Reading Presidential Hopefuls

Over at The Smart Set, Morgan Meis on Obama’s The Audacity of Hope:

If platitudes had weight, Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope would be impossible to lift off the table. Still, it’s a good book. By the standards of “writings by politicians” it’s in the top percentile. You read it and you like the man. You read it and feel that he has managed somehow to be both a skilled politician and a genuine human being. He writes, for instance, about what motivates politicians to run for office and to continue doing so:

Neither ambition nor single-mindedness fully accounts for the behavior of politicians, however. There is a companion emotion, perhaps more pervasive and certainly more destructive, an emotion that, after the giddiness of your official announcement as a candidate, rapidly locks you in its grip and doesn’t release you until after Election Day. That emotion is fear. Not just fear of losing — although that is bad enough — but fear of total, complete humiliation.

Those lines are indicative of the book’s overall tone. They are disarming in their honesty on one hand, but calculated in the end for being so. Will anyone think less of him for admitting the role of fear in a politician’s life?



How Would Darwin Read?

Charlesdarwin190Jennifer Schussler in the New York Times:

Popular books applying Darwinian logic to everything from religion to dating to dealmaking may fly off the shelves, but attempts to apply evolutionary theory to literary analysis tend to make novelists, English professors and other humanist types break out in hives.

So I was interested to receive a copy of William Flesch’s new book, “Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Compenents of Fiction” (Harvard University Press), blurbed by no less stout a guardian of the humanistic tradition than Harold Bloom as a “fresh account of the workings of high literature.”

More here.

making up

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Women’s application of makeup is an update of the Narcissus myth. One cannot apply it — or at least not well — without looking in a mirror. The self-reflexive gaze required has elements of the lover’s gaze: Eyes and lips are focal points and demand the most attention and care. Thus, applying makeup is a ritual of self-love, a kind of worship at the shrine of the self, though it can also reflect insecurity and even self-loathing. At its best, it is an exercise in self-critique, and, if you’ll permit me to be grandiose, a path to existential understanding. Like all great human efforts at improvement, makeup is “over-determined,” weighted down with multiple, often contradictory meanings.

more from The Smart Set here.

lucian freud: strangeness

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“For me, the paint is the person.”[1] “I’d like to think that I had in some way caught a scene rather than composed it, so that you never questioned it.” “I could never put anything into a picture that wasn’t actually there in front of me. That would be a pointless lie.” By his own account, Lucian Freud is a painter who reaches after truth and substance. And for many today, the claims he makes hold good. To treat him as “the greatest living realist painter” has now become commonplace. Robert Hughes gave Freud that title in 1987,[2] the point at which he started to acquire an international renown.

For much of the four preceding decades, he had been a somewhat marginal figure on the art scene, even in his own adopted hometown of London. Twenty years onward, however, the world lies at the feet of the still-active octogenarian. It’s not just that his work is deemed to give new force to the age-old equation between the bodies we look at and the marks we make. His persona—that of a loner and a gambler, trailing, in Hughes’s description, a “long and labyrinthine” sexual history—lends itself to the equally popular pairing-off of high artistic achievement with bohemian recklessness.

more from The NYRB here.

who is The Coens?

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The Coens form a conspiracy of two—industrious, secretive, amused, and seemingly indifferent to both criticism and praise. Early in their careers, they gave detailed interviews, but in recent years they have discussed only specific and relatively trivial matters concerning their movies, avoiding comments on larger meanings or anything approaching a general intellectual outlook. This strategic reticence—the avoidance of art talk—is solidly in the tradition of American movie directors’ presenting themselves solely as pragmatic entertainers. But the Coens have gone further into insouciance than any old-time director I can think of. In the opening titles for “Fargo” (1996), they announced that the movie was based on a true story, though it wasn’t. “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) begins with a title stating that the movie is “based upon ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer,” which they later claimed they had never read. From the beginning, they’ve been playing with moviemaking, playing with the audience, the press, the deep-dish interpreters, disappearing behind a façade of mockery.

more from The New Yorker here.

