts he enjoyed with the woman, some of them memorialized in photographs he brought along to aid the explanation. The woman’s name was Margaret Gooding, and Naipaul met her in 1972 in Buenos Aires. French’s new biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, quotes extensively from her letters: unbearable scrawls that read like clinical case studies drawn from the pages of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. She begs, moans, despairs, and pleads for Naipaul’s “cruel sexual desires.” She calls him her “god,” her “black master.” Her multiple abortions of his children sicken her, but she offers them up to him as proof of her love and abasement.

And all this sex stuff is only the beginning.

(Picture: Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul in 2003. Naipaul married Nadira Khannum Alvi shortly after Pat died).

More here.

Mark Rowlands in The Telegraph:

When Brenin was a young wolf, his favourite game was to steal cushions off the sofa or the armchair. If I was in another room, perhaps working in my study, he would appear at the door, cushion in mouth, and, when he knew I had seen him, he would tear off through the house, through the living-room, the kitchen and then out into the garden, with me in hot pursuit. The game was one of chase and could go on for quite a while. I had already trained him to drop things – so I could have ordered him to drop the cushion at any time. But I didn’t have the heart; and, anyway, the game was much more fun. And so he would charge around the garden, ears back, tail tucked low and eyes shining with excitement, while I thundered around ineffectively behind him. Until he was about three months old, Brenin was quite easy to catch – and so I just pretended he was too quick for me. But the pretence gradually shaded into reality. Soon he was throwing me little shimmies – feinting to go one way while actually going the other. When I caught on to this trick, the shimmies would become double shimmies. Eventually the game was played in a confused blur of feint, double feint and triple feint – feints nested within feints. Of course, this sidestepping practice worked wonders for my rugby skills. I had always based my game on the idea of running over people rather than around them. This worked well in Britain, where I grew up, but not as well in the US, where the people are generally much bigger and have been raised playing American football, where the tackling is ferocious. They are, however, much easier to confuse and, with all this instruction from Brenin, I became a twinkle-toed, sidestepping demon of the south-eastern United States.

More here.

From Burbia:

Sometimes you come upon something so ridiculous, so on-its-face laughably stupid, you just want to stop everything and enjoy. That’s what we did when we first saw this investors-demo video of SpeedFit, a new concept in exercise technology:The Mobile Treadmill…a treadmill designed specially to move/walk down the street while you’re treading.

Because, let’s see, walking down the street without a treadmill is too tough?

The proud creators of SpeedFit are now looking for investors. Seriously — and this vid is their pitch. Sure, if you want to walk or run down the street for exercise, you can…walk or run down the street. But, with SpeedFit, now you can do the exact same thing only on a contraption that costs a ton of money, is a pain in the ass (it’s one heavy mo-fo), is a potential traffic hazard and can only barely turn corners. Kind of like marketing a spanking new heart-lung ventilator-machine to 100% healthy people who are perfectly capable of breathing on their own. Sign us up!

From Nature:

Two teams of astronomers are independently claiming to have the first ever images of planets in orbit around a star other than the Sun — with pictures from one team showing three planet-like bodies orbiting a distant star. Using the Keck and Gemini telescopes in Hawaii, one team took infrared images of three objects, each 5-13 times the mass of Jupiter, in orbit around HR 8799, a star 130 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus.

The other team used the Hubble Space Telescope to take photographs of a potential planet that’s no bigger than three Jupiters². It circles Fomalhaut, a star 25 light years away from Earth in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus, completing one orbit every 872 years. The object is roughly 119 times further away from its star than Earth is from the Sun, and is located at the inner edge of a debris disk that it appears to have sculpted into a sharp smooth ring by pulling in stray dust as it orbits. Astronomers have been hunting for direct evidence of planets orbiting a star outside the Solar System for nearly a decade. More than 300 extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, have been discovered so far but these have been found using indirect methods — for example, by detecting the way a star wobbles as planets orbit them rather than using images.

More here.

In the end, Miriam Makeba got her wish: to take leave of this world right after taking her final bow on stage, the only place where she felt truly at home. It was a grandly operatic ending for a woman whose very life defined drama. She endured multiple marriages and divorces, domestic abuse, alcoholism and cancer. Then, too, there were the 11-plus car accidents, the plane crash, the murders of her two uncles in the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960; the death of her only daughter, Bongi; the arrests, the banning of her records, the extended exile from her homeland, South Africa.

She spent six months of the first year of her life in jail, after her mother was arrested for making beer in their home. She was a teenager when apartheid became the law of the land, not that things were much better before. But under apartheid, she wrote, “things went from bad to worse. [Apartheid] would become one of the most hated words the world has ever known.”

more from The Root here.

In Counterpunch:

Sonal Shah released a statement against “baseless and silly reports” on the Internet. She forthrightly pointed out that her “personal politics have nothing in common with the views espoused by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or any such organization.” The VHP and the RSS are well known to spread hate and to have participated in ghastly acts of violence within India against Muslims, Christians, and oppressed castes, not to speak of spreading the general misogyny that their ideology preaches.
 
Sonal Shah’s statement is gratifying, but unpersuasive. The VHP’s Shyam Tiwari recently said, “Sonal was a member of the VHP of America at the time of the [2001 Kutch, Gujarat] earthquake. Her membership has expired.” This was eight years after the 1993 Gujarat riots, when the VHP had an active, and ghastly role. Ms. Shah was 33 years old then. Her parents were active in Hindutva organizations. How could she not have known of their role, and the controversy surrounding them? She was not from an apolitical household, but an activist one. I brought up her parents only to suggest that she cannot claim now that she was ignorant of the VHP’s role in India. She must have known. And yet she participated in its activities. There were a host of other agencies that raised money for the earthquake survivors. All the earthquake survivors: credible media reports showed that the money raised by the VHP did not go to Muslim survivors, only Hindu ones (for example, “Communalizing Relief: VHP seizes earthquake opportunity,” Statesman, Kolkata, 12 February 2001 and Vijay Dutt, “Discrimination in Distribution of Relief against Dalits in Gujarat Causes Concern,” Hindustan Times, 27 February 2001). This is hardly an act of charity.

The VHP says Ms. Shah left the organization in 2001. Three events from 2004 bear mention:       

(1) Ms. Shah delivered a keynote address at the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh young conference. The HSS is the U. S. branch of the RSS. The University of Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum describes the RSS as “possibly the most successful fascist movement in any contemporary democracy.” The RSS “guru” (teacher) M. S. Golwalkar wrote glowingly about Nazi “race pride,” and called it a “good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”

(2) Ms. Shah delivered a keynote address at an Ekal Vidyalaya conference in Florida. The Ekal Vidyalaya’s are schools set up in tribal areas. The RSS’s Chief of Service work, Premchand Goel, said that the RSS and the VHP run “thousands of Ekal Vidyalayas.” One Ekal Vidyalaya teacher, Mohan Lal, told Frontline reporter, T. K. Rajalakshmi, “We go for the RSS shakha [branch] meetings regularly. The teachers are selected only if they subscribe to the RSS way of thought.”

‘It’s certainly an excellent arrangement,’ the official says, ‘always unimaginably excellent, even if in other respects hopeless.’ We can easily picture, or even recall, arrangements that are excellent for some and hopeless for others, and that is what the phrase ‘in other respects’ invites us to do. But the larger rhythm and grammar of the sentence ask us to go beyond this option, to think both contrary thoughts at once, taking excellence and hopelessness as partners in an intricate dance, each calling for and implying the other; as if the arrangement is excellent because it’s hopeless, hopeless because it’s excellent. Can we manage this logical feat? And where are we?

We are in a room at the Herrenhof Inn, in Kafka’s novel The Castle. The time is around 5 a.m.; K, the land surveyor hired by the castle authorities, but not as yet entrusted with any land-surveying, has an appointment with an official. His great goal, we have learned by now, is not necessarily to get on with his work but rather to be directly acknowledged by the higher officials of the castle, to experience something other than the many evasions and obstructions he has met with so far.

more from the LRB here.

I should perhaps myself note, however, the way that curiously, while the two artists have been engaged in entirely different artistic enterprises—undergirded, they would argue, by entirely opposite readings of history—many of Hockney’s and Irwin’s core concerns have come to seem, to me at any rate, almost entirely identical: the emphasis, for instance, on the critique of photography, the countervailing celebration of the human quality of looking and experience, the focus on the centrality of the observer, the vitality of the periphery, the interpenetrations of art and science, the dialogue of immanence.