Richard Nathaniel Wright (1908-1960)

From Books and Writers:

“And, curiously, he felt that he was something, somebody, precisely and simply because of that cold threat of death. The terror of the white world had left no doubt in him about his worth; in fact, that white world had guaranteed his worth in the most brutal and dramatic manner. Most surely he was was something, in the eyes of the white world, or it would not have threatened him as it had. That white world, then, threatened as much as it beckoned. Though he did not know it, he was fatally in love with that white world, in love in a way that could never be cured. That white world’s attempt to curb him dangerously and irresponsibly claimed him for its own.” (from The Long Dream, 1958)

Wright Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His grandparents had been slaves and his father, Nathaniel, who was an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, left home when Richard was six. Wright grew up in poverty, staying often at homes of relatives. His mother, Ella Wilson, was a schoolteacher; she moved with her family to Memphis, where she found employment as a cook. In 1915-16 Wright attended school for a few months, but his mother’s illness forced him to leave. He attended school sporadically, lived in Arkansas with his aunt Maggie and uncle Silas, who was murdered, and in Mississippi. In his childhood Wright was often beaten. However, he continued to teach himself, secretly borrowing books from the whites-only library in Memphis. “My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety,” he later wrote in his autobiography BLACK BOY (1945).

Wright worked at various jobs, among others as a newspaper delivery boy and as an assistant to an insurance agent. His spare-time jobs enabled Wright to buy schoolbooks, pulp magazines, and dime novels, all of which he read avidly. At the age of fifteen, he wrote his first story, ‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre’. It was published in Southern Register, a local black newspaper. Wright attended junior high school in Jackson, Mississippi, and graduated in 1925. From 1925 to 1927 Wright lived in Memphis, where he worked for an optical company.

Wright2 In 1937 Wright moved to New York City, becoming editor of Daily Worke , and a later vice president of the League for American Writers. In 1938 Wright published UNCLE TOM’S CHILDREN, a collection of stories of Southern racism, which was reissued in expanded form two years later. The story ‘Fire and Cloud’ was given the O. Henry Memorial award in 1938. Uncle Tom’s Children helped Wright to win a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to devote his full time to writing.

Wright was named in the late 1930s to the literature editorial board of New Masses, and was denounced by the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities investigating the Federal Writers’ Project. In 1940 Wright’s Native Son became an instant best-seller. In some bookstores stock was sold out within hours; the novel sold 215,000 copies in the first three weeks. Many white Americans saw Bigger Thomas, the central character, as a symbol of the entire black community, and Wright later stated that “there are meanings in my books of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the paper.” Wright used in the book a 1938 criminal case involving a black youth, Robert Nixon, who killed a white woman.

For the most part, the book was rendered in the present. Wright was an avid filmgoer and he explained that “I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger’s story was happening now, like play upon a stage or a movie…” In the first film version, directed by Pierre Chenal, and adapted by Chenal and Wright, the author himself acted the role of Bigger Thomas. Wright spent three years on the project. The film was a disaster. The 1986 version was directed by Jerrold Freedman and adapted by Richard Wesley. Oprah Winfrey was in the role of Bigger’s mother. “The second adaptation even goes so far as to eliminate Bigger’s murder of Bessie, in order to reinforce the idea that Bigger is a mild-mannered victim, thus robbing the story of any controversy, and dialectic, and any philosophical significance. It also robs the story of the complexities of gender relations between black men and black women that are touched upon by Wright.” (from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, 1999)

The protagonist of Native Son is a young black man in Chicago, Bigger Thomas, who lives in a one-room apartment in Chicago’s South Side Black Belt, with his mother, his young sister, Vera, and younger brother, Buddy. He is hired by a wealthy family named Dalton as their chauffeur. Mr. Dalton gives money for social welfare, but at the same time owns the rat-infested building in which Bigger lives. The rhythms of Bigger’s life are “indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger – like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force.” The family’s free-thinking daughter Mary befriends him – with her he visits Communist headquarters, where she meets her boyfriend Jan Erlone. Mary has had too much drink. Bigger carries Mary back to her room. When her blind mother enters the room, he accidentally smothers her. In panic, he burns the body in the basement and attempt to implicate Jan. Mary’s bones are discovered and Bigger also kills his own girlfriend, Bessie, to cover his tracks. He is captured and in the jail Bigger feels for the first time a sense of freedom: “Seems sort of natural-like, me being here facing that death chair. Now I come to think of it, it seems like something like this just had to be.” He is then condemned to death and faces his destiny unrepentantly, affirming that ‘what I killed for, I am!’ Yet in prison he also comes to terms with the need for a common brotherhood. The last third of the book is largely a speech given by Boris A. Max, a party attorney, in Bigger’s defense at his trial. Wright clearly used Max to convey his own Marxist assessment of the racial situation in the United States. The speech is also based on Clarence Darrow’s defense of Leopold and Loeb. Wright’s leftist friends were troubled because the Wright did not view Bigger’s fate from an exploited worker’s perspective. During the 1950s, the widespread fear of communism incited by the Cold War and McCarthyism led to the diminished popularity of Native Son. The sexually explicit scenes were removed from the Book-of-the-Month Club publication and Thomas did not show such obvious interest in the white character, Mary Dalton.