Hockney recently embarked on an extended series of lush landscape paintings documenting the changing seasons in the beloved eastern Yorkshire of his youth. And, granted, what could possibly seem more retrograde from Irwin’s point of view? (“You get me all wrong,” Irwin once said to me with regard to Hockney, before concluding, witheringly, “I’ve always thought him a first-rate practitioner.”) But what in turn is one to make of Hockney’s recent characterization to me of those deliriously colorful nature studies, devoid of any human presence, as figure paintings? Figure, I asked him, taking the bait, what figure? There’s no figure in these paintings. “You,” Hockney replied triumphantly, “you, the viewer, are the figure.” And one can’t imagine Irwin’s having parsed things any plainer.

more from The Believer here.

///

I Sing the Body Reclining
Grace Nichols

I sing the body reclining
I sing the throwing back of self
I sing the cushioned head
The fallen arm
The lolling breast
I sing the body reclining
As an indolent continent

I sing the body reclining|
I sing the easy breathing ribs
I sing the horizontal neck
I sing the slow-moving blood
Sluggish as a river
In its lower course

I sing the weighing thighs
The idle toes
The liming knees
I sing the body reclining
As a wayward tree

I sing the restful nerve

Those who scrub and scrub
incessantly
corrupt the body

Those who dust and dust
incessantly
also corrupt the body

And are caught in the asylum
Of their own making
Therefore I sing the body reclining
...............................................
...........................................
Painting
Giorgione (andTitian), Sleeping Venus
  

Bill Maher hoped to use science to paint religion as a neurological disorder, but the researchers in his film Religulous hold a more complex picture of why we have faith.

Nathan Schneider in Seed Magazine:

Robert Burton’s 17th century treatise, The Anatomy of Melancholy, treats psychological disorders as a religious problem. Depression, Burton believed, is an expression of original sin. Three centuries later, Freud reversed the diagnosis entirely by calling religion a symptom of mental dysfunction. Now, a growing number of scientists are studying why we are religious with modern research methods from a range of disciplines. For some interpreters, such as philosopher Daniel Dennett and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, science reveals religious beliefs to be malignant memes gnawing their way through believers’ brains, diseases needing to be cured. Yet for many of the researchers closest to this work, the recognition that religion has biological roots only makes it harder to talk about severing it from ourselves.

More here.

A talk with Alva Noë in Edge:

We should reject the idea that the mind is something inside of us that is basically a calculating machine. There are different reasons to reject this. But one is, simply put: there is nothing inside us that thinks and feels and is conscious. Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.

A much better image is that of the dancer. A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world around us. And this idea that human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, in motion, as a way of being part of a larger process, is the focus of my work. Experience is something that is temporarily extended and active. Perceptual consciousness is a style of access to the world around us. I can touch something, and when I touch something I make use of an understanding of the way in which my own movements help me secure access to that which is before me. The point is not merely that I learn about or achieve access to the world by touching. The point is that the thing shows up for me as something in a space of movement-oriented possibilities.

Visual consciousness relies on a whole set of practical skills that we have, making use of the eyes and the head. I understand that if I move my eyes, I produce a certain kind of sensory change. Perceptual consciousness is a mode of exploration of the world, making use of a certain kind of practical bodily understanding. And that is what dance is. And this makes dance, for me, the perfect metaphor for consciousness.

But there’s more to the comparison with dance. 

More here.

From The Economist:

Journalists sometimes joke that the ideal headline for a science story would be something like “Black holes cure cancer”. Sadly, it will never happen. “Nanotechnology cures cancer”, though, is a pretty good runner-up, and that might just turn out to be true.

In fact, nanoparticles (ie, objects whose dimensions are measured in nanometres, or billionths of a metre) have been used to treat cancer for some time. But these treatments are mainly clever ways of packaging existing drugs, rather than truly novel therapies. For instance, Doxil, a medicine used to treat ovarian cancer, is wrapped up in naturally occurring fatty bubbles called liposomes. Taxol, a common breast-cancer drug, is similarly packaged with naturally occurring blood proteins in a product called Abraxane. In both, the packaging aids the delivery of the drug and reduces its toxic side-effects.

Now, however, a second generation of nanoparticles has entered clinical trials. Some are so good at hiding their contents away until they are needed that the treatments do not merely reduce side-effects; they actually allow what would otherwise be lethal poisons to be supplied to the tumour and the tumour only. Others do not depend on drugs at all. Instead, they act as beacons for the delivery of doses of energy that destroy cancer cells physically, rather than chemically.

More here.

In a devastating blow to millions of unsuspecting Americans, newly elected president and international con man Barack Obama fled the country Wednesday with nearly $85 million in campaign funds.

According to FBI investigators, Obama’s sudden disappearance was discovered at 6:15 p.m. when the former Illinois senator failed to arrive at a gala event in Lincoln Square, prompting several aides to rush back to his campaign headquarters. At 6:23 p.m., flight logs at O’Hare International Airport confirmed that two passengers, a male carrying two silver briefcases and dressed in a perfectly tailored Brioni tuxedo, and an African-American female wearing a fur coat and speaking in a thick Russian accent, were seen boarding a private plane.

Obama’s campaign office, sources said, was completely vacant aside from a discarded Abraham Lincoln portrait, behind which was an emptied safe that his aides claimed never to have seen before.

In addition, three unconscious Secret Service agents were discovered at the scene, along with two lit cigarettes still burning in an ashtray, and Obama’s daughters, who authorities now believe were taken from an Alabama foster home six years ago.

More here, from The Onion.

This is from an excellent radio program called Backstory: With the American History Guys, produced by 3QD friend Tony Field:

Between the election and the economy, news about the war in Iraq has become scanty-at-best. And what little coverage there is tends to focus on developments overseas. In this Veterans’ Day special, the History Guys look at what happens when vets return home. Sons of Confederate Veterans spokesman Frank Earnest makes a case for separating the politics of war from our remembrance of its veterans. Historian Rebecca Jo Plant discusses the changing expectations for veterans’ wives and mothers. And psychologist Ed Tick talks about PTSD and how psychological trauma was seen in a pre-psychological age.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

David Biello  in Scientific American:

If you thought you were eating mostly grass-fed beef when you bit into a Big Mac, think again: The bulk of a fast-food hamburger from McDonald’s, Burger King or Wendy’s is made from cows that eat primarily corn, or so says a new study of the chemical composition of more than 480 fast-food burgers from across the nation. And it isn’t only cows that are eating corn. There is also evidence of a corn diet in chicken sandwiches, and even French fries get a good slathering of the fat that makes them so tasty from being fried in corn oil. “Corn has been criticized as being unsustainable based on the unusual amount of fertilizer, water and machinery required to bring it to harvest,” says geobiologist Hope Jahren of the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, who led the research. “We are getting a picture of the American diet on a national scale by using chemistry, which is quite objective.”

Eating a diet of meat from corn-fed animals hasn’t been linked to any specific health effects in humans. But it has resulted in widespread environmental degradation, including drained water supplies, degraded soils, and reliance on fossil fuels for fertilizer, pesticides and farm machinery fuel, says preventive medicine physician Bob Lawrence, director of the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who was not involved in the study. It’s also hard on cows, whose stomachs are specially designed to break down the cellulose in grass, leading to an epidemic of antibiotic use. Also, humans may lose out on beneficial omega-3 fatty acids—important for development of the nervous system and heart health—when they consume corn-fed as opposed to grass-fed beef.

More here.

I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee — what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry’s nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama’s pick and who was on everyone’s short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin’s. Whatever knowledge deficit Palin has about the federal bureaucracy or international affairs (outside the normal purview of governors) will hopefully be remedied during the next eight years of the Obama presidencies.

more from Salon here.

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.

I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage. I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out much richer three years later, and even though I wrote a book about the experience, the whole thing still strikes me as preposterous—which is one of the reasons the money was so easy to walk away from. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later, there would come a Great Reckoning when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds if not thousands of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money, would be expelled from finance.

more from Conde Nast Portfolio here.
(This is one hell of a read, it may also be, I dare to say, an important read)