Wright_richard In 1944 Wright left Communist Party. He spent the summer of 1945 as an artist-in-residence at the Bread Loaf School for writers in Middlebury, Vermont, and then went to France with his wife and 4-year-old daughter. During his years in France, Wright spent much of his time supporting nationalist movements in Africa. In 1953 he travelled in Africa, gathering material for BLACK POWER (1954), and witnessing the rise of the Pan-African movement. Among his other works in the 1950s were SAVAGE HOLIDAY (1954), about a white man caught in a web of violence, THE COLOR CURTAIN (1956), about Asia, PAGAN SPAIN (1957), a travel book of a Catholic country full of contradictions, and WHITE MAN, LISTEN! (1958), a collection of lectures on racial injustice. Wright’s last short story, ‘Big Black Good Man’, which originally was published in Esquire and was collected in EIGHT MEN (1961), was set in Copenhangen and dealt with prejudices. THE LONG DREAM (1958), a novel set in Mississippi, had a poor reception. Its sequel, Island of Hallucination, set in Paris, was not published. “Everything in the book happened, but I’ve twisted characters so that people won’t recognise them,” said Wright to his agent. AMERICAN HUNGER, a sequel to Black Boy, appeared in 1977.

Wright distanced in the last years of his life from his associates. He suffered from poor health and financial difficulties and grew suspicious about the activities of CIA in Paris – in which he was right. Wright’s plans to move to London were rejected by the British officials. In 1959 he began composing haiku, producing almost four thousand of them. Wright died nearly penniless at the age of fifty-two in Paris, on November 28, 1960. At his request, his body was cremated and his ashes mixed with the ashes of a copy of Black Boy. Wright’s daughter Julia has claimed that her father was murdered. Upon his death, Wright left behind an unfinished book on French West Africa. His travel writings, edited by Virginia Whatley Smith, appeared in 2001.

Visionary Research: Teaching Computers to See Like a Human

From Scientific American:

Computer For all their sophistication, computers still can’t compete with nature’s gift—a brain that sorts objects quickly and accurately enough so that people and primates can interpret what they see as it happens. Despite decades of development, computer vision systems still get bogged down by the massive amounts of data necessary just to identify the most basic images. Throw that same image into a different setting or change the lighting and artificial intelligence is even less of a match for good old gray matter.

These shortcomings become more pressing as demand grows for security systems that can recognize a known terrorist’s face in a crowded airport and car safety mechanisms such as a sensor that can hit the brakes when it detects a pedestrian or another vehicle in the car’s path. Seeking the way forward, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers are looking to advances in neuroscience for ways to improve artificial intelligence, and vice versa. The school’s leading minds in both neural and computer sciences are pooling their research, mixing complex computational models of the brain with their work on image processing.

More here.

THURSDAY POEM

   

   W.H. Auden would be 101 years old today.

   Musee des Beaux Arts
   W.H.Auden

   About suffering they were never wrong,
   The Old Masters; how well, they understood
   Its human position; how it takes place
   While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
   How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
   For the miraculous birth, there always must be
   Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
   On a pond at the edge of the wood:
   They never forgot
   That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
   Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
   Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
   Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

   In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 

   Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may   
   Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 
   But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 
   As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 
   Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 
   Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 
   had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

..

  Painting_bruegel_icarus

 

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

An Interview with Sahabzada Abdus-Samad Khan

Dieter Farwick at the World Security Network [WSN]:

WSN: What are the most important consequences?

Samadkhan_bioSahabzada Abdus-Samad Khan: Short term: (i) the vacuum created by Ms. Bhutto’s death in a highly centralized PPP party structure will be difficult to fill even if her son becomes a figurehead leader. If her husband Asif Zardari is involved (even behind the scenes) it may lead to fragmentation in the party. If the elections are held and the party remains intact there is a good chance that they may get a majority in any election, as the vote bank will be bolstered by the “sympathy factor” amongst the electorate. As a result a divided Parliament was expected to emerge with the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) sharing power following the January elections. This would have been to the advantage of the Musharraf leadership as it would presumably be more malleable and easy to control, may now be an unlikely eventuality. One scenario to redress the situation would be for Musharraf to allow Nawaz or his brother Shabaz to run for election (they are presently barred on corruption charges and the Constitutional ban on a third term; the latter only applies to ex-PM Nawaz Sharif, not his brother). If there is general political fragmentation owing to the removal of the single strongest national opposition leader from the scene (seeing that the PML-N’s power base is largely limited to central and northern Punjab) the crisis of governance seen in the NWFP could well spread to other provinces (ii) the lack of law and order across the country and the consequent deployment of most of the second line forces for internal security duties strengthens the hand of radical Islamist elements who may try and destabilize the political process further and/or go on the offensive in the NWFP and Tribal areas.

Dieter Farwick- Is martial law a tool to stabilize the situation and what role does the military play?

Sahabzada Abdus-Samad Khan: Martial Law is definitely seen as a potential tool to stabilize the country. At least in the short term, if the law and order situation worsens. This is all the more true if a the Army cannot work out a modus operandi with the political parties. In the longer term this will weaken civilian institutions further. Even in the short term martial law is likely to be problematic, as the Army has become very unpopular in the eyes of many.

More here.

substance and accidents

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Aristotle distinguished between “substances” and “accidents,” this second ground being those properties that substances happen to have, but which could come and go without affecting their “essence” and, hence, existence. We can change height without ceasing to be who we are, say: We do so as we grow up, or grow older. But we cannot change species: If I cease to be a human being, I cease to exist. Accidents in this sense need not be truly accidental: There may be good scientific reason for me to be the height I am, even if a shorter or taller version would still have been me. Aristotle’s idea would therefore not figure in a history of accidents in the vernacular sense. His accidents are closer to what we call “properties,” such as speaking Greek, or having brown eyes, whereas our “accidents” tend to be events. It may even be an accident that we have the one word for the two different ideas. In “Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History” (University of Chicago Press, 320 pages, $35), Ross Hamilton’s vast, serious canvas is wide enough to include both notions, brought together by the paradoxical idea that it is the accidents that happen to us that determine our essential nature. In the modern consciousness, apparently, it is “spots of time,” or moments, that create meaning and structure, defining who we are. Mr. Hamilton has assembled testimony from a panoramic array of writers, philosophers, and French theorists in support of this diagnosis of the modern way of looking at things: Dante is defined by his chance encounter with Beatrice, for example, and Wordsworth by an equally rapturous encounter with a daffodil.

In the face of such a chorus, it is difficult to dissent, yet I find the idea dubious, a product of our tyrannical narrative impulses.

more from the NY Sun here.

stupor tuesday

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So strongly did the Clinton campaign assume that Super Tuesday, with its 1,000-plus pledged delegates up for election in more than 20 states, would be the effective end of the nomination campaign, that it failed to have a Plan B. Organising for the string of caucuses that followed Super Tuesday? Opening field offices in the smaller states? Drumming up the extra fundraising needed to pay for it? None of it, or not enough of it, got done. And as a result, when Super Tuesday failed to deliver the knock-out blow that Hillary Clinton expected, her campaign was exposed to a series of rapid jabs in places like Maine, Virginia and now Wisconsin – states the Clinton campaign should have competed in strongly, not lost by double digits.

But again and again, following Super Tuesday, the Clinton campaign failed in basic on-the-ground organisation. In each of the states after February 5 it was the Obama campaign that arrived first, opened more field offices and began advertising on local television weeks ahead of its rival. And the evidence was there to see last night in Wisconsin, with a 17% margin of victory for Obama.

more from The Guardian here.

new sounds

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This winter produced two epic Westerns, both powerful and unconventional, both filmed in the same landscape, similar in some dimensions and contrasting in others. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood present visions of the American dream gone haywire, one in orgies of killing, the other in a labyrinth of greed and madness. One thing that unites them is how all the elements of their soundtracks—dialogue, effects, music—work together to shape the story. What divides their approach to sound is that Jonny Greenwood’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson plays out in the usual musical fashion if not with the usual sense, while the Coen brothers created a soundtrack of great expressive effect with next to no “music” at all.

more from Slate here.

What Quantum Field Theory Tells Us About Spoon Bending

Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance gives us a tour de force and tour of forces of and on science and what this means for parapsychology and similar, er, pseudo-phenomena:

In the aftermath of the dispiriting comments following last week’s post on the Parapsychological Association, it seems worth spelling out in detail the claim that parapsychological phenomena are inconsistent with the known laws of physics. The main point here is that, while there are certainly many things that modern science does not understand, there are also many things that it does understand, and those things simply do not allow for telekinesis, telepathy, etc. Which is not to say that we can prove those things aren’t real. We can’t, but that is a completely worthless statement, as science never proves anything; that’s simply not how science works. Rather, it accumulates empirical evidence for or against various hypotheses. If we can show that psychic phenomena are incompatible with the laws of physics we currently understand, then our task is to balance the relative plausibility of “some folks have fallen prey to sloppy research, unreliable testimony, confirmation bias, and wishful thinking” against “the laws of physics that have been tested by an enormous number of rigorous and high-precision experiments over the course of many years are plain wrong in some tangible macroscopic way, and nobody ever noticed.”

The crucial concept here is that, in the modern framework of fundamental physics, not only do we know certain things, but we have a very precise understanding of the limits of our reliable knowledge. We understand, in other words, that while surprises will undoubtedly arise (as scientists, that’s what we all hope for), there are certain classes of experiments that are guaranteed not to give exciting results — essentially because the same or equivalent experiments have already been performed.

On Post-Castro Cuba

Over at Comment is Free, two takes on what to expect following Fidel Castro’s retirement (via normblog). The first by Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique:

It is on this international plane, developing ever stronger ties with Latin America, where the most visible changes in Cuban politics are likely to come. Its socialism will undoubtedly alter – but not in the manner of a China or Vietnam. Cuba will continue to go its own way. The new regime will initiate changes at the economic level, but there will be no Cuban perestroika – no opening up of politics, no multiparty elections. Its authorities are convinced that socialism is the right choice, but that it must be forever improved. And their preoccupation now, more than ever with the retirement of Castro, will be unity.

But everything in Cuba is related to the US: that is the one overarching aspect of political life which outsiders need to understand. The retirement of Castro, long anticipated, means continuity. But in the evolution of this small nation’s history, the election of Obama could be seismic.

Oliver Balch:

In a country of shortages, political symbols are one of the few objects of plenty in Cuba. Hasta la victoria siempre (always, on towards victory) screams from billboards and television screens across the Caribbean island.

But, almost 50 years after Fidel Castro marched into Havana, many younger Cubans are beginning to ask how much longer the promised “victoria” will take. Hospitals may be free, they say, but they lack medicines; pupils may not pay for school, but there are few textbooks.

Before yesterday’s announcement of Castro’s retirement, many had already started tuning out of Cuba’s revolutionary rhetoric.

WEDNESDAY POEM


At an Old Grave, 1841
Jonas Hallgrimsson


Hardship! Though your unhappy son
lies here secure in nature’s keeping,
clad in eternal night and sleeping—
his soul’s enduring weal is won.

“”””””””””””

Glazed is your eye — how free from guile,
how kind in my young estimation!
It made me sigh with admiration,
seeing the triumph of your smile!

Stilled are your thin, deft hands (how high
their art had been! our envy lingers),
agile as winsome maidens’ fingers
laying white linen out to dry.

Bide here, my old friend, in your bed
until the golden tones of seven
trumpets remold the earth and heaven!
Iceland was cold, oh Kjaenested.

“”””””””””””

Artistry knows her cue to cry:
wintertime snows lay waste the flowers,
waiting to close their tale of hours —
the reddest rose is first to die.


………………………………………….

……………………………………………
……………

Jackie Robinson

Jackierobinsonlg_2 Henry (“Hank”) Aaron in Time:

He thrilled fans, shattered baseball’s color barrier and changed the face of the nation.

They say certain people are bigger than life, but Jackie Robinson is the only man I’ve known who truly was. In 1947 life in America — at least my America, and Jackie’s — was segregation. It was two worlds that were afraid of each other. There were separate schools for blacks and whites, separate restaurants, separate hotels, separate drinking fountains and separate baseball leagues. Life was unkind to black people who tried to bring those worlds together. It could be hateful. But Jackie Robinson, God bless him, was bigger than all of that.

Jackie Robinson had to be bigger than life. He had to be bigger than the Brooklyn teammates who got up a petition to keep him off the ball club, bigger than the pitchers who threw at him or the base runners who dug their spikes into his shin, bigger than the bench jockeys who hollered for him to carry their bags and shine their shoes, bigger than the so-called fans who mocked him with mops on their heads and wrote him death threats.

Jackierobinsonphotofilephotographc1 When Branch Rickey first met with Jackie about joining the Dodgers, he told him that for three years he would have to turn the other cheek and silently suffer all the vile things that would come his way. Believe me, it wasn’t Jackie’s nature to do that. He was a fighter, the proudest and most competitive person I’ve ever seen. This was a man who, as a lieutenant in the Army, risked a court-martial by refusing to sit in the back of a military bus. But when Rickey read to him from The Life of Christ, Jackie understood the wisdom and the necessity of forbearance.

To this day, I don’t know how he withstood the things he did without lashing back. I’ve been through a lot in my time, and I consider myself to be a patient man, but I know I couldn’t have done what Jackie did. I don’t think anybody else could have done it. Somehow, though, Jackie had the strength to suppress his instincts, to sacrifice his pride for his people’s. It was an incredible act of selflessness that brought the races closer together than ever before and shaped the dreams of an entire generation. Before Jackie Robinson broke the color line, I wasn’t permitted even to think about being a professional baseball player. I once mentioned something to my father about it, and he said, “Ain’t no colored ballplayers.” There were the Negro Leagues, of course, where the Dodgers discovered Jackie, but my mother, like most, would rather her son be a schoolteacher than a Negro Leaguer. All that changed when Jackie put on No. 42 and started stealing bases in a Brooklyn uniform.

Jackie’s character was much more important than his batting average, but it certainly helped that he was a great ballplayer, a .311 career hitter whose trademark was rattling pitchers and fielders with his daring base running. He wasn’t the best Negro League talent at the time he was chosen, and baseball wasn’t really his best sport — he had been a football and track star at UCLA — but he played the game with a ferocious creativity that gave the country a good idea of what it had been missing all those years. With Jackie in the infield, the Dodgers won six National League pennants.

Jackierobinson_donnewcombe_roycampa (Picture on right: Jackie Robinson, Don Newcombe, and Roy Campanella).

I believe every black person in America had a piece of those pennants. There’s never been another ballplayer who touched people as Jackie did. The only comparable athlete, in my experience, was Joe Louis. The difference was that Louis competed against white men; Jackie competed with them as well. He was taking us over segregation’s threshold into a new land whose scenery made every black person stop and stare in reverence. We were all with Jackie. We slid into every base that he swiped, ducked at every fastball that hurtled toward his head. The circulation of the Pittsburgh Courier, the leading black newspaper, increased by 100,000 when it began reporting on him regularly. All over the country, black preachers would call together their congregations just to pray for Jackie and urge them to demonstrate the same forbearance that he did. Later in his career, when the “Great Experiment” had proved to be successful and other black players had joined him, Jackie allowed his instincts to take over in issues of race. He began striking back and speaking out. And when Jackie Robinson spoke, every black player got the message. He made it clear to us that we weren’t playing just for ourselves or for our teams; we were playing for our people. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the black players of the late ’50s and ’60s — me, Roy Campanella, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson and others — dominated the National League. If we played as if we were on a mission, it was because Jackie Robinson had sent us out on one.

Even after he retired in 1956 and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962, Jackie continued to chop along the path that was still a long way from being cleared. He campaigned for baseball to hire a black third-base coach, then a black manager. In 1969 he refused an invitation to play in an old-timers’ game at Yankee Stadium to protest the lack of progress along those lines.

One of the great players from my generation, Frank Robinson (who was related to Jackie only in spirit), finally became the first black manager, in 1975. Jackie was gone by then. His last public appearance was at the 1972 World Series, where he showed up with white hair, carrying a cane and going blind from diabetes. He died nine days later.

Most of the black players from Jackie’s day were at the funeral, but I was appalled by how few of the younger players showed up to pay him tribute. At the time, I was 41 home runs short of Babe Ruth’s career record, and when Jackie died, I really felt that it was up to me to keep his dream alive. I was inspired to dedicate my home-run record to the same great cause to which Jackie dedicated his life. I’m still inspired by Jackie Robinson. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t think of him.

Science and Sorrow

From The New Republic:

Book The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder
by Allan V. Horwitz.

In a series of papers that Wakefield published beginning in 1992, he developed a theory of mental illness called “harmful dysfunction” (HD). The HD theory holds that disorders are genuine when they meet two criteria: they produce distress or impairment in the afflicted, and they are the result of a failure in a brain mechanism that prevents it from performing its natural function — that is, the function for which it was biologically designed by natural selection. Thus, when a person experiences “normal” sadness, according to the HD model, nothing is broken, except perhaps his heart. Conversely, authentic depression (major depressive disorder) is the product of mechanistic failure. What might such failures be? One hypothesis regarding depression, for example, is that it is caused by a defect in the behavioral activation system. This could account for apathy, dampened interest in both the seeking of pleasure and the person’s capacity to respond to it. What we call panic disorder may have origins in a damaged threat-response mechanism. And some speculate that perhaps schizophrenia is a developmental failure of cognitive processing.

If the specific nature of the dysfunction element of “harmful dysfunction” seems vague, that’s because it is. The simplest scenario would posit an errant gene behind the pathology, but that is not how psychiatric conditions work. Mental illnesses are the product of numerous genes that interact with one another, with the environment, and also with experience. A recent study by the National Institute of Mental Health found that eighty genes could be associated with bipolar disorder, eight of which influence how the brain responds to neurotransmitters such as dopamine. Add to this the miasma of social and personal encounters that impinge upon the genetically vulnerable individual — stress, impoverishment, family instability, drug or alcohol use, and so forth — and the “cause” of mental illness becomes staggeringly complex and elusive.

For more than a decade, the Wakefield HD theory has sparked vigorous debate among philosophers, psychologists, and evolutionary theorists. If disorder is a disturbance in an evolved function “intended” by nature, how can we know what nature intended? Must these defects necessarily impair reproductive fitness to count as a dysfunction? Is it appropriate to rely upon standards of evolutionary fitness that developed under conditions that existed hundreds of thousands of years ago?

More here.

When tomorrow comes

I wish I could give a coherent explanation as to why I finally settled on the PPP [Pakistan People’s Party–the party of Benazir Bhutto] but I don’t think I can. When I reached the polling booth, my head was still spinning from the lack of decent choices.

Feisal Naqvi in the Daily Times of Pakistan:

Feisal_naqvi_2Two weeks ago, I attended a seminar organised by the SECP [Securities and Exchange Commision of Pakistan] to publicise the launch of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). The seminar was erudite, the audience was learned and the vision being painted by the SECP of Pakistan’s rosy future was both enticing and entirely plausible.

But when one picked up a newspaper, all the good vibes disappeared. Dozens dead in suicide bombing, screamed one headline. These elections are a farce, shouted another. Between the seminar and the surkhis, my brain all but split into two. Either one or the other had to be right. Pakistan could not be simultaneously so advanced and so messed up.

But that is actually the case.

The problem with Pakistan is not that there are shades of grey which are being missed by casual observers. The problem with Pakistan is that it is a checkerboard with lots of blacks and lots of whites. Whether you think of Pakistan as shining or screwed up, you can find all the evidence you want. What you won’t find is a definitive answer either way.

More here.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Cai Guo-Qiang: pyro

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Cai Guo-Qiang says his favorite artistic moment is the pregnant pause between the lighting of the fuse and the detonation of the gunpowder. “There is a pressure in it to be preserved, and then it explodes,” he says. “This moment belongs just to the artist and the work.” On a breezy afternoon last September, in a large A-frame shed at the Grucci fireworks plant on Long Island, he was setting the stage. With the help of his wife, Hong Hong Wu, he cut a long green fuse into segments, then laid the pieces carefully on eight contiguous panels of handmade Japanese rice paper.

After three young female assistants placed stencils in the shape of an eagle’s wings, head and beak onto the panels, Cai, a onetime serious student of martial arts, moved gracefully as he sprinkled different grades of gunpowder, some custom-made for him. “I don’t know what the result will be, even though I preplan,” he told me, speaking through an interpreter in Chinese. “It is like making medicine — a little of this, a little of that, watch it and taste it a little and see how it is working. My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy.” (In Chinese, the word for gunpowder is literally “fire medicine,” an allusion to the eighth-century Chinese alchemists who accidentally invented it while searching for a magic elixir.)

more from the NY Times Magazine here.